The Man Who Was Saturday Page 18

  But Tokarev, eyes closed, was standing thigh-deep in rushes waiting for duck to come in from the dawn sun to join a decoy on silver water.

  All night a blizzard of letters had swirled inside Calder’s skull assembling in crazy names, unpronounceable names, a few possibilities that meant nothing to him. When he dozed he was agonising over crosswords. One across: The day after Friday. Ten down: The day before Sunday. When he awoke the signature on Jessel’s decode was still garbled.

  Even now eating lunch in the compartment brought by the sullen samovar girl the letters presented themselves. His head ached with them.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Jessel said, spooning soup and rolling black bread into a pellet, ‘Harry’s going to be okay.’

  How would you know? Care? Calder wondered if Jessel had received his ‘further instructions’ yet.

  The girl brought them pyelmeni, meat dumpings, and white wine. She said: ‘There is no service tonight, you will have to eat in the dining car.’

  Jessel said: ‘Maybe they’ve decided to bug the compartment. It’s been clean until now.’ He drank some wine. ‘Of course when you get to the States there’ll be one hell of a debriefing. You’ll be taken to a safe house. And then they’ll have to work on you.’

  ‘How do you mean, work on me?’

  ‘Plastic surgery, another identity. Our friends don’t give up that easily. Look what happened to Trotsky.’

  ‘And Ruth, what do you know about Ruth?’

  ‘I know she’s at Harry’s bedside.’

  Was. You don’t know where the hell she is now; the cable said nothing about Harry.

  Jessel said: ‘Maybe she’ll have you back. You’re doing a great job for America.’

  ‘You sound like a baseball coach.’

  ‘It’s true. No war-medalled hero has done more.’

  ‘Don’t give me bullshit. I didn’t defect to help the States. Ruth isn’t stupid.’

  In any case, did it matter? He loved Katerina. But had loved Ruth.

  He remembered Lidiya who had died because of him. He remembered the ordinary face and the innocent curls at the nape of her neck. He remembered the boy in his red Pioneers’ scarf.

  He drifted further back. His father’s voice carrying down the dining-table picking up the silver tones of the candelabra on its way. Chess. Names on the bases of the pieces. Everyone had always known Holden would go far. But not as far as he had gone. But Holden’s character was blemished. Only I know about it.

  Christ, how pompous hindsight could be. A glade cut from pines and embroidered with kingcups passed the window. A family were picnicking in it. Mosquitoes biting your ankles, ants in the sandwich spread …. If only we realised that one day we’d look back through a hole in the parchment of time – and wonder why we had eroded sunlight with complaint.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Jessel said. ‘Harry will be all right.’

  MARION SHANNON LEAD FALSE …. Someone was trying to stop him getting back to Harry. Saturday. The letters were snowflakes fluttering coldly in his skull.

  At 9.30 that evening when Calder and Jessel had gone to the dining car Tokarev set in motion the evacuation of the soft-class coach. Although they had been forewarned the passengers still protested, but the red ID backed by Kirov’s reputation held sway.

  What Tokarev proposed to do was tiresomely elaborate but necessary because he couldn’t risk a shooting match on the Trans-Siberian – with so many foreigners on board the reverberations could easily reach the West.

  When everyone had been transferred to hard-class compartments, all demanding fare rebates, Tokarev entered the Americans’ compartment. Entered their lives. He smelled the fading camphor from Calder’s clothes, his after-shave; the oil Jessel used to keep his hair in place, his deodorant. He also smelled hostility.

  The magnetic chess board was lying on three paperback books stacked at the rear of the table by the window. He opened it, removed the pieces nestling inside and dropped them into his jacket pocket. In their place he packed sticks of 808 gelignite and in the hinged space that had separated the white and black camps he inserted a pencil time fuse fitted with an acid bulb; he squeezed the end of the fuse to arm it.

  The fuse was set to detonate the gelignite when the soft-class coach was in the siding at Cheremkovo. According to surveillance reports Calder and Jessel didn’t play chess after dinner. But just in case they did Tokarev booby-trapped the board with a flash fuse and release switch that would blow the gelignite immediately the board was opened.

