A Little White Death (6 page)

A day without the cutting wind, a day albeit far from his fantasy of floating around in shirtsleeves, had warmed him, literally, to the Mediterranean. He was, he had always thought, ‘not a
Med person’. He had been dragged uncomplainingly on several grand tours as a child; he had seen towers lean and heard bridges sigh, and gazed unimpressed on the dug-out ruins of a city that
bore his own name; but had never seen himself as a man to laze away his days on a Greek island, or become one of those Englishmen in exile, Graham Greene in Antibes, D. H. Lawrence on Sardinia, or
Robert Graves on Majorca. He took holidays, when he took them, in England. With his pigs and his long-playing records – though he had yet to get around to the joys of stereophonic sound
– and his books.

A waiter coughed politely to drag Troy back to the real world and the present day.

‘A package for you, M’sieur. Delivered by hand.’

It was one of those padded envelopes, bulky and heavy. Charlie. It had to be from Charlie.

Troy ripped it open. Inside the package was a second envelope and a short, typed, unsigned message.

‘Sorry. Change of venue. Still, you always did want to visit the old place, didn’t you?’

In the second envelope was a Soviet Foreign Ministry letter of authorisation in lieu of a visa, stamped and signed and counter-stamped and countersigned, made out in Troy’s name, and four
airline tickets – Beirut to Athens by Zippo Charters, Athens to Moscow by Aeroflot, Moscow to Zurich by Aeroflot and Zurich to London by BOAC. He checked the itinerary. He had two days in
Russia. Two days in Russia. The old country. Land of his father, land of his grandfather and all their fathers before them. It was the last place on earth he wanted to be.

Said Hussein found him, checking out of the Saint-Georges in the morning. He looked at the suitcase, he looked at Troy and drew the obvious conclusion.

‘You know where he was.’

It was not a question.

‘Yes,’ said Troy.

‘You’re not going to tell me.’

‘I can’t. Believe me, I can’t.’

‘You’re not playing the game, Mr Troy. If I had been the one to find out, I would tell you.’

‘What I know you cannot use. If you do, it’s Charlie’s life on the line. I admit it’s not fair on you as a journalist, but that’s the way it is. If it’s any
consolation to you, I’d be happy to talk to the family when I get back. You can have Charlie’s job. Dammit, you can have Alliss’s too.’

‘Which I won’t refuse.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

‘There’s a war coming. Israel and the Arabs again. Perhaps two or three years from now, but coming nonetheless. Arthur’s not up to a war. He’d have to be replaced sooner
or later.’

Hussein paused as he so often did in consideration of his next remark.

‘But’, he continued, ‘don’t you think it’s a bit ruthless?’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘No I don’t.’ Now he too searched for the considered phrase.

‘He’s had his day.’

Hussein did not seem to disagree with this.

‘There is one thing. I will have to continue to look for Charlie and, worse from your point of view, look into Charlie. My employers will expect that of me. Supposing it turns out that
Charlie was a spy?’

‘I think that’s a foregone conclusion,’ said Troy.

‘I meant a spy while he was here. Suppose the journalism was merely his cover. What then? Suppose that even now he is a spy. What then?’

‘Then you publish what you find. I’m not even going to ask those questions. I don’t want to know.’

At Athens he changed planes and bought a bottle of ouzo – he’d never tasted the stuff and, besides, it would be a beakerful of the warm south to take into the
Russian winter. He also bought the
Sunday Post
. An outrageous price and nearly two days old, but he desperately wanted an English paper.

‘Where is Leigh-Hunt?’ ran the headline, and underneath it was another version of what Said had told him, bylined to Arthur Alliss, ‘our Middle Eastern correspondent’.
The piece concluded that Charlie was in Russia. Troy turned to the inside pages. A leader, the work of his brother-in-law Lawrence Stafford, called upon the Foreign Office to clarify the matter
– had Leigh-Hunt defected or not? ‘Mr Woodbridge was forthright in his denial of rumours alleging that Charles Leigh-Hunt was a Soviet agent some six years ago. It is not for him to
remain silent now. Where is Leigh-Hunt? Who is his paymaster?’

Troy thought ‘paymaster’ a bit histrionic, but then writing about spookery brought out all the clichés.

