White Pawn on Red Square Read online

  Published by Boson Books

  3905 Meadow Field Lane

  Raleigh, NC 27606

  ISBN 1-932482-51-2

  An imprint of C&M Online Media Inc.

  Copyright 2007 Hugh McLeave

  All rights reserved

  For information contact

  C&M Online Media Inc.

  3905 Meadow Field Lane

  Raleigh, NC 27606

  Tel: (919) 233-8164

  e-mail:[email protected]

  URL: http://www.bosonbooks.com/

  Cover art by Graffiti BBDO, Romania

  _____________________

  WHITE PAWN ON RED SQUARE

  by

  Hugh McLeave

  __________________

  BOSON BOOKS

  Raleigh

  Prologue

  Nobody who had ever had those black-flecked, green eyes scan him could ever forget them. As we came abreast of each other, they fixed on my face before he ran expert hands over my anorak and down my trousers to check I was not carrying a gun or a bomb. Another star sparkled on the blue epaulettes and collar tabs of his KGB uniform meaning he had become one of the leading guards who, with whistles and batons, were controlling and searching the long queue shuffling across Red Square towards the Lenin Mausoleum.

  Did he recognize me from eight months before when Larissa and I had made this pilgrimage, like so may newly-wed couples, to the Red Christ? I reassured myself by remembering that, on the previous occasion, I was wearing a beard, tinted dark like my hair. Anyway, if he had, what could he have done that his masters hadn’t already done? However, his glacier-green eyes betrayed no interest and a twitch of his peaked cap urged me onward.

  Maybe on that last visit, he had paid more professional attention to the bouquet of lilies Larissa was carrying with other Saturday brides to place on the Unknown Soldier’s tomb as the double file wound alongside the Kremlin Wall. Had he put his hands under my jacket, he might have discovered the miniature automatic camera strapped round my body and covered with my wedding suit.

  Now, I had nothing to hide but my curiosity. Not the morbid attraction of the crime scene for the criminal, but merely to check if Vladimir Ilych Lenin looked as he did the last time I had seen him in his glass sarcophagus. All the same, when I reflected on what we had done and what I had gone through for Lenin, I marveled at my own moral courage in coming here.

  In this queue, we had a bit of everything—the new bourgeois in their felt or astrakhan hats, peasant women in headscarves, their men in mufflers, a few Georgians in traditional costume and a bunch of Young Pioneers, boys in red forage caps and girls in red foulards and white blouses.

  Immediately in front of me and upwind I had a Kirghiz family, a man and two women with oblique, Asiatic eyes, dressed in sheepskin jackets, fur boots and fur hats. Never did I imagine the stink of the yaks, goats and sheep they co-existed with could travel two thousand miles unabated.

  Ahead, the queue halted abruptly as a KGB guard argued with a German holding a bulky leather wallet that had somehow escaped detection half a mile back. Unceremoniously, the guard wrenched it open then flourished a small camera. “You know this is forbidden,” he barked in Russian.

  “Sorry,” said the German, shaking his head, having obviously forgotten that almost everything that was not compulsory in this Communist state was therefore forbidden. Herded with his blonde wife and daughter to the Spassky Tower guardhouse under the Kremlin Wall, he submitted to a thorough search; they left their wallets and handbags before sidling back into the queue.

  “Silence, and keep your hands out of your pockets,” the guards ordered as we inched forward again.

  Prom the Spassky Tower, one o’clock chimed. Two hours it had taken me to work through Red Square, round the Kremlin towers and behind the wall to emerge roughly where I had started; now we were climbing towards Saint Basil’s Cathedral with its ice-cream-cone architecture to turn right towards the red-granite and gray-felspar mausoleum with its Cyrillic letters, LENIN, glittering in the May sunlight.

  Twenty yards from the building, the queue quickened its stride; people began blowing their noses and clearing their throats like a concert audience before curtain-up. Soon, I was going through the gate and mounting the steps. At the top, flanking the entrance, two guards stood immobile but for their eyes flicking over each person who entered. My distorted face shone back at me from a bayonet as I passed through the massive bronze doors and went down the crypt steps.

