White Pawn on Red Square Read online

  “But the meal has cost more than twenty dollars.”

  She gave me a piteous look. “Kostia can sell those dollars na levo (on the side) for seven times their worth and everybody is happy.”

  “Isn’t that speculation?” I protested. “And it is also nye kulturne (not done).”

  She shook her head slowly as though dealing with an infant or a mental defective. “If we did not do everything that was not done, we would never do anything,” she said, leaving me to work out that Irish periphrasis as Kostia palmed the dollar bills I slipped him.

  Back in my hotel later that evening, through the vodka fumes I replayed our conversation and wondered how, in Lenin’s name, I had ever contracted into whatever scheme Larissa had in her head. Of course, I realized why I had tried her vodka trick and we had tussled about trusting each other. I wasn’t worried about her plot. I was drawn to Larissa by another bond, a sexual or a chemical bond. Hence my taking the first and now the second risk.

  I was breaking one of my own rules of conduct—never get into any affair with a woman without first mine-sweeping an escape channel against the inevitable quarrel and parting. I had known prettier girls than Larissa, so there must be something more to her than looks or even sex, though I couldn’t guess what it was then. On the London plane two days after our meeting, I sat wondering who on earth she meant to kidnap and hold as a hostage. Even before we crossed the Baltic coastline I was looking forward to my Moscow trip and my next meeting with Larissa.

  Chapter 3

  From my hotel window, I looked straight into the Kremlin over the crenellated, red-brick ramparts of Red Square. I don’t suppose there’s another urban panorama like this amalgam of mediaeval and modern, oriental and occidental, mysticism and materialism. Snow had fallen the day I arrived, powdering the twisted. prismatic cupolas of Saint Basil’s Cathedral in the square, and I overheard a small Russian boy say to his mother, “Mummy, it’s the lickiest thing, isn’t it?” I had chosen the Hotel Rossiya, a chrome-and-glass warren just off the square, for its central location. Anyway, I knew Moscow almost as well as London and spoke Russian colloquially enough to fool most natives.

  I had glimpsed Larissa three days before at her bookstall in the trade fair, and again at the British Embassy reception for visiting trade delegations; she made no signal or move towards me. I was on my best behavior.

  Simmonds had threatened that a milliliter too much liquor and I would be back in London. So, I spent that evening furtively drinking pure malt whisky with the embassy security officer, Jock Frazer, a former Scots Guards warrant officer. He briefed me about KGB sex traps and other tricks, but had he guessed I was involved with that striking, tawny-haired Russian girl across the room, he would have blasted my head off.

  On the sixth evening my phone went. A muffled voice instructed me to walk to the Lobnoye Mesto (Place of the Skull). I climbed into my coat, hid my face under my astrakhan hat and ear flaps and walked into the square. For a minute or two, I watched the three-man guard goose-stepping from the Spassky Tower to the Lenin Mausoleum. In one intricate drill, two men changed places with the guards and started back with their sergeant to the guardhouse, applause rippling after them.

  I reached the Lobnoye Mesto, a curious circular scaffold where Ivan the Terrible administered a boiling-lead beverage to his victims. A voice whispered, “Follow me at fifty meters.” He walked to Prospekt Marksa tube station and I followed into the great underground gallery, and boarded the same northbound train. At Komsomolskaya station, we got down. I knew the place, a sort of subterranean Valhalla designed by Alexei Shchusev, who built the Lenin Mausoleum. We let two trains go through before taking the one for Sokolniki Park.

  Here, snow lay thick, reflecting the bluish street lights and fudging the profile of high-rise flats. My trail-blazer crossed Rusakovskaya Street, then cut through squares, losing himself in the shadow of birch and spruce trees, loitering now and again until I caught sight of him.

  He disappeared round one tower block and I lost him. A few minutes later, I stopped beyond a fluorescent lamp shining through a spruce tree to give him the chance to backtrack until he spotted me. It was then the soft crunch of feet on snow reached me from the other side of the tree.

