Trial Run

11

He took me to what he called the Architects’ Circle and in the big basement restaurant there, gave me food I hadn’t believed existed in Moscow. Prime smoked salmon, delicious ham off the bone, tender red beef. An apple and some grapes. Vodka to toss off for starters, followed by excellent red wine. Good strong coffee at the end. He himself ate and drank with as much enjoyment as I did.

‘Marvellous,’ I said appreciatively. ‘Superb.’

Yuri leaned back at last and lit a cigarette, and told me that every profession had its Circle. There was a Writers’ Circle, for instance, to which all Soviet writers belonged. If they did not belong to the Circle, they did not get published. They could of course be expelled from the Circle, if it was considered that what they wrote was not suitable. Yuri’s manner dared me to suggest that he didn’t entirely agree with this system.

‘What about architects?’ I asked mildly.

Architects, I gathered, had to be politically sound, if they wished to be members of the Architects’ Circle. Naturally, if one did not belong to the Circle, one was not allotted anything to design.

Naturally.

I drank my coffee and made no remark. Yuri watched me, and smiled with a touch of melancholy.

‘I give information,’ he said, ‘about Lord Farringford.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You are clever man.’ He sighed and shrugged resignedly, and kept his side of the bargain. ‘Lord Farringford is foolish man. With Hans Kramer, he go bad places. Sex places.’ Distaste showed in his face, and the top lip lifted even further off the incisors. ‘In London, is disgusting pictures. In the street. All people can see. Disgusting.’ He searched for a word. ‘Dirty.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Lord Farringford and Hans Kramer go into these places. Three, four times.’

‘Are you sure it was more than once?’ I said attentively.

‘Sure. We see. We... follow.’ The confession came out on a downward inflection, drifting off into silence, as if he hadn’t quite said what he had.

Wow, I thought: and what I said, without any emphasis of any sort, was, ‘Why did you follow?’

He struggled a great deal with his conscience, but he told me what I was sure was the truth.

‘Comrade with me, he look in England and in many country for foolish peoples. When foolish peoples come to Soviet Union, comrade use... make...’

‘Your comrade makes use of them through their liking for pornography?’

He blew out a sharp breath.

‘And if Farringford comes to the Olympics, your comrade will make use of him?’

Silence.

‘What use could Farringford be? He isn’t a diplomat...’ I stopped, thought, and went on more slowly. ‘Do you mean,’ I said, ‘that in return for not... embarrassing the British people, for not exposing a scandalous misdemeanour into which your comrade has lured him, your comrade will demand some concession from the British government?’

‘Say again,’ he said.

I said it again, more forthrightly. ‘Your comrade traps Farringford into a dirty mess. Your comrade says to the British government, give me what I want, or I publish the mess.’

He didn’t directly admit it. ‘The comrades of my comrade,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Those comrades.’

‘Farringford is rich man,’ Yuri said. ‘For rich man, comrade feel...’ He didn’t know the word, but his meaning was unmistakable, and it was contempt.

‘For all rich men?’ I said.

‘Of course. Rich man bad. Poor man good.’ He spoke with utter conviction and no suggestion of cynicism, stating, I supposed, one of humanity’s most fundamental beliefs. Camels through eyes of needles, and all that. Rich men never got to heaven, and serve them right. Which left absolutely no hope of eternal bliss for Randall Drew, who had an unequal share of this world’s goods... If I warned Johnny Farringford, I wondered, putting a stop to my dribbling thoughts, would it be enough? Or would it really be wiser for him to stay at home.

‘Yuri,’ I said, ‘how about another bargain?’

‘Explain.’

‘If I learn more here, I will exchange it for a promise that your comrade will not try to trap Farringford, if he comes to the Olympics.’

He stared. ‘You ask things impossible.’

‘A promise in writing,’ I said.

‘Is impossible. Comrade with me... impossible.’

‘Yeah... Well, it was just a thought.’ I reflected. ‘Then if I learn more, I would exchange it for information about Alyosha.’

Yuri studied the tablecloth and I studied Yuri.

‘I cannot help,’ he said.

He stubbed out his cigarette and raised his eyes to meet mine. I was aware of a fierce intensity of thought going on behind the steady gaze, but upon what subject I couldn’t guess.

‘I take you,’ he said finally, ‘to Intourist Hotel.’

He dropped me in fact around the corner outside the National, where he had picked me up, implying, though not saying, that there was no sense in engaging the attention of the watchers unnecessarily.

