The Good Angel of Death

by Andrey Kurkov

  The fat man looked in through the window at Petro with a glance that was almost ingratiating.

  Petro sighed again, took ten dollars from Galya and handed them to the railwayman.

  ‘Not our money,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Never mind, I’ll buy you some with my own. Will Prima suit? It’s good here, from Makhachkala . . .’

  Petro nodded.

  The fat man asked us to keep an eye on the hammer he left under the wagon and walked away.

  Twenty minutes later he came back and handed Petro a block of Prima – twenty packs glued together with paper tape. Then he gave him back the ten dollars.

  Bemused, Petro put the Prima on the table and shouted ‘thank you’ after the railwayman.

  I felt the urge to break into laughter again, but this time I refrained. I looked at Gulya and we smiled at each other. Galya was sitting there with a smile on her face too. Only Petro, still bemused by what had happened, maintained a serious air. He found an empty cellophane bag and started tipping the tobacco from the papyrosas into it.

  The train had already started moving, and he was still twisting the tobacco out of the papyrosas, although it was clear that he was fed up of doing it. Finally he swore, took out his pipe, stuffed it with Prima tobacco and went into the hallway, leaving behind on the table three packs of papyrosas that had not yet been gutted and a cellophane bag three-quarters full of tobacco.

  A few hours later, when the sun had stretched the shadow of our wagon to its maximum limit, the train began gradually moving away from the sea. Or perhaps it was the sea that was moving away to one side, and we were travelling straight on? Sitting in the wagon, it was hard to tell, but the landscape outside the window was changing, becoming less romantic. The place of the vineyards was taken by endless rows of garages, then there were more holiday houses, only these dachas looked a lot poorer than the ones we had passed before Derbent.

  A city drifted slowly past our window, a city of Khrushchev-period five-storey apartment blocks, private houses and pipes that were laid directly on the surface of the earth – they crossed the roads at a height of three or four metres, and then sank back to ground level again. It was as if all of the city’s intestines, normally prudishly concealed under the ground and occasionally peeping from behind iron manhole covers – had burst out into the open and stayed there. Perhaps it was to make life easier for the repair services, or perhaps there was another reason. Pipes of various diameters also crossed the railway, all following the same line. I watched them go by in amazement: as twilight came they gave the city a look like some faraway world or something from an old children’s book.

  When the train slowed down, I saw two young lads sitting by a campfire on the railway embankment.

  ‘Hey,’ I shouted, ‘what city is this?’

  ‘Makhachkala!’ one of them shouted, and the other one waved,

  I waved back and sat back down beside Gulya.

  ‘Makhachkala,’ I repeated, focusing my attention on the lighted Primus stove.

  It was almost time for supper. Petro was opening one of the cans of food that we had won in battle. Gulya was mixing up soup in the cooking pot. The compartment smelled of mutton fat.

  ‘How good it would be to go straight to Rostov with no stops,’ I thought hopefully.

  61

  THREE HOURS LATER the train braked sharply in total darkness. The Primus stove and the cooking pot with the leftover soup went flying off the table. We jumped to our feet. Petro struck a match and looked out of the window, as if the match burning in his fingers could cast any light on anything.

  Gulya felt around on the floor, found the Primus stove and the cooking pot, and picked them up.

  We heard the roar of an engine outside.

  I stuck my head out of the window, squeezing in beside Petro. There was a vehicle moving towards us from the tail of the train, lighting it up with its full-beam headlights. It was driving slowly and we must have watched it for about three minutes before Petro whispered: ‘A truck!’

  I looked more carefully and saw that there were men standing in the back of the truck.

  Two beams of light from pocket torches ran across the goods wagons as the truck crept past them.

  ‘Further, further!’ someone shouted. Petro and I exchanged glances, then Petro climbed down on to the lower bunk, got his shopping bag and took the pistol with the silencer out of it. Then he struck a match and lit a tablet of solidified alcohol.

  ‘Get under the bunk,’ he said to Galya. She obediently did so. Then Petro looked into my eyes, as if he was expecting me to tell Gulya to hide there too.

