Cold Blood (24 page)

“Thought you said they were hot stuff,” I said.

“Yeah, beats me why they've gone down to a Beaufort. Fifty years ago it was being sold to schoolboys as a bit of fun. Maybe they're having trouble getting decent cipher clerks.”

“Explain it,” I said.

“In ten words,” said Boltikov, bored, picking the seeds from the raspberry jam at the bottom of his tea glass.

“The whole thing? Transposition, substitution, the ways a cipher alphabet's constructed? Why, you could write a book just about the use of nulls—that's letters you put in to confuse the enemy. They don't have a meaning—or do they? You don't want to know about cryptography, Charlie. The war can't last that long.”

Stiffy said, “Repetition is straightforward, sir—with respect.”

“OK, Stiff, you're right. I'll give them repetition seeing how it's the basis of everything. Now, boys, the only cipher that stands a chance of winning is the one that avoids it. OK? Start using the same symbol for one particular letter and you're sunk. If the frequency tables don't undo you, there's any number of mathematical formulae that will. Short is good. Short wins wars. But the type of information that has to be sent by cipher is rarely short. That's why ciphers are so complicated. That's why I have a job... Codes and code words? Forget 'em. They're for kiddies.”

Boltikov was lolling in his chair, snapping at flies with one hand and flicking their bodies into his glass. He caught my eye. He was waiting for the cooperation bit.

The heat was hanging on to the bitter end of the day. Without
the trees, there was no baffle against it. It rolled in from the plains, filling the hollows in the fields and the river valleys, the streets, the courtyards, the houses, rooms, beds and at last the brains of everyone present in Strabinsk in those first days of August. It was why Muraviev drank champagne at ten in the morning, why the mastiff was humping the spaniel and why Leapforth Jones was fingering his pistol.

H
IS VOICE
was deep, solemn, serene, all the effects for which men get trusted and called Uncle. His steadfast brown eyes rested patiently on mine. His tunic had come off and his tie. His khaki shirt had razor-sharp creases. He was wearing a wedding band. In every single respect the Captain was a skilled and wholesome employee of the US Army.

He said, “You don't seem very curious about us. No questions? Like how did you guys get from the States to Strabinsk?”

Boltikov said in his heavy English, “We wait for pay day,” which made Jones smile.

“So tell us,” I said.

“When we left the US there were six in our unit. Four have copped it, three from tif and one from falling into Vladi harbour between two vessels. So I have to press-gang men as I go along to put up the aerial. Hundred and twenty foot to be swayed up and guyed. Not a job for Stiffy and me alone. End of story.”

“You want a labour force.”

“Yep, that's it,” he said, looking me straight in the eye.

Obviously the two were in it together, the wireless king and the cryptographer. They'd got hold of something juicy. Had to be the gold. Everyone was hot for it. Why should they be any different? They couldn't bring it off by themselves: they needed us. To be precise, they needed my armoured locomotive and my driver and my workforce—
nota bene
, my reliable workforce, not dying of tif or getting squashed to death.

I said, “Leapforth, let's not play games. Where's the gold? Now, as we speak?”

That big white smile again. “I like a man who pitches fast. The answer is, Kazan. The Czechs and the Whites recaptured the city last week. They plan to ship the gold east in barges. Kolchak wants to have it where he can see it.”

“And what you have in mind?—let me see if I can guess... It'd be frowned on in the States?”

“Right on, Charlie.”

“But in Russia, where the rule of law has gone down the pan—”

“Down deep, man, real deep.”

“Anything goes?”

“That's it,” he said. “Morality—forget it. You can't find a trace of it in Strabinsk. You should see what I get offered in my hotel room—every night.”

Wanting to put him right on that I said, “Hold it there. I'm not here just for myself. If that makes me a man in a thousand, well, that's the way it is. I'm here for one thing only. Revenge. Revenge, full stop. The man I'm after is People's Commissar Prokhor Federovich Glebov. When I've nailed him, maybe I'll have time for your gold.”

“Man in a thousand, eh? That's a pretty high figure... OK, I wasn't making enough allowance for the sincerity of your motives. So revenge is your game... yeah, well, looking round Strabinsk when the news got out about the Tsar, I'd have said every single person here is hot for revenge... You'll have a good reason for going after Glebov, probably something he did to your family. That seems to be the pattern... So you're not interested in this gold story, have I got that straight?”

“Glebov first.”

“I see... Maybe I can help you, Charlie? How would that be for a deal, if I helped you with Glebov and you helped me into Kazan?”

“We could discuss that,” I said warily.

The next thing he said: “You know, it's a different class of winner that surfaces in a revolution. Sure, the guys with the usual unpleasant qualities'll pop up, the vultures and the criminals, but to make it to the last cut... to have a chance at the big house... yeah, you've got to have one hell of a good story in a proper revolution, one where the whole system of living is
up for grabs. Like you're the first man to discover how to make bricks or the first woman with tits. You get me?”

Thinking he was shooting a line for himself, I asked him what his story was. But he shook his head. “Not me. Stealing gold ain't much of a story these days. I was thinking about some of those Reds we could be up against, the guys who've made it to the top. Trotsky and this Glebov of yours. They'll be as full of tricks as a pack of monkeys. Now, this is what I was thinking . . .”

