Cold Blood (7 page)

“That's the old one.”

“I wasn't to know that, comrade. I've been feeding the troops—”

He cut me short. “A good password system is the key to victory. That's the way one catches traitors and latifundists.”

“May we be preserved from them, Excellency.”

His eyes roamed over me. “You're from Estonia or one of those little relics, you're not a proper Russian. Here, show me your papers.”

“But he's offering us food,” murmured one of the guards.

“Yes, let the fellow go. Free food!”

“I'll eat his bombs,” said a third, snatching at my tray. “I know a good risk when I see it.” His eyes glowed. His teeth, strong and white against the black pelt of his face, bit decisively into the crinkled dome of the mushroom. “Bang!” he shouted comically. “Bang, bang, bang!”—and took a handful.

“Very well, Estonian,” said the officer. “But stay where I can see you.”

T
HERE WAS
a knot of us at the top of the Smolny steps. Below was an anthill of activity. Adventure was in the air. People were taking deep breaths, as if to draw the future into their lungs and never let it go. Excitement! It was flashing like the neon sign of a lady's slipper that hung outside the Makayev champagne bar. Only my interrogator was out of it. Something was needed to sideline him—and here it was—

A brilliant beam of light came boring out of the night, picking out the trees in the square. Behind it, thunderously, was a motorbike and sidecar. The driver spun the outfit round with a sudden twist of the handlebars, spattering mud over some bicycle messengers who'd paused, toes pointed to push off, to see what was up. The man in the sidecar leapt out and stared up at Smolny. He lifted his goggles—stuck them on his head. He lit a cigarette, inhaled, removed it from his mouth with a dramatic swoop. Nodding at the guards, he stalked between the outer machine guns and mounted the steps.

Between his second and third fingers appeared a buff slip of paper. He held it like a dandy, as if it were something infinitely precious and exquisite.

Everyone watched this lean, confident fellow. He seemed to have walked straight out of a film. One had to look twice to get rid of the idea of a rapier in his hand.

Oblivious, my persecutor glanced at me and began to crank the handle of the field telephone. He licked his lips like a woman on heat—glanced at me again—was clearly about to tell someone he'd caught a Tsarist spy.

I pushed against him—not with the Luger side of my coat—
and said, “Comrade, why are you so determined to turn a mushroom into a bomb? Look at the messenger there. He walked straight through.”

As I finished speaking there came from behind me this shrill, harsh voice: “At last, news of the struggle—let me see that message, quickly now.”

It was Lenin. I knew him immediately, even though he appeared quite different from the police photographs. His shoulder brushed mine as he passed. Scanning the bit of paper (putting it close to his eyes): “Then we've taken the Post Office? Good. Very good.” He read it again. “Almost without a shot fired. Even their own people are giving up on them.” This last he said in an undertone, almost to himself.

He was wearing a dark suit of some thick material. The trousers were too long—trailed along the ground at his heels. His beard, which he'd shaved off during the months he'd been hiding from Kerensky, was patchy, as if he had ringworm. And his head, which the newspapers had always shown to be three-quarters hairless, was thatched with a wig that gave him the looks of a dark-haired gigolo of about eighteen. It was how he'd walked into the city from the suburbs, so that the guards on the bridges wouldn't recognise him.

Turning, he noticed me and my tray. Close up his eyes were grey green, hundreds of kilowatts in them. They perforated the skin of my face like a couple of nails. He entered my skull. Not speaking, just looking around inside as my tormentor denounced me as a Kerensky infiltrator.

Lenin stepped up to me. With Kobi's knife I could have reached out and popped his fat little belly. He took one of my mushrooms, snapped it in half and then into quarters and began to eat.

He swallowed—gulped, choked a little, and said to me and all those around me in that shrill, scraping voice: “This is the first night that the people of Russia have ever been able to call their own. If this man is a spy, let him first be useful to us. Let him feed us for nothing. Then we'll shoot him. If he's not—”

He got no further. The soldiers fell on my mushrooms, almost knocking me over.

“I'm no spy,” I shouted at Lenin, throwing open half my coat
to show him I had nothing there except strings of mushrooms. On the other side I had a loaded Luger. My boots were stuffed with diamonds. They'd have killed me for either. But Lenin was hot with luck that night and I reckoned that being so close to him I'd get a share in it.

His mouth twisted sarcastically. “The tall man's no spy... That's what he says, so make out a pass for him... You, Baltic being, what's your name?”

“Sepp, Arno Sepp. Born and bred in Tallinn.” I knew it was a reasonably common name in Estonia but it was the mushrooms that triggered it off.

The man wrote it out, letter by letter. Lenin, Zinoviev and the rest of them looked on with indifference as I became Sepp of Tallinn.

“Welcome to the new Russia,” said Lenin. I bowed. An aide whispered in his ear. He went back into the building.

I stretched out my hand to my tormentor for the pass and said, “Well then, where does this get me?”

“Nowhere,” he said, tearing it across and across, into tiny pieces. “Arno Sepp of Tallinn, my shithole.”

“It's the truth,” I said, placing my hands flat on the table at which he sat and leaning over him. What was extraordinary was that in that short space of time I'd actually come to feel that I was Sepp. It felt a truly seaworthy lie. “My mother's family name was Saar, and that also is a common name in Tallinn. What else should a man called Sepp do but marry a girl called Saar?”