  An explosion on the Trans-Siberian would be messy and complicated but the two Americans would be good and dead. The stock explanation would be offered: saboteurs killed by their own weapons.

  Tokarev replaced the chess board on top of the paperbacks and, swaying with the motion of the train, made his way back to the hard-class compartment where Spandarian, his next target, was waiting for him.

  At 2.30 am Calder, hearing a metallic click, opened his eyes and in the dim blue light from the ceiling lamp looked into the barrel of an automatic pistol fitted with a silencer.

  Jessel, prodding the gun, an American High Standard, at Calder said: ‘I’m glad you woke up. I’ve wanted to tell you what an asshole I think you are for a long time.’

  ‘I never doubted your views,’ said Calder who hadn’t been asleep.

  ‘No one likes a traitor. Not even the Russians.’

  ‘Nor me.’ Calder felt under the duvet for the butt of the TT pistol he had taken from the militiaman at Khimki Port.

  ‘Did it ever occur to you that the KGB and the CIA sometimes collaborate?’

  Calder’s fingers found the butt of the pistol. He shook his head.

  ‘I think you should know a few home-truths before I kill you. I wouldn’t want you to die thinking your values were clear-cut. Them and us ….’

  The train was slowing.

  ‘Cheremkovo,’ Jessel said. ‘No sweat.’ He backed away a little as though he had seen danger in Calder’s eyes; he stood between the table and Calder’s bunk. ‘A two-minute stop.’

  Calder’s hand closed round the butt of the TT. Now he had to aim it under the duvet. ‘How do you mean collaborate?’

  ‘The CIA help to kill your kind in Russia; the KGB do the same in the West. It’s easier that way. An American defector in Moscow being approached by a nice friendly diplomat from the United States Embassy. A Soviet dissident in New York meeting a kindly Russian from his hometown with news of his family. An accident, natural causes ….’

  A summer day. Mrs Lundkvist’s jolly voice. Baskets of mushrooms. jessel wandering back into the wood.

  ‘You killed Lidiya! You went back to the wood and got the Death Cap. You dropped by for a drink later and slipped it into the basket of mushrooms ….’ Astonishment momentarily eclipsed fear.

  The train stopped with a jolt.

  ‘I also killed Kreiber acting on information supplied to the KGB by Dalby, of course. Like you he had begun to doubt, to think about reneging. But the West doesn’t want traitors back. Why should it? Nor does Russia want to keep them if they want to re-defect. So at decent intervals they are dispatched as inconspicuously as possible.’

  ‘Trying to put a bullet through my head in my car … inconspicuous?’

  ‘An Executive Action Department fuck-up.’

  Another jolt. The train seemed to be moving backwards.

  ‘So why did you stop collaborating with Spandarian?’

  ‘Because you came up with this crap about blowing the KGB godfathers in the West. Suddenly you were valuable to Washington and I had to help you escape.’

  ‘Like the good scout you are.’ Calder raised the barrel of the pistol a fraction.

  ‘Even the President believed you. And why did you suddenly decide to re-defect? Because you knew there was a contract out for you, that’s why. The only reason. And do you know when I knew you weren’t going to get away with it?’

  ‘When you got the cable telling you that my information was bullshit?�
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  Jessel paused.

  The train stopped again.

  ‘You read the decode?’

  ‘Sure I did. Have you received “further instructions” yet?’

  Jessel smiled. ‘I didn’t need further instructions. Handle with utmost caution. A pre-arranged code within a code. It means go ahead, kill the bastard.’

  ‘Then why haven’t you?’ Calder asked.

  ‘Because I want to kill you quietly while everyone’s asleep within commuting distance of Irkutsk. By the time your body has been discovered in the luggage rack under the bunks, I’ll be boarding a plane back to Moscow. And in any case the KGB will thank me for doing their job for them. Vladivostok? I didn’t stand a goddam chance in the chess. And as for gathering intelligence – they would have produced every World War II warship they can find just for my benefit.’

