Moskva (21 page)

Becca was on the chair when Tom woke, knees drawn up the way she used to sit in front of the TV, an expression of fierce concentration on her face. Woe betide anyone who disturbed her as she lost herself in the adventures of a saggy old cloth cat. ‘Mummy’s leaving you,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘You’re crying,’ she said.

‘I’ve been doing a lot of that,’ he told her.

‘I didn’t know you could cry. But, you know, it wasn’t like we saw much of each other when I was alive.’

‘Becca …’

She looked at him, head twisted to one side. ‘Did you ever see
Once Upon a Time in America
? You should. You’d like it, I think. Peter took me to a screening in Portsmouth. They shouldn’t have let us in, but …’ Becca shrugged. ‘It was Portsmouth. Mummy was away. You were too. You were always away.’

Shimmering behind her were rolling hills and green glens. A cool breeze from a world beyond. Tom hoped it was heaven but he was worried because it looked like Crossmaglen. His daughter looked happy, though.

Happier than he remembered.

Then she didn’t. ‘I should tell them you’re awake.’

‘Am I awake?’

The nurse unfolded her legs and stood stiffly, like
someone who’d spent far too long sitting in a badly designed chair. She padded across the room, backlit by a window bright enough to make him squint as she leaned slightly forward and stared at him. Her hair was the wrong colour and her face Slavic, but her eyes were almost the same. Only not quite. They belonged to someone alive.

The ceiling blurred and Tom’s throat tightened and he couldn’t stop hot tears running down both sides of his face. He felt so empty, human and helpless and he finally understood why dying boys called for their mothers on the battlefield. If there was a God, he wasn’t here.

‘It’s the drugs,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Alex …?’ he asked.

Alex was on the chair when he woke again.

Knees up, the way his daughter used to sit in front of the TV, with an expression of fierce concentration on her face. Back in the days when Becca could still lose herself in the adventures of a saggy old cloth cat.

‘You took my tape,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you?’

‘Which tape?’

‘You know. The one he gave me.’

‘How could you possibly know that?’

‘I don’t,’ she said, as if it was obvious. ‘You do.’

‘Is that significant?’

‘Doubt it. It’s an out-take from a recording session. He got it from a man in a bar when his boss was in America. He didn’t even know who the band was.’

‘You did.’

‘Of course. Their poster’s on my wall.’

‘Alex?’ Tom squinted into the light. ‘Are you really here?’

‘Obviously not,’ she said. ‘You’re hallucinating. Who did you think I was last time?’

‘Someone I loved. Just not very well.’

‘What happened?’

‘I killed her.’

The girl in his dream looked shocked.

‘Unless she killed herself,’ Tom said hastily.

‘I’d better tell them you’re awake.’

‘But I’m not,’ Tom said.

‘You were shot with the wrong kind of arrow. That’s the truth of it. If you’d been shot with the right kind, you’d be dead. You’d have holes that couldn’t be mended.’

‘I’ve got those anyway.’

‘Do you know what a field point is?’

Tom nodded.

‘Me neither.’

‘You’re here, aren’t you?’

Alex shook her head so fiercely that she disappeared and Tom found a nurse shaking him by the wrist. She was middle-aged and dumpy, slightly sour-faced, as if wondering what this man was doing in her hospital.

She looked nothing like Alex or Becca at all.

Next came a man who wanted answers. A doctor came first though.

He checked Tom’s shoulder, which he unbandaged and bandaged again, then he looked at a machine with chrome-ringed dials too much like a Mini’s dashboard for Tom’s liking, and made a note of what the speedometer said.

Then, pushing up the sleeve of Tom’s gown, he found a vein. In England the gown would be paper, with ties at the back.

This one was cotton and it had buttons.

‘Where’s Alex?’ Tom asked.

‘Who’s Alex?’

‘The girl.’

‘There isn’t a girl.’

‘She talked to me about my daughter.’

‘This isn’t going to hurt,’ the doctor said.

There was a light overhead, hanging from a flex, and sometimes it was too bright to bear and other times barely on at all. The room wouldn’t stop spinning and it wasn’t a room Tom recognized.

