The Vanishing

by John Connor

  20

  Tuesday, 17 April 2012

  Arisha was in the back of a chauffeur-driven car, on her way to Wentworth, where Dima Barsukov lived. She sat with her muscles tight, her lips compressed, trying to keep her feelings down. As the car eased through the big gates and started on the short avenue up to the familiar cluster of buildings, she pulled down the mirror in the partition dividing her from the driver and inspected again her face, her hair, her clothing. ‘Precociously and exceptionally beautiful’ – that was what Dimitri Barsukov had said to her, the first time they spoke. But she wasn’t that smooth eighteen-year-old any more. That had been in 1988, at a theatre production her mother had forced her to attend – some boring political crap that her mother’s friends were staging in a boarded-over ice arena in Konkovo. Dima Barsukov had noticed her from the other side of the arena and sought her out during the interval. She had been sitting in the reserved rows of seating, chain-smoking. A very unhappy eighteen-year-old, regardless of how striking her appearance was.

  Though only thirty-one, Dima had been the guest of honour. He had some post in Gorbachev’s regime, a junior role in a ministry that controlled the state-owned land and buildings used for sporting clubs in the Moscow area. Later, under Yeltsin, this position had enabled his acquisition – his private acquisition – of some choice real estate. But when she had first met him the lies were still in place. He was an ordinary worker, just like her.

  Back then, there were no differences in wealth in the Soviet Union, just differences in proximity to power. If you had something to do with the state and influence over how real estate was allocated, for example, you could get a two-floor, eight-bedroom central Moscow apartment like the one Dima lived in. When Yeltsin changed the rules you could then buy this for next to nothing. They had nearly all done it – all those close enough to the centre to get a slice. But at this point – in the summer of 1988 – with everything in flux and the changes only just beginning, what Dima Barsukov’s activities on the fringes of his official post made him was something closer to a mobster. She had accepted his invitation to dinner because it had made her mother jealous, not because she had seen anything attractive in him.

  He had taken her to one of the new restaurants, this one serving French-style cuisine. You couldn’t get in if you weren’t something in the Party, or on someone’s list. Dima had led her straight past a queue and they had been given a huge table in a room that looked like something out of an old film demonstrating Tsarist excesses – everything decorated in gold and silver, huge oil portraits on the walls, a palatial staircase, chandeliers. There had been exceptional food, and drink – champagne (her first time) – but she couldn’t recall much of that. For the entire evening Dima had sat right next to her, holding her hand like he would never let go. His face was dreadful, the nose broken flat in some childhood gang fight that had also cost him a bullet wound that made him limp, the head bald, the chin jutting out too far. He was short, he spoke roughly. She found out later that he had a politics degree from Moscow State University, but you wouldn’t have guessed that by looking at him. From a distance he looked like a black-marketeer. But close up he was different: the intense attention he paid to her, the way he could speak as if uttering one long, rambling poem, peculiar but melodic (so that at first she had been inclined to laugh, until she saw that was just how he spoke, always) – all of this had her almost mesmerised within the first hour. She had never experienced anything like it. For the first time in her life she was in the presence of someone who made her feel like she was the only person who mattered on the planet.

  A relationship had followed, but not the relationship she expected. From the beginning he had treated her as if she were a daughter, or perhaps a sister, but never a lover. ‘I sleep with prostitutes, tarts,’ he had explained that night. ‘You will meet them. Don’t be fooled by manners. Some of them have money and connections, but they’re all sluts. I cannot even imagine you being part of that side of me.’ She had laughed, but then saw he was serious. ‘If you become my friend,’ he had said, with a touching, naive turn of phrase that reminded her of the way kids would speak about these things, ‘then I will look after you and love you – as a family member, or a friend, closely, with all my heart.’ She didn’t understand it, had thought he was lying, in fact, that it was a chat-up line, a ruse to put her at ease. But it wasn’t. From that day to this, nothing sexual had happened between them. She had gone along with all his proposals, starting with her moving into his apartment right then, that first night. And everything else that had brought her to here – to this point of no return – had followed from that.

  She saw him now coming down the big steps at the main entrance as the car came to a stop in the gravel semicircle. The house behind him, the midday sun bright on the white paintwork, was a restored seventeenth-century manor, a beautiful place. Even with everything she had now – even if she managed to pull this off – she would never be able to live in such a house, never be able to afford anything similar. She bent down and kissed Sasha’s head, whispered that she loved him. Sasha was four years old. She couldn’t even imagine treating him as her mother had treated her. It was for Sasha that she was doing all this, so that he wouldn’t have to live as she had. When she looked back on her life, mostly she saw it as one long prostitution.

  Dima was at the bottom of the steps, a big smile cracking his ugly face. There were two bodyguards a little behind him, keeping a discreet distance. She got out without waiting for the driver to come round and open her door. For a moment she felt like running towards Dima, putting her head on his shoulder, letting go. But Sasha held her back, hanging on to her leg. She crouched down and hugged him, asked him what was wrong. Was he shy of Dima?

