by Craig Thomas
The snow chains on the tyres ground and creaked and the ZiL rolled away from the deeply rutted kerb, skidding into the middle of the road. Lubin righted it and drove cautiously down the centre of the street to the junction with gaudier L Street.
The occasional lurching truck, one or two cars, shop windows holding a subdued glare, a couple of all-night cafes optimistically still ablaze.
‘Park here,’ Vorontsyev instructed.
Lubin dragged on the handbrake and, at Vorontsyev’s nod, switched off the engine. The blizzard was suddenly louder inside the car, shaking it like a riotous crowd. L Street was obscured, then revealed, obscured again; darker 9th Street seemed like a narrow tunnel.
‘Right, gentlemen, I said an hour, and an hour is what I meant.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We leave at three, at the latest’
The mobile phone in his pocket trilled. All four of them were startled, as if by a sudden searchlight thrown on them. Lock tugged it from Vorontsyev’s coat pocket and switched it on.
It was evident to Lock that it was Maria’s voice, despite the hoarse, urgent whisper she employed like a bad actress.
‘They’re here, Alexei — sir. GRU. They want to search the place from top to bottom — ‘ There was another, harsher female voice beyond Marfa, urging the girl to get out. ‘They’re here I’
‘For God’s sake, Sonya — shut up!’ Marfa snarled, pressing her face close to the mask of make-up worn by the older, heavier woman.
They were standing against the bedroom door, Sonya’s large, plump white hand still gripping the porcelain doorknob. Sonya’s eyes were wild with concern, almost oblivious to Marfa except as a presence. There was spittle on the carmined lips.
‘Get out, leave us alone!’ Sonya repeated. ‘They mustn’t find you here!’
‘Which way?’ Marfa demanded, the mobile phone pressed against the side of her face like a dark poultice. She heard Vorontsyev gabbling reassurance. ‘No, don’t come here!’ she snapped at him. ‘The place must be surrounded. I’ll get out where are you? Yes, 9th and L–I’ll find you. Yes!’ She closed the connection and thrust Dmitri’s phone into her pocket, tugging her scarf tightly around her face.
Then she was adrift, bereft of volition. She felt panic begin to spread like a blush across her features. Sonya was contemptuous for an instant, then simply afraid again. Only the rabbit, browsing leaves in its cage, seemed oblivious of threat. Marfa forced herself to the window and lifted the edge of the drawn curtain, which smelt of old velVet and old dust. Headlights glared through the blizzard outside and she heard the sound of raised voices and the clump of boots on rutted snow. Dark figures hurried.
Behind her, Sonya was clearing coffee cups with clumsy hands.
Marfa knelt and began shuffling the scattered papers into an untidy bundle, then stared wildly about her for a place of concealment — for the papers, herself? God Sonya was staring at her, but her attention was directed beyond the door, her head cocked to one side like that of a large, predatory animal. Marfa opened the heavy old wardrobe to push the bundle of papers into it’. Garish slips and housecoats, boots, underclothes. A spangled, ribboned basque lay like an abandoned piece of armour on the floor of the wardrobe. Then Sonya was behind her, her hands gripping her shoulders, her lips against Marfa’s cheek.
‘Quick — get your clothes off! Come on — put the papers in the bedV
She was tugging at the scarf, the long dark coat, even the glasses Marfa had not removed. Marfa tried to push her hands away, then experienced a moment of terrified betrayal as the woman held her wrists with one big hand and slapped her face.
The spectacles flew off.
‘Get away — V
‘Get your clothes off, put on a housecoat — hereV Sonya replied. ‘I hope to God Teplov doesn’t give the whole bloody game away! Come on!’
Marfa took off the coat, then her sweaters, lastly her denims.
Sonya bundled them into the wardrobe. Closing the door, she snapped:
‘Don’t get into the bed, it’s too obvious! Christ, why can’t you women wear some make-up — who’d fancy you in a month of Sundays?’
She pushed Marfa down on the bed. Marfa was chilly in the flimsy housecoat which reeked of cheap scent and barely covered her white knees. Sonya seemed no less distraught than when she had entered the room to warn her.
‘Can you smoke a cigarette without coughing?’ she asked.
