Читать книгу The Man Who Was Saturday - Derek Lambert, Derek Lambert - Страница 11
ОглавлениеThe Kremlin – kreml, fortress – is the hub of Moscow, more so than the seats of government of most capital cities. Driving into town there is no escape from it, the great avenues converging on it like the spokes of a wheel.
Around this fabled triangle of palaces, towers and cathedrals and around the old town of Kitay-Korad lie seven squares hemmed by a belt of green boulevards which are linked in the south, beneath the Kremlin’s walls, by the River Moscow. After the boulevards, and the next layer of assorted development – Czarist baronial, Stalinist wedding-cake, 1980s’ functional – comes the Sadovaya, the Ring, the city’s broadest highway, and finally a roaring motorway that girdles Greater Moscow as the Périphérique girdles Paris.
Katerina Ilyina lived on a spoke of the wheel, Leningradsky Prospect, leading to Sheremetievo Airport and, eventually, Finland.
When he crossed the Sadovaya, Calder pulled into a side road to consult the map Katerina had drawn. She would never make a cartographer: she even managed to make Leningradsky, as wide and straight as a runway, look like the trail of some demented insect. Past the Bolshevik sweet factory, she had said, not far from the Dynamo stadium.
He compared her effort with a printed map; it wasn’t much better. Cars swooped past on the avenue, phantom-quick in the moonlight. Across the street a dewlap of snow hung from an old wooden house, one of the few left in this area, old teeth among new dentures.
Why had she invited him to the Women’s Day party? There were a number of possibilities, most of them unwelcome; those that were welcome were unlikely.
Why had he sent her the mimosa? Easier. She was an injection of impetuous youth into the Institute, that fount of futile endeavour, and he wanted to share it. (The defectors reminded him of Dickensian clerks.)
Apartment block 33. There it was on the insect trail. He read the name of the side street under the dewlap of snow. Raskovoj. He was almost there.
The block was white and square with a children’s playground and thinning lawns scattered with a dandruff of snow. There were several notices telling tenants what they should not do.
Calder took the elevator to the fourth floor. Party sounds came from the end of a long corridor that smelled of disinfectant. No. 41, that was where the action was.
Katerina opened the door. She was wearing a black dress cut provocatively but not shamelessly low, Baltic, probably, or one of Zaitsev’s specials which never reached the stores. Her shoulder-length hair had been brushed until it shone blue-black. She wore an amber necklace, almost certainly Baltic, and her grey eyes challenged.
For one disturbing moment Calder saw himself through her eyes. Ageing – forty if he was a day. (He was thirty-eight). Tall and dark and defeated.
‘Comrade Calder, come in.’
He handed her a bottle of pink champagne and walked into Baccanalia.
Rugs had been drawn back from the parquet flooring of the sitting room, dark lacquered furniture pushed flush with the walls. Television, potted plants and assorted chinaware were on high ground out of harm’s way, a bed was doubling up as a couch. Guests crowded the small arena expansively.
‘Can I get you a drink?’
Her English was almost perfect. Although he spoke near-perfect Russian he answered her in English. ‘Are you sure you’ve got enough?’
The table at the end of the room was a distillery. A dozen different vodkas, Stolichnaya, Starka, Russkaya, Yubileinaya, lemon, pepper, hunter’s – Kreiber’s tipple, Calder remembered – caraway, the liquid gunpowder known as animal killer, and a few bottles of moonshine. The firewaters took pride of place. Among the other ranks were Georgian wines and Armenian brandies, Zhigulovsky beer, mineral waters, Limonad and the Soviet Coke, Sayani.
She smiled back at him, the smile at the funeral. ‘I think we can manage.’
‘Vodka then. Yubileinaya.’
‘You’re a connoisseur.’ She poured him a shot of vodka and a glass of mineral water and pointed at the zakuski. ‘You have to eat or the vodka burns holes in your stomach.’
Calder inspected the snacks. Glistening mounds of black, golden and red caviar, slices of smoked salmon, pickled mushrooms, gherkins, blinis, salamis and salads tossed with sour cream, brown and black bread.
He selected a couple of gherkins, tossed back the vodka, drank some mineral water and snapped his teeth into a gherkin.
‘You’ve done that before,’ she said.
‘Many times.’
‘We have a saying that drinking is the joy of Russia.’ She drank some white wine.
‘Then everyone must be very happy.’
