Fire Hawk

by Geoffrey Archer

  They stood outside the gate to the stable yard where Taras lived. The street was dark except for the lights of passing cars. Oksana had a key that her cousin had lent her. She opened the gate. There was no light coming from the old stables and they had to feel their way to the door.

  For Oksana, telling Sam about Sergeyi in that railway station shelter had been an essential unburdening. It was, she’d decided, important that he knew how she’d loved her husband. Only if he understood what she’d felt for Sergeyi could she desire him without guilt. She’d built a bridge now between her past and her future, whatever it might be. She’d not expected Sam to respond to her outpourings by revealing things about himself. She’d understood by now that the fence surrounding his private life was of the thickest barbed wire. To cut through it would take time, more time probably than she would have with him. But there was something about the way he’d listened that had convinced her that he too had suffered loss. Sensed too that whereas her loss was history now, his own grief was still continuing.

  She opened the door.

  ‘Taras?’

  No reply, and the place was in darkness. She fumbled for a light switch, but it didn’t work. She turned to look back over the top of the wall that surrounded the yard. Darkness everywhere.

  ‘Power cut,’ she sighed. ‘In Odessa it happen most day. Maybe Taras have candle.’

  She groped her way to the kitchen while Sam aimed for where he remembered the sofa to be. His suitcase should be on it, and inside that a torch.

  They both produced light at the same instant.

  ‘See? We make good team,’ said Oksana with a brittle laugh.

  Nervously Sam illuminated Taras’s bed, fearing irrationally that Rybkin’s men had been here and murdered the man. But the bed was empty, its soiled sheet and blanket rolled into a ball.

  ‘I think he go find friend who make samogon,’ Oksana ventured, setting down the candleholder next to the television. She hugged herself for warmth. ‘You hungry?’

  Sam was so tired he had to think about it. He sank down onto the sofa.

  ‘Yes, Ksucha. I do believe I am.’

  ‘I see if Taras leave any of food which I buy this morning,’ she said, returning to the kitchen. Then after a few seconds she called out, ‘Oh yes. We soon have dinner.’

  Sam rested his head on the sofa back and let his eyelids droop. He had to sleep if he was going to be able to function tonight, yet his keyed-up nerves weren’t going to let him. The plan he’d worked out was shaky at best, and more dangerous than ever. Oksana could not under any circumstances be a part of it. Yet her determination to share his every risk seemed absolute. Somehow he would have to extract himself from her grip.

  To corner Rybkin he would need luck more than anything else. He had no clue where the man lived nor whether he ever moved about without a phalanx of bodyguards. Sam had one lead and one lead only: the name of the restaurant given him by Major Pushkin, the nocturnal operating base of the Voroninskaya gang. He checked his watch. It was seven-thirty. In about three hours’ time he would need to be back in the centre of Odessa, alone.

  Oksana busied herself laying out food on a tray, forcing herself not to look at the filth of her surroundings and more importantly to resist the feeling of dread that had overcome her since returning to this flat. It was a feeling much greater than fear and yet lesser too, because she was powerless to do anything about it. She could be here in Odessa, could be with this Englishman that she adored, but there was nothing she could do to prevent him walking into the jaws of his fate.

  She returned to the main room with bread, sliced sausage and cheese, and a dish of tomatoes and pickled cucumbers.

  ‘Sorry not more exciting,’ she told him. ‘But this kitchen is not place which make me want to cook. Soon I make some tea for us – when water boiling.’

  Sam smiled as she sat beside him. There was a body smell about her now, her rose petal scent tainted by the tensions of the day. A woman’s smell, an animal odour that triggered him like a switch.

  As she balanced the tray on her knees, she looked at him with a watchful steadiness. To Sam it was the look of someone who’d seen the future and was waiting for it to come to pass. A look with the fateful knowledge of a tarot card. It startled him. He glanced away.

  ‘Thanks for the food, Ksucha,’ he whispered. ‘I always seem to be saying that.’

  He loaded a plate from the tray and began to eat. Oksana continued to watch him.

  ‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ he asked.

  ‘Not now.’

  He’d decided what he would do to get away from her. She might hate him for it later, but not, he hoped, at the time.

  ‘What you going to do, Sam?’

  Her huskiness drew him like a velvet vortex. In the dull light of the candle her eyes were almost grey-green.

  ‘I’m going to try again.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘I’ll think of something. I’ll wait until the morning,’ he lied.

  He put the plate down on the floor. She was still looking at him, her gaze unwavering, cutting through, trying to see the truth he was hiding. He took hold of her hands. They were small and had a smooth softness that surprised him.

  ‘You have beautiful eyes,’ he told her.

  They didn’t move from his, but her lips parted into a smile.

  ‘That what you told me a year ago, only you don’t remember,’ she teased.

  He pulled her to him and kissed her. She held her breath, one hand against his chest as if uncertain whether to allow this. Then the hand went to the back of his neck.

  Oksana sniffed in his smell and tried to imprint it in her memory before it went away. She didn’t know why she felt so strongly that Sam’s life had only a few more hours to run. Such certainties were never easy to explain. But the same dread feeling had come to her the night when Sergeyi died. The doctors had told her it would be months before the cancer killed him, but she’d known as she lay down beside him in the bed that when she awoke in the morning he would be gone.

  She pulled back from him. His eyes were half closed as if locked on some far horizon.

  ‘Why you do this?’

  ‘Because I want to.’ He kissed her again but she pushed him back.

  ‘Let me look, you very beautiful man.’ He was like a sleep walker, she thought. Heading for a precipice.

  She took one of his hands and put it on her breast. As he felt its shape a shiver rose up from her womb.

  ‘I very afraid for you, Sam,’ she whispered.

  From the kitchen came the sound of water boiling. And suddenly the lights came on. They blinked at the unaccustomed brightness.

  ‘I’ll switch it off again,’ he suggested.

  ‘I think is better.’

  As he crossed over to the wall switch she slipped into the kitchen to turn off the gas.

  The television came on. News headlines on some English language satellite channel. He watched the screen, fearful suddenly that the anthrax attack might already have happened.

  Oksana came up behind him and slipped her arms round his waist.

  They watched the screen. A car bomb in Jerusalem – tension over Jewish settlements on the West Bank. A truck drivers’ strike in France. Political sniping from the election trail in the USA.

  He turned it off again.

  Oksana held onto him.

  ‘You very dear man to me,’ she murmured. Her hands were on his chest. ‘I feel your heart beating.’

  She kept her hands there, feeling his life force, determined to have of it what she could.

  ‘Please love me,’ she breathed. ‘Love me now.’

  He turned round. Her eyes had a melting softness. She pressed her hips against his groin and lifted up her mouth. He teased at her lips while feeling for the buttons of her embroidered blouse. He undid them slowly, then reached behind her back for the clip to her bra.

  Suddenly she turned away from him and looked towards the bed. As one, they decided w
ithout the need to voice it that to lie where Taras had lain night after night, week after week, masturbating over his porn tapes was not an option.

  ‘Sofa,’ she whispered. ‘Come. I show.’

  She took their bags off it and put them onto the floor, then began heaving at the seat cushions. With a creaking of unoiled springs a bed unfolded, its mattress covered with a linen protector that looked passably clean.

  He held her again, their breath faster now after the exertion with the sofa. A smile crossed her face like the beat of a butterfly, her eyes full of longing, but a little afraid. He slipped the blouse and bra from her shoulders. Her breasts were round like a young girl’s, their nipples as hard as orange pips.

  ‘Sam . . .’ she breathed, her mouth caressing his ear as he bent his head to kiss them. ‘I want you to tell me something.’

  He stood up straight and put a finger against her lips.

  ‘There’s nothing you need to know.’

  ‘Yes,’ she insisted. ‘This is important to me.’

  ‘Nothing’s important,’ he croaked. ‘Nothing except this.’ He felt for the zip of her skirt.

