A Little White Death (8 page)

Gorki trousered it. Troy had no idea of the rate of exchange but knew from the rate of trousering and way he filled the glasses to the brim that he had just made his day.

‘You’re English?’ Gorki asked with a hint of astonishment.

‘Yes.’

‘How come you speak Russian with a poncey accent? That’s how the last of the toffs spoke when I was a boy. Just before we put ’em upagainst a wall and shot
’em.’

‘Perhaps I come from a long line of ponces,’ said Troy.

Gorki roared with laughter and Troy gently wove through the crowd, clutching virtual quarter-pints of vodka.

Charlie sucked down a huge gulpand relished the rush. They stared a while at the soup congealing in the cold. It was, as Charlie had observed, remarkably reminiscent of school dinners, in which
a multitude of sins could be disguised with custard – custard from a packet. Perhaps this was where all the British Army Surplus Custard Powder went. Dumped cheap on the Russian market.

Troy wiped a clear circle in the wet glass of the window with his fingertips and looked out. A woman stepped quickly back from the arc of light thrown by a streetlamp. It was the first and far
from clear sighting he had had of her, but this must be the unfortunate woman who would be bound for Novaya Zemlya if she lost them. Troy would try to do the decent thing and ensure she kept up
with them. The poor woman must be frozen stiff out there.

Charlie set down his glass and picked up his tale.

‘“How long have I got?” I asked him. “A day? Two?” “Terribly sorry, Charlie,” he says, “it’s less than that. They want you gone now.”
We said goodbye. The bugger even shook my hand. I left the embassy. Slipped old Abu Wagih a fiver to keep an eye out for you, bought a toothbrush at a corner pharmacy and went straight to the
docks. You can always count on there being at least one Russian ship in port. I found the captain. Recited him a little speech I’d learnt phonetically for just such an occasion years ago. He
calls a Party apparatchik – you can always count on there being one of them too – they get on the shortwave to Moscow. Some poor bugger’s turfed out of his berth to make way for
me. Three days later I’m met at Piraeus by the spooks and formally put in the diplomatic bag.
Cetera quis nescit?
’

The vodka showed in his face and in his eyes. A slack-jawed, hang-dog, rheum-eyed, tear-brimmed, bloodshot misery. He gazed into Troy’s – clear, fleckless black mirrors gazing back
at him. It seemed he could not hold his gaze, his eyes flicked around the room and his hand took refuge around the glass once more.

‘You know I never noticed before – never could I suppose – they all look like you, Freddie. Little buggers. Shortarses with ebony eyes. About as warm as the outside bog in
February. I feel like Gulliver, washed up in Lilliput, out of size and out of place, in a country I’d only dreamt about.’

Troy ignored the dig. If Charlie was this drunk there were more important things to be said before he vanished into incoherence. ‘Charlie, if all the British wanted was the guarantee of
your silence, why didn’t they just have you bumped off ?’

Charlie took another huge, corrosive gulpof vodka and thought about it.

‘Y’know,’ he said at last, ‘that’s just what I’ve been asking myself for the past week. It would be so easy, wouldn’t it? I could vanish without trace.
No body, no culprit. Blame the bloody Arabs if they wanted. Blame who the hell they like. Why didn’t they just get it over with? Why didn’t the bastards just get it over with? Out to
the swamplike Big Lennie. And wham! But – they didn’t . . . and here I am looking at the prospect of life in Mtensk . . . or Magneto-Gorsk . . . or Upyer-Bumsk.’

Troy watched Charlie’s head begin to loll at the end of his neck like a slackening string puppet. The jowls beneath his jawline, swelling and shrinking, bellows on a concertina, as his
head rolled around in a lazy arc, and the palpebral flutter as his eyes fought to keep their focus. It was, he thought, all so implausible. He could understand that the British might not want
another trial of a traitor quite so soon after George Blake and John Vassall. Indeed it could be argued, were there a sober opponent to argue with, that a trial would do more damage than a
defection any day, particularly to relationships with the Americans, who might well be thinking by now that we were a deeply unreliable nation. A trial was dirty linen washed in public. A defection
half tucked it away in someone else’s laundry basket, concealed as much as it revealed. But a hit? A discreet, untraceable murder? Really, there was no reason at all why Charlie should not
have joined Norman Cobb belly-up, face-down, picked white, in the remote marshes at some biblical turning of the Thames.