Under Home News, eclipsed by the Charlie scandal, was an item on the Labour Party leadership. The chief contenders to replace the late Hugh Gaitskell were Harold Wilson and George Brown –
both of them politicians swept into the Commons in the great tide of 1945, just like Rod. But Rod’s name was nowhere.

He had always known Moscow would be cold. Family history,
War and Peace
and School Certificate geography told him that – but this cold? He could scarcely believe
thermometers were made that would record temperatures this low. He was wearing every scrap of clothing he had with him, and dearly wished for his Aran sweater or one of those sheepskin things
ex-RAF types wore for tearing round the English countryside in little MGs and boring the arse off village pubgoers with their version of the Battle of Britain. At a pinch he’d settle for an
extra pair of socks or reinforced Y-fronts. Or a hat, he thought, God send me a hat.

The Russians had not set up one of those flexible tubes that conveyed passengers from plane to immigration like dust up a hoover without ever touching ground, without the literal sense that
‘landing’ implies and ought to imply. Troy touched ground, or touched tarmac, as near as he would get to the soil of Mother Russia, feeling little or nothing and wondering what it was
he should feel. Perhaps wonderment was all and perhaps wonderment was enough? He was the first Troy to return to Russia in fifty-eight years. His father had never set foot east of Berlin, nor had
his Uncle Nikolai and neither had ever expressed any desire to. His brother Rod had tried time and time again to wangle his way onto Labour Party or trade union official visits, and failed time and
time again. Troy had never wanted to visit the old country. He much preferred it to exist in the fanciful yarns and fables of his grandfather Rodyon Rodyonovitch – or in the precise,
near-scientific accounts of his father Alexei Rodyonovitch, which in the end served to foster the mythical status of Russia as surely as his grandfather’s highly unreliable tales had done.
All in all, Russia, the Russia of his boyhood, the Russia of the nursery, the Russia imbibed at his mother’s knee and his father’s dinner table, did not exist except as a country of the
mind. As he stood on the windblown tarmacadam, beneath an invisible sky, between the Tupelov jet and the vast blankness of the concrete buildings, blinded by arc lights, frozen to his fingertips,
surrounded by the sibilant babble of the language of childhood, his sense of wonder amounted to one simple, inadequate question: ‘Is this it?’

Troy followed the snaking Russian susurrus into the blockhouse. A lazy silence overlay an intimidated whisper. No jets roared, no propellers thrashed, and the Soviet apparatchiks yawned their
way through the routine like men sleepwalking. It seemed too casual, too informal quite to be the Soviet Union. It was Ruritania – anywhere east of the Danube, anywhere they wore outlandish
uniforms and looked like chorus boys from the
Student Prince
. He changed that. As soon as he presented his passport and papers the uniformed officer diverted the half-dozen people behind him
to a separate table. Troy looked at the uniform. Blue collar flashes with red piping – KGB. He stood several minutes in silence while the officer in front of him looked at every page of his
passport, turning it this way and that to see the blurred stamps of countries he had visited, and read the letter from the Foreign Ministry. When the man had finished a second man appeared and he,
too, took several minutes to reach the obvious conclusion.

‘It’s him,’ he said to the first.

It occurred to Troy that Charlie would undoubtedly have omitted to tell his Russian masters that he, Troy, spoke Russian. He would probably have told them just as much of the truth as he needed
and no more.

The first man looked at Troy. A handsome face. Mediterranean blue eyes, at least the blue of the Mediterranean in January, beneath the low brim of a fur-lined hat. Troy envied him the fur hat.
Troy could kill for the fur hat.

‘Baggage,’ he said simply, and for a second Troy thought it was an insult rather than an instruction. The man gestured upward with his hand and Troy plonked his suitcase on the
counter between them. He flicked the catches and turned the case towards the two immigration officers.

They rummaged through, found only the
Sunday Post
, Troy’s last clean shirt and his washbag. They felt the lining of the suitcase, tapped the bottom, took apart his razor, gazed
oddly at the black-and-white badger-hair shaving brush, sniffed at the styptic pencil that stemmed the flow of blood every time Troy cut himself shaving, and at the end seemed more than slightly
incredulous.

‘Is this all you’ve got?’

‘I’m wearing everything else,’ said Troy.

