Cold Blood (31 page)

We reached calmer waters. Her eyes cleared. The threads of longing dimmed from blood red to the colour of the air between us—air that had been somewhat jostled. I kissed in turn her little pink fruits and blessed them for their presence. Resting on my elbow, I traced the coastline of Africa round her tingling face, Libya being her forehead and the land of the Boer her doughty chin. Her great green eyes were the emerald mines of Xanadu.

She said, “Trim the candle, Charlie.” Then, in a low, replete voice, “We're travelling west now. It's towards trouble. I can feel it. Must you really have that gold?”

“What do you make of Mr. Jones?”

She smiled. I kissed her eyelids, wondering how I could ever have thought ill of her. She said, “I think he's someone other than he seems to be. Putting a bullet through the window is the sort of thing a young aristocrat does in one of our novels.”

“He wants to steal 690 tons of gold and remove it from the country.”

“That's a lot,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to help him?”

“A little. I'm after enough gold to get you and me to Odessa with some left over for when we reach London. Stupichkin gave me good advice. He said I should limit my ambition to what I can move and watch at the same time. A wagon, a barge, a suitcase, a canister. Makes sense.”

“So which are you looking out for?”

Talking to her was like having a corset fitted. A tuck here, an inch let out there, get it all lying perfectly. I said, “Best would be a barge. I know the rumour that the Volga's got a fleet of Red torpedo boats on it but I'm ignoring that. According to rumour, the ground is clogged with their troops, the air is stiff with their planes and the sea black with their cruisers—believe all that and we might as well open our veins.”

“Keep death out of it, Charlie.”

“Disappointment is worse.”

“I know. England might disappoint me. Have you thought of that?”

“Keep England out of it. Odessa first, my peacheroo.”

There was a quick, sharp knock at the door. I wrapped a towel round my waist and opened it a slit. It was Leapforth. He said, “I think you should hear what Stiffy's just picked up on the wireless.”

I said, “You tell me. Six words or less.”

“One'll do.”

“Which one?”

“‘Anastasia'. It's the keyword they've just used. Four identical letters in it. It breaks every rule in the book.”

“Then they wanted it to be intercepted. What does the message say?”

“Haven't broken it all yet. Something about the barges lying in Kazan. Give me another hour.”

“Tell Stiffy he can listen, but if he sends out one single message he's on the next train to Siberia.”

“Why'd he do a thing like that, Charlie?” he said in an insolent way.

I closed the door on him. Xenia, lying there with the sheet up to her chin, said, “When a Russian does a thing like that, there's a trick within the trick,” which even a child could have told me.

T
ISHE EDESH
, dalshe budesh
as our saying goes: he who walks softly, goes far. I reckoned it must have been Glebov who'd sent that message. His spies would have picked up my trace in Strabinsk. It wasn't a difficult guess that I'd team up with the Americans.

“What's his game, then?” I was in Boltikov's compartment, just the two of us.

“He's after the gold. Everyone's after it. Change the system and all you get is new forms of treachery. Nothing alters at the heart of things.”

“But why bring Anastasia into it?”

“The man's waving to you.”

“Peekaboo?”

“Yes. He wants to lure you to Kazan so he can kill you. He'll be eager to get you out of the way—to finish that episode completely.”

“Before I get him.”

“It's what I'd do if I were Glebov.”

I said, “I wonder if he has a conscience. Does he ever wake up in the difficult hours of the night and think to himself, I shouldn't have done that to her?” Then I went down the train to have a word with Shmuleyvich. There were only two ways to get to the centre of Kazan—and I wasn't going to have us walking.

He'd just put into a siding for the night and was banking off the fire. I looked round to see what extra protection he might need. We'd fixed up our two machine guns forward of the cab, on either side of the boiler. Kobi and Vaska, the new
boy, were going to be firing them. So Shmuley'd be covered from in front. And the wings of our armour-plating should protect him from the side. But I wanted to be certain. I didn't have a spare Shmuley.

He said, “Where are we going, boss? Kazan for the gold?”

“You too?”

“Small train, big ears,” and he laughed, a terrific rumble that made his stomach quiver. “You'll need to hurry. The locomen in Strabinsk said Muraviev is after it as well. And the Czechs, to pay their way to Vladivostok. Also—your enemy.”

This surprised me. “Glebov?”

“That's what they were saying. Everyone knows everyone else's business.”

“Especially mine?”

“Yes. Gold easy to get at, is it, boss?”

“On barges lying on the Volga. That's what the Americans tell me. They listen to the Whites' wireless messages.”

“If it was me, boss, I'd wait till they've put it onto a train and then move the train. Get someone else to do the lifting. That'll be sore work.”

“I hear you. But first we have to get into Kazan. How do we do that, Shmuley?”

“Not in a hurry. There's only one way in from this side, on the Sarapul line. That's a one-track railway. We want to have it to ourselves. Follow me? We don't want to be meeting stuff head-on.”

“Sure. Once the fighting starts in earnest, there'll be refugees coming out in their thousands. We'll park up in a siding while their trains go through.”

He put his python's arm around my shoulders. “I'll get you in, no need to worry about that. But will you get us out? At the end of this I want to be rich and I want to be alive. The wife died on me. I need a mate and it works better if the man has money. Get me? So the big question for me is this: How are you going to get us out with the gold if we get caught between thirty thousand Reds fighting thirty thousand Whites? You a magician,
barin
Doig?”

