Trial Run

7

From a purely reflex action I grabbed the reins which he had left dangling to the ground and at the same time glanced back over my shoulder.

The time to death looked like three seconds.

The towering top of the green horse box blotted out the sky. The engine accelerated to a scream. I could remember the pattern of the radiator grill for ever after. Six tons unladen weight, I thought. One had time, I found, for the most useless thoughts. Thoughts could be measured in fizzing ten-thousandths of a second. Action took a little longer.

I grabbed the horse’s mane with my left hand and the front of the saddle with my right, and half-jumped, half-hauled myself on to his back.

The horse was terrified already by the noise and the proximity of the horse box, but horses don’t altogether understand about the necessity of removing themselves pronto from under the wheels of thundering juggernauts. Frightened horses, on the whole, are more apt to run into the paths of vehicles, than away.

Horses, on the other hand, are immensely receptive of human emotions, especially when the human is on their back, and scared out of his wits. The chestnut unerringly got the unadulterated message of fear, and bolted.

From a standing start a fit horse can beat most cars over a hundred yards, but the horse box was a long way from standing. The chestnut’s blast-off kept him merely a few yards ahead of the crushing green killer roaring on our heels.

If the horse had had the right sort of sense he would have darted away to left or right down some narrow cranny where the horse box couldn’t follow. Instead, he galloped ahead in a straight true line, making disaster easy.

It was of only moderate help that I was still grasping a section of rein. Owing to the fact of Misha having taken the reins over the horse’s head to lead him, they were not now neatly to hand, with each rein leading tidily to its own side of the bit: they were both on the left side and came from below the horse’s mouth. Since horses are normally steered by pulling the bit upwards against the mouth’s sensitive corners, any urgent instructions had little chance of getting through. There were also the difficulties that my feet were not in the stirrups, I was wearing a heavy overcoat, and my fur hat was tipping forward over my spectacles. The chestnut took his own line and burst out on to the open spaces of the track.

He swerved instinctively to the right, which was the way he always trained, and his quarters thrust him onwards with the vigour of a full-blown stampede. His hurtling feet set up clouds of spray behind us, and it was while I was wondering how long he could keep up the pace and hoping it was for ever, that I first thought that perhaps the sound of the motor had diminished.

Too good to be true, I thought. On the straight and level, a horse box could go faster than a horse; perhaps it was in overdrive and simply made less noise that way.

I risked a look over my shoulder, and my spirits went up as swiftly as a helium balloon. The horse box had given up the chase. It was turning on the track, and going back the way it had come.

‘Glory Be’, I thought, and ‘Allelujah’, and ‘Oh noble beast’; jumbled thanks to the horse and his putative maker.

There was still the problem of getting the noble beast to stop. Panic had infected him easily. Non-panic was not getting through.

My hat fell completely off. Speed drove cold air through my hair, and stung my ears. The drizzle misted my glasses. Heavy double-breasted close-buttoned overcoats were definitely bad news on bolters. Flapping trousers never reassured any horse. I thought that if I didn’t do something about the pedals and steering I could very well ignominiously fall off: and what would Mr Kropotkin have to say if I let his Olympic horse go loose?

Little by little, a vestige of control returned to the proceedings. It was after all a mile-long, left-hand circuit, and the one way I had a chance of influencing our direction was to the left. Constant pressure on the reins pulled the chestnut’s head all the time towards the inner rails, and, once I’d managed to put my feet in the stirrups, pressure from my right knee did the same. Some soothing exhortations like ‘Whoa there, boy, whoa there you old beauty’ also seemed to help; even if the words were English, the tone and intention were identical.

Somewhere on the home stretch in front of the stands the steam went out of the flight, and in a few strides after that, he was walking. I patted his neck and made further conversation, and after a bit, he stood still.

This time, unlike after his training canter, he showed great signs of exertion, taking in breaths in gusts through his nostrils, and heaving out his ribs to inflate his lungs. I brushed the wet off my glasses, and undid a couple of buttons on my coat.

