by Jeremy Duns
Beneath a curved glass roof, hundreds of shoppers teemed through the vast central hall. Gaudy, cheap-looking toys lined the walls, vying for attention, while a loudspeaker in the ceiling told parents and children to meet near the entrance if they became separated. A queue of people made three loops around the hall and disappeared up a grand-looking stairwell leading to balcony floors above.
‘Sarah!’ I shouted out. ‘Where are you?’
She had vanished. I headed for the foot of the stairs, and a young woman in the queue saw my frozen look and misinterpreted it. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It moves quite fast.’ But I’d already jostled past her, forcing people out of the way by making more official-sounding noises, not gaining any friends but climbing higher, higher, my feet flying, a few steps further away from the entrance below and hopefully out of sight.
As I neared the halfway point, I suddenly felt dizzy, and my vision filled with spots of dancing light. I steadied myself against the banister for a moment and looked down: in the blur below I saw several men in ushankas coming through the entrance, some wearing brown coats – KGB – and some grey ones – GRU. One of the latter suddenly caught sight of me, and our eyes locked. It was Yuri. He turned and shouted an order, his finger raised to point me out.
I shoved myself away from the banister just as the shot glanced off the latticed railings beneath it, sending a plume of metal fragments into the hall below. Everyone started screaming, and I began fighting against a tide of panicked shoppers, most of whom were now trying to flee upstairs. My head was still ringing from the sound of the shot as I pushed through the crush of flailing limbs and echoing cries, and scrambled up the remaining steps to the next floor.
That was when I saw Sarah, just a few feet ahead, her pace starting to flag a little. I ran towards her and she turned and stared at me, her face a mixture of elation and sheer terror.
She grabbed hold of my free hand, and I looked around in panic at the gallery stretching around the hall. It wouldn’t be more than ten or twenty seconds before Yuri’s men reached this floor. We needed to find a rear entrance, and fast. I looked around frantically but could see nothing, so I just picked one of the walkways and started running pell-mell down it, hoping to find another staircase as we went along. After about twenty yards it started to get crowded again, because the shot hadn’t been heard this far in.
As Sarah and I plunged back into the crush of people crowding the counters, a deafening rattle suddenly filled my ears. I ducked instinctively, but then the noise faded and I looked up to see a scruffy-haired boy hurtling past us wielding a plastic machine gun over his head and screaming at the top of his lungs. He ran straight into his mother, who grabbed him by the arm and demanded he place the toy back on the shelves. After some protest, he did and I watched, transfixed for a moment, before something jogged my brain. I raced over to the display and scanned the selection. It wasn’t Hamleys – most of the items were crude East German plastic models. There was a black pistol that looked to have been modelled on the Tokarev TT, but I rejected it. The biggest box on the shelf showed a Vostok capsule deep in space, the blue seas of Earth far below it as it blasted into glory for the Motherland.
There was a rising commotion at the other end of the room and I guessed Yuri’s men had now reached this floor and had started combing through it. I put the case down, then removed the Vostok from the shelf and ripped open the cardboard box. Sarah watched in confusion as I stamped the mould under my feet until it had broken into dozens of pieces. I leaned down and picked up a thin shard of crude plastic, and she nodded in mute understanding. I picked the case up again and we raced back into the crowd, looking around desperately for a till. I found it a few seconds later, in a section devoted to babies’ clothes: a young salesgirl was clacking away at an abacus behind a large wooden desk.
I ran over to her, shouting at the top of my lungs: ‘Empty the till! Now!’
The girl looked up, her face frozen in horror, and shoppers started screaming and vacating the area. Through the crowd I glimpsed some of the GRU and KGB men by the staircase, and they were heading straight towards us. I jumped forward and grabbed the girl around the throat with one arm in a choke hold, then pressed the point of the shard against her collar-bone. She started whimpering and her arms flailed out, releasing the catch on the register.
Sarah leaned down and scooped out a handful of notes and coins, and I released my hold. The cashier placed her head in her hands, sobbing hysterically, but we were already on the move again, past singing mechanical birds and doll’s houses and miniature tanks and parents shielding their children from the sight of the man and the woman fleeing from the secret police. At the other end of the gallery there was another stairwell, but as we made our way towards it I saw a man in a grey uniform emerging from the floor below. Panicking, I looked for another way out. There must be a service exit of some sort. Sarah had begun making her way along the wall, and I followed her, pressing one shoulder against the surface as we passed marble columns and ornate lamps. But there were no exits or stairwells, and the GRU man was rapidly gaining ground. I could hear his breathing behind us and feel movement in the air…
Door.
It was recessed into the wall, an oak monstrosity with brass Art Deco curlicues. I grabbed at the handle, but my hand was soaked with sweat and slipped clean. I transferred the attaché case to my other hand and tried again, desperate, but fared no better. I hefted my shoulder against it instead, and suddenly it flew open, revealing a small, spartan office containing a desk piled high with papers, a samovar, and a threadbare oriental rug. I called out to Sarah and she came running back to join me. There was another door diagonally opposite and we raced across to it, but I must have made a lot of noise shouting out because a woman suddenly came through it – thick spectacles, hair in a bun, brown serge suit – and I knocked into her elbow, righted myself and kept running, ignoring her as she shouted after us.
