The Man Who Was Saturday Read online

  ‘Red Square,’ Svetlana told her.

  Today, despite its intimidating aspect, Red Square was a wistful place. September sunlight lingered and, although there were heady days yet to come, a chill breeze fanned the broad expanse of cobblestones like the first sniff of a gathering cold.

  On one side foreign newsmen had assembled opposite the red walls girding the Kremlin, close to the Christmas tree baubles of St Basil’s Cathedral, as though seeking their blessing. Women’s Lib, although old hat in the West, was news in Russia, especially when a couple of the protagonists could have graced Playboy’s centrefold, especially if the militia mounted on pawing horses in the side streets were ordered to charge.

  So far only a few women had arrived but there were still ten minutes to go before rallying time, advertised in samizdat newspapers and spread by word of mouth.

  Militia were already doing their best to break up the gathering, employing druzhniki, part-timers wearing red arm-bands, to fool the snapping cameramen. A party of Cubans in shabby military denims bringing up the rear of the queue leading to Lenin’s Tomb watched nervously.

  But not as nervously as the officer, wearing the blue epaulettes and collar tabs of the uniformed KGB, sitting in the grey Volga on the corner of Kuibychev Street. His name was Shevchenko and, like the nineteenth-century poet of that name, he came from the Ukraine. Shevchenko, thirty years old with, so he had been told many times by adoring women, Paul Newman’s blue eyes, was nervous – shit-scared, he confessed to himself – for several reasons.

  Firstly, he hated the authority of Moscow, yearning for the wind-rippled wheat-fields of Little Russia and the leisurely graces of the Kreschchatik, the Champs-Elysées of Kiev, and you couldn’t get much closer to Authority than Red Square.

  And then, although he was KGB, infiltrated there by his father who worked in the Procurator’s Office in Kiev, he secretly admired defiance and had been known to tip off members of the OUN, the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, who believed – rightly in his opinion – in an independent Ukraine, that a police raid was imminent. He suspected that it was these sympathies that had resulted in his transfer to Moscow. Siberia next, he thought gloomily as re-enforcements reached the women gathered opposite the Redeemer’s Gate.

  Moreover, although rebellious by nature, he was scared of women – a Ukrainian failing, according to Muscovites – and here he was charged with the destiny of God knows how many mutinous females. Although, he admitted, he wouldn’t mind sharing the destiny of the blonde with the heart-breaking legs.

  And finally, his briefing had been outrageously ambivalent. His Director didn’t want the rally to succeed. ‘We can’t allow any form of dissidence to prosper; it would spread like wildfire throughout the Soviet Union.’ (Didn’t he realise that the Soviet Union was spawned on dissidence?) But at the same time he didn’t want the Western media to witness force being used to disperse female belligerents. ‘You must use your discretion,’ that popular injunction for passing the rouble.

  Behind the Volga a horse reared on its hind legs. Shevchenko recalled pictures of sabre-wielding Czarist cavalrymen cutting down mobs of peasants. Imagined the photographs in the Western newspapers of his own horsemen charging a mob of women. He glanced at a copy of Pravda lying on the seat beside him. It contained an article advising men not to waste time over the kitchen sink, to untie their apron strings and hurry back to the assembly line where they were needed.

  The article attacked the Western idea of sharing housework. ‘The worth of the husband, his prestige, should be the prime thing in the moral code of a family. There should be a strict hierarchy in a man’s home. He is the provider of the family, the builder, the keeper of the foundations. Women should always feel the strong hand and kind strength of the man.’

  And an extraordinary case was quoted. A housewife had caught her ‘hapless’ husband washing the dishes. She was quoted as remarking: ‘I saw my man had changed – even his voice wasn’t what it used to be.’ And then, realising what she had done to him by demanding equality, she had thundered: ‘Take off that apron. I don’t want to see you bent over the kitchen sink again. Be a man!’

  It didn’t help, Shevchenko brooded, on this day of days.

  He looked at his wristwatch. In five minutes it would begin. A few rabble-rousing speeches, a petition at the Redeemer’s Gate and a march twice round Red Square. Really it was unthinkable. So what are you going to do, Shevchenko? Behind the cavalry, militia armed with water cannon and rifles loaded with rubber bullets were awaiting his orders.

