The English Assassin (6 page)

“Basically—emotionally—I do think that. I know the question’s arguable.”

“I detect a strong whiff of anti-aryanism. You support the pogroms?”

“Of course not. I am not a racialist. I speak only of education. I would like to see a vast re-education programme started throughout Europe. Within a couple of generations we could completely eradicate their portentous and witless philosophies.”

“But haven’t our own thoughts been irrevocably influenced by them? I can’t echo your idealism, personally, General Auchinek. Moreover, I think our destiny is with Africa…”

“The chimera of vitality appears again,” Auchinek sighed. “I wish we could stop moving altogether.”

“And become like Cornelius? I saw him in Berlin, you know.”

“There is a difference between tranquillity and exhaustion. I had a guru, colonel, for some time, with whom I would correspond. He lived in Calcutta before the collapse. He convinced me of the need for meditation as the only solution to our ills.”

“Is that why you became a guerrilla?”

“There is no paradox. One must work in the world according to one’s temperament.”

The hillside, covered in tents, shook as the white ruins of Athens began to powder under the impact of the dynamite explosions.

Dust clouds rose slowly into the blue air and began to form peculiar configurations: ideograms from an alien alphabet. Auchinek studied them. They were vaguely familiar. If he studied them long enough, they might reveal their message. He changed the angle of his head, he narrowed his eyes. He folded his thin arms across his spare chest.

“How beautiful,” said Colonel Lyons, and he seemed to be speaking of Auchinek rather than of the explosions. He placed his brawny hand on Auchinek’s bony shoulder. His large digital wristwatch shone beneath the tangle of black hairs, the coat of dust. “We must get…” He removed his hand. “How is Una?”

“In excellent health.” Auchinek coughed on the dust. “She’s leading our mission in Siberia at present.”

“So you are serious about your loyalty to the oriental idea. Have you forgotten the Chinese?”

“Far from it.”

“Would they agree to an alliance? And what about the Japanese? How deep is their reverence for occidental thought?”

“A few generations deep in both cases. You’ve seen their comic books. All China wants, in international terms, is her old Empire restored.”

“There could be complications.”

“True. But not the confusion created artificially by Western interference since the fifteenth century.”

“
Their
fifteenth century,” smiled Colonel Lyons.

Auchinek missed the reference.

Una Persson watched the military ambulance bouncing away over the yellow steppe towards the wooden bridge which spanned the Dnieper. The sky was large, livid, on the move, but it could not dwarf the Cossack sech with its ten thousand yurts of painted leather and its many corrals full of shaggy ponies. Compared with the sky’s swift activity the sech was almost static.

The ambulance reached the bridge and shrieked across it, taking the Cossack wounded back to their special encampment. A dark eddy swept through the sky for a hundred miles. The Dnieper danced.

In the strange light, Una Persson left her Range-Rover and strode towards the sech. Cool and just a trifle prim, with her big coat completely open to show her long, beautiful legs, the short multicoloured kaftan, the holstered S&W pistol on the ammunition belt around her small waist, the knee-length black boots, she paused again on the edge of the camp, allowing her blue-grey eyes to reveal the admiration she felt for the Cossack host’s picturesque style.

These were not the Westernised Cossacks who had taken Berlin with their sophisticated artillery and mechanised transport. These were the atavists; they had resorted to the ancient ways of the Cossacks who had followed Stenka Razin in the people’s revolt three hundred years before. They wore the topknots and long flowing moustachios copied from the Tartars who had been their ancient enemies but who now rode with them. All who presently dressed in Cossack silk and leather had been recruited east of the Volga and most of them looked Mongolian.

Their leader, wearing a heavy burka, blue silk trousers and yellow leather boots typical of the Zaporozhian Cossack, rode to where she stood. A Russian SKS carbine jostled on his back as he dismounted from his pony and wiped a large hand over his huge, hard face.

His voice was deep, humorous and resonant. “I am Karinin, the Ataman of this Sech.” His oval eyes were equally admiring as he studied her, putting one foot in his pony’s stirrup, hooking his arm around his saddle pommel and lighting his curved, black pipe with a match which he struck on the sole of his boot. “You come from Auchinek, they tell me. You wish to make an alliance. Yet you know we are Christians, that we hate Jews worse than we hate Moslems and Muscovites.” He removed his floppy grey-and-black sheepskin shako to expose his shaven head, the gold rings in his ears, to wipe his dark brow and thick moustache. A calculated set of gestures, thought Una Persson, but well accomplished.