‘It’s also a problem,’ she said. ‘Crime, absenteeism, divorce – drinking is usually the culprit. Even children in the kindergartens have been found drinking alcohol.’ She poured him another shot of vodka.
Calder noticed a stocky man, black hair needled with grey, pushing his way through the throng towards them. He skirted a poet tearfully reciting, stepped over two guests arm-wrestling on the floor and stopped beside Katerina. He carried himself like a soldier.
Katerina introduced him as her step-father. He clasped Calder’s hand and crushed it. ‘My name’s Alexander,’ he announced in Russian. ‘Sasha to you. My home is your home and now you must drink or else I shall be offended.’ He laughed hugely. ‘And now a toast. Silence!’ He waited until the only sound was the sobbing of the poet. Raising his glass he proposed a toast: ‘To Anglo-Soviet friendship and our guest from the United States.’
For a frozen moment everyone stared at Calder. He sensed no hostility in the concentrated gaze. But what was all this about? He had left America five years ago.
The stares dissolved, heads tilted. There was some scattered applause.
Sasha tapped his throat with one finger. ‘Pah, it is good to drink is it not, Gaspadeen Calder?’ He refilled their glasses with Yubileinaya. ‘Where do you live in America? I have only been to New York. With the choir, you understand.’
‘Sasha was in the Red Army Choir,’ Katerina explained and, turning her back to her step-father for a moment, whispered: ‘I didn’t tell them who you are.’
‘Boston,’ Calder said.
‘Ah. I pahked my cah in Hahvahd Yahd. How is that?’
‘Spoken like a true Bostonian,’ Calder said in Russian. The vodka was beginning to reach his socks. He smeared caviar on a finger of toast and ate it.
‘Sadly I had to return from New York before I could visit anywhere else. There was, ah, a little trouble ….’ Sasha winked theatrically. ‘But my voice stayed with me. Later I will sing to you.’
Katerina said: ‘The kitchen first. Have you forgotten what day it is?’
‘Ah, the most terrible day of the year. But if we don’t play their little game, Gaspadeen Calder, then we shall be denied our creature comforts for the other 364 days of the year.’ He winked again, with the other eye this time. ‘Isn’t that right, dochka?’ He pinched Katerina’s cheek and thrust his way back to the kitchen.
Katerina sighed. ‘Another male chauvinist.’
Beside them the arm-wrestlers, hands locked, veins bulging from their necks, grunted. In another corner a young man with long pale hair began to strum a guitar.
‘So I’m just visiting, huh?’
‘I couldn’t say you were a defector. My step-father wouldn’t have let you in. And not a single person in this room would have raised his glass to you.’
‘And you?’
Katerina sipped her wine. ‘You won’t find anyone in Russia who has much time for someone who ….’
‘Betrayed their country?’
She shrugged. ‘Deserted.’
‘Then why did you invite me here?’ He held up one hand. ‘Don’t tell me – you felt sorry for me.’
‘Because you worry me. You know, you left the West because you were disillusioned. That was the reason, wasn’t it? And now you seem to be disillusioned with the Soviet Union. I thought I’d show you what life here can be like.’
Calder gestured with his empty glass around the room. ‘Your friends certainly know how to enjoy themselves.’ It was the first time he had been inside a home like this; all the other invitations had been arranged – safe, tame, dull Communists. ‘It’s a bash.’
‘Would you find people enjoying themselves like this in Boston?’
Here we go, he thought, the equation. There was no escape from it. He said: ‘Sure you would.’ In his shared apartment near Fenway Park in his long-ago student days, for instance.
The arm of one of the wrestlers almost touched the floor, then sprang back again. The poet, to whom no one was listening, petulantly threw his glass against the wall.
A small woman with dimples and bright brown eyes said: ‘Is this the gentleman you were telling me about, Kata?’
Katerina introduced her mother.
Her mother said: ‘His glass is empty, Kata. Fill it with the demon. And don’t forget to eat, Gaspadeen Calder. We have a saying in the Soviet Union. Food on an empty stomach makes a full grave.’
Calder had long decided that Russians made up their sayings on the spur of the moment. ‘A wise proverb,’ he said graciously as she handed him cucumber salad and sour cream on a side-plate.
‘And what are you doing in Moscow, Gaspadeen Calder?’
Hurriedly, Katerina said: ‘He’s a writer. He’s writing an article for an American magazine.’
‘The National Geographic,’ Calder said, looking Katerina straight in the eye.
