by M. H. Baylis
‘I did find out a bit more about the group Helfeld and Lepidus were involved in. It was called Leesma. Latvian for ‘the flame’. It stayed active over here for a couple of years. They were key players in the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911. You know about that one?’
‘Was that the one where there was a massive shoot-out and Winston Churchill came down to have a look?’
‘The very article. Thing is, there’s plenty of whatnot about the Leesma’s activities over here. Chuff-all information from their homeland, though, largely because Lenin got rid of all the anarchists and then Stalin got rid of virtually all the records. There was one thing, though…’ He held up a finger and rummaged in his black leather satchel for an iPad.
‘There is a website…’ he said, typing something into the browser bar. The screen went black, then two words shot in from opposite sides of the screen to make the message “Black Flag”. ‘It’s a sort of anarchist hangout. Some rum coves on here, I can tell you…’
He clicked on a profile in one of the site’s forums to reveal three burly young men in balaclavas, displaying an array of knuckledusters and knives on a table.
‘Boy Scouts, all of them, I’m sure,’ Rex said.
‘Indeed. But you also get lots of free-the-web hacker-types and flat-earthers who just believe in the philosophy. And…’
He scrolled down a list of discussion topics on the site, ranging from ‘Bakunin on the Church’ to ‘Top Ten Ways To Disappear’. He found what he was looking for and turned the device towards Rex.
On a forum about pre-revolutionary Russian archives, there was a request for information about people suspected of involvement with the Leesma. The request had been posted eleven months previously by one ‘KovaGN15’.
‘Sounds like our George,’ Rex said, looking up.
‘Read on, MacDuff.’
The conversation which followed this query seemed to confirm the identification. Someone calling themselves GoldVlad had offered information, but asked for a research fee. KovaGN15 had agreed to this, and there’d been no further communication until the autumn, when GoldVlad had re-appeared, abusing KovaGN15 and warning other site-users to stay away from him. It wasn’t clear whether the research had been done or not, but KovaGN15 had responded, and there had ensued several months’ worth of toing and froing cyber-abuse. During the final exchanges, GoldVlad was accusing KovaGN15 of assorted deviant sexual practices, and KovaGN15 was calling GoldVlad a ponderous cretin. The ponderous cretin had had the last word, though, signing off with the following words:
Watch you’re back, Kovacs. If I can fined one girl in Russia I can fined one sad cunt in N15.
‘Not exactly a gifted writer, is he?’
‘Kovacs had his problems, too,’ Lawrence pointed out. It was true. KovaGN15’s posts looked as if a gang of cats had been let loose on a keyboard – random capitals, punctuation marks and symbols dotted throughout. Rex remembered the printers complaining that he’d refused to send an electronic copy of his book. The man obviously hadn’t been at ease with computers. Yet he, and this GoldVlad had chosen the internet to conduct their very public spat.
That was less important, though, than the timing of the whole exchange. The very last message had been posted on Saturday the 28th of February. Two days before Kovacs was murdered. Rex stared at Lawrence.
‘When did you find this?’
‘Just this afternoon. That’s another reason I came over in the car – I wanted to show you and Terry. You realise what it means? Someone else is on record, making threats against Kovacs, just before he died.’
‘So if we can find out who this GoldVlad is…’
Lawrence chuckled. ‘He’s made that rather easy for us.’
He clicked on the profile name and they were taken to another page. GoldVlad had not included a photograph but he described himself thus:
Research Associate in Russian History at Goldsmiths, University of London. Genius. Black belt. Exile.
‘Goldsmiths. That’s where Kovacs taught.’ Rex stared at the profile page. ‘So the guy happily puts his sodding job title next to his death threats. Do people really not understand what the internet is?’
‘My youngest went on Twatbook or whatever it’s called to complain about her boss at the bookshop and then had a fit when she got sacked. They think this stuff is just like talking. They don’t realise it stays around forever.’
They were interrupted by a pretty Chinese nurse. ‘Your friend is waking up. You can take him home once the doctor has given him the all-clear.’
