Cold Blood (45 page)

A corridor, gloomily lit by skylights high up the wall. Cubicles on our left, squats, the smell unmistakable. Here the floor was linoleum. We had to be close to the monks' sleeping quarters.

But he wouldn't be receiving me in the dormitory: his sense of cruelty was too refined for that. I strode down its length, through an incredible odour of used bedwear, men's unwashed
clothes, candle stubs and cats. Breviaries lay on the floor, abandoned in the flight to get aboard my train.

I whispered to Kobi, “Where is he then?”

He pointed at the door leading out—raised his eyebrows.

“Glebov's mine. Some things just can't be shared.”

He looked blankly at me, maybe not understanding fully how it was between me and Glebov. Then he padded out of the room, back down the way we'd entered.

My skin was tingling like an anthill. Revenge would be mine for the remainder of my life. It would be like a meat loaf, knobbly and nourishing. Would never melt or go mouldy. Would attract no rodents. I'd carve a slice from it whenever the memory of Elizaveta got too bitter, and when it was finished, I'd be cured.

A physician might have known where my energy was coming from. It was thirty-six hours since I'd slept. And I was hungry, God damn Hercules but I was hungry. Hungry and choking with anger.

Everything desperate that had ever happened to me was in my expression as I kicked that door down and went flying in, neck stretched out, fanning the Luger to left and right. My eyes, the tip of my nose, my snarling lips, all were charged with a determination of brutelike proportions to get rid of the past by a single murderous deed. My father's debts, the plague that slew him, falling in love, the whole bag of tricks that life had played on me was stacked in that look. Every blood cell in my body was red and boiling. I could have torn someone limb from limb such was my physical strength.

Nor should I forget nor shall I what was most important of all.

“Elizaveta!” I bellowed as I hurtled into that softly lit room. Elizaveta, my life, my love, my eternity.

The oak door caromed against the wall and flew back onto my shoulder. I flicked it away. Glebov, Lenin and Marx lined up in front of me, that was my vision. They'd have been smirking in their intellectually condescending manner. “Charlie Doig, loser,” I'd have read on their faces. Then I'd have shot them to pieces, shattered them with the hard facts of my Kriegsmarine parabellum bullets. “And fuck you the most, Karl Marx,” I'd
have cried, “for being the daddy of these lice.” Then I'd have shot him again and again for what his theories did to my Elizaveta, pincushioned him as he lay there in a welter of his petty jealous blood.

Of course not one of them obliged me. But that didn't worry me as there was someone just as good.

W
INDOWS SHUTTERED
: floor littered with bearskins: a coal fire, just lit: in the very corner of my eye a medieval brasshooped chest against the wall. That was at first glance. Then, at an angle from me, a desk. On it was a black upright telephone, its cable severed about nine inches from its base; a vase of white long-stemmed roses in full bloom, and a lamp with a bare soft pink bulb.

Why was the fire lit and the bulb pink, Doig?

Don't expect me to answer smart-alec questions. I was dispatching the past to oblivion, was as tight as a spring. And what was important to me at that moment was in the chair behind the desk. Lolling, half in and half out of those firelight-flickering shadows, eyes unfathomable but with that same damned sardonic smile pulling one corner of his mouth down— Captain Leapforth Jones. The man from Grand Rapids, the decrypt wallah, the President's undercover negotiator.

“Whichever it is, I don't believe it,” I snarled and in the same breath I shot him, giving him no chance to reply. I didn't know how he'd been turned by Glebov and I wasn't going to ask. I fired an inch to the left of the pink bulb. The bullet entered his skull exactly where I aimed and flipped his head back. When the smoke cleared I gave him another one in the same place, to make sure.

His head fell forward. But he was still smiling at me.

I reloaded, strode round the desk. The chair was drenched in blood. I pulled back his coat. The bullet hole in it was plain— in the chest. I'd shot a dead man.

A door opened in the wall on my left. A sharp bright light
shone out. Figures moved silently across it, filing into the room. The door was closed behind them; the light vanished.

There were six of them. They lined across the end of the room in the semi-darkness, legs astraddle, arms folded across their chests. Latvians, with bulky black leather jackets that whispered when they moved. Chunky Browning pistols on their hips, no nuances there.

The situation required no discussion. They didn't bother to draw their weapons or search me. They were the victors and I was not. I laid my pistol on the desk. Jones's glassy stare caught me. I winked at him.
Contra mundum
, old boy, nothing unusual about that for Charlie Doig.

I walked up to the guards. Loneliness and fatigue, in equal proportions, that's what I was feeling. Only pride kept me from admitting that I was done for.

They looked straight past me. I was shit to them.

Quit that miserable way of thinking, I said to myself. Don't let them get you down. They daren't look you in the eye because they know it's you who's the hero.