  ‘Reti was right,’ Calder said. ‘A chess player’s style is a contradiction of his character. You’re a pirate, Jessel.’ The TT was now aimed at Jessel’s heart.

  ‘A sophisticated pirate. For instance I took the precaution of unloading that pistol you’re aiming at me under the duvet.’

  A train crept away from the station; then there was silence except for the night breathing.

  Jessel’s finger tightened on the trigger of the High Standard.

  Calder, preparing to make a hopeless leap, said: ‘You realise we’re still in the station.’

  ‘So? The gun’s silenced.’

  His trigger finger tautened, as the magnetic chess board exploded behind him projecting him, a human shield, at Calder, snapping his head forward and scooping a hole in his back that left the knuckles of his spine bare.

  The blast buffeted about the compartment breaking things. Blood sprayed the mirror and the shards of window. Calder, lying beneath Jessel’s body, felt him die. He pushed the dead-weight from him, prising the slippery butt of the pistol from his fingers. His ears ached and he was screaming silently but the blood on him was Jessel’s not his.

  Dressed in vest and pants, he waited inside the door that had been kicked out by the blast. Footsteps, toe and heel the way a hunter stalks, cracking glass on the floor of the corridor.

  You didn’t wait any longer for the sort of man who had made a bomb out of a chess board, for a man who approached with such a professionally tentative tread. Calder leaned abruptly into the corridor and shot Tokarev in the head.

  Tokarev dropped his gun, brushed at the blood and bone with his big hands and came at Calder. Calder shot him again in the chest. The hands reached for Calder’s throat. Another shot in the belly. But Tokarev was an inexorable bear squeezing the life out of the tormentor in the green depths of the forest, his forest.

  Calder’s gun-arm was pressed impotently between their two bodies. He cried out hoarsely like a bird warning the forest that a predator is on the loose. Hearing the cry, Tokarev released his grip, gazed into the branches and fell onto the soft bed of leaves.

  Spandarian watched the door of the soft-class coach through the sights of the AK 47 assault rifle he had drawn from militia HQ at Krasnoyarsk half way between Novosibirsk and Irkutsk. He had lodged the gun with the driver of the locomotive because Tokarev would be on his guard.

  But Tokarev, absorbed with the results of the explosion, wouldn’t be anticipating the executioner’s bullet quite so soon; nor would he know of the existence of the AK 47.

  Spandarian heard three shots, Tokarev making quite sure that Calder and Jessel were dead. Smiling, he caressed the trigger of the rifle with his forefinger: one bullet to make him Director of the First Chief Directorate. And then ….

  Calder stood quite still for a moment to allow his instincts for survival, honed by pursuit, to re-assemble. It was probable, those instincts told him, that Tokarev would have had a back-up.

  He dressed quickly, found Jessel’s briefcase in the darkness and slid it into his suitcase. Then, using a corner of his duvet as protection, he pulled the daggers of glass from the frame of the window. He swung one leg over the sill, then the other, and disappeared into the rain-powered night.

  He had no idea where he was going. Just away from the station and the gunman who, according to his sharp new instincts, would be on the other side of the train.

  He didn’t run: kicking up noise was death. He saw railway lines gleaming faintly with the polish of night and stepped over them. Ahead the saw-edge of pine forest against the sky, sprawling hills of coal and the skeletal outline of a bridge. From the station came movement, the sound of voices; he assumed that the staff had been dismissed for the killing but had been called back by the explosion.

  He reached the bridge spanning a river and crouched behind a steel support pillar. In Russia rivers were used day and night for moving raw materials and there would be a steady stream of barges taking coal from the rich fields of Cheremkovo to Irkutsk.

  He waited. The rain thickened. A movement near the abandoned coach. In the distance the muted roar of an approaching train. Up river a throb – a tug. Behind it three whale-like shapes.

  The tug passed under the bridge as the train, swaying and rattling through Cheremkovo station, howled into the streaming night.

  As Calder stood up a bullet hit metal beside his head.

  Suitcase in hand he jumped.

