Blood Red, Snow White (13 page)

He thought of Ivy, and immediately of Tabitha. He thought of his mother and Geoff, but right at that moment, England, and everyone in it, seemed so very far away.

9:20 P.M. CONTINUED

LIFE IN MOSCOW WAS GETTING
more and more precarious. Bands of rogue anarchists roamed the city, pillaging for food, and were holed up in numerous palaces in the better areas. They raided the American mission building, stealing a car belonging to Robins, the head of the mission, but the disturbances had not gone unnoticed by the Bolsheviks. Trotsky had decided to act, and set up a special police force he called the Extraordinary Commission, the Cheka.

Lockhart knocked on Arthur’s door, early one morning in April.

“Did you hear the shooting last night?”

It would have been impossible to have missed it.

“There were twenty-six raids,” Lockhart said. “Get your coat.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’ve been invited to survey the Cheka’s handiwork…”

“Who by?”

“The Cheka. They want me to see what they’ve been up to. They want a western journalist to see it, too.”

Outside a motor car stood running. In the back stood an officer, who introduced himself as Peters, second in command of the new special police force.

Soon, they were driving through some of the best streets in Moscow, stopping now and again to survey the result of the Cheka’s assault on the anarchist strongholds. House after house was the same, most of them badly smashed up by bullets outside and in. The mess and filth were hideous; the houses had been looted by both the anarchists before the raid and hooligans during the day after it.

Along the Povarskaya, once one of the most fashionable streets in Moscow, half a dozen houses had suffered the same fate.

The car stopped and Peters invited Lockhart and Arthur to follow him.

Arthur turned to Lockhart as they walked up the steps of the nearest house.

“Why are they showing all this? To impress us…?”

“Or to scare us?”

They fell silent as they made their way through the once luxurious house into a large atrium from which vast staircases curved up to the first floor. The destruction was terrible. Broken bottles lay everywhere. Pictures were pocked with bullet holes, or slashed by swords. Excrement mixed with the stains of wine and other fluids on what remained of the Persian carpets.

The dead lay where they had fallen. Among the bodies were officers and other men in uniform, students, boys of twenty or less, and shaven-headed men who had probably been convicts until the Revolution freed them. They picked a route past the bodies, trying not to gag at the stench. Upstairs, they found an even worse scene; the anarchists had clearly been caught in the middle of an orgy. In a perverted mockery of the party Lockhart threw at the Elite, the scene before them filled Arthur with horror. A massive table lay spread with food and drink of all kinds, glasses and champagne bottles, plates, and cutlery, yet now the table was also filled with other, more horrific things.

On the floor lay a young woman, facedown.

Peters, the Cheka man, walked over to her and, with his boot, turned her body over. She was no more than twenty. She had been shot through the back of her neck, and a large clump of hair and blood had congealed into a purple mass on her shoulder.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Prostitutka,” he said, without emotion. “Perhaps it is for the best.”

Lockhart and Arthur looked at each other. They nodded at Peters as if they’d seen enough and left the building.

Very soon they were back at the Elite and without a word went their separate ways, as if an unspoken agreement not to talk had been made.

Back in his room, Arthur stared across Moscow, toward the Povarskaya.

What had he seen?

What had he
done
? For some reason he’d felt guilty, looking at the dead prostitute, as guilty as if he’d pulled the trigger himself.

As they’d left the building, Peters had told them what a proud achievement this was for the Bolsheviks. Ever since the Revolution the anarchists had been out of control, he said, a thorn in the side, and it had taken decisive Bolshevik action to rid the city of the plague. In time, the Cheka would establish discipline and order throughout revolutionary Russia. A hundred people had been shot in the raids, a further five hundred arrested. The night had been a complete success.

If this was success, Arthur wanted none of it.

He was lost.

He’d been there, at the Revolution, seen the new Russia born, with hopes of democracy for the greatest nation on earth. He’d supported the Bolshevik cause in his articles for the
News,
and had helped Lockhart to try and get London to understand what their hopes for Russia were all about.

The Bolsheviks had put a bullet through those hopes.

