Cold Blood (32 page)

It was the second time he'd used the word. But the fact was that from rich to poor, from dunce to genius, no one in Russia had the smallest interest in fairness, hadn't even any knowledge of the word. Power, that was the brew in the black bottle. Trample the common man. To hell with fairness. Surely Jones knew enough about the country for that.

There was a fiction in him, maybe two or three or four.

Looking directly at him, I said, “Someone here is after something I don't know about. And that's too bad for him, cos I'm only making plans for myself and my payroll. Shmuleyvich! In here!”

When he came I told him to take a no. 22 screwdriver and dismantle the armature of Stiffy's sending key and bring it back to me. That or break up some of his nice soldering.

“No!” Stiffy grabbed Shmuleyvich by the arm and held him fast. “It's my life! It's given me friends all over the world—a family. Without it I'd be a null. The wireless, it's who I am.”

Boltikov growled at Stiffy, “In what way are you necessary to us? Why don't I just shoot you and take your share of the gold?”

With an upward, preening, corkscrew movement of his neck, Stiffy said, “I'll tell you why. Because you want to know the exact date Trotsky'll attack Kazan, that's why.”

Boltikov said, “I'm waiting.”

Stiffy looked at him with total disdain. “3247813127829311T. The ‘T' is a null to complete the series of digraphs. I'm not just a secretary taking down shorthand, you know, some stupid little polly.” He made Boltikov a tiny bow, a lovely piece of rudeness.

Jones said, “It's the usual checkerboard cipher with the transposition coming from the keyword. Like a Vigenère with reversed alphabets. An altogether better class of cipher than a Beaufort.”

“That's shit,” bristled Boltikov.

“You think so? You think I'm bluffing?”

“How do you know it's from Trotsky?”

“Came from Stavka. His HQ. Can't be anyone else.”

“How do you know it's for attacking Kazan?”

“Short is always orders. Decipher what Stiffy just told you and you'll find an abbreviation that stands for ‘Treat this as confirmation of the tactics already discussed.' The rest is date and time and target coordinates.”

“Who's he speaking to?”

“Kreps. He's leading another army up from the south... Gee, you're a quick man on the draw, Mr Boltikov.”

I sort of shouted at Stiffy, quite a release of breath, “So what the hell day is it in September? I'm not interested in your schoolboy number games.”

Stiffy asked Jones if he could tell me the date. Jones nodded.

It was to be 5 September. On that day the Reds were going to pile in with every man they could lay their hands on. Trotsky and his armies were closing in from the west, were attacking the Romanov Bridge even as we spoke. Kreps and the 6th Army'd be the other arm of the pincers.

I said to Jones, “Was this another Elizaveta message?”

“No.”

“So this date isn't part of their game? They're not leading us up the garden path?”

He shook his head. “It's for real. Stavka wouldn't play games with Kreps. It'll be on the night of the 5th because the Whites don't care for night fighting. The Anastasia and Elizaveta messages are probably being sent by Propaganda Bureau. They put out all the dummies—create false armies, sow suspicion, get the other guys jumpy . . . Mr. Boltikov, mind if I ask you something? Where does the paranoia come from in your countrymen?”

“In the nation's milk, from titties.”

But it wasn't paranoia that was tapping out my wife's name. What I was hearing was a whore rattling the curtain rings of her booth and the name of the whore was Glebov. The golden rule: a man is never more easily hunted than when he believes he's hunting another. A cold tremor rippled from my heart into my arms and legs and down to their very tips.

C
HIRILINO WAS
the place I chose to lie up until the time came. We cruised quietly into the station one evening with men at both machine guns to show we meant business. We needn't have bothered. The only person who hadn't got out was the stationmaster.

His name was Blumkin: short, stout with a chipped front tooth and a gold watch chain as thick as a skipping rope hanging between his waistcoat pockets.

His story was a sad one the first time we heard it. Every evening he'd take out his stepladder and light the twin rows of oil lamps that stretched the length of the platform. Every hour of every day he expected to hear again the thunder of the TransSiberian expresses and see his lamps set a-swaying by their billowing bow wave. He loved the expresses, he loved the little stopping trains, he loved the ladies in woollen scarves who popped out from town to sell glasses of tea and offer napkincovered baskets of warm piroshkas to passengers who were delayed. Bells, whistles, coded messages on the railway telegraph, locomotives on the potter (columns of sooty smoke like mushrooms in the grey sky), changing the date on his ticket machine, triple-stamping dockets for the shipment of heavy goods, all such matters were his life blood to exactly the same extent that the wireless was Stiffy's.

He wasn't downcast by the fact that we were his first train for over a week. He was one of those people who are on top form throughout the day. He and Jones were like twins, smiling away at each other from the moment dawn broke.

One particular reason he was so cheerful was that he too had
worked out what the fall of Kazan would mean in terms of refugees. The ticket office and both waiting rooms were crammed with everything from blankets to jars of kerosene, not forgetting the Kapral cigarettes that he was going to sell at five kopeks each to these desperate people instead of the usual five kopeks for twenty. When he'd sold three-quarters of his stock, he was going to jump aboard the next train and make a run for America.

So his story became less sad and I foresaw that his chipped tooth was in line to become golden.

