The Samurai Inheritance

XXII

Jamie froze at the soft knock at the compartment door and for the first time on Keith Devlin’s mission he wished he’d brought some kind of weapon. He motioned Magda back to the window and stepped warily to one side as the knock was repeated. Very carefully he pushed the door a few inches, then opened it fully to allow Boris and Ludmilla to enter. They’d changed into pyjamas and thick robes. The husband avoided eye contact as he laboriously climbed the ladder to the top bunk, lay back and stared at the ceiling. Ludmilla handed Jamie a brown paper bag before taking her place below her husband.

‘Spasibo, Ludmilla.’ He nodded his thanks, opening the bag to find a pair of sweet pastries. Magda caught his eye and he shrugged. ‘They had nothing to do with it. Our visitors probably made them an offer they couldn’t refuse to stay away for a little longer while they were changing for bed.’

‘So I’m just supposed to forget the fact that I had to spend quarter of an hour within reach of Harry the Hatchet’s twitching fingers?’ She shook her head and the raven hair shimmered. ‘No way, Jamie. I want to know what the hell is going on.’

‘Now?’ Jamie lowered his voice to match Magda’s.

She frowned and glanced across at Ludmilla, who was already snoring gently. ‘I wouldn’t want to disturb them.’

‘We could go out in the corridor,’ he offered.

‘We might wake them when we come back in.’

‘Tomorrow then.’

She took a deep breath and pinned him with dark eyes that told him that tomorrow there’d be no wriggle room. ‘First thing.’

They slept fully dressed, just in case. Lying in the darkness, the rhythmic clatter of the train’s progress east was a faint backdrop in his mind and the gentle side-to-side motion of the carriage barely noticeable after nine hours. Jamie could hear the sound of regular breathing from the bunks opposite, but he guessed Magda was still awake below him. He sensed her frustration, but the delay suited Jamie because he needed some time to make some sense of what had happened.

He’d first encountered the enigmatic Mr Lim a few years earlier when they’d discovered a mutual interest in the Sun Stone, a peculiar leftover from a fallen meteorite that had opened up the possibility of controlled nuclear fusion and a source of unlimited power. They’d struck a deal in a Munich airport coffee house but, unknown to Mr Lim, it had been of the one-sided variety. Fortunately, when it turned out the Sun Stone was lost forever amongst a million tons of rubble buried beneath Dresden, Lim hadn’t seemed too put out. And that was that.

Now Lim had appeared out of nowhere to present Jamie with another infuriating riddle, matched to a tantalizing offer: What if there was a man — perhaps in Germany, perhaps not … Twice in two days Jamie Saintclair had been offered the Holy Grail of the art world, and he had no doubt that each of the two men could deliver what he had promised. So why did it feel as if he was in the middle of a frozen lake with the sun on his back, the ice creaking louder with every step and dry land a mile away in any direction? Because the Russians and the Chinese both wanted a piece of him. In the first instance, he didn’t have any option; he could still feel the chill in his bones from that Lubyanka cell. In the second, it looked as if the choice was somewhere down the line, which meant he would just have to make it when it came. On the face of it, only one of his new allies was interested in his commission for Keith Devlin, and Mr Lim seemed happy for him to carry it out … to a point. But could he really believe the Russians? Even if they’d been sincere, how would they react when they discovered — as they undoubtedly would — that their faithful new comrade had spent fifteen cosy minutes alone with a high-ranking agent of the Chinese Ministry of State Security?

Then there was the question of just when Mr Lim and — he smiled at Magda’s description — Harry the Hatchet had begun taking an interest in Jamie Saintclair. Certainly since Moscow, because that was where they must have boarded the train. But if Lim was telling the truth about the level of surveillance on Keith Devlin, it was possible they’d been tracking him since Sydney. Jamie had no doubt Devlin’s man Max had followed him in Berlin, but had Lim searched the hotel room? He tried to remember what had been in his suitcase. His laptop, but it had only the few basic details that had brought him to Germany. He hadn’t yet made the connection with Tokyo, but that didn’t matter either, because he and Devlin had talked openly on the phone about the possibilities, which presumably meant the Chinese knew as much as he did.

