Trial Run

8

They were, if anything, more surprised to see me.

‘Randall!’ Ian said. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘If it isn’t the sleuth!’ Malcolm Herrick’s English voice boomed confidently into Kutuzovsky Prospect, scorning discretion. ‘Found Alyosha yet, sport?’

‘Afraid not,’ I said. ‘This is Stephen Luce. A friend. English.’

‘Malcolm Herrick,’ said the Moscow correspondent of The Watch, introducing himself, shaking hands, and waiting for a reaction. None came. He must have been used to it. ‘Moscow correspondent of The Watch,’ he said.

‘Great stuff,’ said Stephen vaguely, obviously not having read a word from the Herrick pen.

‘Are you going to the British Club?’ Ian asked. ‘We’re just on our way there.’

His watchful eyes waited for a reply. There were some replies I saw no harm in giving, and this was one.

‘I came to send a telex,’ I said. ‘Oliver’s suggestion.’

‘The snake,’ Herrick said unexpectedly, narrowing his eyes. ‘He usually gives messages for the telex to the guy in the hall.’

‘And the guy in the hall relays them to you?’ I said.

‘Sources, sources, sport.’ He tapped the side of his nose.

Ian was unmoved. ‘If an answer comes,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll see that you get it.’

‘I’d be grateful.’

‘Where are you going now, sport?’ Malcolm said, loud and direct as always.

‘To the University, with Stephen, for tea.’

‘Tea!’ He made a face. ‘Look, why don’t we meet later for a decent meal? All of us,’ he added expansively, including Ian and Stephen. ‘The Aragvi do you, Ian?’

Ian, who had not reacted visibly to the original suggestion, seemed to find favour with the choice of place, and nodded silently. Malcolm started giving me directions, but Stephen said he knew the way.

‘Great then,’ Malcolm said. ‘Eight-thirty. Don’t be late.’

The faint drizzle which had persisted all day seemed to be intensifying into sleet. It put, anyway, an effective damper on further conversation in the street, and by common consent we split up and went our own ways.

‘Who is the man who looks Russian?’ Stephen asked, ducking his head down and sideways to avoid the stinging drops. ‘The one imitating the Sphinx.’

‘Let’s get that taxi,’ I said, waving to a grey-green car coming with the green light shining for availability in its windscreen.

‘Expensive,’ he protested automatically, slithering into the back seat beside me. ‘Ve vill have to cure this disgusting bourgeois habit.’ He had a rich way of imitating a Russian accent while sardonically putting forward the Russian point of view. ‘Vorkers of the Vorld unite... and go on the metro.’

‘Caviar is immoral,’ I said dryly.

‘Caviar is not bourgeois. Caviar is for everyone who can scrape up a fortune in roubles.’ He considered me, relapsing into ordinary English, ‘Why did you say caviar is immoral? It’s not like you.’

‘Not my idea. A friend’s.’

‘Girl?’

I nodded.

‘Aha,’ he said. ‘I diagnose a rich middle-class socialist rebelling against mummy.’

‘Not far out,’ I said, a touch sadly.

He peered anxiously at my face. ‘I haven’t offended you?’

‘No.’

I got him to ask the taxi driver to stop by a telephone kiosk, and to wait while we tried our numbers again. There was still no answer from Misha, but the second number was answered at the first ring. Stephen, holding the receiver, made a brief thumbs up sign to me, and spoke. Listened, spoke again, and handed the receiver to me. ‘It is Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky himself. He says he speaks English.’

I took the instrument. ‘Mr Chulitsky?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘I am an Englishman visiting Moscow,’ I said. ‘My name is Randall Drew. I have been given your name and telephone number by the British Embassy. I wonder if I could talk with you?’

There was a longish pause. Then the voice at the other end, calm and with an accent that was a carbon copy of Stephen’s imitation, said, ‘Upon what subject?’

Owing to the meagreness of the telex bearing his name, I couldn’t entirely answer. I said hopefully, ‘Horses?’

‘Horses.’ He sounded unenthusiastic. ‘Always horses. I do not know horses. I am architect.’

‘Er,’ I said. ‘Have you already talked about horses to another Englishman?’

A pause. Then the voice, measured and still calm. ‘That is so. In Moscow, yes. And in England, yes. Many times.’

Bits of light began to dawn. ‘You were at the International Horse Trials? At Burghley, in September?’

The pause. Then, ‘At many horse trials. September... and August.’

Bingo, I thought. One of the observers.