‘And how do you like our city?’ her mother asked. ‘Beautiful, no?’
‘Noble,’ Calder said. ‘Especially the Kremlin and the metro stations. They put ours to shame.’
Creases of pleasure appeared at the corners of her mouth. ‘We are very clean people, we Russians. Orderly and exuberant. Nothing by halves. And we look after our old people,’ she added.
Why don’t Intourist and Novosti introduce foreigners to people like this? Calder wondered. Instead visitors were forced to listen to actors reciting tired scripts, and taken to brochure showplaces instead of wooden villages clustered round a pump, to escape the dreaded condemnation: ‘Primitive.’
Not that the West managed much of a PR job: most Russians still thought London was a nineteenth-century stew.
Katerina’s mother said: ‘Soon we will eat and see what sort of a mess our men have made of it,’ sounding very indulgent towards male inefficiency. ‘And you, Kata, what have you been doing with yourself today?’
Calder sensed maternal worry: at the Institute it was common knowledge that Katerina was into Women’s Lib. What surprised everyone was that she was allowed to keep her job.
Katerina told her mother that she had been to a meeting. She didn’t elaborate and, although there was transparently more to it than that, her mother accepted the compromise and departed for the kitchen to see what sort of a hash the menfolk were making of supper.
‘What sort of meeting?’ Calder asked when she had gone.
‘You know perfectly well.’
‘The feminist movement?’ Calder frowned. ‘But why? I realise women get a pretty raw deal here. Divorce, abortion, exploitation …. But why do you care so much?’
She told him.
She was nineteen now, her father had left her mother when she was three. He met a girl at a summer camp on the Black Sea organised by the snow-plough factory where he worked and came home only to pick up his belongings.
The babushka, Katerina’s grandmother on her father’s side, left too and her mother had to quit her job as a waitress in the National Hotel to look after her daughter.
Her family helped financially and the State helped but she had to move into an apartment block of ‘boxes’ near the docks at Khimki Port. She got a job in a canteen there and paid a neighbour to look after Katerina during the day.
She tended to Katerina in the evenings and worked late into the night cooking and cleaning and mending.
A docker moved in briefly. He beat her up and stole her savings from under the mattress. Where else?
Her mother became bitter towards men. The bitterness was infectious.
Apart from visits from a family friend – ‘Yury Petrov, a pirate,’ Katerina said fondly – and an expedition to his home in Siberia this state of affairs lasted for thirteen years.
Then she met Sasha at the Central Soviet Army Drama Theatre on Kommuny Square and everything changed.
A miracle.
‘He sang his way into our hearts,’ Katerina told Calder. Her eyes were moist. ‘A wonderful man.’
‘But a chauvinist.’
‘Beyond redemption,’ she said happily.
‘Don’t you think the big-heartedness of Russian men outweighs their faults?’ They were both speaking English now.
‘You don’t understand: it’s injustice I’m fighting. I lived with it for thirteen years; it’s part of me. Just as it’s part of your Judy Goldsmith. When her father left home her mother lived for three years with five children in a chicken-coop. Now Judy Goldsmith is president of the National Organisation for Women, but I bet she still dreams she’s living in a chicken-coop.’
‘And you want to become president of something like that?’
‘Doubtful, after what happened today.’
‘The meeting?’
‘I burned down the hall,’ she said.
Sasha made his ceremonial entry from the kitchen carrying a dish of chicken cutlets and singing:
A circle for the sun
Sky all around
That’s what the little boy drew
Carefully sketched on his paper
Wrote underneath the corner.
Sasha paused. Children had materialised from another room. They stood like a choir poised for song. Sasha winked at them. Piping voices joined his baritone:
Let there always be sunshine
Let there always be blue skies
Let there always be Mummy
Let there always be me.
Then everyone fell on the food. Chicken and meat dumplings and beef stewed with sour cream and borsch. The men, Katerina’s mother admitted, hadn’t made such a hash of it.
‘So,’ Katerina said, spearing a meat dumpling with her fork, ‘do you feel as if you’ve been accepted?’
‘Marvellous people.’
‘That song – the chorus was written by a four-year-old boy. Sentimental people, the Russians.’
‘What would Sasha do now if I told him I was a defector?’
‘Throw you out on your ear.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you that it can take more courage to defect than to stay in your own country?’
‘You didn’t defect,’ she said, ‘you ran away,’ voice suddenly frosted.