The constant rhythmic jolt and clatter of the train seemed to eat into his mind, numbing one sector at a time into a relaxed trancelike state. His last thought before the darkness closed in was that Keith Devlin’s quest was far from the joyride it had seemed in Sydney, accompanied by a pang of guilt that he hadn’t contacted Fiona.

His first thought when he woke was that he must phone her. If it was 7 a.m. here — and here was somewhere between Kirov, where they’d stopped two hours earlier, and Perm, another five hours up the line — his best guess was that, with Sydney time eight hours ahead of Moscow time, and Krasnoyarsk four hours ahead of Moscow, the time in Sydney was probably just after lunch, give or take a few hours either way.

He heard a rustle from the bunk below and knew Magda was awake too. They lay in bed waiting awkwardly while the Russians emerged from their bunks and wrapped themselves in their thick, all-encompassing dressing gowns. Ludmilla cheerily announced that there were always long queues for both of the bathrooms in the morning, but that was what she and Boris were used to. They’d be happy to allow the sir i ledi to go first. The next step was finding breakfast, but judging by last night’s experience with the restaurant car there seemed little point in looking there. The immediate problem was solved by Ludmilla’s gift of pastries the previous night accompanied by tea in polystyrene cups purchased from the provodnik trolley. When they’d eaten, they followed Boris’s example of folding the bedclothes and stowing them on the upper bunk, and settled for another day of confinement that the schedule said would be punctuated by a single stop at Perm.

Jamie suspected Magda was still desperate to discuss the events of the previous day. His first priority was to call Fiona, but when he checked his phone it was out of battery. Annoyed he hadn’t thought of it earlier he looked vainly around the tiny compartment for a power source to recharge the machine. It meant that, as well as having no phones, which was bad enough, there’d be no access to the computer or the internet for at least two more days, which for some reason was worse. It felt like having one hand cut off.

Eventually Magda could stand it no longer. ‘We need to talk about our visitors,’ she hissed, drawing a glance from the two Russians.

‘All right,’ he conceded warily. ‘Let’s go and stretch our legs.’

Outside in the corridor someone had opened a window, which only emphasized the oppressive heat and fetid atmosphere in the compartment. Washing facilities in the train bathrooms were utilitarian at best, with just a trickle of water. In those conditions it didn’t take long for the scents of four people sleeping, eating and in Boris’s case — he’d started sucking at a bottle of vodka after breakfast — drinking together to become overwhelming. They stood in front of one of the viewing points, Jamie leaning on the rail and Magda clutching it as if it was the handle of a life raft. A tiny village with redwood walls, green tiled roofs and an onion-dome church flashed past like something out of a dream, to be replaced by the endless steppe.

‘So?’

‘It turns out,’ Jamie explained hesitantly, ‘that the Chinese have an interest in Mr Devlin’s mining project neither of us was aware of.’

‘Okay,’ she said in a way that told him it wasn’t okay at all. ‘But what kind of Chinese? Harry the Hatchet didn’t look like your average trade delegate.’

‘I’m not sure what kind,’ he said, which was the truth, even if he could make a pretty good guess. ‘Businessmen, or possibly some kind of state official. I know his bodyguard looked intimidating, but the chap I spoke to was very reasonable.’

The words were accompanied by what he hoped was a comforting smile, but the early-morning Magda Ross appeared to be immune to his charms. ‘What did he say, specifically?’

‘It’s a bit difficult, to be honest, because he played the inscrutable Oriental to the hilt. All he wanted to do was to let me know of their interest and that they would be … I think monitoring is probably the best word … monitoring our progress.’

‘And that’s all there is to it?’ She didn’t hide her disbelief. ‘They bribe our Russian neighbours and scare me half to death to give you a message they could have sent on a postcard?’

‘That’s it,’ he insisted. ‘I suspect they left the train at Kirov, but there’s a possibility someone stayed on board to keep an eye on us. It doesn’t really matter, because we can’t change anything until we reach Krasnoyarsk in another thirty-odd hours.’ He sensed she still wasn’t convinced. ‘You said you wanted an adventure,’ he pointed out. ‘Well, here you are travelling across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express, pursued by inscrutable Chinese agents and sharing a cabin with the Posh and Becks of the steppe. What more can you ask?’

