Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

  ‘Are we in trouble?’ the girl asked. She sounded Welsh.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Tom, passing Alex’s photograph across.

  ‘Pretty. Who is she?’

  ‘Someone who’s missing. You haven’t seen her?’

  ‘No,’ the Welsh girl said.

  ‘You sure? Her boyfriend studies here.’

  ‘Quite sure. I’m Siân,’ she added, as if this was something that needed to be said. ‘I thought I knew most of the girls from the UK. What’s she studying?’

  ‘She’s home for the holidays.’

  ‘From boarding school?’

  Tom nodded.

  ‘Tacky.’

  Tom glared at Lenin Cap.

  ‘Not her,’ he said hastily. ‘Whoever’s boffing her.’

  Siân peered at the photograph carefully. ‘Upper sixth?’

  ‘Lower,’ Tom said.

  ‘Even tackier,’ the boy muttered.

  ‘What’s her boyfriend’s name?’ That was Siân again.

  ‘David Wright. I’m told he’s American.’

  The friends glanced at each other. The other girl shook her head very slightly. A warning, Tom imagined. Unless she was simply suggesting they stay out of it.

  ‘Spit it out,’ Tom said.

  Only the first girl met his eyes. She looked embarrassed.

  ‘Mr Right. Davie Wong. It’s a pun.’

  ‘And a play on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?’ Tom asked.

  She nodded gratefully. ‘He’s Canadian, not American, and I very much doubt he’s going out with … What was her name?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Where do I find him?’

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘Siân …’ Lenin Cap said.

  ‘It’s okay. Davie knows me.’

  ‘Davie knows you?’ Tom asked, when they were on their way out.

  He left the others convinced they’d got off lightly, without knowing for what. Moscow probably did that to you after a while.

  ‘The students halls are self-policing,’ she said. ‘Elected representatives, Komsomol committees. You know, the youth organization of the Communist Party. Every corridor has a deshurnaya, one of those old women who sit at a desk and spy on who comes and goes. Some of them have been here for ever. We should be okay. I know most of those in this block.’

  Concrete stairs led to a swing door with a corridor beyond. A hard-faced woman looked up from a desk and barked a question when she saw Tom. It was Siân who answered. ‘I told her you were from the embassy.’

  ‘I speak Russian,’ Tom said.

  He watched the girl assess that.

  She knocked at a door and waited. There was a sound of scurrying and then silence, as if someone was pretending not to be there. ‘Davie,’ Siân said, ‘it’s okay. It’s me.’ Very slowly the door opened a little and a slim boy peered through.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘He needs to talk to you.’

  ‘About Alex,’ Tom said.

  The door opened as wide as its little chain would allow. ‘I haven’t seen her,’ a soft voice said. ‘She only came here twice. Now go away and leave me alone.’

  ‘She’s disappeared,’ Siân said.

  ‘Maybe she wanted to disappear.’

  ‘Maybe she did,’ Tom agreed. ‘Her family are still worried.’

  ‘You’re family?’

  Tom knew the chain would snap with a single kick. All the same, he pulled his ID from his pocket and held it up so Davie could examine it. ‘I’m from her embassy.’ The door closed a little, but only so the boy on the far side could slide the chain free and open it properly.

  ‘I’ll find my own way out,’ Tom said to Siân.

  She nodded, glanced once at the nervous boy in the doorway and kept whatever she’d been about to say to herself. She left without looking back.

  ‘Friend of yours?’ Tom asked.

  ‘She’s nice.’

  He said it so sadly Tom wondered if he was simple.

  The room stank of piss, and shit stained one wall. The window was wide open despite it being less than zero outside. A torn copy of Pushkin lay face down on a locker, the shredded halves touching as if the boy hoped they’d heal. A Praktica SLR sat on the windowsill with film ripped from its back. The front of its leather case had been torn off and the Zeiss lens cracked.

  ‘Christ. Who have you upset?’

  Davie Wong said nothing.

  His eyes were huge and brown, and fearful behind the tiny wire spectacles he put on to examine Tom. His lashes were long enough to make a girl jealous. He wouldn’t have lasted a day at Tom’s school.