Marfa nodded doubtfully. ‘Here!’ She thrust a cigarette at her.
‘And stop shivering!’
In a mockery of stately ease, Sonya sat in one of the velvet upholstered chairs, lighting another cigarette.
There were noises along the corridor, then the door was flung back and two GRU soldiers, greatcoated, wet-shouldered and grinning, appeared at the threshold.
‘Didn’t your mother teach you to knock?’ Sonya snapped.
‘What is this, another raid?’
‘Shut up, Grandma!’ the more pimply of the two young men mocked. The other snickered, nudging his companion and announcing:
‘Don’t fancy yours, Sasha!’
‘Mother Fat and her daughter, Miss Thin — bloody hell, you don’t go to any trouble for the customers, do you?’
A voice, sharp with authority, called from a distance, and the two soldiers snapped to half-attention before Sonya’s mocking laughter made them shambling figures of uncertain contempt once more. Quickly, they opened the wardrobe, drawers in an old chest, glanced beneath the bed.
‘Expecting to find your older brother here, boys?’ Sonya observed, exhaling smoke theatrically at the ceiling and crossing her legs.
The two young men scowled. One of them, onion on his breath, stared affrontingly at Marfa, his body hovering very close to her. She forced herself not to flinch, to present no more than patient indifference.
Tired of his lack of authority, the youth with acne snapped to his companion: ‘Let’s go before you catch something!’
‘Not even the flu, boys,’ Sonya shot after them as they slammed the door.
Sonya’s features crumbled into a clownish expression of exaggerated defeat and anxiety. Then she said hoarsely:
‘Now, get your clothes on and get ready to leave as soon as they do.’ She was listening to the clump of retreating boots.
Marfa tried to control the shiver that possessed her, rubbing her arms furiously and hunching into herself. She could taste the onion that had been on the soldier’s leering breath! ‘Come on, they won’t be back — just a couple of tarts, they’ll report. Not that anyone but a kid’would say that about you!’ she snorted, relieving her nerves. ‘Snap out of it! Sod off and don’t come back!’
Vorontsyev stared at the phone in his hand, listening to the noise of the disconnected call. Then he and the others were Startled as the blizzard buffeted a shapeless staggering lump against the side of the ZiL. Then the drunk or addict or whatever he was slouched on, bent against the flying snow and the force of the wind, towards the lights of an empty, hopeful cafe. A snowplough ground across the next intersection, its warning light dim through the storm.
‘What’s happening?’ Dmitri blurted, turning back to Vorontsyev.
‘The GRU are there.’
‘Teplov?’
‘No, he wouldn’t. Just bad luck’
‘What about Marfa?’ Lubin all but wailed.
‘She told us not to go back there!’ Vorontsyev warned as Lubin turned the key and the engine coughed.
Lock remained silent as he watched the snowplough disappear and the huddled lump of the man retreat up L Street. The girl was none of his affair, however her vulnerability nagged at him.
If they caught her, she’d talk, as would any of them in time, but there was little or nothing to tell. Only the location of the ZiL.
Lubin and Vorontsyev were staring at each other in challenge.
Then the young man in the driving seat turned away, swallowing loudly. Dmitri’s large hands rested on the back of his seat.
The
n he flapped his fingers in acquiescence and shrugged his shoulders. Lubin’s breathing was the sole noise of dissent.
‘We hang on?’ Lock asked.
Vorontsyev nodded. ‘We hang on-‘ he began gloomily.
‘Hello, what’s that?’ Dmitri was looking past Vorontsyev. Then he opened the door and began clambering out of the car. ‘There’s a car on 9th — parked. I’ll just go and have a look.’ He shut the door quickly on any reply.
The wind cut through his bulky clothing and the snow blinded him for a moment, until he read the direction of the wind and turned his gaze aside. He staggered like the drunk against the wall of wind and snow, as if feeling his way blindly along its solidity. Heard his teeth chattering and pulled his scarf across his mouth. His boots floundered through the drifted snow against shop fronts, grilles, steel doors. Signs in Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, pigeon-English, Russian, Ukrainian. Smells, even in that temperature and force of wind, mostly the scent of the poor and the crowd, what they ate and drank.