‘There you are, then, chum,’ I said. ‘You’re a good old boy, my old fellow,’ and patted his neck some more.

He shifted only a little while I cautiously leaned far forward to his ears, and put my arms right round under his chin, and brought the reins back over his head. It seemed to me that he was almost relieved to have his headgear returned to its normal riding configuration, because he trotted off along the track again at my signal with all the sweetness of a horse well-schooled in dressage.

Kropotkin had come a little way out to meet us, but no man walked far on that sticky dirt from choice, and he was back by the stable entrance when the chestnut and I completed the circuit.

Kropotkin showed considerable emotion, which was not surprisingly all for his horse. After I had dismounted and handed the reins to a stunned-looking Misha, he rumbled away in basso profundo, anxiously feeling each leg and standing back to assess the overall damage. Finally he spoke at some length to Stephen, and waved an arm in a gesture which was neither anger nor apology, but perhaps somewhere between the two.

‘Mr Kropotkin says,’ Stephen relayed, ‘that he doesn’t know what the horse box was doing here today. It is one of the horse boxes which take the Olympic horses, when they travel. Mr Kropotkin had not ordered a box to come to the track. They are always parked beside the stables he is in charge of, across the road. He is sure that none of the drivers would drive so badly in a stable area. He cannot understand how you and the horse came to be in the way when the horse box prepared to leave the stables.’ Stephen’s eyebrows were rising. ‘I say,’ he said dubiously, ‘you weren’t in its way. The bloody thing drove straight at you.’

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Tell Mr Kropotkin that I quite understand what he is saying. Tell him I regret having stood in the way of the horse box. Tell him that I am glad the horse is unharmed, and that I see no reason why I should need to mention this morning’s happenings to any other person.’

Stephen stared. ‘You learn fast.’

‘Tell him what I said.’

Stephen obliged. Kropotkin’s manner lost so much tension that I only then realised quite the extent of his anxiety. He even went so far as to produce a definite lightening of the features: almost a smile. He also said something about which Stephen seemed less doubtful.

‘He says you ride like a Cossack. Is that a compliment?’

‘Near enough.’

Kropotkin spoke again, and Stephen translated.

‘Mr Kropotkin says he will give you any further help he can, if you ask.’

‘Thank you very much,’ I said.

‘Friend,’ the deep voice said in its slow heavy English. ‘You ride good.’

I pushed my glasses hard against the bridge of my nose and thought murderous thoughts about the people who had stopped me racing.

Stephen and I trudged about half a mile to where Kropotkin had said there was a taxi rank.

‘I thought you’d be one for rushing off to the police,’ Stephen said.

‘No.’ I picked some of the dirt off my fur hat, which someone had retrieved. ‘Not this trip.’

‘Not this country,’ he said. ‘If you complain to the fuzz here, you as likely as not surface in clink.’

I gave up cleanliness in favour of a warm head. ‘Hughes-Beckett would have a fit.’

‘All the same,’ Stephen said, ‘whatever Kropotkin may say, that horse box was trying to kill you.’

‘Or Misha. Or the horse,’ I said, untying the ear-flaps.

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘Did you see the driver?’ I asked.

‘Yes and no. He had one of those balaclava things on under a fur hat with the earflaps down. Everything covered except his eyes.’

‘He took a hell of a risk,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘But then, he darned near succeeded.’

‘You take it incredibly calmly,’ Stephen said.

‘Would you prefer screaming hysterics?’

‘I guess not.’

‘There’s a taxi.’ I waved, and the green-grey saloon swerved our way and slowed. We piled aboard.

‘I’ve never seen anyone jump on a horse like you did,’ Stephen said, as we set off to the Intourist. ‘One second on the ground, the next, galloping.’

‘You never know what you can do until Nemesis breathes down your neck.’