I said I'd figure that out.

But actually he was asking the wrong question. What he
should have asked was how I was going to get Glebov alone for long enough to kill him—and
then
get out. Get them all out. Right down to Vaska the sixteen-year-old with his fluffy cheeks.

Jones was at me first thing next morning, he and Stiffy together. “What could he have been thinking of using Anastasia as a keyword? I got it in seven minutes precisely. See here, Charlie, keywords aren't usually chosen at complete random. They're almost always things that are on a guy's mind. ‘Armistice' or ‘Bolshevik' would be good examples for right now.”

I said, “He was turning a knife in my hip joint. You don't know Glebov like I do.”

Stiffy opening his mouth to speak, I said, “You didn't respond, did you? For one thing you're meant to be dead and for the other the Reds'll have a range-finder somewhere.”

“No one likes to have us around,” he said plaintively.

“Of course not. Wherever you set up your kit, shells will surely follow. Shells or planes, comes to the same thing. So keep your dabby fingers off the sending key. I don't want another black Fokker—Hey, you smile like that again, Leapforth Jones, and you can run out and switch a set of points over while I shoot at you. It was no fun. Nor for the guys he killed.”

“They've got spies everywhere,” said Jones.

“Why make it easier for them?”

I glowered at Stiffy, who was back to twining a lock of hair round his finger. I knew he'd find it hard to resist that sending key. “If your fingers get an itch for something, stick them in your fly.” I bared my teeth like a dog and growled at him.

Jones said, “There's something else. ‘Anastasia' was yesterday. Today we have ‘Elizaveta.' I thought that'd interest you. Note the repetition again. And the ‘z'—only beginners use a rarity like that. Up to now their keywords have been real snorters. I've had to lever them open letter by letter. Here's an example: the last one they used before ‘Anastasia,' I found it meant a drawing of a staircase that has an ambiguous perspective—”

“‘Schröder,' “ put in Stiffy. “The umlaut was doing duty as a null, but it wasn't really a null, so the Captain was thrown completely. Very clever.”

“You see what I mean?” said Jones. “We're going along with
these keywords that have a real sarcastic twist to them, and now they give me a couple of sitters. What's the story, Charlie? What's with this Elizaveta? Anastasia was just a tease, you were right there. But this other dame—”

“Let it go, Jones.”

“I would, but I have to know whether it's going to affect my operation. That's fair, isn't it? All I get from Joseph are hints. Whenever I press him about the exact reason you're gunning for Glebov, he dreams up some urgent duty. Urgent, in Russia! So's my asshole. Whatever it is between you and Glebov, I reckon it's pretty gruesome. Got to be about money or a woman. Isn't nothing else in the whole wide world that could fly so far. Am I getting warm here, Charlie? Do I feel a little heat rising ...? OK, you're taking the Fifth, that's up to you. But you know, vendettas, sideshows, they mess up everything.”

I said again for him to let it go. Boltikov entered the room.

“This Elizaveta—beautiful name. Really gets my balls twitching. Was that the lady in the contest, la belle Russki dame?”

The smile had gone. His look was as hard as flint, those languid brown eyes of his having shrunk to the size of centavos. “If it's that personal, like a duel between the two of you—and I'm not forgetting you're half-Russki yourself and that you guys are a riddle to the rest of us—then I don't want to get caught in the mesh. Out-of-plan things'll happen. That's no way to win a fight.”

He eyed me like a bull eyes a small dog. No trace of pretty boy Jones now.

“I'm thinking, Charlie, that maybe something happened to this Elizaveta that where I come from would land a man in gaol for a century. Now is that getting warm or am I baking fucking hot?”

Smoothly, as if opening a packet of cocktail sticks, I unbuttoned my holster and took out my Luger. He was right across the table from me. I pointed it at the cartilaginous knob at the base of his breastbone—four feet away.

Stiffy stopped twiddling his hair. The handful of kopeks that Boltikov was jiggling in his pocket lay still.

The blood had left my face as all the poundage of my love
came thundering up from my heart. Hard on its heels was anger that this smiler, whose idea of love would be having the fat girl from next door over the sofa arm once a week, should take it on himself to defame my woman.

I said to him, “Elizaveta Rykov was my wife for exactly seven days. On the eighth day I was lured out of the house by a trick. By the time I discovered my mistake she had been raped by Glebov and a gang of soldiers. Why? Because she was the daughter of a nobleman, no other reason. Then they tortured her. Don't think of the worst, think past it. I shot her to put her out of her agony. At present I have only one purpose in my life: to find Glebov and kill him. If you mention her name again, I shall kill you also. With this pistol, the same one that I used on her. You have my word for it, the word of Charlie Doig.”

But he still held me with his eyes, probing. “So you shot her, huh. I guess she'd have been lying down... Pretty dramatic, snow on the ground and so forth. Yeah, snow, blood all over it, the smoke from the shot... that's hellish.” His face softened a little. “Hellish,” he said again.

Then briskly, turning over a new leaf, “Charlie, I don't want to mess with you now or at any time. I'll tell you straight out what's bugging me. You're after Glebov and we're after the gold. How do we get those two things reconciled? I only want to deal fairly with you.”