Trial Run

12

Winter had already penetrated the Moscow River. I went down under the surface, and the sudden incredible cold was the sort of numbing punching shock which Arctic Ocean bathers don’t survive.

I kicked my way up into the air, but I knew in my heart that the battle was lost. I felt weak and half-blind, and it was dark, and thickly snowing. The temperature made me breathless, and my right hand had no feeling. My clothes got heavier as they saturated. Soon they would drag me under. The current carried me down river, under the bridge and out the other side, away from the Embassy; and even while I tried to shout for help I thought that the only people who would hear me would be the two who wouldn’t give it.

The yell, in any case, turned into a mouthful of icy water; and that seemed the final reality.

Lethargy began slowing my attempts to swim and dulling my brain. Resolution ebbed away. Coherent thought was ending. I was anaesthetised by cold: a lump of already mindless matter with all other bodily systems freezing fast to a halt, sinking without will or means to struggle.

I began, in fact, to die.

I dimly heard a voice calling.

‘Randall... Randall...’

A bright light shone on my face.

‘Randall, this way. Hold on...’

I couldn’t hold on. My legs had given their last feeble kick. The only direction left was downwards into a deep numbing death.

Something fluffy fell on my face. Fluffier and of more substance than snow. I was past using a hand to grab it, past even thinking that I should. But somewhere in the last vestiges of consciousness an instinct must still have been working, because I opened my mouth to whatever had fallen across it, and bit it.

I held a lot of soft stuff between my teeth. There was a tug on it, as if something was pulling. I gripped it tighter.

Another tug. My head, which had been almost under water, came up again a few inches.

A sluggish thought crept back along the old mental pathways. If I held on to the line I might be pulled out on to the bank, like a fish.

I should hold on, I vaguely thought, with more than my teeth.

Hands.

There was a problem about hands.

Couldn’t feel them.

‘Randall, hold on. There’s a ladder along here.’

I heard the words, and they sounded silly. How could I climb a ladder when I couldn’t feel my hands?

All the same, I was awake enough to know that I had been given one last tiny chance, and I clenched my jaws over the soft lifeline with a grip that only total blackout might loosen.

The line pulled me against the wall.

‘Hold on,’ yelled the voice. ‘It’s along here. Not far. Just hold on.’

I was bumping along the wall. Not far might be too far. Not far was as far as the sun.

‘Here it is,’ shouted the voice. ‘Can you see it? Just beside you. I’ll shine the torch on it. There. Grab hold, can’t you?’

Grab hold. Of what?

I lay there like a log.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said the voice. The light came on my face again, and then went off. I heard sounds coming nearer, coming down the river side of the wall.

‘Give me your hands.’

I couldn’t.

I felt someone lift up my right arm, pulling it by the sleeve out of the water.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said again; and dropped it back.

He pulled my left arm out.

‘Hold on with that,’ he commanded, and I felt him trying to curl my fingers round some sort of horizontal bar.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to climb out of the bloody river. You’re bloody nearly dead, do you know that? You’ve been in there too bloody long. And if you don’t get out within a minute, bloody nothing will save you. Do you hear that? For Christ’s sake... climb.’

I couldn’t see what I was supposed to climb, even if I had the strength. I felt him put my right arm up again out of the water, and I thought he was trying to thread my right hand behind the horizontal bar until I had the bar against my wrist.

‘Put your feet on one of the steps under the water,’ he said. ‘Feel for them. The ladder goes down a long way.’

I began vaguely to understand. Tried to lodge a foot on an underwater horizontal bar, and by some miracle found one. He felt the faint support to my weight.

‘Right. The bars are only a foot apart. I’ll pull your left hand up to the next one. And whatever you do, don’t let your right hand slip out.’

I dredged up the last remnants of refrigerated strength and pushed, and rose twelve inches up the wall.

‘That’s right,’ said the voice above me, sounding heartily relieved. ‘Now keep bloody going, and don’t fall off.’

I kept bloody going and I didn’t fall off, though it seemed like Mount Everest and the Matterhorn rolled into one. At some point when half of me was out of the water I opened my mouth and let the fluffy but now sodden thing fall out: and there was an exclamation from above and presently the line was tied round my left wrist instead.

He went up the ladder above me, still cursing, still instructing, still yelling at me to hurry up.