He realised his mistake even as he imitated the figure who had faltered against the car. Lurching against the black, snow roofed car, he identified it as German. BMW. The thin, pale face of the driver stared into his and he recognized Dom Kasyan, Val Panshin’s hit man; small and neat as ever in a dark overcoat and black driving gloves. The face twitched with recognition and the decision to act. The door of the car began to open. Dmitri pulled himself away as if from a magnetic field, stumbling back across the pavement and against a darkened shop window protected by an ice-cold metal grille. Kasyan’s face was alert, threatening, even as his lips moved close to the mouthpiece of the earphone. A white wrist rested on the steering wheel. Something gleamed as it was held in the black driving glove.
Dmitri struggled with his clothes, opening his overcoat and reaching for the pistol in the shoulder holster. Kasyan put down the phone. It was only seconds since — the BMW’s engine fired, the door slammed, and the car screeched and ripped its way on snow tyres across the ruts and into the middle of 9th Street. Dmitri’s gun wavered in front of him, as if heid by someone else. His heart was pounding.
‘Oh — bugger it, buggerV he bellowed at the flying snow, way ing his arms as if he had been stranded in the storm by the accelerating BMW.
He turned and blundered back towards the ZiL, the wind behind him pushing him like a rock down a mountainside. Lubin and Lock were already standing beside the car, guns drawn. He looked back, stumbling, and saw the BMW turn out of sight.
‘What is it?’ Lock shouted.
Ignoring him, Dmitri reached the car and leaned into it, his breath coming in great sobs.
‘Kasyan — that little shit Kasyan!’ he shouted. ‘I recognized him and he recognized me Oh, shit, Alexei, it’s all cocked up —!’
‘What’s the matter?’ Lock demanded.
Vorontsyev snapped: ‘Panshin’s right hand. Panshin’s got the scientists all right, Kasyan must have been scouting the place they won’t bloody well come now!’
‘Lubin, let’s move it, uh?’ Lock ordered. ‘They know where we are now. Come on, fella, move it!’ He bundled Lubin back into the driver’s seat and climbed in beside Vorontsyev. ‘How far is this guy Panshin from here?’
‘What?’
Speed, man, speed. Did the guy use a phone?’ Dmitri, slamming his door, grunted in the affirmative. ‘OK, so Panshin knows. But he has to talk to Turgenev now. There have to be new arrangements, another safe house. Panshin must have them at his place — jazz club, you said?’ Vorontsyev nodded. ‘Then let’s hit it before they can get those people out of there. Hit it now— or forget it!’
‘Four of us—?’ Dmitri began.
‘What about Marfa?’ Lubin asked urgently. ‘She’ll expect us to be here.’
Marfa had obviously escaped; had necessarily escaped, for Lubin’s equanimity, his ability to function. Perhaps each of them assumed the same, Lock realised, even himself. The reminder of their numbers jolted him. He shook his head.
‘Hit it now, or forget it,’ he repeated. His hands were clenched into fists in his gloves, resting on the thighs of his denims. Come on, Vorontsyev, he thought, willing the policeman to agree. He looked at the Russians in turn. ‘We need one guy, just one. It was your idea — one guy to show to Moscow, to the CIA or the FBI. Only one.’
‘Lubin — take us to Panshin’s …’ He smiled, though he was leaning back in the rear seat to ease his ribs and arm. ‘I feel like some late jazz.’
‘What about Marfa?’
‘I can’t call her — it might kill her!’ Vorontsyev snapped.
The scullery door of the old house was slammed shut behind her. She stood shivering in the wind, her scarf flying away from her face so that she had to release her shaking body and grab at it. The cold she blamed as much on the ridiculous, humiliating housecoat — her throat and cheeks still reeked of the cheap scent — as on her fear or the storm. The door being banged shut was Sonya’s final ejaculation of angry relief.
She looked at her watch. Almost two-thirty in the morning.
The blizzard and the darkness oppressed her. Her own escape sharpened her sense of Goludin’s death. He’d been casually, finally erased, like some mistake. She saw his earnest, affably willing features and experienced a lurching sense of loss that momentarily dizzied her.
