The Man Who Was Saturday Read online

  Calder said: ‘You know better than that: they don’t trust anyone.’

  He moved to the window and gazed at the floodlit public gardens below. He enjoyed them. In summer they dozed dustily; in winter they radiated vitality as youngsters with polished faces skated exuberantly along paths hosed with water to convert them into canals of ice.

  In fact he enjoyed the apartment near the monumental buildings of Gorky Street, the best bakery in town and the extravagances of Gastronom No. 1. Compared with the barrack-block flats occupied by most of the defectors it was a palace and attracted much envious comment. But then they didn’t know what he knew. He was a VID, a Very Important Defector, and as such was entitled to a home isolated from the Brigade. He even had a wooden dacha in the country. Dalby was the only other defector with one of those.

  Jessel said: ‘You’d better take white. In your condition you need the extra move.’

  ‘I can still beat you blind-folded,’ Calder told him. In fact there wasn’t much to choose between the two of them, although Jessel was the more cautious player, Calder finding it difficult to resist a potentially swashbuckling brilliancy without assessing it thoroughly. Patience was what he lacked. Jessel’s careful intricacies had earned him the right to play in a few minor tournaments in the Soviet Union and to spy in unlikely places. ‘I’ll take black,’ Calder said.

  P-K4.

  P-K4.

  Calder made his move standing beside the marble-topped coffee table and continued to patrol the living room; movement, he hoped, would help to sober him up. The apartment helped to settle him – he had grown into it and it was shabby like himself. Period Muscovite with sombre furnishings and a rich, balding carpet; but it did contain small glories such as carvings leafed with gold, a painting of Siberian pastures feathered with mauve blossom, a chandelier whose frozen tears had been washed with soapy water only that morning by Lidiya, his maid. Unlike so many members of the Twilight Brigade he hadn’t cluttered it with bric-à-brac, the detritus of the abandoned West.

  ‘Your move,’ Jessel said.

  ‘Knight to queen’s bishop three,’ Calder replied without looking at the board.

  ‘You’re very sure of yourself.’ Jessel undid his button-down collar and loosened his striped tie.

  ‘How many times have we played the Ruy Lopez before?’

  ‘I might surprise you this time.’

  ‘Surprise me,’ Calder said.

  A few minutes consideration, then: ‘Your move again.’

  ‘Pawn to queen’s rook three,’ Calder said, again without looking. The popular line these days, when vodka was your second and you had to play carefully.

  Looking at the sparkling chandelier, he hoped he hadn’t been too abrupt with Lidiya earlier that day. She had been waiting for him when he had returned from the Institute, normally docile features animated. Apparently she had joined a queue in Warna, the Bulgarian store on Leninsky, and bought a cherry-coloured dress with a flared skirt. Despite the fact that five hundred other women would be wearing the same dress she was delighted with her purchase and she was wearing it for him.

  He was touched. ‘Very pretty,’ he told her.

  She smoothed the skirt against her thighs. She had been allotted to him when he first came to Moscow and she had served him well in the apartment, adequately in bed.

  Respect had arisen between them although even now he didn’t really know if she enjoyed the love-making: it seemed to him to owe a lot to a Western sex manual given to her to cater for a decadent American’s appetites.

  She was a lean woman with surprisingly large breasts. She was frankly plain and might one day look spinsterish, but there was a pleasing serenity about her and her brown hair curled prettily at the nape of her neck.

  ‘Would you like me to stay?’ she asked him but he told her no, he had work to do, and she departed ostensibly unperturbed, but you could never really tell with Lidiya.

  The reason for the dismissal had been the invitation to the party from Katerina Ilyina.

  Calder sat down at the coffee table and considered the Ruy Lopez developing on the board. He had little doubt that Jessel would move his bishop to rook four and that he would be able to produce a reasonable opening game by making copybook moves. By the ninth move they had progressed predictably to the Closed Defence. No dazzling variations tonight. Wasn’t it Reti who had said that a player’s chess style tended to be the opposite to his life-style? Tonight that made him a buccaneer off the board.

