The Man Who Was Saturday - Derek Lambert

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say idealists. Perhaps you know secrets to which I couldn’t possibly have had access.’

      Did he – could he – know?

      Calder directed the conversation into safer waters. ‘Idealists? A cosy euphemism.’

      ‘Then how would you describe us? Traitors?’

      ‘There isn’t a tag,’ Calder said. ‘We merely followed our convictions. We had our own sets of values but they weren’t necessarily idealistic.’

      ‘Values … you make Moscow sound very different from London or New York. Is it so different?’

      ‘It’s different all right,’ Calder said. He half-turned his head with exaggerated nonchalance. The crow-like figure was alone on the avenue. Perhaps he was just a lone walker – parks could be the most desolate places in the world.

      ‘Mmmmm. Outwardly, perhaps, but what about the equation?’

      Always the equation. Vodka in the Soviet Union versus drugs in the West. Scarcities versus surfeits. Spartan flats versus chic apartments. Full employment versus unemployment ….

      Dalby who, like most defectors, tilted the equation in Moscow’s favour, said: ‘Here a police state, in the West freedom. Such freedom. A g …gutter press that incites violence, encourages promiscuity. A political system hellbent on self-destruction. I sometimes wonder which is the CIA’s greatest enemy, the KGB or Congress.’

      When they reached the birch trees and the silence made conspirators out of them Dalby said: ‘All right, out with it. Kreiber?’

      ‘He looked so … puzzled. Even in death he seemed to be saying, “Now what the hell was that about?”’

      ‘I should imagine everyone thinks that before they meet their maker, defectors, priests, gangsters.’

      ‘I doubt whether they ask themselves if they’ve wasted their lives by taking a wrong turning when they were too young to understand.’

      ‘Don’t they? I wouldn’t be too sure about that.’ Ice-sheathed twigs slithered together like busy knitting-needles. ‘But that isn’t what you really want to talk about, is it?’

      Calder said abruptly: ‘Do you figure it was an accident?’

      ‘Kreiber? Why not? He had enough alcohol in his blood to fuel an Ilyushin from Moscow to Berlin.’

      ‘He’d been fishing from that hole in the ice all winter. He wasn’t likely to fall in.’

      ‘People can die falling over their own doorsteps.’

      ‘There was blood on the rim of the hole.’

      ‘Sharp stuff ice, especially in minus twenty degrees.’

      ‘And bruising on one arm.’

      ‘You don’t fall down a well without touching the sides.’

      ‘It must be wonderful to be so sure of everything.’

      ‘Why doubt? We’re here. There’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it. Let’s enjoy our elected way of life.’ Dalby tore a strip of paper bark from a thin tree and began to shred it.

      ‘And Maclean?’

      ‘Cancer, surely. ‘Dalby threw tatters of bark into the air. ‘Ah, you mean euthanasia. A possibility,’ he admitted. ‘Compassionate people, the Russians. Just listen to their choirs.’

      ‘And Blunt?’

      ‘Poor old Anthony? He hadn’t even defected.’

      ‘He was blown,’ Calder pointed out. ‘And he died within three weeks of Maclean.’

      The American newspapers, part of the material analysed by Calder and his staff at the Institute, had given a lot of prominence to Blunt’s death. Queen’s art adviser and Establishment figurehead, he had been exposed in 1979 as a one-time Soviet agent and died four years later.

      ‘Aren’t we being a little m … melodramatic? Paranoic even? Blunt died from a heart attack.’

      ‘They can be faked.’

      ‘True.’ Dalby knew about such things. ‘An injection of potassium chloride, usually into the main vein in the penis where it isn’t readily detectable. It alters the ionic balance between potassium and sodium and the heart febrillates. If the body isn’t found for five or six hours the potassium chloride isn’t detectable. But who would want to kill poor old Anthony? He wasn’t of any use to anyone any more.’

      Somewhere a twig cracked.

      ‘I guess I’m getting morbid,’ Calder said.

      ‘Positively funereal. Anthony wasn’t neurotic. He would have been tickled pink to think that he was buried on Spy Wednesday – the Wednesday before Good Friday when Judas asked how much he would be paid to betray Jesus.’

      ‘Okay, I’m stupid.’

      ‘Not stupid, you just listen too much to Institute gossip.’

      ‘You’re right, let’s get out of here. I’m purged.’

      As they emerged from the wood the figure on the avenue turned abruptly and began whistling to an invisible dog.

      When they reached the fountain Calder asked: ‘Why weren’t you at the funeral?’

      ‘I find my enjoyment elsewhere,’ Dalby replied. ‘I don’t read obituary columns either.’ Smiling, he pointed at a group of tipplers who had begun to sing The Sacred War – ‘Arise enormous country, Arise to fight till death’ – and said: ‘I was once asked by a fellow traveller from London with bum-fluff still on his cheeks why Russians drank so much. Do you know what I told him?’

      Calder shook his head although he could have hazarded a guess – Dalby’s contempt for naïve Communists from the West who, like penguins, gulped every morsel of doctrine tossed to them, was well-known.

      ‘I told him, “Because they like to get drunk.”’

      They shook hands, confessor and penitent. Behind them park and sky were a black-and-white print. And chords of sadness could be heard in the strutting voices of the vodka choir. Compassion? For whom? Themselves?

      Briskly, Calder walked to his Zhiguli outside Sokolinki metro station. Kreiber, Maclean, Blunt … stupid! He put the car into gear and drove down Rusakorvskoe Road towards the Sadovaya, the highway ringing central Moscow.

      The Estonian at the wheel of the battered cream Volga who had been keeping Calder under surveillance in the park gave him a five-second start before following.

      March 8th. Women’s Day in the Soviet Union.

      From the ice wastes of the north to the deserts of the south, from mid-Europe across eight time zones to the Pacific, women reigned in the country comprising one sixth of the world’s land masses.

      In fretwork villages becalmed in Siberia, in the splendid dachas of the privileged outside Moscow, men made love with unaccustomed tenderness, dressed the children, cooked dinner, washed the dishes and bought carnations at ten roubles a blossom.

      Beaming, Mother Russia loosened her stays and relaxed. Until the following day when the men became goats again. Or so the feminists asserted.

      On a platform in a wooden hall that smelled of resin and carbolic to the south-west of Moscow near the Olympic Village on Michurinsky Prospect, the girl from Personnel was poised to make just such an assertion. As it was her first speech, apprehension fluttered inside her like a trapped bird.

      While the introductory speaker, mannish and indignant, barked hatred of all men, Katerina Ilyina nervously smoothed her blue woollen dress, fashionable but not provocative in case it upset the clucking hens in the

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