‘You look,’ Stephen said, ‘like one of those useless la-di-dahs in the tele-ads, and you perform...’ Words failed him.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Depressing, isn’t it?’

He laughed. ‘And by the way... Misha gave me a telephone number.’ He put a hand in a pocket and brought out a crumpled scrap of paper. ‘He gave it to me while Kropotkin was chasing after you on the track. He says he wants to tell you something without Kropotkin knowing.’

‘Does the taxi driver speak English?’ I asked.

Stephen looked only faintly and transiently alarmed. ‘They never do,’ he said. ‘You could tell them they stink like untreated sewage and they wouldn’t turn a hair. Just try it.’

I tried it.

The taxi driver didn’t turn a hair.

On the principle of turning up where and when expected, I arrived on time for lunch in the Intourist dining-room. The soup and the blinis were all right, and the ice-cream with blackcurrant jam was fine, but the meat with its attendant teaspoonfuls of chopped carrot, chopped lettuce, and inch-long chips went across the table to Frank.

‘You’ll fade away,’ said Mrs Wilkinson, without too much concern. ‘Don’t you like meat?’

‘I grow it,’ I said. ‘Beef, that is. On a farm. So I suppose I get too fussy over stuff like this.’

Mrs Wilkinson looked at me doubtfully. ‘I would never have guessed you worked on a farm.’

‘Er... well, I do. But it’s my own... passed down from my father.’

‘Can you milk a cow?’ Frank said, with a hint of challenge.

‘Yes,’ I said mildly. ‘Milk. Plough. The lot.’

He gave me a sharp look from over my chips, but in fact I spoke the truth. I had started learning the practical side of farming from about the age of two, and had emerged from agricultural college twenty years later with the technology. Since then, under Government sponsorship, I’d done some work on the interacting chemistry of land and food, and had set aside some experimental acres for research. After racing, this work had been my chief interest... and from now on, I supposed, my only one.

Mrs Wilkinson said disapprovingly, ‘You don’t keep calves in those nasty crate things, do you?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I never do like to think of all the poor animals being killed, when I buy the weekend chops.’

‘How were the Economic Achievements?’

‘We saw a space capsule.’ She launched into a grudgingly admiring outline of the exhibition. ‘Pity we don’t have one in England,’ she said. ‘Exhibition like that, I mean. Permanent. Blowing our own trumpet for a change, like.’

‘Did you go?’ I asked Frank.

‘No.’ He shook his head, munching. ‘Been before, of course.’

He didn’t say where he had been instead. I hadn’t noticed him following Stephen and me, but he might have done. If he had, what had he seen?

‘Tomorrow we’re going to Zagorsk,’ Mrs Wilkinson said.

‘Where’s that?’ I asked, watching Frank chew and learning nothing from his face.

‘A lot of churches, I think,’ she said vaguely. ‘We’re going in a bus, with visas, because it’s out of Moscow.’

I glanced at her as she sat beside me, divining a note of disappointment in her voice. She was a short woman, solid, late fifties, with the well-intentioned face of the bulk of the English population. An equally typical shrewdness lived inside and poked its nose out occasionally in tellingly direct remarks. The more I saw of Mrs Wilkinson, the more I saw to respect.

Opposite her, next to Frank, Mr Wilkinson ate his lunch and as usual said nothing. I had gathered he had come on the trip to please his wife, and would as soon be at home with a pint and Manchester United.

‘Quite a few people are going to the Bolshoi this evening, to the ballet,’ said Mrs Wilkinson a little wistfully. ‘But Dad doesn’t like that sort of thing, do you, Dad?’

Dad shook his head.

Mrs Wilkinson said in a lower voice to me, confidingly, ‘He doesn’t like those things the men wear. Those tights. You know, showing all the muscles of their behinds... and those things in front.’

‘Cod-pieces,’ I said, straight-faced.

