The Golden Sabre

Dedication

To Eric Neal

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

‘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 his luck that he had managed to pass unmolested through the domain of the worst of the atamans, General Semenov. The White forces of Admiral Kolchak, the commander-in-chief, were already retreating east to Omsk and Cabell had had doubts about going on. But he had been assured before he left the States that there was little or no fighting in the area where American-Siberian were sending him and they wanted to know whether oil was there. If there was, American-Siberian, blessed with executives whose loyalty to governments was as slippery as their product, would come to an arrangement with whoever won the civil war.

Cabell had taken his truck off the train at Ekaterinburg, carefully not letting his curiosity get the better of him in the town where the Tsar and his family were said to have been murdered. He had put the truck on a branch-line train and come a hundred miles south-west to Verkburg and found that another ataman, intent on building an even worse reputation than Semenov, had moved west and taken over this region. Up till now Cabell had not been disturbed in his work, since he had spent all his time out in the hills west of town. He had found no evidence of oil and last week his employers had sent word that, because it seemed they could not pick the winner of the civil war, though they did not say that, he should give up and head back to the United States. So he had driven into town this morning, dropped off the two local men he had hired, gone to the railroad station to see about putting himself and his truck on the next train for Ekaterinburg and within ten minutes found himself in General Bronevich’s office in the town barracks.

‘Am I under arrest, General?’

‘That would mean putting you in prison, Cabell, and having to feed you. Food is short, as you know—’ Bronevich ran his hands down over his fat belly, tried to pull some creases into his uniform to suggest he was underweight; he failed, looked up at Cabell and smiled. ‘Well, food is short for some people, shall we say? No, Cabell, you will be free to walk around – you will have the money to feed yourself, I’m sure. If Pemenov’s investigation finds you are not a Bolshevik spy or an American spy or any other sort – the investigation may take weeks, of course, because there are so many spies—’ He smiled again, an expression that did nothing to endear him to anyone who witnessed it. He had the broad Mongolian face, a completely bald head, a mouth full of gold teeth and eyes that looked as if they could cut glass. It seemed to Cabell that he must have made a career of his ugliness, matching his character to his looks. ‘If you are cleared, you can take the train for Ekaterinburg. I shall see you get a compartment to yourself. The fare will be – What do you suggest, Pemenov?’

‘Two thousand American dollars.’ The dwarf’s intelligent blue eyes seemed to gleam with malicious humour.

‘Where did you learn to speak Russian, Cabell?’ said Bronevich.

‘I worked down at Baku for eighteen months before the war with the Germans. Will the two thousand dollars pay my truck’s fare, too?’

‘Ah no. What room would there be in a railway compartment for a truck?’

‘You shouldn’t be trying to rob me, General. I don’t know if you know it, but America is supposed to be on the side of the White armies.’

‘But we don’t need the Americans, do we, Pemenov?’

The dwarf smiled his child’s smile. ‘Not here in Verkburg, General.’ He addressed Cabell directly for the first time, spoke in English: ‘We don’t need the Americans anywhere at all in Russia, Mr Cabell.’

‘Are you a Bolshevik, Mr Pemenov, and the General doesn’t know it?’

The child’s smile flickered again on the big adult face. ‘Don’t be stupid, Mr Cabell. You’re too far from home and all alone – being insulting isn’t going to help you. No, I’m not a Bolshevik. I just hate Americans, all of you.’

Cabell looked at him, feeling a reluctant pity. ‘Your mother must have been a real bitch.’

‘She was, Mr Cabell. A real shit of a bitch.’

‘What a beautiful language!’ Bronevich blew out a cloud of smoke, rolled his head in ecstasy at the music he had been listening to. ‘I could listen to English all day. What a pity I don’t understand it.’

‘Two thousand dollars, Cabell,’ said Pemenov, this time in Russian. ‘The General will be waiting for it – after we have investigated you.’

Two minutes later Cabell was out in the square that fronted the barracks. The August sun pressed down like a bright golden blanket; the air was dry but so hot that it seared the nostrils and dried Cabell’s lips almost instantly. The bell in the tower beneath the green onion dome of the church at the far end of the square tolled noon; the iron notes hung on the heavy air as if cloaked in velvet. Soldiers lolled like dark shocks of corn in the thin midday shadows; a row of them looked as if they were stacked ready for loading on the two military trucks parked by the barracks wall. But Cabell noticed that each truck, decrepit antiques, had a wheel missing: the axles were jacked up on bricks. He knew then that he would never get his own truck on the train for Ekaterinburg. Battered though it was, it was still in better shape than the two military vehicles and General Bronevich wouldn’t let it slip out of his hands.

Shopkeepers were locking up their stores, getting ready for lunch; in a town full of soldiers they had learned to leave nothing unattended. Shutters were closing on house windows, locking out the heat. A peasant crossed the square at a slow walk, bent over beneath the load of firewood on his back: the heat didn’t fool him, he knew winter would have no memory of today and would freeze him if he was not prepared against it. An open carriage drawn by two black, sweat-shining horses came round the square and broke into a trot as Cabell, eyes blinded by the white cobblestones, stepped out of the shade to cross the road.