  She whispered in his ear as Dima came closer. ‘Don’t be afraid, Sasha. This man is your uncle. It’s Dimka. He’s a friend.’ Sasha could speak exceptionally well, in Russian, in English, even a little French, but he said nothing now, his eyes fixed on Dima. ‘You’ve been here before,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  She stood up and hugged Dima, the urge to cry gone already. She trusted children’s instincts absolutely. She thought they were like dogs – they had pre-conscious capacities to judge that you lost as you got older. She needed to know what was bothering Sasha.

  ‘Any developments?’ Dima asked, face very serious now.

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing yet.’ They spoke Russian, as always.

  ‘I knew it would fuck up. I shouldn’t have let you persuade me.’ He winked at her, reached a hand out and stroked her cheek. She felt Sasha’s little hand tighten on her leg. ‘But how could I refuse?’ he said. He glanced back at the house, at the big clock mounted on the tower there. ‘We’ll give it a few hours more, I think, then it all stops. It’s silly to take these risks …’

  ‘It can still work,’ she said quickly. What would she do if it didn’t work? That thought was too awful. ‘Max will do it. I trust him.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll decide. You can come inside and tell me the details.’ He looked down at Sasha and put a hand out, to ruffle his hair, or touch his head, but Sasha pulled back, slipped behind his mother’s legs. ‘He’s feeling shy,’ Arisha said.

  ‘So I see.’ Dima squatted suddenly, right in front of Sasha. ‘Come here, Alexandre,’ he said, too sternly. ‘Let me see you.’

  But Sasha wouldn’t move. Dima looked puzzled. It didn’t happen often that he was disobeyed.

  ‘He’ll come out of it,’ Arisha said. Sasha was pulling at her leg, trying to get her to bend down, so he could whisper to her.

  Dima stood up, his smile fading. ‘How very unfortunate,’ he muttered. ‘He looks more than ever like his father.’

  21

  Tom was just beyond the barriers fronting the arrivals gate at Brussels airport, with crowds of people around him, most staring past him at the doorway he had just come through, waiting for family, or friends, or business connections to walk out. Some held signs in the air
with names written on them. He read the time on an arrivals monitor – just after 11.00 a.m., but the place was like a rush-hour train station. Behind the crowd of static faces people flowed back and forth in the main concourse. The ceiling was low and the noise level high, the air stuffy. The images became a blur and he rubbed his eyes.

  He felt scruffy, exhausted, bewildered. He’d never been in the position he was in now. He looked at Sara, standing at his side, head down and on her mobile, trying to call someone to arrange a ‘ride’. She had kept her phone clear of the water en route to the seaplane. His hadn’t done so well. His had been in his pocket, with his wallet and passport, as he had waded to the dock. He had managed to buy a new phone at the airport in Victoria, and had put his old SIM card in it, but still with no effect. The passport also was probably now unusable, but no one had bothered to ask for it between the Seychelles and here. On landing Sara had led him to an area reserved for private jet passengers. There hadn’t even been staff on the gate. It seemed in her world you didn’t really need a passport.

  ‘Let’s go over there,’ she said quietly, pointing to an open bar area that didn’t look too full. She had spent most of the flight from Mahe huddled into a corner seat, staring into space. She didn’t look quite so young now, or fresh and full of life. Her face was blotchy, her eyes red-rimmed, her short hair unkempt because she had been running her hands through it all morning, compulsively.

  ‘We need to decide what to do now,’ she said. ‘We can talk over there.’

  He followed her over, watching the faces in front of him, the eyes passing over them without reaction. The worst of it was inside their heads – images and memories that no one else had access to. They had both taken showers on the plane, done their best to look normal. There had been clean clothes to wear – in his case a spare set belonging to the pilot; jeans, and another T-shirt. Sleep should have been possible – the flight had been comfortable – but it hadn’t happened, for either of them. He thought he might have dozed for an hour, maximum. It wasn’t enough to support his slender grip on what was real and what wasn’t.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ she whispered, standing very close to him at the bar, while waiting for the waiter to pay attention. She sounded desperate.

  ‘We do what we agreed,’ he said.

  ‘So you’re going to leave me?’

  At some time yesterday he had said he would go with her as far as Brussels. As he had seen it, the crucial thing – for both of them – had been to get away from the Seychelles as quickly as possible. He had no trust in the police, not even the police from relatively controlled, ethical forces like the one that had sacked him. And as far as he was concerned the Seychelles was a banana republic. He had absolutely no idea what their police force was like. Maybe it was a beacon of tropical rectitude, but Tom wasn’t taking any risks with his personal liberty, and had made that very clear to her while they were still on the way to Mahe. All the guards she had entrusted with her security were ex-police from the Seychelles, and he was certain that the only reason they hadn’t repaid that trust was because someone had paid them a higher fee, or they were in on the kidnap plan. Plus, she had probably killed someone who was a police officer from Victoria, so her idea of landing at Mahe and reporting what had happened to the forces of law and order was a non-starter.

