id="u5076073c-8eec-508d-84c1-bd79554cf54c">
JON CLEARY
The Golden Sabre
To Eric Neal
Contents
‘We could make you disappear, Cabell. Magic like that happens all the time in Russia. Who knows what has happened to our beloved Tsar? They say he is dead, but they have not produced his body.’
‘I’d remind you, General Bronevich, that I’m an American citizen.’
‘Then we’d make you an American magical act. Like your famous magician Houdini. I have read about him.’
‘Houdini is an escape artist, General.’
‘Ah, but he doesn’t walk about without his head, does he? Could you do that, Cabell?’
Matthew Martin Cabell was very attached to his head. It was his wits and not his size that had brought him all the way from Chicago’s Prairie Avenue to this town of Verkburg on the eastern slopes of the Ural mountains in Siberia. As a boy smaller than the other kids on his block, the only one who did not have an Irish name though he had an Irish mother, he had had to talk his way out of fights or, if it came to blows, fight dirty. His fame as a fighter of crafty viciousness had brought fight managers looking for a kid they could groom into a champion, someone of the likes of Joe Walcott, the Barbados Demon, or Honey Mellody. But the kid had been brighter than the managers: he wasn’t going to get his most valued possession, his head, knocked off to make money for crooked promoters. He had gone to the Armour School of Engineering on a scholarship and for a while he had thought he had chosen the wrong profession; engineers appeared to be bigger and tougher and more aggressive than he had expected and he had thought of changing to English literature or Art History where the personalities and the wrists seemed much limper. But he had survived, again by using his wits and the occasional dirty tactic, such as a boot in the privates or two fingers in the eyes, and gone on to be a geologist in the oil fields of Texas, Venezuela, Roumania and Baku, where sometimes he had lost a fight against a bigger, equally sharp-witted, just-as-dirty fighter. But he had never lost his head and he was determined not to lose it now.
‘General, all I want is to have my truck loaded on a train for Ekaterinburg – from there I’ll get another train for Vladivostok. I’m not a spy for the Bolsheviks or anyone else. I’ve been looking for oil around here and I haven’t found any.’
‘Who do you work for? Yourself?’ General Bronevich put out a hand and the dwarf who stood beside him gave him a fresh cigarette from a battered silver case. The General lit the cigarette from the stub he took from his thick loose lips, then dropped the stub on the floor. The floor was littered with crushed stubs, like bird droppings, and the room swirled with smoke that smelled days old. ‘You work for yourself?’
‘No, the American-Siberian Oil Company of New York.’
Bronevich looked at the dwarf. ‘What do you say, Pemenov? Have you heard of this company? Peregrine Pemenov is my chief-of-staff,’ he explained to Cabell. ‘He had an American mother, a whore who came from San Francisco to Vladivostok and married my stupid cousin. Unfortunately she only laid half an egg.’
The dwarf smiled a child’s smile, as if he found the cruel joke funny. The poor son-of-a-bitch, Cabell thought, he’s probably had to put up with stuff like that all his life. He was not an ugly little man, but Cabell found himself averting his gaze, as if he did not want to embarrass the misshapen Pemenov. The dwarf’s mother had subjected him to another cruel joke when she had labelled him with the ridiculous Peregrine.
‘The American-Siberian Oil Company is legitimate, General.’ The dwarf had a soft raspy voice, as if it too were misshapen, the larynx flattened. His broad Mongolian face had a straight, handsome nose, one of the few good things his mother had bequeathed him; his blond hair was cut very short to the scalp and surmounted with an embroidered pillbox cap he had stolen from an Hussar. He wore a grey silk blouse, with the sleeves chopped off just above the cuffs to accommodate his very short arms, and black trousers stuffed into what looked to be a child’s pair of riding boots. A silver dagger was in a decorated scabbard on his belt. ‘They have been in Siberia since just after the war against the Japanese. Never found any oil.’
‘Have you found any oil, Cabell?’
‘Not a drop. Now all I want to do is pack up and go home.’
‘You can do that, Cabell. But only after we have investigated you – Pemenov will do that. We can trust no one these days, neither Reds nor Whites. I keep telling that to my wives every day. And to my mistresses,’ he said, trying to look like a Siberian Don Juan. He was a Moslem with three wives, all of whom he was glad to leave at home. But his mistresses were a figment of his vanity, since no woman could stand more than one night of him and then only at gunpoint. ‘They all agree with me and there’s nothing like a woman’s intuition, is there?’
Not when she knows she’ll get her head chopped off if she doesn’t agree.
When Cabell had arrived in the Verkburg district three months ago he had been surprised to find that the regional commander was General Bronevich. He had been warned before he left Vladivostok that the White Russian opposition to the Bolshevik revolution was made up of many factions, most of them at vicious odds with each other. The most independent of them were the Siberian atamans, the Tartar Khans with their private armies who saw the civil war as the greatest opportunity for large-scale raping and looting since the hey-day of their ancestor Genghis Khan. Cabell had thanked