Charlie lay sprawled on his back across the bed, arms and legs spread wide, still in his shirt, socks and underpants, his mouth open, snoring. Troy shook him gently. He did not
stir. He shook him harder. His gut wobbled between the gaping shirt buttons and the elastic of his Y-fronts, but he did not wake. It seemed to Troy that he might well sleepoff a bellyful of
cheapvvodka until lunchtime.

He went through Charlie’s pockets, pinched a few roubles to get him through the morning, put on the winter wardrobe – the sable hat, the fur coat – and stepped into the Moscow
streets. The first time. The first breath of Russian air, the first sight. Last night did not count. Charlie got between him and Moscow. Vodka got between him and Moscow. Again the same question in
his mind: ‘Is this it?’ Whatever he saw – splendour or squalor – ‘Is this it?’ was the only form response could take in his mind. After so long, after a
generation and more: ‘Is this really it?’

He found a bookshop on a street corner less than quarter of a mile away and bought a map of the city. The address was imprinted in his memory. Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Street, where Tolstoy used to
live, out in the Khamovniki, the old industrial quarter. He could find no such street on the map. Then the obvious dawned on him and he quickly found Lyev Tolstoy Street. For all he knew it had
been renamed some forty years or more. All the same, he’d know the house as soon as he saw it. Of that he was certain. The Moscow home of the Troitskys, abandoned by his father in 1905,
passed to an uncle in the interim and confiscated by the state in 1922.

He knew as soon as he left the bookshop that she was following him. It confirmed what he had first thought, that he, not Charlie, was the object of suspicion. He would have liked a clear look at
her, but the streets offered too few plate-glass windows in which to catch her reflection. He decided it did not matter. She was unlikely to lose him, and sooner or later, he’d have a chance
to turn without simply stopping her on the street. He caught a tram out to the southwest. The spook ran and leapt onto the platform at the last minute. If she broke a leg doing it, this woman would
not dare lose him.

Even the paint was the same colour his father had described to him – a middling, dull shade of green. The house rose straight upfrom the pavement on Lyev Tolstoy Street,
the ground-floor windows too high to see into, the outer doors closed tight against the season. A narrow, gabled house, climbing to five storeys in off-off-white, almost pale brown brick, with
copper pipes and gutters dulled by a century and a half of air and rain to a verdigris green brighter than the paintwork. The bars of the gates were folded back, a pattern of blooming lilies,
venuses rising from conch-like shells, woven into the ironwork. A splash of yellowy-white amid the greens.

A polished brass plate was fixed to the wall underneath the house number. ‘Ministry of Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat & Barley’. The house had once
belonged to the owner of the perfume distillery next door. His father had told him of the wafting scents that had curled upto his open window all summer long. The ministry had taken both buildings.
Not a wisp of summer’s scent remained.

There seemed no point in ringing. The doors looked to him as though they opened for no one. Besides, what reason, what excuse could he give for wanting to see inside? The Ministry of
Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat & Barley could scarcely be accustomed to the sons of the disinherited asking for a quick look round. He crossed the street to look
upat the topfloors, where the rooms disappeared into the pitch of the roof and reappeared as dormer windows, copper topped and adorned with ironwork so distant they could be fleur-de-lis or budding
roses. He could not tell and he could not recall that the old man had ever mentioned them to him. His father’s memory was for incident much more than static detail. He described the rooms
– the dining room in green, again green, as though it were the colour motif of the building; the main bedroom with its faded wallpaper of vast Monetesque flowers in paintbox colours; the
library in red maroon – simply because the boy Troy had nagged him for such detail. Of his own choosing he had told of his own boyhood in the next to attic room that was his nursery, where a
German governess had taught him to read and her French successor had let him watch her strip and bathe.