  ‘Yes,’ she insisted again, pulling back from him and holding him by the waist at arm’s length. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I want to know if you love someone, Sam.’

  Love? He didn’t know what it meant any more.

  ‘No,’ he breathed eventually.

  She didn’t know whether to believe him or not. But it freed her, what he’d said. She placed her palms on the hard muscles of his behind and pressed him to her, fearing the lump in his trousers that she’d felt against her belly might have been softened by her prevaricating. It wasn’t. She began unbuttoning his shirt.

  They undressed quickly and stood naked in the flickering candle light, her eyes clouding at the sight of the burn marks on his chest. Before she could ask, he kissed her hard on the mouth and then her neck. Her heat enveloped him as their bodies touched. She tasted of salt. Her fingers clasped the back of his head and he felt her opening up to him like a crocus in sunlight.

  Then she did something he wasn’t expecting. She detached herself from his embrace, knelt in front of him on the bed and hooked her hands behind her back as if they were shackled to her ankles.

  ‘I very happy you not like man in video,’ she smiled. Then she took his penis in her mouth.

  Sam gasped. He held her head, gently stroking behind her ears as she sucked. But he quickly realised she’d not done this before. Her movements were frenetic and uncertain. A desire to please but without knowing how.

  ‘Hey,’ he breathed, pulling back and crouching in front of her. ‘You don’t have to do that.’ He kissed her lips, tasting his own salt on them, and cupped her breasts with his hands.

  ‘I want to . . .’ she moaned, throatily.

  ‘No you don’t.’

  He lay her back on the bed and kissed her down the length of her body. The touch of his hands and tongue felt like fire to her.

  ‘I love you, love you, Sam,’ she mouthed, stretching wide her legs so she could take all of him into her, every last piece of him and hold him there, hold him so tight and so firm that he would never be able to leave her. And so that the volcano that had been dormant inside her for years could finally erupt.

  37

  HE AWOKE WITH a start, his heart kicking into life like a motorbike engine as he remembered what he now had to do.

  The candle had burned down, but light from the bare bulb in the kitchen was bright enough for him to read his watch by. After eleven. He’d slept for far longer than he’d intended. Oksana lay by his side breathing heavily and evenly. After making love they’d lain with just a scratchy blanket for cover and fallen asleep like babies.

  Moving slowly so as not to wake her, he swung his feet to the floor and stood up. He thanked God that Taras hadn’t returned.

  He gathered his scattered clothes, dressed, then carried his suitcase to the kitchen. He dug into it until his fingers found the package Figgis had given him in Kiev. He unwrapped the pistol, and checked it over. Figgis had called it a PSM, a Russian version of the Walther Polizei Pistol he’d once had instruction on. He checked the location of the safety, finding it at the rear of the slide instead of the side. The gun was slimmer and easier to conceal than a Walther. He unclipped the magazine to check it was full, then, after replacing it, tucked the barrel of the weapon into the sock on his left foot and bound the grip to the inside of his calf with a necktie. He straightened the trouser leg over the weapon and took a few paces to ensure he could walk with it.

  His passport and cash he stuffed into a money belt and secured it round his waist next to his skin. Then he pulled a thick sweater over his shirt. It was cold in this house and it would be colder outside. Pocketing his torch and the street map that he’d bought from a kiosk at the station on their return to Odessa, he checked he’d left nothing in the suitcase that he needed, then said goodbye to it, because he didn’t expect to be seeing it again.

  He tiptoed back into the bedroom. Oksana’s breathing was steady and full. She lay on her back, her legs apart like a sated creature and with one hand on the pillow. He decided he must leave her a note. There was some scrap paper and a ball pen by the video. He scribbled a message saying that she should catch the first train to Kiev in the morning and he would contact her there soon. He left it on the pillow then stepped over to Taras’s bed, picking up one of the empty vodka bottles lying on the floor beside it and stuffing it under his sweater. Finally, with a last look at Oksana, he slipped out into the night.

