Angels in the Snow Read online

  ANGELS IN THE SNOW

  Derek Lambert

  COPYRIGHT

  Collins Crime Club

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1969

  Copyright © Derek Lambert 1969

  Design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

  Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

  Derek Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

  HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

  Source ISBN: 9780008268329

  Ebook Edition © November 2017 ISBN: 9780008268312

  Version: 2017-10-04

  DEDICATION

  To MONA

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  First Snow

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  First Snow

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  An author’s first line of defence against possible libel actions always used to be the introductory assertion that all characters in his novel were fictitious and bore no resemblance to anyone living or dead. The custom appears to be dying, but I wish to resuscitate it for the purposes of this book. The book is about Russia and it occurred to me that it was possible that the Soviet authorities might take action against any of their subjects on whom they believed I had based my characters. Certainly a new liberalism expanding freedom of expression is being born in the Soviet Union, but the labour is a long and painful process. Unless the stricture is sanctioned by the Kremlin any criticism of the system can still be interpreted as a hostile act if it emanates from a foreigner, or a treasonable act if it emanates from a Russian. There are Russians in my novel who criticise the system: I met some such critics, albeit not many, when I lived in Moscow. In each case the criticisms stemmed from patriotic love rather than disloyalty, but it would be difficult to convince the police or bureaucratic mind of any such altruistic motives. For this reason I want to emphasise to any Russian who may read this novel that, although I met such people, they are not identifiable here. I did, for instance, visit Khabarovsk in the far east of the Soviet Union near the Chinese border. I was shown around by a charming, knowledgeable and intensely patriotic guide who bears no resemblance whatsoever to the fictitious guide of treasonable intent in the book. Perhaps I am over-dramatising the problem, perhaps I am attaching far too much importance to the novel itself, but if there is the slightest possibility of retaliatory action being taken against any individuals it is preferable to err in those directions.

  In the novel I have to an extent re-arranged chronology. The structural requirements of a novel in which the action is confined to one year—my year in Moscow—necessitated this. For example, the demonstration by the Chinese outside the American Embassy did not take place during that year. But the atmosphere and background are, I believe, authentic, and many of the incidents are factual. The principal story-lines are fictional; but that is not to say they could not have happened.

  FIRST SNOW

  The first snow of winter fell at night. Middle-aged women who saw it rejoiced because in the morning there would be work clearing the pavements; lovers in doorways kissed tenderly because, they said, their love was as pure and clean as the flakes settling on their shoulders; militiamen guarding the apartment blocks where the foreigners lived swore as they peered into the five months of frozen misery that lay ahead.

  The snow fell hesitantly at first. It was late this year and the people of Moscow had been waiting for it as they would wait for the thaw in the spring, as people wait for the rains in the tropics, as if crises were seasonal to be buried or thawed or drowned. Soon the tired city was polished with new light.

  The flakes touched the window of the bedroom where Luke Randall was making love to someone else’s wife.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘it’s snowing.’

  ‘Is it?’ he said. The arrival of the snow seemed to crystallise the knowledge that in the morning he would no longer find the woman beside him attractive.

  ‘Tell me you love me,’ she said.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. He filed away the knowledge for the night and embraced her softness and warmth. But there was desperation, hatred almost, about his love-making.

  On the embankment beside the bridges snow-ploughs held their annual reunion. The river was dark and strong and the only colour in the black-and-white city came from the illuminated red stars on the Kremlin towers; in the morning the cupolas would gleam with a new lustre amid the snow.

  The snow covered the children’s playground outside the foreigners’ flats. Yesterday it had been a seedy place: a few benches and a couple of swings planted in soiled sand. Now it was sugared and clean, awaiting the children.

  Three floors above Luke Randall’s flat a Middle East diplomat quietly hanged himself. No one ever knew why. Women, men, Moscow. Everyone included Moscow in their speculation. The curtains of his bedroom were drawn and some said that if he had drawn them and seen the snow he might have cancelled, or at least postponed, his journey. Others said he killed himself because he had seen the snow.

  Richard Mortimer was not at all surprised to see the snow when his TU 104 landed at Sheremetievo Airport several hours late from London. He had never envisaged Moscow without snow. He had seen pictures of river beaches and sunny boulevards; but only the sombre prints of dark buildings brooding in the snow had been fixed in his mind.

  So the airport was as he had expected it. He was elaborately polite to the officials and surprised that the formalities were finished within ten minutes. The red neon letters MOCKBA reminded him of
a milk bar.

  He was met by a young diplomat in a fur hat who said his name was Giles, Giles Ansell.