He glared at me, his eyes festering with disbelief.

Suddenly there was a terrific racket below. A lorry had broken down and was preventing another of the usual black saloons from getting in. It was sorted out with a lot of shouting. Then the driver of the car, even though there were only fifty yards to go, put on maximum revs in order to draw attention to himself and to make people leap aside.

The car door flew open, kicked from inside. A soldier put up his rifle in alarm. “Password! Now!”

It was a thin, youngish man who came sliding out, galoshes first. He stood up—tall, six foot four, let's say—planted a black fedora on his black hair and said in an American style of
Russian, “Christ, Ivan, I haven't a clue. At midday, when I went out, it was
chyerf—
worm in English, which I thought a good choice for a revolution. But midday”—he looked at his watch— “that was a lifetime ago. Between then and now we've changed the world... Jee-sus... Can you believe it, Ivan, that we've changed every number in the equation? It's a goddam miracle, that's what it is.”

“Password, papers,” said the soldier stolidly.

The man flapped a reporter's notebook at him. “That's all I've got for papers, the rest are in the hotel. Reed's my name, representing the finest socialist newspaper in the United States. That should be enough for you.”

He put the notebook back and with one hand braced against the car roof, leaned down and said to the person inside, “Here we are then, comrade. Go easy on it, one step at a time and we'll get there.”

Crash! Rifle butts were being slammed against the flagstones behind me—for Lenin, back onstage, as calm and commanding as before. He paid me no attention this time. With him was Trotsky, unmistakable on account of his athletic hair and pointed beard. Behind his steel-rimmed spectacles, his eyes glowed. Victory was to the Bolsheviks and he knew it.

Their four hands were in their coat pockets. My Kriegsmarine was a semi-automatic. I'd have had time to shoot them both. That's another dream I often have.

They strolled in front of me, blocking my view of Reed. I heard him shout up, “Comrade Ulyanov-Lenin, wonderful news—the Telephone Exchange, the Telegraph, the Military Hotel...”

Lenin murmured to Trotsky, their heads converging, “Our tame American. A useful man. He should be humoured.”

Trotsky, hands now clasped behind his back, swaying on the balls of his feet, said, “He could be paired with your sister Maria. That would be an international dimension we could exploit.”

“I would tell her it was historically inevitable. She would obey me. Is he a homosexual? It would be easier for him if he were.”

“I'll have one of our female followers discover... Ah, here
comes Prodt at last. Which of those two is our greater friend, would you say, Vladimir Ilyich, Comrade Prodt or the American?”

“Friend? I don't think we need speak in those terms,” and they moved to one side as Reed trotted up the steps towards them.

Halfway up he paused and looked back: “Comrade, you doing all right back there?”

The man they were calling Prodt was limping, head bent so that only broken views of his face were visible, never the whole thing. But I didn't need to see it all. There were at least ten things about him that told me instantly who Prodt was.

Up the steps he laboured towards Lenin and Trotsky. He was making heavy weather of it. He'd put on weight while his leg was healing.

I'd hoped... I can't tell you what exactly. That I'd catch Glebov alone in an office or in the darkness of the night, something like that. As it was, he had only to raise his eyes and I was butchers' meat. I was up there with Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev, me and my tray of mushrooms. Just the four of us, the soldiers and my tormentor being a few yards away in the opposite direction.

I heard the hiss of Elizaveta's indrawn breath and a little catch in her voice as she whispered in my ear, “I know that man. Now's not the place for heroics, Charlie. Scoot and make it fast.”

He was wearing a military cap with a scarlet band. His mouth was working. He was in pain from his leg, was having to use a stick. I
had
to study him. I was unable to do otherwise—for a few seconds I was hypnotised and stared at him in the most obvious way. Then Lenin and Trotsky moved forward to greet him. I heard the smooth, welcoming tones of their voices—and came to my senses.

“Right you are, Lizochka, scoot's the word,” and I melted away, sliding behind one of Smolny's bright blue pillars.

Lenin must have seen the movement from the corner of his eye. He called out to me, “Sepp of Estonia, you've nothing further to give us. You've played your part. So go back to your city and tell them that tonight the proletariat has triumphed. Yes, Mr Arno, triumphed!” He raised his fist in salute. “Tell them that, Mr Arno Sepp.”

Reed had his arms outspread to embrace Lenin. He was still
a step or two below him. Glebov was tucked into Reed's shadow. The American shouted, “Kerensky's had enough! Fled! The revolution's certain!” He got to the top—skipped the last two steps in one.

He embraced Lenin and then Trotsky. Suddenly, as he stood back, the whole tableau shifted and regrouped so that I was no longer concealed. I was out there in the open. No more than thirty feet separated me from Glebov.

I looked down as if searching for a coin I'd just dropped— risked another glance. He had four steps to go, was leaning heavily on his stick, still had his head down. When he got to the top he'd take a breather, then he'd line up beside Lenin and Trotsky. The three of them would face out over Smolny Square to field the applause and unburden themselves of a few speeches. I'd be up there with them, only feet away—tall, young, distinctive—

“For Christ sake, Charlie,
scoot
!”

There'll be a musical direction for how I walked down those steps: neither too fast nor too slow. But no such direction can speak of what was going on between my shoulder blades.