Derek Lambert - The Man Who Was Saturday

Realising that it was the card the young man on the bus had given her and realising that Spandarian was impressed, she said: ‘From its owner, of course.’ She wished she had read the card.

‘I wasn’t aware you knew him.’ Him . Who? Spandarian was patently furious that the name hadn’t featured in the blue folder. Someone would fry! ‘Have you known him long?’

‘Since childhood.’ They would boil!

Spandarian timed his revenge nicely. ‘By the way, your mother and father – apologies, step-father – are quite comfortable in their jail.’ He slid the invitation back into the wallet.

‘You bastard. What have they done wrong?’

‘Let’s think. Harboured a known hooligan?. How about that?’ He gave a stage bow and walked out of the cell.

When he had gone Katerina allowed herself to cry. ‘A good man … my mother, always hardship … What right?’

Svetlana sat beside her again. ‘Never mind, pussycat. They won’t come to any harm. It’s us they’re gunning for.’

Me, Katerina thought. ‘I never dreamed they would expel me without you.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there too. ‘And curiously: ‘Who was that invitation from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on, Kata, I’m not a Georgian bandit.’

‘Honestly.’ Katerina extracted the card from her wallet. ‘My God!’

‘Hand it over.’ When she did Svetlana whistled. ‘How did you get to know him?’

Katerina retrieved the card. It was an invitation to a pop concert. A personal one with the star’s name embossed on the bottom right-hand corner. Leonid Agursky. Pop idol, sex symbol …. And I met him on a bus!

Spandarian returned the following day. Picking up the expulsion order, he said: ‘You have read and understood it?’

‘I realise I’m being expelled for preaching Leninism.’

‘Ah, the rights of women. A worthy cause, Katerina Ilyina.’ He stroked his moustache downwards and outwards. ‘But you do understand the document?’

‘I’m not an imbecile.’

‘Good, good.’ He was pensive for a moment; Georgian spice reached Katerina strongly. ‘By the way you will be pleased to know that your mother and step-father have been released from jail. After all, why hold them? I’m sure you’re not going to be a hooligan any more.’

He tore up the expulsion order.

Striding past Petrovka’s shops in the direction of Sverdlov Square metro station, Svetlana said: ‘So it’s a different game from football. Two yellow cards and we’re still on the pitch.’

‘My parents … the son of a bitch.’

‘We were being given the treatment,’ Svetlana said. ‘The expulsion order – a phoney.’

Judas counselled Katerina. Would it really harm Calder if I processed what he told me and passed on innocuous trivia?

‘What I want you to concentrate on,’ Spandarian told her later in his office, ‘is Calder’s state of mind, what he plans to do with the rest of his life. Any secrets he’s kept to himself ….’

Why, she wondered, was Calder so important? She hoped she never found out.

CHAPTER 8

In summer mushrooms proliferate in the green and silver countryside outside Moscow as urgently as that short season itself. And armies of gribniki , mushroom-hunters, leave their sweating city in search of Little Foxes, Shaggy Parasols, Caesar’s Mushrooms, Horns of Plenty …. The fungi are eaten raw, cooked, pickled or salted; they are also measured with a fisherman’s elastic rule and toasted exuberantly – brown vodka for the milk mushroom, pellucid and ice-cold firewater for a russala . The pastime is pursued exhaustively because there has to be a little exquisite suffering in most experiences; photographs of mammoth fungi are printed in the Press; doctors in hospital casualty departments stand by with stomach-pumps for the first imprudent gribniki .

At the Institute the Twilight Brigade went mushroom-hunting with qualified enthusiasm. Few of them had ever hankered after anything more exotic than the cultivated mushroom, on the other hand the younger recruits were keen to take part in anything characteristically Russian. It was all part of adapting, being accepted, and if long-serving members of the Brigade were sceptical about this they nevertheless accompanied the alien gribniki because there was not a lot to be said against supping a few grams of Stolichnaya in the cool of a birch forest.

In charge of mushroom-hunting was Mrs Lundkvist from Sweden. In fact she was in charge of most Russian-orientated pursuits managing through perseverance and unrelenting good humour to drum up support for her activities.

She was a once-beautiful blonde who was being remorselessly converted by the years into a matron. A decade earlier her husband had fled to Moscow bringing with him the secrets of Swedish submarine surveillance in the Baltic and his wife had followed him. The unkind asserted that if he had known this he would have stayed where he was and faced the music.

On this particular June morning Mrs Lundkvist, seated at the head of Table No. 5 during mid-morning break in the Institute canteen, was finding it difficult to sustain interest in mushrooms because another subject was vying for attention. A subject that is always discussed with animation in any expatriate society. Death.

Just as speculation about the death of Alfredo Bertoldi had begun to wane a Dutchman named van Doom had disappeared.

Mrs Lundkvist, sipping lemon tea and speaking in English because she had long ago discovered to her chagrin that Russian would never be the lingua franca of the defectors, began to list to her audience the ten articles they would have to take with them into the country.

‘Basket, waxed paper, tins, notepaper, stick ….’

Fabre, the Frenchman, said to Calder: ‘Do you think he’s still alive?’

‘How should I know? It’s not the first time he’s gone missing ….’

‘True. Once he meets the pretty boys outside the Bolshoi he seems to stick with them.’ The nodding of Fabre’s creased old face acquired an obscene air.

Dalby said: ‘He’ll be back.’ As usual he spoke with nonchalant authority. He had retired from the Institute two years ago and had stopped by for coffee on his way to the Pushkin Museum.

‘Unless he’s dead.’ The speaker was Langley, the Canadian who had been talking to Katerina at Kreiber’s funeral. A bright young hope in the RCMP he had elected to stay in Moscow when the KGB had shown him photographs of himself with two girls which they planned to show to his boss and his wife unless ….

‘Dead?’ The slanting pouches on Dalby’s face took up the question. ‘Why should he be d … dead? You younger people do tend to be terribly dramatic’

‘Well he won’t be the first this year,’ Langley said defensively. He was thirty-ish and followed Western fashions as best he could, managing with his mussed fair hair and moustache to look like a shop-worn model for a cigarette advertisement.

‘True. Natural causes, accident, suicide …. We all have to go some time you know. Even you.’

‘A whole lot of people seem to have been going-some-time recently.’

‘Coincidence, my dear fellow. Would you have preferred their deaths to have been staggered tover the year?’

‘I’ll let you know,’ Langley said, ‘when van Doorn shows his face.’

Mrs Lundkvist said loudly: ‘You must pick out mushrooms with care. Never, never experiment. Peasants will tell you’ – Calder suspected that anyone outside Stockholm was a peasant – ‘that there are ways of testing fungi to see if they are edible. Take no notice, consult the experts.’ She laughed gaily. ‘In this case me.’

‘Do you really think,’ Langley went on, ‘that Bertoldi committed suicide?’