  I thought for a while, then took out my pistol and put it under the sleeping mat on my right.

  ‘Maybe I should make coffee?’ Gulya asked unexpectedly.

  I turned round. She was looking at Petro.

  ‘No thank you,’ Petro said and sighed. The truck was approaching our wagon. Petro took his pistol off the table.

  ‘Stop, it’s here. That wagon there!’ said a hoarse voice outside.

  We heard the truck come to a halt. The driver switched off the engine.

  The beam of a torch suddenly broke in through the opening of the window and I started.

  ‘Hey, lads, is there anyone there?’ asked the voice that we had already heard.

  Petro got up, froze and then looked around anyway. I stuck my head out and immediately shut my eyes, blinded by the light of the torch.

  ‘Come out,’ someone invisible said in calm, affable voice.

  ‘What do they want?’ Petro said, when we had left the compartment and were standing in the hallway.

  I shrugged.

  Jumping down from the welded iron steps, we found ourselves by the side of the truck. The man with the torch immediately came across to us.

  ‘Roll back the gates,’ he said, without any particular threat or insistence in his voice. He spoke faultless Russian, without any trace of an accent, and that reassured me a little – I had been prepared for an encounter with Chechens.

  ‘Are you going to check it?’ Petro asked cautiously, approaching the centre of the wagon.

  ‘What for?’ the man with the husky voice asked in surprise. ‘We’ve got everything well under control anyway. Unload this and load that, and everyone goes his own way! Come on, get a move on! Where’s the Moldovan?’

  ‘What Moldovan?’ Petro said, stopping in front of the sliding door and glancing in bewilderment at me.

  ‘That bastard!’ the man hissed. ‘I’ll break his ribs for him, that lousy damned courier.’

  He spat down in front of his feet and then looked around. He fixed his gaze on me and forced a smile.

  ‘Never mind, never mind, come on, lads!’ he said, nodding to reassure either us or himself.

  But I still couldn’t understand what was going on. One thing was clear: these guys who had come out of the night were behaving as if we knew all about their business. Perhaps our tattooed travelling com panion, who had left our wagon involuntarily, was the Moldovan who was supposed to have enlightened us. All we could do was make guesses and wait for everything to become clear.

  I walked over to Petro, tore the lead seal off the wire wound round the handle of the wagon door and pulled the door towards me. The door opened with difficulty, and only half a metre. Two men came across and helped me slide it all the way.

  ‘Come on, back it in here!’ the husky-voiced man yelled into the darkness.

  The engine started up again and the truck swung round and set its back end against the open wagon.

  Petro and I moved aside and watched as several men clambered into the wagon and rolled up the tarpaulin. To our amazement, by the light of the torches we saw ordinary sacks piled up into a hill underneath it.

  The night crew began dismantling the hill, carefully stacking the sacks they removed against the inside wall opposite the opening. A pyramid of green wooden crates was revealed under the sacks.

  ‘Stop, lads!’ we heard someone in the w
agon say. ‘Right, shine a light over here!’

  They left the pyramid of crates and moved over the right-hand corner. We couldn’t see what was going on, but we remem bered what had happened there recently, only the day before. And we looked at each other.

  ‘They’re not armed,’ I whispered to Petro. A man with a torch appeared at the opening of the wagon. The beam of the torch slid across our faces.

  ‘Come here!’ he said in a husky voice. We went towards him and climbed into the wagon.

  ‘Why are you so laid-back?’ the man asked, raising the torch so that it was shining into Petro’s face, almost touching him. Petro put his hand over his eyes. The man moved his hand away.

  ‘Don’t cover them up!’ he said, peering into Petro’s pupils. ‘What happened here?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Petro answered and pushed the hand with the torch away from his face.

  ‘Nothing?’ he echoed suspiciously. ‘And what’s this?’

  He shone the beam into his left hand, on which a pistol with its handle bound in blue insulating tape was lying. We didn’t say anything.

  ‘Ivan!’ the man called, turning round. ‘Check the crates!’

