Cold Blood (41 page)

I asked him, What about the Reds? I was sure they'd have a force close by, waiting to profit from any misunderstanding or jealousy between the Whites and the Czechs.

Kobi said, Nothing doing that he could see.

I said, “Sure?”

He said, “Maybe you want to come up and see for yourself?”—a bit of his usual lip creeping in.

But I couldn't leave Boltikov alone, him and his bad arm. What if another lot of Reds turned up and found him surrounded by their dead pals?

I said to Kobi, “Try making your eyes round. That way you'll see more.”

There was shooting going on all the way through the northern part of the city and along the railway track there. Small-arms stuff, nothing big at this hour of the night with ammunition so scarce. And through the docks and warehouses and all the little alleys and grimy chandlers' offices, it was the same. In short there was a decent racket all round us.

Nevertheless, Kobi's reply reached me with the clarity of birdsong.

“If I heard myself saying to anyone what you've just said to me, I'd say to myself, ‘Hello, cunt, you're at it again.' Where would you be without me, Doig? Answer me that. Then I'll tell you where the Reds are.”

I said, “You want me to take a hacksaw to the ladder?”

He laughed, knowing it was an empty threat with time running out on us. Kobi's laugh, coming down a field telephone?
Like an oak tree creaking in the wind, a remarkable noise from so whippy a man. Maybe all Mongolians have that sort of deep, gruff, grunting laugh.

Then he said no more. I knew he wouldn't let me down. He'd be imprinting the Bolshevik positions in his mind, visualising the thrust they'd be preparing, the thrust that we'd get in before them, how the ground might look in the places where the shadows were thickest...

The telephone tingled in its box. “Doig, there's a Red signaller down there trying to lamp me a message.”

“Show him your own lamp, then. Just flash it around a bit while you have a final look.”

“Can't. It must have gone over the side with the officer. He went through the roof of the warehouse. Didn't you hear?”

“Then come down damned quickly.”

I ran over to the armoured car. Boltikov stank of Vladimir. He said, “They'd be very foolish to attack now,” and closed his eyes.

I shoved him out of my way and took a tyre lever to the box of Happy Christmas dynamite—thus stencilled on the lid by the All-Nippon Explosive Corporation—and grabbed an eight-inch stick and a detonator: whipped off a length of Bickford cord.

Kobi touched down lightly, knees flexing. He saw what I was up to and would have helped, only I wanted to hear his report before the tower went up. Afterwards we were going to be too busy to hang around.

“The Whites put a flare up, that's the only reason I could see. The Reds've got a train on the unused line half a mile back from the godown. Looks like they're getting ready for a charge— going to slide up parallel to the gold train and jump it.”

“Coaches?”

“Horse wagons, a string of them.”

“Same idea. The Whites have blocked that line?”

“Yes.”

“How substantial?”

“They're doing it right now. Rubble. Carting it in with barrows.”

I finished laying out the Bickford and cut the fuse: muttered
to Kobi, “I can't think why the Whites didn't blow this place up when they could have.”

“Too stupid,” he said. And then, grinning, “That Bolshie signaller'll get more of a reply than he bargained for.”

Elation is a good explosion viewed from a safe distance. There was a terrific flash and then these bluish-grey petticoats of smoke, curling and billowing. In the middle of them the tower went up like a rocket stick—not very far, but it got its feet off the ground before toppling away from us like a giant.

“Lucky it fell the right way,” said Boltikov, blearily.

“Stuff it, Jeremiah,” I said and took the wheel. I'd never thought the tower'd go anywhere else, dicky-bird luck being perched on my shoulder with a nice tight sphincter.

I was fairly bubbling as I manoeuvred
Chort
through the back lanes of the dock workers' hovels—ghastly places, low-lying and full of ague. I said to myself, These people are no different to anyone else. They just have to get to the end in as good an order as they can. Maybe revolution is the best thing for them, will improve the quality of getting there. But once they've wiped away the past, there'll be nothing left to hate. They'll have to fabricate new demons. Or try loving each other.

Hate and love, the only constants—

God bless the pair of them! I cried out, and dragging
Chort
round a corner, found I was in a cul-de sac.

But this was ridiculous, to get us lost at such a critical point. They were the same wretched little wooden houses on either side, quite evidently deserted. I stopped and got out, thinking to get my bearings from the direction of the gunfire. And what happened was that in my very first breath I smelt the dawn.

I steadied myself. Don't panic, man. Look to the east and tell me if you see even a glimmer of pale.

I did—and breathed again. The violet glow had left the clouds: there was nothing up there but blackness. It had been my mind at work, the craziness brought back by tension.

I felt my pulse: spoke to myself and got calm. And then it was no longer the smell of the dawn that reached me but the smell of the Volga: cordage, wet tarpaulins, creosote, tobacco, dried fish, motor oil, sails, boats, the effluvium of Kazan's drains. But it was a warning not to dally, and I looked round
desperately for a way through to the wharves. There were narrow passages that the dock workers used but I wanted something I could get an armoured car through. I needed a seven-foot clearance.

Kobi said, “What's that at the end of the street?”

“The back wall of a warehouse, idiot,” I replied.

“I don't think so. There are gaps in it. I saw a lantern moving on the other side.”

I ran to it—and I ran back, having found it was only a wooden paling and that on the other side was the railway track with a train as Kobi had described it from the top of the tower, and that lying around on porters' trolleys were Red soldiers, shagged out and smoking.

