The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  Irakli reappeared with a gun in his hand and a lack of concern that suggested the moment of extinction for Max might have arrived, and the trip to this suburban garden had been a remarkable and clever set-up. But the quiet salesman mode switched on as soon as he reached the table. Max watched him like a hawk and picked over all the implications and hidden meanings in every nuance of everything he said, and every look in the big, soft eyes.

  He laid the gun on the table with the reverence of a priest placing a relic in front of a believer. To Max it lay there like an execution, dull and scarred, well used and he wondered who had felt its awful indifference. “SR1 Gyurza. Classic. Range of fifty metres, and with these,” he held up a clip of bullets, “it can pierce body armour and cars.” Max remembered the Mercedes coasting up to him in the darkness. “Russian army pistol but the Federal Security Service uses it now, your old boys as they are now, eh? So that’s a good endorsement, eh? I can really recommend this. It’s a big grip, too big for me, but you’ve got big hands, try it for comfort”, and he handed it to Max grip first. It felt reassuringly heavy, comfortable, balanced, although it was obviously old, the gunmetal blue worn on all edges to dull silver. This was a gun that had seen action and for some reason that now comforted him, as if he were linking up with a veteran. “It’s simple, easy to strip and clean, you know about guns?”

  “A little. Long time ago.”

  “If you want something smaller, I’ve got this’” and he produced another gun from his belt. “Makarov PM, classic self-defence pistola. Not much use beyond twenty metres and it doesn’t have the penetration of the Gyurza but it’s a little beauty.”

  “I remember this. It was standard Red Army issue.”

  “Yeah. Very reliable. Elegant little thing, uh?”

  “Yes,” said Max, taking a gun in each hand, turning both for balance, holding them up to the light, aiming along the sights as if he knew what he was doing, “Light. The Makarov. Very light. Compared to the other one.”

  “Too light? Some people like a bit of weight. Gives stability.”

  “This one will go through a car?” He held up the Gyurza.

  “Like paper. It was part of the design specification.”

  “But the Makarov…” Dapples of sunlight fell across it and freckled his hand as the branches above him shifted and rustled, “easily concealed.”

  “If it’s likely to be close stuff the Makarov’s the deal.”

  “I might need a little more.”

  “Then I can’t recommend the Gyurza highly enough.”

  Max placed both on the table, looked at one then the other. The chickens moved in the background. Irakli waited and smoked. The silence reminded Max of another silent suburb many years before. Nothing is as silent as a silent suburb.

  “How much for both?”

  Irakli paused. “I have to charge you for the Gyzura and the clip of armour piercing bullets, because they are expensive, but you can have the Makarov and two standard clips for each for nothing.”

  This kind of bargaining seemed misplaced around guns.

  “No, no no…”

  Irakli reached forward and put his hand on Max’s arm. “You’re a great man, sir, a person of substance.”

  Max laughed, “I wish… Not any more.”

  “No, you are sir, a great hero. Perhaps one day you can help Irakli.”

  “I really don’t have any influence any more.”

  “Of course you do. You only think you have none, but you’re a part of history and that counts for a lot here, a former hero. Maybe a word in someone’s ear if ever Irakli gets himself in trouble, perhaps…”

  “I really don’t have…”

  “A good word from the right person can go a long way. Or perhaps if my daughter – God forbid! – has a problem with the university, a man of education such as yourself may be able to help her.”

  “Well for your daughter, of course. Of course I’d be happy to do what I can, but I’m really not sure I…”

  “You don’t know yourself, sir. Please accept this from me as a token of my esteem for everything you have done.”

  He seemed an ally, an ear on the movements underground, an early warning perhaps. The old animosity between Georgians and Russians still existed. The Georgian underworld would not have been pleased by a couple of Muscovites coming down to create mayhem on their territory. So perhaps Irakli could be trusted.

  Max stayed for a second tray of coffee, subtly probing as he regaled Irakli with a few stories from the old days. The chickens squabbled over more cake crumbs. Business and the afternoon drew to an amicable close. “If your daughter has problems, certainly… I can’t guarantee anything, but I have friends who may have some influence at the University.”

  When the gate clanged behind him he felt a mix of relief to get away from Irakli’s cloying esteem, but also a realisation that he had put himself into a world where conflicts were played out with violence and debts had to be paid. “What have you done, you old goat?” he muttered to himself as he slowly started trudging in the direction of the bus stop.

  Back at the bus terminus on democracy’s high-rise wasteland, he was conscious of the peculiar hang of his jacket, with two pistols and seventy clipped bullets distributed around his pockets. All secured for little more than the cost of a few of Irakli’s chickens. But despite being fully armed, he was no less fearful of the haunted eyes watching him, or of the eyes that froze him on a black winter’s night, and which still seemed to stare from across the sea. The world had turned upside down, and so had he.

  Moscow – April 1999

  “There’s no need for you to know who the client is, but it’s Max Agnew.”

  “My God.”

  “There’s some money, loose change as an earnest of his good intentions to pay the rest and I’ve heard that for forty years, so if you have a problem, let me know and I’ll screw it out of him.”