  To me they were all Ivans. It was impossible to make out their faces in the darkness. A taciturn group of men, all about the same height and quite certainly of the same profession, which was not yet clear to us. I felt a sudden suspicion that we simply wouldn’t have enough time to understand anything.

  Ivan’s dark figure went back to the pyramid of crates. Two torches illuminated them for him from the right-hand corner.

  Ivan muttered something to himself as he moved a few boxes. He leaned down.

  ‘Looks like all of it,’ he said in a tired voice.

  ‘Looks like, or is all of it?’ asked the man with the husky voice, who was clearly the leader of this team.

  ‘Is all of it.’

  The beam of the torch slid across our faces again, as if demanding our attention.

  ‘So what happened here?’ the man with the husky voice asked again, more gently this time.

  ‘We travelled in the compartment, not the wagon,’ Petro said quietly.

  A chilly shiver ran down my spine. I was frightened that now these men would want to go into our compartment – and then what?

  ‘Now, why treat us like idiots?’ the head man asked in a pained voice. ‘Didn’t your mummy ever teach you to tell the truth? It doesn’t hurt to tell the truth.’

  In the silence that followed these words I mentally took my leave of Gulya and my own life. I felt guilty, as if I’d let almost everyone down, especially my Kazakh wife, for whom I had proved to be such a fatal present.

  Ivan walked up to the head man, who took hold of the pistol and turned it in his hand.

  ‘It’s the Moldovan’s,’ he said. ‘He’s got an allergy to iron, and he wraps everything in insulating tape: knives, and forks . . . the stupid jerk.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ The beam of the torch shone into my face again. ‘Did you fall out with him?’

  ‘Aha,’ Petro answered for me, and the beam of light immediately jumped to him. ‘I pushed him off . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ the head man exclaimed almost in delight and chortled loudly. ‘Well, all right, that’s your business! You can slit each other’s throats for all I care. Just as long as the load’s always intact!’

  We stood there, turned to stone, and he tossed the pistol he had taken from Ivan out through the open door of the wagon, into the night.

  ‘Hey!’ he called to his men. ‘Work!’

  We moved away to the side wall of the wagon and stopped there, covering the little door that led into our compartment via the toilet. Nobody took any more notice of us.

  The men transferred the wooden crates to the truck. The upper crates of the pyramid were smaller and shorter that the lower ones. One of the men, who was carrying a crate on his own, stumbled and fell, bridging the gap, with his feet in the wagon and his torso in the truck. As the crate hit the wooden platform of the truck, it gave out a metallic clanking sound.

  ‘Guns,’ Petro whispered to me.

  ‘Hey, stop lying down on the job!’ the head man shouted hoarsely at the fallen man.

  Each of the lower, longer crates was carried by two men. I squatted down, pulled one of the sacks towards me, untied it and stuck my hand inside.

  The sack was full of sand.

  ‘What’s in it?’ Petro asked, squatting down beside me. Instead of answering, I held out the open neck of the sack and he put his hand in too. He looked at me in surprise, then pulled out a handful of sand, raised it to his nose and sniffed. He smiled, opened his hand and held it out to me. My nose caught a strong smell of cinnamon.

  Petro tied the sack shut and got to his feet.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said, nodding towards the open door of the wagon, with the yellow moon hanging in its upper left corner. ‘They’ve unloaded everything . . .’

  No sooner had we taken a couple of steps than the men appeared in the opening again.

  They started carrying small white sacks into the wagon and tossing them on to the spot where the crates had been. One of them – I thought it was Ivan – stayed there and levelled out the sacks tossed on to the floor of the wagon with his feet. Then he stamped down the second layer.

  We stood there, holding our breath.

  After several layers of these sacks had been laid in the place of the pyramid, the men started packing sacks of sand around them and on top of them.

  ‘You can get out – we’ll fix everything up here just the way it was before!’ one of them shouted to us.

  We jumped down out of the wagon.

  The sky was covered with stars. I threw my head back, trying not to think about anything.

