Cold Blood Read online

  The horses took the strain, leaning into their collars. The big wooden wheels rumbled over the cobbles. A kettle fell off. “Kobi,” I said, “nip down and—”

  With a howl of its klaxon the armoured car bowled in from Nevsky and made Joseph jump for his life. It rounded my uncle’s collection of marble catamites—boyfriends of Tiberius—and halted face to face with our terrified horses, its single roof headlight shining over us.

  I said to Valenty, “Lenin’s fuckers. Leave them to me.”

  Kobi shouted, “I’ll shoot the first head that appears,” which was a waste of words since we couldn’t see a thing on account of the blinding roof light.

  But it was Boltikov. His muscular voice came booming through the semi-darkness.

  “One gold rouble it’s cost me, this escort party. They’ll see us to the station and then see our train out of the yard and onto the main line. Not bad, eh!”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, what do we care? They’ve got the armour, that’s what counts. I said to them, Boys, come to Odessa with us, there’ll be rich pickings down there in the sun. They said, Enough excitement here, comrade. Joseph, put a rug over the Emperor. We don’t want the wrong sort of excitement going down Nevsky.”

  Kobi: “He’s dead. Leave him behind’s what I say.”

  But I wasn’t going to have that. Tiberius was another memento. Joseph agreed with me. Uncle Igor had told him that Tiberius had been a lucky mascot for the Founder and should never be sold or abandoned.

  “Every adventure needs an emperor,” he declared loudly.

  A hollow voice from inside the armoured car said, “Shoot them both. Down with all emperor swine.”

  Boltikov smiled over to me and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together like an imitation Jew. “We needn’t listen to him. Money speaks loudest,” he said in thick English. “It’s the sort of thing they’re taught to repeat by people like Glebov.”

  Then to Joseph, who had opened up an abusive exchange with the voice behind the metal slit that was demanding his death, “Stop all that. Just cover the statue.”

  We rolled out into Nevsky led by Boltikov in the armoured car, its klaxon blasting at the curious group gathered at the palace gates.

  Joseph was sitting sideways, his legs dangling over the edge of the cart. I leaned over to him. “Actually, better a woman as a mascot than a dead emperor. More useful.”

  “Best of all would be a live emperor, our little father,” sighed Valenty.

  “No chance of that,” I said. “Lenin’s got him and Lenin’ll keep him. One day we’ll be told he’s died of a fever.”

  Joseph said, “Every army should have its woman to act as mascot, cook, whore, sweeper, seamstress and disciplinarian. That’s what a man needs to make him fight at his best.”

  “See one around?” said Kobi sarcastically.

  “You want a woman, Mongolian prick?” Joseph said. He always spoke with his face closed, giving nothing away, perhaps from working with my uncle. Whenever he said something unexpected, it came as a double surprise.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Kobi.

  “Well, she’s here,” said Joseph.

  It was Boltikov’s headlight that picked her up. She was walking out into Nevsky to intercept us. Quite calmly, a canvas suitcase in each hand. Boltikov shouted to me, “Something to do with you?”

  Her face was as pale as a moth’s. She stared up at me, a triangle of white topped by the same dark felt hat she’d been wearing when I left her. It clung to her springy hair by a miracle.

  We’d come only a couple of hundred yards from the palace. Had she been waiting for me? How had she known? Was it chance? Was it love? Was it an ambush?

  “You got her just like that?” Kobi said suspiciously.

  Boltikov was jutting out of his armoured turret like a submarine commander. He looked Xenia over. He was like Kobi, rough and disbelieving. “Did she fall from the sky? Charlie, have nothing to do with her. She’s dangerous.”

  But she was resolute. She shoved her suitcases aboard—giving them a final push with her shoulder—and clambered up beside Valenty. It was the point at which she should have been refused if that was what I wanted. But I said nothing and Valenty—he neither helped her nor shoved her off. So she got to be there with us, one of the party, which she did neatly, in a quietly determined way, no squawking.