  At that hour, hardly anybody was stirring in these suburbs, lit with the electric glow of TV sets and dim lights. Was somebody following us? How could I warn the man in front, who had now returned, seen me and was waving me on? Since I heard nothing more behind me, I ploughed on, making up several yards on my guide. To make certain there was no-one tailing me, I stopped behind a building and listened.

  Those quiet, stealthy steps still rasped in the snow.

  I waited until they had reached the corner of the building before stepping out to face the man. No sooner had he spotted me than he broke into a run and leapt at me. In the street light, something glinted in his hand. A knife. It raked the arm I threw up to parry the blow, even piercing my heavy coat. I clenched my gloved right hand round the man’s wrist and gave such a vicious twist that we both catapulted into the snow.

  He grunted with pain as the knife hit his own body, somewhere. As he pulled it free, I struck and knocked it away, but this gave him the chance to grab my arm and wrench me over on my back in the deep snow. Pinning me with his body, he brought both his fists down like bludgeons on my face and head. Had there been no snow to cushion those blows and had he not been wearing gloves, he must have killed me with those punches.

  In desperation, I brought my right knee up and buried it in his crotch then threw the arms shielding my face at him. He yelled and rolled over and I heaved myself up and came down on him with my full weight. Like a cry of agony, the breath burst from his lungs.

  I heard him curse in those earthy Russian oaths as I hit him on the face and chopped down on his neck with the heel of my hand. But his heavy clothing and my gloves took much of the sting out of my blows. Kicking and flailing his arms at me, he had wrestled clear and was turning to run when a torch beam fell on his face, blinding him.

  “Lev, you stupid bastard,” a voice grated at the figure in the snow. “He’s one of us.”

  Lev opened his eyes and scrambled upright. “I thought he was from Lubyanka…I thought he was following you…She should’ve warned me.”

  “Go and get lost for an hour.” My guide flung this over his shoulder as he trudged away. I gave him a fifty-yard lead then followed him. Ten minutes later, he slowed down until I caught up then whispered, “It’s on the eleventh floor…wait for ten minutes.” He turned into a tall block and I hid for quarter of an hour before entering and wheezing up in a slow, scarred lift.

  As soon as it stopped, a landing door opened and Larissa beckoned me inside, pointing to the two other doors. “They listen to everything,” she said. She had evidently been told of the fight for she drew me under the dim, waxy hall light to examine my face then pulled off coat and jacket and saw the blood. It was only a scratch on my right forearm, but she produced sticking plaster to cover it, repeating as she worked, “Lev’s a raving fool.” She kissed me on both cheeks, saying in my ear, “I’m so glad you’re back, Alan.”

  In the small living-room, I handed her the camera and the package containing the two wigs she wanted. She did the introductions to the two people there, the man who had led me there, and a girl, Raya Ivanova Chernova.

  “Raya’s with Aeroflot,” Larissa said. “She was an air hostess, but when her brother was imprisoned with Sasha and the others, they didn’t trust her to fly, so she’s in the office in Moscow.” Raya smiled at me; she had russet hair and a frank, Slav face with wide eyes and flat cheekbones.

  Ivan Vassilevich Roskov was short and stocky and wrapped a thick hand round mine, squeezing until my knuckles fused. “Sorry about the secret-agent stuff,” he said in good Russian. “But we have to watch everybody in this place.” He thumbed at the walls of the living-room. “Even a schizophrenic can’t talk to himself in Russia in case one half of his split mind narks to the KGB
about the other half.” This quip did not raise a flicker of amusement, it was too serious.

  “Vanya works at Sheremetyevo.”

  “Moscow airport?”

  Vanya nodded. “I’m well-hidden, on the maintenance staff,” he said. His accent and turn of speech suggested he could have landed himself something much better. From the way he looked at Raya, I guessed he was in love with her and his commitment to whatever she and Larissa were doing was emotional.

  Vanya had taken the camera and was studying it and the rolls of fast film I had bought in London; he handled the equipment like an expert, checking the batteries, the zoom lens. Shushing the girls who were chattering, he set it in motion. At ten feet, only by straining our ears could we detect the motor hum and film hissing through, and Vanya and Larissa nodded their approbation.