But was it the same train that Kobi had seen, the one lined up for action? There was only one way to know.

We were doing thirty when we hit the paling—when we took it out by the roots. It had been built upright but I'd spotted a sliver of space that the dockers' kids had been using to get onto the railway to forage for coal and I went for it. If the baulks fell forward we'd have a hard time getting over them without tipping. But if they went sideways—which they did, splintering, crashing and pulling down an entire section of the paling that had been nailed with a cross-beam.

“Now!” I yelled to Kobi, who let rip with his Maxim over the heads of the soldiers—so that they'd know not to trifle with us.

Empty drums of something went booming over the railway lines like gongs. One of the soldiers who was more alert than his comrades tried to stop us by pushing his trolley under the wheels. We rode over it, crunching it to shreds. Then we were among them.

No one ever got out of an armoured car quicker than I did. I was like a djinn, like a magic puff of smoke, and then I'd caught hold of the Red closest to me and had him fast in my embrace. Christ, he smelt but I was nothing very pretty myself and the point was that I was hugging him like a lover and kissing his furry cheeks and hugging him again, squeezing him against my body at the same time as saying to myself, Until his ribs crack, Charlie, until they bloody well crack.

I held him at arm's length. My eyes were soaked with tears.

He said, “Why did you fire on us then, comrade?”

“What do you expect, if you skulk around in the dark like adulterers?”—and I fell on him again, a short burly man whom I smothered.

“Talk sensibly, Estonian.”

“Not at you but over you! Yes, over your heads! You were never in danger! We thought you were White traitors up to some knavery and wanted to take you prisoner. Yes! It's true! We were after a share of the money Comrade Trotsky has promised. Can you blame us? Still, all's well that ends well—” and I would have hugged him a third time had he not pushed me away and said, “Money? What's all this about? How much? Cash?”

“You knew nothing?”

There were about a dozen of them altogether, ragamuffin soldiers. I went round them one by one, shaking hands, drawing each of them into my embrace and asking for forgiveness. They said they were an advance party: that they'd been waiting for orders from an officer stationed on the fire-watching tower that had just been blown up: that now they were headless and unmotivated.

One of them came up to me and peered at my tabs. “Comrade Colonel!” He saluted me sharply. And now they looked at me very differently, knowing that as a colonel I could save them from being shot for insufficient bravery. Also, in the eyes of each of them and particularly in the eyes of the man I'd hugged, stirring unresolved but hopeful, glinting flashes of silver, was the matter of the cash. They'd all heard the word. Some of them would never have seen even one live rouble in their short lives. Magic was in the air—my magic.

“Gather round me, boys,” I said. “Now, this is how I plan to get ourselves some benefit from Comrade Trotsky's promises...”

Give a man a chance at women, pelf or a good strong horse and world revolution vanishes entirely from his mind.

T
HE ENGINE
driver was my problem. No Shmuleyvich this one but a man with a wedge-shaped nose and a long swaying neck like a cobra.

I said to him merrily, “Let's get that money, eh, Ivan Ivanovich!”

“And not wait for the rest of the comrades? Is that brotherly, Comrade Colonel?” Like voice, like man—small, mean and whining.

“Why? They may have given up trying to get to us—been cut off by the enemy, maybe killed. Or they may've found a good billet and gone to bed! That'd be just like them, wouldn't it! So what I say is this, why share Comrade Trotsky's cash if we don't have to? Ten thousand roubles—listen to the sound of that, boys!”

“Ten thousand divided by twelve isn't enough. I must have a thousand for myself. Who's the driver? I am. Who's going to risk a bullet first? I am. You can't deny that, comrades.”

Taking a chance with the squaddies, I said to him, “You want a thousand? Done,” and kissed the little swine.

“That's all very well but the barricade they've put up: how's that to be dealt with?”

“With the snowplough over there. Push it aside. Easy as picking your nose.”

He was relentless: “What about my safety? I've no fireman in the cab. I'll be alone. I'll get shot to ribbons.”

I said, “Oh, but I'll be at your side, comrade, your boot alongside mine, as it should be. Together we'll take our chances, together we'll strip those lice of their illegal spoils. The age of
the proletariat is dawning and we shall be its first ray of light. What say you all?”

I glanced to the east. Get on with it, Doig! Then, make haste slowly. Work the crowd properly, take your time, don't get it wrong.

“Thank the Lord for that,” said the driver sarcastically, with a snaky twist of his neck.

But I sensed he had no support among the soldiers. I called Kobi over and said loudly, “Our comrade friend here has some difficulty with the new style of military discipline. Have him slot onto the snowplough and be ready to go in four minutes. If he argues shoot him and find me another driver.

“Your widow would receive the Order of Lenin as well as the thousand roubles,” I said soothingly to the driver.

He said, “Fat lot of good that'd do me,” and wanted to argue, but when the soldiers openly laughed at him, I knew he was in the bag.

While he was putting on the snowplough, the Whites shot up a flare to see what was happening. It floated above us like a fizzing star at the end of a tiny white petal of a parachute. We threw ourselves down, in between the rails, in there with the dog shit. Bullets pinged off the rails around us. Raising my head I could see that the loading derrick had given up. In the mouth of the godown there were stevedores bent double, portering the gold across on their backs.