The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  Suvarov went to move in on his flank. Menschkin turned the gun and fired it in Suvarov’s direction. The birds, the very air, seemed shocked at the noise. My friend Suvarov put his hand to his upper arm, which was gushing blood.

  You have wounded me, you son of a harlot, said Suvarov in his native tongue.

  I wanted to kill Menschkin but first moved to Suvarov. By some happy chance the bullet had scored the flesh of his bicep and, though the blood fell copiously, it did not appear that any extreme damage had been done.

  It seemed enough blood to shock Menschkin too.

  God’s curse be on you all, he cried and raised the pistol, so that we shied away. But then he fired the revolver at his own head, creating another terrific detonation and felling himself backwards.

  The women were coming back from their walk, summoned by the two shots and hurrying bravely towards us.

  Menschkin lay crookedly among the ferns, and I felt a fraternal pity for him. Perhaps the fellow had been hounded to death. Less than satisfactory to the police and despised by every Russian in Queensland. For a man who could be comical, this shot to his own head was far too large and tragic a gesture, and I could sense that as well as giving himself peace, he had at last created a great threat to us.

  Podnaksikov went forward to Lucia and stopped her from coming closer. At his example, Buchan and I moved up to reassure Amelia and Hope.

  It’s Menschkin, I told them. He was spying on us. When he saw us coming, he shot himself.

  Oh God, said Hope. Genuinely? Shot himself?

  Amelia, who had the air of someone who had seen everything, moved in with me and looked down on Menschkin. I had of course hoped he had done neat damage to himself. But I saw the bloodied top of his head whose skull was partly lifted away from the rest and he was shocking to look at. Just the same Amelia, beside me, was unflinching above the corpse and the drain of blood and grey matter.

  Does he have a heartbeat?

  I kneeled outside the circle of the mess he’d made of his head and felt for that and a pulse, but there was nothing. How could there be any throb of life left?

  Meanwhile, Suvarov produced from his pocket a little flask of raw liquor and poured it on his wound. His paleness increased. He staggered and raised his eyes to heaven. I reached out and grabbed him to prevent his fainting away.

  Hope moved in to look down on the dropped revolver.

  I asked her, What should we do about the police?

  Tom, of course we must let them know what happened.

  And they won’t believe us.

  Even so, Tom. Think clearly. It is so obvious that the man did himself the harm that there is no chance any of us will be arrested. Or if we are, we won’t be held for long.

  It was decided as a fair thing that Amelia should be taken home, and that, after we took Suvarov to hospital, Lucia should be dropped off too, and only myself, Buchan, Podnaksikov and Hope should face the police.

  Buchan bent over to pick up Menschkin’s revolver, as if to study it.

  No, leave it there, Mr Buchan, Hope called urgently. They can tell if anyone else but Menschkin has handled it.

  This chastisement made Buchan feel as if he had lost face.

  How would they do that? he asked.

  Fingerprinting, Hope said brusquely. Even backward police services have had it for years.

  The corpse was covered, at Hope’s insistence, with the picnic rug. Amelia herself bound up Suvarov’s wound with a tea towel and, with nothing further to do other than look at Menschkin, at length we left him lying there on the edge of the ferns.

  24

  Suvarov seemed clear-headed but silent during our return to the city. Indeed I would have called his demeanour brooding, not at all like the old Suvarov. Even so, his wound was staunched and he bore it without complaint.

  Now they will try all their nonsense on us again, he murmured to me.

  At Suvarov’s insistence we dropped a distressed Lucia off in South Brisbane, then Amelia at her house on stilts, before driving across the river and coming at last in the dark to a private hospital named Greenslopes. Hope, Buchan, big Podnaksikov and I helped Suvarov in from the car, and up the garden stairs to the hospital door. A stocky matron answered the bell.

  Heavens, what is that? she asked. Did you cut yourself, my dear?

  Hope said, It’s a gunshot wound.

  The matron blinked. But she had seen most of what could be presented for mending and dressing, and she said, Yes, come in to our outpatients room and we’ll sort out that mess.