We were in a long corridor with bare concrete walls. There was a steel door at the end and I grabbed the handle, panicking that it would be locked. But it opened, and I was greeted with a blast of wind whipping into my face. Peering into it, I saw a metal fire escape leading to a tiny rectangular courtyard below. It looked deserted. I turned and started lowering myself down the ladder as fast as I could, one hand clutching the rungs and the other gripping the case. Slivers of wet snow from the platform above dropped onto my neck, but I ignored them and focused on navigating the ladder. When I reached the final rung, I leapt the last couple of yards to the ground, then caught my breath and looked around the courtyard as I waited for Sarah.
It was very quiet – almost peaceful. A couple of pigeons waddled around the space importantly, their eyes glossily taking in the intruder. The rear of Detsky Mir took up the whole of this side of the courtyard, with a few more fire escapes dangling down, and directly opposite was a similar-looking building, the paint peeling from the walls. To the left an alleyway cut between the two buildings, and I glimpsed a section of main road at the end of it with traffic streaming by.
Sarah landed and dusted herself off, and I pointed to the alley. She nodded and we headed towards it, but as we came through the arched entrance blue and red lights flashed ahead of us and I realized we would be spotted if we came straight out on the street. Sarah made to turn back, but my eye was caught by a shadow in the curved wall of the passage, a little darker than the rest of it.
‘Wait,’ I said. I ran over to take a closer look. Yes, there was a gap in the wall. A small flight of stone stairs led down to what looked like another passageway leading off horizontally from this one: it was much narrower, but dim light was visible at the far end. With any luck, it should bring us out somewhere that wasn’t crawling with armed men. I beckoned to Sarah to come over and we headed down the stairs.
It was very dark, and as we reached the last step I realized the surface was softer beneath my feet, and that the passageway ahead was filled with several inches of stagnant water. No mind.
I stepped down and began wading through it carefully, letting my eyes adjust and holding up the attaché case to make sure it didn’t get wet. A few feet in, I saw a sheet of corrugated iron blocking the path. Cursing inwardly, I leaned down and grabbed a corner to pull it away, but it was too difficult to dislodge with one hand so I turned and motioned to Sarah to help me.
That was when I heard the noise. We both froze. It was a clanging sound – the fire escape in the courtyard? Perhaps the man I’d glimpsed coming up the staircase was on our tail.
We stood still, straining our ears. The clanging stopped, but was immediately replaced by the sound of rapid footsteps – boots, reverberating on stone. Was it just one pair or more? And would they head straight out of the courtyard into the adjoining alley, or would they search the courtyard first? I had the sudden fear that we might have left telltale footprints in the ground at the bottom of the ladder.
I lifted my feet very carefully – the dripping now seemed to echo thunderously around the small space – and moved to the wall to the left of me, flattening my back against the brickwork so I was in the deepest shadow available. Sarah saw what I’d done and moved to the same position by the opposite wall. The footsteps approached – it sounded like they had entered the alley. Would they run on, or stop to investigate?
They stopped.
I slowed my breathing, exhaling very gently through my nostrils, and turned the lapels of my jacket inward to hide the whiteness of my shirt.
The boots began to descend the stairs, but when they reached the final step there was silence. Could they see us? I tensed my muscles, and closed my eyes.
Legs splashed through the water. How many of them were there? I fixed on the breathing. It was one man. Alone. He could be no more than a couple of yards away from us now, and he was coming closer every second. I caught a sudden whiff of diesel-like cologne – yes, it was Vladimir, the little bastard who’d treated me like a dog in my cell this morning.
There’s nothing in here. Turn around and leave.
He didn’t take my extrasensory hint. I listened to him, his breathing shallow but drawing closer, and the air tightened behind my ears. I stood as still and as silent as I could, my fingers clamped around the handle of the briefcase, praying to God to stop this man from seeing us, please Lord, I’ll do anything you ask, just make him turn around…
I jumped an inch as there was a very loud thud on the wall behind me, the sound of it vibrating in my eardrums. Peering into the darkness, I thought I saw the outline of a raised arm, and guessed that he had slapped his hand against the wall. Had it been just a gesture of frustration, or did he suspect something and was trying to bring us out? Had he heard my sharp intake of breath? I strained to catch a response.
He sniffed the air, and I wondered if he could smell my body odour, as Yuri had done and as I had smelled his cologne. Sarah and I would also both be emitting the smell of fear, the pheromone dogs can scent. The moments stretched out, as though on some sort of loop. Beads of sweat formed across my forehead, and my left hand started to cramp from gripping the case. I longed to move just a fraction, but knew I couldn’t. I could try to kill him, of course, but it would have to be silent in case some of his colleagues were still in the vicinity. I tensed my other hand and the muscles in my forearm, ready.
A shadow suddenly moved and I saw to my horror that his hand was moving towards Sarah. He was reaching further and further in and there wasn’t much more space – soon she would hit the corrugated sheet.