  When my neck got tired, I looked at Petro. He was standing beside me, thinking about something and gazing down at his feet.

  There was a loud rustling of tarpaulin from the wagon.

  ‘Move away a bit!’ someone shouted.

  The door of the truck slammed, the engine started up, and it moved a couple of metres away from the wagon, then stopped.

  The men closed the door of the wagon and the head man came up to us.

  ‘Have you got anything to smoke?’ he asked wearily.

  ‘Yes, Prima,’ Petro said with a nod, and was just about to move towards the steps of the compartment, but I grabbed hold of his arm.

  He stopped, and I quickly set off for the wagon. I went into the compartment, rummaged about under the table and found the pack with the contents that had given Petro a laughing fit. I brought it out and handed it to the head man.

  He took out a pinch of the ‘tobacco’ and sniffed it. His face broke into a broad smile.

  ‘Thanks, guys!’ he said. ‘You’ve got heavier stuff than this under the tarpaulin. Safe delivery! See you next time.’ The head man turned and walked to the truck.

  ‘Where are the others?’ I asked Petro, noticing that we had been left alone.

  The truck’s engine roared and it set off, feeling out the way ahead with its headlights. Another pair of headlights flashed on not far from us and moved off after the truck. It was a Niva. Either the truck or the Niva sounded its horn and literally a few seconds later the wagons of the train gave a rumble and a jerk. We jumped into our own wagon and closed the outside door of the hallway. When we walked into the compartment, Gulya wasn’t on the lower bunk. I raised my head in fright and saw her lying on the upper one.

  Galya was sitting at the table. As soon as the train picked up speed, she lit an alcohol tablet and started brewing coffee.

  Petro stuffed his pipe, lit it from the blue flame and went into the hallway.

  I followed him. We stood there for a while, facing each other in the narrow hallway and not saying anything.

  Petro opened the outer door and the hammering of the wheels became louder. We were riding past occasional lights, both close up and in the distance. And up above the stars were shining. Th
e sky was cut off by a smooth black line – the train was climbing into mountains.

  Petro breathed out tobacco smoke and the hazy cloud flew away through the open door.

  ‘What are we carrying?’ he asked quietly, lowering his head.

  ‘Narcotics,’ I replied just as quietly. Petro sighed heavily.

  ‘And I thought it was sand,’ he said in a weary voice.

  ‘We’re carrying sand too . . . only it seems to me that there isn’t very much of it . . . we had two dump trucks full . . .’

  Petro nodded without raising his head. He put his pipe to his mouth again.

  I remembered that in the documentation for the load it said twelve tonnes of sand. Twelve tonnes was probably a full wagon, or at least half a wagon. But how much did we have here? I started thinking, trying to figure out the number of sacks of sand.

  ‘No, no, that’s a stupid waste of time,’ I decided and glanced out of the open door.

  The sky was rising higher and higher above the mountains that thrust up from below.

  ‘Back in a moment,’ Petro said and went into the compartment. He came back without his pipe, but with two bowls of coffee in his hands.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked, warming my palms on the hot bowl. ‘Wait for the first station and go to the militia? Eh?’

  ‘Then what will happen? They’ll arrest us, throw the sand away, and the narcotics . . . who knows what they’ll do with them . . . He sighed again and took a sip of coffee. ‘We have to get the sand to Ukraine, and then we can go to the militia, it’s our militia there . . .’

  ‘Yes, the Ukrainian militia would be more likely to believe that we were transporting sand from Kazakhstan, and not guns or narcotics . . . especially if we asked Colonel Taranenko to confirm that our story was true.’

  ‘We can’t turn back,’ Petro declared coolly, but there was no note of despair or particular concern in his voice. He seemed to have calmed down now that he had realised there was no easy way we could get out of this situation. ‘We have to keep going, otherwise we’ll never know anything. God willing, we’ll get the sand home, and then we’ll see what we have to do.’

  I squatted down and leaned back against the wall. I drank the strong, bitter coffee in small sips and watched the sky trembling to the hammering of the wheels.