by Alex Dryden
She kept walking, the apparent purposefulness of her step belying the conflict in her mind. The drizzle drained over her face and down her neck. It nibbled at her ankles and crept up the sleeves of her jacket. She felt that it was washing her of something. She hadn’t agreed with them, that was what struck her in the first few moments of her confused thoughts. Why not? They were – in any operational sense, anyway – correct. And yet failure should not be so easy. If she were going to run at the first raised fist of the MVD, or any of Russia’s myriad security agencies, why come to Russia in the first place? It was this, winning against the odds, that was her purpose – at least that’s how it seemed to her as she walked the dull, wet street. In the rarest of moments for her, she examined the complex motives that lay behind her actions, in whose simplicity lay a kind of beauty. Revenge against the Russian intelligence service that had killed the only man she’d ever loved, was that it? But revenge was merely banal. And she knew she contained a hate that was far greater than a hate just for them.
No, it was this mission, like all the others, which was what defined her. This was what she was for, why she existed, what had given her life its meaning for as long as she remembered.
She gave no thought to the fact of disobeying their order. Burt’s personal authority, his corporate power and political cunning meant nothing to her. He, in ways that were hard to fathom, was as useful to her as she was to him. She and Burt were parallel lines of independent thought that flung sparks between them, but no more than that.
She paused at a corner of a street, uncertain suddenly of how far she’d walked and where she was in the city. And then suddenly she knew. Burt had put her safety before the outcome of the operation. That too was banal. The operation, the mission, was too important for the triviality of her safety or otherwise to interfere with it. And she realised then that this was Burt Miller’s weakness and it wouldn’t be hers. Her life meant everything and nothing, but she wouldn’t allow it to stand in the way of a chance, however slim, of success. Burt himself had told her that it was the most important ten days of his entire life.
Her mind cleared then. She’d understood her motives by seeing his. Within a few seconds her mind was free of confusion and she was once more the coolest of operatives. A second and almost instantaneous thought swam into her mind. She was going to the far north, up into the Russian Arctic, unprotected, maintaining her mission intact, and with the possibility – no, probability – that the MVD would soon know the name of Valentina Asayev. Her watchers would follow her, certainly – but only as far as they could, to Igarka. Miller would be furious that she’d disobeyed and would barely be able to conceal his fury as he ordered her watchers to follow her. But they could follow only as far as the ferry went.
Whether the MVD were specifically looking for her or not at the block, their investigations would eventually and undoubtedly reveal a Valentina Asayev who hadn’t returned to pick up her bag. The manifest of the ship Rossiya would also, eventually, be consulted and found to contain the same name, once they’d tracked her down that far. The only question was how much time did she have? Enough time to reach Igarka? Maybe. Then, with luck, she could lose herself in the vast tundra to the north.
She began to prepare for what lay ahead.
She walked back towards the docks, avoiding Sverdlovsk Street and the market where she’d first met the babas. She stopped to buy a small bag and some good boots and warm clothes to replace the belongings she had left at the apartment block, as well as to buy provisions for the journey.
Finally, in a dead-end alley where even the addicts didn’t venture, she retrieved the gun and the ammunition, wrapped, waterproofed and concealed inside a disused electrical box somewhere at the rear of the dock area.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LIEUTENANT ALEXEI PETROV decided to wait until it was dark before he made the risky return trip to the apartment block.
The afternoon had gone according to his improvised and swiftly developing plans. After he’d visited the MVD office, he’d returned to the militsiya station where, with surprisingly little ceremony, Sadko had granted him two to three weeks’ leave to visit his grandfather. Three or four days downriver, Petrov had explained, and then there was still a trek into the wilderness where his people would be gathering their reindeer for the spring feeding and birthing in the Putorana. So two weeks at least was necessary. Sadko waved his hand at him in dismissal. Petrov and his efficiency were a thorn in his side, not to mention the major’s feelings of disdain for the lieutenant’s undesirable Evenk relatives. Petrov was free to go.