  In the sharper light of the clinic, where she sat Suvarov down beside a steel table, she could see better. Off-handedly she said, Mrs Mockridge, how are you?

  Hope said she was well and introduced us. Tom Samsurov, Mr Buchan, and the victim here is Mr Suvarov.

  My God, said the matron, what a crowd! Do you all need to be here?

  Hope pretended not to hear. This happened at a picnic we were enjoying, she explained. We were intruded upon by a man armed with a revolver. After wounding Mr Suvarov, the assailant shot himself.

  You know, said the nurse, looking up, this will need to be reported to the police.

  We are about to do so, said Hope. Can we leave you here, Mr Suvarov? We’ll be back later to collect you.

  Yes, go, he said, but uncharacteristically began to weep.

  It’s the shock, opined the matron.

  Hope said, Don’t fear, Mr Suvarov. No one can blame you for this, I promise you.

  Don’t leave me alone, said the nurse. In case he becomes...

  I’ll stay here, said Podnaksikov, looking pale. He didn’t want to present himself to the police yet.

  His offer didn’t seem to cheer the nurse. She warned Podnaksikov, You behave yourself while you’re here, young man.

  Hope, Buchan and I went out to the car and drove off to tell the police that up on the mountainside south of the city lay a corpse and a revolver.

  Arriving within a few minutes at the Roma Street police office, we left the car and entered the lobby. There was a sergeant standing behind a desk who looked like a monument to boredom.

  Hope Mockridge took a card from her purse and gave it to the sergeant. I would like to see the duty inspector, please. Who is it tonight?

  The man said it was Chief Inspector Kirkwood. He looked at us, Hope in her elegance, me in my bad suit, Buchan in his two-tone shoes. We were a strange trinity, I suppose. We would have made, in our contrasts, a good travelling theatrical group.

  A constable arrived to take us upstairs. We mounted a broad staircase past photographs of stern attorney-generals and police commissioners who all seemed to me to be sure of the guilt of anyone who ascended. At the head of the stairs was a portrait of Geoffrey Cahill, into whose leg Amelia had once dug a hatpin. Inspector Kirkwood waited outside his office door to greet Hope, but it was written on his face that he did not like her, though he was clearly determined to treat her with courtesy.

  Can I be of service? he asked her in a dubious growl. He looked Buchan and me over with an acid amusement he didn’t try to hide. He said we had better come inside. On the wall of his office sat a picture of the commissioner and of the King of England, who was about to call his brave boys forward for the fight. Hope introduced us to Kirkwood as if we were fellow lawyers, explained to him we had been at a picnic, and what we had seen, and the extraordinary thing Menschkin had done when surrounded.

  She told him where the body could be found, at Slaughter Falls, some hundred yards up from the rock platform. She told him that we had paused on our way to report this tragic event only to drop off Mr Suvarov at Greenslopes private hospital.

  I believe the matron has or will be reporting the wound, Hope told him solemnly.

  Just to humiliate her and us, he made a meal of spelling my name. I always have trouble with these Irish names, he told me, and winked at Buchan malignly.

  I wonder if you would be so kind as to call my husband and inform him of what I’ve just told y
ou. It seemed important that I come here before consulting him.

  But you did not bring this corpse, suspected to be that of Menschkin, back with you?

  The top of his head was blown off. I thought it important, too, that you see him as he lay, in the suicide posture.

  Life was extinct when you left him? asked Kirkwood.

  Life was obviously extinct, Mr Kirkwood, Hope told him. As the saying goes, he had virtually blown his head off. Had there been the slightest sign of life, he would have been brought back with us.

  Intending to be helpful, Buchan said, That wee troublemaker couldn’t have been deader, Mr Kirkwood.

  Kirkwood ignored him.

  And where is the spot you abandoned him?

  Hope didn’t like that word, abandoned.

  We left him where he fell. None of us touched him or the revolver, though we closely inspected him. Could you telephone my husband, please? Or send a messenger?