* * *
Everyone in a stew this morning. Missus Cutter being sick now, clutching her bonnet, saying the slightest noise is a torment. Leah, looking pink and plump, growing weary of her mother’s demands. She’s got better and she’s got plump, that girl. Not in a bad way. In a way like they say in Yiddish zaftig. Like a peach you want to bite. But she’s breathless on the stairs, going up and down for her mother. I’ve noticed that.
Could be Tuberculosis. Could be this smog. Everyone’s suffering. I’ve got a cough I can’t shift, though I’ve been trying the Old Country way – raw garlic, glass of vodka, glass of tea, one after the other. In the streets, though, no one seems to notice the poison that’s hanging in front of their eyes. They only complain about the cold. And until you’ve done the dawn watch on New Year’s Day going up the Neva, you don’t know cold. It’s not cold that I mind.
I was going about in that filthy smog all day. Work. Post Office. Work. Ferry Lane Working Men’s Library. Coughing and coughing. The librarian looks at me, open-mouthed. Funny, he reminded me of my sisters when the Recruiting Officer came to call. No idea what creed we were of course: no money for fine candlesticks or challah-covers in our house. Anyway, who’d think this fine brood of blue-eyed Lettish dune-dwellers might have the taint of Abraham about them?
‘Bright lad, Mrs Kuznetz. Top marks in the exam. And sharp, you know, in his interview, sharp as a kike peddler.’ My sisters’ mouths drop. Mother slaps them. Recruiter slurps tea through his ginger moustaches, none the wiser. Certainly not wise that the father to the lot of us was one kike peddler, now deceased.
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. What a book. I hate it, all those knights and castles. A man called front-of-beef and a Jew moneylender who drools over gold. Velkis picked it for our most private correspondence. Only to be used in dire emergency. I telegraphed him a message last week. This week, the reply. I will come when mother is quite well. Regards, your brother William. Like the arithmetical hocus-pocus those vain young scholars perform on the Torah. Gematria, it’s called. But ours has real messages. You turn each of the letters of those words into numbers and the numbers point you to the pages and the lines of the dreaded Sir Walter Scott, and there’s your answer.
Velkis was a teacher and a poet, I believe, before he discovered a talent for slitting postmen’s throats and exploding railway bridges. Still likes to fill his messages with metaphor and symbol.
So it comes out as: Sailor tells Captain how to sail ship, ship hits rocks.
The joke of it is, if the boss sent a message like that to Elephant and Torch, they’d be scratching their heads like a pair of Tartar whores ransacking their crotches for lice. Wouldn’t get it at all. I, on the other hand, get it fully, even though what it means is – I’m the sailor, and they’re the Captains, and they know what they’re doing, and I’m to follow, quiet like, never mind the Police Station next to the factory or any other example of their thundering dunder-headedness. A rebuke. Just like sending me here to work with the pair. That had nothing to do with getting me away from the girl. That was Velkis – jealous. I’m the one who can hold a room. I’m the one who can change minds. And the more I changed, the more the boss hated me for it.
I despair of our organisation. Leesma is not pure any more. Half of us are informants. And I suspect the other half are policemen. That explains why they are so stupid. Anyway, I’ve decided. I don’t care if it is a suicide mission. I won’t be dying.
>
Speaking of informants, I had this feeling I was being watched. Not in the library. Of course they were watching me there, spluttering like a clogged tender among the bookstacks. I mean in the streets on the way back to the Cutters’. The smog plays tricks, of course. It’s so heavy and dark, it can almost feel like a person at your neck. Still. I know what it is to be followed.
Got it wrong, though, sometimes. All those weeks I spent in Riga, on the trail of the one I thought was on the trail of me. Same flash of red as I turned my head, no matter whether it was the fish-market, the book-market or the clothes-market. Or a gate would creak. Or there’d be this sweet smell outside my door, above and through the dog-piss and the pickles. Heaven filtered through hell.
All thoughts of this following business vanished, though, when I rounded the corner. Leah at the door of the house, flushed, wet-faced, calling out. Missus Cutter flat on the hearth rug in her nightgown, pale as holystone, vomit on the floor.
Run for a doctor!
