A Little White Death by John Lawton Read Free Book Online Page B

roared, no propellers thrashed, and the Soviet apparatchiks yawned their
way through the routine like men sleepwalking. It seemed too casual, too informal quite to be the Soviet Union. It was Ruritania – anywhere east of the Danube, anywhere they wore outlandish
uniforms and looked like chorus boys from the Student Prince . He changed that. As soon as he presented his passport and papers the uniformed officer diverted the half-dozen people behind him
to a separate table. Troy looked at the uniform. Blue collar flashes with red piping – KGB. He stood several minutes in silence while the officer in front of him looked at every page of his
passport, turning it this way and that to see the blurred stamps of countries he had visited, and read the letter from the Foreign Ministry. When the man had finished a second man appeared and he,
too, took several minutes to reach the obvious conclusion.
    ‘It’s him,’ he said to the first.
    It occurred to Troy that Charlie would undoubtedly have omitted to tell his Russian masters that he, Troy, spoke Russian. He would probably have told them just as much of the truth as he needed
and no more.
    The first man looked at Troy. A handsome face. Mediterranean blue eyes, at least the blue of the Mediterranean in January, beneath the low brim of a fur-lined hat. Troy envied him the fur hat.
Troy could kill for the fur hat.
    ‘Baggage,’ he said simply, and for a second Troy thought it was an insult rather than an instruction. The man gestured upward with his hand and Troy plonked his suitcase on the
counter between them. He flicked the catches and turned the case towards the two immigration officers.
    They rummaged through, found only the Sunday Post , Troy’s last clean shirt and his washbag. They felt the lining of the suitcase, tapped the bottom, took apart his razor, gazed
oddly at the black-and-white badger-hair shaving brush, sniffed at the styptic pencil that stemmed the flow of blood every time Troy cut himself shaving, and at the end seemed more than slightly
incredulous.
    ‘Is this all you’ve got?’
    ‘I’m wearing everything else,’ said Troy.
    All the same, the second man patted him down, arms in the air, took his fountain pen from his jacket pocket, unscrewed the top, put it back, and pronounced him ‘clean’.
    The first man shrugged, the second man responded like an imitative monkey and they got on with the routine.
    ‘Commander Troy. This permits you entry to the Soviet Union for forty-eight hours. It permits you entry only to the city of Moscow and to the airport. You are forbidden to travel outside
the city limits. Do not attempt to travel outside the city limits, and be back here in time for your flight the day after tomorrow. If you’re not, we’ll come looking for you.’
    ‘Of course,’ said Troy. ‘Thank you.’
    The man held out the passport and papers to Troy, and as Troy took them he turned to the second man and said, ‘Tell her he is leaving now. And if she loses him she’ll spend the rest
of her life directing traffic in Novaya Zemlya.’
    No – they definitely didn’t know he spoke Russian.
    He caught up with the tail end of the crowd. A barn-like lobby, drab and makeshift – two styles, as he would soon learn, that the Soviet Union did rather well – and fifty-odd people
milling around under the watchful eye of a dozen uniformed militia and God only knew how many out of uniform. The crowd thinned as people made their way out through a wall of swing doors and into
the freezing night, and suddenly one door swung inwards with a mighty push and there was Charlie.
    ‘What would you like first,’ he boomed, ‘The riddle, the mystery or the enigma?’
    This was not the man he had known, not the man with whom he had shared the permanence of boyhood and adolescence. Here was a man bloated by booze, elephantine with indulgence. Allowing for the
bulk of his heavy fur coat, he was still fat. The chin had quadrupled and was now better