A Little White Death Page 5

  ‘What I know you cannot use. If you do, it’s Charlie’s life on the line. I admit it’s not fair on you as a journalist, but that’s the way it is. If it’s any consolation to you, I’d be happy to talk to the family when I get back. You can have Charlie’s job. Dammit, you can have Alliss’s too.’

  ‘Which I won’t refuse.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  ‘There’s a war coming. Israel and the Arabs again. Perhaps two or three years from now, but coming nonetheless. Arthur’s not up to a war. He’d have to be replaced sooner or later.’

  Hussein paused as he so often did in consideration of his next remark.

  ‘But’, he continued, ‘don’t you think it’s a bit ruthless?’

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘No I don’t.’ Now he too searched for the considered phrase.

  ‘He’s had his day.’

  Hussein did not seem to disagree with this.

  ‘There is one thing. I will have to continue to look for Charlie and, worse from your point of view, look into Charlie. My employers will expect that of me. Supposing it turns out that Charlie was a spy?’

  ‘I think that’s a foregone conclusion,’ said Troy.

  ‘I meant a spy while he was here. Suppose the journalism was merely his cover. What then? Suppose that even now he is a spy. What then?’

  ‘Then you publish what you find. I’m not even going to ask those questions. I don’t want to know.’

  § 7

  At Athens he changed planes and bought a bottle of ouzo – he’d never tasted the stuff and, besides, it would be a beakerful of the warm south to take into the Russian winter. He also bought the Sunday Post. An outrageous price and nearly two days old, but he desperately wanted an English paper.

  ‘Where is Leigh-Hunt?’ ran the headline, and underneath it was another version of what Said had told him, bylined to Arthur Alliss, ‘our Middle Eastern correspondent’. The piece concluded that Charlie was in Russia. Troy turned to the inside pages. A leader, the work of his brother-in-law Lawrence Stafford, called upon the Foreign Office to clarify the matter – had Leigh-Hunt defected or not? ‘Mr Woodbridge was forthright in his denial of rumours alleging that Charles Leigh-Hunt was a Soviet agent some six years ago. It is not for him to remain silent now. Where is Leigh-Hunt? Who is his paymaster?’

  Troy thought ‘paymaster’ a bit histrionic, but then writing about spookery brought out all the clichés.

  Under Home News, eclipsed by the Charlie scandal, was an item on the Labour Party leadership. The chief contenders to replace the late Hugh Gaitskell were Harold Wilson and George Brown – both of them politicians swept into the Commons in the great tide of 1945, just like Rod. But Rod’s name was nowhere.

  § 8

  He had always known Moscow would be cold. Family history, War and Peace and School Certificate geography told him that – but this cold? He could scarcely believe thermometers were made that would record temperatures this low. He was wearing every scrap of clothing he had with him, and dearly wished for his Aran sweater or one of those sheepskin things ex-RAF types wore for tearing round the English countryside in little MGs and boring the arse off village pubgoers with their version of the Battle of Britain. At a pinch he’d settle for an extra pair of socks or reinforced Y-fronts. Or a hat, he thought, God send me a hat.

  The Russians had not set up one of those flexible tubes that conveyed passengers from plane to immigration like dust up a hoover without ever touching ground, without the literal sense that ‘landing’ implies and ought to imply. Troy touched ground, or touched tarmac, as near as he would get to the soil of Mother Russia, feeling little or nothing and wondering what it was he should feel. Perhaps wonderment was all and perhaps wonderment was enough? He was the first Troy to return to Russia in fifty-eight years. His father had never set foot east of Berlin, nor had his Uncle Nikolai and neither had ever expressed any desire to. His brother Rod had tried time and time again to wangle his way onto Labour Party or trade union official visits, and failed time and time again. Troy had never wanted to visit the old country. He much preferred it to exist in the fanciful yarns and fables of his grandfather Rodyon Rodyonovitch – or in the precise, near-scientific accounts of his father Alexei Rodyonovitch, which in the end served to foster the mythical status of Russia as surely as his grandfather’s highly unreliable tales had done. All in all, Russia, the Russia of his boyhood, the Russia of the nursery, the Russia imbibed at his mother’s knee and his father’s dinner table, did not exist except as a country of the mind. As he stood on the windblown tarmacadam, beneath an invisible sky, between the Tupelov jet and the vast blankness of the concrete buildings, blinded by arc lights, frozen to his fingertips, surrounded by the sibilant babble of the language of childhood, his sense of wonder amounted to one simple, inadequate question: ‘Is this it?’