It was by that time growing dark, as for various reasons our lunch had been delayed in arrival and leisurely in the eating, not least because of a wedding party going on in the next room. The bride had worn a long white dress and a minuscule veil. Did they get married in church? I asked. Of course not, Yuri said: it was not allowed. Pagan rituals, it seemed, had survived the rise and fall of Christianity.

The powdery snowfall of the morning had thickened into a determined regularity, but by no means into a raging blizzard. The wind, in fact, had dropped, but so had the temperature, and there was a threatening bite to the cold. I walked the short distance from one hotel to the other among a crowd of hurrying pedestrians and no men in black cars attempted to pick me off.

I arrived at the Intourist entrance at the same time as the Wilkinsons and their package tour, fresh back from the coach trip to Zagorsk.

‘It was quite interesting,’ said Mrs Wilkinson gamely, pushing through into the suddenly crowded foyer. ‘I couldn’t hear the guide very well, and it seemed wrong somehow, guided tours going in through churches, when there were people in there praying. Did you know that they don’t have any chairs in Russian churches? No pews. Everyone has to stand all the time. My feet are fair killing me. There’s a lot of snow out in the country. Dad slept most of the way, didn’t you, Dad?’

Dad morosely nodded.

Mrs Wilkinson, along with nearly everyone else on the bus tour, carried a white plastic bag with a green and orange swirly pattern on it.

‘There was a tourist shop there. You know, foreign currency shop. I bought ever such a pretty matroshka.’

‘What’s a matroshka?’ I said, waiting beside her at the desk, to collect our room keys.

‘One of these,’ she said, fishing into the white plastic depths and tearing off some tissue-paper. ‘These dolls.’

She produced with a small flourish an almost identical double of the fat brightly-coloured wooden doll I too carried in the string bag dangling from my left hand.

‘I think matroshka means little mother,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you know, they pull apart and there’s another smaller one inside, and you go right down to a tiny one in the middle. There are nine inside here. I’m going to give it to my grandchildren.’ She beamed with simple pleasure, and I beamed right back. If only all the world, I thought regretfully, were as wholesome and as harmless as the Wilkinsons.

Wholesome and harmless did, I supposed, describe the outward appearance of my tidy room upstairs, but this time, when I swept the walls with the tape-recorder, I heard the whine. High-pitched, assaulting the ear, and originating from a spot about five feet up from the floor, and about midway along the bed. I switched off the recorder and wondered who, if anyone, was listening.

The matroshka doll which Elena had handed me proved, on a closer look, to be a well-worn specimen with paint scratched off all over her pink-cheeked face and bright blue dress and yellow apron. In shape she was a very large elongated egg, slightly smaller round the head than lower down, and flat at the bottom, in order to stand. In all, about ten inches high and rotund in circumference.

Pull apart she should, Mrs Wilkinson had said, and pull apart she did, across the middle, though either the two halves were a naturally tight fit, or else Misha or Elena had used some sort of glue. I tugged and wrenched, and the little mother finally gave birth with a reluctant jerk and scattered her close-packed secrets all over the sofa.

I collected Misha’s souvenirs of England and laid them out on the dressing-table shelf; a row of valueless bits and pieces brought home by an unsophisticated young rider.

Easily the largest in size was the official programme of the International Event, printed in English but with the results and winners written in, in several places, in Russian script. The programme had been rolled to fit into the matroshka doll, and lay in an opening tube with the pages curling.

There were two picture postcards, unused, with views of London. A brown envelope containing a small bunch of wilted grass. An empty packet of Players cigarettes. A small metal ashtray with a horse’s head painted on the front, and ‘Made in England’ stamped into the back. A flat tin of mentholated cough pastilles. Several pieces of paper and small cards with writing on, and, finally, the things which had come from the vet’s stolen case.

Stephen had been right in thinking that Misha’s share had not been very much, and I wondered what in fact he had made of it, with all the wording on the labels being in English.

There were four flat two by two inch sachets of a powder called Equipalazone, each sachet containing one gram of phenyl-butazone B Vet C, otherwise known succinctly in the horse world as ‘bute’.

I had used the drug countless times myself, in ten years of training my own horses, as it was the tops at reducing inflammation and pain in strained and injured legs. In Eventing and show jumping one could give it to the horses up to the minute they performed, but in British racing, though not in some other countries, it had to be out of the system before the ‘off’. Bute might be the subject of controversy and dope tests, but it was also about as easy to get hold of as aspirins, and one did not have to get it through a vet. The amount that Misha had brought home was roughly a single day’s dose.