  The blonde tapped on the window; he wound it down. ‘Are you Shevchenko?’ Stacked as well.

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘Bykov told me.’

  ‘Bykov?’

  ‘First Chief Directorate.’

  That Bykov! That bastard. The lingering spectre of the execution chambers that had once existed in Lubyanka in Dzerzhinsky Square.

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘I was with him last night.’

  Doing what? he wondered. ‘So, what do you want?’

  ‘He told me that Kirov is quite adamant there shouldn’t be any violence. Did you know that?’

  ‘I have my instructions.’

  ‘My God,’ she said, ‘those eyes.’

  ‘Eyes?’ He was becoming confused.

  ‘Cornflower blue. I suppose lots of women have told you that.’

  ‘A few,’ he admitted.

  ‘I’ve got tickets for an Agursky concert tonight. Would you like to come along?’

  ‘Will Bykov be there?’

  She shook her head. Her smile was devastating. ‘It’s a date,’ she said. ‘See you at the ticket office.’ She strode across the square and began to address the suffragettes.

  On the fringes of the gathering a few scuffles broke out but the druzhniki stood no chance: every time they manhandled a woman a cameraman took a picture.

  Shevchenko bleeped the cavalry to be at the ready and radioed his Director.

  ‘The rally’s started,’ he said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Permission to move the horses in?’

  ‘You have your orders Shevchenko. Use your discretion.’

  ‘But ….’

  But the Director had cut the connection. Shevchenko stared at the mausoleum where Soviet leaders stood to review the military parades. Were the old men of the Politburo even now watching him from above the swallow-tail battlements of the Kremlin wall? Was Kirov there?

  He bleeped the horsemen to move onto the square, water cannon and rubber bullets to stand by.

  The blonde was well into her stride now. He could just hear her over her microphone. ‘Equality is all we seek. We have it in the office, in the factory. Oh yes, the equality of which the founder of this glorious nation of ours, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, was so proud is well established in our workplaces. But is it elsewhere? The answer, comrades, is no. And I have here the organ of the Communist party to prove it.’ She held aloft the copy of Pravda urging Russia’s manhood to undo its apron strings.

  Shevchenko admired her with a terrible perversity. He would put on an apron for her any time. But the way events were progressing he would soon be chipping ice from tin plates in a labour camp.

  The blonde’s place was taken by a girl with shining black hair and a face full of suffering. Beautiful but not his type: she lacked the arrogance of the blonde.

  Cameras clicked. Foreign tourists disobeying Intourist shepherds stopped and gazed curiously at this display of feminine defiance on the Kremlin’s doorstep. Whatever I do, Shevchenko thought, I am doomed.

  He was saved by the arrival of a procession of Young Pioneers, the boys in black trousers, white shirts and red scarves, girls in black dresses under white aprons, rehearsing for November 7th, the anniversary of the Revolution. They were led by a goose-stepping boy and girl carrying the Red Flag and it was a safe bet that, as they must have come from a school close to the Kremlin, some of them were the sons and daughte
rs of the privileged.

  At any rate his subsequent explanation that he couldn’t send in the horses or fire the water cannon or rubber bullets in front of the children was accepted, albeit without enthusiasm.

  ‘You know something?’ he whispered to Svetlana that evening while Leonid Agursky wooed his audience in a concert hall near the Botanic Gardens. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Kirov’s own grandchildren weren’t among those kids.’

  ‘And do you know something? You could go down in history as the man who established Women’s Lib in Russia.’

  ‘I am not sure I want that,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ She took his hand and patted it. ‘Now be quiet and listen to Agursky.’

  When Katerina got home Spandarian was waiting for her. But he was different; the gloss had gone.

  Sasha was at work at the Operetta Theatre and her mother had been dismissed by Spandarian. They were alone.

  Spandarian, pacing the floor, said: ‘I want you to think very carefully: I want you to remember where Calder said he was going.’

  Joy expanded inside her: Calder had eluded them.