Step by slow step, we ascended. When I reached the top he was standing on the far side, grabbing hold of me to roll me over on to the flat solid land. My legs buckled helplessly as they touched down, and I ended in a dripping heap on the snow-covered ground.

‘Take your coat and jacket off,’ he commanded. ‘Don’t you realise cold kills as fast as bloody bullets?’

I could crookedly see him in the streetlights, but it was his voice I at last conclusively recognised, though I supposed that at some point up the wall I had sub-consciously known.

‘Frank,’ I said.

‘Yes? Get on with it. Look, let me unbutton this.’ His fingers were strong and quick. ‘Take them off.’ He tugged fiercely and stripped off the clinging wet sleeves. ‘Shirt too.’ He ripped it off, so that the snow fell on to my bare skin. ‘Now put this on.’ He guided my arms into something dry and warm, and he buttoned up the front.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now you’ll bloody well have to walk back to the bridge. It’s only about a hundred yards. Get up, Randall, and come on.’

There was a sharp edge to his voice, and it struck me that it was because he too was feeling cold, because whatever it was that was sheltering me had come off him. I stumbled along with him on rubbery knees and kept wanting to laugh weakly at the irony of things in general. Didn’t have enough breath, however, for such frivolities.

When I nearly walked into a lamp post he said irritably, ‘Can’t you see?’

‘Lost my g-glasses,’ I said.

‘Do you mean,’ he said incredulously, ‘that you can’t even see a bloody big lamp standard without them?’

‘Not... reliably.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

Inside his coat my whole body was shuddering, chilled deep into the realms of hypothermia. Although they were apparently functioning, my legs didn’t feel as if they belonged to me, and there was still a pervading wuzziness in the thinking department.

We arrived at a flight of steps and toiled upwards to the main road. A black car rolled up and stopped beside us with amazing promptness. Frank threw my wet coats into the back of the car and shovelled me in after them. He himself sat in the front, instructing the driver briefly in Russian, with the result that we went round the by now familiar and lengthy one-way system and arrived in due course outside the Intourist Hotel.

Frank took my coats and escorted me through the front doors into the embrace of the central heating. He collected my room key without asking me the number. Shovelled me into the lift, pressed the button for the eighth floor, and saw me to my door. He fitted the key, and turned it, and steered me inside.

‘What are you going to do, if you can’t see?’ he said.

‘G... got as... spare pair.’

‘Where?’

‘T... top drawer.’

‘Sit down,’ he said, practically pushing me on to the sofa; and only the tiniest push was necessary. I heard him opening the drawer, and presently he put the reserves into my hands. I fumbled them on to my nose and again the world took on its proper shape.

He was looking at me with unexpected concern, his face firm and intelligent: but even while I watched the hawk-like quality dissolved, and the features slackened into the mediocrity we saw at meals.

He was wearing, I saw, only a sweater over his shirt, and, wound round his neck, his long striped college scarf. My lifeline.

I said, ‘I’d b... better give you your coat,’ and tried to undo the buttons. The fingers of my right hand seemed both feeble and painful, so I did them with the left.

‘You’d better have a hot bath,’ he said diffidently. No decision, no swearing, no immense effectiveness in sight.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

His eyes flickered. ‘Lucky I happened along.’

‘Luckiest thing in my life.’

‘I was just out for a walk,’ he said. ‘I saw you get out of a taxi ahead and go down those steps. Then I heard a shout and a splash, and I thought it couldn’t possibly be you, of course, but anyway I thought I’d better see. So I went down after you, and luckily I had my torch with me, and well... there you are.’

He had omitted to ask how I could have fallen accidentally over a breast-high wall.

I said obligingly, ‘It’s all a bit of a blank, actually,’ and it undoubtedly pleased him.

He helped me out of his coat and into my dressing-gown.

‘Will you be all right, then?’ he said.

‘Fine.’

He seemed to want to go, and I made no move to stop him. He picked up his torch and his hat, from where they were lying on the sofa, and his coat, and, murmuring something about me getting the hotel to dry my clothes, he extricated himself from what must have been to him a slightly embarrassing proximity.

I felt very odd indeed. Hot and cold at the same time, and a little light-headed. I took off the rest of my clammy clothes and left them in a damp heap on the bathroom floor.