There was next a small plastic tub of sulphanilamide powder, which was useful for putting on wounds, to dry and heal them: and a sample-sized round tin of gamma benzine hexachloride, which, as far as I could remember, was anti-louse powder. There was a small, much folded advertisement leaflet extolling a cure for ringworm; and that was all.

No barbiturates. No pethidine. No steroids. Either Kramer, or the German lad, had cleaned out the lot.

Well, I thought, as I began to pack everything back into the doll; so much for that. I went through everything again, more thoroughly, just to make sure. Opened up the sample-sized tin of louse powder, which contained louse powder, and the small plastic tub of sulphanilamide powder, which contained sulphanilamide powder. Or at least I supposed they did. If the two white powders were actually LSD or heroin, I wasn’t sure that I would know.

The Equipalazone sachets were foil-packed, straight from the manufacturers, and hadn’t been tampered with. I stuffed them back into the doll.

There was nothing lodged between the leaves of the programme. I shook it; nothing fell out. The writings on the pieces of card and paper were some in Russian and some in German, and I laid these aside for a translation from Stephen. The empty cigarette packet contained no cigarettes, or anything else, and the small tin of cough lozenges contained... er... no cough lozenges. The tin of cough lozenges contained another piece of paper, much handled and wrinkled, and three very small glass phials in a bed of cotton wool.

The phials were of the same size and shape as those I had for adrenalin: tiny glass capsules less than two inches in length, with a much-narrowed neck a third of the way along, which snapped off, so that one could put a hypodermic needle through the resulting opening, and down into the liquid, to draw it up. Each phial in the tin contained one millilitre of colourless liquid, enough for one human-sized injection. Half a teaspoonful. Not enough, to my mind, for a horse.

I held one of the phials up in the light, to see the printing on it, but as usual with such baby ampoules it was difficult to see the lettering. Not adrenalin. As far as I could make out, it said 0.4 mg naloxone, which was spectacularly unhelpful, as I’d never heard of the stuff. I unfolded the piece of paper, and that was no better, as whatever was written there was written in Russian script. I put the paper back in the tin and closed it, and set it aside with the other mysteries for Stephen to look at.

Stephen himself had planned to spend the day between lectures and Gudrun, but had said he would be near the telephone from four o’clock onwards, if I should want him. It frankly didn’t seem worthwhile for me to traipse up to the University, or for him to come down, to decipher Misha’s bits of paper, without first seeing if it could be done by wires; so I rang him.

‘How’s it going?’ he said.

‘The walls are whining.’

‘Oh cripes.’

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘if I spell some German words out to you, can you tell me what they mean?’

‘If you think it’s wise.’

‘Stop me if you don’t think so,’ I said.

‘OK.’

‘Right. Here goes with the first.’ I read out, letter by letter, as far as I could judge, the three lines of German handwriting on one of the cards.

Stephen was laughing by the end. ‘It says “With all good wishes for today and the future, Volker Springer”. That’s a man’s name.’

‘Good God.’

I looked at the other cards more attentively, and saw something I had entirely missed. At the bottom of one of them, signed with a flourish, was a name I knew.

I read out that card too, letter by letter.

‘It says,’ Stephen said, ‘ “Best memories of a very good time in England. Your friend...” Your friend who?’

‘Hans Kramer,’ I said.

‘Bull’s eye.’ Stephen’s voice crackled in my ear. ‘Are those by any chance Misha’s souvenirs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Autographs, no less. Anything else?’

‘One or two things in Russian. They’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning.’

‘I’ll be with you at ten, then. Gudrun sends her love.’

I put the receiver down, and almost immediately the bell rang again. A female English voice, calm, cultured, and on the verge of boredom.

‘Is that Randall Drew?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Polly Paget here,’ she said. ‘Cultural attaché’s office, at the Embassy.’

‘How nice to speak to you.’

I had a vivid picture of her; short hair, long cardigan, flat shoes and common sense.

‘A telex has just come for you. Ian Young asked me to phone and tell you, in case you were waiting for it.’

‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘Could you read it to me?’

‘Actually, it is complicated, and very long. It really would be better, I think, if you came to collect it. It would take a good half hour for me to dictate it while you write it down, and to be honest I don’t want to waste the time. I’ve a lot still to do, and it’s Friday evening, and we’re shutting down soon for the weekend.’

‘Is Ian there?’ I asked.

‘No, he left a few minutes ago. And Oliver is out on official business. There’s just me holding the fort. If you want your message before Monday, I’m afraid it means coming to get it.’

‘How does it start?’

With an audible sigh and a rustle of paper, she began, ‘Hans Wilhelm Kramer, born July 3rd, 1941, in Dusseldorf, Germany, only child of Heinrich Johannes Kramer, industrialist...’

