Authors: Jack Grimwood
42
Dennisov met Tom at the door to his bar. Given the speed with which he moved from behind the zinc, he must have been watching from the window. Behind him, the room was hot and fuggy and crowded with a lunchtime crew only half as drunk as those who’d be there that evening. ‘We’re shut.’
‘Beziki took Alex.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t believe you. As I said, we’re shut …’
‘He told me before he died.’
‘We’re shut,’ Dennisov repeated loudly.
‘The bar is full of people.’
‘To foreigners,’ Dennisov said. ‘We’re shut to foreigners.’
Behind the counter, Yelena glanced up and looked away. Sveta didn’t even do that. She finished a bowl of something, knocked back a beer and took her turn at the computer. That pretty much guaranteed everyone in the bar stopped looking towards the door and began watching falling Tetris blocks instead.
Stepping out on to the walkway, Dennisov shut the door behind him.
‘What’s Sveta’s score now?’ Tom asked.
‘You don’t call her Sveta,’ Dennisov said with a scowl. ‘Only her friends call her Sveta. You can call her
Major
. Svetlana, if you must.’
‘This is about Gabashville?’
‘Fuck Gabashville.’
‘Dennisov, what’s going on?’
‘She told me. She told me how you took advantage of her.’ He glanced at the concrete wall behind Tom and the steps down to the street. That was where Tom had come in, watching Dennisov throw someone down those steps.
‘Sveta says I took advantage of her?’
The Russian glared. ‘She doesn’t have to.’
‘It was once, for God’s sake.’
‘So you admit it?’
‘Dennisov.’
‘You told me nothing happened.
I asked you
.’
‘You asked what was between us. I said nothing. It was once. Someone had just tried to kill me. I was …’ Tom didn’t have to say more. The sour twist of Dennisov’s mouth said he understood. Sex could be complicated or simple. Sometimes it wasn’t about sex at all. Sometimes it was about convincing yourself you were alive.
‘Once?’ Dennisov said.
‘She was being kind.’
‘You took advantage of her.’
‘Dennisov. She was being kind.’
He looked at Tom, then glanced through to where Sveta was lost in her game, manipulating blocks at impossible speed, oblivious to the crowd pushing in on her, or the lover and ex-fuck at the door edging back from a fight. Would she mind if they fought over her, Tom wondered. Would she be pleased? Appalled? He imagined all she’d display would be contempt.
‘Anyway,’ Tom said, ‘she didn’t know you then.’
Dennisov’s face cleared and Tom cursed himself for not coming up with that sooner. ‘You’re right,’ Dennisov said. ‘She didn’t know me then. When I saw her … with that rifle and a rabbit hanging from her hand … The light was on her
hair. And the trees were dark and sharp behind her. You’ve seen that poster in my room. I felt …’
A
coup de foudre.
Tom could honestly say he’d never had one, had never felt his entire happiness depended on someone returning a smile. Not even in his teens, when that kind of insanity was just about acceptable.
‘You like her?’
Dennisov smiled. ‘It’s been a long time.’
Not sex, Tom doubted it had been a long time for that. There were a lot of prostitutes in Moscow for a place where official statistics proved the selling of sex had been abolished. Perhaps Dennisov meant it had been a long time since he’d been with a woman he loved.
If Dennisov wanted to think of Sveta as a simple country girl of the forest, content to bring back food for her grandfather, then let him. Tom was fine with that. He hoped they would be happy. He suspected that they both deserved some happiness.
‘Dennisov, what’s the penalty for killing a political officer?’
The Russian’s eyes went flat. ‘I didn’t,’ he said.
‘I know. You killed your CO. Sveta told me. Before the two of you met. All right? Before the two of you met. Now, what would it be?’
‘How long ago?’
‘Berlin.’
Dennisov froze. He looked at Tom from under lashes far too long for a man’s and if he’d seemed drunk or nearly drunk the moment before, he was sober now, the alcohol burned from his veins by whatever darkness was in his heart.
‘You have the photographs?’
‘How do you know about them?’
‘I found my father’s set as a child. As you can see …’ He lifted his scarred hand, the one Tom thought had been damaged in a helicopter crash. ‘We burned them together. He had me hold each one over an open fire until it caught.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Six.’ Dennisov looked away so Tom couldn’t see his eyes.
Tom followed Dennisov to the walkway’s edge and they stood side by side, passing a papirosa between them while Tom looked for his shadow, half intending to offer the man a drink, but his usual doorway was empty, and the couple who stumbled down the street a minute later and fell into the doorway, their hands already reaching into each other’s clothes, were too preoccupied to notice those watching from above.
‘We should go in,’ Dennisov said.
Tom agreed.
‘Oh, so he’s talking to you now …’
Yelena nodded to Tom and scowled at her brother, making it clear that he wasn’t included in her politeness. Having dumped a bowl of soup in front of Tom unasked, she produced a large chunk of dark bread and a cold can of East German beer, only reluctantly relinquishing vodka duties to her brother.
‘I should probably ask what you did for her,’ Dennisov said, once Yelena had retreated to her kitchen. ‘But I’m not sure I want to know.’
‘She’s a good kid.’
‘That’s not the general view.’
‘This stuff with your father …’
‘He always treated my sister entirely properly.’
Tom waited as his friend vanished inside himself for a moment. When he reappeared, it was to say, ‘His friends weren’t always that careful.’