The essence of his plan was to vanish from the US Army, he and Stiffy. Not to desert, but to get themselves artificially killed and thus disappear from the army's books. That was what really made him nervous: having the US authorities on his trail. So once they were dead they'd buy new documents from the counterfeiter opposite Blahos's office and when they made off with the gold, why, they'd just be regular desperadoes who'd got lucky.

“The papers, the witnesses to our execution, I can arrange them all. Then burial in a mass grave. I've got a photographer for that part, here in Strabinsk, name of Smichov. That's all that's needed. My wife's not going to send her lawyer to Siberia to sift through a heap of bones just so she can have a good weep. The kids neither. Pa was a soldier, so he got himself killed, that's how they'll reason. Stiffy here's only got a sister for a family—”

“Two.”

“OK, two. What's the second one called, Stiff? Back in Bristol, so how was I to know that? Older or younger? OK, she's the oldest of you three so what she's going to say is, That little Timmy was never going to come to any good, not snotting like he did. It's his just deserts. Forget about him . . . Listen to me, Charlie, Stiffy and I can check out of Strabinsk any time we want. Out of here, out of the army, out of our lives. No one'll be any the wiser. Anything goes. You said it yourself.”

Boltikov, seeming asleep, opened for me one brusque, bright, intense blue eye.

Stiffy was twiddling a hank of his anaemic ginger hair round his index finger, girly fashion.

Jones, looking directly at a vertical line drawn halfway between me and Boltikov: “And you're no different, you two. You could vanish like us.”

I said, “Why'd I want to do that? I'm not the one in the US Army.”

“OK, maybe you don't need to for the same reasons I need to. But you'll be the very first man to exist if you don't want— let's put it like this—to renew yourself. You name me a man who's not running away from something.”

“Didn't I just tell you, I'm a man in a thousand?”

We regarded each other in silence. Had I bought the Cinema Lux, this would have been the bit in the movie where my Russian audience would have stopped spitting out their sunflower husks—when the four gunfighters played a card game, loser to be hanged in the morning. Through their fantastic system of eavesdropping, Jones and Stiffy had uncovered information that was available to neither the President of the United States nor the King of England nor the Pope, the Infanta nor anyone in the entire and teeming billions of the world save Colonel Zak and a handful of top Bolsheviks.

I looked round the table, moving my eyeballs only. Behind each of the others' masks, I could make out the shape of a giant truth that was glowing red hot: that never again, though we were each to be immortal, would we possess the knowledge that could place 690 tons of gold in our possession.

Women—if you miss one, there are more on the way. Wealth isn't like that. It's not stacked up back to the horizon. It has to be earned.

Mouth at an angle, Jones said, “You ain't no man in a thousand, Charlie Doig. That's bullshit. You're a scavenger just the same as Mister Ordinary.”

“Tell me what you know about Glebov. Blahos says he's nowhere near here.”

Jones picked up his pistol, aimed it casually through the window at bossy Mrs. D. who was on platform patrol on that side of the train. “Good-looking dame, the big one . . . your friend Glebov, People's Commissar for the Political Re-education of Prisoners, was in charge of the arrangements for the Tsar and his family. The late Tsar, God have mercy on him... You heard
Glebov was doing anything different, you were being fed birdseed. He's one of the Big Three. Lenin, Trotsky, Glebov, that's the line-up. Glebov ran the show at Ekat. He had them shot. Except maybe his daughter Anastasia, the chubby one. I'm hearing a rumour that she survived and your fellow's trying to organise a ransom for her.”

I sat silently, trying to work out if that told me anything more about Blahos than he was a liar.

Jones snowed me with those teeth of his. “That's first-class information I've just given you. See, Charlie, there's not much around here that I don't know. Do a deal with me and there'll be more.”

It enriches the spirit of mankind to be desired, especially after a period of down. Pressure builds again in the heart cavity and in the lungs. We are invigorated by a new form of oxygen, that of popularity. Our organs swell, our blood fizzles, our kidneys grind like fury and smash the toxins to pieces.

I smiled like a prince on Jones. Nevertheless I said, “Glebov first.”

“Here's what I say to that,” he said, and sent a bullet between Boltikov's head and mine, shattering the window.

A scarf of blue smoke curled past the jagged ends of the glass. He said, “Without our information you'd still be at base camp.”

“Without us you'll be digging latrines to hold red piss for the rest of your life.”

Stiffy said, “The room was getting too warm anyway.”

I said to Jones, who was still in his chair, still holding his pistol, “A bullet's a poor argument. Maybe it's a big thing in America, but in this country loosing off like that is a way of saying good morning.”

He said, “Glebov's chasing the gold as well. I know it for a fact. Come with us and you'll get to meet him face to face. Is that a better argument?”

I said, “But I give all the orders, understood?” and saw him nod. I said, “And we split the proceeds four equal ways, understood?” and saw him nod. We shook on it. Then the door started to rattle and the handle to turn.

It was Xenia, in a state of high alarm after the shot. I scooped
her up and kissed her until she squealed and the others went out grinning into the corridor.

I told her what had been said about Princess Anastasia. Her hand went to her throat. “The poor love! I shall pray for her,”— which is what she did while I idly watched Mrs. D., who'd been joined on patrol by Shmuleyvich.