Death Is My Comrade (13 page)

We'd had no barbed wire to cut, no plowed and mined border zone to cross, no sentries on watchtowers to challenge us. We were entering Moscow under a legal cover. As employees of the American Exhibition in Gorky Park, we were even expected. But still, more than four thousand miles from home and listening to the Caravelle's landing gear thump into place, I could almost picture the Iron Curtain come clanking down behind us.

We were on our own. We were in Moscow.

They gave our bags a perfunctory once-over in the customs shed at Vnukovo Airport. That year American tourists would come to Russia fifteen thousand strong, and they didn't want to discourage the arrival of the Yankee dollar. But just in case something was wrong, hard-faced militiamen with machine pistols waited nearby.

Immigration was next. “The purpose of your visit to the U.S.S.R.?” “Business.” We showed our passports, visas and credentials. “The duration of your stay?” “Six weeks.” Forty-eight hours, I thought, for me. Forever, for Mike Rodin.

A man named Plekhanov from the Ministry of Culture was supposed to meet us at Immigration and escort us to the Hotel Metropole, where we'd stay. But the Caravelle had picked up a tailwind over the Lithuanian S.S.R. and had arrived twenty minutes early. Comrade Plekhanov was tardy.

“Can we get a cab?” I asked the Immigration officer.

“You are not being met?”

“Guy hasn't showed up.”

His face brightened suddenly. “Of course, of course, Mr. Drum. That would be Comrade Plekhanov of the Ministry of Culture. I have a message. Comrade Plekhanov is on his way. He will meet you in the Hero's Lounge.”

I nodded. “Come on, hero,” I said to Mike Rodin. We had one piece of luggage each, a Val-pac for Rodin, a B-4 bag for me. I stooped and lifted mine. Suddenly Rodin's face turned gray. He broke out into a sweat. Swaying, he leaned heavily against the Immigration counter.

“That fellow's sick,” an American in line behind us said.

The Immigration officer looked concerned. “A touch of—air sickness,” Rodin said, gritting his teeth. I went over to help him. It was like hell air sickness. But he shook my hand off. “I'm all right,” he said. “When I need your help, as I needed it in Maryland, you'll know. Otherwise leave me alone.”

“Okay.”

“Don't forget it. I'm no invalid. Let's get out of here.”

“Right.” I lifted his bag and mine. By the time we went through the swinging door at the end of the Immigration counter he was all right again.

The door didn't swing shut behind us. I turned sharply. Rodin's attack so soon after our arrival in Moscow had set my nerves on edge.

A boy stood there. He was wearing a white shirt, not clean, and frayed bell-bottom trousers. He had blond hair, uncombed, and a broad, high-cheekboned face. He looked about seventeen. He gave us a smile that just missed being insolent.

“You wish porter?” he asked in English.

I shook my head. “Just going to the Hero's Lounge.”

His accent thickened. “You weesh leetle beeznis? I am beeznisman too.” He let the door swing shut behind us. Rodin and I started walking. He fell into step with us. “All kinds beeznis. Clothing you weesh to sell? To barter? Nothing?”

There were porters, in uniform, carrying luggage, but there were kids like the blond boy too, scurrying around the terminal. “Watch suitcases then?” he wheedled. “Is thieves in lounge.” Flashing a grin, he bowed from the waist. “Allow me to introduce. Am Leonid Ivanovich Kalmykova, beeznisman. You are Citizen Drum, yes?”

“Yeah,” I said, interested now. “What kind of business, Leonid?”

“All kinds beeznis,” he repeated. “Ministry of Culture say no, Intourist say no, good Moscow beeznisman say yes. Maybe black market rubles, twenty-five to dollar?”

I set down the suitcases. He leaped nimbly toward them, toted them, kept walking.

“You're kind of young,” I said, “for a businessman.”

He grinned again. “In your country I would be juvenile delinquent, yes?”

We went through another set of swinging doors with a bronze relief of a Red Army soldier on the wall above them. The lounge beyond was crowded. Leonid set our bags down near a bench. MacReedy's contact, I thought, hadn't wasted any time.

Leonid held out his hand. I hadn't changed any money yet, and told him that. I looked at my watch. It was just past six-thirty.

“Can you come to the Hotel Metropole?” I asked.

“Noon, Citizen?”

“Noon. Okay.”

Leonid Ivanovich Kalmykova swaggered off, cornered a fat Danish tourist and began to chew his ear.