  She folded her skirt beneath her and sat down in one continuous movement. She crossed her hands in her lap, tipped her chin and said firmly, “I have an invitation.”

  Boltikov, turning right round in his turret, said, “What’s all this about?”

  She said to him, “I’m no Bolshevik. A week ago this man was in my bed,”—with a glance in my direction. “That was when he invited me to join his train. But he said as a ‘mascot,’ which I didn’t like, so I turned him down. Since then, I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Why?” he demanded. “Why at the precise moment we’re leaving?”

  She removed her hat and tossed her head.

  No man can resist a woman doing that. A bell rings. If not in his heart, then somewhere.

  “There’s no food here any more. I don’t want to leave but I don’t want to starve. Which would you choose? If you think the same as I do, you have my full answer to all your questions.”

  She was a goer all right was my girl.

  Boltikov looked across at me with narrowed eyes. People were beginning to gather.

  I waved at him to get on with it. He suddenly grinned. “Hope she’s as obedient as Liselotte.” He shouted down to his driver who noisily engaged gear. The engine coughed and a cloud of choking oily black smoke enveloped us. The horses snorted and blubbered their lips. We were on the move again. We had a mascot.

  Twenty-one

  WITHOUT ANY warning, not even a preliminary flicker, the electricity was cut off. The night fell over us like a giant tarpaulin. One moment I’d been able to distinguish the clothes and expressions of the passers-by and the next unutterable blackness held sway along the whole length of Nevsky, gripped between the buildings on either side and pressed down on us by the weight of the sky. The stars were black, the moon was black, God and His saints and His angels and all the stuff volleying around in the cosmosphere were black as well, that’s what it felt like. I thought, Do Lenin and his people not understand how power stations work or has coal become a rarity? Is the day about to arrive when we give our friends a lump of coal as a birthday present? Then another thought came to me, that deep in some subterranean vault, Lenin had his own private generator humming flat out while he sat at Smolny bathed in light and heat, his huge skull glowing, thinking of a name for his next red setter as he signed death warrants.

  That such a man could have stomped down from his attic in cuckoo-clock land to take control! As well to be ruled by a croupier, who never pretends to be anything other than a cheat.

  God damn all thinkers.

  God damn V. I. Lenin and infect him with a hideous death. V for Vladimir, vile and vermin and VD and for the small red grave-worm and for the greatest of them all—vengeance.

  But one had to be alive to enjoy it—

  Run, prince!

  Run, miller!

  Run, every beautiful woman in Russia! Bury your jewels, muzzle your jangling breasts, dirty your milkmaid cheeks, let your buttocks fall and travel only by night. Trust no one. If cornered, trade Jerusalem for protection. Men don’t lose their appetites just because times are troublesome.

  Run, every man of principle, everyone who likes to wear a clean collar, can count to ten or knows more than five hundred words. Run like blazes, for the frontier, for a train, for a ship. Don’t be embarrassed to fire first. Don’t look back. Don’t bother praying. The gods of the past have had it and the new gods are monsters. Accept this. Continuing to put your faith in the morals that were your grandfather’s will bring you nothing except a share in a mass grave.

  Run, run, run, children, you above all. Run ti
ll your pudgy legs come off.

  I rose on the cart and jabbed my fist into the darkness.

  Xenia looked up at swaying me and said, “What are you doing?”

  I was crazed. My visit to the Rykov mausoleum—my thoughts upon extinction—and now quitting the palace, which goddammit belonged to me and no Red bastard, had caused my brain to sprout with every sort of resentment. Neither father nor mother was left to me. Brothers and sisters—none. Friends—the tempo of my life had been too rapid.

  I said to myself, Doig, this Lenin and his brutish philosophy has not only destroyed your youth: it has made an orphan out of you.

  Orphan! What loneliness there was in that word.

  My fingers, splayed like a shuttlecock, were on Xenia’s head to steady myself. I was squashing her hat, which was damp with the evening mist. I thought, Therefore my vengeance will not only be on Glebov but also on the entire Bolshevik system for having exposed me to this awful state.