*   *   *

For the first time Arthur admitted to himself that he was scared. Not just of the violence that occurred so casually, day in and day out, but scared in a more profound way. He wondered if he had any control in his life, and that maybe, he’d never had any control. Had he ever made a choice in his life that was his, or had he always been part of someone else’s devices? His parents, his teachers, bullies at school, friends, and lovers. The British, the Russians. He thought for a while and came up with an answer; one choice that was truly his. He’d left Ivy and come to Russia. With that decision, he’d left Tabitha, too.

He turned from the window, but the picture in his mind would not shift.

Standing by the prostitute’s body, Lockhart and Arthur had seen the look in each other’s eyes. What should they have done, when Peters rolled the girl over onto her broken back? Should they have screamed at him, railed and fought with him, denounced him and his Cheka and the Bolsheviks, too?

No. If they had done so, they might not have left that building alive either, but joined the girl on the floor with a bullet in their necks.

But Arthur finds that answer doesn’t satisfy him. Perhaps he should have fought, even if it meant danger, even death.

Perhaps it would have been for the best.

9:35 P.M.

IT’S NEARLY TIME TO GO,
and Arthur pulls on his jacket.

It is a warm night. The faintest glow of red from the sunset still glimmers over the western horizon of the city.

He opens his desk drawer, tears a strip from a sheet of letter paper. He tears it in half again, and again, and, closing the door to his room, slips the paper between the door and the frame.

He does exactly as Lockhart has told him.

*   *   *

He does what Lockhart has told him, because he changed his mind in the end. There is one condition, though, that Arthur has been careful to make.

“I need someone else,” Lockhart had explained one night, in his room at the Elite. “I need someone neutral, not attached to the Embassy, well, not officially anyway.”

“What for?” Arthur had asked.

“We’ve been approached by two Latvian officers. Now, you know the Latvian regiments are under Red control.”

“What of it?”

“Well, these two aren’t playing the Bolshevik game anymore. They want us to help them. They want independence for their country, not Bolshevik rule. If we help them, they’ll work with us to stage a counterrevolution.”

“And we give Latvia independence when the Bolsheviks have been toppled?”

“That’s the idea.”

Arthur gritted his teeth.

“So where do I come in?”

“I’m not asking much, Arthur. But I can’t afford to be seen with them. If there are any Cheka agents watching … But there’s no reason why a British journalist shouldn’t run into a couple of officers in a bar for a drink and an interview, is there?”

Arthur hesitated. Inside he felt nothing. He felt dead. Dead already. He remembered the young prostitute in the anarchist’s hideout, and shook himself. That was death, not what he was feeling inside. What he was feeling, he told himself, was confusion. The feeling of not knowing, of being lost.

“All right,” he said, “what do you need me to do?”

“Meet me at the Finland bar, the night after next. You know it? Good. Meet me there at ten. Then I’ll tell you where the Latvians have told me to be. You go and meet them instead, bring them to me. Without being followed. Clear?”

Arthur nodded. He didn’t speak for a long time, then put a hand on Lockhart’s.

“I’ll do it. On one condition. When I meet you at the Finland bar, I want you to have a passport out of here for me, and…”

“And?” asked Lockhart.

“For Evgenia, too.”

“My God, Arthur! You can’t be serious. You want to elope with Trotsky’s secretary?”

“What’s wrong, Robert?” Arthur said. “I thought you of all people would understand.”

Lockhart sighed, admitting defeat.

“You mean Moura? Yes, I do understand. I understand completely. I’m besotted with Moura, there’s no other word for it. I have found someone who makes me happy. You and I are the same Arthur, the only difference is that you may be able to get a divorce and marry your Russian girl, whereas I am a member of the establishment. Divorce is out of the question, never mind marrying a Russian. My wife back home in England is a woman to whom I proposed after we’d had just one dance together. I made a mistake. But I’ll pay for that mistake always, whereas you may be free to try again.”

He forced a thin smile.

“But it’s not that easy. I don’t doubt you love Evgenia, but where will you go? She won’t be allowed into England; she’s a Bolshevik.”