Ten minutes later Plekhanov arrived. He was a sweaty, plump little man in an ill-fitting gray suit. He had an oily smile as sincere as a credit chaser's. “I am so very sorry, Mr. Williams, Mr. Drum,” he said. “The plane was early. Outside I have a limousine waiting. You have seen Moscow before? No? A beautiful city. En route to the Metropole I can perhaps show you … the Spasskiye Gate … Red Square … Gorky Street. Yes, a beautiful city.” He spoke with an odd mixture of apology and enthusiasm in his unctuous voice. He mopped his plump, damp face with a large handkerchief.

As we left the Hero's Lounge with him, I saw Leonid. He wasn't giving his pitch to the Danish tourist any longer. He was looking at us and at Plekhanov.

Leonid looked very unhappy.

The limousine was a two-tone maroon-and-cream Chaika with tail fins and a few hundred pounds of gleaming chrome. It wasn't quite as garish as a juke box, and it had drawn the kind of crowd a private car in Moscow would—overweight women in kerchiefs and cheap print dresses, leaning on the hafts of the twig brooms they'd been using to sweep the parking lot, a couple of uniformed drivers from the black Zims parked nearby, a half-dozen Red Army soldiers in their gray-green uniforms.

“A lovely vehicle, yes?” Plekhanov said with apologetic enthusiasm.

Then the front door opened almost hard enough to be torn from its hinges, and Plekhanov's chauffeur emerged. The crowd dispersed like confetti before a wind. Plekhanov's chauffeur was a cataclysm of a man, a huge acromegalic with hands the size of paddles and feet the size of swim fins. He was close to seven feet tall. He had a nose like a weight lifter's bent elbow, and the smallest eyes I had ever seen. He went around the Chaika with my bag and Mike Rodin's, and tossed them in the trunk with the same effort it would have taken me to slip two lonely bucks into an empty wallet.

“This is Boris,” Plekhanov said. “He and the Chaika are at your disposal should you wish to go anywhere in Moscow during your stay at the Exhibit.”

Boris smiled a yellow-toothed smile, and we all got into the Chaika.

He'd be a fine one to tangle with, I thought.

Chapter Sixteen

T
he Hotel Metropole is a big Victorian barn of a place crowned by the inevitable red star. It holds down a corner of Gorky Street, which is Moscow's main drag, and from which you can see the crenelated wall of the Kremlin. Boris took our bags inside. The lobby was all brightwork and red plush and crystal chandeliers, and was busy even at seven o'clock in the morning.

After we checked in, Plekhanov said Boris would drive us to Gorky Park and the Exhibition at three in the afternoon. Would that be all right? That would, Mike Rodin said, be fine. Boris and Plekhanov departed, and the elevator groaned and clanked its way up an open shaft to the fourth floor with us, a porter and our luggage in it. They had given us a suite of two small rooms done up in baby blue with heavy brown upholstered furniture and red plush drapes. From the window you could look down on Gorky Street. The early morning trucks were beginning to roll. There were very few cars. Militiamen with their machine pistols patroled the stretches of sidewalk between their sentry boxes.

I left my bag on the rack, took off my shoes, jacket, tie and pants and stretched out on one of the beds.

“Now what?” Mike Rodin asked.

“Now we wait for Leonid.”

The trucks roaring along Gorky Street lulled me to sleep.

I was unpacking when Leonid knocked at the door. It was a quarter to one. Mike Rodin and I had lunched in our room on golubtsky, which is stuffed cabbage, and blinchiki, which is pancakes with cherry jam on them.

Leonid came in and grinned when he saw my open B-4 bag. “Socks, shirts, ties,” he enumerated. “You have phonograph records too? Portable radio to sell? I do beeznis with you.”

He helped me unpack. He fondled a wash-and-wear suit, saying, “Dreep-dry. Ees nice. I get you good price.”

“Leonid,” I said, “what's the matter with Plekhanov?”

“Comrade Plekhanov? Why do you ask?”

“The way you were looking at him.”

Leonid picked up a balled pair of nylon socks and tossed them idly from hand to hand. “Okay,” I said, smiling a little. “They're yours.”

Leonid pocketed the socks. “Comrade Plekhanov,” he said, “is Ministry of Culture, is also Lubianka Street.”

The office of Internal Security, that at various times has been called OGPU, NKVD and MVD, all standing for Secret Police, was on Lubianka Street.

“And Boris, his chauffeur?”

Leonid said it with a straight face. “The leetle man too.”