But, to himself, Petrov didn’t actually have the faintest idea what he was going to do with the time apart from making the trip. Certainly, he now had an overwhelming desire to see Gannyka, to touch the old man’s forehead, hear his dying words, even to listen to what the old man had been wanting to tell him since he’d been five years old – but Petrov had never given him time to do. But now he had a second overwhelming desire too – to make some kind of progress with the documents. Their importance was growing on him hourly. And that was why he wanted to revisit Sverdlovsk Street a second time, no matter what the risk.
He left his own apartment at just after eight o’clock in the evening. If the MVD were still at the grim concrete blocks where the body had been found, he wouldn’t be able to conduct any further inquiries there. The last thing he wanted was to be immediately reported for returning to the scene of a crime from which the ordinary militsiya was now specifically excluded.
But if they’d finished their work – if they’d squeezed the memories of the block’s inhabitants dry and also, no doubt, noted down a load of false stories made up by individuals to please the MVD – then perhaps he would be able to sit and take tea with one of the babas he’d seen that morning.
That was his one advantage over the Interior Ministry police; he knew, and had for a long time taken care to know, the lives of the block’s occupants, their successes and failures, their great losses and tiny triumphs, their children and grandchildren, and all the convoluted family stories which consisted mostly of tragic happenings. He, Alexei Petrov, had bothered to listen to people and it was perhaps the most valuable lesson he could have given to anyone in any position of power or influence, whether political or domestic. To listen. But this was a gift which came naturally to him.
As he walked with a steady stride away from his apartment he noted a thin rain was now coming from the low mountains that ringed the city and, in the lights of the river bridge nearest to him, he could see steam rising off the river. Upriver from the city, the water was constantly warmed by the crumbling and ancient hydroelectric dam that powered the aluminium factories, so that the river was usually warmer than the air around the city of Krasnoyarsk.
He walked along the broken concrete pavement, tossed a few kopecks to some beggar children, and kept his hands in his pockets in case theirs tried to find a way into them. He was wearing his scuffed brown civilian leather jacket, a beret-type cap pulled over his head and thick winter boots into which were tucked warm, lined trousers. It was still cold at night, even in the early days of June. Further north where his mother lived it could still occasionally fall to twenty degrees below even in the spring months.
It didn’t take him long to reach the street where the block was located, the grim urban shipwreck of Sverdlovsk Street. From the corner, he was able to take a long view down the street in order to establish that there were no MVD cars in the area. No doubt they’d have kept a presence there, however. He would have to bluff his way past whoever was left to ask visitors awkward questions, to make life difficult for anyone entering or leaving.
Suddenly, without his uniform, he realised with some astonishment that he was no longer Lieutenant Alexei Petrov. He was just a friend and sympathiser of the city’s dispossessed and damned. It was a long time, he realised, since his rank and his job had taken second place to the man he was – or had once been.
As he approached the block, he sa
w he’d been right. There were two uniformed MVD troopers at the entrance, stopping anyone they chose. Petrov felt in his pocket for his papers. It was always better to offer than to be ordered. Quite often in a country where fear and corruption were the norm, willingness on the part of a suspect – and everyone was a suspect – was misinterpreted as innocence. If you showed your papers, the power-crazed little men who were the vital cogs in the machine controlled by the truly powerful simply waved you through.
But in the papers that he now held in his hand he was no longer Lieutenant Petrov. The papers he was preparing to offer the MVD represented his other side, his non-Russian identity. He’d quietly obtained them from his ethnic tribal family, the Evenk, in his mother’s name. There’d been nothing calculated about obtaining and then prolonging the existence of the papers, they were merely a link, as Petrov saw it, to a past that was as much a part of him as his present, if not more so. Up to this moment, he had never thought of using them for anything, let alone dared to do so.
