Red to Black f-1

by Alex Dryden

  And then the dissident Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in broad daylight in a London hotel, and whoever in Britain had tried to cover up the colonel’s death couldn’t keep this one out of the press. We knew that both of us were probably on a hit list somewhere in the Forest, where I’ve seen them use photographs of their targets for shooting practice.

  By the end of the winter, Finn said he’d spoken to Dieter and that Dieter had contacted the German company Hammerein in an anonymous letter and had received information that they were putting their defences in place.

  And then one day Willy turns up out of the blue and opens all the shutters in the restaurant and sweeps the sand away that has piled up against the doors in the course of winter storms. A posse of Polish women arrives and cleans up the rooms in the other huts and washes the cheap bedlinen.

  Finn and I have lost weight, Willy tells us, but now he is doing the fishing things will be better.

  Soon Willy’s summer guests, the hippies, arrive like migrating birds, in twos and threes. They come loaded with huge stripy plastic bags full of Indian clothes and trinkets, which they will sell at various hippy markets along the coast during the summer, and which keeps them in hash and whisky. Willy treats them like his naughty children and isn’t above cuffing them round the head if they get out of hand. Finn says Willy’s place is like a holiday home for dysfunctional kids, and that he feels right at home here.

  Willy and Finn spend hours drinking beers and talking, while I start reading from the suitcase of new books that Willy has brought with him.

  And then, on the third morning after Willy arrived, I realise that I am pregnant.

  I don’t say anything for a few days. But I go into the local town with Willy and buy a kit to test myself. We stop at a café further up the street and I take the opportunity to do the test. It is positive, and I come out of the toilet at the back of the café clutching my bag of cosmetics to fool Willy, but the look in his eyes tells me I haven’t succeeded. He says nothing and neither do I. But when we get back to the beach and have lunch, Finn and I walk a mile or so along the edge of the sea and I tell him.

  There is no hesitation, he literally jumps into the air with joy. If he had four legs, all of them would have left the ground. But I still ask him what he thinks we should do.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he says, and his joyful expression crashes for a moment. ‘Of course we want a baby,’ he says, then corrects himself. ‘I mean, don’t you, Anna?’

  ‘I’ve never wanted to have children,’ I say. ‘Not before.’

  ‘Well, of course not before, no. It would have been mad,’ he says, slightly madly. ‘But we’re free now. We have no jobs, no money, no home, no prospects and pretty much nothing at all. It’s the perfect moment.’

  I laugh and then we can’t stop laughing.

  A baby. I can hardly get the word out of my mouth.

  Finn takes me by the shoulders.

  ‘Do you honestly think, darling, that you and I, of all people, can’t find a way to provide for something that eats mashed apples and is less than a foot long?’

  ‘That’s not how people normally see a baby,’ I reply.

  ‘Well, OK, no,’ he says. ‘Most people I know put their kids down for some school ten years before they’re born, they create Disneyland on one floor of a large house, then they sign it up for piano lessons, karate classes, swimming diplomas, extra maths, post-birth therapy, nannies and a nutrition expert. Other people seem capable of just having babies.’

  ‘Maybe there’s something in between,’ I say.

  ‘There must be.’

  ‘We aren’t safe, Finn.’

  ‘We’ll make ourselves safe.’

  ‘We need to think about this carefully,’ I say, and then I hug him. ‘I’m glad you’re so happy. I really am. Thank you.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’ve always been a slow developer,’ he says.

  We have supper that evening with Willy and Finn tells him. Willy says that he’d like to have a baby too, by which he means in his environment, I think, rather than literally.

  Willy says, ‘He or she has a mother and a father and I’ll be his or her grandfather and I have cousins who’ll be cousins. How do you help a child to be happy, Anna? That’s all you need to think about, believe me. The rest will come.’

  I think to myself that there is something about having two men, Willy and Finn, that makes the whole idea seem more palatable.