‘What more can I ask?’ She shook her head and finally smiled. ‘Only that when we leave Krasnoyarsk, whatever direction we are going in, we do it in a plane. For some reason the Trans-Siberian Express has lost its allure.’

‘I guarantee it.’ Jamie grinned. ‘In fact, I’ll fly the bloody thing myself if it comes to it. No more Minsk, Pinsk, Chelyabinsk in the second-class compartment from Hell for us. If we find the Bougainville head in Krasnoyarsk, we’ll take off for Sydney to hand it over to Devlin, then enjoy a bit of R and R. I’ll introduce you to my family on Devlin’s private island. If not, it’s off to Tokyo and our appointment at the Last Chance Saloon.’

Magda’s face turned serious again. ‘What do you think our chances really are of finding the head in Krasnoyarsk?’

‘Realistically? Probably less than fifty-fifty,’ he admitted. ‘We know Gennady Berzarin was in Berlin at the right time and he wasn’t averse to taking sweeteners from the Nazis. The problem is that for a man whose primary motive was to make a profit, the head wouldn’t be a big prize.’ He remembered what had been said in the Moscow dacha. ‘And then there’s the family. They came from a cultured background; Siberian aristocracy who survived the October Revolution and what followed by living on their wits. Is a shrunken head really something the Berzarins would have passed down from father to son?’

‘If it’s such a wild-goose chase, why are we here?’

‘Because the one thing I’ve learned in this business is that you take nothing for granted. Maybe Berzarin never had the head, but we won’t know for certain unless we ask the right questions of the right people.’ And, he thought with a familiar twinge of guilt, a certain person wanted me here for reasons I don’t understand and can’t tell you.

They spent the rest of the day reading and dozing and chatting. By now Boris was more or less comatose. Jamie learned from Ludmilla that the couple were on their way to Irkutsk where, much to their annoyance, their eldest son, an aircraft engineer, was to marry a local Siberian girl. Yes, she was pretty, in that doe-eyed eastern fashion, but what good was a wife who could not bake a loaf or boil an egg, ser? She shot a sly glance at Magda who sat by the window staring out at the never-changing flat, featureless landscape. ‘You will marry some day?’

Jamie spent a moment studying Magda’s reflection in the glass. ‘I’ve asked her a hundred times,’ he shook his head solemnly. ‘But she won’t marry me until I learn to cook.’

Magda turned at the Russian woman’s bark of laughter. ‘What did you say to her?’

‘I told her the tractor factory joke,’ he lied. ‘It has them rolling in the aisles every time. Nikita points to a red tractor and says to Ilya—’

‘Idiot,’ she said and slipped past him to the door. ‘I think I’ll freshen up.’

‘Suit yourself, but you don’t know what you’re missing.’

She was gone for fifteen minutes and Jamie was just becoming concerned when the door slipped back. He knew something was wrong the instant he saw her face. She was breathing hard and the blood was high in her cheeks. It took a moment before he realized she wasn’t frightened, just very angry.

‘What happened?’ He got to his feet and helped her to her seat. Ludmilla closed the door and looked on apprehensively, clucking like a mother hen.

‘A man was waiting for me outside the bathroom.’ Her eyes hardened at the memory. ‘He was drunk and he asked me for a cigarette. When I told him I didn’t have any, he started to interrogate me. Was I a tourist? Where was I from? What was I doing on the train? Was I with anyone? I tried to get past him, but he wouldn’t let me.’ She met Jamie’s eyes and shrugged. ‘What was a girl to do? I used my knee where it hurts the most and he won’t be bothering anyone else for a while. The only problem is,’ her face turned serious again, ‘I don’t think he was as drunk as he acted.’

‘Chinese?’ Jamie asked.

She shook her head.

He went to the door and checked the corridor to right and left, but no one was in sight, drunk or otherwise, and he closed it again. ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘we stay in the compartment unless it’s strictly necessary, and when we do go out we go out together. Okay?’

Ludmilla cut in with a machine-gun rattle of Russian demanding to know what had upset Magda. Jamie explained what had happened. She looked at her snoring husband with a look of pity, but when she spoke her voice was heavy with contempt and she shook her head. ‘Ach, vodka.’