‘Mr Chulitsky,’ I said, persuasively, ‘please may I meet you? I’ve been talking to Nikolai Alexandrovich Kropotkin, and if you want to check up on me, I think he will tell you it would be all right for you to talk to me.’

A very long pause. Then he said, ‘Are you writing for newspaper?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I telephone Nikolai Alexandrovich,’ he said. ‘I find his number.’

‘I have it here,’ I said, and read it out slowly.

‘You telephone again. One hour.’

The receiver went down at his end with a decisive crash, and Stephen and I went back to the taxi.

Stephen said, ‘When we get up to my room, don’t say anything you don’t want overheard. Or not until I tell you it’s OK.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘I’m a foreigner. I live in the section of the University reserved for foreign students. Every room in Moscow which is used by foreigners should be considered bugged until proved different.’ The University building, of vast blocks of narrow windows punctuated by soaring fluted towers, like an immense grey stone blancmange, looked from its hill to the river and the city centre beyond; and on the far bank lay, spread out, the Lenin stadium, where the Olympic athletes were scheduled to run and jump and throw things.

‘How will they manage with the whole city full of foreigners?’ I said.

‘Apartheid will prevail.’ The Russian accent made it a wicked joke. ‘Segregation will be ruthlessly maintained.’

‘Why did you come to Russia?’ I said, ‘feeling as you do?’

He gave me a quick bright glance. ‘I love the place and hate the regime, the same as everyone else. And nowhere’s a prison when you can get out.’

The taxi shed us at the gate, and we walked to the foreign students’ entrance, a door dwarfed by the sheer height of the adjoining walls. Inside, coming down to human scale, there was a dumpy middle-aged woman behind a desk. She looked at Stephen with a lack of reaction which meant she knew him, and then at me; and she was out of her seat and barring my way with the speed of a rattlesnake.

Stephen spoke to her in Russian. She dourly shook her head. Together they consulted a list on her desk; and with severe looks she let me through.

‘Dragons like that guard doorways all over Russia,’ Stephen said. ‘The only way past, is to be expected. Short of slaying them, of course.’

We went for a long walk which ended one floor down in a help-yourself foodshop. All the packages were unfamiliar, and owing to the Cyrillic alphabet, which made restaurants look like ‘PECTOPAH’ to Western eyes, I couldn’t even guess at the contents. Stephen went round unerringly, choosing what later turned out to be crisp-sided cream cakes and ending with a bottle of milk.

A girl stood at the cash desk before us, paying for her groceries. A pretty girl, with light-brown hair curling on to her shoulders, and the sort of waist Victorian young ladies swooned over. When Stephen greeted her, she turned her head and gave him a flashing smile with a fair view of excellent teeth. The smile, I saw, of at least good friends.

Stephen introduced her as Gudrun, and the unpretty lady behind the cash register pointed to her packages and clearly told her to pick them up and go.

The girl picked up her bottle of milk, and the bottom fell out of it. Milk cascaded on to the floor. Gudrun stood looking bewildered with the whole-looking bottle still in her hand and milk stains all over her legs.

I watched the pantomime that followed. Stephen was saying she should have another bottle. The unpretty lady shook her head and pointed to the cash register. Everyone engaged in battle, and the unpretty lady won.

‘She made her buy another bottle,’ said Stephen, disgusted, as we set off on another interior tramp.

‘So I gathered.’

‘They make the bottles like tubes here, and just stick a disc in for the bottoms. Anyway,’ he finished cheerfully, ‘she’s coming along to my room for a cup of tea.’

Gudrun was West German, from Bonn. She filled and illuminated Stephen’s tiny cell, which was eight feet long by six across, and contained a bed, a table covered with books, a chair, and a glass-fronted bookcase. On the bare wooden floor there was one small imitation Brussels rug, and at the tall narrow window, skimpy green curtains.

‘The Ritz,’ I said ironically.

‘I’m lucky,’ Stephen said, taking three mugs from the bookcase and making a space for them on the table. ‘A lot of the Russian students are two to a room this size.’

‘If you had two beds in here you couldn’t open the door,’ I said.

Gudrun nodded. ‘They stand the beds up against the wall in the daytime.’

‘No protest marches?’ I said. ‘No demos for better conditions?’

‘They are not allowed,’ Gudrun said seriously. ‘Anyone who tried would lose his place.’

She spoke English perfectly, with hardly a trace of accent. Her Russian, Stephen said, was just as good. His own German was passable, his French excellent. I sighed, internally, for a skill I’d never acquired.

Stephen went off to make the tea.