The noise around him seemed to swell. Chink of cutlery against china, laughter, talk, the strummed notes of the guitar. The arm-wrestlers had called it a day, neither vanquished, the poet was asleep curled up like a bulky foetus. Sasha had his arm round the shoulders of Katerina’s mother.
He thought: ‘I’ll never belong.’
He heard her voice distantly. ‘… told you my story. Isn’t it time you told me what happened?’
He concentrated. ‘Not yet. Not here.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I think I drank some animal killer by mistake.’
Would Sasha really throw him out? Of course. The Red Army Choir rang with patriotism. The Twilight Brigade took a different view. Their motto was Samuel Johnson’s: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Calder felt like an island. He told Katerina that he was leaving.
‘So soon?’
‘Perhaps you’ll show me more of your Moscow. The city foreigners never see. I remember as a kid on the waterfront in Boston there were some slot machines. You fed them a nickel and a tableau came to life. A circus, a rodeo, that sort of thing. That’s the Russia foreigners see. Feed Intourists with hard currency and the tableaux come to life. But with you I have a passport ….’
‘You have Soviet citizenship, an internal passport. You’re free to travel.’
‘You know that’s not true.’
She gave a shrug, a dismissal. ‘Perhaps one day ….’
Calder said goodbye to Katerina’s parents. ‘But the party’s only just beginning,’ Sasha objected. He sung a few bars of the Volga Boatman. ‘The song all Americans know.’ Calder braced himself for Sasha’s handshake but it was limper this time, emasculated by firewater.
Calder left.
Outside the cold embraced him like an old friend and sent the vodka coursing through his veins. With a skull full of fancies he made his way on rubber knees to the Zhiguli in the parking lot.
The cream paint on the battered Volga that followed him shone silver in the moonlight.
When he got back to his apartment off Gorky Street Calder found Jessel from the American Embassy waiting for him.
Jessel, a New Yorker, was his link with the United States: he was one of Jessel’s links with the Soviet Union. Jessel worked for the Commercial Counsellor. He was middle-aged with amiable features and a soft voice and thin, ear-to-ear hair. He didn’t look at all like a spy and that was his strength.
He pretended to like Calder but from time to time Calder caught a frayed glance and he knew that Jessel was thinking: ‘How can you have done it?’
To make things easier for themselves they played chess.
For Calder chess was his therapy. It gave him direction. He believed it to be the distillation of human behaviour encompassing prodigious foresight, petty opportunism, grand strategems, puny deceptions and glittering combinations that could fail because of a single unsighted flaw. Moreover chess was the honed product of centuries of trial and error, a diamond made of compressed genius.
Jessel, who had the key to the apartment, was sitting in front of a crowded chess board drinking bourbon.
‘Make yourself at home,’ Calder said.
‘And where,’ Jessel asked, moving a white pawn, ‘have you been making yourself at home?’
‘At a party.’
‘Obviously. Whose?’
‘None of your business.’
‘That,’ Jessel said mildly, ‘is for me to decide.’
Calder took off his coat and shapka. In the kitchen he dropped ice-cubes into a glass and poured Narzan mineral water onto them. The ice-cubes cracked back at him. The vodka had made his tongue thick and unmanageable.
Glass in hand, he went back to the living room. Jessel had lit his pipe and rearranged the chess pieces in pre-battle order.
Calder gestured around the room with “his glass. ‘Clean?’
Jessel picked up the bag containing his electronic sweep. ‘As a whistle. The comrades must trust you. What were you drinking, paint-remover?’
Jessel wasn’t a great drinker. He took care of himself and jogged every morning along the banks of the Moscow River. He was tougher than his appearance suggested.
Calder said: ‘You know better than that: they don’t trust anyone.’
He moved to the window and gazed at the floodlit public gardens below. He enjoyed them. In summer they dozed dustily; in winter they radiated vitality as youngsters with polished faces skated exuberantly along paths hosed with water to convert them into canals of ice.
In fact he enjoyed the apartment near the monumental buildings of Gorky Street, the best bakery in town and the extravagances of Gastronom No. 1. Compared with the barrack-block flats occupied by most of the defectors it was a palace and attracted much envious comment. But then they didn’t know what he knew. He was a VID, a Very Important Defector, and as such was entitled to a home isolated from the Brigade. He even had a wooden dacha in the country. Dalby was the only other defector with one of those.
Jessel said: ‘You’d better take white. In your condition you need the extra move.’