  Remembering the postcard, Tom wondered if the ‘She’ in ‘You will hear thunder & remember me & think: She wanted storms’ had been referring to Alex at all. Perhaps Davie had been talking about himself.

  ‘Anna Akhmatova,’ the boy said when Tom fed him the line. ‘You’ve been through Alex’s things then …’

  ‘As I said, her family are worried.’

  ‘Bit late now.’

  ‘When did you last see her?’

  ‘A few days before New Year.’

  ‘You didn’t fly home over the holidays?’

  ‘My parents can’t afford it. The university let me stay.’

  ‘Ask them for the money and go home. Don’t stay here. If the Russians are being this nasty, there’s little point. It’ll only get worse.’

  ‘The Komsomol keep an eye on us, you know? One Uzbek boy wanted to be friends. I didn’t dare.’ Davie reddened, realizing he shouldn’t have said that. ‘It’s not the Russians though. They’re not my problem.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘I thought you wanted to talk about Alex?’

  ‘I do. I’m just getting a picture of how things work here.’

  ‘Has Alex really run away?’

  ‘I’m told that her note said she’d be staying with a friend. I was hoping that was you. She’s not your girlfriend then?’

  Davie Wong looked so shocked Tom smiled.

  ‘Didn’t think so. How did you meet?’

  ‘At the swimming pool.’

  ‘The big one opposite the Pushkin?’

  The boy nodded. ‘She was smart and funny and suggested we get a coffee after we got changed. So that’s what we did. We met a few times. Nothing happened.’

  ‘Not your type.’

  Davie Wong glanced at him sharply.

  ‘My uncle was a stoker on destroyers,’ Tom said. ‘These days he lives in Portsmouth with a P&O steward he met in Singapore in the sixties. They’re just friends, obviously. Two bachelors sharing a small mews house outside the dockyard because it’s easier than living alone.’

  The boy grinned.

  ‘So, if you weren’t going out with Alex, who was? I mean, she’s smart and pretty and about to turn sixteen. There has to be some boy on the horizon. Unless her tastes don’t run in that direction.’

  ‘They do,’ Davie said.

  Seeing Tom’s look, he added. ‘We used to ogle Russian boys at the pool and in the cafe afterwards. She likes brooding and dark or blond and angular. I’m a bit less dramatic. It’s difficult here though. I mean, it’s not just illegal, it’s an illness. Did you know they put you in a mental hospital?’

  Yeah, Tom did know that.

  The wrong politics. The wrong public pronouncements. The wrong kinds of religion. The wrong sexual orientation. They put you in a mental hospital for a lot of things in the Soviet Union, although these days it was getting better.

  ‘There was a Russian boy at the pool,’ Davie said suddenly. ‘Thin, good-looking, very intense. He came over and introduced himself. I thought …’ Davie hesitated. ‘I thought he was interested in me. We went out as a group for a coffee and he took us to Patriarch’s Ponds to sit on the bench from The Master and Margarita. I didn’t see him again. Alex might have done.’

  ‘Might have done?’

  Davie blushed. ‘She cancelled me the next week. She was nice about it but we both knew why. She
was going swimming with K.’

  ‘What does the K stand for?’

  ‘Kotik. But that’s just Russian for …’

  Little cat. Yeah, Tom knew.

  ‘Did Alex mention a New Year’s Eve party?’

  Tom watched the boy wrestle with his conscience and the good angel win. Looking round the ruins of his room, the boy found a paperback of Cocteau sketches that had escaped destruction and flipped towards the back, extracting an address not that far from Tom’s flat.

  ‘It was going to be great, Alex said. She said I should go. Her new friends were cool, they’d like me.’ Davie shrugged, looking briefly puzzled. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘Alex didn’t do friends, not really. She hated school. Things were horrid at home. Her mother drank. Her stepfather hated her. I’d never met anyone so lonely.’

  Tom wondered if Davie realized that he kept referring to Alex in the past.

  The student room Tom wanted was right at the end.

  ‘Who is it?’

  He knocked again.

  ‘I said, who is it?’

  A third knock produced swearing, more swearing and the clatter of someone stamping to the door. It was thrown open and filled with the bulk of the sneering jock who’d been persecuting Davie for being different.