  “I heard he drank himself to death?”

  “Work in progress.” Alexei shook his head. “I gave up on him years ago but last week he phones and this arrives. It’s a couple of women who were decorating the beach down where he lives. Just check out who they are, what they are, etc., etc. Credit card slips in there, and their addresses. I didn’t think they were evolved enough for credit cards in Georgia.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Max playing Sherlock Holmes. God knows. I think that waitress fancies you. Have you..?”

  But Dimitri laughs. Business done they drink coffee and chatter. Alexei has little to fill his days except the exercise for the new hip, walking the old streets of new Moscow and watching the world make a mess of Yugoslavia. They discuss the occupation of Pristina airfield in Kosovo by the Russian army. Alexei doesn’t think it unlikely the Yanks might have a pop; they are stupid enough. “Too much John Wayne and this shit” he nods at the interior of the Pizza Hut, “strips away the cortical layer of the brain. They’re so rich they’ve lost the power of thought.” He looks out the big window and lifts the cup to his lips and Dimitri sees the tremble. Despite the hip operation and the increased mobility, Alexei has gone through some gate of age. His skin is thinner and opalescent – yellows, blues reveal themselves mysteriously through its pale sheen – he has shrunk half a size, his chest heaves; the mischievous stage presence that charmed or terrified, has dimmed. Dimitri’s fingertips lightly fall on the bill and draw it across the table.

  “You know when he quit America he had a tiny daughter? New born.”

  “New born?”

  “He never mentioned her, all the time we were talking to him. Whole bloody de-briefing he held out. I was intrigued, so I let it go then smacked him with it near the end. He went into a trance. Lost the power of speech. Anyway, last summer his newborn turns up on his doorstep. Unannounced.”

  Dimit
ri whistled. “How’d he handle that?”

  “I would give my left testicle to have been there. Now it’s of no bloody use to me. Goodlooking too, apparently. The daughter. Must have got it from her mother. The mother, yes, I wouldn’t have kicked her out of bed.”

  “You wouldn’t kick a female bed bug out of bed.”

  Dimitri smiles at the sexiness in the old bastard. Enhanced by the new pharmaceuticals, escort agencies and the new hip, there will be no stopping him.

  “You know some over-dressed bitch in a Mercedes nearly ran me down in Tverskaya Street. Thirty years ago I could have had her thrown in the Gulag.”

  “Thirty years ago she wouldn’t have had a Mercedes.”

  “Anyway, this commission – if we can invest a plea from Max with such a dignified description – ASAP.”

  “If its just ID stuff it won’t take long. And it is for a Hero of the Soviet Union.”

  “We were all bloody heroes. And for what?’ he tossed a contemptuous look at the citizens of the new Moscow strutting past outside, “T-shirts, guns and fucking Givenchy.”

  Max expected photographs from Alexei, and had neither video player nor television. When Shota closed up he showed Max how to operate the video and left him in the bar to his solitary viewing. When he had finished Max sat for a while, then invited Shota to watch.

  They found themselves staring at apartments that Max explained had once been a luxury block for Party officials in the middle of Moscow. Two women slid in and out of focus in street crowds, sped under the Kremlin walls in an open-top car, and lurked in café shadows and smoke; blurred actors in a drama of banal ordinariness. A department store struggled for sharpness before revealing a clear shot of them. One was tall, dark, beautiful and the other’s breasts were bursting her dress. Both men recognised the tits.

  The image moved into darkness and rainbow flare before the two girls materialised at a nightclub table laden with glasses. The Slavic cheekbones of the man smoking beside the huge breasts confirmed everything. Lizard eyes he had last seen scanning him from a dark Mercedes now scanned the lap dancers simulating ecstasy behind. He sat at his drinks with his pumped up woman, full of life in its debased, foulest forms, while Gia’s mutilated corpse returned to earth. Irakli had been right. They had come for Gia all the way from Moscow. Gia had finally fucked himself to death.

  Words were redundant; the tribe’s divine rubric held the commands. The police were not worth a thought. Information need be passed to no one. Shota took the video out of the machine and they quietly bade each other goodnight.

  The fire burnished the thuja and walnut trees. Max dropped in the video and sparks belched at the stars. Blue flame hissed from electronic bonds; tape curled, melted, and the girls and their murderers deliquesced from their magnetic gallery into plastic lava running into mouths of red embers. Then the Slavic eyes floated up from the embers and he automatically withdrew from the fire into the darkness of the trees, looked and listened. The Makarov was in his pocket, but there was no one but a ghost in a melting video.

  Max has a photograph of himself and Alexei, taken by Petra, Alexei’s wife, in their apartment near the Bolshoi. They sit under a gallery of other photographs festooning the wall above them; a pictorial history of Alexei’s socialist star life. There is the boy soldier with older comrades hoisting the red flag in war shattered Berlin: the young Party member being patted by a bloated Stalin in a high Kremlin room; laughing with Kruschev; standing with glum, badly tailored Members of the Comintern and a back-combed, uniformed dyke effulgent with her Order of the Red Banner of Labour Junior Class. There is one of Alexei and Max, both dark haired and content sitting with beers at a table in the Old Square Prague, and a young, startlingly handsome Alexei, Jimmy Dean narcissistic in coat and dangling cigarette against St Petersburg’s classical townscape. A young wife with luminous beauty glows from an old photo above the samovar.