  Later, back at the hut, Finn explains that it is an opportunity; that here we are being given this blessing, which also gives us the chance to do for our child what we missed ourselves as children. He says we would be the best parents, precisely because our own childhoods have been a mess.

  ‘We’re just the sort of people who should have children,’ he says. ‘We know what not to do.’

  ‘Either that, or we’ll end up doing what was done to us,’ I counter. ‘That’s pretty common.’

  ‘How can you say that!’ he says, genuinely aghast. ‘How could we behave in the way our parents behaved?’

  ‘Isn’t that what all parents say?’

  ‘I will love this child, Anna, in all the ways I wanted love,’ he says and puts his hand on my stomach.

  I want to believe him and I decide to believe him then. Totally. We hold on to each other on this cold April night, with the burner spluttering in the background, and I feel that nothing can ever stand in the way of such happiness.

  We stayed at the beach until the hippies departed again and winter set in. Unusually, Willy stayed after the end of summer and into the beginning of winter.

  One day in November, Finn announced that he was going away for a few days.

  ‘Where?’ I asked him, unable to keep the fear out of my voice.

  ‘I have to see Frank. There are one or two things I still need to tie up,’ he said, so lightly that it hangs in the air between us. ‘Loose ends, that’s all.’

  ‘You want me to come?’

  ‘Of course, come, yes.’

  He said it genuinely. And so I declined, content that it was something he’d like me to have done.

  On the night before he left, Willy had the cook whom he’d retained after the end of the season make us a special dinner.

  Afterwards, Willy said goodnight, and Finn and I walked up the beach. He was very calm, I remember, serene even. I couldn’t help noticing that. He was always like this before taking a risk.

  But I took it to be the wine and us, that I was pregnant, and that we were beginning a new life. When we went back to the hut, we hardly slept all night. Finn said he didn’t want to go. I said nothing. But he left anyway.

  He left around six-thirty in the morning, and Willy gave him a lift, hidden in the back of the van, to the railway station in Aix-en-Provence.

  38

  FINN SAID HE WOULD CALL twice a day until he returned. We waited, Willy and I, for three days without a word from him. On the third day, we were sitting in the restaurant, looking out to sea, and our conversation had dried up. Everything that could have been said about Finn had been said. We’d exhausted every possible explanation for his disappearence and an air of panic enveloped me.

  Finally, sighing, Willy got up from the table and went into his hut. After a while he emerged with an envelope and gave it to me.

  ‘Finn asked me to give you this,’ he said. ‘But only in an emergency.’

  I seized the envelope out of his hand, angry that it had taken him so long. Inside was a letter giving me directions, and a key, to the pink house.

  So here I am, in the pink house, having reached the end of Finn’s handwritten books and sitting down again in the cellar with its smoky oil burner and its secrets that nobody wanted. I’ve found nothing that tells me where he is now or why he disappeared. These secrets, they are what my life has become. They are so useless.

  I am counting up the times when I believed I could have turne
d Finn away from his course and in my head I’m back in Moscow, at the Baltschug Hotel, hearing Finn say, ‘Come with me, Anna. I want you to come with me.’ And me replying, ‘Ask me something else.’

  But finally I came to him, I let go of the past, and we had an agreement; I’d changed, I’d made the leap, and I thought he’d done so too. But it seems he’d gone back, that he was unable to let it all go. And now he’s disappeared.

  Willy also had his instructions from Finn, it seemed. He’d gone to Paris. There, through some channel of his working life, whether past or present I don’t know, Willy contacted an officer inside the French intelligence service, the DGSE.

  It was established that Finn had gone to Luxembourg. On the first night Finn had arranged to call me, Willy found that an Englishman answering to Finn’s description stayed at the Bretonnerie Hotel, in the Marais district of Paris. There was an ‘incident’–beyond that, the French intelligence officer wouldn’t expand. The hotel was sealed off by the security services and remained so. The Englishman’s room was examined down to every last thread in its carpet. Men in protective suits tested the bedsheets and pillow cases, the curtains, the shower-head over the bath, the bottles in the mini-bar–everything. Again, there was no explanation for this that Willy could find. Finn was nowhere to be found.