  On my previous visit, we had moved more slowly. But then we had posted Raya and Anastas ten yards ahead, and the little Armenian with his thick, dark glasses and white stick was holding up the procession long enough for me to fire off my series of pictures.

  At the same time, Larissa on my arm wearing her white bridal gown was noting everything about this quaint ritual; she was studying the crypt layout, the figure of Lenin in his crystal cage and taking stock of the guards who were hustling the crowd round the body and out. It all seemed eons ago.

  In the wake of my Kirghiz family, I stepped quickly down the marble stairs, first left then right, to enter the funeral hall. Up another half-flight of steps to a parapet along the wall just above the holy of holies of Mother Russia. At the corners of the glass coffin stood four guards with fixed bayonets while another half-dozen watched the rapt crowd looking down on the figure in its aura of pink, penumbral light. They were watching for whichever madman might want to destroy what represented Lenin with a bomb, or even commit the sacrilege of photographing him.

  For a moment or two I glanced at the worshipping faces, intent on that tiny, black-clad figure with angular features, reddish hair and beard and that Tartar cast to his closed eyes. On previous visits, I had sensed the religious awe in that incense-laden vault, but did not have time to notice how ritualistic, how theatrical the whole ceremony was. A hundred pairs of hypnotized eyes gazed at Lenin as though at some icon while the guards stared back at the crowd.

  “Keep moving. Hands out of your pockets,” a guard whispered hoarsely as we scuffed along the back wall by Lenin’s feet, then towards the exit. “Er sieht wie Wachs aus,” hissed the blonde German woman to her husband. “No talking,” a guard snapped at her beckoning her onwards.

  But she was right. Lenin did look waxy. His hands and face, all there was of him on show under that fluorescence, appeared dark yellow, jaundiced - though at ten feet it was difficult to tell if this were a mummy or a waxwork dummy. Yet, despite my own doubts, despite everything I have learned about Vladimir Ilych Lenin, every time I have gazed at that parchment face and those tiny hands lying on that black, silk cloth, I get the sort of feeling pilgrims must have before the grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, or at Fatima.

  I know that face like my own with its cropped ginger hair and the flare of its side nostrils, the outsize cranium; I could describe exactly how the right index finger is crooked; in fact, I don’t suppose Professor Boris Zbarsky or Professor Ferdinand Hochstetter, the doctors who embalmed Lenin, knew some of the details as well as I did. Shuffling round, I wondered what that curious, Eurasian head would have thought had it been aware of the trick we played on him.

  Nothing seemed to have changed from the first time I had seen Lenin. Same guards. Same enormous crowd. Yet nothing was the same for me, since Larissa could not share it with me. We had shared so much; and even though she had never loved me as much as I loved her, nobody had ever loved me like her. Nobody.

  “Move along, chelovek,” the senior guard whispered in my ear. But gently, perhaps mistaking my faraway expression for adoration of the Communist ‘Christ.’

  After rounding the coffin, we inched down some steps, up some more and out the back door leading to the path along the Kre
mlin Wall, lined with spruce trees. There, the queue scattered though guards still marshaled us and urged us forward. Several people loitered to peer over the iron railing at the graves of Stalin and other revolutionary figures buried beside the crenellated wall.

  My mind was still back there, in the crypt. Wondering exactly what that was lying under the glass cage. Had she been here, Larissa might have enlightened me. Or maybe she finished up having to guess. And she was the one who thought up the whole crazy scheme.

  But I’m away ahead of myself. I suppose I should really begin by telling you about Larissa and myself from the time we met.

  Chapter 1

  Everything started in another mausoleum nearly a thousand miles south of Moscow with another canonized Communist hero, this one a Bulgarian. Don’t get the notion I have a morbid fascination for mummies. I was keeping clear of my colleagues, burning off my hangover and trying to forget the night before by walking the sights in Sofia. On Ruski Boulevard, the capital’s yellow-cobbled main street, I halted before the Georgi Dimitrov mausoleum.