“The alliance Auchinek suggests is an alliance of the Orient against the West.” She spoke precisely, as if unimpressed by his style, his strength, his good looks.

“But you are—what?—a Russ? A Scandinavian, uh? A traitor? Or just a romantic like Cornelius?”

“What are you but that?”

He laughed. “All right.”

The wind began to bluster, carrying with it the overriding smell of horse manure. The sky seemed to decide its direction and streamed rapidly eastward.

Karinin took his foot from the stirrup and slid the slim, scabbarded sabre around his waist until it rested on his left hip. He knocked out the pipe on his silver boot heel. “You had better come to my yurt,” he said, “to tell me the details. There’s no-one much left for us to fight in these parts.” He pointed into the centre of the sech, where the circles of yurts were tightest. His yurt was no larger than the others, for the Zaporozhians were touchily democratic, but a tall horsehair standard stood outside its flap.

Una Persson began to see the farcical side of her situation. She grinned. Then she noticed the gibbet which had been erected near Karinin’s yurt. A group of old Kuban Cossacks were methodically putting a noose about the neck of a young European dressed in a yellow frock-coat, lilac cravat, yellow shirt and a blue, wide-brimmed hat. The European’s expression was amused as he let them tie his hands behind him.

“What are they doing?” Una Persson asked.

The ataman spoke almost regretfully. “They are hanging a dandy. There aren’t so many as there were.”

“He seems brave.”

“Surely courage is a characteristic of the dandy?”

“And yet those old men plainly hate him. I thought Cossacks admired courage?”

“They are also very prudish. And a little jealous.”

The tightening rope knocked the blue hat from the fair hair; it covered the face for a moment before falling to the mud. The dandy gave his captors a chiding glance. The Kubans slapped at the rumps of the two horses on the other end of the rope. Slowly the dandy was raised into the air, his body twisting, his legs kicking, his face turning red, then blue, then black. Some noises came out of his distorted mouth.

“
Sartor Resartus
.” Karinin guided Una Persson past the gallows and ducked to push back the flap of his yurt and allow her to precede him. The yurt was illuminated by a lamp on a chest—a bowl of fat with a wick burning in it. The little round room was tidily furnished with a wooden bed and a table, as well as the chest.

Karinin came in and began to lace up the flap from the inside.

Una Persson removed her coat and put it on the chest. She unbuckled her ammunition belt with its holstered Smith and Wesson .45 and placed it on top of the coat.

Karinin’s slanting eyes were tender and passionate. He stepped forward and took her to him. His breath smelled of fresh milk.

“We of the steppe have not lost the secret of affection,” he told her. They lay down in the narrow bed. He began to tug at his belt. “It comes between love and lust. We believe in moderation, you see.”

“It sounds attractive.” Much against her better judgement she responded to his caress.

Ironmaster House was built of grey stones. It was Jacobean, with the conventional small square-leaded windows, three floors, five chimneys, a grey slate roof. Around its walls, particularly over the portico, climbed roses, wistaria and evergreens. Its gardens were divided by tall, ornamental privet hedges; there was a small lawn at the front and a larger lawn at the back. The back lawn ran down to a brook which fed a pool in which water lilies were blooming. In the middle of the lawn, a water-spray swept back and forth like a metronome, for it was June and the temperature was 96°†F.

From the open windows of the timbered sitting room it was possible to see both gardens, which were full of fuchsia, hydrangeas, gladioli and roses all sweetening the heavy air with their scent. And among these flowers, as if drugged, groggily flew some bees, butterflies, wasps and bluebottles.

Inside the shadowy house and seated on mock Jacobean armchairs near a real Jacobean table sat Major Nye in his shirtsleeves; two girls, one fair and one dark; and Major Nye’s wife, Mrs Nye, a rather strong-looking, weather-beaten woman with a contemptuous manner, a stoop and unpleasant hands.

