Death Is My Comrade (16 page)

Turning again, I sprinted down the dark narrow street to my left. The machine pistols? They wouldn't use them. They hadn't followed me here to kill me. If I could stay ahead of them around the block and reach the Metropole—where there were lights and foreign guests to hear the ruckus—still ahead of them, I'd be all right.

Shouting behind me. I took a dozen running steps. A lamppost down the block threw its long skeletal shadow at me. Then all at once another shadow loomed.

A giant of a man stood in my path.

Boris.

I was running too fast to stop. Boris' arms stretched out wide. From fingertips to fingertips Boris was now as wide as he was tall. Seven feet of him from head to foot and from side to side. And acromegalics are incredibly strong.

Still running, I brought my right fist up from the knees. It hit his jaw. I felt an electric shock from hand to shoulder socket. I have never hit a man harder, and I had momentum behind me. Boris staggered back. His head clanged against the lamppost.

He bounced back. Maybe his knees wobbled. If they did, it was only for a split second. I tried to get around him. An enormous hand caught my arm. A hundred and ninety pounds of me were swung like an apache dancer and thrown like a TV wrestler. I landed with a jolt at the base of the lamppost.

Boris tried to stomp me. I rolled clear, and he kicked the lamppost. He grunted. Except for his breathing, that was the only sound I ever heard him make.

I got to my feet. Tried to run for it again.

The bandaged militiaman tripped me.

Then Boris went to work.

He grabbed me by the nape of the neck, lifted me, shook me. I swung at his face. He didn't bother to protect it. I heard and felt the splat of fists on flesh. Blood streamed from his nose. Aside from that, it was like hitting a tree. Only this tree hit back. He let go of me and cuffed the side of my neck lazily. The sidewalk swooped up at me. I chewed on it for a while. A crane came and raised me. A pile driver went to work on my midsection. I felt it the first few times. Then it receded to where it didn't seem to hurt. It was happening to two other guys.

I stood with my back nailed to the lamppost, watching, listening to the businesslike thud, thud, thud of Boris' hamshank fists, to the puffing steam engine of his breath, watching his little eyes blink rapidly a few inches from my face as he crouched, intent on his work, and wondering when in hell those two other guys would fall.

Boris' face seemed to get bigger and smaller. I waved a hand at it languidly, a very large hand and then a baby's hand and then no hand at all. I slid down a little ways. I was sitting at the base of the lamppost looking for Boris.

I didn't see him. I didn't hear him, or anything. The street was deserted. I got to one knee. I even got one shoe planted firmly on the sidewalk. It was nailed there. I went down slowly, to my hands and knees. My nose was about three inches from the curb. I thought of the old drunk vomiting onto his lap on Gorky Street. I gagged. He hadn't been drunk. He had met Boris. My cheek came to rest on the curb. It was cool and damp. I let it prop my head up. Then it moved, and my chin was dangling over the gutter.

I was alone—and then not alone. The acrid swamp-water smell of Boris assailed my nostrils. I felt my head lifted, and the smell went away because I couldn't breathe. I gagged again, in earnest now. Something wet dribbled on my chin. Then that too went away and I lay half on, half off the last curb of the last city at earth's dying day.

That was the nice thing about Moscow. Came the early summer dawn and the three
A.M.
vodka-stand curfew and they let you get drunk in peace.

Chapter Nineteen

N
ifty,” a tired old voice croaked. “Real nifty. Comrade Plekhanov had a problem, all right. They couldn't give you the full brain-washing treatment on Lubianka Street, the international situation being what it is. They couldn't beat your mission out of you. That would have taken too long. But Plekhanov asked his dialectical question and you gave him the answer he wanted. Not that he really needed the question or your answer. He had the dossier which said how tough you are, didn't he?”

The tired old voice was mine. I rolled over and climbed the lamppost until I could stand. A fat middle-aged man did a lurching roll and shuffle in front of my face. He gave me a broad wink and kept going. Had a little too much vodka, Comrade? You and me both—but I can hold my liquor.

