Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Wax Angel had said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘You must be freezing.’

  ‘This is nothing,’ Wax Angel said. ‘This is practically summer.’

  ‘Here.’ Digging into her jeans pocket, the woman had found a rouble. ‘Buy yourself something hot. You’ll buy food, right?’

  She meant food rather than vodka.

  Wax Angel was impressed that she left that part unsaid.

  After the coroner’s office took the body, the militsiya man abandoned his post without sealing the ruin, or even putting tape across its door. How could Wax Angel not go to investigate? She found the burned-out building to her liking. There was something familiar, almost comfortable about its ruin.

  Even better was a smouldering pile in one corner, with enough embers at the bottom to restart the fire once the rubble smothering it was dragged away.

  Wax Angel spent a happy hour feeding the growing flames with every unburned scrap of wood she could find and then settled back to enjoy the warmth while snowflakes fluttered down in the sections of the warehouse where the roof had fallen away.

  She could remember real blizzards, God wiping the face of the earth until everything was white.

  She’d been younger then, of course. Much younger than the girl who’d given her money … And it was a long, long way from here. She’d been a campaign wife, but with a difference. Other ‘campaign wives’ were clerks or signallers. She was a sniper in her own right, dozens of kills to her record, her photograph in the army newspaper.

  He was different too.

  A political officer with actual battle experience.

  He wasn’t one of those red-badged fools who screamed through a megaphone from the rear that everyone had to advance, that the Motherland was counting on them. He expected everyone to advance, right enough; he expected them to die. He just found that the walking dead fought better if talked to properly.

  Not softly but firmly.

  He’d been matter-of-fact about shooting anyone who tried to retreat.

  It was the woman by the road Wax Angel remembered most.

  They were beyond Breslau, with snow piled high against the hedges and a vicious wind ripping across the German fields and through the ruins of farmhouses destroyed in battle or burned by their owners before fleeing. She was young, the woman by the road. Her hair, in a thick blonde plait, was covered by a scarf too expensive to be any use against the cold. When Wax Angel found her she had her back to a hedge. Her skin was marble and her flesh as hard.

  The baby at her frozen breast had died of cold, not hunger.

  The men – heroes all – said what you’d expect.

  All the houses were huge, palaces that turned out to belong to doctors and lawyers. Everyone had fridges. Most people had cars. More cars than anyone could imagine. At first their letters home were censored. Then they were burned in front of them. Finally, they’d been told that writing home would be forbidden if they kept exaggerating what they saw.

  There’d been another nursing mother after Breslau.

  Young and clear-skinned. Very German.

  That had been later, after they’d won another battle.

  The girl had been dragged into a church and raped throughout the day, the same men coming back hours later to take another turn. In the end, her grandfather had gone in tears to Wax Angel’s political officer. He’d begged him to make them stop; not for good, he knew that wouldn’t happen. Simply for long enough to let his granddaughter feed her child, which was hungry and wouldn’t stop crying.

  Wax Angel shot the girls she saw after that.

  The pretty ones first.

  Such things happened because of Stalingrad.

  Life expectancy for a new conscript was a day. Three days for a seasoned officer. Half a day for a junior lieutenant. She’d survived Stalingrad’s full seven and a half months. The lifespans of over two hundred men.

  12

  A Knock on the Door

  For Soviet citizens, a knock on the door at four in the morning traditionally indicates trouble for whoever quivers behind it, wondering whether to answer. But a knock on the door of an apartment in a block given over to foreigners? Tom took a Tokarev from his bedside cabinet, jacked the slide noisily enough for whoever was outside to hear and kept to one side as he undid the bolt.

  As the door swung open, he grabbed the figure outside and hauled it into the apartment. Flicking on the overhead light, he found Anna Masterton glaring at him. Releasing the Tokarev’s clip, Tom dropped it out and would have put it in his dressing-gown pocket if he hadn’t suddenly realized he was naked. Squeezing the trigger, he supported the hammer with his thumb while it fell into place. He put the sidearm on the table beside the telephone, which began glowing red.

  ‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

  ‘Why are you naked?’

  ‘Anna, why are you here?’

  ‘You’re having an anxiety dream.’

  The knock came a few minutes after Tom woke, as he stood in the flat’s tiny kitchen, boiling a kettle and staring at empty Carlsberg cans, filthy coffee cups and a slick of Vesta curry dried to a crust across the only unchipped plate in the place.

  ‘At least this time I’m wearing a dressing gown.’

  Anna Masterton’s glance was wary.

  ‘I wanted to thank you,’ she said, ‘for letting me know the body was definitely not Alex. Your note said male, early twenties. Do I ask how you found out?’

  ‘A militsiya major from the investigator’s office south of the river on Novokuznetskaya Street lives locally and we drink in the same bar. I bought him a flask of vodka and he told me what I wanted to know.’

  ‘You make it sound so obvious.’

  There was more, facts that Tom hadn’t put in his note.