  While I chatted to Vanya, I heard both girls giggling in the small bedroom; they emerged wearing the wigs I had brought, Raya in the dark one and Larissa with bright red hair. “You look like a couple of Arbat Street tarts,” Vanya grunted, but he agreed they were a good disguise.

  Both girls disappeared into the tiny kitchen to bring back a tray of zakusi. Knowing how difficult it was for Russians to buy caviar or other delicacies, how long it meant queuing in various gastronoms, I was astounded to note they had black and red caviar on thickly-buttered white or black bread, smoked salmon, crab salad on salt biscuits, bits of salted herring, salami and various other titbits like pickled cucumber, gherkins, beet salad.

  “Raya has friends in the business,” Vanya murmured.

  In my honour, they had procured a bottle of Scotch but I insisted I preferred vodka which went better with the feast they had prepared, and the cold climate. “We’re not waiting for Lev and Anastas?” Vanya queried and Larissa shook her head. “They’ll get their share when they arrive,” she said.

  Vanya clouted the base of the bottle with the heel of his hand and the cork hit the low ceiling. We were using ordinary tumblers yet he half-filled them with the chilled liquor then raised his glass and said, “To the new Anglo-Russian pact—pye do dna (bottoms up).”

  He didn’t have to breathe out or in before the raw spirit vanished into his bearded mouth. And since the girls both threw theirs back, I had to do the same. Mine went down like sulphuric acid and I gobbled a hunk of bread and caviar to cushion my stomach. Vanya had another glass and another toast ready, “To the gulags and may those who run them rot in hell.” We all drank to that, then to everyone in camps all over Russia, then to the men sentenced with Raya’s and Larissa’s brothers.

  Both girls now put their hands over their glasses, but Vanya knocked my hand away when I tried to do the same. At that point, I noticed two empty vodka bottles on the table and we had drunk half the third.

  Despite the firebreak of caviar, smoked salmon, salami and pickled onions, the vodka had invaded my system, lapping through my blood and numbing my nerve-endings. I had witnessed this sort of self-destructive drinking before in every Eastern Bloc capital, and especially in Moscow. But what could I do? This was considered a sort of blood-brother initiation ceremony. I drank on.

  Just after ten, another man slipped into the flat. Swam into my ken would describe it better. He wore a fur cap with ear-muffs and a heavy coat. They didn’t have to explain this was the man who had mistaken me for a KGB agent. And I him. As he shook the snow off his coat, I saw he was small and fine-boned with Jewish features.

  They introduced him as Lev Davidovich Shapirov and his hand left the impression in mine of an ice lump. Thin lips and stony eyes smiled—or sneered?—at me as he used his scarf to mop the moisture off his face. When he turned, I noticed a wine-stain birth-mark, crescent-shaped and fully an inch and a half long spreading from the right temple to the corner of his right eye. I decided, apart from our tussle, I didn’t much care for Shapirov. Especially when he kissed Larissa on the lips, too fervently in my opinion.

  Earlier that evening, Larissa had told me something about him. He had trained as an architect but after graduating, he found the best jobs had gone to Party members, then their friends, then Russians without the word ‘Evrey’ (Jew) in the nationality section of their passport. Several of his friends grew frustrated with this anti-semitism, applied for emigration visas but were turned down. One of them, Leonid Goldfarb, a first cousin, had joined another Jewish youth in an attempt to hi-jack a Moscow-Kiev flight and divert it to Vienna. But the pilot fooled them by landing at Budapest; so, now Goldfarb and his companion were serving fifteen-year sentences in Yaroslavl prison not far from Moscow.

  As an architect, Shapirov had worked for three years inside the Kremlin, helping to redesign and restore the fortress buildings as well as some of the ancient monuments and buildings in central Moscow.

  A year ago, he had transferred to a minor job as an architect with a municipal council in the Lenin Hills district; but he chafed at having to stamp out identical concrete blocks of flats or offices decreed by state planners and copied throughout the Soviet empire. With that word, Evrey, on his domestic passport, he realized he would get no further than district surveyor or municipal architect turning out schools, clinics, creches to some aparatchik’s plans.