He was pretty sure he hadn’t been this drunk since he turned twenty-one. He tried to find the pub but the room didn’t seem to have one. There were no other customers either. The sky was wrong for Belfast, the temperature wrong for a Belize brothel. Tom had just decided he was on his back on the pub floor when someone dragged a chair across the floor and sat by his bed.

‘What is your wife’s name?’

‘Caroline. I call her Caro.’

‘Why?’

‘Everyone calls her Caro.’

‘Your daughter. What happened to her?’

‘She died.’

‘How did she die?’

‘She crashed into a tree.’

‘Did you cause her to crash into a tree?’

‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

There was silence, then a chair creaked, paper rustled and the voice came closer. ‘Now, more recent things. What happened with Vladimir?’

Tom could remember this one. ‘His jeep went through the ice.’

‘Did you force my son to drive across the lake?’

‘He should have had skis on his plane.’

‘Major … why did he drive across that lake?’

‘Why do boys do anything?’

There was an exasperated sigh.

The next person Tom saw was Sveta, who arrived with a young man in wire spectacles. She came flanked by two men in uniform. When they made to follow her in, she barked at them to stay put. Hefting his case on to a chair, the young man opened its lid, flicked a switch on what looked like an oscilloscope and began turning dials, while listening through one side of a pair of oversized headphones.

He nodded to Sveta.

‘Who were you expecting?’ Tom asked.

Sveta waited until the young man had dragged his case out of there before answering. ‘The Americans, obviously.’

That’s when Tom realized his room was bugged. Although probably not by the Americans. ‘Alex was here earlier.’

‘You’ve had a fever,’ she said.

‘Sveta, I saw her.’

‘Hallucinations. You just wish you had.’

‘You were at the house, weren’t you?’

Sveta nodded.

‘Why?’

‘I followed you. Obviously.’

‘Did Vladimir follow me?’

‘Vladimir’s dead.’

Tom stared at her, shocked. ‘Really?’

‘Really,’ she said. ‘His jeep went through the ice. You were dying. An ambulance brought you here.’

‘An accident,’ Tom said.

‘Vladimir? An accident,’ Sveta agreed. Pulling a scrap of paper from her pocket, she dug around for a pencil.
We’re going to get you out of here.

Tom didn’t want to leave.

He wanted to stay in case Alex came back.

Sometimes it was better to stay. Sometimes that got you answers.

The night a foot patrol in Belfast decided to kick the shit out of him he’d been ordered to pull out. He’d have left next day. Instead he made himself a cast-iron cover story. The best thing was the soldiers didn’t even know they’d helped build it. He’d been in a white transit, with a ladder on top, heading up the Falls Road, and he’d put his headlights up the moment he spotted them.

Patrols hated that.

After bringing his van to a halt, they smashed his lights front and back with their rifle butts before starting on him. Two boys, barely older than fourteen, in denim jackets that stank of cigarettes, dragged him up to A&E. Tom told the triage nurse about the patrol and she wrote him down as a drunken fall.

One of the boys’ dads was outside when she was done.

He shook Tom’s hand, took him to the pub, poured a couple of pints down him, told him to keep up the good fight and introduced him to the boys. The pints mixed nicely with the painkillers the nurse had slipped into his pocket as he was leaving. They mixed so nicely he couldn’t …

‘Concentrate,’ Sveta ordered.

‘It’s the injections.’

‘Your records show orally administered analgesics.’

They were using truth drugs. He knew they were using truth drugs.

‘I think it’s sodium …’

She held up her hand before he could add
pentothal.

When the light returned, she was gone and a serious-looking man in a white coat stood next to Tom’s bed, a huge syringe in his hand. Tom’s eyes widened and the man looked more
serious still. When Tom tried to move, he discovered that his arms were fixed by his sides. A wide leather strap tightened his chest, and from the feel of it there was one across his stomach as well. At an order from the doctor, a nurse hurried forward and fixed a final strap across his ankles. The brass buckles that Tom could see were tarnished, the belt holes stretched.

Not like this,
he thought.

His muscles strained as he tried to fight free.

‘It’s only a sedative,’ the doctor said. ‘This won’t hurt.’

He lied. A bruise blossomed where he missed Tom’s vein the first time, his fingers shaking as he stabbed at the crook of Tom’s elbow, too frightened by those waiting outside to do his job properly.

The world spun so fast people thought it stood still.