  Troy followed the snaking Russian susurrus into the blockhouse. A lazy silence overlay an intimidated whisper. No jets roared, no propellers thrashed, and the Soviet apparatchiks yawned their way through the routine like men sleepwalking. It seemed too casual, too informal quite to be the Soviet Union. It was Ruritania – anywhere east of the Danube, anywhere they wore outlandish uniforms and looked like chorus boys from the Student Prince. He changed that. As soon as he presented his passport and papers the uniformed officer diverted the half-dozen people behind him to a separate table. Troy looked at the uniform. Blue collar flashes with red piping – KGB. He stood several minutes in silence while the officer in front of him looked at every page of his passport, turning it this way and that to see the blurred stamps of countries he had visited, and read the letter from the Foreign Ministry. When the man had finished a second man appeared and he, too, took several minutes to reach the obvious conclusion.

  ‘It’s him,’ he said to the first.

  It occurred to Troy that Charlie would undoubtedly have omitted to tell his Russian masters that he, Troy, spoke Russian. He would probably have told them just as much of the truth as he needed and no more.

  The first man looked at Troy. A handsome face. Mediterranean blue eyes, at least the blue of the Mediterranean in January, beneath the low brim of a fur-lined hat. Troy envied him the fur hat. Troy could kill for the fur hat.

  ‘Baggage,’ he said simply, and for a second Troy thought it was an insult rather than an instruction. The man gestured upward with his hand and Troy plonked his suitcase on the counter between them. He flicked the catches and turned the case towards the two immigration officers.

  They rummaged through, found only the Sunday Post, Troy’s last clean shirt and his washbag. They felt the lining of the suitcase, tapped the bottom, took apart his razor, gazed oddly at the black-and-white badger-hair shaving brush, sniffed at the styptic pencil that stemmed the flow of blood every time Troy cut himself shaving, and at the end seemed more than slightly incredulous.

  ‘Is this all you’ve got?’

  ‘I’m wearing everything else,’ said Troy.

  All the same, the second man patted him down, arms in the air, took his fountain pen from his jacket pocket, unscrewed the top, put it back, and pronounced him ‘clean’.

  The first man shrugged, the second man responded like an imitative monkey and they got on with the routine.

  ‘Commander Troy. This permits you entry to the Soviet Union for forty-eight hours. It permits you entry only to the city of Moscow and to the airport. You are forbidden to travel outside the city limits. Do not attempt to travel outside the city limits, and be back here in time for your flight the day after tomorrow. If you’re not, we’ll come looking for you.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Troy. ‘Thank you.’

  The man held out the passport and papers to Troy, and as Troy took them he turned to the second man and said, ‘Tell her he is leaving now. And if she loses him she’ll spend the rest of her life directing traffic in Novaya Zemlya.’

  No – they definitely didn’t know he spoke Russian.

  He caught up with the tail end of the crowd
. A barn-like lobby, drab and makeshift – two styles, as he would soon learn, that the Soviet Union did rather well – and fifty-odd people milling around under the watchful eye of a dozen uniformed militia and God only knew how many out of uniform. The crowd thinned as people made their way out through a wall of swing doors and into the freezing night, and suddenly one door swung inwards with a mighty push and there was Charlie.

  ‘What would you like first,’ he boomed, ‘The riddle, the mystery or the enigma?’

  This was not the man he had known, not the man with whom he had shared the permanence of boyhood and adolescence. Here was a man bloated by booze, elephantine with indulgence. Allowing for the bulk of his heavy fur coat, he was still fat. The chin had quadrupled and was now better referred to in the plural; his nose was a shining red beacon to any stout-hearted fellow boozer in search of a good, miserable time getting to the bottom of another bottle, and as they peeped out from under his fur hat, it seemed to Troy that even his earlobes were fat. How could anyone have fat earlobes?

  Charlie crushed him in a bear hug.

  ‘Bugger the enigma,’ Troy said. ‘I want a coat like yours and I want it now.’

  ‘Trust me,’ said Charlie. ‘I’ve thought of everything.’