Behind them, the bar erupted into cheers and Dennisov looked relieved at the distraction. Sveta had beaten her best, which was Moscow’s best. She’d gone from stranger to regular in an impressively short time; her uniform and gender no longer a hindrance. When she spotted the two men behind the bar – Tom still in one piece, Dennisov missing no more bits than usual – she looked relieved. It lasted less than a second and her face was impassive again by the time she joined Tom.
‘He made the leg himself,’ she said.
‘From the leaf spring of a jeep?’
Her look said she considered Tom to be simple.
‘What then?’
‘From the landing gear of his helicopter, obviously.’
Tom thought of the organization needed to ship a pointless strip of twisted metal from Afghanistan to Moscow just so that some crippled, barely sane ex-pilot could machine it into something useful. He could see Dennisov’s friends doing it. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘You should be … First Vladimir Vedenin, now Erekle Gabashville. My grandfather wants to know if he should be worried.’
‘I didn’t kill Beziki.’
‘That’s what you said about Vladimir.’
‘When are you going to talk to your grandfather next?’
Sveta’s face closed down as she waited to see what Tom wanted. What he wanted was any information the commissar might have on Kyukov.
‘He’s in prison,’ Sveta said.
‘You know who he is?’
‘I’ve heard the name.’
‘Everything okay?’ asked Dennisov, reappearing from behind the bar. He had a flask of vodka in one hand and two
shot glasses in the other. Unusually, the flask looked full and both glasses were empty.
‘All good,’ Sveta said. ‘We were talking about your leg.’
‘She likes it,’ Dennisov said. He sounded slightly disbelieving. Smiling at Sveta, he said, ‘We’re going through to the back.’
‘Want me to join you?’ she asked.
‘Best not,’ he said.
He blushed slightly when she stared at him.
‘Trust me on this,’ he begged.
Unexpectedly, she smiled in turn. ‘On everything.’
He flushed bright red. He blushed so fiercely he looked like a twelve-year-old ready to pull her pigtails. Then he swivelled, pushed past his sister, cast a glance back at Sveta and vanished through the curtains, leaving Tom to follow.
Yelena rolled her eyes.
In the kitchen, Dennisov was already pouring Tom a vodka. He looked put out when Tom asked for coffee instead, and only slightly happier when Tom pulled what was left of his Colombian from the pocket of his Belstaff and began making coffee with that.
When Dennisov tried to clear a space at the little fold-up table, only just avoiding tipping plates to the floor, Tom stopped him. ‘Let me,’ he said.
By the time Tom had filled the sink, Dennisov had the file open and was flicking in disbelief through one of the account books. ‘You know what this is?’
‘I’ve a pretty good idea.’
‘You stole these?’
‘Beziki gave them to me.’
The chair creaked as Dennisov sat back, his hand reaching for his glass. With it halfway to his mouth, he changed his mind and put it down. A moment later he asked if there was enough coffee in the saucepan for two. ‘Shit,’ he said.
Several minutes later he said it again.
By then he’d skimmed the account books, totted up half a dozen columns using a calculator the size of a brick, checked something in an atlas he scooped from under his bed and sat in silence for several seconds, looking longingly at his vodka.
‘Yelena!’ His shout was so loud it made Tom jump.
His sister came through scowling, stopped when she saw her brother’s face and put her hand on his shoulder, a gesture somewhere between a question and reassurance.
‘All good in the bar?’
‘Food’s done. Everyone has a drink.’
‘Sveta all right?’
‘She’s playing her machine. You want me to fetch her?’
‘No,’ Dennisov said. ‘Maybe best not. Not yet. You look at these and I’ll make more coffee.’
‘I can do that.’
‘I’d rather you read these.’
So Yelena did, her eyes flicking from column to column as she skimmed the pages, occasionally turning back to double-check a figure. Only once did she reach for the calculator, and then, like her brother with his vodka, her hand stilled halfway and she did the sum in her head. Finally, she flicked to the last page of the last account book to check the date. It was two days earlier.
‘What are you going to do with these?’ she asked Tom.
‘Give them to your brother.’
Dennisov choked on hot coffee.
‘You can’t,’ Yelena said. ‘I mean …’
‘I’m not Russian,’ Tom told her. ‘I don’t have the contacts. I can’t make the deals. I can’t make the old contracts stick. I can’t bring the old lieutenants to heel. You need muscle for something like that.’
‘I have friends,’ Dennisov said.
‘I’m sure you do. All those men coming back from Afghanistan looking for something more than they had when they left. All with new skills and weapons training. All used to obeying orders.’
Yelena looked thoughtful.
‘As for things like the farm,’ Tom said, ‘I’m not even sure Russians can pass property on to foreigners.’
‘They can’t,’ she said.
‘There you go. It has to be your brother. I’ve taken one of the bank books and left you the rest. And I might be able to access the West Berlin one for you.’
‘I should turn you in,’ said Dennisov. ‘You’ve just offered to help with money laundering. You’ve confessed to being there when Beziki died. You’ve …’ He shrugged. ‘Proof of criminal conspiracy. Illegal accounts. Extortion. Corruption. You’re trying to compromise an ex-officer. This is probably a Western plot.’
‘You know where the telephone is.’
‘There will be money,’ he said. ‘For you. Regularly. There will be money. We can work something out later. What can I do for you now?’
Answer a question
, Tom thought. But he wasn’t sure if he should ask it. And if he did, who they might tell.
‘Give me a vodka,’ he said instead, wondering how long it would take Sveta to get him his other answer and how badly he was going to dislike it when it arrived. ‘And then I need to get home.’
‘You mean the flat?’ Yelena asked.
Yes, he supposed he did.