Cold Blood (46 page)

F
IVE FOOT
five or a little more. Dark slicked-back hair, going bald on the crown. Pale blue eyes. Tufty, truculent moustache, something of the badger about it.

The moustache was an obvious difference. Also there was something new in his eyes. Where before they'd been shifty they were now firm, and where there'd been jealousy I saw confidence. Otherwise I'd got in front of me the same Glebov as the man Kobi and I had tossed screaming into the back of a White hospital wagon.

Or maybe not quite the same. There was his broken leg to be considered.

“You running again yet?” I said.

“I even dance,” he said back.

“No amount of dancing'll help you get away from me.”

“But I have my Fokker.” If he hadn't been some ways shorter than me, he'd have been able to smile down on me. That's what he was trying to do.

“You flying it yourself then?”

“Sometimes. But in general I just give the orders. You must remember who I am.”

He had a bearskin cloak lined with dark blue cotton draped round his shoulders. Beneath it he was naked except for a red towel round his waist and a pair of loose leather slippers. He'd got here, shot Jones, fixed up his welcome for me, had his men stoke the furnace in the bathhouse—and had been enjoying Xenia, both of them slippery with steam, while I'd been groping up that dank staircase.

I said, “You've been busy.”

The fat was hanging from him in corrugated rolls of creeping black hair. His bosoms quivered as he chuckled. “Life is always busy for those at the top.”

We were so close our bodies were almost touching. I thought, This was what lay on my Elizaveta?

He said jauntily, “You look clapped out, Comrade Charlie. You should model yourself on me. Half an hour in the baths works wonders for a man's energy. I'm going to need all mine again in a few moments, for my chick. She's ravenous for my body. All women appreciate a good lover. Seems you were too eager, comrade . . . Doesn't she look sophisticated smoking through that amber holder! It belonged to royalty, of course. I had quite a few knick-knacks from their rooms.”

“Including Anastasia?”

“For three days only. Then she died—the bayonet had gone in too deep. You know, she was fatter than I am—and only seventeen. She'd have been a royal mountain if she'd had the chance. And the other thing I was going to say about the woman you know as Xenia but who is actually Nadya is that she told me you always smell. Isn't that right, darlingka? And I agree with her. You smell like a loser, Doig.”

He padded off into the chantry, yanked Xenia out of the abbot's throne and took it himself. He flapped his hand disparagingly at the portraits of the saints. “So many baubles, such unnecessary riches. No wonder the people detest their priests... Comrade, close the door, will you? No point in bewildering these baboons with conversation that's over their heads . . .” He shouted to them, “Play a game of Riga poker. Recite Lenin's April Theses. I don't care. But stay handy—do you hear me?”

I pulled the door to.

“Latvians, good for only one thing—killing people.”

“You've gone up in the world. Was rapist, now People's Commissar.”

“You never thought it would come to this, did you? You thought the bourgeois principles of your class were certain to prevail, as they always have done in the past. That's why you came after me with such obstinacy, saying to yourself, Reason must out. But ours is the reason you should have listened to. What you lacked was the intelligence to see that destiny was
against you. I myself spotted her coming a long way off and let her give me a ride. A certain breed of man has this gift. Oh yes, I've licked and licked and licked. That's the way to get on, knowing where to lick. I don't mind talking to you like this. Things are going my way. The fact is that you're of no importance, a minor figure, like a junior captain in the old army. Luck doesn't want to know you any more. If I don't have you killed, someone else soon will.

“I may call you comrade but I don't mean it. You're not one of us. You don't even have the excuse of being a Jew... Pass me that cigarette, Nadya... This day's been so good to me... The reason I call you comrade is purely out of habit. We all call each other comrade—like brother. It's a healthy custom.”

It was obvious he wanted to talk about himself—and I had nowhere to sit. I stuck my nose out of the door. The Latvians were lounging on the desk playing cards. I told one of them to tip Jones onto the floor and fetch me his chair.

Anyone stealing my pistol would be shot, I added.

“Through the stomach,” Glebov yelled. “I'll have no thieving in my units.”

The Latvian carrying the chair looked from Glebov to me. I told him to place it opposite Glebov's throne.

“Wipe the blood off it before he sits down, animal,” Glebov said to the man. “There's a rag on the hook over there,” pointing to a stole embroidered in cream and gold.

Xenia lit another cigarette and lay on her back on the altar. Her shoes stuck up vertically. They were lime green. The colour went better with her pink dress when she was standing.

Glebov said, “Vladimir Ilyich has decreed that God no longer exists. Therefore all religion ceases to have a meaning except in the context of historical error. Unless an American will pay a good price for these tapestries and so forth, they'll be cut up and used for blankets in our hospitals. Something like that. It's not my business.”

Xenia said dreamily, looking up at the chambered turquoise roof, “Am I your business?”

“You wouldn't be here if you weren't.”

“There was a rumour in Strabinsk that the new government intends to nationalise women,” she said. “That's pure spite.
They may be the wives and daughters of the
boorjoi
but that sort of woman deserves as much respect as the rest of us. It's we who bring children into the world. We are the future, not you, Prokhor Federovich.”