  He usually did.

  He stuck his own fur hat on Troy’s head. His blond mop had thinned at the crown, his forehead had creased into a hundred furrows, though the blue eyes twinkled still in the falling ruin of what had been a beautiful, heart-shaped face.

  ‘Back of the car,’ he said. ‘Keeping warm for you.’

  Charlie led Troy to his car. A Soviet-built, Soviet-issue, sixseater Zim saloon – defectors for the use of – looking like a poor man’s Studebaker from ten or twelve years ago, with a front end like a set of mocking false teeth. An ugly car conforming precisely to the maxim of the late genius of capitalism, Henry Ford, in being available in ‘any colour you want so long as it’s black.’

  Charlie opened the back door, picked up a coat so dense it looked to Troy like a dead mammoth. He wrapped Troy in it as though he were a helpless child, grinning all the time as if they were sharers of some silent, exclusive joke. The grin became a laugh. Troy felt huge arms embrace him once more, the bear’s paws clapping him on the back, then pushing him away to arm’s length in a gesture that said ‘Let me look at you.’ He had not changed, he knew. Hardly a grey hair, not an extra pound of weight nor inch of girth since he was twenty-five. They were the same age. They had matched each other step by step throughout their lives until a few years ago, big man and little man, twins of adversity. At forty-one they had parted, divided lives and ideologies. Not that Troy knew for a moment what his own ideology was. It just wasn’t Charlie’s.

  ‘Can we go,’ he said. ‘I’m freezing.’

  Charlie put the car into gear and lurched off. He was an even worse driver than Troy.

  They tore down a tree-lined road, so thick with trees it struck Troy that they had entered some mythical Russian forest, been sucked effortlessly into the plot of Peter and the Wolf, not the outer suburbs of a capital city.

  ‘Y’know,’ said Charlie, ‘I have one hell of job remembering which side of the road the Russkis drive on.’

  Troy had noticed this.

  ‘We’re being followed, by the way.’

  ‘I keep forgetting you’re a detective. Yes, Freddie, of course we’re being followed. Give me half a chance and I’ll spot the bugger and we can lose him.’

  Charlie peered into the rear-view mirror. Troy felt the car meander across the lanes, heard the honks of protest.

  ‘It’s not a him, it’s a her.’

  ‘How do you know? You’ve spotted her already?’

  ‘No, I heard them talking about her. Indiscreet because they don’t expect foreigners to speak the language. And I don’t think we should lose her. They’ll find us petty damn quick anyway. Far better a tail you know about than one you don’t. Or am I teaching my spymaster to suck eggs?’

  ‘Touché, old chap, touché.’

  § 9

  It was a truly dreadful place. A gin house from a Hogarth plate. A joyless hole in which to drink and smoke and smoke and drink. A place with but one purpose, to quench the committed. A brown study of a brown room, a room of worn and peeling paintwork, of years of encrusted dirt, of woodwork shaped and worn with elbows, of floors patterned in spittle, with but a single piece of decoration, a tiny touch of red and gold among the shades of brown – a cobwebbed, foxed portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the wall behind the bar. Heroic of posture, caught in a media moment at the Finland Station, making his first speech in many a year on Russian soil. He had to make a speech – how else would he have passed the time in that sealed train except by writing a speech?

  ‘Don’t tell me it’s a dive, Freddie,’ said Charlie, reading his mind. ‘It’s this or nothing. Or to be precise, it’s some other place exactly like this or one of the hard-currency joints in the hotels which are strictly for the tourists. I can’t play the tourist. I’m here for life. Begin as you mean to go on, Isay.’

  Dark eyes under beetle brows occasionally glanced at them as Charlie forced a way through to the bar. Miserable men, working men, heavily wrapped up against the winter cold, heavily wrapped upagainst the working life, their heads in clouds of tobacco fug, their feet in puddles on the floor, streaming from their boots. Two toffs, two foreigners, in good clothes, but scarcely meriting enough attention to detract from the serious business of getting seriously drunk.

  Charlie got both elbows on the bar and seized the attention of the barman. He was a dead ringer for the late Maxim Gorki, a face consisting largely of open pores, a nose like a ripe strawberry and a moustache the size of a yard brush.