Troy looked slowly down the height of the building, each floor’s windows closed and shuttered as though the Ministry of Agriculture, Subdivision of Planning & Production, Wheat &
Barley had no need of natural light, and it struck him that the house was blind, that the ministry had put out its eyes, that the house was great and grey and grief-stricken, blind as blind
Gloucester. It saddened him. He could recall every room, though he had seen none. The governess’s bedroom; beneath that his aunt’s; beneath that his grandparents’; beneath that
the dining room; next to that the library; beneath that the drawing room; beneath that the scullery. He could have no feeling one way or the other about the use to which the Soviet government put
the building. No feeling even about the simple fact of possession. They were welcome to it. But the blindness of the house seemed simple and sad. They should not put out its eyes.

The spook stood at the corner. Awkward and idle. Her back to him as though waiting for anyone but him. She was small, even in the bulk of furs; he thought she could not be much more than five
foot four and eight stone.

Troy turned on his heel and set off across the street to the house on the other side, to No. 21, a clay-coloured house with green shutters, looming lime trees beyond a garden fence, and a bigger
brass plate reading ‘Tolstoy House Museum. Home of Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy 1828–1910. Writer.’ It could not have been more different as a house. A glorified wooden cottage on a
grand scale, grander than the Troitskys’ brick house, and found for Count Tolstoy by Troy’s grandfather some time in the 1880s.

It reminded him of similar houses he had visited in London. The Soane House in Lincoln’s Inn. A house more interesting for itself than any of the junk of antiquity Old Soane had collected
and stuffed into it from floor to ceiling. A house that seemed designed for living, inviting one always to sit down. The last thing one was expected to do. So it was here. He felt he wanted to sit
in the chair where Tolstoy sat, to have the same view across the desk, to doodle on the same blotter, to look out of the same window as Tolstoy himself, to see a lamplit in the windows of the
Troitsky house. It was all wired off against the invasive backside, just like Sir John Soane’s sitting room.

Tolstoy’s study was a small, pale green room on the mezzanine. His bicycle was propped outside the door, as though he’d parked it there only yesterday and nipped in for a quick
scribble. The pervasive illusion of the preserved home – the big bug-in-amber – that the occupant was merely out for an hour, not long dead. His writing desk was a plain deal table,
covered in green baize, at which the old man had worked by the light of a single candle. Just to the left of the desk was a group of framed photographs. Tolstoy in many of the poses made famous in
the countless biographies. Young Count Tolstoy in his artillery uniform during the Crimean War. Old Count Tolstoy in peasant garb, the demonically forked beard, the great dome of his forehead. The
reluctant husband standing with his dumpy, grumpy wife. The assembled sons of Lyev and Sonya Tolstoy – Sergéi, Ilyà, Lyev Jr, Andréi, Mikhàil – sat on a park
bench sporting an array of moustaches and beards and winged collars, looking less like the sons of a writer, more like the board of a continental bank posing for the photographer. And shots of the
great man and his disciples.

One was a pale print of four people, a little girl, two men – and a boy, stuck between the men, receiving the avuncular touch of Tolstoy’s hand upon his shoulder, and looking at the
camera over the little girl’s head. It was dated 1877 and captioned ‘Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy with his daughter Marya, Rodyon Rodyonovitch Troitsky and unknown youth.’

Troy stared. His grandfather was just recognisable. A younger version of a man he had known only in extreme old age, a man who must have been over eighty when Troy was born. A tall man, seen
here in his late forties, sporting a full, greying beard and looking much like his mentor Tolstoy. The unknown youth standing between the two men he knew at once. He looked to Troy to be no more
than fifteen or sixteen, but the look in his eyes was far from young, the eyes of a man already more worldly, more calculating than the two old men he stood between, with their air of Christian
innocence, their peasant clothing and their
faux-paysan
surrender to nature. It was his father Alexei Rodyonovitch.

He had never known Alex Troy surrender a damn thing. Never gave uphis gripon the solid world and its reality. Left it to his father to idle away time in philosophy and pamphleteering. He had
grown upto take responsibility for a family which seemed beyond the practicalities of the Tolstoyan ethic; he had grown up to bale his father out time after time. His perception of a world turning
itself inside out, and his ability to keep one twist, one turn ahead of it, had saved the old man, indeed the entire family from a chaos that passed comprehension, the turmoil that was the
twentieth century.