Cold Blood by James Fleming Read Free Book Online Page A

stalked between the outer machine guns and mounted the steps.
    Between his second and third fingers appeared a buff slip of paper. He held it like a dandy, as if it were something infinitely precious and exquisite.
    Everyone watched this lean, confident fellow. He seemed to have walked straight out of a film. One had to look twice to get rid of the idea of a rapier in his hand.
    Oblivious, my persecutor glanced at me and began to crank the handle of the field telephone. He licked his lips like a woman on heat—glanced at me again—was clearly about to tell someone he’d caught a Tsarist spy.
    I pushed against him—not with the Luger side of my coat—and said, “Comrade, why are you so determined to turn a mushroom into a bomb? Look at the messenger there. He walked straight through.”
    As I finished speaking there came from behind me this shrill, harsh voice: “At last, news of the struggle—let me see that message, quickly now.”
    It was Lenin. I knew him immediately, even though he appeared quite different from the police photographs. His shoulder brushed mine as he passed. Scanning the bit of paper (putting it close to his eyes): “Then we’ve taken the Post Office? Good. Very good.” He read it again. “Almost without a shot fired. Even their own people are giving up on them.” This last he said in an undertone, almost to himself.
    He was wearing a dark suit of some thick material. The trousers were too long—trailed along the ground at his heels. His beard, which he’d shaved off during the months he’d been hiding from Kerensky, was patchy, as if he had ringworm. And his head, which the newspapers had always shown to be three-quarters hairless, was thatched with a wig that gave him the looks of a dark-haired gigolo of about eighteen. It was how he’d walked into the city from the suburbs, so that the guards on the bridges wouldn’t recognise him.
    Turning, he noticed me and my tray. Close up his eyes were grey green, hundreds of kilowatts in them. They perforated the skin of my face like a couple of nails. He entered my skull. Not speaking, just looking around inside as my tormentor denounced me as a Kerensky infiltrator.
    Lenin stepped up to me. With Kobi’s knife I could have reached out and popped his fat little belly. He took one of my mushrooms, snapped it in half and then into quarters and began to eat.
    He swallowed—gulped, choked a little, and said to me and all those around me in that shrill, scraping voice: “This is the first night that the people of Russia have ever been able to call their own. If this man is a spy, let him first be useful to us. Let him feed us for nothing. Then we’ll shoot him. If he’s not—”
    He got no further. The soldiers fell on my mushrooms, almost knocking me over.
    â€œI’m no spy,” I shouted at Lenin, throwing open half my coatto show him I had nothing there except strings of mushrooms. On the other side I had a loaded Luger. My boots were stuffed with diamonds. They’d have killed me for either. But Lenin was hot with luck that night and I reckoned that being so close to him I’d get a share in it.
    His mouth twisted sarcastically. “The tall man’s no spy... That’s what he says, so make out a pass for him... You, Baltic being, what’s your name?”
    â€œSepp, Arno Sepp. Born and bred in Tallinn.” I knew it was a reasonably common name in Estonia but it was the mushrooms that triggered it off.
    The man wrote it out, letter by letter. Lenin, Zinoviev and the rest of them looked on with indifference as I became Sepp of Tallinn.
    â€œWelcome to the new Russia,” said Lenin. I bowed. An aide whispered in his ear. He went back into the building.
    I stretched out my hand to my tormentor for the pass and said, “Well then, where does this get me?”
    â€œNowhere,” he said, tearing it across and across, into tiny