Moskva (10 page)

A door was open to a tiny box room beyond. Clothes were folded into piles along one wall, two camp beds occupied most of the floor. A small window with an ill-fitting frame had a bird feeder on the far side. The only decoration was a tattered poster of a blonde Komsomol girl with braids wrapped tightly round her head. Full-breasted and blue-eyed,
she raised her face to the sun as she stared enthusiastically into the future.

Dennisov said, ‘A childhood present from the general.’

‘The general?’

‘Our dear father,’ Yelena said.

She stamped across and shut the box-room door, muttering darkly as she returned to her saucepan and turned off the gas. Dennisov and Tom watched as she slopped soup into two bowls, cut thick slabs of dark bread, dumped the lot on a tray and headed for the curtain. ‘Call me when you’re done.’

‘Yelena …’

‘Talking to foreigners is dangerous.’

It was hard to tell what Dennisov was thinking as he watched the curtain fall into place behind her. ‘She and the general don’t get on.’

‘Any particular reason?’

‘She burned his dacha down when she was ten.’

‘Good God, why?’

‘He was inside.’

‘You’ve served,’ Dennisov said. ‘Haven’t you?’

Tom thought of long nights watching darkened windows, dawns when he’d witnessed uniformed men smash down doors to extract people who thought they were safely hidden. He thought of firefights in glens so beautiful they belonged on postcards, and pushed his hands into his pockets, noticing Dennisov notice.

‘After a fashion.’

Dennisov grinned sourly. ‘Me too,’ he said. He repeated Tom’s ‘After a fashion’
back to himself. ‘Yours was not a clean war?’

‘As filthy as it comes.’

‘Mine too. The generals want it ended. The Kremlin
refuses. So year after year, TASS tells the people we’re winning, when everyone knows we’re not. Once the Americans started giving the mullahs missiles … You think these wars are winnable?’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think you shouldn’t answer a question with a question.’

‘I think we should talk about this another time. But no, I don’t think those wars are winnable. It’s hard to win against people who want their country back.’

Dennisov gulped his vodka. ‘Too many dead children.’

Tom looked at him.

‘Once you start killing children, how do you stop their families wanting to kill you? … War, what is it good for?’

‘Absolutely nothing.’

The Russian laughed. ‘You have LPs?’

Tom’s own vodka stopped halfway to his mouth.

‘You know? Edwin Starr? The Who? Led Zeppelin?’

‘Those are old.’

‘New bands would be better. Good bands.’

‘I have this,’ said Tom, pulling Alex’s cassette from his pocket. ‘And yes, I’ve got a few LPs somewhere. I’ll dig them out.’

‘This is a bootleg?’

‘Home-taped. It’s killing music.’

Dennisov stared at him blankly.

‘Do you have a tape recorder?’ Tom asked.

‘Of course I have a tape recorder. All Russians have a tape recorder.’ He pulled a bulky brown slab from one of Yelena’s kitchen drawers. ‘East German.’ Dennisov’s expression was sour.

‘What’s it doing in there?’

‘It lives in there.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘In the room you just examined. You saw the beds.’

‘No perks for returning veterans?’

‘None that I’d want. And Yelena is not good on her own.’

Tom spread his hands to admit defeat, perhaps incomprehension. His own sister was six years older, already a mother several times over and quite possibly a grandmother. ‘Haven’t seen my sister in years.’

‘I would miss Yelena.’

When the snare drum and guitar started up, Dennisov grew still. ‘This is good,’ he said finally. ‘This is very good. You find any more like this, you bring them to me, right?’

‘If I do,’ Tom agreed.

‘These badges have to do with that girl?’

‘No. I found them on the street.’

‘Show me the last again.’

Dennisov took the Lenin badge, turning it over in his hand.

‘The others are tat. This is gold and reserved for senior Party members. These days they’re platinum, so this is at least twenty years old.’

‘You’re saying her boyfriend was older?’

‘More likely his father is important.’

It looked like any other Lenin badge to Tom, although perhaps the great man’s head was a little finer, the enamel a little brighter. This wasn’t good. He’d been hoping they were all tat, the kind of thing a foreign student out at the university might give a younger girl to impress her.

‘You’re sure?’

‘My father has one. It goes nicely with his silk suits.’

Stubble, gym shorts, rusting prosthetic leg … Dennisov really didn’t look like someone whose father was
nomenclatura
, important.

‘He lives in Leningrad with my sister.’

Tom glanced towards the bar.