It spun in orbit around the sun. The day didn’t fade. Night didn’t fall. The angel of death that had hovered so close to Tom’s shoulder in recent years refused to come. Instead, the door opened and Comrade Vedenin entered. He glanced back once and the suited men behind him stayed where they were.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Constrained.’

Looking at the straps, Vedenin sighed.

With an expression of quiet distaste, he began undoing the buckles and unpeeling the curling leather straps. ‘How are we ever going to take our proper place in the world if we insist on behaving like this?’ Having undone the strap across Tom’s legs, he freed his right wrist before walking round to free his left. By now the room was spinning so fast the syringe might as well have contained neat vodka.

‘You were right,’ Vedenin said. ‘Sodium pentothal. We borrowed the idea from you. More reliable than the old methods. So I’m told.’

He made himself sound ancient.

‘What do you want?’ Tom asked.

‘The truth.’

‘About what?’

‘About anything would be good.’ Pulling a chair from under a desk, he turned it round and sat splay-legged. ‘Let’s start with the obvious. Do
you
know where your ambassador’s daughter is?’

‘She was here. Earlier.’

‘I doubt that very much.’ Vedenin’s gaze was steady.

‘Do you know?’ Tom asked.

‘No,’ Vedenin said, ‘I don’t.’

Tom believed him.

‘Now. Did you kill my son?’

‘He drove on to the ice.’

‘So I’m told. Why did he drive on to the ice?’

‘Why does anyone do anything?’

‘Please answer the question. Did you kill my son?’

The room was hot. A strip light overhead rotated like a slowly turning ’copter blade. Tom could hear its thud coming across the hills as he clung to damp turf and hoped they’d find him without him needing to stand or wave.

Don’t leave me here.

It was all the man beside him could say.

His pleas grew weaker as the flow of blood trickled through tufts of rough grass. He was a good man, the dying man, as wife-beating racist porridge lice went. He’d simply done one tour too many, been in the army too long. Been too close to retirement to think this would happen.
Fuck them all,
he said.

As last words went it beat
Mummy
.

‘Shit,’ Vedenin said. ‘How much did that idiot give you?’

The bruise on his arm was yellow. The light above his bed was neither a single bulb on a twisted flex nor a fluorescent
tube. It was hidden behind a flat recessed panel, sleek enough to belong in a New York hotel. The walls were pale green, the floor marbled. There was a long line of neatly made-up beds. Occupants: one.

‘Where am I?’

‘The KGB’s new hospital,’ Sveta said.

‘Why am I here?’

‘We don’t trust other hospitals.’

The commissar arrived later that night.

Six soldiers walked behind him. Having confirmed that Tom was still alive, and still here, he told two to guard the door, two to guard the stairs and the last two to stand guard at the hospital’s entrance.

‘Let’s see Vedenin move you now,’ he said.

He kicked at a marble tile with his heel. Complained about the waste of state money. Felt the thickness of the curtains. Sneered at the flowers in a large vase. Criticized the effeteness of the mosaic on the far wall, and asked which idiot had signed off on a black glass desk that belonged in a science-fiction film.

‘As for that …’ he said, pointing at the luminous panel overhead.

‘What about it?’ Sveta demanded.

‘Find out who designed it, so I can have him shot.’

When he saw Tom’s shoulder, he smiled. ‘Been upsetting people, I gather.’

‘Not intentionally.’

The commissar snorted. ‘How do you feel?’

‘I’ve been better.’

‘Believe me, you could be a lot worse.’

‘Don’t doubt it,’ Tom said.

The fact that he could barely feel where the crossbow’s bolt had skewered him meant he had to be on opiates of
some sort. He wondered why Sir Edward was letting the Soviets look after him. Then wondered aloud if Sir Edward even knew what had happened.

‘Of course he knows,’ the commissar said. ‘Sveta called the embassy. Said she knew they’d want to help and could they tell her where Sir Edward had been the afternoon you were shot.’

He shrugged. ‘They didn’t think it was funny.’ Glancing at his granddaughter, he added, ‘I’m not sure she meant it to be funny. Now … Let’s get this over with.’

A doctor was summoned. In her hand was yet another syringe. She tapped the shaft to dislodge a bubble, squirted a thin jet of clear liquid to check the needle was full and reached for Tom’s arm.