  Calder moved his knight to queen’s rook four. The Chigorin System still as popular as ever nearly eighty years after the master’s death. When your own adventurous instincts were temporarily paralysed you could do worse than follow the father of the modern Soviet chess who had confounded the old Tarrasch school.

  He said: ‘How’s Harry?’

  Jessel said: ‘Whose party was it?’

  ‘A girl at the Institute.’

  ‘The new girl who looks after the files on the defectors?’

  Calder nodded. ‘Harry?’

  ‘He’s fine. He’s got a sailboat and he’s hoping to take part in the Charles River Regatta in October.’

  ‘He isn’t sailing now, is he? It must be cold.’

  ‘It’s Boston,’ Jessel said. ‘He had a little accident the other day.’

  Alarm spurted like acid. ‘How little?’

  ‘Very. He fell off his bicycle and grazed his knee.’

  So why tell me? All part of the process, Calder assumed.

  ‘He’s still a Bruins freak of course,’ Jessel said, moving a bishop.

  Still? Harry was only eight. ‘And Ruth?’

  ‘Where was the party?’

  Calder gave him the address on Leningradsky.

  ‘Guests?’

  ‘Her mother and father were there.’

  ‘Step-father,’ Jessel corrected him. ‘Ruth’s finally passed all her exams and got a job teaching handicapped children.’

  Who would have thought it? Ruth, one of the flowers of Bostonian society, arrogance her birthright. He saw her shopping in Newbury Street: the street seemed to belong to her.

  Jessel said: ‘I presume this girl is stukachi.’

  ‘An informer? If she catalogues our lives she must be. One in twelve Soviet citizens are supposed to be KGB contacts, aren’t they? But I should think she’s innocent enough. You know, merely passing on updated material to her superiors.’

  ‘She’s into Women’s Lib isn’t she?’

  ‘You seem to know a lot about her.’

  ‘Sure, I do my homework.’

  Calder knew that Jessel had contacts other than himself inside the Institute.

  Jessel said: ‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd? You know, that a dissident of sorts should be employed there?’ He relit his pipe and blew smoke across the chess board; it smelled of autumn.

  ‘Ours not to reason why,’ Calder said.

  Jessel stroked his long, sparse hair. ‘Aren’t you going to ask about your parents?’

  Calder asked; he doubted whether they ever asked about him. His mother, perhaps.

  ‘Your mother’s fine. Your father had a stroke but he’s going to be okay. Maybe a little speech impediment.’

  Calder found it difficult to imagine his father’s diction impaired. That magisterial voice saying grace before lunch – Calder had never quite forgiven God for semolina pudding.

  ‘How’s my mother taking it?’

  ‘Bravely. As always. It’s your move.’

  Calder stayed with Chigorin. Pawn to bishop four.

  Somewhere a clock chimed. He stood up and walked to the window. The floodlights had been switched off but he could see the bluish radiance of the street lights on Gorky Park. He closed the curtains.

  Jessel was frowning at the board. What was bothering him about Calder’s play was his uncharacteristic conformity: it upset his own. Calder wondered how the party on Lenin-gradsky was progressing. For the first time he had been accepted by Russians, but only becau
se his presence had been a lie.

  Jessel said: ‘Is there still a lot of speculation about Kreiber?’

  ‘The rumours have become facts. He committed suicide, he was dumped beneath the ice after being knifed in his apartment, he was a double – or should it be triple – agent, a rapist, a homosexual ….’

  ‘He was a sad sack, ‘Jessel said, not quite touching his queen’s pawn. ‘So the Twilight Brigade is in disarray?’

  ‘Alarm bells have been sounded, sure. If Kreiber was murdered then the comrades were clumsier than usual. That blood on the edge of the ice ….’

  ‘And you, do you think he was killed?’

  Calder shrugged. ‘It’s your move.’

  ‘Do you anticipate any more deaths? No one thinking of trying to get an exit visa?’

  ‘You must be kidding, ‘Calder said.

  ‘Not even figuratively? You know, retracing their footsteps.’

  ‘You think they’d tell me if they were? If they confided in anyone it would be Dalby.’

  ‘Alas, he’s not my pigeon.’ Jessel moved. P-Q4 as Calder knew he would.