  You realise you must stay here until the body is retrieved? Kirkwood asked with savage joy.

  Inspector Kirkwood, said Hope, we certainly expected to be held and questioned.

  Kirkwood asked who the other members of the picnic were, and since Podnaksikov had been so prominently standing on the running board on the way out of town, it was better for him to be named than not, though it seemed strange to do it with him still waiting at the hospital with Suvarov and still, in theory, a free man. Hope also named Amelia, who was not within four hundred yards of Menschkin when it happened, and whose age and frailty seemed to warrant dropping her at her house. And then, of course, the wounded Suvarov. She didn’t mention Lucia, however. If challenged on that she could put her omission down to the shock of events.

  Now Hope was permitted to occupy a primitive waiting room where she sat at a table with a police matron who had been summoned from home on this Sunday evening and did not seem happy about it.

  Buchan and I were taken down to a communal cell. After an hour there we were quite genially served some stew, but, pensively spooning it, Buchan told me, They will put this drear death on us if they can. This stew is just the prelude. This will make us a stew in another sense before the night’s out.

  It’s impossible that they can do that, I said. Not even to Suvarov and me.

  They would love to put the blame on you Russians, he said. They would love it better than a night with a harlot.

  25

  Two hours later an agitated Podnaksikov was brought in to join us in the cell. He told us that Suvarov had been allotted a bed and was told by a doctor that he was well but to pray against septicaemia. Podnaksikov himself was worried that Lucia’s honest Italian parents would think him even more of a criminal than when he was sent to Boggo Road.

  So we’re off to prison again? he asked us, wide-eyed. I’d rather die. I wish the Cossacks had drowned me in the Lena.

  I had spent the intervening time chatting with Buchan about Vladimir Ilich’s What is to be Done?

  So we have a long wait, according to you, Artem?

  I don’t think so, I told him. Capitalism is thundering towards the extreme. This war may very well be the extreme we look for. It may in the end turn men against their officers.

  Not in the British army, he said. Not in those fancy-dressed Scottish regiments or the Irish Guards or any of that crowd.

  But now, in the immediacy of Podnaksikov’s panic and genuine anguish, we moved away from theory altogether.

  Mrs Mockridge, Buchan comforted the young man, says we’ll be questioned and let go. You too.

  I took Podnaksikov by the shoulders. When you are questioned, you would not let them put words in your mouth, would you?

  How do I know I wouldn’t? he asked me.

  Because we are innocent, I told him.

  Buchan entered the discussion. They will tell you they’ll let you go if you say we killed Menschkin. But they’ll let you go anyhow. Mrs Mockridge’s husband has been called, and he’s a powerful man.

  I said, He’s not a shadow of Hope but no judge will treat him the way judges have treated her, because he’s one of them. So please have courage, Podnaksikov. Remember your brothers and sisters who died in the massacre. If you go along with what these police say, these Australian gendarmes, you disgrace them. Remember that.

  Indeed, as soon as enough detectives could be summoned to undertake the job on the Sabbath, we were taken away and questioned. Kirkwood himself questioned me with a half-smile that implied he had new information of my guilt.

  You hated Menschkin, didn’t you? he asked me in a room painted to match the colour of a migraine. He told us about your sly grog. He told us you had a supply of fire junk. He told us about your printing press. He told us about you and Mrs Mockridge playing jig-a-jig. And now you produce a weapon and shoot him, and plant it by his hand.

  I resisted the temptation to be angry and denied it all, of course, but with a weary sense that the night had merely begun.

  He came within fifty yards of you, you say? If he was spying on you, why would he come so close?

  I had to confess I did not know. It was part of his mental disorder, I told Kirkwood. He has always been mentally unsteady.

  You’re his doctor, are you? Well, you doctored him this afternoon. You killed him with a dosage of lead.

  Somewhere, in parallel rooms, Buchan and Podnaksikov were being questioned. And somewhere, condescendingly, Hope Mockridge.