  He walked quickly though the broad, ochre streets of Moldovanka, concerned that the lateness of the hour meant he’d missed his chance. The feeble street lighting of the neighbourhood concealed the terrible disrepair of its graceful buildings. He avoided doorways and patches of shadow where there were shapes that moved. A short-skirted whore, stoned out of her head, who was exposing her bony crotch to any car that passed, made a lurch towards him, then spat abuse when he ignored her. From time to time cars sped by at lunatic speeds as if escaping the scene of some crime. From inside a house he heard a woman scream, though whether from ecstasy, from a beating, or from the effects of vink he couldn’t tell.

  He shivered, partly from cold and partly through fear. He’d never felt more alone or more full of doubt. He knew that the prospect of persuading Rybkin to tell him about the anthrax plot had the flight potential of a brick, but that wasn’t the only issue he needed the man to resolve.

  The night sky was clear and pricked with stars. He’d been walking for more than twenty minutes by the time he reached the street he was aiming for, a street very different from the slums he’d left behind. White fairy lights twinkled in the lower branches of the lush trees lining its broad, cobbled carriageway. Beneath the canopy of leaves, plastic tables and chairs clustered under parasols marked Marlboro and Pall Mall. This was vulitsya Deribasovska, the centre of Odessa’s night-life.

  Despite the chilly air, hundreds of twenty and thirty-somethings thronged the pedestrianised zone in jeans and bomber jackets, or smart suits, dresses and long coats. They were socialising with the vivacity of Romans. Sam slipped among them, slackening his pace to match that of the ambling crowd. As his eyes adjusted, he caught the occasional flash of white or navy. The NATO sailors were still in town. On a corner opposite, shiny helmets glinted above the watchful eyes of a US Military Police patrol.

  The street was dotted with cafés and bars. Doing good business for a nation on its knees, thought Sam wryly. New Russians, new money. And somewhere here was the restaurant the renegade Major had identified as the nocturnal haunt of Dima Filipovich Grimov and his friends.

  He’d memorised the tourist map of the centre. He was in the grid of the old town, little altered since it was laid out by architects from France and Italy in the nineteenth century. Roads intersected every hundred metres. The restaurant used by Grimov’s gang should have been to his left at the fourth
junction down, but when he looked into that particular side street it was in darkness. None of the garish neon that adorned every night-spot he’d seen so far.

  He was about to check out the next street when he saw something. He slipped into the turning, losing himself in shadow while his eyes attuned to the dark. After a few seconds he could make out a large car parked about thirty paces down whose bodywork had the square bulk of a Mercedes.

  Too dark to see if there were men inside or standing by it, but fearing his presence had been noted, he pulled the empty vodka bottle from under his sweater, raised it shakily and as visibly as possible to his lips, then lurched down the street like a drunk. Once he’d drawn level with the car on the opposite side of the road, he halted, swaying like a willow in a gale, and opened his fly to urinate.

  He could see now that there were two men on the far pavement and they were watching him. Suddenly they turned back towards the building behind them as if responding to a noise. A shaft of light beamed up from a basement, accompanied by coarse laughter. One of the men shouted at Sam who took the words to mean fuck off out of it. The thug began moving towards him so he quickly zipped his fly and shuffled away. He heard the click of a gun being cocked and lurched away faster, terrified these hoods might be in the habit of using drunks for target practice.

  After twenty paces he risked a look back. Next to the Mercedes several men were now gathered, talking in low voices. Some ducked into the car. Doors closed and the engine roared. As the machine pulled from the kerb, its headlamps ablaze, Sam leaned drunkenly against a tree.

  The Merc’s tyres slapped thickly at the cobbles as it passed him. The glow of the tail lights revealed a man on the opposite pavement. Sam cowered, fearful it was a gunman coming looking for him. But the man walked briskly on, his head bowed.

  A burly man. A man with the same build as Viktor Rybkin.

  Sam abandoned his empty vodka bottle and kept pace with the dark-coated figure, praying he’d got lucky. As they headed towards Prymorsky Boulevard, he heard beat music and remembered the concert platform they’d seen earlier being set up in front of the town hall.