  Calder sat down and tried to concentrate but the firewater had frozen in his veins and his head was full of ice. He looked at Jessel who was examining his pipe the way pipe-smokers do, as if he had only just discovered it protruding from his mouth. ‘I quit,’ Calder said.

  Jessel appeared mildly surprised; disconcerted never. ‘You really put one on, didn’t you?’ His speech was a curious mixture of slang and protocol English.

  ‘Do you mind if I go to bed?’

  Jessel stood up. ‘It’s your bed.’ He picked up his coat and Persian lamb hat from the sofa. ‘Laura will be surprised to see me home so early.’ Jessel was very proud of his happy marriage and tried to keep his home in one of the complexes reserved for foreigners as American as possible. Calder found his visits disconcerting, their purpose questionable; he tolerated them because Jessel kept him informed about Ruth and Harry. In the past he had tried to contact Ruth but his letters had been returned unopened and her telephone number was no longer listed. ‘I’ll be in touch. Any messages?’

  ‘None.’ There wasn’t any point: he was his family’s shame. He hoped Ruth had put antiseptic on Harry’s knee.

  Jessel let himself out of the apartment, closing the door softly behind him. Calder waited until he heard the clatter of the elevator gates, then went into the bedroom.

  The phone shrilled as he was lowering his head gently onto the pillow. When he picked up the receiver he heard breathing.

  ‘Hallo.’

  The breathing was slow and measured.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Click.

  He stared at the receiver for a moment before replacing it.

  He laid his head on the pillow; above him the moulded ceiling spun like a dying top. He closed his eyes. He was playing chess with Stalin and he was losing. When Stalin called: ‘Check,’ he leaned across the board and pulled his shaggy moustache. It came off in his hand.

  CHAPTER 5

  The next to die was a fat Italian named Bertoldi.

  He died, paradoxically, at a time of hope – the thaw. Moscow rang to the music of water. Dripping from dwindling icicles, plunging down drainpipes, frothing in the gutters. Listen carefully and you could hear the accompaniment – wet snow falling thickly from rooftops and, in green-blushing parks, tentative bird-song. On the river this April day the ice was on the move and in the streets Muscovites straightened up from winter. A time of hope. But not for Alfredo Bertoldi.

  Since he had come to Moscow five years ago, blown, it was said, as financier for the Red Brigade, unsuspected for years because you expected Red Brigadiers to be young and fierce and Bertoldi was neither of these things, he had mourned. For pasta. For girls on the Via Veneto who wore nothing but fur coats and high heels. For Neapolitan songs. For God, Italian style.

  Hopeless lamentations when, because you were a gangster rather than a fugitive keeper of secrets however cob-webbed, you were housed in a cramped studio in the foreigners’ complex on Kutuzovsky Prospect, named after the field-marshal who sent packing another intruder, Napoleon.

  Despite the lack of pasta Bertoldi perversely grew fatter on Chicken Kiev spurting with butter and black bread and assorti ice-cream which he bought even in minus 20 degrees. But it wasn’t the healthy, baritone fatness of an Italian enjoying his sustinence: it was the bloated corpulence of the compulsive eater, the worrier.

  His departure from this life of regret was spectacular. A few tenants were strolling in the courtyard of the barrack-block apartment blocks where foreigners – diplomats and journalists mostly – were housed together in the interests of surveillance. It was 10.35 am. The sun had already melted the temporary skating rink, tyres hissed excitingly on Kutuzovsky, even the two militiamen posted at the gates to check visitors were smiling.

  Suddenly the windows of an apartment on the fifth floor were flung open with such force that the glass shattered. And there stood Bertoldi in a scarlet dressing gown. Later some witnesses were to testify, unofficially and without any degree of certainty, that they had observed movements behind the obese Italian; others were equally convinced that Bertoldi had stood alone.

  What was undisputed was the manner of his fall. He seemed to float supported by the scarlet wings of his dressing gown. There was, it was asserted, a monstrous grace about his exit. His scream lasted from the window to the ground.

  Such was his bulk that when he hit the concrete he spread. Within fifteen minutes the mess was cleaned up by militia and taken away in an ambulance.