I finished unpacking. All right, Plekhanov was a cop. Nothing to get in an uproar over. I was a cop too, if a private one. Maybe they thought I'd feel more at home with a cop guide. That wasn't the answer, of course, but on the other hand they couldn't have learned of our mission. It just wasn't possible.

I lit a cigarette. Leonid looked at the pack. I tossed him one. He kept looking at the pack. I tossed him that, and Mike Rodin burst out laughing.

“Rodzianko,” I said. “Vasili Rodzianko.”

Leonid scowled while lighting a cigarette. “The poet?”

“The writer, yeah. We have to see him.”

“Is seventy kilometers from Moscow.” He leered. “The leetle man Boris will drive you?”

I shook my head.

Leonid, blowing smoke rings and poking a finger through them, said: “When?”

“As soon as possible. Tonight.”

Leonid made big eyes at the ceiling and whistled. “Ni kulturni,” he mumbled to himself, then said in English: “My cousin Sergei can get truck. For dreep-dry suit?”

“Okay, for drip-dry suit.”

Mike Rodin asked suddenly: “What about Rodzianko's family? Are they in Zagorsk or here in Moscow?”

It was the sort of question you'd expect Leonid could answer. Wherever there are cities like Moscow there are people like Leonid, often kids, who could have told you how many moles the Prime Minister had on his fanny—for a price.

“Boy Mikhail in Moscow University,” Leonid told us. “Girl Galina—” he winked elaborately—”ees sexy broad with Bolshoi. Both in city.”

Mike Rodin said: “I want them to join us tonight.” Up went my eyebrows. “They'll have to know about it sooner or later, Chet.”

I led Mike Rodin into the other room and shut the door. “They're liable not to be wild about it. What happens to them after their old man leaves Russia?”

“I told you. It's a problem we'll have to face sooner or later. It's a problem they'll have to face. Got any ideas?”

“Jack Morley sprang it on me. at the last minute. No ideas, Mike. The girl's a ballerina. The boy's studying to be an engineer. Two professions with a lot of prestige and advantages in the U.S.S.R. They're liable to lose all that when your brother takes a powder. They won't be crazy about it.”

“I've already thought about that.”

“And?”

“If it doesn't look as though Vasili flew the coop, they'll be all right.”

“You can't masquerade as Vasili Rodzianko indefinitely. You know that.”

“I won't have to.”

“You mean because you're going to die inside of six months? That isn't what I mean. In six months of trying to play Vasili Rodzianko, you're bound to make a mistake. When you do, his kids are in trouble. Get them in on it now and they'll—”

“I want to see them tonight, Chet. That's definite. I want to see what they're like. Just let the rest of it ride for now.”

I tried arguing with him, but it was no use. Rodin wanted to see his niece and nephew; that was that. “If you're cooking up some kind of scheme,” I said, “it wouldn't hurt to tell me what's going on.”

Mike Rodin headed for the door. “What are you complaining about? You've got your ten grand.” He turned suddenly. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean it that way. Just let it ride for now, okay?”

I shrugged. It was his family.

When we reentered the other room Leonid was folding one of my rep ties. He looked at me coolly and went ahead folding it, then put it in his pocket.

“Number Two Pushechnaya Street,” he said. “Ees around corner from Bolshoi Theater. Ees Bolshoi school. Militiaman is good friend of my cousin Sergei. Ees also juvenile delinquent, Sergei. We meet there tonight, yes?”

“When?”

“Dark not start before eleven. Eleven-thirty?”

“Will Galina and Mikhail be there?” Mike Rodin asked.

Leonid nodded.

“Alone,” I cautioned him.

“Top-secret stuff, Citizen.” Leonid got up. “We feenish?” And, when I said we had: “Have fat Dansker to show sights of the city. Eleven-thirty. Number Two Pushechnaya Street. Across street, near vodka stand. Good-bye, Citizens.”

An enormous gold anodized dome crowned the central building of Ugolok Ameriki, the American Corner in Gorky Park. Boris drove us there in the Chaika at three o'clock. Beyond the dome, white in the bright Moscow sunlight, was the fan-shaped exhibition hall. Boris pulled up behind it without saying a word.

Under his cover of Robert Williams, Rodin had a job of some kind with the stock market exhibit. A young guy in a navy blue blazer with a shield-shaped stars-and-stripes crest on it took him in tow and started to talk about people's capitalism. Then Plekhanov came outside and pumped my hand. His eyes were as mild and sadly apologetic as a basset hound's. His handshake was limp and moist.