‘Not Yelena. My other sister. Yelena’s our housemaid’s daughter.’

‘Your father has housemaids?’

‘He calls them something else.’

The call came first thing next morning. A brisk five or six rings, put down at the other end and then, almost immediately, the phone rang again, and kept ringing until Tom rolled out of bed, grabbed his dressing gown and slumped on to a tapestry-covered stool beside the telephone table. ‘Fox,’ he said.

‘This is Masterton.’

‘Sir?’

‘Thought you must have left.’

‘I was still asleep, sir. Hard night.’

‘You’re not out here to enjoy yourself.’

‘Believe me, sir, I’m not. I went drinking with the son of a KGB general. Ex-Spetsnaz. Ex-pilot. Wounded in Afghanistan and invalided out. He’s of the opinion that killing civilians is self-defeating. Also, that Afghans are fanatics. Like all religious fanatics, the more you attack them the worse they get. The Red Army have been begging the Kremlin for years to bring the troops home.’

‘Any of that true?’

‘Every word of it.’

Sir Edward was silent for a moment.

‘You realize he’s probably reporting everything you say? So take care not to compromise us. As long as you don’t do that, and get more out of him than he gets out of you, I suppose it’s fine. This is for your report, I imagine?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Want a word. I’ll send a car.’

‘Probably quicker if I take the metro, sir.’

‘Quick as you can then.’ Sir Edward began to put the phone down, then his voice was there again, suddenly loud in Tom’s ear. ‘I gather my wife visited you yesterday. Is that correct?’

‘She wanted to know what I found on Alex’s computer.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘Nothing, sir. I’m not sure Alex even turned it on.’

‘That’s what Anna said.’ The telephone clicked, and a second later there was another click and then static and a sudden sense of distance. In part, that had to result from the magnitude of the gulf between Tom and the man he reported to. Tom was closer to Dennisov, a crippled Soviet pilot, than he was to the ambassador, in every way except being on the same side.

The last thing Tom did before leaving his flat was pin two of the three enamel badges he’d found in Alex’s room to the collar of his Belstaff. The Fortieth Anniversary of Victory badge on the right, the little circle with Lenin’s head to the left. He left the Komsomol badge on the side.

Tom really did intend to take the metro. But the Muscovites flowing down the steps into the underworld had clothes the colour of smog, and their cheap aftershave, bad haircuts, dour expressions and stink of cigarettes and wet wool reminded him of Belfast. So he let himself be caught up in the tide flowing past the entrance, with two men in heavy coats behind him and a woman with a wobbly pushchair up ahead. When she suddenly stopped, Tom stepped into the road to avoid her, raising his hand in apology to a black Volga.

The crop-haired driver wound down his window.

‘Foreigner,’ Tom said. ‘Sorry.’

It took the men in coats moving in for him to realize this wasn’t about him stepping into the road. An arm went round his shoulder a split second before a blade touched his side. ‘No one would see a thing,’ one of the men said.

The other nodded towards the Volga.

‘Your choice.’

Three of them. Two outside, one in the car. Four, if you included the woman with the pushchair, who once again blocked his way.

‘I have diplomatic immunity.’

‘Not with us.’

A hand touched Tom’s head to force him into the back and he tensed, feeling the blade jab slightly. You could survive a stab to the side … All those shit-filled tubes, though. You could die from it too.

‘I demand to talk to my embassy.’

‘Later,’ the man said. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Perhaps?’

‘Perhaps not.’

It was the driver who made up Tom’s mind.

Instead of worrying about how this would unfold, he reached into his glove compartment for a packet of cigarillos, took a lighter from his leather jacket and lit up, sweetish smoke drifting through his open window.

It was magnificently ‘fuck you’, the action of someone who already knows how a scene will unfold. Tom too knew his part. The rules said stay alive as long as possible.

Until dying became preferable.

One of the two men slid in beside him.

As the Volga pulled away, the other turned back towards the metro, shrugging to Tom’s shadow. Only the woman with
the buggy stared after them. Up ahead was what passed for a Moscow traffic jam: a handful of cars edging past a broken lorry. A
militsiya
car, siren off, lights flicking lazily, was parked behind. Tom’s driver didn’t even glance across as he pushed his way through. He was younger than Tom had thought, less confident than his display with the cigarillo had suggested. Discreetly checking the door, Tom found it locked.

‘I have a gun,’ the driver said.

‘I’m sure you do.’

The problem with the young was that they had things to prove.