The horses were abruptly pulled up, rearing high, one of them almost knocking Cabell’s head off as its front hooves pawed at the air. Cabell fell back, just managing to keep his feet, and leaned against the side of the carriage as it came level with him. He looked up into the sun and dimly saw the shape of a woman pulling hard on the reins.

‘For crissakes, lady, why don’t you watch where you’re going?’

‘Watch it!’ said the lady, let go of the reins with one hand, swung her handbag on its long strap and whacked Cabell across the ear. ‘If you’re going to use that sort of language, you’re not getting an apology out of me. Out of the way, you lout!’

The carriage swept on and Cabell jumped back to avoid being run down. He held a hand to his ear, glad to find it was still attached to his head; his other ear was still ringing with the echo of the sharp voice that had spoken to him in English. It was not his day; first a general who suspected he was a spy, then a dwarf who hated him because he was an American, now an English-speaking woman who thought he was a foul-mouthed lout. He stood in the middle of the square, looked around him, wondered where he might find a friend; but two thousand miles of isolation stretched away from him in all directions. All at once he realized that he was sinking very rapidly into a very serious situation.

He walked across the square, still feeling his sore ear, swore at a dog that lazily snapped at him, and came to the line of plane trees under which he had parked his truck. It was not strictly a truck; it was a 1914 Chevrolet car which had had its rear seat and bodywork stripped away and a high-sided platform substituted. It had done more than its fair share of hard travelling and Cabell did not dare to guess how many more miles it had left in it before it fell apart from the battering it had taken in the past five years. It was a car that had been built for the soft dirt roads of America and not for the jungle tracks of Venezuela and the trackless rocky ground he had driven it over here in the Urals. The tyres, worn to condom thinness, had had forty punctures in the past three months; the brakes, when applied, were just a plunger pressed into a well of wishful thinking. He had intended taking it home more for sentimental reasons than because he thought it had many more years of usefulness left in it.

But it was useful now. He knew that the next train for Ekaterinburg did not leave for another three days; by then General Bronevich might have decided that he was indeed a spy. He turned his mind against any thought of what might happen to him. Houdini, the greatest escape artist of all time, always made sure that he did his magic in front of a friendly audience. He never attempted anything where the nearest applause was two thousand miles back in the stalls.

As Cabell approached the Chevrolet a soldier rolled out from behind the shadow of the tailboard, stood up, lethargically brushed the dust from himself and asked Cabell where he thought he was going.

‘Can you drive?’ Cabell said.

The soldier squinted and pondered, decided he understood the question and shook his head.

‘General Bronevich wants the truck round in the barracks yard. You better let me drive.’

The soldier looked around for guidance, saw that he was alone, squinted and pondered again. Then he shook his head and raised his rifle threateningly. It was a Krenk, an ancient one that looked as if it might go off without its trigger being touched.

Cabell smiled, feeling that his lips were splitting and his teeth falling out of their gums. ‘You can ride with me.’ He patted the front seat. ‘Right up there with the driver, Ivan. That should do wonders for your prestige with the girls around here.’

The soldier squinted and pondered once more. Then he abruptly nodded and was up in the front seat so quickly it was almost a feat of instant levitation. Cabell went round to the front of the truck, swung the starting handle, got the engine to fire at the first couple of turns, got in behind the wheel and let in the gears. He drove slowly round the square till he came to the street that headed out to the main road to Ekaterinburg. The gasoline tank was half-full and there were eight four-gallon cans packed in boxes in the back of the truck. If the tyres held he could be in Ekaterinburg in just over two hours, three at the most. A British consul was stationed there and perhaps he could be persuaded to shelter an American till the latter could board the first train going east to Vladivostok. Cabell decided he would make the Consulate a present of the Chevrolet.

As they reached the far side of the square Cabell, glancing across past the broken plinth that had once held a statue of the Tsar, saw General Bronevich come out of the barracks with Pemenov. There was a yell from the General and next moment a shot; a bullet hit the soldier in an arm and he dropped his rifle and screamed in pain. Cabell stepped on the accelerator.

‘Sorry, buddy,’ he said in English, ‘I think you’ll be safer on the ground.’

There were no doors on the truck. Cabell reached across, gave a hard shove as he took the truck round a corner, and the soldier went tumbling out and hit the cobblestones with a thud that made Cabell flinch guiltily. But there was no time for conscience or sympathy. He put his foot down hard and the Chevrolet leapt away up the road towards Ekaterinburg.

In the square General Bronevich was shouting Mongolian obscenities, than which there is nothing more obscene. An officer appeared out of the shadows and, hampered by his heavy riding boots, galloped across to the line of slumbering soldiers who, startled by the shot, were blinking themselves awake and looking for the enemy. The officer kicked them to their feet, yelling at them and himself, urged on by the yelling of General Bronevich. The soldiers, still only half-awake, stumbled towards the barracks stables and their horses.