She shook her head to clear it and sniffed loudly; then reached into her pocket and removed Dmitri’s phone, at once dialling Vorontsyev with clumsy, gloved fingers. Then she waited, hearing nothing but the wind. The looming church was the only other building she could distinguish. Come on, come on, she muttered in her thoughts, stamping her feet.
‘Alexei — I’m all right!’ she blurted, at once embarrassed at her released nerves.
‘What happened?’ she heard in a voice from which all emotion was excluded, to her disappointment.
She told him in a babble of disconnected sentences, concluding:
‘They didn’t fancy me!’ And giggled with tension.
‘Where are you now?’
‘Outside the brothel. You?’
‘We’re—’ It was as if he had paused to consult the others, then he added: ‘We’re on our way to Val Panshin’s club. We think the people we want are hidden on the premises.’
‘I’ll join you,’ she said quickly. ‘Be there in fifteen minutes at most.’ She switched off the phone at once and thrust it decisively back into the pocket of her coat. In the other pocket, she gripped the pistol. The file of papers was held under her arm.
She stepped out into the full force of the wind and the hurled snow, which stung hard against her face. Her boots plunged into heaped snow as she’walked lumberingly towards the church’s dark, empty, decayed bulk and the lane where the car had been parked — aware that someone might have been left to keep the car under surveillance. It had a police numberplate, even if it was caked and hidden with frozen, dirty snow. She gripped the gun more lightly as she reached the broken fence that bordered the lane alongside the church. The deep impressions of the ZiL’s tyres were all but hidden. Maybe they hadn’t noticed the smaller car, her car …?
There was no one near’ it. She warmed the lock with the petrol-fuelled handwarmer she kept for the purpose, pressing it against the icy metal, then inserted the key. Tugged the door open with a crack of ice and climbed into the driving seat. The storm’s noise hardly diminished inside the car. She could hear her own breathing though, and saw it cloud the inside of the windscreen. She thrust the ignition key towards the dashboard — hands, a stiff arm, around her throat. Heard someone else breathing, close against her face, closer than the soldier with acne, smelt the scent of his clothes and old sweat … Her head was being dragged back by the arm locked around her throat, dragged upwards to be snapped away from her body, the breath squeezed out of her. His fierce breathing beside her, his bulk leaning over the seat from the rear of the car where he had concealed himself … others?
Couldn’t breathe now, not at all, not even through her nose which
was running, not through her mouth, clogged with saliva and terror … Sensed his success, the imminence of it, through his frame and stiff arm. The windscreen was blind but the snow was darkening, darkening — body a long way below her now, not part of her, head spinning but in darkness, just little flashing lights like red and green stars flickering in the blackness … Body further away, much too far to help, that slow-moving arm more distant than his arm around her throat, much too distant…
The shot deafened her, so that she hardly heard his roar of pain. Hardly felt his arm release its grip, or saw it wait in slow motion away from her, sliding like a defeated snake back over her seat into the rear of the car. She turned to watch the white hand as if it belonged to a waving friend. And her hand — really her finger — squeezed the trigger once more. The pistol exploded, illuminating his face and blinding her … There had been a great deal of blood from the first head wound.
She turned away from the dead man, her whole body shaking in the seat, her thoughts repeating that she had not noticed the wetness of recently melted snow on the door, should have noticed it was wet, should have …
She started the engine out of panic, and the car squealed and wriggled down the lane, thrown from rut to rut, drift to drift.
She winced in anticipation of firing from behind her. The last air bubbled out of the dead man’s lungs. She felt sick, so desperately sick — she had to stop …
… She threw the door open and vomited into the snow.
When she closed the door again, the shivering would not stop.
She was icily cold. She wiped her chin with the back of her glove. Gripped the wheel hard enough to still her arms, then slowly, deliberately accelerated. The car appeared much bigger, overwhelming her as it seemed to turn out of the lane towards the new town of its own volition. She clung to it as if vainly to restrain it from bolting.
They’d left only one man. Probably didn’t know it was hers, hadn’t given it much of a priority. The watcher had decided to be clever, hide in the car, or just be more comfortable than pressed against the wall of the church. She didn’t want to think about him. She could smell the blood but could not bring herself to stop the car again in order to bundle the body into the snow.