Tom certainly did back then. Thirty-eight wasn’t old but it mostly wasn’t reckless either. These two had been entrusted with delivering him. They wanted to live up to that trust. The IRA worked on the same model. Young men sent out by men far older. All forces worked like that, Tom’s included. Of course, his didn’t have black Volgas, black glass office blocks or famous jails.

‘Where are you taking me?’

The man beside him looked over, his expression flat. ‘You talk too much.’

Heading south, they passed Red Square, crossed the Moskva and a canal beyond, then joined a long loop of the Boulevard Ring that carried them back over the river and round the east side of Moscow. Finally, they turned back towards the centre and stopped a quarter of an hour later outside a row of houses fronted by spindly trees. They sat for a moment, the engine ticking to itself.

Tom began sliding for the door the moment he heard it unlock, only for a thickset pedestrian on the far side of the road to unbutton his coat, show Tom his holster and walk across and open the door for him.

‘Am I under arrest?’

‘You have immunity. Who could arrest you?’

The driver, who was happily lighting another cigarillo, smiled.

The house had curtained windows and stone steps up to a shiny black door. The door looked freshly painted and the steps had been scraped free of snow. But Tom was shown to cellar stairs at the side.

‘Take care,’ the thickset man said.

Tom looked at him.

‘The brickwork is icy.’

‘What now?’ asked Tom, when they were in the cellar, where a single chair stood in the middle of a stained concrete floor, under a bare bulb on a fraying flex. The walls were splashed with God knows what. A coil of rubber hose hung from a nail. A tap below it dripped repeatedly. At the far end was a steel door.

‘What now? You strip.’

‘No chance.’

Stepping back, the man folded his fingers round his Makarov and lifted the weapon from its holster, jacking back the slide to put a round in the chamber. The action was unthinking, effortless. Close to instinct. ‘Those are my orders.’

No noise came from beyond the steel door.

No screams. No raised voices. No pleas for mercy.

Tom scanned the room for CCTV but the cellar was clean. A swept expanse of concrete, splashed walls scabbed with ancient paint. The ceiling was supported on beams as old as the walls. Perhaps the space beyond was soundproof. Perhaps it was simply empty.

‘What then? I tie myself to this chair? Torture myself?’

‘Who said anything about torture?’

‘Why am I here?’

The man sighed. ‘I have no idea.’

‘And after I strip?’

‘You go through that door and I go home to a brandy. And, unless the boss calls later, maybe I get to fuck my wife or go to a card game. Or perhaps we go to the movies, if there’s something worth watching. Have you any idea how long it’s been since there was something worth watching?’

Tom shook his head.

‘Fucking years. You know what’s on this week?
Come and See.
About the Great Patriotic War. Just for a change. Only this time they used live ammunition to make the battle scenes realistic. A country can have too much realism, you know …?’

It was the pub-like nature of his conversation that threw Tom, the way his words contrasted with the filthy cellar and solitary chair. The man really did look as if all he wanted was to get home to a drink, his wife and maybe a movie.

‘What was the last film you liked?’ Tom asked.

‘
Solaris.
She had good tits … Think about it,’ the man said. ‘If you don’t strip, how can my boss be sure you’re not carrying? That you’re not wearing a wire? He has to be careful. You can’t blame a man in his position for being careful.’

Placing his trousers over the chair, Tom put his socks inside his shoes, his pants under his shirt and his Belstaff over the chair’s back. The concrete was like ice under his feet and goose pimples covered his legs.

‘Through there,’ the man said.

They looked at each other. When Tom knocked crossly on the steel door, it was the man with the gun who sighed with relief.

‘Welcome, Major Fox.’

The young woman who handed him a bathrobe was dressed in a short skirt and a slightly too tight white blouse. Despite his nakedness, she was the one who blushed when she caught Tom staring.

‘If you’d follow me?’

She led him along the edge of a pool, past bentwood chairs and between squat palms in terracotta pots. White marble pillars held up porphyry arches that supported a domed ceiling above. Steam from the pool made the chairs on the far edge look further away than they were. ‘In here, sir.’

Tom was slapped by a wall of heat.

‘Come in, Mr Fox.’

A huge man sat on a marble bench, his back to the green tiles of the steam room, a white towel the size of a sheet worn like a toga. He had the broken nose and heavy brows of a boxer, but his gaze belonged to someone altogether more complex. When the door slammed, Tom knew the girl was gone and they were alone.

‘So,’ said the man, ‘tell me about your daughter.’

‘My daughter?’

The man surveyed him silently for several seconds. ‘Start with how she died.’