  ‘I told you before, he didn’t say where he was going.’

  ‘You knew he was going east. You lied to me. You told me he was heading west.’

  She didn’t care what she had told him: she wanted to dance. Outside children’s kites, red and blue and yellow, flew high in the September sky.

  Spandarian grasped her shoulder and spun her round. ‘You will remember!’ he said. The gloss had left his voice too.

  ‘There’s nothing to remember.’

  He raised his hand to hit her, changed his mind. He said: ‘You remember what happened to your friend Svetlana?’

  ‘She’s going out with a Colonel Bykov in the KGB at the moment.’ She was also going out with a very junior officer with cornflower-blue eyes but that wouldn’t help. Katerina was amazed at the instincts aroused by the realisation that Calder was free: she was in the ascendancy. ‘Do you know this Colonel Bykov?’ Bykov was undoubtedly very junior to Spandarian. Or had been? The new instincts were racing.

  ‘I know of a Colonel Bykov. Why?’

  ‘He wouldn’t like to see his fiancée’ – another inspiration –‘hurt in anyway. Or her best friend for that matter.’

  ‘What do I care what a colonel thinks?’

  Katerina appraised him: he had a beaten air about him. ‘I think you should care,’ she said. And then: ‘Have you been sacked, Comrade Spandarian?’ Masterly.

  Spandarian didn’t reply. He walked to the door leaving a slipstream of brandy fumes behind him. ‘I’ll give you until tomorrow. Think hard, Katerina Ilyina. In the meantime you will remain under house arrest.’

  Not quite beaten. Still dangerous.

  But he didn’t return the following day. And three days later Katerina made her move. She packed a bag and took the money she had won on the lottery from Sasha’s safe under the linoleum covering the kitchen floor.

  When Sasha and her mother were out she undid several buttons of her blouse and opened the front door. The plainclothes militiaman standing outside was middle-aged, bored and untidy. Leaning forward so that he could see the slopes of her breasts, but not quite the peaks, she asked him if he would like some tea or some beer, or even a little vodka.

  She led him straight to her bedroom. ‘You must be hot,’ she said, and helped him take off his jacket, and, ‘You make yourself comfortable while I get a drink. Vodka?’ and when he nodded and sat on the side of the bed, ‘Then we can both make ourselves comfortable,’ breasts brushing his face.

  In the living room she picked up her case and went into the corridor locking the door behind her. Then she ran.

  She caught a taxi to the apartment of Leonid Agursky who, she remembered, was embarking on a tour of Siberia and asked him if he could help her to get there because her new and wonderful instincts told her that Calder would make for the address she had given him on the shores of Lake Baikal.

  ADJOURNMENT

  CHAPTER 23

  The White House. December.

  First snowflakes of winter hesitating outside the long, blue-draped windows of the Cabinet Room. Beyond them the Rose Garden in hibernation.

  Holden, addressing select members of the National Security Council, said: ‘So that’s it, gentlemen, it looks as though we lost Calder.’

  He stared down the long mahogany table at Harry Truman warming himself on the wall above the fire.

  ‘How long since we lost contact?’ Secretary of State Howard Fliegel asked. Being a part-time huntsman he could never give up a chase.

  ‘Nearly three months.’

  And not a whisper from the steppe about his fate. Or the fate of Jessel. All the passengers in the faulty soft-class coach of the Trans-Siberian had been moved to another car; all, according to the Soviet authorities, had arrived at their destinations except the two Americans.

  ‘But they can’t just have disappeared off the face of the earth,’ the US Ambassador in Moscow had protested. To which the Russians had responded: ‘We agree. We demand to know the nature of their mission in Siberia.’

  ‘So,’ NSA Director Howard Zec said, ‘we’ve lost a heaven-sent opportunity to bust the Soviet operation in the West.’ He rumpled his soft white hair and stared accusingly at Louis Thurston, Director of the CIA.

  Thurston removed his spectacles, his disguise, and said: ‘Unless they got lucky it looks to me as if our friends were tipped off by someone that Jessel’s chess-playing buddy was Calder.’