“I’ve thought of that. I’ll go to Stockholm. It’s still neutral; there’s lots of British, Russians, White and Red, there. We can live there until the war ends.”

“Oh, and when will that be?”

Arthur smiled despite himself.

“Soon, Robert. Soon.”

Lockhart frowned.

“What you’re asking, Arthur … It won’t be easy.”

“Nevertheless, do it for me and I’ll help you.”

There was another long silence, then Lockhart whispered.

“Very well. A passport. And I’ll arrange everything for Stockholm. But you’ll have to clear a way out of Russia with the Bolsheviks.”

*   *   *

That night Arthur lay in bed, and his conversation with Lockhart took him back to that short spell he’d spent in Stockholm, as beautiful as Petrograd, perhaps even more so, and with a sense of safety that had fled the streets of Russia long before.

He thought of the two wealthy English children who he’d amused by pretending they were Russian peasants for an hour or so, and as he did so, it seemed that it had been a lifetime since he wrote that book.

Will I ever write another?
he wondered.
Or will I be doomed to write a journalist’s lies for the rest of my days?

A lifetime, a lifetime.

Oh, Tabitha.

What have I done?

9:35 P.M. CONTINUED

SO ARTHUR MADE HIS CONDITION WITH LOCKHART
, but there was still the small matter of getting the Bolsheviks to agree to let him across the border. As an Englishman he knew he couldn’t travel through Germany or Finland, but there was an option open to him.

He went to the Kremlin, to see Radek, to strike a deal.

“It seems to me,” he said, “that the Bolsheviks could use a contact in Stockholm.”

Radek nodded, in his hobgoblin way.

“Indeed. That city is the key to the West for us. But we have Vorovsky there. What could you do for us?”

“An English journalist to disseminate news from Moscow … Does that not give you something you do not currently have?”

Unusually, Radek was reticent.

“I’ll think about it. Come back tomorrow.”

“But…”

“I said, come back tomorrow.”

Time was starting to run out, Arthur knew, but when he returned the following day, he was not to be disappointed.

“Very well, Comrade Ransome. You will travel as a diplomatic courier to Stockholm. I for one am sorry to see you go. You are the finest example of your nation it has been my pleasure to meet.”

Arthur smiled modestly at the compliment, and slightly surprised by it, almost missed what Radek said next.

“Good luck, Comrade Ransome. Oh! One more thing. Comrade Trotsky would like to see you before you go.”

The name alone was enough to scare Arthur now. Now he’d seen what he was capable of.

“Why does he want to see me?”

“Oh,” Radek said, “merely to wish you well.”

It crossed Arthur’s mind that it was very unlikely that Comrade Trotsky, Commissar for War of the new Soviet State, would take the time to wish him a safe journey, but there was no choice.

He was walked from Radek’s office to Trotsky’s by a couple of Red Guards.

Trotsky rose to greet him, and then bade him sit in a chair across the desk from his own.

He studied Arthur slowly, as if deciding how best to berate a small child. Arthur was too nervous to utter a word, but noticed with amusement a small hole in the window, just like the one in the Smolny, back in Petrograd.

“Mr. Ransome. All is well?”

Arthur nodded.

“Come now,” Trotsky said. “Do we not know each other? Can we not speak freely?”

It was all Arthur could do to stammer one word.

“Yes.”

“Excellent. Then you will agree with me that all is well. That Miss Shelepina is safely appointed as of this morning in her new position as secretary to Comrade Vorovsky and will soon be on her way to Stockholm.”

Arthur froze in his chair.

“Yes, of course if you are to leave then Evgenia must go, too. Do not think I am so heartless. Or so ignorant of the facts…”

He let his words sink in for just long enough, then went on.

“Yes, she will be safe from the Whites. Safe, too, from the British who are pretending they haven’t invaded our country at Murmansk, yes? So all is well, and I think you can agree that we have been very helpful in arranging all this for you. And maybe I will be safer, too. Miss Shelepina had an accident rather similar to my own.”