‘What?’ She looked embarrassed, as if I’d used too strong a swear-word for her shock-threshold.

‘That’s what they’re called. Those things which disguise the outlines of nature.’

‘Oh.’ She was relieved. ‘It would be much nicer if they wore tunics, that’s what I think. Then they wouldn’t be so obvious. And you could concentrate on the dancing.’

Mr Wilkinson muttered something which might or might not have been ‘Poncing about’, and filled his mouth with icecream.

Mrs Wilkinson looked as if she’d heard that before, and instead said to me, ‘Did you see your horses?’

Frank’s concentration on food skipped a beat.

‘They were great,’ I said, and enlarged for two minutes on the turn-out and the training exercise. There was nothing else in Frank’s reactions to say he knew I was giving an incomplete account, but then I supposed if there had been, he would have been bad at his job.

Natasha drifted up purposefully to complicate my life.

‘We have been lucky,’ she said earnestly. ‘We have a ticket for you in a box at the Bolshoi tomorrow evening, for the opera.’

I caught Mr Wilkinson’s eye, with its message of sardonic sympathy, as I started feebly to thank her.

‘It is The Queen of Spades,’ Natasha said firmly.

‘Er...’ I said.

‘Everyone enjoys the opera at the Bolshoi,’ she said. ‘There is no better opera in the world.’

‘How splendid,’ I said. ‘I will look forward to it.’

She began to look approving and I seized the moment to say I would be going out with friends for the evening, and not to expect me in for dinner. She tried very delicately to lead me into saying exactly where I was going, but as at that moment I didn’t actually know, except that it was anywhere for some decent grub, she was out of luck.

‘And this afternoon...’ I said, forestalling her, ‘the Lenin museum.’

She brightened a good deal. At last, she was no doubt thinking, I was behaving as a good tourist should.

‘Mind if I tag along?’ Frank said, shovelling in the last of my lunch. His face looked utterly guileless, and I understood the full beauty of his method of working. If following a person might raise their suspicions, tag along in full sight.

‘Pleasure,’ I said. ‘Meet you in the lobby, in half an hour.’ and I vanished as soon as he’d started his specially ordered double portion of ice-cream. It would take a good deal to shift him before he had finished it.

I made fast tracks out of the hotel and along to the main Post Office, which was conveniently nearby.

Telephoned to the Embassy. Reached Oliver Waterman.

‘This is Randall Drew,’ I said.

‘Where are you calling from?’ he said, interrupting.

‘The Post Office.’

‘Ah. Right. Carry on, then.’

‘Have there been any telex messages for me, from Hughes-Beckett, or anyone in London?’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said vaguely. ‘There was something, I think, my dear chap. Hang on...’ He put the receiver down and I could hear searching sounds and consulting voices. ‘Here we are,’ he said, coming back. ‘Got a pencil?’

‘Yes,’ I said patiently.

‘Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky.’

‘Please spell it,’ I said.

He did so.

‘Got it,’ I said. ‘Go on.’

‘There isn’t any more.’

‘Is that the whole of the message?’ I asked incredulously.

His voice sounded dubious. ‘The whole message, as received by us from the telex people, is “inform Randall Drew Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky”, and then there are a few numbers, and that’s all.’

‘Numbers?’

‘Could be a telephone number, perhaps. Anyway, here they are: 180–19–16. Got that?’

I read them back, to check.

‘That’s right, my dear chap. How’s it going?’

‘Fair,’ I said. ‘Can you send a telex for me, if I give you the message?’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I think I should warn you that there’s a spot of trouble brewing on the international scene, and the telex is pretty busy. They told us pretty shirtily just now not to bother them with unessentials like music. Unessentials, I ask you. Anyway, my dear chap, if you want to be sure your message gets off, I should take it along there yourself.’

‘Take it where?’ I said.

‘Oh yes, I was forgetting you wouldn’t know. The telex machine is not here in the Embassy, but along with the Commercial section in Kutuzovsky Prospect. That’s the continuation of Kalinin Prospect. Do you have a map?’

