Cold Blood (38 page)

I said back to him, “Yeah, the numbers aren't particularly in our favour. Any time you want to quit—the train's down below. I don't mind.”

Now whispering in case there really were a thousand Reds in front of us, he said, “You're a bastard, Charlie. Not one of us can leave and you know it.”

“You could get killed if you stay.”

“You're crazy. This whole business with Glebov and Elizaveta has rotted your brains. It's mush, that's what you've got in there now. I should have got out when I could—should have jumped from the train.”

I didn't mind what he said. After a year and a half I'd got within maybe a mile of Glebov—and I wasn't going to give up on him now. On this day, 7 September, I'd been born and since I couldn't have myself a cake with thirty candles I was going to have Glebov's head, and furthermore I was going to help myself to a pinch or two of the Tsar's gold so that in twenty-four hours I was not going to be a corpse thank you very much but at the helm of the future, which'd make a change so help me God it would. I may have been crazy. But I was doing all right so far.

“Go, conqueror!” I shouted at Tornado and whacked him on the butt so that he reared and gave my girl a nasty turn.

The cobbles crackled under his dancing iron-tipped hoofs. The walls behind which the eleven monks were enjoying their last manly pleasures before the avalanche of atheism arrived, threw back the echo. Lights were winking in the maddening sky—the green and red tails from signal rockets. Something was about to happen down at the wharves.

Kobi brought Tornado curvetting back to where I stood. Xenia had recovered. She called down to me, “Thank you, Charlinka, thank you from every vessel in my body. Such a place has always been my dream.”

“For Christ's sake listen to that,” muttered Boltikov, looking at Xenia in disbelief. Then to the nightwatchman, “Hey, whatever your name is, toll the big bell, let's get some action round here.”

The sound made me shiver, that big-bellied pot of iron from the time of Peter the Great booming through the violet night.
Even the Marxists down at the river must have had second thoughts about God on hearing it.

Heads appeared like magic from the casement windows of the dormitory building, all shaggy-looking as if they'd been taken completely by surprise, as if they'd never heard a single rifle shot and knew nothing about a war going on.

“God will protect them,” said the nightwatchman mildly.

From a window in the central part of the building, which jutted out from the rest and was probably the council chamber, a thin imperious voice called out, “What is it, Sergei Sergeivich? Have the dogs of Satan come for us?”

I strode over and stood a little way out from him. Eyes closeset above a bent and bony beak and a cleft chin stared down at me. He had to be the Archimandrite. “Well, have you come to shoot us? Is there enough light to shoot accurately or do you expect us to provide candles?”

“Old man,” I said, “stop your nonsense. I have a train waiting for you below. It has coal, some food, and the firebox is still hot.”

“Where's it going?”

Kobi, joining me on foot, said, “So much for staying in Kazan with his God.”

“Strabinsk—Irkutsk—then America if you feel like it. It's yours. Go wherever you want.”

Kobi: “That way you'll get to keep your guts inside you.” The abbot fellow shouted down, “Why are you doing this?”

“Want me to change my mind? Want a taste of martyrdom?”

He looked around, I suppose to gauge the feelings of the monks. But the other heads had all vanished, every one of them. They weren't going to miss the chance to escape. He said, “I see. This is what the skunks were always after, to save their skins. It's being left to me, God's ambassador, to proselytise among these Communist heathen—”

“Let me shoot the buzzard,” said Kobi. “That'll make them hurry.”

“But don't hit him,” I said, and as the sound of the shot died away I turned to the nightwatchman: “Count them out for me. I want the place emptied.”

They assembled in the courtyard. When they were all spoken
for, I sent them waddling down the track with their suitcases and homespun grips. One had a carpet flexing fore and aft of his shoulder, another was clutching an ornate samovar—an heirloom never to be abandoned, like my Rykov flag.

“God go with you,” I shouted, in particular to this man with his samovar.

The Archimandrite, going last, was pulling a handcart. “Our holy books,” he said. He embraced and kissed me. “God will reward you. May you scatter our enemies.” He faced the monastery and bowed to it.

The nightwatchman said, “But my wages—”

“Take them in kind. There's plenty of stuff lying around,” said the man and then he fairly scampered off, the cart bouncing behind him.

Boltikov said, “Why did you do that, Charlie? How are we going to get out if things go badly?”

They were all here now, including Jones and Stiffy with the wireless van. “Listen up,” I said, “that's a fine question Alexander Alexandrovich has just asked. The reason I gave them the train is this: so that no easy way out is left to us. We have to succeed. If we don't capture a gold barge, we'll die here.”

What I didn't say was that that train of ours had no chance of getting out of Kazan without being attacked by the Reds. Trotsky would snap it up and then those monks'd be dead soldiers of Christ.

S
HE'D CHAFED
, she said, her skin wasn't used to that sort of thing—and sat down on a bench with her thighs parted.

I wanted to leave and get on with the business. But—this was a bad few moments for me. Fact was that I'd removed her from her straightforward life in St. Petersburg, had made her follow the flag almost to Siberia, and was now going to dump her in a monastery under the guardianship of Smiler and a nightwatchman whose last job had been scaring birdies off apricots.