I halted in the centre of the line. In my pocket was a whole lot of Kerensky metal currency. Jiggling and jangling it, I said, “
Vot?
” meaning “Well?”

They said nothing. Russians can be like that. No one can wear a face like a wall better than they. It comes from fear of the knout. I walked up and down the line of thugs, examining each black-pelted face in turn to embarrass them. My shoulders, which had been at half mast, began to rise. The theatre had been set: I had nothing to do except amuse myself. If at the end I was executed, so be it.

“Well, where is he? Don't keep me hanging around.”

The door behind them was opened from the inside—and this time left open. The same bright light poured out. I found I was looking directly into the abbot's private chantry, at the altar wall and thus at a portrait gallery of their saints, one next to another, a row of halos and garish costumes. To the left, a rood screen plastered with gold leaf. All the trappings of divinity were on display, in which I must include the person I saw at my very first take.

Who was meant to be seen first.

Who was seated on the abbot's throne wearing an evening dress of pink satin and long white gloves.

Who was idly swinging the leg crossed at her knee, who was tapping the ash off her cigarette onto the silver communion plate—who was the woman I loved.

She'd been eating caviar off the knife, which she was licking slowly, like a cat. The pot was on the altar table with a silver ladle sticking out of it.

The guards parted, making a frame for her.

My heart, what can I say about that poor pained lump? What can I say about the sudden weight in my eyelids, my shoulders, my knees, about the anguish that came flooding up from my lower stomach, about the death of self-esteem, about the sheer pointlessness of living if this was all that was going to happen to me every time I got going?

“So it was you all along. From when you touched me up in the tram. And there I was, thinking what a lucky chap I was. Bitch.”

I moved forward. Part of me wished to strangle her. I got my hands ready. I can see them now, out there in front of me, like claws. But another part insisted that too much had passed between us. I knew immediately which was right. My hands fell away, I shook my head.

I didn't want to be fair to her. Who had been fair to me? However, we had lived together as man and woman should. She had brought my soul contentment and my body relief. In return I had borne her to safety and made her a promise of freedom. Love had passed between us. It was the right word. Neither of us had been faking it.

But somehow Glebov had a grip over her. Either he'd seen me at Smolny or his spies had heard I was living in St. Petersburg. So he'd sent her into action. She'd snared me because she had to.

I squinched up my eyes and examined her face.

There was no triumph there, no glitter in those green eyes, no malice. What I saw was sadness. She was being forced to act out a role. The bright colour of her dress, the fancy shoes, the cigarette, the pose—none of those belonged to the Xenia I knew. And to have made her sit in the abbot's throne and use
the communion plate as an ashtray—it must have wrung her heart dry to do it.

I stepped towards her. The guards closed ranks against me. But I'd been up against far worse that night. Imposing on them my height and sheer force of character, I prised the scum apart. They grunted to each other in their wretched dialect but quietened down when they saw I wanted only to speak to her.

Leaning against the door frame I watched her smoke. We'd been together a year and I'd never seen her even touch one before. She'd rouged her cheeks and used a light tone of lipstick, again things I'd never thought part of her. She was wearing sheer white stockings too—showing them off to me as she waved her dainty foot around. Where there were stockings'd be a garter belt, with pouches for money and hooks for scalps.

How sorry for her should I feel? How sorry for myself?

Be realistic, Charlie. Don't over-consider the lady. Think about getting out of here and think quickly.

That was what the less exhausted part of my brain said. But the rest of it was sluggish and coarse and saying to me, How come you got cunted again, Charlie?

I said, “Got a different name now?”

Of course she didn't reply, just drew on her cigarette and pouted. She was waiting for Glebov. He'd do the talking for both of them.

“Frightened, were you? He's not nice with his women, you know.”

In a low voice she said, “Thank you for showing me what love is. Thank you for your heart, your honesty, your strength. I would rather have chosen death than this.”

“Why, that's good to hear,” I said, wishing to show her the extent of my hurt.

“God is the only real man in my life. You know that. What I did with my lovers was for my personal pleasure. Except you, Charlinka.”

So God was in there as well as Glebov. It didn't surprise me. She'd said her prayers twice daily, undertaken the correct periods of fasting and stood in freezing churches for hours at a time, chanting and bleating with the breath coming out of her mouth
as white as manna. Who in their right mind would volunteer for such discomfort?

Everything in this era was so mixed up when you thought about it, so stood on its head.

And so unfavourable to me, what with the six animals behind me and some other disadvantages to my situation.

I said to her, not having moved from the doorpost, “Life's a spittoon, no question about it.”

Her eyes shifted. The black jackets rustled. A voice behind me said, “And you, Comrade Doig, are going to have to drink from it.” It came from below my shoulder level because he was such a dwarfish runt.