I got Blumkin to give us one of his sidings so I could observe the refugee trains passing. It's not every day one hits off a revolution plumb in its spinning eye. Wasn't I going to sire kids sometime? Wouldn't they say to me, “Hey, Pa, what did all those escaping princes look like? Were they crying their Russian eyes out, dressed in the family furs, had emeralds up their asses?”

Blumkin said, “Why be interested by them? They'll soon be poor or dead.”

“Damned right they will if they buy anything from you,” I said. Then I got Kobi to persuade him to fill my coal tenders.

Hearing the roar of the stuff coming down the chute, Jones stuck his nose into my affairs. “What's all that for?” he asked. “It'll take us miles past Kazan. Isn't the idea that we board the gold train and use their coal? Why buy more than you need?”

Here I became certain that he was either a dope or a fraud. First, I wasn't paying for the coal. Second, if all that gold, 690 tons of it, left Kazan on a train, everyone in the province'd be after it. There'd be spies hidden in culverts, snipers, bombardiers, army commanders, tarts, lawyers, dentists, jewellers, makers of weighing scales, assaying agents—Christ, there'd be no limit to the number of spoons in the stew if 690 tons of gold got loose. To stay anywhere near such a train would be fatal. Yet Jones hadn't thought of that?

I tapped my nose. “All part of the plan, Leapforth.”

Then I had Shmuley take the train down into our siding, which ran alongside a lake with ducklings (a second brood) strung out like commas behind mamasha, who'd be tomorrow's dinner if I knew Kobi. Chivvying the ducklings along, lowering its neck and hissing at them, was a swan, compensating for its
bad temper by the snow-white elegance of its plumage and its stateliness.

It was like a real Russian summer paradise down there. Stupichkin should have been with me, should have lain down and died there so he didn't need to look upon any more awfulness. At any moment Chekhov could have strolled out from the shimmering birch trees in his crumpled linen jacket and scuffed brown shoes and said something witty to us. The hand coming from his trouser pocket to take out his notebook would have been hot and moist. Shoving his cap onto the back of his head, he'd have shown his brown hair to be lax with sweat. He'd have leaned against a birch and lit up. Mrs. D. would have come to the door of the galley. Skillet in hand, warm fat dripping onto her apron, she'd have stood there gazing upon him, eyes soft with admiration. In her mind she'd have been murmuring to him, “Come and have a little breakfast with me, dovey.” With a smile he'd have pushed himself upright and shrugged his jacket straight. (That would have been the moment for his witty remark, not earlier.)

The birds sang softly, the wasps shone with health, the crickets chirruped and the bees were happier than they had been for years now there were no peasants left to steal their honey. In the evening the mosquitoes would be bad but it wasn't evening yet and next to the lake was a meadow full of grass and bursting white clover for Tornado.

The ramp of his wagon came down. Out he trotted, the horny old bruiser, with his head up and his big bold eye on full alert. He halted to sound his trumpet. Greetings, girls! went out to the mares of Chirilino and when he had no reply he lowered his head in resignation and strode off in step with Kobi, whose shoulder he rubbed affectionately with his muzzle. Better than hauling the Strabinsk death cart, that's what my charger was thinking.

Kobi loosed him in the meadow, slapping his dusty rump.

I was at the bottom of a telegraph pole chatting to Stiffy, who was up there with his headphones listening to the traffic between Strabinsk and Kazan. We watched Tornado roll, we watched him drench a couple of molehills with a volley of glittering sun-blest piss. Then Stiffy said to me in a most ordinary voice, “Horses are easy to understand. But none of you get me.”

“Beg pardon, Stiffy.” I squinted up at him. He was leaning
back in his climbing harness, dark against the blue sky and all odd angles like a pterodactyl.

He held up a hand for hush. A message was coming through. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “The Whites are so thick. If it's important, they have a special group, a letter–numeral mix that they put at the beginning of a cable. It means, ‘Clear the line immediately . . .' Bloody stupid. Tells everyone to listen . . . Hang on, let's just see what this is about . . . Feeding prisoners, nothing interesting to us . . . May I go on, sir?”

I nodded.

“I'm not a complete coward, sir. I just don't want to be trapped in a woman's vagina, that's what I'm most afraid of. It's not as if I haven't given it a try... Got a moment, have we, sir?”

There followed the history of Stiffy's sexual experience with women, which he spoke partly to me and partly to the sky and partly towards the birch trees, where Chekhov's image persisted for me.

The day was a cracker. Listening to Stiffy's voice from up the telegraph pole made me wonder what God's voice would be like. Shouting? Smoochy? Cajoling? Probably a wheedling bullying mixture—

“Masturbation's the best. Wanking's trumps, that is. That's why I enjoy listening to folk on the wires. I get all the excitement and have none of the cost. And why I'm telling you this is because I know there's a battle coming soon but, sir, well, sir, the truth is that I'll be at my best out of the line of fire. I'll be worth more to you at my wireless than with a rifle in my hand, and that's God's own truth, sir.”

When I said nothing, he called down anxiously, “Have you been listening, sir?”

I said, “You mean you want to be in a bunker? Both you and Joseph?”

“Merely being alive is enough danger for me, sir. You can't avoid women.”

He unclipped his taps and came down the pole. Kneeling on the ground, he packed them into a canvas satchel with his headphones. “I'd shit myself. You'd think less of me... The thing is, if you're in a uniform, everyone thinks you're brave. Well, I'm not.”