‘I’ll find it,’ I said.

‘Tell them I sent you. They can check with me, if they want. And I should stand over them, my dear chap. Make yourself a bit of a nuisance, so they send it to get rid of you.’

‘I’ll take your advice,’ I said, smiling to myself.

‘The British Club is along there in Kutuzovsky Prospect,’ he said languidly. ‘Full of temporary exiles, wallowing in nostalgia. Sad little place. I don’t go there much.’

‘If any more messages come for me,’ I said, ‘please would you ring me at the Intourist Hotel?’

‘Certainly,’ he said civilly. ‘Do give me your number.’ I stifled the urge to tell him I’d given it to him twice already. I repeated it again, and wondered whether, by the time I left, he would find his office scattered with small pieces of paper all bearing the same number, which he would peer at with willowy bewilderment while smoothing back his grey-winged hair.

I rang off and debated whether or not to lose Frank there and then, and make tracks for the telex: but the message would keep for an hour or two and wasn’t worth the stirring up of trouble. I hurried back to the Intourist, went upstairs, came downstairs, and strolled out of the lift to find Frank waiting.

‘Oh there you are,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d missed you.’

‘Off we go, then,’ I said fatuously, and we walked out of the hotel, down into the long pedestrian tunnel which led under The Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution Square and up into a cobbled street with the red walls of the Kremlin away to the right.

On the underground way he gave me his thoughts on Comrade Lenin, who was, according to Frank, the only genius of the twentieth century.

‘Born, of course, in the nineteenth,’ I said.

‘He brought freedom to the masses,’ Frank declared reverently.

‘Freedom to do what?’ I said.

Frank ignored me. Somewhere under the wet and woolly sociological guff which he ladled so unstintingly over the Wilkinsons and me, there had to be a hard-core card-carrying fully-indoctrinated communist. I looked at Frank’s angular, pitted face framed in a long striped college scarf, and thought he was marvellous: he was giving a faultless performance as a poorly-educated left-wing encumbrance of the National Union of Teachers, so convincing that it was hard to believe he was acting.

It flickered across my mind that perhaps Ian Young was wrong, and Frank was not K.G.B. after all: but then if Ian was what I thought, he would be right. If Frank were not K.G.B., why should Ian say he was?

I wondered how many lies I had been told since I had arrived in Moscow: and how many more I had yet to hear.

Frank more or less genuflected on the threshold of the Lenin museum, and we went inside to have our ears bent about the clothes, desk, car and so on that the liberator of the masses had personally used. And this was the face, I thought, looking at the prim little bearded visage reproduced without stint on paintings and posters and booklets and cards, who had launched a million murders and left his disciples bloodily empire-building round the world. This was the visionary who had unleashed the holocausts: the man who had meant to do good.

I looked at my watch and told Frank I’d had enough of the place; I needed some fresh air. He ignored the implied insult and followed me out, simply saying that he had visited the museum every time he’d been to Moscow and never tired of it. Easy enough to believe that that, at least, was true.

Stephen, back from lunch and an unmissable tutorial, was waiting, as arranged, outside. He had arranged, that is, to meet only me. Frank was surplus to requirements.

I introduced them without explanations. ‘Frank Jones... Stephen Luce;’ and they disliked each other at once.

Had they been dogs, there would have been some unfriendly sniffing and a menacing show of teeth: as it was, their noses actually wrinkled. I wondered whether Stephen’s instinctive response was to the real Frank, or to the cover Frank: to an individual or to a type.

Frank, I supposed, merely guessed that any friend of mine was no friend of his; and if Ian were right about him following me, he had certainly seen Stephen before.

Neither of them wanted to say anything to the other.

‘Well, Frank,’ I said cheerfully, hiding my amusement, ‘thank you for your company. I’m off now with Stephen for the rest of the day. See you at breakfast, I guess.’