  A tourist ‘must,’ the white-marble monolith sat in a large garden guarded by two soldiers straight out of Ruritania. Clad in brilliant white tunics with scarlet belts and shoulder-boards and white-striped blue trousers thrust into burnished jackboots, they shouldered rifles with fixed bayonets. It looked interesting and, on a hot day with my head dinning I reckoned it would be a nice, cool, air-conditioned spot. I strolled inside.

  In the middle of the austere, square cavern four more guards flanked the glass coffin under which Dimitrov lay. A squat figure in general’s uniform with an ivory mask for a face and stubby-fingered hands. I knew little about him, only that he had founded the Bulgarian communist party and become a legendary figure when the Nazis accused him of starting the Reichstag fire in 1933. During his trial, he had made Goering look foolish. He had lain in this marble vault since his death in l949.

  No more than a trickle of visitors passed through the crypt, stopping to stare at the museum piece for a few moments. I took it more slowly, the chill room reviving me. Moving round the barrier rope, I noticed a girl studying Dimitrov’s face and hands as though meaning to stamp everything on her mind - his silver hair, moustache, Slav face and peasant hands.

  She was much more exciting. She had violet eyes, their color heightened by an emerald-green blouse which also set off her long, tawny hair. Her upper lip had a sensuous sort of pout. As her eyes met mine, she smiled and I realized I had seen her before. At least her upper half. She had been sitting behind a pile of books in the Russian pavilion at the trade fair in Freedom Park - Marx, Engels and Lenin in Russian and a half-dozen other European languages.

  When my head felt a bit clearer I made my way out and walked through the gardens at the rear then turned to regain Ruski Boulevard. As I came round the corner the girl from the mausoleum stood blocking my path.

  “Excuse me, do you not remember me?” Her English hadn’t much of a Slav ring.

  “The Gosizdat bookshop in the Russian pavilion.”

  “No, I meant last night.”

  “About last night I have total amnesia.”

  It was true. At the Bulgarian reception for the opening of the trade fair. I had shipped half a dozen vodka toasts too many on an empty stomach and lost both head and legs. I caught this girl smiling at me.

  “Then you have no recollection of dancing the gopak.”

  “The gopak! I don’t even know what it is.”

  “Neither did the Russian ambassador’s wife.”

  “You mean…” I drew a deep breath. “You mean I did the gopak with her in front of everybody in that pavilion?”

  For a moment I tried to envisage such a scene but gave up for lack of fantasy. How could I imagine dragging the monolithic figure of the Soviet ambassador’s wife into a drunken version of something between a dervish dance and the Highland Fling? I began to sweat, thinking of my own ambassador watching the spectacle with half a hundred bigwigs from the Dip Corps and the trade fair. She was still scrutinizing me, grinning.

  “It was that bad, was it?” I got out.

  “Well, it was nye kulturne (not correct) but quite…quite a performance. The ambassador’s wife was amused.”

  “And the Russian ambassador?”

  “He is a man without much sense of the ridiculous and thought it was nye kulturne.” She paused. “When you fell…”

  “I fell! But not badly? I’ve got no bruises.”

  “Drunks fall like cats.” Her violet eyes tracked over my face, twinkling at my embarrassment. “I picked you up and took you back to your hotel in a taxi.”

  “I knew my hotel, then.”

  “No, I did.”

  “So, we’re back at my hotel. Tell me, did I behave myself?”

  She brushed a tawny curl off her right eyebrow, canted her head from side to side, as though undecided. “I would say you were rather roughly amorous.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There is nothing to be sorry for. You were relatively harmless.” As though to switch the conversation, she said, “You are not American, are you?”

  “No, I’m British.”

  She intrigued me, this girl. She wore American jeans, hard to come by hereabouts, and her green blouse had been bought somewhere more fashionable than GUM in Moscow or CUM, the equivalent department store in Sofia. I was beginning to wonder if this was the sort of pickup our London security men and Jock Frazer in the Moscow embassy had warned me about. Coupled with his injunctions about getting drunk and being caught in sex traps either with girls like this, or male homosexuals paid by the KGB and their associates.

