Derek Lambert - The Man Who Was Saturday

Hands deep into the pockets of his Crombie, fur hat worn with a jauntiness he didn’t feel, Calder roamed between the burgeoning drunks and the pavilions remaining from international exhibitions. The cold crisped his nostrils.

No sign of Dalby. But, like the Russians with whom he mixed more compatibly than most defectors, he wasn’t noted for punctuality. From the very beginning of his banishment from Britain he had managed to adapt. Calder envied him.

‘Good evening my dear fellow.’

Calder spun round. Dalby still managed to surprise; that was thirty years of espionage for you. He was smiling benignly. Although the slanting lines on his face had settled into pouches Dalby, now in his seventies, still looked like an urbane pirate. He wore a peaked cap instead of a shapka , challenging the cold to take off his ears.

He squeezed Calder’s arm. ‘Come, let’s take a walk.’

They walked down one of the avenues that had once rung to the harness jingle of aristocratic coaches; on either side the snow had been packed hard and bright by children at play and cross-country skiers, but they had departed for the night and loneliness was settling.

Calder glanced at the fountain. He saw a figure detach itself from the boozers and strike out towards the avenue.

‘Is he there?’ Dalby asked.

‘I didn’t know you had a watchdog.’

Dalby chuckled. ‘Not me, my dear chap. You.’

Sokolinki was derived from the Russian for falcon because falconry had once been practised in the park and Calder felt the scissored nip of sharp talons. ‘I wasn’t aware I was being followed.’

‘You wouldn’t be, would you? Not if your watchdog is a pro. And the comrades are very professional in these m …matters.’ Paradoxically, Dalby’s occasional stammer refurbished his authority.

‘How did you know I was being followed?’

‘Let’s just say I’ve acquired a certain prescience over the years.’

No one quite knew what those years had entailed. But as he had been in the top echelon of British Intelligence it was safe to assume that he had blown great holes through many Western spy networks.

But he doesn’t know what I know . The knowledge gave Calder an edge over the enigma that was Austen Dalby; it also scared him. He was about to look over his shoulder again when Dalby, gripping his arm, said: ‘Don’t.’

‘Why would they want to follow me?’

‘You would know b … better than me. After all, you’re from another generation of … let us 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.