‘You bet.’

We turned away, but after a step or two Stephen glanced back, frowning. I looked where he did: Frank’s back view, walking off.

‘Haven’t I seen him before?’ Stephen said.

‘Where?’

‘Couldn’t say. Yesterday morning, up here in the Square, maybe.’

We were walking along the side of Red Square, towards the GUM department store.

‘He’s staying at the Intourist,’ I said.

Stephen nodded, dismissing it. ‘Where to?’ he said.

‘Phone box.’

We found one and inserted the two kopeks, but there was no answer from the number Misha had given us. Tried again, this time for Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky. Same result.

‘Telex in Kutuzovsky Prospect,’ I said. ‘Where do we get a taxi?’

‘The metro is cheap. Only five kopeks, however far you go.’

He couldn’t understand why I should want to spend money when I didn’t have to: incredulity halfway to exasperation filled his eyes and voice. I gave in with a shrug and we went by metro, with me battling as usual against the claustrophobic feeling I always got from hurtling through mole-runs far underground. The cathedral-like stations of the Moscow metro seemed to have been built to the greater glory of technology (down with churches) but on the achingly long and boring escalators I found myself quite missing London’s vulgar advertisements for bras. Ritzy, jazzy, noisy, dirty, uninhibited old London, greedy and gutsy and grabbing at life. Gold coaches and white horses along the Mall instead of tanks, and garbage collectors on strike.

‘Do the dustbin men ever strike here?’ I said to Stephen.

‘Strikes? Don’t be silly. Strikes are not allowed in Russia.’

We finally resurfaced, and after a good deal of asking and walking, arrived at the Commercial section, which was guarded as before by a soldier. Again we talked our way in, and, by following Oliver Waterman’s advice and making a nuisance of myself, I persuaded the inmates to telex my message, which was: REQUEST DETAILS OF LIFE AND BACKGROUND OF HANS KRAMER. ALSO WHEREABOUTS OF HIS BODY. ALSO NAME AND TELEPHONE NUMBER OF THE PATHOLOGIST WHO DID THE AUTOPSY.

‘Don’t expect an answer,’ I was told brusquely. ‘There’s all hell breaking loose in some place in Africa which is choc-a-bloc with Soviet guns and so-called advisers. The telex is steaming. The diplomats have priority. You’ll be way way down the list.’

‘Thanks very much,’ I said, and we trudged our way back to the pavement outside.

‘Now what?’ Stephen said.

‘Try those numbers again.’

We found a glass-walled box nearby and put the kopeks in the slot. No answers, as before.

‘Probably not home from work yet,’ Stephen said.

I nodded. At four in the afternoon the daylight was fading fast to dusk, the lighted windows shining brighter with every minute.

‘What do you want to do now?’ Stephen said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Like to come up to the University, then? We’re not all that far away, actually. Nearer than to your hotel.’

‘No hope of anything to eat, there, I suppose?’ I said.

He looked surprised. ‘Yes, if you like. There’s a sort of supermarket for students in the basement, and kitchens upstairs. We can buy something and eat in my room, if you like.’ He seemed doubtful. ‘It won’t be as good as the Intourist Hotel, though.’

‘I’ll risk it.’

‘I’ll ring up and say you’re coming,’ he said, turning back to the telephone box.

‘Can’t we just go?’

He shook his head. ‘In Russia, everything has to be arranged first. If it is arranged, it is OK. If it’s not arranged, it’s irregular, suspicious, or subversive, and what’s more, you won’t get in.’ He fished around for another two-kopek piece and put it to good use.

Coming out of the telephone box and saying my visit was fixed, he began planning a route via the metro, but I was no longer listening. Two men were walking towards us, talking intently. From thinking there was something familiar about one of them I progressed by a series of mental jumps to realising that I knew them both.

They were Ian Young and Malcolm Herrick.