I leaned against the lamppost and the tired old voice croaked again: “‘Would I be wrong in assuming that if Boris attempted persuasion you would become more stubborn than ever?' Hah, you bastard. You'd be right as little silver raindrops, and didn't you ever know it? So Boris took off after me and did what Boris could do so well. Now? Now I'm supposed to be stubborn and determined, but scared too. Now I'm supposed to go about my business. But now, also, Boris has put the fear of Boris in me, and while I will go about my business I will go about it with decreased efficiency, peering anxiously around street corners to see if friend Boris is lurking yonder. Stubborn but scared. A nifty combination. Sooner or later a stubborn but scared man will lead Boris to what he's after. Which is exactly what you're after. Which is what Comrade Plekhanov wants to find out.”

I said all that, out loud to the empty street. I felt as loquacious and light-headed as a drunk. Strangely, there was hardly any pain at all. Then I began to realize I felt too drunk not to
be
drunk.

Foxy too. Look around. He hasn't touched your eyes. You can see. You're a detective. Where's the evidence?

The evidence lay, shattered, at the curb. It was a bottle of vodka. Boris or one of the militiamen had used it on me. The technique is simple: you hold the nose and the mouth opens to breathe, and then you pour. A state of semi-consciousness doesn't interfere. It just adds an element of risk. The victim is liable to choke to death. I was lucky. I didn't choke to death. I was also drunk. When I got to the Metropole, that's what they would see. “A drunk,” I said, and went on, still out loud: “Shut up, stupid. Got a job to do. Going to the Metropole, that's what. Paid for a bed there. Or Mike Rodin has. Logical drunk. First thing you need is some sleep, that's what you need. Shut up. Let her roll.”

I leaned away from the lamppost. It seemed to reach out and pluck me back. I took a step. Another. My knees wandered off, left knee to the left, right knee to the right. I took a few deep breaths. I began to walk better, but it was not an improvement you would have noticed from across the street. My middle, where Boris had done his work, still didn't hurt much. But it felt like lead.

On the corner, the militiaman smiled at me. A condescending smile. He might or might not have been the one who had asked for my papers. My watch, crystal broken but hands intact, said it was just past five
A.M.
I had been in Moscow twenty-three hours. Twenty-three hours and nothing's happened to you, I thought. What's the matter with you, Drum?

Doesn't anything ever happen to you?

Chapter Twenty

T
he Metropole's night porter was sitting in his cubbyhole reading yesterday's
Pravda
when I came in. He gave me a knowing look. By then I was getting a little tired of knowing looks in Moscow.

“Good morning, Citizen Drum. Shall I perhaps assist you to your room?”

I shook my head. “Coffee. A pot full of it, hot and dark. Up in my room, okay?”

“No coffee before second breakfast. Tea perhaps? A pot of strong tea?”

I nodded, and headed for the elevator. Near it was a wall mirror, and I saw myself in it. My jacket was torn and stained, my eyes bloodshot. I had a bruise on my right cheek, where I'd struck it against the curb. I also looked haggard, but only a little desperate. All in all, I looked like the dregs of a bottle of hundred-proof vodka.

I rang for the elevator, saw the cable start to move in the open shaft.

“Citizen Drum?” the night porter called. “I have for you a cable.”

He brought it to me and waited, polishing the mirror with a rag, for me to open it. The elevator arrived. I got in, shut the gate and took myself up. When the night-porter's disappointed face was on a level with my shoes, I opened the cable. It said:

L. GOT OFF THE TROLLEY IS EN ROUTE YOU KNOW WHERE ARRIVING EARLY WEDNESDAY.

JACK MORLEY

I read the cable a second time. It didn't tell me anything else. I pocketed it, thinking: all this and Semyon Laschenko too. I felt my lips part in a stiff grin. That's it, keep smiling. The state mortician won't have to do a thing to your face for the funeral.

The door to the suite I'd shared with Mike Rodin wasn't locked.

The sitting room was dim, its heavy drapes drawn across the single window. At the far end of the room, Leonid Ivanovich Kalmykova sprang up from the chocolate-colored divan, an embarrassed grin pasted to his face. He was not alone. A girl sat up on the divan, buttoning her blouse. In the dim light I couldn't make put her face. Probably the chambermaid, I thought.

I asked Leonid: “What the hell are you doing here, besides making out with the hired help?”