All the same, the second man patted him down, arms in the air, took his fountain pen from his jacket pocket, unscrewed the top, put it back, and pronounced him ‘clean’.

The first man shrugged, the second man responded like an imitative monkey and they got on with the routine.

‘Commander Troy. This permits you entry to the Soviet Union for forty-eight hours. It permits you entry only to the city of Moscow and to the airport. You are forbidden to travel outside
the city limits. Do not attempt to travel outside the city limits, and be back here in time for your flight the day after tomorrow. If you’re not, we’ll come looking for you.’

‘Of course,’ said Troy. ‘Thank you.’

The man held out the passport and papers to Troy, and as Troy took them he turned to the second man and said, ‘Tell her he is leaving now. And if she loses him she’ll spend the rest
of her life directing traffic in Novaya Zemlya.’

No – they definitely didn’t know he spoke Russian.

He caught up with the tail end of the crowd. A barn-like lobby, drab and makeshift – two styles, as he would soon learn, that the Soviet Union did rather well – and fifty-odd people
milling around under the watchful eye of a dozen uniformed militia and God only knew how many out of uniform. The crowd thinned as people made their way out through a wall of swing doors and into
the freezing night, and suddenly one door swung inwards with a mighty push and there was Charlie.

‘What would you like first,’ he boomed, ‘The riddle, the mystery or the enigma?’

This was not the man he had known, not the man with whom he had shared the permanence of boyhood and adolescence. Here was a man bloated by booze, elephantine with indulgence. Allowing for the
bulk of his heavy fur coat, he was still fat. The chin had quadrupled and was now better referred to in the plural; his nose was a shining red beacon to any stout-hearted fellow boozer in search of
a good, miserable time getting to the bottom of another bottle, and as they peeped out from under his fur hat, it seemed to Troy that even his earlobes were fat. How could anyone have fat
earlobes?

Charlie crushed him in a bear hug.

‘Bugger the enigma,’ Troy said. ‘I want a coat like yours and I want it now.’

‘Trust me,’ said Charlie. ‘I’ve thought of everything.’

He usually did.

He stuck his own fur hat on Troy’s head. His blond mop had thinned at the crown, his forehead had creased into a hundred furrows, though the blue eyes twinkled still in the falling ruin of
what had been a beautiful, heart-shaped face.

‘Back of the car,’ he said. ‘Keeping warm for you.’

Charlie led Troy to his car. A Soviet-built, Soviet-issue, sixseater Zim saloon – defectors for the use of – looking like a poor man’s Studebaker from ten or twelve years ago,
with a front end like a set of mocking false teeth. An ugly car conforming precisely to the maxim of the late genius of capitalism, Henry Ford, in being available in ‘any colour you want so
long as it’s black.’

Charlie opened the back door, picked up a coat so dense it looked to Troy like a dead mammoth. He wrapped Troy in it as though he were a helpless child, grinning all the time as if they were
sharers of some silent, exclusive joke. The grin became a laugh. Troy felt huge arms embrace him once more, the bear’s paws clapping him on the back, then pushing him away to arm’s
length in a gesture that said ‘Let me look at you.’ He had not changed, he knew. Hardly a grey hair, not an extra pound of weight nor inch of girth since he was twenty-five. They were
the same age. They had matched each other step by step throughout their lives until a few years ago, big man and little man, twins of adversity. At forty-one they had parted, divided lives and
ideologies. Not that Troy knew for a moment what his own ideology was. It just wasn’t Charlie’s.

‘Can we go,’ he said. ‘I’m freezing.’

Charlie put the car into gear and lurched off. He was an even worse driver than Troy.

They tore down a tree-lined road, so thick with trees it struck Troy that they had entered some mythical Russian forest, been sucked effortlessly into the plot of
Peter and the Wolf
, not
the outer suburbs of a capital city.

‘Y’know,’ said Charlie, ‘I have one hell of job remembering which side of the road the Russkis drive on.’

Troy had noticed this.

‘We’re being followed, by the way.’

‘I keep forgetting you’re a detective. Yes, Freddie, of course we’re being followed. Give me half a chance and I’ll spot the bugger and we can lose him.’

Charlie peered into the rear-view mirror. Troy felt the car meander across the lanes, heard the honks of protest.

‘It’s not a him, it’s a her.’

‘How do you know? You’ve spotted her already?’