  Max knows that the man who now sits under this gallery is frail as a bird and bearing no resemblance to the matinée idol in the photos above, that he spends a great deal of the day sleeping in an old chair brought back to him in the Fifties from the Selfridges store in London, that he takes walks to exercise the hip replacement that leave him wheezing and dribbling spit, that his flesh has thinned to parchment, his neck hawsers disappeared into a collar now several sizes too big, and that his wife now shuffles about in an exhaustion of remoteness and weight gain that reduces her to an inflated prettiness, the soft, doe-eyed and enigmatic beauty of her face squashed onto a body that has grown spherical over the years, a Da Vinci pumpkin. Their presence in each other’s life passes almost unnoticed now, and the last time Max saw them he left sensing some longstanding complaint in Petra that she never articulates.

  He listens to her voice down the phone as she shouts at Alexei to wake. “Phone! It’s Max! Alexei! The phone! It’s Max on the ’phone. Oh, I better go and make sure the old goat hasn’t died, Max.”

  “Not yet!” he hears faintly and the familiar voice – aspirate yet rasping, with an attitude that had not faded with his physical vigour – comes on the phone. “Okay, get to the fucking point.”

  “And nice to speak to you, Alexei. I believe the lobotomy was successful?”

  “Completely. I have no recollection of who you are.”

  The banter that was their team trademark in the old days sputtered then died when the subject of the call was reached. From Max’s point of view it was a bitter lesson in the realities of the new Russia. He was trading on good will and years of collaboration from the old days, but Alexei adopted a tone that had about it a whiff of his old superior position, a cadence reserved for the subordinate who hasn’t quite come up to scratch, and Max was informed that it was now a fee-paying culture. The days when an army of fixers could be sent out on the street to clear up a little inconvenience were gone.

  “Well, how much are we actually talking about Alexei? Give me a figure.”

  “Including the women?”

  They were talking in death sentences. Max felt calm, determined. “I suppose so.”

  Alexei plucked a figure from the air that had Max reeling. “No concession for old times’ sake?”

  “Max, money’s still owed for the identification. Getting rid of the problem cannot be done till you pay that bill. With cash. Not promises. It’s the market.” Alexei had purloined the language of the entrepreneur and banker. “Strict conditions have to be observed in these transactions.”

  “I understand Alexei, but I really am in a very dangerous position. If I don’t sort this problem out, it will sort me out.”

  “Get a bank loan.”

  “What?”

  “For house improvement.”

  It was clear the conversation was to be ended.

  “Max, this man, what’s he called…? Tolya. Tolya Verkovensky. I don’t want to alarm you, but he is a serious figure in certain circles.”

  “You’ve alarmed me.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “You’re not making this a very good day for me, Alexei.”

  “I’m not a fucking psychotherapist.”

  “What’s his name again?”

  “Tolya Verkovensky. Max, we can do this for you. But you must meet the fee.”

  “Well, that’s just not possible, Alexei.’

  “On the contrary, Max, I know it’s possible.”

  “How?” asked Max.

  “Because you always get what you want.”

  Shota was enraged by the refusal of an old friend to help and apoplectic at the price quoted.

  “Muscovites! What’s so fucking special about these bastards? They’ll kill a man down here for the price of an orange.”

  “Maybe Masha will help.”

  “Max, you’re grabbing at straws. She’ll have nothing to do with this.”
>
  “What about you Shota? You must have a little spare cash.”

  “I spent everything on those two cottages and I haven’t had the bookings. The whole tourist trade just hasn’t…”

  “Just a loan, Shota. I’m owed money on these translations I’m doing.”

  “If I could, I would.”

  The end of the line had been reached. There was no protection anywhere. “If I were a Christian, I suppose this is where I’d go and pray.”

  “Max,” said Shota, “this isn’t our kind of thing. We’re not killers or mafiosi. This isn’t our kind of contract. Your contracts are for translating, mine are for building and renting out holiday homes. This is beyond anything we… you know. We shouldn’t be getting involved in this.”

  “It’s my life, Shota.”

  “I don’t think so, Max. If they ever arrest them – which they won’t – just withdraw your statement.”

  “I don’t like to give in to that kind of intimidation.”

  “You’re no longer a big man Max. You’re just one of us. Get real.”

  27 April 1964

  The night before I defected, I was home late, reeking of drink, trying to hide what had been planned for the next day. Peg had been picking up on things, it was slipping out in little seeps and spills and, as usual, she would look at me as if it was all her fault. I wanted to hold her and reassure that everything was okay and nothing was her fault. Of course, it wasn’t okay, but I couldn’t tell her a thing. I suffered in silence and she suffered in ignorance.