  ‘Now we get to the heart of the matter. Four fucking days in this utter fucking igloo of a country and I still can’t muster enough of the lingo to ask this bugger for a drink. I got you here just to order the booze. Tell him I want a whisky, and make damn sure he pours at least three fingers.’

  This struck Troy as innocent, but he asked anyway.

  ‘Where do you think you are?’ said the barman. ‘What do you think this is? Order vodka or piss off the pair of you.’

  Troy translated loosely for Charlie.

  ‘It’ll have to be vodka. That’s all they serve.’

  ‘If your English pal wants whisky he’ll have to use his privileges. In this place there are no privileges. We’re the scum of the earth. Vodka or vodka. And none of that fancy shit with bison grass or red peppers in it. Take it or leave it.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘Two large ones.’

  ‘Not so fast,’ said Gorki, and pointed over his shoulder to a small blackboard and the chalked entries under the heading ‘menu’.

  ‘First you order a meal.’

  The kopeck dropped for Troy. It was not a bar; there was no such place as a bar. In a nation of drunks there were only two places to get drunk outside the privacy – or not – of your own home. In the street or in a café. An approximation of which this place seemed to be.

  ‘Charlie – you have a choice. Sausages, fish dumplings or soup.’

  ‘Sausages,’ said Charlie. ‘Anything as long as the bugger pours me a drink.

  Troy ordered for them.

  ‘Nah,’ said Gorki. ‘Bangers is off.’

  ‘Dumplings then.’

  ‘Nah, dumplings is off too.’

  Troy looked around the room at the pack of miserable boozers. Each one of them had in front of him a bowl of yellowish gruel. Not one of them seemed to have touched it.

  Another kopeck dropped.

  Nobody ate a damn thing in this satanic hole; the pretence of food, the utterly ‘off ’ menu, was just a front to keepa fraction the right side of the law. If a militiaman – the Soviet version of a copper – walked in, doubtless a few elbows would ply a few spoons, but that was it. A bar by any other name in a country where there were no bars was a caff.

  Just for the pleasure of the hunt, he
said, ‘What’s the soup?’

  ‘Yeller soup,’ said Gorki.

  Troy could see that.

  ‘Yellow what?’

  ‘Yeller taters and yeller cabbage, bit o’ this, bit o’ that.’

  ‘Sort of like saffron?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Then a kopeck dropped for him too.

  ‘Bloody good idea.’ He turned to a fat man in a greasy apron lounging behind him. ‘Andrei, change the menu. From now on its soupe au saffron.’ He stuck two bowls in front of them and ladled out the yellow mess.

  ‘Good bloody grief,’ said Charlie. ‘Crambe repetita. School dinners.’

  ‘You don’t have to eat it,’ said Troy. ‘No one else is.’

  ‘Water?’ Gorki was asking. ‘You want water?’

  ‘Water,’ said Charlie through Troy’s interpretation. ‘We don’t want fucking water.’

  ‘Yes you do,’ Gorki said. And he winked hammily at Troy.

  ‘Yes,’ Troy replied. ‘Two large waters will be fine. Doubles.’

  Gorki set two far from spotless tumblers on the bar, splashed vodka generously, but without any sense of measure, into them and shoved them over. He did not ask for money. It looked to be the kind of place that did most of its business on the slate, and Gorki looked to be the kind of man who would never forget your face or what you owed him down to the last kopeck.

  Charlie was staring at the disparity in their glasses. Troy swapped his huge one for Charlie’s lesser and they touched glass together.

  ‘About bloody time,’ said Charlie. ‘Cheers.’

  He knocked back half the glass in a single swallow. Troy sipped at his.

  ‘Jesus, that’s strong. Bloody hell, they certainly mean you to get pissed, don’t they?’

  ‘Sole purpose of visit,’ said Troy. ‘It’s probably about 120 degrees proof. You could run a car on the stuff.’

  ‘Good,’ said Charlie. ‘I can die happy.’

  Troy doubted this very much. All the same, he wondered at the shred of truth buried in the statement. That death was the only thing left to look forward to. It did not need to be said that Charlie had no idea what he was getting into, little idea of what kind of a country he had come to. But he felt sure it would be said, and equally sure of its finality. Charlie might live ten or twenty or thirty years, but Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, would be home for the rest of his days. And die happy he would not.