She let out a cry and I leapt on top of him, bringing my right hand down onto his neck with all the strength and speed I could muster. He staggered towards me but managed a half-turn and grabbed me by the neck with one very strong arm. Sputtering, my throat on fire, my eyes bulging, I watched him raise his other hand, a pistol clutched in it, and swung the attaché case at him. There was a flicker of light as the gun spun away and fell into the water with a clunking splash. While he was caught off balance, I leaned forward and smashed my knee up into his groin. He doubled over and started to cry out, but I couldn’t risk any more noise so I jumped across and stamped my shoe on his head, pressing it down until the top of his scalp had disappeared into the water. The surface bubbled as he struggled to come up, but I kept my foot there, pushing his face to the bottom, and then the air was throbbing in my ears and his body went slack and I removed my foot and he slipped away, sinking into the water.
My muscles had also slackened, and I suddenly felt drained, but my heart was pulsing frantically. Flashes of light swam on my retina and I stood there, swaying a little and panting, my face slicked with sweat and the blood beating in my brain, conscious but detached, and for a moment I was suspended both from the world and from myself, swept up in a kind of oblivion, in the same state I had been on waking that morning of not knowing where I was, or even who I was.
I staggered back in the water, and as I steadied my breathing and the sweat cooled on my skin I tried to clear the mist in my mind, but the rage was still pulsing through my veins and as I looked down at the body one thought overrode all the others: Not such an old man, am I? No, not such an old man . . .
‘Is he dead?’
I looked up to see Sarah watching me from the other wall, the whites of her eyes glowing in the surrounding darkness.
I nodded dumbly, staring back at her.
‘You can talk,’ I said, finally, my voice strangely muffled. ‘When did you get your hearing back?’
She stepped forward. ‘A few months ago.’
‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘I heard you cry out when he approached you.’
‘I’m fine. He just gave me a fright, that’s all.’ She turned to the corrugated sheet and started trying to prise it away. ‘Let’s get out of here and find the embassy. I need to get home. My whole family must think I’m dead.’
I didn’t answer for a moment, and she sensed the hesitation and stopped what she was doing.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said.
I stepped away from the wall. ‘Let’s see if we can find this bastard’s gun first, and I’ll explain the rest on the way. We need to get moving.’
*
We spent several minutes searching for Vladimir’s pistol, but with no luck: it had been lost somewhere in the water, perhaps finding a drain. We managed to move the iron sheet fairly easily, though, and waded through the rest of the passageway. After a couple of hundred yards, it widened and then emerged into another courtyard, which in turn led to a main street. A quick reconnaissance revealed no uniforms or sirens in the immediate area. I took Sarah by the arm and told her to keep her eyes fixed ahead as we walked through the throng of pedestrians hurrying past on their own paths to survival.
We were walking, not running, because we needed to be inconspicuous. The militsiya would probably have our descriptions by now, as might the druzhinniki, the force of citizen volunteers. A man walked towards us and for a moment I thought he had some sort of transmitters attached to his face, but it seemed they were miniature hot water bottles fitted to his ears and nose, presumably to ward off the cold. We passed an emaciated woman in a frayed black coat as she hustled along a group of children in bright red quilted jackets. Red was everywhere, here and there enlivened by splashes of gold in hammers and sickles, but the red stood out more against the largely monochrome landscape. The snow had stopped falling, but it was still freezing, and the bottom halves of our legs were soaked.
Sarah was shivering and coughed occasionally. My throat ached and the tips of my fingers throbbed in the wind, but the bigger problem was internal. My insides were in freefall – unsurprisingly so, as I’d just killed a man. I didn’t see it as murder, though. Brezhnev had ordered ballistic missiles primed, and we were on the brink of a Third World War. Vladimir had been a GRU agent and his orders had been to capture us, and that would have led to our torture and, no doubt, death. That was justification enough, but in this case it hadn’t simply been a case of him or the two of us; it had been him or, potentially,
everyone.
Nevertheless, the adrenalin was still thrashing around my veins like a cat in a bag. After months in captivity I had escaped my cage, killed one of my pursuers and was now being hunted by the full strength of the Soviet apparatus. And I had brought Sarah with me again. Was this really preferable to leaving her behind, I wondered?
I turned to look at her, shivering in her tunic. ‘How’s your Russian?’ I asked.
A group of young boys selling coat hangers approached, and she waited until they had passed before answering. ‘Craddock marked me as fluent a couple of years ago.’
Craddock was a Cambridge don who had taught Service officers Russian since the war, and was notoriously hard to please.
‘Good. We’ll talk Russian together from now on. Let’s get off the streets and find somewhere to warm up.’
We reached a turning and took it, then several more, until we were on a street called Neglinnaya. Along the opposite side of it from us was a row of buildings, most of them shops. But one was smaller than the rest, a squat brick-and-glass building, and people were milling around the entrance. On the awning above it said ‘Victory’.
We headed towards it.
VII
The café was only marginally warmer than it had been outside: the mist of customers’ breath mingled with cigarette smoke and steam from bowls of shchi. A transistor radio in the window blared out a folk song from Radio Moscow, the balalaikas keening like a troop of drunken bagpipers.
