John Sweeney - The Useful Idiot

“Now, do you believe me?” said Jones.

By way of answer, she jumped back onto the floe, steadied herself and squatted down towards the front, clinging on to the precious bag with the film reel in it.

Sunrise found them midstream, Jones wrestling with the force of the current. Ahead the river curved to the east, offering an end to their struggle. As the sun climbed, swathes of early morning mist came and went, sometimes hiding both sides of the channel from them, sometimes clearing entirely away. Jones was wrestling with the current but somehow winning his battle when the bullets started to fly, zzzing past them, hissing as they hit the ice.

The mist cleared for a spell and, on the western bank, they saw three lorries etched against the skyline, troops on the bank below. Evgenia flattened herself against the ice, while Jones went down onto his knees. The moment they hit the mass of the river ice on the eastern bank, Evgenia jumped to safety, quickly followed by Jones. Bullets whistled overhead, in front and behind them. Then the mist came down again, blanketing them, and they hurried towards the memory of the sun.

The mist was so thick that the coal train had dawdled to a slow walk, so it was the easiest thing in the world for Jones and Evgenia to hop aboard the plate of a wagon, climb the short ladder and then untie the tarpaulin covering the coal so that they could slide underneath it. The coal was caked in soot, sharp-edged, almost fiendishly uncomfortable. Yet, compared to hiding under the marble, it was heaven.

After a time, the mist cleared and the train picked up speed. Jones peeked under the edge of the tarpaulin and looked across the river but could not see the three GPU lorries. Their luck was still holding.

Sinking back, he tried to make himself comfortable on their bed of coal. Exhilarated by their escape, it took a moment for him to realise that Evgenia was crying.

“Why are we doing that? We managed to escape, no?”

“The GPU tried to kill us.”

“But they missed.”

“That means Pyotr talked. He told them about us. It means the Old Believers… all of them….” She was crying so hard she could not get the words out.

Jones’ face hardened as he struggled to come to terms with the evil that was hunting them. In the Hollywood movies the hero would say, “They’ll never get away with it”, but something held his tongue and instead he simply held onto her as the coal train jolted its way through the mist.

This was not Hollywood, he knew – and, here and now, the Cheka had every chance of getting away with all of it.

The big man had slobber on his beard and dust and straw in his wild hair. He was foully drunk and not a little mad, but there was nothing wrong with his animal instinct. He could smell their fear.

Stopping them on the broad, tree-lined avenue a hundred yards from Odessa train station, the vagabond barked at the top of his voice, “This one’s a foreigner. You can tell from his fancy spectacles. What’s a foreigner doing all dressed up up in tramp clothes, eh? There’s a few kopecks for someone who asks that question, eh?”

Doing a little dance in front of them, he sucked noisily on the teat of his vodka bottle.

“Pretty lady’s got herself a foreign tramp, eh? Come on, give us a few kopecks, your secret’s safe with me.”

It was five o’clock in the morning by the station clock, and not that many people were about – but still the drunk’s attention was the worst possible thing for them. They hurried on through the slush – the season was beginning to turn, the snow starting to melt, here in the most southwesterly corner of the Soviet Union – doing their best to ignore him. But he just skipped along after them, barking more loudly.

“Running from a jealous husband, eh, are you my pretty lady? Taking ship to Constantinople, eh? I’ll show you the way. Running from somebody, that’s for sure.”

“Listen, brother, sssh, I’ll give you some kopecks,” said Evgenia, struggling to suppress the desperation in her voice, “but not here in the street.”

They ducked into a dark alley leading to a dilapidated nineteenth century villa, pools of slush on the cobbles. Opening her purse, Evgehnua scrabbled around for two twenty kopeck coins – “that’s all I’ve got” – but in her haste to shut him up a thick fold of one hundred rouble notes fell to the ground. As bad luck would have it, they landed in a cone of light thrown by a streetlamp.

“Ooh, the pretty lady is a rich one too. Smells a bit bourgeois to me. On the run from the Cheka, are we pretty lady? My tongue’s going to wag and the nosy ones will start asking questions about your fancy foreign friend.”

Jones punched him on the jaw, then in the gut, twice, and slowly the drunk crumpled to the cobbles. Evgenia picked up the fold of rouble notes and they were about to run for it when the drunk said in a voice quite different from the one he’d been using before, “You won’t last five minutes on the street. There’s Cheka snouts every hundred yards between the station and the ferry terminal. I can show you a way to the docks… but it will cost you.”

“How much?”

“Two hundred roubles.”

“That’s a fortune.”

“Not to you, lady.”

Her eyes questioned Jones. He nodded.

“OK,” she said.

“Money now please,” said the tramp.

“No.”

“Now.”

“One hundred now, one hundred when we’re at the docks.”

The tramp got to his feet, clutched the hundred rouble note she offered and hid it in his coat, then gestured for them to follow. Hurrying away from the street into the yard of the old, run-down mansion, he jogged down some stone steps into a gloomy basement, Jones and Evgenia following close behind. He turned right, then left, then came to a passageway down which a small boy in a sailor suit stared at them, frozen in terror.

“Not a word about this son, ever, or I will come to you in your dreams and you will never sleep soundly again.”

The boy stood stock-still for what seemed an eternity, then nodded and stepped aside, so that they could walk past him in silence.

Two turns further on, they came to a mouldy wooden trapdoor in the floor.

Reaching into his coat, the vagrant found the stubs of three candles, lit each with a match and shared them with his two customers. Then he lifted the trap and guided them down, down into the old catacombs of Odessa.

The light from their candles flickered in the darkness, illuminating a length of tunnel with a curved roof and dull yellow limestone underfoot. Down here, the air was sweet and clear, the temperature coolish, the labyrinth never ending. Every hundred yards, passages veered off to left and right. Sometimes they sloshed through stagnant pools of clear water, but for most of their journey the ground was dry and the going easy. The most troubling thing about the tunnels was, apart from the scuffling of their own boots, the lack of sound. There was something about the texture of the stone that absorbed noise. Occasionally they had to stoop low to pass from one set of underground chambers to the next; at one point, Jones bumped his head and, rubbing it, slightly dazed, was in danger of getting left behind. The tramp said, “You keep up, Mr Foreigner. If you wander off, you’ll go stark staring mad in half an hour. There’s too many tunnels down here. You get lost, you die.”

At length they came to a stop in a chamber, the floor lined with soiled blankets, the walls decorated with chalk drawings of sailing ships, dolphins, naked women. Though they couldn’t hear the sea, the tunnel air smelt differently down here; it carried a slight but unmistakeable salty tang.

“We’ll wait a while,” said the tramp. “When the day is done, that’s the best time to see if we can find a ship that will take you. I’ll go with the pretty lady. The foreign gent best stay. Otherwise, someone might sniff out his peculiar origins.”