“I get off truck on Pushkin Street, come back for dreep-dry. Ees bargain, no?” He scowled. “What ees ‘hired help?'”

I pointed a weary finger at the girl on the divan. She got up, fluffing her auburn hair. She was wearing a dark green blouse and a light green skirt, and a sleepy, contented smile. But her big eyes were shining with excitement.

The hired help wasn't the hired help. The hired help was Eugenie.

“Ees your American sweedie,” Leonid said, sounding as embarrassed as he looked.

“That's a nice way you have of entertaining my American sweedie,” I told him. He shuffled his feet and looked down at the carpet.

“Ees her idea.”

“I don't doubt it.”

“I still get dreep-dry?” Leonid asked, a shade pugnaciously.

“She's not my American sweedie.”

Instead of looking relieved, Leonid gulped. “Ees bad.” He came close, placed both hands on my shoulders and whispered conspiratorially: “She say she ees your American sweedie. I tell her everything.”

“Everything being what?”

Leonid gulped again. “Bolshoi school. You and Mr. Williams. The Rodziankos. Zagorsk. Everything.”

Eugenie spoke for the first time. “You look drunk, Chester. You look nice when you look drunk. Kind of tired, but still—dangerous. I hope you're not mad at me for coming here, to your room and all. Are you? Mad at me?”

There was a knock at the door. The hall waiter came in with my steaming pot of tea and said something in Russian.

“He say only one glass,” Leonid explained.

I waved the waiter away. When he had made his perplexed exit, Eugenie licked her lips and said: “If I knew you were coming … but this boy said you were in trouble with the police.…”

“Let me guess. You arrived in Moscow with your stepfather. Is Lucienne here too?”

“It's their honeymoon.”

“How'd you find me?”

“The funniest coincidence,” Eugenie said ingenuously. “My stepfather has a bachelor apartment in one of the Ministry of Culture apartment houses. It isn't big enough for all three of us, and today he's going to get new quarters. But meanwhile we're stopping here at the Metropole. Just as we came in, a cable arrived. It was for you. I heard them talking downstairs.”

“You understand Russian?”

“A little. I asked at the desk if that was Mr.
Chester
Drum. They said no other. After mother and my stepfather went to bed—I have a separate room, of course—I went back downstairs. A few rubles and I got your room number. A few more to the hall waiter and I got in. Then—”

“What for?”

“—then Leonid came in.” She appraised Leonid, as if for the first time. “He's cute, but—”

“What do you want, Eugenie?”

She gave me a hurt look. “To see you, of course. Leonid tells me you've come to Moscow to see Vasili Rodzianko. I think that's thrilling.”

“Your stepfather won't think it's so thrilling.”

“Him? Mother's got him wrapped around her little finger.”

Eugenie asked abruptly, changing the subject with that swiftness which is as charming in a child as it is disconcerting in an adult or a near-adult like Eugenie: “Who's Mr. Williams?”

“Nobody,” I said. Nobody: just Lucienne Duhamel's ex-husband, just your father, just Vasili Rodzianko's long-lost brother.

“You must think I'm awful,” Eugenie said. “Necking with Leonid like that.”

She smiled. Then she pouted. “Whenever I arrive in a strange country I feel so free, so completely myself, like I can do anything, anything at all I feel like doing. And Leonid—”

“Was handy,” I said. I poured myself a glass of tea.

“You
are
mad at me,” Eugenie pouted.

“Your stepfather know I'm here?”

“No-o. I don't think so. He was taking care of the luggage when the cable came.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“Why should I? I don't even like him very much. And after the way he shot Ilya, I certainly won't tell him.” She fluttered her eyelids at me. “It's because of Ilya's letter you came to Moscow, isn't it? You're very brave. What are you going to do?”

I sat down on the divan and took my shoes off. “Take a bath. Get some sleep.”

“Was that a subtle hint? I mean later, silly.”

That was a good question. I couldn't answer it now. I felt irritable and annoyed with myself and as operationally effective as a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound matador. I said: “Look. Stop playing Mata Hari, junior grade. I want to get some sleep. Okay?”

“Well, I just thought you'd like to know my stepfather is going to see Vasili Rodzianko. Tomorrow. I mean today. This afternoon.”