  He came over and mumbled something and when I didn’t catch it his brown eyes narrowed, searching my face. “He’s drunk,” he whispered loudly to Larissa, evidently thinking me too far gone to understand.

  “Alan isn’t used to vodka.”

  “Then what’s he doing with us?”

  “He is necessary to our operation and I vouch for him.”

  “And the others—what do they think?” Shapirov rounded on Vanya, who shrugged and nodded at Larissa.

  “She makes the decisions,” he muttered.

  “Well, I don’t like this one.” Shapirov thumbed, contemptuously, at me then went to help himself to a vodka from the fourth bottle and fell into talk with Raya.

  Half an hour passed before a timid knock came to the door and Larissa ushered in a little man with a hangdog face, introducing him as Anastas Artemevich Asmarian. With that name, nobody needed to explain he was Armenian though his features might well have fooled me. I got my vocal chord knotted round his name, and Larissa laughed. “Call him Anastas like everybody else,” she said.

  Even through a bottle of vodka, Asmarian’s features made an impression; he had prominent Tartar cheekbones and the broad face, but big, dark-blue eyes with no Tartar slant; his nose had obviously come from his Armenian father, being long and slightly hooked. Anastas worked as a medical orderly at the Botkin Hospital, on the other side of Moscow near the racecourse.

  His arrival signaled another bottle and another round of toasts. By now, the vodka had breached my cortex and was dowsing my critical faculties and even my senses. Even the pickled onions and gherkins neither tasted nor smelled. Larissa was having a whispered though lively conversation with Vanya and Anastas.

  Aroused by the alcohol, I had a primeval urge to go and grab her, kiss her fully on the lips, chase everybody else out of the flat and make love to her for at least a week, nonstop. But whatever brain I had left told me I could never have borne even my lust across the room on wobbly legs. Anyway, Larissa and the two men had turned their eyes on me.

  “Have we told Alan what it’s all about?” Anastas asked.

  “No, we were waiting for Lev and you to give your votes,” Larissa replied.

  Raya and Lev had stopped talking; everyone had become suddenly silent and solemn. I noticed Shapirov twirling an empty glass in his hands then rolling it up and down his jacket sleeve like a circus performer. He flicked his dead eyes towards me. “Are we really bringing a character like this in with us?” he asked, and I didn’t care for the way his large nose curled.

  “We need Alan and without somebody like him it is not possible,” Larissa said. Vanya and Anastas nodded agreement.

  “Is he prepared to co-operate and keep his mouth shut?” Shapirov insisted.

  “We can trust him,” Larissa said. “We can,
can we not?”

  When a woman like Larissa looks at you in that way and puts you on your honor, what can you say? “Of course you can trust me,” I came back. “Anyway, what’s it all about, this great conspiracy, this secrecy?”

  “We’re going to steal Lenin,” Larissa said, matter-of-fact, as though she were talking about shop-lifting an apple off a street-market barrow.

  “Lenin,” I murmured, feebly. “But he’s dead.”

  One or two of them tittered. “We mean the dummy or the mummy in the mausoleum,” Vanya specified.

  “We’re going to use him as a hostage,” Raya added, her pretty peasant face flushing at the idea.

  “A hostage?” I repeated.

  “”Yes, we’re going to swap his remains for the freedom of Larissa’s brother, Raya’s brother, the other two gulag men and Lev’s friends,” Vanya explained, slowly so that I would understand.

  “And if the Politburo won’t play, we’ll rip their fake mummy apart bit by bit and drop the pieces all over Moscow.” It was Shapirov, the Jew, who spoke and drunk as I was, I could see he meant every word.

  “But you’re all crazy,” I stammered. “Anyway, it’s the most closely-guarded object in the whole of Russia. Even the Scythian Treasure in the Hermitage…” My flustered mind could not round off the thought. Then I laughed aloud. “You’re not serious…It’s just a Russian joke.”

  Larissa shook her head and I could see the others, too, were all looking somber. They were really asking me to join them in this madcap stunt. To blackmail the Soviet Government. Me, who wouldn’t spit in the street! Who couldn’t pinch a hotel coat-hanger or a library book without believing Scotland Yard was after me!