  Tom’s punch was low, fast and dirty.

  The boy was twenty, maybe twenty-one. Not used to being on the wrong side of the equation. Not used to being the one on the floor. Once the Texan had his breath back, Tom hooked two fingers into his nose, yanked back his head and gripped his throat. The list of nasty things he promised to do if the boy trashed Davie Wong’s room again, or indeed went anywhere near him, was long and very detailed.

  The boy believed every word.

  Tom left him curled on the floor and found his own way out of the overblown concrete cake, Stalin’s idea of how a skyscraper should look. Outside, an old woman sat in the shelter of its steps being ignored by students, a black scarf tied tightly round her head to protect her from the wind. He wondered how many old women there were in Moscow selling wax figurines.

  Tomorrow he’d have a new shadow, one better suited to dealing with someone trained in tradecraft. Tom didn’t regret losing the rat-faced little KGB man. He had an address for the party and, anyway, it was worth it for a morning of walking free.

  Snow glittered on the distant roofs of the Kremlin, and the ice on the Moskva had been broken and healed so often that shards lay scattered across its surface like shattered glass. The balustrades of the bridge he used were glazed with virgin snow. Tom barely noticed. His thoughts were locked tight inside.

  Alex was sad and lonely? He knew that already. She hated school and had problems at home? He could tell that by looking round her room. If he could do that for a teenager he’d barely met, why hadn’t he been able to do it for his own daughter?

  Why hadn’t anyone?

  9

  Party Address

  ‘No work today …?’

  ‘This is work,’ Tom said.

  Narrowing his eyes, Ivan Petrovich Dennisov put a flask of vodka in front of the Englishman without being asked, shouted to the kitchen for some food and found a cold can of beer that left a ring on the zinc.

  ‘What’s this?’ Tom asked.

  ‘The produce of our wonderful democratic neighbours.’

  Picking up the can, Tom examined it. East German and past its drink-by date.

  ‘Drink up,’ said Dennisov, punching holes in the top.

  It was eleven in the morning and Tom had already eaten borscht at a stall by the metro but he took the bowl slapped down in front of him by the lumpy teenager in her badly fitting knitted dress, knocked back his vodka, glugged from the can and offered Dennisov a cigarette.

  They smoked in silence for a few minutes.

  The hours the bar kept were written by the door. Six a.m. until nine thirty. Eleven until two. Seven until eleven at night. It could be local regulations. It might simply be Dennisov. ‘How’s the leg?’ Tom asked.

  ‘It got blown off.’

  ‘You’ve got painkillers?’

  ‘Morphine,’ he said. ‘Reserved for glorious veterans.’

  Behind them the teenager who’d slammed down the bowl muttered something.

  ‘Yelena,’ Dennisov said, sketching an introduction. ‘Ignore her. She blames me for going. Also for losing my leg. At least she didn’t blame me for coming back. There are those who do …’

  The girl looked ten years younger than Dennisov. But pain had etched so many lines into the helicopter pilot’s face it was hard to say how old Dennisov really was.

  ‘You found coming home hard?’ Tom asked.

  ‘You never come home,’ Dennisov said. ‘You know that. A little bit of you always gets left behind.’ He regarded his leg sourly. ‘Sometimes a big bit. You know how many alcoholics we have in our glorious state? Forty million. Those are just the ones we admit to. I tell Yelena it could be worse, I could be an opium addict.’ He squinted at Tom. ‘What’s this about work?’

  ‘My boss needs a favour.’

  Dennisov dragged harder on his cigarette, winced as he hit its cardboard filter and ground it underfoot. His face was oily, he sweated vodka and a tightly wound unhappiness tightened the sinews in his neck. ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘He wants to buy icons? Preferably old ones?’

  ‘Not icons.’

  ‘Foreigners always want icons.’

  ‘Not this one.’

  ‘If he wants roubles for dollars, I’m the wrong man.’

  ‘Britain doesn’t use dollars.’

  ‘No wonder you’re fucked. Not drugs. He’ll get into trouble for drugs. Unless he’s got a doctor like mine. That’s the secret. Then you can have anything. I’m not sure my doctor’s allowed to treat foreigners though.’