He held them just in the right way as he approached the troops who flanked the entrance to the block; not too eagerly, not too much in their faces, but modestly and in a quietly helpful way, but not too close to his own chest either. It was always important with authority to let them believe they were in control, had the power to grant or deny, or just to snatch something away. He stopped under an arc light the MVD had erected and waited while the soldier nearer to him took them from Petrov’s half-stretched hand. Then he stood in the light so that he could be seen and matched with the photograph.
The men were cold, they had a brazier burning nearby and the second soldier wandered off towards it to warm his hands and turn something they were cooking – chestnuts, Petrov thought, judging from the aroma.
The remaining soldier took his papers in thick-gloved hands and cast a look of infinite weariness over them. He made a play of doubting Petrov’s photo match with a series of rehearsed expressions. God knows, Petrov thought, perhaps they all stand in a room at MVD training camps and practise looking sceptical or angry.
‘What are you doing here?’ the guard demanded.
‘Visiting my mother’s cousin.’
‘Who?’
‘Irina Demidova. They’re close, but my grandfather’s been ill for some time so I come here on Thursdays instead of her.’ Petrov embellished his story a little, pretending his mother lived in the city, enjoying the pretence, and he now found himself comfortable with his own grandfather’s illness.
‘How long are you staying?’ the soldier asked nastily.
‘A half-hour, maybe an hour.’
‘Report to me when you leave.’
The guard made a note with a Biro whose ink seemed to come and go; first Petrov’s Evenk name, Munnukan, then the identity number that matched it on the papers. Mannukan meant ‘hare’ in the Evenk language.
‘I will,’ Petrov replied.
He held out his hand for his papers and the soldier withheld them for an instant. Just trying to get a reaction, Petrov thought. They love a reaction. It gave them a chance to do something mean. But then he was through and into the filthy entrance lobby, with its broken ceiling and missing floor tiles and the ubiquitous stench of urine.
Irina Demidova’s two-room chicken coop was, in its interior decoration, an almost exact replica of the home where she’d been brought up nearly eighty years before, a wooden log cabin by the river way up near the Arctic Circle.
There were dozens of little Russian icons mingled with spirit pictures and prayer feathers from the Evenk side of her family. The walls were completely covered in these and other prayer flags that might have had some Buddhist origin, from closer to the Mongolian border and the Evenk’s genetic relations. In the few spaces where the walls were bare, small rugs were hung, one or two original, hand-woven Evenk rugs – probably quite valuable now, Petrov thought. But mainly the rugs were cheap Chinese imports.
Otherwise, vegetables hung in baskets from hooks in the ceiling, two dogs slept by an electric fire and there was a samovar in one corner. Petrov looked about him as he always did. A bit of straw and a pig was all it needed to be a stage set for some peasant Yolki Palki pageant, he thought.
A few feet away from the old woman, a television was switched on and it was showing a Brazilian soap opera with subtitles. Irina Demidova now switched down the sound to silence.
Petrov greeted the old woman warmly. He was a frequent visitor.
Irina Demidova was cracked and wizened like an old leather wine flask, mostly toothless, and looking pale under her ethnically brown skin. The whites of her eyes were, in fact, yellow but the pupils were hard and the colour of beaten copper. A heart condition was what it looked like, and then Petrov saw a bottle of pills on a small cabinet by the chair in which she clearly spent all her waking hours. Her most prized possession hung over the back of this chair. It was a shaman’s coat, not unlike Petrov’s grandfather’s. She’d told him once, on one of his visits, that the coat had once belonged to her brother. Stalin’s men had thrown him from a helicopter and told him to show them how a shaman could fly.
‘Fetch me the vodka and pour us both one,’ she demanded. Requests were a thing of the distant past for her.
Petrov dutifully found a half-full bottle of cheap vodka on a bookcase near the chair and a tin tray with glasses on it. He poured two measures and handed her one. She motioned to him to sit on an ottoman next to her. She had failing hearing, he knew from past visits.
She raised her glass shakily to him and he saw her grin toothlessly. ‘You’re here about the dead foreigner,’ she said. ‘But let’s drink to life.’
She sipped delicately, then took a larger swig, half draining the glass. Petrov raised his glass silently but just sipped.