  ‘I’ve got the old jalopy outside,’ Ansell said. ‘It’s only an Eleven-hundred but it’s quite adequate for Moscow. Having a bit of trouble with the gears though.’

  He tried to ram the gear lever home and there was a rasping protest from the car. Porters and taxi drivers stared without smiling. ‘Peasants,’ said Ansell. ‘Bloody peasants.’

  The first attack of home-sickness, like a small explosion of weak acid inside him, came as they drove through herring-bone woods of silver-birch. He saw them through the falling snow, fragile, cold and lonely. He saw himself as a child walking in the woods at home hearing a wood pigeon disturbing the snow in the ceiling of branches. The wood pigeon flew away and he was alone in the muffled tranquillity. Wellington boots and Balaclava, woollen gloves with fingers sticking out of holes; the humiliating laxative of fear.

  ‘We saw Giselle last night,’ Ansell said. ‘You don’t know what ballet is until you’ve been to the Bolshoi.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ Mortimer said.

  ‘It’s absolutely bloody marvellous. The choreography’s superb. Nutcracker’s my favourite.’

  The small boy began to cry. His Wellingtons were leaking, his fingers aching, and if he ever got home again he would always be good.

  ‘Does the mail take long?’ Mortimer asked. He would write home as soon as he reached the flat.

  ‘Ordinary mail I’m told takes about a week,’ said the diplomat. ‘But of course we use the bag.’

  They turned on to a broad, badly-lit highway. Headlights swooped on them through the snow.

  ‘I keep thinking they’re going to hit us,’ Mortimer said. ‘I’m only used to driving on the left.’

  ‘You’re not allowed to have your headlights on in the city,’ Ansell said. He enjoyed old-handing it with newcomers. He pointed out of the window. ‘See that monument? That’s as far as the Germans got in the last war.’

  Richard saw the blurred outline of huge wooden crosses tilted like trench fortifications. Then they were in the outskirts of the city; over a bridge, through a bright tunnel, past big, square buildings.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Ansell. ‘Home sweet home.’

  The snow faltered and faded and Richard Mortimer saw the block. It was as he had expected it: high, bleak and impersonal. Only the cars on parade in the yard seemed snug, rounded and softened by the snow.

  The militiaman on guard emerged from his hut to inspect the newcomer. ‘Zdrastvuite,’ he said.

  ‘Zdrastvuite,’ Ansell said.

  Mortimer said: ‘Good evening.’ He looked at the policeman’s gritty, smiling face, the blue uniform, the grey sentry box. ‘I’m in Russia,’ he thought. ‘For heaven’s sake I’m in Russia.’

  On the tenth floor the hanging body of the Arab, not long dead, moved in a vague breeze. His eye-balls bulged and his swollen tongue protruded as if someone had just popped it in his mouth.

  Three floors below Luke Randall awoke briefly and drank some Narzan mineral water. The woman beside him who could no longer sleep because she was frightened waited for him to put his arm around her, but he turned on his back and slept again snoring gently.

  Two miles away Harry Waterman sensed the snow in his sleep because he had been anticipating it for weeks. He awoke and watched the flakes brushing the window. He thought, as he always did when the snow came, of the camp.

  He woke his wife. ‘The snow’s come,’ he said.

  She shivered although it was warm in the flat; shivered with the knowledge of the winter ahead; shivered with chilled resignation.

  ‘Somebody always tried to escape when the snow came,’ Harry said.

  ‘I know, Harry,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  She stroked his back, hard and scarred from the mines.

  ‘Give it six weeks and I’ll be able to go fishing on the ice with a bottle of vodka.’

  ‘You’re getting too old for that, Harry. You’ll catch pneumonia.’

  ‘Too old at forty-eight? Don’t talk bloody nonsense woman.’ He spoke in English as he often did when he was angry. She spoke in Russian.

  ‘You’ve been through a lot,’ she said. ‘You’re not as strong as other men.’

  ‘I’m as fit as any bloody Russian,’ he said.

  She put a hand on his hairless chest. ‘You are Russian,’ she said.

  He pushed her away. ‘I’m British. I’m as British as the Queen of England.’

  ‘Go to sleep, Harry,’ she said. ‘Go to sleep.’

  In the morning the children were out early on the playground surrounded by the foreigners’ flats. There was about half an inch of snow and they scooped it up with the sand beneath and threw it at each other, but it disintegrated in mid-flight. They tried to make a slide but the snow was too thin; they tried to make a snowman but the snow wouldn’t stick. But they didn’t care: the snow had arrived.