  Listen, you Red bastard, said Kirkwood, gathering himself. There will be no rest for you tonight, nor tomorrow night, until you tell us what really happened. I know what you socialist pricks are like. You fuck Mrs Mockridge and you think you own the world. You think you can aim a gun at a fellow like Menschkin, poor hapless bastard that he is. But you will be found out. You will be tried. And you will be hanged.

  Everything about my resentment of Menschkin was again listed by Kirkwood. I hated him for causing the soyuz trouble, didn’t I? I’d incited the Russians of Rockhampton to drive him out of his home. Now the poor fellow had been following me around in the hope of finding something that might restore his credit with the authorities. He might indeed have seen something happen at the picnic that would very much interest the authorities. And as a result, I had shot him.

  I have never owned a gun, I told him, not on this side of the ocean.

  As I went on denying everything, he repeated his questions again and again. I was anxious about how Podnaksikov would stand up to similar treatment. For some reason I trusted that Buchan would. There was a lot of instinctive determination in him.

  I wondered had the police been out onto that dark hillside where Menschkin’s berserk blood dampened the ferns, and collected him and brought him back to town.

  You forget he wounded Suvarov, I reminded Kirkwood frequently, but he was not influenced by that.

  Well, what if the gun was Menschkin’s? We have yet to test it. So he wounds your friend Suvarov and, enraged, you take the gun from him and blow his skull off.

  I could see the many ways that they could depict Menschkin’s death, and I was suddenly not so sure that I’d avoid treading the boards of that long, evil-spirited hall whose tainted floor Podnaksikov and I had scrubbed.

  Kirkwood left at last and was replaced by a detective sergeant, who pursued exactly the same line. I dealt with it in the same way, even though I knew that in the end they would make me plead for sleep.

  I had learned as a prisoner and an escapee that it was possible to endure in the second, to enter the instant and say I am safe here in this little nut of time. And all the more so if they were not beating me.

  They thought they could get me – or one of the others – without a beating. It was a belief convenient to me, but perhaps more terrifying. They knew how wonderful it would be for them to prove a Russian murder in the first days of the war craze. You go, my sons, they could say, to fight alien things – while we fight society’s good fight here.

  I think I might have been questioned for five or six hours before a man
in a military uniform, holding what the British called a swagger stick, opened the door and sat by the wall, crossing his long legs. I saw a crown on his shoulder. His cavalry boots squeaked. His features were lean, he had a delicate mouth, a waxed moustache and worried eyes.

  At the first chance the police sergeant greeted him as if he was a man of great significance, and then walked out and closed the door, leaving me with him. He rose and came to the interrogation table but did not sit.

  Mr Samsurov, I am Warwick Mockridge, said the officer, without extending a hand. I know of Hope’s enthusiasm for strange causes, and I have already spoken to her. She’s made a statement. But at the moment she’s not being questioned in the way you chaps are. It’s essential, whatever they do, that you refuse to touch that firearm, the one the Russian ended his life with. I have told the police not to try it on, and I think I’ve dissuaded them from it – I know them well. I don’t mind them verballing and arranging things for people I know are guilty. But I am sure, Mr Samsurov, that you and that strange Scotsman and your friends are not guilty. I know because Hope told me.

  I was more confused than was usual. I had never been in this situation before, where I was being favoured with the advice of a man for whose wife I had some definite feeling – a passion or infatuation or need or love?

  Have they tried it already, by any chance? he asked. The gun?

  No.

  Good. Now we may be a remote part of the Empire. But the police have been using fingerprints for nearly ten years now. You don’t seem to have been beaten?

  No.

  He frowned and then said what I had already surmised. Well, in that case they must be confident they’ve got you.

  You are very kind to advise me, I managed to say at last. But have you warned my friends yet?

  No. I intend to, however. Because if they fix you to a supposed murder, they’ll directly or indirectly fix my wife with it too. I have no interest in wandering Russians, Mr Samsurov. My aim is to help my wife, who for all her faults of enthusiasm makes a very unlikely accessory to murder.