  A note was found in his cramped apartment. It was written on a picture postcard of his native Turin beside the remains of his last supper.

  It said: I can’t stand this fucking life anymore.

  CHAPTER 6

  Katerina always remembered Easter that year: it changed her life.

  In the afternoon of the Saturday she went with Svetlana to a meeting of the feminist movement near the pink massif of Soviet Radio and Television on Piatnitskaya Street.

  The purpose of the meeting was to establish some sort of order in the crusade. And to an extent it succeeded largely due, Katerina believed, to the call of spring. The lime trees were tipped salad green, kvas vans were in the streets, cotton dresses were beginning to blossom. ‘Anything is possible,’ the breeze whispered.

  In a small assembly hall – ‘Stone, this time,’ Svetlana had insisted, ‘in case of arson’ – a committee was elected, a chairman appointed. Katerina was given a place on the committee with a responsibility to teenagers; Svetlana was charged with ‘spreading the word across the length and breadth of the nation.’

  ‘Just because I was going out with an Aeroflot pilot, ‘Svetlana said later when they were drinking lemon tea in a steely-bright cafeteria. ‘Ah, well, it’s only one sixth of the world’s land surface – it shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘It’s because you work for Intourist,’ Katerina corrected her. ‘Was going out?’

  ‘He was too keen that one,’ Svetlana said.

  Keen for what? Svetlana had never been sexually reticent. All she demanded was respect. And that, if you boiled it down, was all the movement wanted.

  Beside them a crumpled-looking man was reading Pravda, starting at the bottom of a page where brevities of interest lurked and losing interest when he reached the exhortations to greater productivity and recriminations about absenteeism. The coffee machine behind the stainless steel counter hissed like a steam engine.

  ‘He wanted to get married,’ Svetlana explained when the hissing subsided. ‘Can you imagine? Marrying a Russian is bad enough but a pilot … girls in Leningrad, Kiev and Archangel and the faithful wife waiting in Moscow to stir his borsch while he kicks off his shoes in front of the television. No thanks. Besides he was a goat.’

  By which, Katerina assumed, she meant he was a selfish lover. The old school. The younger generation were more considerate, some of them.

  ‘So wh
o’s taken his place?’ Katerina asked.

  ‘An architect. Lots of blat. Special pass for the third floor of GUM, dollars for the Beryozka shops, a Volga, hi-fi, video. He tells me he’s got a dacha in the country too.’

  ‘Obviously a very good Communist,’ Katerina remarked.

  The crumpled-looking man looked up from his newspaper and smiled.

  ‘And he’s not bad-looking,’ Svetlana said. She sipped her tea. ‘Not exactly good-looking.’ The coffee machine hissed. ‘But architecturally sound.’

  ‘Does he know you’re a defender of women’s rights?’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t like that at all,’ Svetlana said decisively. She searched in the pockets of her coat for cigarettes; to Katerina the coat looked suspiciously like part of an Aeroflot stewardess’s uniform. ‘And you, what have you been up to pussycat?’

  Katerina wanted to tell her that Calder was taking her to midnight mass but she checked herself. The crumpled-looking man looked benign enough but you could never tell. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘The Institute’s boring as ever. It reminds me of a literary treadmill. No one ever gets anywhere, they just keep turning pages.’

  The crumpled-looking man folded his newspaper. He said: ‘Enjoy yourselves while you’re still young,’ and was gone.

  Pushing at her blonde, untamed hair with her fingers, Svetlana leaned conspiratorially across the table. ‘So tell me, kotik, what have you really been up to? Consorting with decadent foreigners?’

  When Katerina told her Svetlana was uncharacteristically solemn. ‘Take care. It’s always struck me as odd that we weren’t prosecuted over that fire.’

  ‘I don’t see the connection,’ Katerina said.

  ‘Nor do I, but I suspect one.’ Svetlana sipped her tea. ‘Perhaps I’ve been reading too many spy novels. Too many videos …. Why not give the American a miss?’

  ‘He’s a Soviet citizen. I’m not doing anything wrong. Merely showing him the real Moscow. He bothers me,’ Katerina added. ‘He’s not weak like the others. Just ….’

  ‘… misguided?’