He wanted to ask her how she, or anyone, knew the body found that morning was that of a foreigner, but he knew better than to ask. Maybe some of the local kids had flicked through Bachman’s clothing and got frightened when they’d found the passport, before they locked on to the wallet.
‘Yes, baba, I’m here about the foreigner,’ he said.
‘I told them nothing,’ she exclaimed. ‘They’ve had their brains sucked out of them, those Interior people. Look at them. Morons. Why would I tell them a thing, the bastards.’
‘I agree with you,’ Petrov replied and sipped again. He wondered how many bottles the old woman managed to polish off in a week, or if she only drank when she had a visitor. ‘Did they find anything that interested them though?’ he asked.
‘How can you tell what might interest those pigs?’ she said, and waved her empty glass for a refill.
Petrov stood and topped up the glass and she seemed content this time to wait before she tasted it.
‘No arrests, then?’ Petrov enquired. ‘No suspects, no leads, and nothing you didn’t tell them, baba, that might have helped them?’
She looked at him and he saw a great cunning in her copper eyes. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Everyone made up lots of stories, that’s certain. Noises in the night, men with guns, flashes and bangs, groans and cries for help. The MVD were given very graphic descriptions of what didn’t happen.’
‘And you know something, don’t you?’ he asked gently. ‘But only if you want to tell me. It won’t go any further.’
‘You know something yourself too,’ she replied in a mock-accusatory way. ‘That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? I can see it in your eyes, Lieutenant Alexei Petrov.’
Petrov wondered whether he should tell the old woman now that he had come this evening, not as Lieutenant Petrov, but as a private citizen under his mother’s name. He was Mannukan. Or whether he should tell her at all. There was a risk either way. The MVD might question her about her visitor.
‘I’m not on the case, baba,’ he said.
‘So why are you here? To share my vodka?’ She cackled with enjoyment.
‘Just for your wise thoughts,’ he replied. ‘Anything you might like to tell me that you didn’t tell them.’<
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She went into herself for a while and Petrov waited patiently while she decided what to say and how to say it.
‘You like pretty women?’ she demanded, out of the blue, and Petrov wondered whether the vodka had gone too swiftly to her brain. He looked back at her and shrugged, smiling with a slight embarrassment. ‘Of course you do,’ she persisted. ‘Even since the sad death of your own pretty wife,’ she said. ‘Well, there was a very pretty one staying in the block the last few days. In the apartment of Zhenya. Upstairs, you know.’
Petrov nodded. Another old piece of faded human parchment on the floor above, skin like rice paper, a hooked nose out of a pantomime, and a taste for the national drink that made Irina’s seem abstemious.
‘She paid in money’ – cash she meant, Petrov knew – ‘and upfront for seven nights. Tonight was the second night, or third night, wasn’t it. I can’t remember exactly. But she’s gone, and left her things. Disappeared. Wearing only what she was wearing at five this morning. Before the body was found,’ she added, with a hint of melodrama that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Brazilian soap opera that still played out silently on the screen.
‘Who was she?’ Petrov prompted gently.
But she wasn’t going to be that easy.
‘Who knows?’ Demidova replied flirtatiously. ‘Her papers said she came from Bratsk. She said she was running away from a drunk husband and looking for work here. So she said,’ Irina added.
Petrov sipped his drink thoughtfully. He knew well enough not to hurry a storyteller.
‘But you didn’t believe her story did you, baba?’ he said finally. ‘Did you, you clever old witch.’ He laughed in an openly conspiratorial way and she looked at him with appreciation at his perspicacity.
Then Irina Demidova laughed with a sound like a child’s rattle. ‘You see, she was healthy,’ she said. ‘A very healthy young woman. No one around here, or in Bratsk, for that matter, looks like she did, not unless they’re married to one of those thieving pirates who run the country and steal our money. And those people all buy their looks in the West, don’t they? Or maybe in one of those fancy salons they have in Moscow and Petersburg now.’