  And that was just last night, when I spoke to Willy from a call box in Tegernsee.

  I’m wondering how much time I’ve got left, who else will find the pink house, and when will they find it. I gather up Finn’s books and I eventually find the microfiches that Dieter gave Finn six years before. They are hidden behind a stone in the wall of the cellar. I put everything into a bag I’ve brought, turn off the oil heater for the last time, and ascend the wooden ladder stairs to the sitting room. I throw the bag down on the floor and close up the metal doors, pull the false wall with its false fireplace across the front of the metal doors and rearrange some ornaments on its mantelpiece that have fallen over in the movement.

  I have Finn’s record, and I have the microfiches that Dieter told Finn people would kill for.

  I feel a sense of urgency now. I have to get out of here. For someone will find the pink house soon, either from Finn’s or from my side, of that I’m certain. Whichever side it will be, the result will be the same; the evidence will be destroyed and anyone in possession of the evidence will be destroyed with it.

  I walk quickly upstairs and throw the few belongings from the bedroom I’d brought with me from the beach hut into another smaller bag. I dust the surfaces of the room, the banisters of the staircase as I walk back downstairs, all the door handles, the fireplace, the kettle and the cup, the whisky bottle and the glass. I dust everything I’ve touched for prints and then I am ready to leave. And at that point, when there’s nothing left to do to distract me from myself, I break down and cry. Finn has gone.

  And as I’m crying, I suddenly feel a fear, a presence. There is something in the house. Is it too late? Have they come? I break off from my tears and look around, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. And when I half turn, over to my right and standing in the middle of the doorway to the kitchen, I see there is a man.

  I look all around the room in total shock, then through the window, looking for the blue police lights or men surrounding the house, German back-up for their Russian friends. But there is nobody, just this man. I’m frozen in the chair, I’m waiting to die. But the man doesn’t move.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I say. ‘I’m pregnant with Finn’s child.’ It’s as if I’ve given up. As if this will be a defence against them. To myself I sound completely lost.

  ‘I know,’ the man says, but he doesn’t move towards me, or take his eyes away.

  I look at him more closely. He knows? He is a Russian. Yes, I’m sure he is a Russian. He’s smartly dressed, he has an easy air of wealth. His hair is black like mine and is thick and short and parted like some thirties movie star’s. He has a tanned face. His hands are manicured, his skin is polished and clean, the skin of a non-smoker, I think. Will he kill me with those manicured hands? I have no strength at all. But if I can find my strength, I know I can kill this man.

  ‘You know me, Anna,’ he says, ‘and you don’t know me.’

  I look at him harder, but it isn’t true, I don’t know this man.

  ‘I’m Mikhail,’ he says.

  I sit in shock, speechless.

  He walks slowly, unthreateningly, across the room, keeping well clear of the space I’m occupying and sits in a chair opposite me across from a low table. He reaches into the side pockets of his jacket and pulls out two plastic cups, a yellow one and a blue one, the type that pack neatly into a picnic basket. He puts them on the table and then reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a silver flask. He unscrews the top of the flask and pours a generous measure for me.

  ‘A favourite,’ Mikhail says. ‘Basilica vodka from Georgia.’

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ I say again. It sounds so foolish, and I wipe my face and feel my strength returning.

  Mikhail waits. Then he pours two drinks to show that we are sharing whatever he’s brought in the flask. He seems to sense my reluctance and drinks from my cup too. Then he raises his own cup between us.

  ‘To your child, then,’ he says.

  I pick up my cup and we toast his children and my unborn child and all children.

  He refills the cups and lifts his again for another toast.

  ‘And to Finn,’ he says. ‘Himself, in some ways, a beautiful child.’

  And I hear myself repeat it. To Finn. And I drink to the bottom of the cup and cry inside.