  ‘Monday?’ Defence Secretary Martin Duff suggested. He stroked his beaky nose. ‘Or Tuesday or Wednesday.’

  ‘Or Saturday,’ Zec interrupted. ‘Not even Calder knew who Saturday was.’

  ‘Knew?’ Thurston queried.

  ‘Sure. To disappear in Siberia is to be dead. Wasted.’

  Shoemaker, Holden’s Assistant for Security, said: ‘It figures, I guess. If the six agents left, now Marian Shannon is dead, are as influential as Calder suggests, then one of them might have heard about the Trans-Siberian escape route.’

  Shoemaker, Holden thought, looked damp, as though he had just struggled into his grey suit after saving someone from drowning off Malibu beach. A bead of water from the shower slid off his slicked blonde hair.

  Silence as the snowflakes peered in.

  Finally Zec, still staring at Thurston, said abruptly: ‘Has it occurred to anyone in this room that Jessel may have killed Calder?’

  ‘And why in the hell would he want to do that?’ Fliegel asked, predatory instincts aroused.

  ‘Yes, why?’ from Duff.

  ‘Supposing he was a double-agent working for the KGB as well as us. Supposing he was Saturday. What better place to be installed than the American Embassy in Moscow?’

  ‘Then he would have killed him a long time ago,’ Thurston said. ‘As soon as he knew that Calder was going to renege. Let’s not get too convoluted just because the NSA hasn’t got too many fingers in the pie in Moscow.’

  ‘In any case,’ Duff remarked, ‘Jessel is missing too. Presumed dead. Unless, of course, they killed each other ….’

  Holden intervened. The situation was serious enough without intelligence directors infecting the meeting with their own paranoia. ‘All that need concern us,’ he said, ‘is the disappearance of Calder and the names he was bringing with him. If Calder is dead then we have to think about tracing their identities without his help.’

  Dead. And in a way I killed him. It was as if the chess games all those years ago had been the opening moves for the gambit – the betrayal – with the final check-mate somewhere in the wastes of Siberia. Holden remembered how, after giant sand-wiches at Elsie’s, they had tabbed the names of personalities they would like to have eliminated under the major pieces. The name he should have written under Calder’s king should have been CALDER.

  The previous day he had spoken to Calder’s ex-wife. Harry who had surfaced from his coma back in Sept
ember had made a good recovery physically. But the neurologist wasn’t over-optimistic about his progress mentally. Apparently it was difficult in the formative years to assess whether brain damage would be permanent.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be ironic,’ Ruth had said on the phone, ‘if he came under my care at the school?’ Her voice was taut.

  What do you say? Don’t worry, he’s going to be okay. He said: ‘These things take time.’ Worse.

  ‘No news of Bob?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘They got to him, didn’t they?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ruth. He vanished. Maybe he escaped ….’

  ‘A few hours after he regained consciousness Harry was asking about his father again … after all those years.’

  Maybe, Holden thought, the children of Bostonian high society had never let him forget that his father was a traitor. His defection had never come into the open but it would be discussed in the cul-de-sacs of élite gossip.

  ‘… according to the psychiatrist,’ she was saying, ‘it might help if Harry could see his father.’

  ‘We’re still looking,’ Holden said.

  ‘In Siberia? Don’t insult my intelligence, Gary.’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do ….’

  ‘You did enough,’ she said. ‘A long time ago.’

  Click.

  ‘And how do we go about doing that?’ Fliegel asked. Holden returned to the Cabinet Room. ‘How the hell can we trace the identities of six days of the week? Computer print-outs on every VIP in the Western world?’

  ‘We’re working on it,’ said Zec who never elaborated on his platitudes.

  Thurston, face naked but calculating, was more expansive. ‘We,’ CIA not NSA, ‘got a few leads from Marion Shannon’s effects. It was her function to promote disarmament. You know, disarmament in the West but not in the Soviet bloc. She funded peace rallies, got to the kids, even turned a few heads at Bilderbeg. She was doing a good job. Given a few more years she might have fashioned “a world fit for our kids to grow up in” – and the Communists to occupy. Peace perfect peace and freedom a whisper from the past.’