  The boy’s hands had been bound so tightly that his wrist fractured. Also, wounds exposing body fat burn at a different rate. In the coroner’s opinion the boy had been castrated. Given that his genitals had been cut away and his wrists bound tightly enough to crack bone, the balance of probability was that he’d been burned alive … Further tests could have proved that. But resources were tight, the department overworked and no one knew who he was anyway.

  ‘That’s the official version,’ Tom had said.

  The militsiya major had stared at him, shocked.

  ‘That’s the truth,’ he insisted.

  ‘The Moscow prosecutor cares so little about crime victims that he doesn’t even investigate arson, torture and murder?’

  The major hesitated. ‘That building was used by deviants. Homosexuals,’ he added, in case Tom hadn’t understood his meaning. ‘I talked to the case officer, who objected to the prosecutor’s decision. It was suggested that his department has more pressing priorities.’

  ‘Who would suggest such a thing?’

  ‘The KGB,’ said Dennisov, abandoning all pretence of not listening. The militsiya major didn’t agree, but then he didn’t deny it either. He simply finished his vodka, thanked Tom for the flask and cut his evening short.

  ‘Lose me customers,’ Dennisov said, ‘why don’t you.’

  Yelena sighed.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’ Anna said.

  ‘Is your entourage downstairs?’

  ‘They let me out of my cage now and then.’

  ‘All alone?’

  ‘Moscow’s one of the safest cities in the world.’

  ‘Provided you’re not Russian. Then I imagine it’s different.’

  ‘Soviet,’ Anna Masterton corrected. ‘Provided you’re not Soviet. Even then it’s safer than London. Far safer than New York.’

  ‘If you believe their crime figures.’

  ‘Do you believe ours?’

  ‘Lady Masterton. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Anna, for God’s sake. I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘About Alex?’ Tom asked.

  Obviously, her expression said. What else?

  ‘You’d better come in
then.’

  ‘Hallelujah … It’s smaller than I expected,’ she said, looking around.

  ‘There’s only one of me.’

  ‘So your family aren’t …?’ Something in Tom’s expression killed the rest of her question. In daylight, without full make-up, she looked older, more tired. There were lines beside her mouth, dark rings around her eyes. ‘My jewellery’s gone.’

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Your jewellery box was locked?’

  ‘I keep the key in a Wedgwood pot on my dressing table.’ She caught Tom’s glance. ‘Yes, I know. But it’s a bloody embassy, for God’s sake. And what does a girl of fifteen need pearls for?’

  ‘To sell.’ Tom listed the reasons Alex might want money.

  Drugs, drink, an abortion, blackmail, greed, a very long stay, somewhere very far away … Anna wasn’t keen on any of them. He was in the kitchen, putting two slices of black bread into his toaster, turning them round and grilling them again by the time she reached the end of her reasons why he was wrong.

  ‘Have you told Sir Edward?’

  ‘I daren’t.’

  Nothing as strange as other people’s marriages. Nothing as strange as his, come to that. Tom decided to pass on asking why. If Anna wanted to tell him, she would.

  ‘I’m going to eat,’ he said. ‘Then take a shower. You sticking around long enough for that?’ He hadn’t meant it as a challenge but her look told him she took it as one. When he got back, she’d done the washing up.

  ‘In here,’ she called. She was in his living room, flicking through a week-old copy of Time. ‘Vesta curry?’ she said.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Even students don’t eat Vesta curry.’

  ‘I don’t like Pot Noodles.’

  ‘My daughter does …’

  ‘Does your husband at least know you’re here?’

  Her gaze sharpened. ‘Have you any idea how that sounds?’

  ‘I’d have thought it was an obvious question.’

  ‘Which,’ she said flatly, ‘says more about you than the question.’

  She’s probably right about that, Tom thought. ‘Unreconstructed’ was the word his daughter had used. Reaching into her bag, Anna Masterton pulled out a pack of B&H and flipped the lid.

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  Tom gave her the cactus saucer as an ashtray.

  Then he picked up something else he’d inherited from the previous occupant and shook the child’s toy, hearing tiny beads rattle inside a tatty plastic case as they cleared its grey screen. Twisting the wheels at the bottom of the Etch A Sketch, he wrote: You realize this place is bugged?

  She nodded.

  So they know you’re here.

  ‘I was followed. Obviously they know I’m here.’

  You want them to know?

  ‘My daughter is missing,’ Anna said. Her matter-of-factness contradicted the hurt in her eyes. ‘She’s fifteen. Sixteen next week. Adrift in a strange city. I want her back. I will do anything to get her back.’

  ‘Did I tell you I tracked down David?’

  ‘Why the hell didn’t you say?’

  ‘That’s how I got the party address. The boy himself is a dead end. Canadian, not American, and their friendship is strictly platonic. He hasn’t seen her since before New Year. He has no idea where she is now. I’m sorry. This must be really hard.’

  For a moment, he thought she’d slap him.

  She had agate eyes, he noticed. Tiny speckles like flaws in stone caught the winter light. Her daughter had those eyes too.

  ‘It’s unbearable,’ she said finally. ‘If this was London, we’d have called the Met. We’d be getting hourly updates. Edward has friends at the Yard.’

  The man probably had friends everywhere.

  ‘I know you don’t like him.’