“Enough of the lecturing. Leave a man's work to men.” To me he said, “She's angry because when she was young she knew nothing about the vinegar douche. A girl called Lili was the result. I made Lili my captive—my pawn, comrade. She was the lever I used to get her mother to enslave you.”

I looked up sharply, surprised. I said to Xenia, “I did you an injustice.”

Grinning, Glebov said, “And she trapped you with her body, didn't she? She's got an aptitude for that line of work. Haven't you, woman?”

She said, “He's a bastard. They all are. One chink and they rip you open like a can of beetroot. I'll give you a tip though, Charlie—he's afraid of spiders. Would you believe it? Tiny little insects, a fraction of his size... So you thought I did it for the money?”

“Yes.”

“I did it for my daughter. I do everything for her. I went to the baths with him for her. I'm wearing this dress for her. Soon I'll be sucking his stinking cock for her. But the worst thing of all I've done for her is to lie on this altar and mock God. May He open His merciful heart and forgive me.” She crossed herself twice. “He's the vilest man in Russia.”

“Comrade Trotsky is far worse,” Glebov said. “The most common words in his orders are ‘Shoot them'. Not March or Halt but ‘Shoot them.' In comparison, I—I am a saint.”

I laughed at him. I didn't mind if he shot me for it. Russia was strewn with corpses, its rivers and weirs blocked with them. If death was so commonplace, it had to be easily suffered. I laughed with all the bitterness I could summon, leaning forward in my chair, right into the face of the man who'd ruined my life and now pronounced himself a saint.

He held up his hand like some Roman emperor. “I and my comrades, Vladimir Ilyich and Lev, we are in the process of changing the world. We are doing this for the benefit of all its peoples. The class system has to be destroyed for that benefit
to be released. Therefore this war is taking place. War means necessity. There can be no exceptions, not even for young brides.”

Was I going mad? Glebov lounging in his bearskin, Xenia rigid on the altar—and these stupid, barbaric assertions—

I rose, kicking back the chair. Automatically I patted my pistol holster.

He said, “On the desk out there. Minus its bullets or heads will fall.”

God, how I detested that knowing grin of his. I eyed his neck. Would the guards hear anything? Would Xenia start howling?

He said, “That Mongolian youth of yours does all the murdering, not you. You don't have the experience, so don't look at me like that. See, I know everything about you. She kept me well informed. No detail was omitted. Because of her daughter... You mustn't blame her, Doig. You know how it is between women and their children.”

“I should have killed you.”

“But you're weak. When the moment offers itself, you fluff it. They never come again, those moments. But yes, you should have.”

I'd had him, trussed, in the forest. I could have killed him in one of ten different ways, at my leisure. Then I'd backed down. And this was the consequence: defeat, humiliation, maybe death.

I said, “Next time there'll be no mistake.”

That was what I meant, but in another part of my brain I was thinking, Hang on, Charlie, that's for the future. The short-term problem is how to improve your situation. I said with a sigh, “You're right, I am weak. It's from my mother's side, her female reserve.”

“You've inherited the aristocrat's typical ignorance of the rules for survival. Because he's read a stirring tale in a novel, he thinks he can easily battle through. Of course he does! There he is turning the pages before a good coal fire while upstairs his fattest housemaid is rolling in his bed to get it warm. Such a man believes sincerely that in a contest for existence he can perform as efficiently as a plate-layer on the Siberian railway. That's rubbish. First, his hands let him down. They're too soft to chop enough wood to keep the fire going for even one night. Here! Look at mine! Look at the pad on
that thumb, how hard it is . . . Then there's his lungs—servants have done all the running for him. Pouring out his coffee, that's all he can manage. Maybe a walk in his garden. Thereafter he's exhausted. The weakness of his body spreads to the mind. It takes hold. He can't form his words properly. He's finished. He dies.”

“So what am I to do?”

He wagged a finger at me. “That's a better tone. You've stopped speaking through your nose. When I was in Berlin, ‘on leave' as we exiles called it, I heard people speaking like that everywhere. The effeteness of wealthy European industrialists disgusts me. However, now that you're prepared to accept that you're inferior—there, you don't even bristle when I say that... Bring your chair close to me. Nice and close. There's something I want to say.”

I obeyed. I found his knee between mine. He'd just shoved it there.

“There are only three of us who matter in Russia today. I count Vladimir Ilyich and the Jew as my absolute comrades— comrades in the most spiritual sense, you understand. We have taken vows, have mingled our blood before witnesses. We have one goal. Nothing can come between us.

“That said... Well, Vladimir Ilyich is in the capital and the Jew is completely engrossed by his desire to film the capture of this city. No one loves him more than I do but there are times when he goes too far. Stavka is like a caravanserai. All the specialists in Russia are there. Eight men at the wireless sets, two in his private cinema, one in his darkroom waiting for film, another four grinding out tracts on the duplicators—and so on. It's not right. Action first,
then
the propaganda. It's a beaten foe that makes the best believer. Another thing... You know that I have my men everywhere—”

“And women,” said Xenia in a voice husky from the cigarettes.

“Trotsky owes his life to me. That man you knew as Jones— he was an American assassin. He was sent to kill Lev because the Americans thought him the most dangerous of us. A complete amateur, of course. It was going to be poison. We found it on him. Lev was going to be poisoned like some sort of vermin.”