Cold Blood (44 page)

2 November 1793 to 12 November

The date of his death was unknowable in that especially dark corner.

I remembered the last time I'd waited for Glebov. I'd killed a perfectly innocent man believing it to be him. So now I started by disbelieving.

Which was correct, for the man with wild white hair who appeared out of nowhere and came weaving across the square was clearly a drunkard, a small narrow-haunched squeakyfarting man in slippers or galoshes, I couldn't say which, being able to make out only his bare ankles, which flashed like ivory beneath the bottoms of his trousers. Grasping a black umbrella halfway down the shaft and waving it as if at a tram that hadn't stopped, he wobbled dribbling and babbling towards Lobachevsky.

“Dog! Apostate! May you always feel empty, may crayfish trample you flat, may... may...”

He rounded the statue and spotted the table and chair. “Oh,
borzhe moy
, how noble of that waiter to remember the needs of an old man...”

“Get out, dottled old fool. Go!
Provalivai
—scram!” said Kobi, not shouting but not quietly either.

The man's head went up. He looked towards us, trying to get a fix. I couldn't let him near. He'd come wheedling in, clasp us in his arms, would swamp us with his embraces. I might as well
go into the square with a loudhailer and say, “Here's where we are, Prokhor Federovich.”

By the same token nor could I shoot him.

The fellow stared and stared at our tea house. I said to myself, It's chance, he didn't really hear Kobi, how could he in that condition. It's just that he's eaten cakes here once or done something here that's triggered this spasm of memory.

He took half a dozen tottering steps towards us: “Why should I be afraid of anybody? Am I not pure? I was baptised and lo, the holy water still endures, in my soul, like a lagoon...”

He turned half round, with a sweep of his open palm as if on the stage, “Can anyone doubt what I say?”

Putting his head right back so that his white beard was cocked up like a hen's tail feathers, he shouted at the sky, “Jealousy!” He glared ferociously round the square. “Liars! Murderers! Fornicators!” Then he shuffled over to the table and sat down— sat perfectly silent and still, contemplating the cobblestones between his parted knees.

“What now?” said Kobi.

“Wait.” It was all that was possible, even though it was growing lighter with every minute that passed.

Suddenly the man gathered himself up, hammered on the table with the handle of his umbrella and shouted at the statue, “I hate all Bolsheviks!” He hung the umbrella on the back of the chair—climbed onto the seat—climbed from there onto the table, which lurched beneath him.

Bony knees bent, arms flung out, hands steadying the air, cautiously turning to face us: “Ha ha! Whoever you are over there, observe the power of the God-fearing...”

Jabbering to himself, he began to feverishly polish his spectacles.

His mouth was moving. I could see every detail through the scope. He was thirty yards away, that was all. I could have put a bullet through his forehead by moving only my finger.

Eighteen fifty something, that was when Lobachevsky had died. Only the last digit remained in shadow now.

I said to Kobi, “When I can see if it's eighteen fifty fucking four or nine or whatever it fucking is, if the bastard's still up there you go and pull him in here and slit his fucking throat for him.”

He said back, “It's not the same for Glebov. He's winning. He can wait for us all day.”

Eighteen fifty-six. That was when the chump had turned his toes up. I said to Kobi, “Go and do it.”

He said—frowning, not like him at all: “Maybe you are sentencing me to death. If Glebov's watching—”

“So what the hell else are we to do? It's halfway light and we're about to have three armies searching for us.”

“We could come back another day. Dead men can't do that.”

The sun was racing down Lobachevsky's plinth now. His nose had got to the stage of leaving a shadow beneath its ridge. I could make out the dust on his eyelids, that on his left breast was the Order of Stanislav. Christ, he looked smug up there.

Kobi said unexpectedly, “What's that noise?”

I said I didn't know.

He said, “It must be Boltikov. He wants to get out of town. People'll be around him, getting curious, maybe hostile.”

But it wasn't an Austin engine that I was now starting to hear. It was deeper and throatier than any armoured car.

I started up. My eyes locked with Kobi's. “That bastard—”

The Fokker came up the hill, following the street. Came low, almost brushing the houses, its black wings waggling. Its exhaust was a pale blue streak dotted with red sparks. The pilot banked opposite the cathedral—had a look at the square. He was alone in the cockpit, his leather-capped head sticking up like a toffee apple on the end of its stick. Impossible to tell whether he had a moustache.

He took the plane out in a loop in order to make his approach with the rising sun at his back.

The voice of the old man rose and hung wavering in the little bushy square, “Hail, great spirit of Our Lord Jesus Christ . . .” He took a pinch of his trouser legs and hoisted them, showing a glimpse of his alabaster shanks—then knocked out a foot-tapping routine on that perilous table: swaying, undulating like a houri, the sun faintly kissing his long bouncing white locks.

The air whined through the Fokker's rigging as it came in behind us. Then it was directly overhead, the beat of the engine reverberating down the broken flue of the tea-house stove.
It came into view, its wings smeared with golden bars of sun like a tropical butterfly.

The pilot—hunched, solitary, goggled. Going away from me at about 120 mph, dipping as he dropped the nose to attack, showing me his shoulder blades.

Was it the same man as before? And was that man Glebov?