General Bronevich, no runner, waddled back into the barracks and through to the barracks yard; Pemenov, following him, looked more agile despite his tiny legs. The General’s driver, having taken both front wheels off the General’s car to repair the tyres, had lain down in the shade of the car and fallen asleep. He had taken off his boots and in his sleep, dreaming of his wife’s sister, was sensually wriggling his bare toes. General Bronevich, beside himself and everybody else with rage, shot off three of the driver’s toes and waddled back into the barracks and out into the square as half a dozen soldiers, mounted now, thundered out of the stables and took the road for Ekaterinburg.

‘Get my car fixed!’ General Bronevich bellowed to Pemenov. ‘I want that American’s head fitted to the radiator!’

‘Yes, General!’ Pemenov whirled and his short legs blurred as they carried him back into the barracks at surprising speed.

Two miles up the road, the outskirts of the town already behind it, the Chevrolet was bowling along like the excellent car it had once been. Cabell, feeling better already as the wind drove in to cool him, began to think of home. In another month, six weeks at the outside, he would be driving down the road to Bloomington. His mother had died three years ago and since then his father had moved from Chicago to just outside Bloomington, where he had a small general store. If he was lucky he might even be home in time to take his father to see the White Sox play in the World Series. The Old Man’s last letter, picked up in Verkburg only this morning, had been dated June 1; but Jack Cabell had already been claiming then that this White Sox team was the greatest of all time, would be sure to make it to the World Series. Cabell had not seen a major league game since May 1912 and he was looking forward to seeing the men his father acclaimed, Eddie Collins, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Shineball Eddie Cicotte.

He was dreaming of heroes of the past, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner, thinking what a nice clean war baseball was compared to this civil war going on around him, when the off-side front tyre blew out. The car swerved violently and it was only with tremendous luck that he managed to keep it on the road. He had just got it under control and on a straight course again when the other front tyre blew out.

[2]

Eden Penfold dusted herself off after the truck, its horn blasting at her, had sped by. The horses had shied, but she had managed to steady them, though they were still trembling and nervous as she got them back into a steady trot. Beside her the children were brushing dust from themselves and Frederick was cursing in Russian.

‘Watch it!’ she snapped in English.

‘But I don’t know any English swear words—’ Frederick was twelve, a handsome, dark-haired boy with a slim frame, an innocent expression and an attitude towards life that suggested his education had begun some years before his actual birth. ‘You are always saying, Miss Eden, that one should never hide one’s true feelings—’

‘There’s a time and place for everything, even feelings.’ Ah dear God, if I could only express my true feelings. After six years she had begun to doubt that she had a true vocation as a governess. Sometimes she found herself thinking thoughts that were as revolutionary as those being trumpeted in Moscow right now; though hers were social and romantic rather than political. So far she had managed not to reveal any of her thoughts to her two charges.

‘You have a double standard,’ said Frederick. ‘One law for the rich like us and another one for you.’

‘How on earth can you stand him?’ Eden asked Olga.

Olga, ten years old, already beautiful and waiting for the world to be laid at her feet, shrugged. ‘He’ll get worse, I’m afraid. But by then I shall be married and living on the French Riviera.’

‘You have a little while to go before that happens, my girl.’

Ah, what dreams we women have! But at ten she, living in the semi-detached house in Croydon, south of London, had been dreaming of nothing more than being the bride of the boy next door who, she remembered now, had had adenoids and a tendency to nervously pick his nose when spoken to by a girl. She had never thought of herself as of the stuff of which French Riviera beauties were made. But then she had also never thought that she would finish up here in Russia and Siberia as governess to the children of a Russian aristocrat.

It was another hour before they came to the first fields that marked the border of the Gorshkov estate. Once a month Eden drove into Verkburg in the carriage to see if any mail had arrived for herself or the children; it was a twelve-mile drive each way and she did not enjoy it in the summer heat. There had been no letter today for her from her parents, but there had been one each for the children from their mother and another one for her. The children had read theirs with excitement and delight; she had read hers with growing trepidation and despair. She turned the horses in through the white pillars of the gateway and drove up the long avenue of poplars and wondered how much longer she and the children were going to be isolated here, the children separated from their parents and she from the England that she had now begun to pine for.

She pulled the horses to a halt in front of the Gorshkov house. The house, built of a white-painted stone with a Palladian façade that had been added by the children’s grandfather, looked out of place amongst the wooden barns that surrounded it. Grandfather Gorshkov, the first Prince Gorshkov to add wealth to his title, had tried to buy taste at a time, in Europe, when taste was not at its highest. The Palladian-fronted house in itself was attractive; he had just not known enough to complement it with the appropriate surroundings. Plane trees threw shadows that softened the grey drabness of the barns and cow-sheds, and a few lilacs, faded now by the summer sun, added a touch of colour in the yard between the main barn and the house.