The fingers on my right hand were in dead trouble. They hadn’t bled much because of their immersion in ice-water, but there were nasty tears in the skin of three of them from nails to knuckles, and no strength anywhere at all.

I looked at my watch, but it had stopped.

I really had to get a grip on things, I thought. I really had to start functioning. It was imperative.

I went over to the telephone and dialled the number of the University, foreign students department. Stephen was fetched, sounding amiable.

‘Something else?’ he said.

‘What time is it? My watch has stopped.’

‘You didn’t ring just to ask me that? It’s five-past-six, actually.’

Five-past-six... it seemed incredible. It was only three-quarters of an hour since I had set off to the Embassy. Seemed more like three-quarters of a century.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘Will you do me a great favour? Will you go...’ I stopped. A wave of malaise travelled dizzily around my outraged nervous system. My breath came out in a weird groaning cough.

Stephen said slowly, ‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Look... will you go to the British Embassy, and pick up a telex which is waiting there for me, and bring it to the Intourist? I wouldn’t ask, but... if I don’t get it tonight I can’t have it until Monday... and be careful... because we have rough friends... At the Embassy, ask for Polly Paget in the cultural attaché’s office.’

‘Have the rough friends had another go with a horse box?’ he said anxiously. ‘Is that why you can’t go yourself?’

‘Sort of.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way.’

I put the receiver back in its cradle and wasted a few minutes feeling sorry for myself. Then I decided to ring Polly Paget, and couldn’t remember the number.

The number was on a sheet of paper in my wallet. My wallet was or had been in the inside pocket of my jacket. My jacket was wet, and in the bathroom, where Frank had put it. I screwed up the energy, and went to look.

One wallet, still in the pocket, but, not surprisingly, comprehensively damp. I fished out and unfolded the list of telephone numbers and was relieved to see they could still be read.

Polly Paget sounded annoyed that I had not even started out.

‘I’ve finished my jobs,’ she said crossly. ‘I want to leave now.’

‘A friend is coming instead of me,’ I said. ‘Stephen Luce. He’ll be there soon. Please do wait.’

‘Oh very well.’

‘And could you give me Ian Young’s phone number? Where he lives, I mean.’

‘Hang on.’ She went away, and came back, and read out the number. ‘That’s his flat here in the Embassy grounds. As far as I know, he’ll be home most of the weekend. Like all of us. Nothing much ever happens in Moscow.’

Lady, I thought, you’re a hundred per cent wrong.

Stephen came, and brought Gudrun.

I had spent the interval putting on dry pants, trousers and socks, and lying on the bed. I disregarded Frank’s advice about hot baths, on the Ophelia principle that I’d had too much of water already. It would be just too damned silly to pass out and drown surrounded by white tiles.

Stephen’s cheerful grin faded rapidly.

‘You look like death. Whatever’s happened?’

‘Did you bring the telex?’

‘Yes, we did. Reams of it. Sit down before you fall down.’

Gudrun folded her elegant slimness on to the sofa and Stephen dispensed my scotch into toothmugs. I went back to sitting on the bed, and pointed to the sensitive spot on the wall. Stephen nodding, picked up the tape recorder, switched it on, and applied it to the plaster.

No whine.

‘Off duty,’ he said. ‘So tell us what’s happened.’

I shook my head slightly. ‘A dust-up.’ I didn’t particularly want to include Gudrun. ‘Let’s just say... I’m still here.’

‘And ve have vays of not making a fuss?’

I more or less smiled. ‘Reasons.’

‘They’d better be good. Anyway, here’s your hot news from home.’ He pulled an envelope out of his pocket and threw it to me. I made the mistake of trying to catch it naturally with my right hand, and dropped it.

‘You’ve hurt your fingers,’ Gudrun said, showing concern.

‘Squashed them a bit.’ I took the telex message out of the envelope and, as reported, there was reams of it: Hughes-Beckett busy proving, I thought sardonically, that my poor opinion of his staff work was unjustified.

‘While I read all this,’ I said. ‘Would you cast your peepers over that stuff there?’ I pointed to the cough-lozenge tin and Misha’s pieces of paper. ‘Translate them for me, would you?’

