Cold Blood (28 page)

In the centre of his desk, on a square of black velvet, was a skull. He picked it up, hopped it around on his fingertips. “My second wife, not the mother of poor Misha Baklushin. This woman, to whom I would gladly have given all my chances of going to Heaven, died in a carriage accident. I had the greatest difficulty making her head my own. Religion, undertakers, tradition, you can imagine the barriers.”

I murmured about letters and pressed flowers in a book and even photographs being not quite the same.

“Yes,” he said. “With a skull you know where you are. You can speak to it without feeling you're going gaga. Your people, they have similar feelings so they don't look queerly at you . . . It's good to have your company, Doig. Your father was quite a scamp, you know, always getting into one trouble or another. Your mother . . . But that's all in the past. Everything worthwhile is in the past. How were we to know that what we were doing was wrong? We'd been doing it for centuries. No one ever thought before that it was wrong to have servants or money. Yet now that little tradesman fellow is calling us names that were only ever used for the devil. Thank God I'm not young.”

He gave the skull another twirl. Puffed at the eye sockets, dusting them. “We never had children, no little Stupichkins. The doctors said her shelf was lying the wrong way. I'm glad. To have one's children die before one must be an unspeakable pain. And today they might well die first, you know. There's so much mischief around. Whenever peasants take over, you get bad government... Misha Baklushin, my stepson, he was the closest I got to having a child. Lydia, his mother—we remained friendly. When I became a widower and got sent here, she would write to me almost every month.”

“Was that how you heard about Misha?”

“Yes. It was the most frightful letter I ever received. Misha, your cousin Nicholas—and of course your wife.”

“Elizaveta.”

“Yes, Elizaveta née Rykov, the same as your mother's family. You did a brave thing. I could never have done that to either of my wives. I loved them too much.”

We were drinking vodka. His drawing room was on the first floor. Below the window the soldiers were changing guard. The windows were open, the curtains undrawn except for a light muslin drape to keep the insects out. There was enough of a wind to make them bulge, a hot wind coming up from the deserts in the south.

He said, “Everyone knows why you're here. Blahos tried to get rid of you because he and Muraviev hope that when the gold pops out from Kazan, it'll pop down their throats. They don't want a man like you around.”

I smiled and raised my glass to him.

He said, “I can see why. When I first saw you, I said to myself, If he's only half the man his father was, I'll help him. Come to the window with me.”

The floodlights were on. The compound was octagonal in shape. At each angle was a blockhouse covering the smooth glacis where they reckoned to kill any attackers who got through the coils of barbed wire.

“The greatest danger is from within,” Stupichkin said. “One of these days the prisoners will attempt a breakout—and my guards will not resist. It'll happen as I say. The Reds are certain to win. We have nothing to set against the notion of equality.
When they do so, they'll murder me as painfully as they can... Those machine guns of mine down there, they have a watercooling jacket that surrounds the barrel. In winter there is often no water, but there is always snow. The design of the jacket is so bad that it is impossible, or at least very hard, to stuff them with snow. If a soldier is in a hurry he can't afford to boil up the snow. Otherwise they fire when wanted and will kill Bolsheviks if fired accurately. Therefore I am giving you two of them, here and now. Do you have a little...?”

He stroked the palm of one hand with the fingertips of the other, smiling delicately as he did so. “Something in the Tsarist currency will keep my men happy... scarlet would be the best colour... yes, two thousand is a perfect sum. Now what else do you need, Doig?”

“I have two objectives. The first, to kill Glebov—”

“That's what my information concerns. Second?”

“To seize the gold in Kazan and get out of the country.”

“For which purpose you will of course need to get into Kazan. If the Whites are holding it, you need no disguise. But if Trotsky,”—his wizened monkey's face twisted passionately— “who is the most unprincipled monster in the universe, has taken it, you'll need something. We can help you with Red Army clothing, from the men we executed... Also, ammunition for the machine guns,
bien entendu
. I will give you six boxes with a thousand rounds in each. What else does a modern caballero need?”

I asked for an armoured car, at which he laughed. “If I had one, I'd set off in it right now for America. But I'll tell you where you can find one—in Blahos's yard. Go past his office keeping it on your left, down the lane that opens up in front of you and at the end you'll find his compound. He may keep a soldier sleeping in the car... What else, what else to defeat the Bolshevik? Of course you know why I'm doing this. Because I'm as good as dead, because of your father, because—because I wish to make a clear and unmistakable contribution to the civilisation that has born and nurtured me. My country has served me well—it has kept me going for seventy-seven years! Now I shall return something to it... Horses! You must have your own cavalry! What can I have been thinking of!”

He drained his glass, throwing his head back. He drew a handkerchief from the lace at his wrist and wiped his lips. He smiled up at me. “Smash them to pulp, Doig!”

We started to move downstairs, when suddenly—

“Wait! I haven't told you about Glebov. The most important thing of all.”

I now learned everything that Stupichkin had extracted from his prisoners.

On the subject of Anastasia, the unaccounted-for princess, nothing was certain except that men had been withdrawn from each Bolshevik regiment to search houses round Ekat as well as every train that left the city. Some of the men sent to Stupichkin as prisoners had taken part in the train searches, pulling at women's hair to see if it was a wig and making them stand up and be measured in their stockinged feet.

