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CHAPTER 8

In summer mushrooms proliferate in the green and silver countryside outside Moscow as urgently as that short season itself. And armies of gribniki, mushroom-hunters, leave their sweating city in search of Little Foxes, Shaggy Parasols, Caesar’s Mushrooms, Horns of Plenty …. The fungi are eaten raw, cooked, pickled or salted; they are also measured with a fisherman’s elastic rule and toasted exuberantly – brown vodka for the milk mushroom, pellucid and ice-cold firewater for a russala. The pastime is pursued exhaustively because there has to be a little exquisite suffering in most experiences; photographs of mammoth fungi are printed in the Press; doctors in hospital casualty departments stand by with stomach-pumps for the first imprudent gribniki.

At the Institute the Twilight Brigade went mushroom-hunting with qualified enthusiasm. Few of them had ever hankered after anything more exotic than the cultivated mushroom, on the other hand the younger recruits were keen to take part in anything characteristically Russian. It was all part of adapting, being accepted, and if long-serving members of the Brigade were sceptical about this they nevertheless accompanied the alien gribniki because there was not a lot to be said against supping a few grams of Stolichnaya in the cool of a birch forest.

In charge of mushroom-hunting was Mrs Lundkvist from Sweden. In fact she was in charge of most Russian-orientated pursuits managing through perseverance and unrelenting good humour to drum up support for her activities.

She was a once-beautiful blonde who was being remorselessly converted by the years into a matron. A decade earlier her husband had fled to Moscow bringing with him the secrets of Swedish submarine surveillance in the Baltic and his wife had followed him. The unkind asserted that if he had known this he would have stayed where he was and faced the music.

On this particular June morning Mrs Lundkvist, seated at the head of Table No. 5 during mid-morning break in the Institute canteen, was finding it difficult to sustain interest in mushrooms because another subject was vying for attention. A subject that is always discussed with animation in any expatriate society. Death.

Just as speculation about the death of Alfredo Bertoldi had begun to wane a Dutchman named van Doom had disappeared.

Mrs Lundkvist, sipping lemon tea and speaking in English because she had long ago discovered to her chagrin that Russian would never be the lingua franca of the defectors, began to list to her audience the ten articles they would have to take with them into the country.

‘Basket, waxed paper, tins, notepaper, stick ….’

Fabre, the Frenchman, said to Calder: ‘Do you think he’s still alive?’

‘How should I know? It’s not the first time he’s gone missing ….’

‘True. Once he meets the pretty boys outside the Bolshoi he seems to stick with them.’ The nodding of Fabre’s creased old face acquired an obscene air.

Dalby said: ‘He’ll be back.’ As usual he spoke with nonchalant authority. He had retired from the Institute two years ago and had stopped by for coffee on his way to the Pushkin Museum.

‘Unless he’s dead.’ The speaker was Langley, the Canadian who had been talking to Katerina at Kreiber’s funeral. A bright young hope in the RCMP he had elected to stay in Moscow when the KGB had shown him photographs of himself with two girls which they planned to show to his boss and his wife unless ….

‘Dead?’ The slanting pouches on Dalby’s face took up the question. ‘Why should he be d … dead? You younger people do tend to be terribly dramatic’

‘Well he won’t be the first this year,’ Langley said defensively. He was thirty-ish and followed Western fashions as best he could, managing with his mussed fair hair and moustache to look like a shop-worn model for a cigarette advertisement.

‘True. Natural causes, accident, suicide …. We all have to go some time you know. Even you.’

‘A whole lot of people seem to have been going-some-time recently.’

‘Coincidence, my dear fellow. Would you have preferred their deaths to have been staggered tover the year?’

‘I’ll let you know,’ Langley said, ‘when van Doorn shows his face.’

Mrs Lundkvist said loudly: ‘You must pick out mushrooms with care. Never, never experiment. Peasants will tell you’ – Calder suspected that anyone outside Stockholm was a peasant – ‘that there are ways of testing fungi to see if they are edible. Take no notice, consult the experts.’ She laughed gaily. ‘In this case me.’

‘Do you really think,’ Langley went on, ‘that Bertoldi committed suicide?’

Dalby sighed. ‘How many times have we been through this? There is no evidence to the contrary. He left a note, he was seen to jump.’

‘Fall,’ Calder said.

He was keeping his eye on the Russians coming into the canteen to see if Katerina was among them. He had been to the Maly Theatre with her the previous evening and he wanted to discuss the play – and to be near her. The Russians veered away from the corner of the canteen occupied by the defectors: that was alien territory.

‘Very well, fall. That’s what happens when you jump, I believe. Do you m … mean you still have doubts?’