They picked up the little bunch of papers and shuffled through them, murmuring. I read the first section of the telex, which dealt exhaustively with Hans Kramer’s life history, and included far more details than I’d expected or asked for. He had won prizes on ponies from the age of three. He had been to eight different schools. He appeared to have been ill on and off during his teens and twenties, as there were several references to doctors and clinics, but he seemed to have grown out of it at about twenty-eight. His earlier interest in horses had from that time intensified, and he had begun to win horse trials at top level. For two years, until his death, he had travelled extensively on the international scene, sometimes as an individual, and sometimes as part of the West German team.

Then came a paragraph headed ‘CHARACTER ASSESSMENT’, which uninhibitedly spoke ill of the dead. ‘TOLERATED BUT NOT MUCH LIKED BY FELLOW MEMBERS OF EVENT TEAM. UNUSUAL PERSONALITY, COLD, UNABLE TO MAKE FRIENDS. ATTRACTED BY PORNOGRAPHY, HETERO AND HOMO, BUT HAD NO KNOWN SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP OF ANY LENGTH. LATENT VIOLENCE SUSPECTED, BUT BEHAVIOUR IN GENERAL SELF-CONTROLLED.’

Then a bald, brief statement. ‘BODY RETURNED TO PARENTS, STILL LIVING IN DUSSELDORF. BODY CREMATED.’

There was a good deal more to read on other subjects, but I looked up from the typed sheets to see how Stephen and Gudrun were doing.

‘What’ve you got?’ I said.

‘Four autographs of Germans. A list in Russian of brushes and things to do with looking after horses. Another list in Russian of times and places, which I should think refer to the horse trials, as they say things like “cross-country start two-forty remember weight-cloth”. Both of those must have been written by Misha, because there is also a sort of diary, in which he lists what he did for his horses, and what feed he gave them, and so on, and that’s all.’

‘What about the paper in the cough-lozenge tin?’ I said.

‘Ah. Yes. Well. To be frantically honest, we can’t be much help with that.’

‘Why not?’

‘It doesn’t make sense.’ He raised his eyebrows at me comically.

‘Or do ve have vays of sorting out gibberish?’

‘You never know.’

‘Well, right then. We are of the opinion that the letters on the paper probably say the same thing twice over, once in Russian and once in German. But they aren’t ordinary words in either language, and they’re all strung together anyway, without a break.’

‘Could you write them in English?’

‘Anything to oblige.’

He picked up the envelope which had contained the telex and wrote a long series of letters, one by one.

‘There are some letters which come near the end, which do make an actual English word...’ He finished writing, and handed me the envelope. ‘There you are. Crystal as mud.’

I read: Etorphinehydrochloride245mgaceprornazinernaleate romgchlorocreso lo 1 — dimethylsulphoxidegoantagonistnaloxone.

‘Does it mean anything?’ Stephen said. ‘A chemical formula?’

‘God knows.’ My brains felt scrambled eggs. ‘Maybe it’s what’s in these ampoules: they’re stamped with something about naloxone.’

Stephen held one of the baby phials up to the light, to read the lettering. ‘So they are. Massive chemical name for a minute little product.’ He put the phial back in the tin, and the original paper on top of it. ‘There you are, then. That’s the lot.’ He closed the tin and put it down. ‘What a dingy-looking matrochka.’ He picked up the doll. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘It contains the rest of Misha’s souvenirs.’

‘Does it? Can I look?’

He had almost as much difficulty in pulling it apart as I had had the first time, and everything scattered in a shower out of it, as before. Stephen and Gudrun crawled about on the floor, picking up the pieces.

‘Hm,’ he said, reading the veterinary labels. ‘More of the same gobbledegook. Anything of any use?’

‘Not unless you have bed bugs.’

He put everything back in the doll, and also the tin and the autographs.

‘Do you want me to take this out to Elena’s new flat some time, after she’s settled in?’ he said.

‘That would be great, if you have the time.’

‘Better to give Misha his bits back again.’

‘Yes.’

Stephen looked at me closely. ‘Gudrun and I are on our way out to supper with some friends, and I think you’d better come with us.’ I opened my mouth to say I didn’t feel like it and he gave me no chance to get the words out. ‘Gudrun, be a lamb and go and wait for us in those armchairs by the lifts, while I get our friend here into some clothes and do his buttons up.’ He waved at my non-functioning fingers. ‘Go on, Gudrun, love, we won’t be long.’

Good temperedly, she departed, long-legged and liberal.

‘Right then,’ Stephen said, as the door shut behind her. ‘How bad is your hand? Come on, do come with us. You can’t just sit there all evening looking dazed.’