‘Don’t come,’ he said. ‘The kitchen is filthy. About twenty of us share it, and we’re all supposed to clean it, so nobody does.’

Gudrun sat on the bed and asked me how I was enjoying Moscow, and I sat on the chair and said fine. I asked her how she was enjoying her course, and she said fine.

‘If the Russians are so keen to keep foreigners at arm’s length,’ I said, ‘why do they allow foreign students in the University?’

She glanced involuntarily round the walls, a revealing glimpse into the way they all lived. The walls had ears; literally.

‘We are exchange students,’ she said. ‘For Stephen, there is a Russian student in London. For me a Russian student in Bonn. Those students are dedicated communists.’

‘Spreading the gospel and recruiting?’

She nodded a shade unhappily, again glancing at the walls and not liking my frankness. I went back to harmless chit chat, and Stephen presently arrived to distribute the goodies, which, for me at least, nicely filled an aching void.

‘Show you something,’ he said, stuffing the last of the cake into his mouth and shifting along to the end of the bed, on which he was sitting. ‘A little trick.’

He picked up what I saw was a tape-recorder, and switched it on. Then with a theatrical flourish he stood up and pressed it against the wall beside my head.

Nothing happened. He removed it and pressed it to another spot. Again nothing. He took it away, and put it delicately against a spot above his bed. From the tape-recorder came a high-pitched whine.

‘Abracadabra,’ he said, taking the tape-recorder down and switching it off. ‘From ordinary walls, you get nothing. From a live mike inside a wall, you get feedback.’

‘Do they know?’ I said.

‘Of course they do. Like to borrow it?’ He pointed to the recorder.

‘Very much.’

‘Then I’ll dash to get a chit to take it out.’

‘A chit?’

‘Yes. You can’t just walk out of here carrying things. They say it’s to stop people stealing, but it’s just the usual phobia about knowing what goes on.’

I glanced at the wall behind his head. Stephen laughed. ‘If you don’t complain about the whole bloody repressive Soviet system they suspect you’re putting on an act.’

In the corridor, from the telephone installed for the students, I called Yuri Ivanovich Chulitsky. The telephone was safe, Stephen said. The only telephones which were tapped were those in the houses of known dissidents: and Yuri Chulitsky would be anything but a dissident, if he had been sent to England as an observer.

He answered at once.

‘I talk with Nikolai Alexandrovich,’ he said. ‘I meet you tomorrow.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘I drive car. I come outside National Hotel, ten o’clock, tomorrow morning. Is right?’

‘Is right,’ I said.

‘Ten o’clock.’ Down went the receiver with the same crash, before I could ask him how I would know him or his car. I supposed that when I saw him, I would know.

Stephen tried the other number. The bell rang hollowly at the far end, and after ten rings we prepared to give up. Then the ringing stopped and there was suddenly a breathless voice on the line.

‘It’s Misha,’ Stephen said.

‘You talk to him. It’s easier.’

Stephen listened. ‘He wants to see you again, and it must be tonight. He says he is going to Rostov tomorrow with two horses. The snow is coming, and the horses are going south. Nikolai Alexandrovich — that is, Mr Kropotkin — is going next week. It was decided today.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘When and where?’

Stephen asked, and was told. He wrote it down, and the directions took some time.

‘Well,’ he said, slowly replacing the receiver and looking at what he had written, ‘it is miles out of the centre. I think it must be an apartment block. He says he will wait outside, and when you arrive, don’t speak English until he says it’s OK.’

‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘You don’t really need me. Misha does speak some English.’ He handed me the address, written in Russian script. ‘Show that to a taxi driver. He’ll find it. And I’ll meet you later, at the Aragvi.’

I looked beyond him to the open door of his room. Gudrun half-sat, half-lay, on the bed, her long legs sprawled in invitation.

I hesitated, but finally I said, ‘I wish you could come. Someone did try to kill Misha or me this morning. I expect you’ll laugh, but if I’m going off into the wilds to meet him, I would feel safer with a back-up system.’

He didn’t laugh. He said goodbye to Gudrun, and came. He also said, ‘Ve have vays of postponing our pleasures until tomorrow,’ and made a joke of it: and I thought that for plain good nature he would be hard to beat.

‘It’s very difficult to think of a good meeting place, if you’re an ordinary Russian and you want to talk to a foreigner,’ Stephen said. ‘There are no pubs in Russia. No discreet little cafés. And there are always watchers, with tongues. You’d have to be pretty solid with the hierarchy to be seen anywhere public with a foreigner.’

We flagged a passing taxi, again without much of a wait.