‘Yes, all right,’ I said, interrupting. ‘I’ll come. How long will you be there?’ I had visions of uncooperative taxis, of having to walk.

‘An hour or so. If you’re definitely coming, I’ll wait for you.’

‘You’re on,’ I said. ‘Warm the scotch.’

Having grown a little wilier I engaged a taxi to drive me to the far side of the bridge, pointing to a street map to show where I meant. The road over the bridge, I had found, extended into the Warsaw highway and was the road we had taken to Chertanovo. In another couple of days I would have Moscow’s geography in my head for ever.

I paid off the driver and stepped out into the falling snow, which had increased to the point of flakes as big as rose petals and as clinging as love. They settled on my sleeve as I shut the taxi’s door, and on my shoulders, and on every flat surface within sight. I found I had stupidly forgotten my gloves. I thrust my hands in my pockets, and turned down the steps to the lower road, to turn there along to the Embassy.

It had seemed to me that I was unfollowed and safe; but I was wrong. The tigers were waiting under the bridge.

They had learned a few lessons from the abortive mission in Gorky Street.

For a start, they had chosen a less public place. The only sanctuary within running distance was now not the big bustling well-lit mouth of the Intourist Hotel, but the heavily-closed front door of the Embassy, with an obstructive guard outside at the gate.

They had learned that my reflexes weren’t the slowest on record, and also that I had no inhibitions about kicking them back.

There were still only two of them, but this time they were armed. Not with guns, but with riot sticks. Nasty hard things like baseball bats, swinging from a loop of leather round the wrist.

The first I knew of it was when one chunk of timber connected shatteringly with the side of my head. The fur ear-flaps perhaps saved my skull from being cracked right open, but I reeled dizzily, bewildered, not realising what had happened, spinning under the weight of the blow.

I had a second’s clear view of them, like a snapshot. Two figures in the streetlights against the dark shadows under the bridge. The snow falling more sparsely in the bridge’s shelter. The arms raised, with the heavy truncheons swinging.

They were the same men: no doubt of it. The same brutal quality, the same quick ferocity, the same unmerciful eyes looking out of the same balaclavas. The same message that human rights were a laugh.

I stumbled, and my hat fell off, and I tried to protect myself with my arms, but it wasn’t much good. There’s a limit to the damage even a riot stick can do through thick layers of jacket and overcoat, so that to an extent the onslaught was disorientating more than lethal, but bash numbers three or four by-passed my feeble barriers and knocked off my glasses. I stretched for them, tried to catch them, got hit on the hand, and lost them entirely in the falling snow.

It seemed to be all they were waiting for. The battering stopped, and they grabbed me instead. I kicked and punched at targets I could no longer properly see, and did too little damage to stop the rot.

It felt as though they were trying to lift me up, and for a fraction of time I couldn’t think why. Then I remembered where we were. On the road beside the river... which flowed along uncaringly on the other side of the breast-high wall.

Desperation kept me struggling when there was absolutely no reasonable hope.

I had seen the Moscow River from several bridges, and everywhere its banks were the same. Not sloping grassy affairs shading gently into the water, but grey perpendicular walls rising straight from the river bed to about eight feet above the surface of the water. They looked like defences against flooding more than tourist attractions: designed to keep everything between them from getting out.

I clung grimly to whatever I could reach. I tore at their faces. At their hands. I raised from one of them a grunt and from the other a muttered word in a language I didn’t recognise.

I didn’t rationally think that anyone would come along the road and beat them off. I fought only because while I was still on the road I was alive, but if I hit the water I would be as good as dead. Instinct and anger, and nothing else.

It was hopeless, really. They had me off my feet, and I was being bundled over. I carried on with the limpet act. I pulled the knitted balaclava clean off one of them, but whatever he might have feared, I still couldn’t have sworn to a positive identification. One of the streetlights was shining full on his face and I saw him as if he’d been drawn by Picasso.

In my racing days I had kept my glasses anchored by a double head strap of elastic, a handy gadget now gathering dust with my five-pound saddle. It had never crossed my mind that it might mean the difference between life or death in Moscow.

They pushed and shoved, and more and more of my weight was transferred over the wall. It all seemed both agonisingly fast and painfully endless: a few seconds of physical flurry that stretched in my mind like eternity.

I was hanging on to the parapet and life with one hand, the rest of me dangling over the water.

They swung, as I had time to realise, one of the riot sticks. There was an excruciating slam on my fingers. I stopped being able to use them, and dropped off the wall like a leech detached.