Mrs Nye was serving a sparse tea. She poured from a mock Georgian, mock silver teapot into real Japanese porcelain cups. She sliced up a seed cake and slid the slices onto matching plates.

Major Nye had not bought Ironmaster House. His wife had inherited it. He had, however, worked hard to support the place; it was expensive to run. Since leaving the Army and becoming Company Secretary to the Mercantile Charitable Association, he had lost his sense of personal authority. Many of his anxieties were new; he had previously never experienced anything like them and consequently was at a loss to know how to cope with them. This had earned him the contempt of his wife, who no longer loved him, but continued to command his loyalty. One of the girls in the room was Elizabeth, his daughter. He had another daughter, Isobel, who was a dancer in a company which worked principally on ocean-going liners, and he had a small son who had won a chorister’s scholarship to St James’ School, Southwark, a school reputed to be unnecessarily brutal but, as Major Nye would explain, it had been the only chance “the poor little chap had to get into a public school”, since the major could not afford to pay the kind of fees expected by Eton, Harrow or Winchester (his own school). In the army Major Nye had rarely had to make a choice; but in civilian life he had been given only a few choices and most of his decisions had been inevitable, for he had his duty to do to his wife, her house, and his children. During the summer they usually took a couple of paying guests and they also sold some of the produce of their market garden at the roadside. Mrs Nye was seriously considering selling teas on the lawn to passing motorists.

Major Nye had to work solidly from six in the morning until nine or ten o’clock at night all through the week and the weekend. His wife also worked like a martyr to help keep the garden and the house going. Her heart was weak and his ulcer problems were growing worse. He had sold all his shares and there was a double mortgage on the house. Because he was insured, he hoped that he would die as soon as his son went up to Oxford in ten years’ time. There were no paying guests at the moment. Those who did turn up never came for a second year; the atmosphere of the big house was sad and tense and hopeless.

Elizabeth, the dark-haired girl, was large-boned and inclined to fatness. She had a loud, cheerful voice which was patronising when she addressed her father, accusing when she spoke to her mother and almost conciliatory when she talked to the fair-haired girl with whom, for the past nine months, she had been having a romantic love affair. This affair had never once faltered in its intensity. The fair-haired girl was being very polite to Elizabeth’s parents whom she was meeting for the first time. She had a low, calm, unaffected voice. Her name was Catherine Cornelius and she had turned from incest to lesbianism with a certain sense of relief. Elizabeth Nye was the third girl she had seduced but the only one with whom she had been able to sustain a relationship for very long.

It was Catherine who had asked Elizabeth to get Major Nye to collect Jerry Cornelius from Cornwall and deliver him to Ironmaster House where her brother had been picked up by Sebastian Auchinek’s agents and transported to Dubrovnik. Catherine had come to know Sebastian Auchinek through Una Persson who had introduced Catherine to her first lover, Mary Greasby. Una Persson had once possessed mesmeric power over Catherine similar to that which Catherine now possessed over Elizabeth. Una Persson had convinced Catherine that Prinz Lobkowitz in Berlin would be able to cure Jerry of his hydrophilia and so Catherine had been deceived into providing the collateral (her brother) for the guns which had helped reduce Athens. She had also been instrumental in delivering Jerry into the hands of his old regimental commander, Colonel Pyat of the ‘Razin’ 11th Don Cossack Cavalry, who, for some time, had been obsessed with discovering the reason for Cornelius’s desertion. He desperately wanted, once he had proved Jerry authentic, to revive the assassin and question him.

Catherine was only gradually becoming aware of her mistake. She had still not voiced the suspicion, even to herself, that Una Persson might have deceived her.

“And how is the poor blighter?” asked Major Nye, dolefully watching the water fall through the overheated air and rolling himself a thin cigarette. “Hypothermia, wasn’t it?”

“I’m not sure, major. I haven’t heard from Berlin yet. It’s confused, as you know.”

“It beats me,” said Mrs Nye harshly, rising to collect the tea paraphernalia, “how your brother managed to get himself into that state. But then I suppose I’m behind the times.” Her wide, cruel mouth hardened. “Even the diseases have changed since I was a girl.” She gave her husband a sharp, accusing glare. She hated him for his ulcers. “You haven’t eaten your scone, dear.”