‘I can still beat you blind-folded,’ Calder told him. In fact there wasn’t much to choose between the two of them, although Jessel was the more cautious player, Calder finding it difficult to resist a potentially swashbuckling brilliancy without assessing it thoroughly. Patience was what he lacked. Jessel’s careful intricacies had earned him the right to play in a few minor tournaments in the Soviet Union and to spy in unlikely places. ‘I’ll take black,’ Calder said.
P-K4.
P-K4.
Calder made his move standing beside the marble-topped coffee table and continued to patrol the living room; movement, he hoped, would help to sober him up. The apartment helped to settle him – he had grown into it and it was shabby like himself. Period Muscovite with sombre furnishings and a rich, balding carpet; but it did contain small glories such as carvings leafed with gold, a painting of Siberian pastures feathered with mauve blossom, a chandelier whose frozen tears had been washed with soapy water only that morning by Lidiya, his maid. Unlike so many members of the Twilight Brigade he hadn’t cluttered it with bric-à-brac, the detritus of the abandoned West.
‘Your move,’ Jessel said.
‘Knight to queen’s bishop three,’ Calder replied without looking at the board.
‘You’re very sure of yourself.’ Jessel undid his button-down collar and loosened his striped tie.
‘How many times have we played the Ruy Lopez before?’
‘I might surprise you this time.’
‘Surprise me,’ Calder said.
A few minutes consideration, then: ‘Your move again.’
‘Pawn to queen’s rook three,’ Calder said, again without looking. The popular line these days, when vodka was your second and you had to play carefully.
Looking at the sparkling chandelier, he hoped he hadn’t been too abrupt with Lidiya earlier that day. She had been waiting for him when he had returned from the Institute, normally docile features animated. Apparently she had joined a queue in Warna, the Bulgarian store on Leninsky, and bought a cherry-coloured dress with a flared skirt. Despite the fact that five hundred other women would be wearing the same dress she was delighted with her purchase and she was wearing it for him.
He was touched. ‘Very pretty,’ he told her.
She smoothed the skirt against her thighs. She had been allotted to him when he first came to Moscow and she had served him well in the apartment, adequately in bed.
Respect had arisen between them although even now he didn’t really know if she enjoyed the love-making: it seemed to him to owe a lot to a Western sex manual given to her to cater for a decadent American’s appetites.
She was a lean woman with surprisingly large breasts. She was frankly plain and might one day look spinsterish, but there was a pleasing serenity about her and her brown hair curled prettily at the nape of her neck.
‘Would you like me to stay?’ she asked him but he told her no, he had work to do, and she departed ostensibly unperturbed, but you could never really tell with Lidiya.
The reason for the dismissal had been the invitation to the party from Katerina Ilyina.
Calder sat down at the coffee table and considered the Ruy Lopez developing on the board. He had little doubt that Jessel would move his bishop to rook four and that he would be able to produce a reasonable opening game by making copybook moves. By the ninth move they had progressed predictably to the Closed Defence. No dazzling variations tonight. Wasn’t it Reti who had said that a player’s chess style tended to be the opposite to his life-style? Tonight that made him a buccaneer off the board.
Calder moved his knight to queen’s rook four. The Chigorin System still as popular as ever nearly eighty years after the master’s death. When your own adventurous instincts were temporarily paralysed you could do worse than follow the father of the modern Soviet chess who had confounded the old Tarrasch school.
He said: ‘How’s Harry?’
Jessel said: ‘Whose party was it?’
‘A girl at the Institute.’
‘The new girl who looks after the files on the defectors?’
Calder nodded. ‘Harry?’
‘He’s fine. He’s got a sailboat and he’s hoping to take part in the Charles River Regatta in October.’
‘He isn’t sailing now, is he? It must be cold.’
‘It’s Boston,’ Jessel said. ‘He had a little accident the other day.’
Alarm spurted like acid. ‘How little?’
‘Very. He fell off his bicycle and grazed his knee.’
So why tell me? All part of the process, Calder assumed.
‘He’s still a Bruins freak of course,’ Jessel said, moving a bishop.
Still? Harry was only eight. ‘And Ruth?’
‘Where was the party?’
Calder gave him the address on Leningradsky.
‘Guests?’
‘Her mother and father were there.’
‘Step-father,’ Jessel corrected him. ‘Ruth’s finally passed all her exams and got a job teaching handicapped children.’