  One thing reassured me. They’d have gone for somebody prettier, more glamorous. Not that this girl was unattractive. But the KGB would have dressed her out of the Avenue Matignon or the Via Veneto and got the Mosfilm studio make-up man to show her the art of rouge and lipstick.

  This girl didn’t need them. Her face had character and strength imprinted all over it. Anyway, it’s not looks that matter but what’s done with them. This girl seemed to go direct into my mind with those candid eyes and the amusement dimpling her cheeks. And her English was too bookish for the KGB.

  “You are interested in Georgi Dimitrov?” she asked.

  “Alive I’d hardly heard of him, and dead he’s not a very attractive sideshow,”

  “Here, he is considered a great man.” She fell into step with me. “You know he is embalmed by the same doctor who embalmed Vladimir Ilych Lenin - Professor Zbarsky.” Her brow puckered and she threw an arch lock. “You have heard of Lenin, haven’t you?”

  “Now, if you’re trying to be provocative…”

  She halted and gripped my arm with surprising force. “No, I am not. Do not think that.” Her violet eyes appealed to me. “I was trying to make an English joke because I am nervous,”

  “Nervous—what about?”

  “I didn’t want to give the idea I was - how do you say it?…I was picking you up.”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  To my astonishment, she nodded. In another country, I wou1dn’t even have put the question; I would have wheeled somebody this good-looking into my hotel and, after the usual social rite, into my room and my bed. But in the Eastern Bloc this could be a trap, a secret-police set-up to compromise a minor diplomatic official and blackmail him into spying for them.

  I waited for her to explain and when she remained silent, grabbed her arm, “What are you trying to do, get me into more trouble than I’m in already?”

  “Please!” She wrenched her arm free. Glancing round as though afraid somebody might spot us or overhear, she dropped her voice to a whisper. “Have you heard of Marchenko, Golovanov, Barinova, Ginsburg?”

  I had heard of Ginsburg, one of the most prominent dissidents. However, I shook my head, declaring my ignorance of the three men and the woman she had mentioned.

  Her head twitched, sorrowfully. “All right, Solzhenitzin, Sakharov, Litvinov, Charansky—you must h
ave heard of them,”

  “You mean, the dissidents,” I said, cautiously.

  “The dissidents!” It sounded like a steam valve blowing. “All they’ve done is speak their minds and the truth.”

  “What are you driving at?”

  She glanced round again. “My brother is one of them. He’s in a camp in Siberia and he’ll die unless I do something about it.”

  “I still don’t see how this concerns me.”

  I wanted to ask you a favor, a very small favor.” She was pleading again. “There is no risk to you, no risk at all.”

  That no-risk-at-all remark should have set me running. But I listened. Afterwards, I wondered why. It had something to do with this girl’s intensity, her candour and. that voice of hers; it had a husky, throaty note as though a couple of her vocal chords had frayed; to me, it had a sensuous sound and it turned me on.

  Her eyes shifted over my face in the way a portrait painter’s might have done. That voice, the eyes, the face I have tried to describe without ever succeeding. In fact, the more I got to know Larissa, the more difficult it seemed to define anything about her. Before you can analyze something, you have to catch it, pin it down, dissect it. At that point, it’s a post-mortem. And for me, Larissa will never be dead.

  Maybe you’d better tell me about it.” I glanced along Aksakov Street, where we were standing, seeking a café; she guessed my purpose and shook her head.

  “Anybody might see us,” she whispered. “Tomorrow at eleven o’clock come to the stand at the trade fair. I can find a place to talk and tell you about it.”

  I kept her in view until she turned the corner at Rakovski Street but she did not look back. I strolled to Ruski, past the mausoleum to the Balkan Hotel in Lenin Square where I had a room. Still wondering why she had followed me, accosted me and what game she was playing.