‘No shortage of these,’ I said, climbing in. Then, as Stephen’s mouth opened, I interrupted. ‘Don’t say it. Taxis are dear, the metro’s cheap.’

‘And the taxi charges have practically doubled recently.’

‘Ask the driver to go via the Intourist Hotel, so that I can drop off the recorder.’

‘Right.’

We sped down the Komsomolsky Prospect and I looked two or three times out of the back window. A medium-sized black car followed us faithfully, but we were on a main road where that was likely to happen anyway.

‘When we get to the Intourist,’ I said, ‘I will get out and say goodnight to you unmistakably. I’ll then go into the hotel, and you and the taxi will drive off, and go round the corner, and wait for me outside the National Hotel entrance. I’ll dump the tape-recorder, and come and meet you there.’

Stephen looked out of the rear window.

‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘Do you think you’re being followed?’

‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘Most of the time.’

‘But... who by?’

‘Would you believe, the K.G.B.?’

For all his guided tour to the prying state, he was staggered. ‘What makes you think so?’

‘The Sphinx told me.’

It reduced him to silence. Ve have vays of making you stop talking, I thought facetiously. We arrived in due course at the Intourist, and went through the act.

I spent some time on the pavement talking to Stephen through the taxi window, and then bade him Goodnight in ringing tones, and waved a farewell as I went through the double glass entrance; overdoing it, no doubt. I collected my key from the desk, removed hat and coat, and went up in the lift. Then I parked the tape-recorder in my room, and without hurrying, so as not to alert the old biddy sitting watchfully at her desk by the lifts, walked back, still carrying outdoor clothes, and descended to the ground floor. There were several routes from the lifts to the front door, as it was a very large hotel: I took the most roundabout, putting on hat and coat on the way, and wafted at an ordinary pace out again on to the pavement. No doubt the watchers there took general note, but no one broke away to bob in my wake.

I stopped at the corner and glanced back. No one seemed to be peeling off to look in non-existent shop-windows. I walked on, thinking that if the followers were determined as well as professional, my amateur attempts at evasion would have been useless. But they would have had no reason to suppose I knew they were there, or that I would try to duck them, as I had given no signs so far of wanting to; so perhaps they might think I was still somewhere inside the hotel.

The taxi-driver was agitated and grumbling at having had to wait a long time where he was not supposed to. Stephen greeted my arrival with sighs of relief, and we set off again with a jerk.

‘Your friend Frank went into the hotel just after you,’ Stephen said. ‘Did you see him?’

‘No,’ I said tranquilly.

He didn’t pursue it. ‘The driver says the temperature is dropping. It has been warm for November, he says.’

‘It’s December, today.’

‘He says it will snow.’

We motored a good way northwards, and then north-east, through the wide well-lit mostly empty streets. When the roads became narrower I said, ‘Ask the driver to stop for a moment.’

‘What now?’ Stephen said.

‘See if we’ve a tail.’

No car stopped behind us, however, and when we went on, we found no stationary car waiting ahead. I asked Stephen to get the driver to circle a fairly large block. The driver, thoroughly disillusioned by these junkettings, began muttering under his breath.

‘Get him to drop us before we reach the address,’ I said. ‘We don’t want him undoing the good work by reporting our exact destination.’

A large tip on top of the big fare cured most of the driver’s grumbles, but wouldn’t, I guessed, keep his mouth shut. He sped off back to the brighter lights as if glad to be rid of us. But no black cars, or any others, passed or stopped. As far as we could tell, we were on our own.

We stood in an area which was being developed. On each side, end on to the road, were ranks of newly-built apartment blocks, all about forty feet thick and nine storeys high, clad in grey-white pebbledash and stretching away into the darkness with ranks of windows front and back.

‘Standard issue housing,’ Stephen said. ‘Egg boxes for the masses. Six square metres of floorspace per person; the maximum regulation allowance.’

We walked along the slushy pavement, the only people in sight. The block we were currently passing was unfinished, with its walls in place but empty holes for windows. The one after that, although still uninhabited, had glass. The one after that looked furnished, and the one after that had residents. It proved also to be where we were going.

A last look at the street showed no one taking the slightest notice of us. We wheeled into the broad space between the two blocks and discovered from the numbers that the entrance we wanted was the second door along. We went towards it without haste, and stopped a few paces short.

We waited. A minute ticked past, and another. No Misha. With every lungful the wet freezing air chilled from the inside out. If we had travelled all this way for nothing, I thought, I would be less than amused.

A voice spoke softly, from behind us.

‘Come.’