Leah begs. I can’t run of course. But there’s this police sees me. Big lad with a country face and a silky moustache. Old Bill they call him round here, though he’s a young fellow, and P.C. William Tyler’s his proper name. Sees me hobbling and says he’ll run for the quack.
Off like a wolf on a goose he was. A good lad. Torch and Elephant will go on about the ‘truncheon-bearing lackeys of the hegemony’ but that’s just because they’ve read it somewhere. I’ve nothing against the police here. Just working lads, most of them, and I’ve seen Old Bill slipping a penny to the odd, hollow-cheek beggar child with a hacking cough.
They took Missus Cutter to the Prince of Wales Infirmary. It’s just Leah and me now. Playing house. At least, she thinks that’s what I’m doing because when we got back from the hospital, I washed the window that looks out onto the yard. Before, you could only see a glimpse of your own face shining back at you from the blackness. Such a dirty town. Worse even than Sosnovy Bor, where they light the whole port with herring oil and you come away with black, greasy, fishy dust all over your clothes, reeking like a whore at dawn.
‘Aren’t you going to do the rest of them windows, Mr Smith?’ Leah asks me. And, I think, asks with a bit of sauce in it, too. Weeping for her poor mama a few hours before. Now doing the innkeeper’s daughter dance with the lodger. She’s to go to an aunt at Highgate tomorrow, while her mother’s in the infirmary. A good idea, too.
No, Miss Leah, I need a view of the yard, because that’s where my friends will be placing a secret signal, any day now, for us to begin a most audacious robbery of the Bank of England.
See, I actually said that. Like I was teasing her back. Must be losing my mind. Time she went to her auntie’s, like I said.
* * *
The next morning, Rex took an overground train – a new, strange, wide, orange-liveried thing with concertina sections between the carriages. It was mostly empty, the commuters who packed it out during the week being all tucked up in bed. Rex pictured them, this alien tribe, having languid, hungover weekend sex and consuming tea and biscuits under their duvets in their gadget-filled flats. There were times when he envied them: the people with the straight jobs and the other-halves, the eat-in kitchens and the holiday plans. He’d almost joined them, once.
The overground line was high up, and he looked out onto attics and top floors, mobile phone masts and advertising hoardings. It was no uglier than his own patch of North-East London. But it wasn’t his, and nowhere seemed less his, less familiar or capable of sustaining life, than the place that lay across the Thames but was, incredibly, still called London.
This attitude, he remembered, had been a point of contention with his wife, who, at various points during their truncated marriage, had suggested moving out of their Camden flat to something bigger in the south, where she had lived for years in the dense yet strangely barren areas of Rotherhithe and Bermondsey. Rex had stubbornly resisted, without being able to provide a single solid reason for it. He just didn’t like south London. Something bad happened to him, he said, every time he went over the water.
‘Bad like getting into bed with me?’
It was what she always said in response to this argument, half-joking, sometimes following it up with a pinch of the soft flesh under his ribs. Suddenly he remembered it all, their life together: that quip, her incongruously rough, physical way of showing tenderness, the night they’d first fallen into her hard, lumpy, pine-smelling bed. It all came back, sharply, painfully, as the tannoy said ‘change here for Bermondsey’. He got up and moved seats to take his mind somewhere else, away from what he’d lost forever.
He tried to concentrate on the Goldsmiths campus map he’d printed up last night. He’d established that the library and the history faculty building were open on Saturdays, but of course that was no guarantee of the person called GoldVlad being there. Even if he was, confronting him might be a very bad idea. But Rex knew that if they put their findings to the under-resourced, overworked and increasingly short-tempered D.S. Brenard, nothing might happen for days, or even weeks. It had to be worth a try.
In the event of something bad happening on this particular trip across the river, there was a pre-written text, addressed both to Lawrence and Terry’s phones, ready to go at one push. That had been Lawrence’s idea. Since leaving the hospital, Terry had adopted a numb, blank look, speaking only to say that he was fine, that he felt fine, and that he didn’t want another cup of tea.
At the North Middlesex hospital, they saw too much self-harm. Too much to be able to do more than patch up those for whom it was still an option, and send them home. In the car on the way back to Tottenham, Lawrence had tentatively suggested Terry might want to talk to someone. Their gaunt, grey-faced friend had shown a sudden, brief flash of passion.