“Where is the Princess? I don't know. But Glebov doesn't have her. I interrogated his driver. On 24 July, the day before Colonel Zak and his Czechs entered Ekaterinburg and a week after the Tsar and his family disappeared, Prokhor Federovich Glebov got into a Wolseley six-cylinder motor car with new tyres and was driven south-west towards Kazan. He was alone except for his bodyguard. At Sarapul the driver handed him over to another one. This man then tried to return to Ekat but was nabbed by Zak's men at a roadblock and sent down to me. Glebov's talk in the car concerned what was to be done if Kazan fell to the Czech forces. This has now happened. So we must suppose that he's near Kazan, probably having joined Trotsky whom all reports agree is massing his armies for a counter-attack.”

“Do you have proof that Glebov's after the gold?”

“That's a silly question. Nothing can be proved during a revolution. There is one thing more, Doig. I have known you were on the way for a fortnight. Three separate men have told me of this. Blahos also knew it, independently of my information. Strabinsk is a nest of spies. Do you suppose that Glebov has heard nothing about you?”

Something in his parchment face caught my eye, some flicker of ambiguity. I said suggestively, “I wonder what he'll hear when I leave your house.”

He sighed deeply and laid his hand on my sleeve. “The horror
that we have of a violent death doesn't stem from the fact of death itself but from our unpreparedness. When I die I wish to do so with dignity. For that I may need assistance from my enemy. There, you have your answer. During the long span of my life I have concluded that truth exists nowhere except in certain mathematical data. If I make two pronouncements with opposing meanings, it doesn't mean that one of them is a lie. Whichever happens is the truth. Truth exists only in the past.”

He calmed me, this small old man who didn't even come up to my shoulder—“You wish to see an avenue stretching out before you and to know that this road only is the one paved with sincerity, honesty and decency. I'm sorry. It's impossible to live without lies. Every human comes to realise this. Maybe you are starting to discover it too when you make love to your young lady. There may be times when you tell her something that is not up to the highest standards of Christian truth. If that is indeed the case then be tolerant, I beg you, and when you remember old Stupichkin, think of him as a radish—a red skin maybe, but round the heart and in all the vital areas, white as the snow. Now come. Let me give you these weapons I spoke about.”

A duty soldier was at the door to his rooms. Stupichkin told him to go and fetch his sergeant.

T
HE MACHINE
guns were to go forward of the cab on either side of the locomotive. It wasn't ideal. Without swivelling turrets an armoured train has limited offensive potential but I didn't have time to get into that branch of engineering.

Moreover, two machine guns took up the services of two men. They could only be Boltikov and Kobi.

I said to Stupichkin, “Muraviev's got one of my men. Seen a Mongolian around the city? He'll be unhappy by now, he'll be chewing his whiskers.”

He asked his sergeant. Yes, such a man had been seen. No one had been able to understand why a member of the great warrior nation had got mixed up with a layabout like Muraviev.

The sergeant had got an off-duty detachment to wrestle the machine guns onto a large station trolley. Some sacks of Red uniforms were thrown on top of the ammunition boxes. A piebald was led round to be hitched up, not a handsome horse but with solid quarters and good bone.

It shuffled forward into the floodlights with alert, suspicious movements of its head, which I saw were caused by the fact that it had a wall eye. Its name was Buran, meaning gale or tornado. It regarded us each in turn, expressively, probably out of hunger. As he was being backed up to the trolley, I heard a seashore slapping noise and, looking beneath him, I saw that we had a stallion.

“Christ, how did he get past the pincers?” I asked the sergeant, who was standing between me and Stupichkin.

Stupichkin smiled—they both smiled. The cavalry requisitioning department refused to accept piebalds because they
stood out so much. The enemy invariably concentrated their fire on them. No cavalryman would accept a piebald for a mount. Therefore all the farmers naturally wanted to breed piebalds and keep the requisitioning men away. Tornado was in demand.

“Now you understand the fullness of my generosity,” said Stupichkin.

“Whoa, Tornado, whoa,” I addressed him as he began to play up, I suppose having masculine pride about pulling a station trolley through town. “It's dark, no one'll see you.”

Looking into his wall eye, I saw that it was exactly the same vivid blue as those of the man who'd been bludgeoned to death on the cart. The other eye was wonderfully quick and virile, almost human. I said to that horse, “Hairy hoofs or not, I must ride you through Kazan or die,” and because of Stupichkin's vodka and perhaps also through being light-headed in reaction to the gruesome episode at the pit, I saw myself in a wall-eyeblue pyjama suit riding bareback on Tornado with Glebov's severed head at my saddle-bow, his livid blood flowing like sauce onto my curling vizier's slippers—

Stupichkin had taken a pinch of my coat and was leading me out of the floodlights. He checked none of his guards were within earshot. “Kazan, sometime in the first week of September, that's when Trotsky'll attack. The Czechs'll fight like rats. The second day'll be chaos. That's when you should go in.”

This time I didn't even begin to wonder how he knew that. I thanked him and said goodnight. However, he was reluctant to let me go. Did I want a hand or two of Boston? One for the road? I wouldn't try any rough stuff with Blahos, would I? He'd be a vindictive adversary...