I remembered dimly that I was supposed to be going to the opera. Natasha’s earnest ticket to fantasy seemed as irrelevant as dust: yet if I stayed alone in my room I should feel worse than I did already, and if I slept there would be visions of death in balaclavas... and hotel bedrooms were not in themselves fortresses.

Frank had not mentioned seeing my attackers, and very likely when he ran to the rescue they had kept out of his sight. But that didn’t mean that they hadn’t hung around for a bit... and they might know that he had fished me out.

‘Randall!’ Stephen said sharply.

‘Sorry...’ I coughed convulsively, and shivered. ‘Wouldn’t your friends mind, if I.came?’

‘Of course not.’ He slid open the wardrobe door and pulled out my spare jacket. ‘Where’s your coat... and hat?’

‘Shirt first,’ I said. ‘That checked one...’

I stood up stiffly and took off the dressing-gown. There were beginnings of bruise marks on my arms, where the riot sticks had landed, but otherwise, I was glad to see, my skin had returned from an interesting pale turquoise to its more normal faded tan. Stephen helped me speechlessly to the point where he went into the bathroom for something and came out looking incredulous.

‘All your clothes are wet!’

‘Er, yes. I got shoved in the river.’

He pointed to my hand. ‘With that sort of shove?’

‘I fear so.’

He opened and closed his mouth like a goldfish. ‘Do you realise that the temperature tonight has dropped way below zero?’

‘You don’t say.’

‘And the Moscow River will freeze to solid ice any day now?’

‘Too late.’

‘Are you delirious?’

‘Shouldn’t be surprised.’ I struggled into a couple of sweaters, and felt lousy. ‘Look,’ I said weakly, ‘I don’t think I can manage the friends... but I also don’t want to stay in this room. Would there be any chance, do you think, of me booking into a different hotel?’

‘Not the faintest. An absolute non-starter. No other hotel would be allowed to take you without a fortnight’s advance booking and a lot of paperwork, and probably not even then.’ He looked around. ‘What’s wrong with this room, though? It looks fine to me.’

I rubbed my hand over my forehead, which was sweating. The two sweaters, I thought, were aptly named.

I said, ‘Three times in two days, someone’s tried to kill me. I’m here through luck... but I’ve a feeling the luck’s running out. I just don’t want to... to stand up in the butts.’

‘Three times?’

I told him about Gorky Street. ‘All I want is a safe place to sleep.’ I pondered. ‘I think I’ll ring Ian Young... he might help.’

I dialled the number Polly Paget had given me for Ian’s flat in the Embassy grounds. The bell rang and rang there, but the Sphinx was out on the town.

‘Damn,’ I said, with feeling, putting down the receiver.

Stephen’s brown eyes were full of troubled thought. ‘We could slip you into the University,’ he said. ‘But my bed’s so narrow.’

‘Lend me the floor.’

‘You’re serious?’

‘Mm.’

‘Well... all right.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s too late to get you in through the proper channels, so to speak. They’ll have knocked off for the day... We’ll have to work the three card trick.’

He took his student pass out of his pocket and gave it to me.

‘Show it to the dragon when you go in, and keep on going, straight up the stairs. They don’t know all the students by sight, and she won’t know you aren’t me. Just go on up to my room. OK.?’

I took the pass and stowed it in a pocket in my jacket. ‘How will you get in, though?’ I said.

‘I’ll ring a friend who has a room in the block,’ he said. ‘He’ll collect my pass from you, and bring it out to me, when Gudrun and I get back.’

He held my jacket for me to put on, and then picked up the sheets of telex and folded them back into the envelope. I put the envelope in my jacket and thought about black cars.

‘I’d awfully like to make sure I’m not followed,’ I said.

Stephen raised his eyes to heaven. ‘All in the service,’ he said. ‘What do you want me to do?’

What we did, in the event, was for me to travel in one taxi to the University Prospect, the tourist stopping place for the view down over the stadium to the city, and for him and Gudrun to follow in another. We all got out of the cars there in the thickly falling snow and exchanged vehicles.

‘I’ll swear nothing followed you,’ Stephen said. ‘If anyone did, they used about six different cars, in relays.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘Any time.’

He told the taxi driver where to take me, and disappeared with Gudrun into the night.