  “If that is possible,” I said out loud, taking a grip of her hair as we lurched over the Liteyni Prospekt tramway. But was it? One thing at a time. Everyone knew that.

  “If what is possible?” she asked.

  And suddenly the street lighting returned and I was standing there, all of them looking up at me and my rage already ebbing. Joseph said, “Lo, the universe again,” and I said to myself, Once I get Glebov I’ll go to Chicago and everything will be for me as it is for others.

  Twenty-two

  INITIALLY WE haunted the metropolitan lines round Moscow and St. Petersburg. Valenty had used his connections to frank us into the railway system. The signalmen kept the points open for us to enter the line and the depots let us take on coal and water for free.

  We became in effect a ghost train, and in those chaotic conditions were bothered by nobody. We drifted around, listening and waiting. “Special” trains interested me mightily since they were only put on for the Soviet bosses. Thinking to find Glebov this way, I made a point of shadowing them. Sometimes we got too close. One apple-crisp morning I saw Trotsky, laughing, sweep back his hidalgo’s cloak and urinate off the platform of the guard’s van of his private train. I could have sworn that his mane of hair had been sprinkled with hoar frost. It seemed white, like a saint’s. That can’t have been right but what was indubitably the case was that he had a fine arc for a man with so much on his mind. This may be true of all revolutionaries who are physically very active. Ambition, which I know from Mongolian medicine to be a really hot emotion, must burn away the plaque in the body’s watercourses and allow the liquids to gush. That urine of Trotsky’s, which may have been his first go of the day, soared over the guard rail of the van all yellow and glittering like the sort of champagne one only reads about. What was he chatting about so gaily over his shoulder? A dream he’d had? The day’s plans?

  “Call out to him, invite him in for a meal,” Boltikov said sourly, grabbing back his binoculars.

  Everything was elastic during these months. All information, both the true and the false, was available to everyone. But none of it related to Glebov. He just wasn’t where we were.

  New Year passed and the worst of the winter. Peace was made with Germany. April arrived and our armies began to come home from the front—by now Bolsheviks to a man, even the officers. More and more troops became available for the struggle against the Whites. Lenin was getting a grip on things: the holiday season was over. That was my judgement, and to support it, our chums up and down the railway started to say that there was no coal to be had, even though I could see mountains of it glistening in the wet sun. Oh, but it wasn’t steam coal, it’d be terrible in a locomotive like ours. I didn’t argue. One day Joseph returned from the railway canteen and reported that he’d been asked to pay a rouble for a posy of six matches tied by a scarlet thread. A month before he’d have got them for nothing, a whole carton. I didn’t argue with him either. I could tell the way things were going.

  Boltikov, sensing my despair, sidled up and whispered, “So why don’t we forget about Glebov and slip down the line to Odessa? A boat to Constantinople, a spot of the old commerce with the orientals—restore our fortunes?”

  My anger returned. Why should I have to fight everyone? Who was paying, who was the piper?

  I eyed him. For the first time I noticed the touch of crocodile skin about his face, the twist of his mouth and the way he worked his eyes, which were constantly probing me, as if certain that in some corner of my brain I’d hidden the alchemist’s secret.

  He said, “You’re obsessed about going east. If you’re so keen on it, why not keep going until you get to China? Gather an army of Chinks. Get yourself some Manchu pussy.”

  I was poised to go for him. But Xenia saw the heat in my eyes and laid a soothing hand on my sleeve. Then very softly, those green eyes dancing, she produced the clincher: the Americans were landing in Siberia. Someone had received a letter from his brother in New York who was in the habit of drinking with a man who worked for the government...

  “Americanski!” That one word transformed everything, like a magic potion. If we went east we’d meet up with them, couldn’t fail to.

  “What?” I shouted.

  Very sweetly she said, “I speak a better Russian than you. I come along after you’ve been wading around in your lordly manner and smooth things out.” (Saying which she rubbed my arm again.) “The lives of these men are poor. They can’t see how they’re going to get better. But they want to believe in fairy tales and they like a woman with a pretty manner. So they tell me what they won’t tell you. Anyway, the Americanski are on the way. They’ll reach Siberia this summer. What else can I help you with, Charlinka?”