  ‘Not drugs either. I’m looking for a girl …’

  Before Dennisov could do more than grin, Tom pulled a 5x4 from his pocket and put it on the counter, wiping up spilt beer with his sleeve first.

  ‘Young,’ Dennisov said.

  ‘Too young.’

  The picture had been taken, according to Lady Masterton, the day her daughter turned fifteen. Alex was silhouetted against an English sky. Scowling, inevitably. A shaggy pony munched grass beside her. A large white-painted rectory stood behind. She looked as self-conscious and uncomfortable in her own body as she did in her brand-new body warmer, jodhpurs and shiny riding boots.

  The teenager from the kitchen stopped at the sight of the photograph.

  ‘This girl,’ she said, ‘she’s missing?’

  Tom nodded.

  ‘In Moscow?’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Your boss has gone to the authorities?’

  ‘I imagine they know. But until he asks for help officially, they can’t approach him. He won’t ask unless he has to. He feels he should handle it himself.’

  Dennisov appeared to believe this. At least to believe it as much as Tom did, which was not at all. There had to be deeper reasons than not wanting to lose face for Sir Edward’s refusal to go to the Soviets.

  Tom intended to discover them.

  ‘Handling it himself meaning asking you?’

  ‘Yelena …’

  ‘It’s a fair question. Anyway, how do you know he’s telling the truth? What if he’s hunting the girl for other reasons? He’s a foreigner. What if it’s a trap?’

  ‘Her mother’s worried. Wouldn’t your mother worry?’

  ‘My mother’s dead.’

  ‘Yelena! Enough.’

  Helping himself to what remained of Tom’s vodka, Dennisov shooed the girl towards the kitchen and reached for the photograph, examining it carefully. He seemed to be paying particular attention to the grandness of the Georgian house behind.

  ‘There’s a reward?’ he asked.

  ‘Dollars if you want.’

  Dennisov spat on the floor. ‘That for dollars.’

  ‘He’ll help you anyway.’ Yelena was back with a mug
of black coffee, which she put in front of Dennisov, removing Tom’s glass. Before Dennisov could open his mouth to protest, the girl took the photograph, peered at it intently and then placed it in front of Tom, keeping her fingers on the edge. ‘You like her?’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  ‘All the same, for you this is personal?’

  The girl’s scrutiny lasted another few seconds, then she nodded as if Tom’s silence was answer enough, lifted her fingers from the photograph’s edge and tried to smooth where it had curled. ‘I hope you find her.’

  Tom produced the address Davie had given him.

  ‘Who’s meant to live here?’ Dennisov asked.

  ‘A boy she met at the swimming pool.’

  Dennisov slid the address along the zinc to the girl.

  ‘You’re sure this is the place?’ She sounded worried.

  ‘There’s a problem?’ Tom asked.

  She shrugged. ‘As you know, there’s no crime in the USSR. If there was, this is where it would live. Even the militsiya walk in pairs.’

  ‘You don’t mind me borrowing your husband?’

  Yelena scowled. ‘I’m not his wife.’

  ‘Your man then.’

  ‘I’m his sister.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’

  ‘His wife left him when he lost his leg.’

  A dead bullfinch lay at the edge of an overpass with an illegal car lot beneath. The small bird was frozen solid, eyes closed, orange breast glazed pink by frost. Seeing Tom’s gaze, Dennisov pointed to the corpse of a sparrow.

  ‘Happens every winter,’ he said.

  The overpass was crumbling concrete with squat pillars, and the taxi that Dennisov had ordered and Tom paid for had left them in the shadow of an office block built around the same time. The car lot offered a handful of Ladas, a couple of Moskvitches and a single sleek Volga. The Moskvitches and Ladas were dented and rusting while the Volga looked new.

  Tom couldn’t help wondering what had happened to its owner.

  When he voiced that thought, Dennisov smiled. ‘Bought new, sold for a profit next day. There’s a five-year waiting list. You know that old fridge Yelena uses? I can get more for it than it would cost me to buy a new one. You know why? Because I can’t buy a new one. You know what else?’