  When Spandarian reached the bridge all he could see through the rain was the grey breadth of the river, a channel of the night washing away the detritus of the day.

  By which time, the coal barge carrying Calder, one leg broken, had rounded a curve of the river, and was proceeding on its elephantine but majestic way to Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world.

  CHAPTER 22

  When Katerina was released from house arrest she assumed that Spandarian had either caught Calder or knew where to find him.

  Despairing, she went to see Svetlana in her apartment on Gruzinsky Bank Street. Svetlana had already shed the husk of her beating and, apart from a few fading bruises, was magnificent once more.

  Wearing a brown and saffron kaftan, she made coffee in the kitchen. The apartment was only a studio and bathroom but Katerina envied her the smart little home with its trailing greenery and avant-garde pictures, furnished by pilots and architects and, once, the centre-forward for Zenit Leningrad.

  ‘So,’ Katerina said, sinking into a black-leather armchair. ‘How’s the architect?’

  ‘He’s doing marvellously,’ Svetlana said sitting opposite. ‘He’s had a great incentive to work. When the KGB worked me over he was so worried about being contaminated by my wounds that he applied himself whole-heartedly to designing a new block of flats. I haven’t seen him since.’ She bit sharply into a chocolate biscuit. ‘And Calder?’

  ‘They must have got him.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Svetlana’s voice became more gentle. ‘I wondered why they stopped redesigning me with rubber truncheons. But don’t give up hope: he’s not stupid, your American. He’ll give them a run for their money. Has anyone heard anything at the Institute?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know; I’ve been suspended.’

  ‘Because of Calder?’

  ‘According to the Director because of my association with the feminist movement.’

  ‘Good.’ Svetlana swept blonde hair from her forehead revealing a cut with two spider stitches in it. ‘Because we’re having a rally next week. Are you game?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Because, pussycat, we have to carry on whatever happens.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Katerina said, frowning.

  ‘Ah, but you don’t know everything: the rally has been banned. This is it, Kata, time to see what sort of stuff we’re made of. Precocious infant doomed for a premature death or resilient youth.’

  The phone rang; Svetlana picked up the old-fashioned receiver, the only antique in the room. She put on her telephone-voice-for-males; Katerina knew it well – firm but loaded with suggestion. Yes, she would love to go to the Bolshoi. Giselle? It always seemed to be Giselle but
, no matter, she would look forward to seeing it again. She hung up and said to Katerina: ‘The replacement.’

  ‘A quick turnaround,’ Katerina remarked.

  ‘You’ve got to be quick to catch them. He’s a little on the old side but distinguished.’

  ‘And influential?’

  ‘Naturally. And do you know something? When I really fall it’s going to be for some little guy with a mother fixation instead of blat. It is written.’ Svetlana picked up a copy of Family magazine. ‘Here, listen to this. Single man, 23, with one-roomed apartment and car with good prospects as a teacher seeks older woman with a view to marriage. Older, that’s the giveaway. A wet-nurse is what he wants. Maybe I should reply ….’

  ‘So you’re not going to tell me who this devastating octogenarian is.’

  ‘I don’t know how you’re going to take this. But first I want to point out that he’s going to be very useful to us.’

  ‘Spit it out,’ Katerina said.

  ‘Okay. He’s a colonel in the KGB. The one who stopped the beating.’

  Katerina was on her feet. ‘For God’s sake, Svetlana!’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t like it. But before you stomp out of the apartment think. We need someone on the other side, someone with influence, someone who can tell us which way the wind’s blowing, someone who can tip us off it they’re going to raid us ….’

  ‘Have you …?’

  ‘Slept with him? Not yet.’ She tried a smile. ‘Sleeping with – I always thought that was a contradiction in terms.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Katerina said.

  ‘And you can stop being a prig, Katerina Ilyina. Did I criticise when you were sleeping with your American defector?’

  ‘That was ….’ Different? No, don’t bother with the platitudes. Where was he now? Facing a firing squad? She put down her coffee cup. Her eyes burned.

  She said: ‘So where’s this rally?’