Who would have thought it? Ruth, one of the flowers of Bostonian society, arrogance her birthright. He saw her shopping in Newbury Street: the street seemed to belong to her.
Jessel said: ‘I presume this girl is stukachi.’
‘An informer? If she catalogues our lives she must be. One in twelve Soviet citizens are supposed to be KGB contacts, aren’t they? But I should think she’s innocent enough. You know, merely passing on updated material to her superiors.’
‘She’s into Women’s Lib isn’t she?’
‘You seem to know a lot about her.’
‘Sure, I do my homework.’
Calder knew that Jessel had contacts other than himself inside the Institute.
Jessel said: ‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd? You know, that a dissident of sorts should be employed there?’ He relit his pipe and blew smoke across the chess board; it smelled of autumn.
‘Ours not to reason why,’ Calder said.
Jessel stroked his long, sparse hair. ‘Aren’t you going to ask about your parents?’
Calder asked; he doubted whether they ever asked about him. His mother, perhaps.
‘Your mother’s fine. Your father had a stroke but he’s going to be okay. Maybe a little speech impediment.’
Calder found it difficult to imagine his father’s diction impaired. That magisterial voice saying grace before lunch – Calder had never quite forgiven God for semolina pudding.
‘How’s my mother taking it?’
‘Bravely. As always. It’s your move.’
Calder stayed with Chigorin. Pawn to bishop four.
Somewhere a clock chimed. He stood up and walked to the window. The floodlights had been switched off but he could see the bluish radiance of the street lights on Gorky Park. He closed the curtains.
Jessel was frowning at the board. What was bothering him about Calder’s play was his uncharacteristic conformity: it upset his own. Calder wondered how the party on Lenin-gradsky was progressing. For the first time he had been accepted by Russians, but only because his presence had been a lie.
Jessel said: ‘Is there still a lot of speculation about Kreiber?’
‘The rumours have become facts. He committed suicide, he was dumped beneath the ice after being knifed in his apartment, he was a double – or should it be triple – agent, a rapist, a homosexual ….’
‘He was a sad sack, ‘Jessel said, not quite touching his queen’s pawn. ‘So the Twilight Brigade is in disarray?’
‘Alarm bells have been sounded, sure. If Kreiber was murdered then the comrades were clumsier than usual. That blood on the edge of the ice ….’
‘And you, do you think he was killed?’
Calder shrugged. ‘It’s your move.’
‘Do you anticipate any more deaths? No one thinking of trying to get an exit visa?’
‘You must be kidding, ‘Calder said.
‘Not even figuratively? You know, retracing their footsteps.’
‘You think they’d tell me if they were? If they confided in anyone it would be Dalby.’
‘Alas, he’s not my pigeon.’ Jessel moved. P-Q4 as Calder knew he would.
Calder sat down and tried to concentrate but the firewater had frozen in his veins and his head was full of ice. He looked at Jessel who was examining his pipe the way pipe-smokers do, as if he had only just discovered it protruding from his mouth. ‘I quit,’ Calder said.
Jessel appeared mildly surprised; disconcerted never. ‘You really put one on, didn’t you?’ His speech was a curious mixture of slang and protocol English.
‘Do you mind if I go to bed?’
Jessel stood up. ‘It’s your bed.’ He picked up his coat and Persian lamb hat from the sofa. ‘Laura will be surprised to see me home so early.’ Jessel was very proud of his happy marriage and tried to keep his home in one of the complexes reserved for foreigners as American as possible. Calder found his visits disconcerting, their purpose questionable; he tolerated them because Jessel kept him informed about Ruth and Harry. In the past he had tried to contact Ruth but his letters had been returned unopened and her telephone number was no longer listed. ‘I’ll be in touch. Any messages?’
‘None.’ There wasn’t any point: he was his family’s shame. He hoped Ruth had put antiseptic on Harry’s knee.
Jessel let himself out of the apartment, closing the door softly behind him. Calder waited until he heard the clatter of the elevator gates, then went into the bedroom.
The phone shrilled as he was lowering his head gently onto the pillow. When he picked up the receiver he heard breathing.
‘Hallo.’
The breathing was slow and measured.
‘Who’s that?’
Click.
He stared at the receiver for a moment before replacing it.
He laid his head on the pillow; above him the moulded ceiling spun like a dying top. He closed his eyes. He was playing chess with Stalin and he was losing. When Stalin called: ‘Check,’ he leaned across the board and pulled his shaggy moustache. It came off in his hand.