The plane lurched as it met the slack air in the square. I had him in the scope, had him, lost him—saying to myself, between the scapulae, get him plumb, be calm, squeeze don't pull. But my finger was never really at the point of decision. My heart, my grip, my sighting eye, something was always jiggling too much.

The old fellow looked up from his dance. Ceased—threw his arms wide open. “Alleluia!”—it must have been something like that. I just saw his gaping mouth.

The Fokker closed on him, diving so sharply that the pilot took the risk of clipping the statue as he pulled out. He must have known it wasn't me. Yet he did it, had that man's joyful face fat in his sights as he rammed his thumbs against the trigger levers.

Maybe the old man's last thought was devoted to flamenco. Maybe it was spent addressing the soul of Russia. But it was quickly over. The bullets lifted him off his feet and off the table and slammed him against the plinth—arms outspread, Christlike, head hanging to one side. He remained there, as if impaled on the lettering of Lobachevsky's epitaph. Then he slithered down, the table partially breaking his fall.

Kobi said, “That was not what we expected,” which was undeniable.

The Fokker rose and without once circling the square set off due west—to the monastery. Not wavering, not looking for other targets, heading straight for Zilantov. Half a mile: a minute for that plane.

What took him there? To fetch Jones for that meeting of his with Trotsky or to screw my woman? Had to be one of them.

We ran down the hill to the armoured car. Boltikov had fallen asleep again. We hauled him out of the way. Kobi got into a turret. Then I smoked that car back across the causeway and up the winding hill to the monastery. A couple of families with
handcarts were heading out of the city. “Should have done it a week ago,” I shouted as they took to the ditch. A thump—must have been their dog. They'd have to eat it sooner than they'd planned.

O woman, woman—moaning softly I barrelled that great hulk of a thing round the bends. Had he abducted her? Could two people fit in the plane? He'd squash her in somehow. Then what would I do?

The huge wooden gates were open, just as I'd left them. But I didn't drive through; it was too obvious a snare. I skidded the armoured car round ready for the getaway and killed the engine, even though it would need the crank to start it again.

The drive had shaken Boltikov back into the world of the living. Kobi and I poked him into a turret and swivelled him round so that his Maxim was aiming through the gates. We'd be in a hurry on the way out. We'd need covering fire. Glebov was in that monastery somewhere. I could smell him.

T
HE NIGHTWATCHMAN
was back in his chair in front of the fire—dead, a bullet through his temple.

Keeping to the shadows, Kobi and I flitted round the courtyard wall to the dormitory building. In the gable end was the servants' entrance. I could just make out the fore-edge of the door: it was off the latch. It hadn't been like that when I left Jones and Xenia there.

Kobi said, “Is it a trap?”

But there was no alternative. I led the way in.

The stone threshold was bowed from the passage of millions of feet over the last three centuries. The stairs were a left-handed corkscrew: steep, tight and dark. A rope had been strung up the wall to act as a handrail. The stone had that coldness that comes from never seeing the sun. I went slowly, always turning, enough to make me distrust my bearings.

Silence wasn't possible. Our boot soles scuffed every step. One of mine had a bit of flint embedded in it which scraped across the stone.

Even our breathing was a giveaway. One holds it back when danger is anticipated. But eventually it has to leave.

If Glebov was waiting for us at the head of those steps, he'd be giggling to hear us approach. That was an idea that crossed my mind.
Giggling.
Spluttering his fat little face in half.

I knew something solid was in front of me when the current of air in the stairwell ceased. I was climbing each step as if death was five seconds away—both hands stretched out, Luger at the ready. Its butt was slippery with sweat.

I expected a door but it was a curtain of heavy felt. I poked it:
there was nothing the other side. Next I explored how it was hung—a rod and rings beneath an overlap of felt. Flattening myself against the wall I squeezed past, giving Kobi my hand so he knew to do the same. Not a ring moved.

The room felt large. I could sense the space in front of me by a hollowness in the air, which was clean and new after the clammy atmosphere of the stairwell. Was it the council chamber we were in? I thought it had to be, with its windows looking out over the courtyard—where the abbot had stuck his head out to ask if we were Bolsheviks.

But if there were windows facing the courtyard, why was there no daylight showing? Where an abbot had leaned out, the sun's rays could come in.

Answer: because Glebov had had someone go round securing all the shutters. To confound me as if by a blindfold. To overpower me with his mystique. Clever comrade, bigsy Mr. Glebov.

But it seemed to me, standing there getting my eyes accustomed to the light, that Glebov's was poor reasoning. A battle, maybe the crucial one of the civil war, was going on in the suburbs of Kazan. Trotsky, whom nobody dared defy, couldn't be more than a mile away. Six hundred and seventy tons of gold were disappearing in a driverless train. Another twenty were in the barge. So why should Glebov take time off to make these elaborate preparations for me?

Could it be that I was more important to him than Trotsky— than the gold—than the outcome of the battle?

Do you need me, Prokhor Federovich? In a fix, are you, comrade?

I slid my feet across the planked floor, not wanting to trip on rugs or furniture. Slats of light started to appear in the louvres of the shutters. Gradually I realised that the room was empty of everything except a wooden reading stand in the centre.

In the left-hand corner was the door leading out.