  She also had come round to that view shortly after putting the plane down. She had navigated effortlessly to a private, highly secluded bay owned by her family and, in the fading evening light, brought the plane into a dock about two miles from a massive mansion she referred to as the ‘beach house’. In a hot tropical twilight, they had made their way on foot along a winding path until the building was in view. Then she had started to get frightened. The house was in complete darkness, no sign of life. Only a few days before she had left the place with three permanent staff looking after it, but now, at seven o’clock in the evening, they were nowhere to be seen.

  They had agreed right then that it would be stupid to just walk up to the place, that it was stupid to be standing where they were, fully exposed, that it had been naive to land the plane at so obvious a location. They had no real idea what had happened on the Ile des Singes Noirs. There had been people who looked like kidnappers, yes, but also two white guys who had looked more like mercenaries, one probably a policeman from here. If they had got to her out there then they could have this building covered too.

  Because the pilot of her personal flight – the plane that had brought Tom from Luton – was employed by her mother, and had nothing to do with the Seychelles, and because risking contact with him was preferable to trying to get on a public flight, she had used her mobile to call him and arrange transport to the airport in Victoria. All too easy, and they were in the air again by midnight.

  By then she was as wary as Tom and had decided that what she needed to do, above all else, was get to her mother. Her mother was here, in Brussels. So Tom had come along, not only because it was his quickest route out, but also because he felt some responsibility for her, because right now, until it was sorted, they were in this together. ‘I think what you decided yesterday was right,’ he said, reluctantly, in a very low whisper, after the barman had taken an order for two coffees. ‘Get to your mother. Get her help. I think that’s what you should do. Don’t go to the police here either. Not until you’ve spoken to your mother. Or someone else with some clout. Your father, perhaps. I don’t trust the police. Not here, not anywhere. If you have access to them, then big lawyers and big money are what you need, just to make sure everybody does their duty properly.’

  What he felt like telling her was that she should never ever admit anything, even if she thought she was completely innocent. Especially not that she had put the crosshairs of a high-powered military rifle over someone’s head and pulled the trigger. But he had already gone over all this with her during the flight.

  Financially, it seemed to him, she undoubtedly had enough resources to get the legal help she would need, without having to go anywhere near her parents. She had told him she was on a ‘modest’ allowance until her twenty-first birthday – now only three days away – when she might get more funds of her own. She didn’t seem to know whether that would definitely happen or not, didn’t seem to care. Money wasn’t something that had much reality for her. He had been too tired to smile at what her idea of a ‘modest allowance’ might be, given everything he had seen so far of her lifestyle. But he understood very well that she felt out of her depth and wanted someone with her who would know what to do in this kind of circumstance. That wasn’t him. So she had to get family help. Her father was out of the question, she said – she actually seemed afraid of him, in a surprisingly childish way – and anyway, he was in the States. So that left her mother, mentally unstable or not.

  ‘You should come with me,’ she muttered now. She took the coffee and walked to a table. He followed. They sat down and she stared miserably at her coffee. ‘You could help me explain it all to her. You’re a witness. And you can tell it better. I don’t know if I can say all this to my mother.’

  ‘She’s your mother. It’ll be OK. Don’t worry.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that. She’s my mother, yes, but I haven’t seen much of her recently.’ She pulled a face. ‘In fact, I haven’t really seen much of her since I was ten years old … I’m not sure she will want anything to do with all this …’

  He smiled gently at her. All these de luxe toys, all this money, yet she was too scared to go to her parents when she most needed them. ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure it is. You wouldn’t believe what my childhood was like. I thought it was normal, that everything was happy and normal, that everyone had a childhood like that. That’s what you’re like as a child, right? – you just adapt and get on with it. It was only when I went off to uni and I started meeting ordinary people – I mean people without all that money – that I began to realise just how weird it all was. My mother got ill, you s
ee, when I was about ten. Before that – when we were living on the island – everything was wonderful. Mummy and I. There was only me and her – no sisters or brothers, so we were very close. I can remember it. But then she had to go into a clinic. I was left with my father, and he’s never had much time for me. He’s like a stranger, in a way. And I think he always wanted a son, not a weak little girl.’ She bit her lip. ‘Truth is, I don’t know him at all. Money replaces everything, you see. When there’s so much of it washing around, it has to be serviced, continually. It doesn’t leave time for much else. So you buy help for your kids, buy people to love them.’ She looked up at him. ‘I’m not moaning about it. Just telling you why it might be better if you came with me, if you told her what happened. She won’t believe me. But you’re not family. You’re someone I paid. So she might take it all from you. She might understand. I can … it can be …’ She paused, thinking again. ‘I can extend your contract, increase it …’

  ‘My contract?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  He sighed, then put a hand across the table and held hers. ‘What do you want me to do, Sara? Whatever it is, you don’t need to buy it. We’ve survived something together, something appalling. So there’s something different between us now. Not money. Not a contract.’

  Her lip trembled and she looked around nervously. ‘I just want you to stay with me until I get to my mother. That’s all. I’m sorry. But I feel so scared. I’ve never been so frightened before. I just want you to stick with me. There’s no one else I can ask. No one else I can trust.’