  Boltikov had no answer to that. Only a madman would turn his nose up at the Americans. Who had the latest machine guns, the surest ammo, the best tinned food, tents that really were waterproof? Who had the tip-top wireless kits? Who’d invented money? The guys who were up to that would surely know exactly where Glebov was.

  Then on Mayday itself my girl heard something else: that the Tsar and his family were being taken to Ekaterinburg, which was about as far east as they could go in Red territory. She withheld the news until night, when we were turning in. I’d knocked two compartments into one and had a carpenter build us a honeymoon bed.

  I was kicking off my trousers when she mentioned the word Ekaterinburg.

  Combing out the thicket of her hair—tugging at it—peeking at me in the mirror with a fetching smile: “Of course I’m sure— I wouldn’t be telling it you if I wasn’t.”

  “You know what this means?”

  “We follow them?”

  “Yes. You know what that means?”

  “Bye-bye Moscow, bye-bye St Petersburg, bye-bye civilisation. Hello mud, cold, boredom, Siberia—I need compensation for that, Charlie.”

  She turned to me, slid out of her dressing gown, stood akimbo with a different sort of smile—fetching plus. Strong, meaty, white-fleshed body, full breasts growing from a wide base. How could I ever have imagined her checking the maps in library books?

  She said, “I need full compensation. Glasses off or glasses on?”

  “Didn’t you say you liked to watch?”

  “I’m not that blind.”

  “Take them off then.”

  She bent over me, naked, reached down with her lips. She could do tricks with them, with the muscles round her mouth, like a giraffe plucking leaves from a tree. Having worked her way up me, she said mischievously, “But what’s this written on your chest? I’ll certainly need glasses to read it. Stand up, you lazy fellow!”

  I did so, with some pride. “What are you talking about?”

  She scrawled a forefinger across me from east to west, nipping at tufts of hair for emphasis. Her belly against mine was like a water skin warmed by the sun. “ ‘The rules of behaviour in Siberia,’ that’s what it says here. ‘Number one, go a bit more gently or you’ll bring the partition down.’ That happens, we’ll end up in the corridor, both of us,
Charlie boy.”

  “Number two?” Her buttocks were hot and soft and massive, proper Russian buttocks.

  “No number two.” Her tongue was like a conger eel in my ear and her legs were quivering. She was ready to topple. One hand had my cock tight against her stomach so that I shouldn’t get away. I said, “OK, then we’ll lie the other way round.”

  But by then she didn’t care, I would say from having considered the details of the compensation in some detail.

  I eased her down—she wasn’t heavy, about 135 pounds. But it was awkward: I had to go with her on account of her having hold of me.

  Pinning her I said, “One of these days I’ll get you to faint. I’m not going to be beaten by some city shyster.”

  Her eyes opened wide, green as the sea. “You’ve nothing to be jealous of. I faint from the sheer pleasure of having you. Every single time. If you looked into my eyes more often, you’d see. Yes? Hey, Charlie, yes?”

  Somewhat later, she said, “If I go topsides, the partition’ll be safe.”

  The two of us moving smoothly, I said in her ear, “It was built in America, for God’s sake, a Pullman. It’s not going to collapse. Let’s not be over-dainty.”

  “But to fall into the corridor would not be stylish,” she said.

  “I know what would be,” I said, and the next day I stuck Tiberius on the front of the locomotive and thus we quit the home front to head east, in the direction of Ekaterinburg and Siberia. The Emperor shone with divine right and was sniped at by the Reds from every bridge until we cleared the danger zone.

  Twenty-three

  JOSEPH CAME tripping down the corridor—the town of Tulpan was in sight. I was for running straight through it in order to put more distance between us and the Reds. Joseph said that another train was using our line, that it had halted at the station.

  “What of it?” I said irritably. “Go round. You’ll only have to set a few points.”