  A toast is the Georgian way of expressing more than a thousand words can ever express. It is a method of communicating the impossible in that country.

  And then Mikhail downs his empty cup. He puts his hand inside his jacket again and withdraws a long dagger from a pocket, but I sit there with no thought of running. Just for a moment, I actually want to be released.

  But Mikhail puts the knife on the table between us. It is a kidjal, a Caucasian dagger, and it has an inscription on it.

  ‘Pick it up. Look at it,’ Mikhail says.

  I do so, and written on the blade is an inscription. ‘I will protect you, both in the day and in the night,’ it reads.

  ‘Finn gave it to me,’ Mikhail says. ‘It is the dagger’s word and it is Finn’s word. He kept his word. And now I want you to have it. It’s now my word. I’ll keep my word to you too, Anna.’

  Mikhail stands up and puts the flask and the cups back into his pockets. I pick up the dagger and place it in my bag and do up the zipper.

  ‘We must go,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how much time we have.’

  He leads the way through to the kitchen and the back door and looks out over the lake. I follow him with the bag of Finn’s books and the microfiches.

  I’ve never opened the back door out from the kitchen, I don’t know how Mikhail got to it, but I see there’s a lawn outside the door that leads down to the lake.

  When he seems satisfied with his observation, he opens the door and we walk down the lawn to a small launch tied to a post. He takes my bags and places them gently next to the seat that he guides me to. Then he gets into the launch himself and starts an outboard. I untie the painter from the post and the boat swings around gently with the motor idling and then he accelerates away from the pink house across the lake. I look back at the widening wake, and the pink house disappearing into the distance.

  We reach the other side. He ties the boat up and puts my bags on to a jetty as I climb out. He lets me carry them then, so that I know he isn’t going to take them away. Then we walk up the jetty and to a lock-up garage on the far side of the road. Mikhail lifts the door and unlocks a green car, a Cherokee Jeep, I think, inside the garage, and he opens the passenger door for me.

  The back seats are folded down and Finn is lying with his eyes closed on what seems to be an inflatable camping mattress and he is covered up to his neck in blankets.
I see a drip attached into his arm and smell morphine.

  As Mikhail moves the car away from the kerb I see him look back across the lake and I follow his gaze. On the far side, where we’ve just come from, the lazy blue light of a police car is slowly passing along the road that runs by the edge of the water.

  ‘We must go,’ he says.

  I look down at Finn and I see that he is alive.

  ‘Why isn’t he in hospital?’ I demand. ‘Why is he lying in this damn car!’

  Mikhail doesn’t reply.

  ‘Are we going to hospital?’ I hear the edge of a scream in my voice.

  ‘He has a few hours, Anna.’

  ‘Get him to a fucking hospital, then!’ I scream at him, leaning over the front seat in rage. But he drives into the gathering dusk and I don’t know where we’re going.

  ‘Finn stayed at a hotel in Paris,’ he says at last. ‘Days ago, eight, ten- I don’t know. He hired a car. French police and security have taken his room to pieces and found nothing. That’s because what they were looking for was in the car. They, our people, put a nerve agent on the steering wheel. We don’t know what nerve agent it is. Even if we did, it was too late by the time I found him. If there is an antidote, we won’t be able to find it. He knew that too. He asked me to bring him here.’

  I don’t say anything, but sink back on to the floor next to Finn and watch his upturned face and listen to his laboured, infrequent breathing.

  ‘If he wakes, use the time well,’ Mikhail says.

  We drive in silence, in darkness. I am lying next to Finn, sometimes on one elbow looking at his face, sometimes on my back, like him, looking at the roof of the car. We might both have been corpses then.

  ‘What happened?’ I say after I don’t know how long. We are passing under some street lights, I am on my back, and the lights are beaming through the window, illuminating the interior of the car like a lethargic stroboscope.

  ‘He told me he went to see the man Frank.’ Mikhail pauses.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It was to confront him.’