  The day bloomed white, blue and gold and the air rasped with the scrape of the babushkas’ shovels. The women moved with relentless rhythm—‘Fifty roubles a month, fifty roubles a month’—cosseted in scarves and boots and dungarees, moving like automatons, thinking of roubles and soup and hot potatoes. They were the widows of the last war, the mothers of dead children. They worked for warmth and food and if they hated at all they hated only the memory of the Germans. Some took on larger areas of pavement or car park and earned 100 roubles a month.

  Snow ploughs began to sweep the streets and motorists who had forgotten winter fought the skids and smiled nervously as the militia, angry with the cold, blew their whistles and waved their batons.

  The Kremlin emerged from the night and became a palace of fantasies, its spires and domes notes of music muted and frozen overnight, the gilt as bright as ice. The frosted domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, twisted like barley sugar, were Christmas tree baubles.

  Some of the snow sneaked through the windows in Luke Randall’s bedroom and lay, knife-edged, on the window-sill. He, too, remembered childhood; snow in Washington touching the windows of his parents’ ideal-home flat, the maid coming to wake him and the realisation that his parents had left for a two month vacation in Europe.

  He rolled out of bed and went to the window, a big man with dark hair just greying, who reminded himself when he looked in the mirror of a badger. He was more aware of his age than other people were and everyone said he didn’t look his thirty-nine years.

  A handful of sparrows scattered across the playground and a pigeon with a breast the colour of evening sky in winter, perched on the balcony, ruffled and indignant with the snow.

  The breeze picked up a corkscrew of snow and drove it across the car park. In December the children sprayed the playground with water and their skates sang in the dusk. Now they scrabbled and fell and laughed at a puppy nosing in the snow for moles or bones. By February the snow would be piled eight foot high around the clearing as soiled and sordid as dirty sheets.

  In the kitchen he drew the curtains and watched two cockroaches, brown and shiny, run for cover frantically waving their long antennae. In India he had seen cockroaches as big as your thumb. He made some coffee and took a cup to the woman waiting for him in the bedroom.

  She sipped it slowly, feeling for words, knowing the answers.

  ‘When does your husband return?’ he asked.

  ‘Next week. You know that.’

  ‘I never promised anything,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you never promised anything.’

  ‘You make me feel like a heel.’

  ‘I don’t mean to.’

  Two diamond tears formed in the corners of her eyes.

  ‘For God’s sake don’t cry.’

  ‘Don’t look at me then.’

  The two tears coursed down her cheeks and reinforcements took up their positions. Her eyes were green in the sunlight, the colour of sea-water just past the shallows. The flesh beneath her chin was tired a
nd her breasts beneath the black nylon nightdress chosen for illicit love were flaccid.

  ‘I’m not looking at you,’ he said. He turned towards the snow again and the bright sky curdling towards the centre of the city into a pall of creamed smoke from the power station. It was always there in the winter, quite grand sometimes or—according to your mood—obscene with the convolutions of a naked brain. A red Moskvich car moved off painting black ribbons in the snow. A Russian chauffeur brushed snow from a Mercedes with a brush made from thick, flowering grass grown in the south, with the delicacy of a hairdresser. He looked very compact and self-sufficient nine floors below. The pigeon peered into the bedroom, pulsing its throat.

  ‘I know I look ugly,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t ugly last night, was I?’

  ‘You were beautiful,’ he said. ‘I loved you and desired you.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then it snowed.’

  Upstairs a fat maid called Larissa arrived early for once in her lazy life and, on her way to draw the curtains in the lounge, walked into the hanging carcass of her master. She felt the body uncomprehendingly, then screamed, then fainted, then screamed again and ran out of the flat. At first no one took any notice because noises in the flats were many and varied and the Cubans across the way were accustomed to screams at any time of the day. Finally a woman delivering cables slapped the maid’s cheeks and fetched the militiaman from the courtyard. The agencies reported the death and it made two paragraphs in the New York Times.

  Across the courtyard Richard Mortimer inspected his new home. A narrow, spinsterish bedroom, a small lounge where he would have intimate dinner parties, a bathroom with a hand-shower, a parquet-floored corridor linking all three. It was his for two years and he was excited with the knowledge.

  Outside, Moscow was again as he had imagined it. The blocks of flats staring at each other with dead eyes, grey or yellow-bricked. The snow and the mufflered children. From the other window he looked across the highway at a vast hotel, a lunatic cement wedding-cake, sand-coloured and bayoneted with spires.

  He dressed carefully in his new charcoal suit. White shirt, striped tie, waistcoat.