Something greater was owed to her. Marriage would square her away when the time came. But Odessa was fifteen hundred miles distant and none of them likely to be peaceful. While now was now and Trotsky and his army of rapists were at our heels. She was risking her life—

“You should have left me,” I said, taking her hand. “Said, ‘Goodbye, Charlie,' and found your way back to St. Petersburg.”

The idiot nightwatchman was hovering around us instead of going to look for valuables. He started up, “Their bees, that's what they were most concerned about, and the profit from their skeps. The monastery honey! Big money in the city,
barin
! In the summer they'd sit where the lady's sitting—”

“Scram!” I shouted at him.

“Leaving you... yes, I've often thought about it,” she said, yawning. Then in a light, dreamy voice, “The fighting, it seems unreal from up here. In fact, everything has been unreal since I left home... Oh, I'm so sleepy.”

“Give in,” I said. “There'll be a bed somewhere for visitors. Jones'll wake you up when the time comes and then we'll slip
down the river—invisibly—with the hand of God pointing the way—and—and God at the tiller also.”

I believe I'll remember it forever how she looked at me, this girl who'd rescued me from the most horrible of my memories and who now sat on the bench with her chafed thighs, those eyes staring up at me—those great balls of eyes, more out than in, fantastically soft in their grey green, which was like the underdown on a finch that's its final and most secret layer of warmth, the eyes which were completely heart-conquering and pleading for love, protection, babies and steadiness in a man. Everything about her was soft at that moment: lips, cheeks, eyes—her whole wonderful and uncommon face—which characteristics were magnified by the great bundle of her hair, on which Moses could have floated for months.

She said, “But in reality I could never have left you,” and put her other hand over mine. “Don't be impatient with me. I can see it in your eyes. Open them wider, I'm not a Red about to shoot at you. Look at me, Charlie.”

I said—I've no idea what it was.

Then she said with such sweet simplicity that my breath fell back into my lungs as if it had tumbled down a staircase, leaving my brain gasping for air, exactly the same as when I clinched it with Lizochka—she said: “God knows but you're a hard man to love. But I love you, I love you a million times over. Perhaps it could only have happened in these circumstances. Living in an apartment would have been fatal to us.”

She paused for my rejoinder or for some movement. I tightened my grip on her hand. The small-arms fire swelled and faded down at the wharves. Boltikov should have got Shmuley and Mrs. D. there by now. They'd be picking their way through the abandoned stores and the rubbish and the stunted alder bushes on the river's edge...

She went on, “Yet at the same time I despise myself. There are limits to what a woman who has no money can do. Remember that always. Whenever you think of me, Charlie, say to yourself, But she never had a chance to be the woman she really was. Promise? Say it out loud, then—”

“Why, Colonel Doig, this is a great castello you've got yourself
up here. I've been in a few places since I left Grand Rapids but this beats them all. Some money in religion, I'm athinking—”

I said to the brute, “Thanks for knocking.”

“Hey, did I interrupt something? But you know, Colonel, this is no time for spooning. That's for idle folk, that's what me and the little lady'll be doing while you go out to work. Lean on the battlements and watch the pretty lights, shall us, lady? Quite a spectacle down there. Glad I don't have to be part of it.”

“How's Trotsky to make contact with you, Jones? You going to wave flags at each other?” I said, getting back to the job.

“Don't you go worrying your head about me. These Reds, they're not short of a dollar or two between the ears.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Figure of speech, old boy.”

Suddenly I had the feeling that something had passed out of my hands. I'd been nudged over and someone else had taken a grip on the lever. Was there another issue of which I knew nothing? Was it the rustle of betrayal I was hearing?

I searched Jones's face for a sign of the dagger—some lack of control round the mouth, an aversion of the eyes, impudence, satisfaction, I wasn't sure what.

Stiffy came lounging up, saying he and Joseph had got the wireless ready for removal from the van and what next. I told him to go and find something else useful to do and to bloody well keep his helmet on in a battle zone—speaking from the corner of my mouth, not leaving off my scrutiny of Jones, not giving him the chance to change his face.

Xenia now said, Where was this nice warm room for her lie-down, and I had difficulty concentrating on that as the thought was ripping through my mind, But is Stiffy also part of the betrayal? Are he and Jones acting in consort, partners for Uncle Sam in some act of political chicanery? It was queer that the two of them should have been sent on a mission to the centre of Russia with only book knowledge of the language.

I looked at him, our ginger-haired Peter Panski... I thought, If Stiffy, why not Joseph, why not Boltikov? Could they all be against me?

I thought, Shoot first: shoot before you're shot. What was
the point in thinking of myself as ruthless if I wasn't prepared to be ruthless? I looked round wildly. They had me surrounded: were obviously waiting for a signal. Jones would be their leader—that “old boy” stuff. I thought: I'll shoot Jones and see where it gets me.

I went for my pistol holster, scrabbling at the metal catch.

“Doig!” protested Joseph, just managing to get a tray with a glass of tea on it out of the way of my elbow. I looked down at him, at his slight, dark, upturned face. The tea was strong and at the bottom, glowing sullenly, was a huge clot of the monks' cherry jam.

“You need it, Doig. You are our leader.”