‘Talk about what?’ he snapped. ‘I just took too many of those painkillers because it hurts all down me neck and me back. I didn’t know how strong they were. What’s there to fucking talk about?’
Instinctively, both Rex and Lawrence had acted as if they believed this explanation one hundred percent, but from that point on an unspoken pact existed between them to keep Terry under permanent watch.
Rex had left the two of them at his house. They were planning to spend the morning in Kovacs’ basement, looking for further clues as to what he’d been working on. He doubted Terry would be doing much looking. Most likely he’d be sitting at that wooden table, perhaps in torment, perhaps just utterly empty and numb. Still, it was better he did that with someone’s beady eye on him.
The train arrived at New Cross Gate. Fittingly – for Rex’s prejudices at any rate – what had been a fine, almost sparkling drizzle in Tottenham was driving rain in this part of town.
Ten minutes later, soaking wet, and with his foot sending arthritic spars of agony up as far as his inner thigh, Rex took shelter in the doorway of the very un-historic-looking History Faculty and popped a couple of pills. He had brought the entire remainder of his supply with him, to keep it away from Terry.
A beautiful, Latin-looking woman in a tight angora jumper sat at a desk in the Faculty Office. She wore a thick, cloying perfume, and a coloured scarf was wrapped around her neck.
‘I’m looking for one of your research associates,’ he began. ‘I’m not sure of his name, but it might be Vlad, or Vladimir.’
‘Why do you want him?’
‘I’m down from Lincoln for a few days,’ Rex said, hoping that the way he said ‘Lincoln’ might convey ‘University of’. ‘We’re working on similar turf and he suggested we meet up.’
‘Okay,’ she said slowly. ‘But we don’t have anyone called Vlad or Vladimir.’
‘Ah… It’s just that Vlad is the, sort of, nickname he uses on some of the websites I’ve met him on and–’ He trailed off, noticing her raised eyebrows.
‘You’ve come to see someone you met on the internet?’
‘Well, not like that, but…’
‘Not like what?’
‘We
share a research interest in Russian pre-revolutionary anarchist movements,’ he said sternly.
‘I see,’ she replied, with the ghost of a smile. ‘You must mean Tim. He’s upstairs in the research office. Room 119.’
GoldVlad, aka Tim, turned out to be a pale, very fat young man in a UCLA Sports Department sweatshirt. His haircut was similarly ironic – shaven at the sides and foppishly long on top, rather like the North Korean leader’s. A huge bag of Japanese rice crackers sat on the desk in front of him. He was alone in the room, flipping idly through a learned journal when Rex introduced himself and bluntly stated his business. A look of alarm came into Tim’s piggy eyes.
‘Shit, look,’ he said, in a faint West Country accent. ‘I shouldn’t have said that stuff to Kovacs, I know, I just lost it a bit when he wouldn’t pay up. I’ve been expecting the Feds ever since I heard about him being killed.’
‘Pay you? So you did do some research for him?’
‘Yeah. We agreed a fee… God, must have been back in February last year, but his initial request drew a blank, pretty quickly. Then he said he had some others, and one job sort of kept turning into another, and then at the end, he said he wasn’t going to give me the full fee because I hadn’t sorted out the first request for him. Twat.’
‘Is it normal – for people to hire historians to do research for them?’
‘It’s not abnormal. Most big libraries have a few researchers you can hire if you don’t want to do it yourself.’
‘But why would a historian not want to do it himself?’
‘Are you really not from the police?’
‘I’m a friend of the man who’s currently the main suspect in George Kovacs’ murder. If I hear something the police ought to know, I’ll tell them, Vlad. If I don’t think they need to know it…’
Tim nodded and sighed. ‘It’s not Vlad. It was V-lad. I’m from a village in Cornwall. Virginstow.’ He lumbered over to a bookshelf and fetched a folder.
‘Pre-rev Russia wasn’t his area. He had a bit of the lingo, but unless it’s your specialism, you don’t know where to go, where to cross-refer, what source to trust.’