  ‘He’s the ambassador. It doesn’t matter whether I like him.’

  Anna sighed. ‘Do you mind if I make coffee?’

  ‘I’ll make it,’ Tom said.

  ‘I’ll help.’ Pushing herself out of her chair, she headed for the kitchen. Tom followed, stopping in the doorway while she filled the kettle, found his jar of Maxwell House, rinsed a soapy cup and left the tap running …

  Tom’s hovering in the doorway had more to do with the extreme smallness of his kitchen than any wish to let Anna do the work.

  Gesturing him in, she stepped so close he could feel her body heat and smell Dior and something altogether more animal beneath. For a second, possibilities flared and then died as she stepped back a little, looking rueful.

  Whatever might have happened didn’t.

  Leaning across her, Tom turned off the kettle, which had long since stopped being able to turn itself off, spooned instant coffee into the mugs and poured on boiling water. When he stood back, Anna reached round to turn off the tap.

  ‘Sir Edward’s not losing sleep over this?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t know.’ Looking suddenly embarrassed, she fell silent.

  ‘You have separate beds?’

  ‘Rooms,’ she said. ‘We have separate rooms.’

  ‘This is recent?’

  Her glare asked what business that was of his, and Tom had no real answer. Except that something about Sir Edward’s reaction to Alex’s absence worried him. The man was too controlled, too buttoned down.

  ‘Yes,’ Anna said tightly. ‘This is recent.’

  He almost asked how long things had been like that and caught himself in time. If he had to put money on it, he’d guess since Borodino. Since Anna returned to find her daughter missing. ‘Would you like a biscuit?’

  When she shrugged, he opened a Tupperware box and took out a half-empty packet of Hobnobs, not bothering with a plate. ‘I thought you meant Russian biscuits,’ Anna said, helping herself.

  ‘Do you know if the KGB are already searching?’

  Looking up, Anna opened her mouth …

  ‘I mean,’ Tom said, ‘I know Alex is embassy. But the Soviets must realize she’s missing. And she’s foreign. So that makes it a KGB matter, doesn’t it? Even if she ran off with a Russian boy, they’re hardly going to leave something like this to the local police. I imagine they’re looking already.’

  ‘Without us having …?’

  ‘Not officially, obviously. But I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  Fetching the Etch A Sketch, Anna turned its plastic knobs to and fro. Please tell me you mean that. Her writing was shaky. Everyone’s writing is shaky on an Etch A Sketch. Hers was shakier than most.

  ‘You should probably see these.’

  Tom pulled the three books from his briefcase, handing her Kisses for Mayakovsky first. Opening the tatty paperback, Anna found her daughter had written her name in precise and tiny letters. She’d been equally neat in the Complete Voznesensky and the Yevtushenko.

  ‘I didn’t even know Alex liked poetry.’

  Taking out a plastic disk, Tom slotted it into the Amstrad.

  ‘She writes the stuff.’

  He waited for software to load and green lettering to appear on the television-like screen. Drive A: 163k used. 10k free. Six files. Choosing the first of them he waited for the file to open and one of Alex’s poems to appear.

  ‘A Room With No View’ was as overblown as its title.

  Alex’s bedroom at the embassy, her life and her family were all prisons. The view south to Gorky Park was no view. Her window, like her life, simply opened on to places she couldn’t go. When Tom looked up, Anna was crying. Silent tears dripped on to the cheap keyboard. He felt ashamed for dismissing Alex’s feelings so glibly. Without a word, he found the brandy he’d brought from Dennisov’s and topped up her coffee. After a moment’s thought, he topped up his own.

  ‘Now this one,’ he said.

  ‘Do Not Talk with Strangers’ was less indulgent.

  The poem’s setting was a wooden bench outside the swimming pool opposite the Pushkin. The voices were those of a boy and
a girl separated by race, language, religion and politics. Different in every way except for looking at the world through the same eyes. They fell in love while waiting for a cat. They’d been waiting for the cat their entire lives. The cat never appeared.

  ‘You don’t think that’s David?’

  ‘Canadians are hardly different in every way. How interested is she in …’

  ‘Boys?’ asked Anna, before he could put another word to it.

  Tom watched her take a large mouthful of coffee, then another. She winced at the heat, or maybe the strength of the Georgian brandy.

  ‘Obviously more interested than I imagined. You’ve read them all?’

  ‘There’s only one more.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘If you insist.’

  Alex’s last poem was religious.

  ‘Born Anew’ spoke of life and death and unity. Of sensing the sinews under the skin of her lover as he hovered in the dark above her, her own nerves lit by lightning.

  ‘Thank God,’ Anna said.

  It was hardly the reaction Tom expected.

  ‘Come on. No one who’s actually had sex could write that.’

  Sex, underage or not, wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to a missing girl in Moscow. Maybe it was the mention in Alex’s poem of a cat that never appeared, but Tom couldn’t help remembering the brutalized animal hung above the sink in the kitchen where they’d just made coffee.

  He decided not to mention that.

  One of the badges was Komsomol, these days little more than the Soviet version of the Scouts; one had been issued the previous year to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the USSR’s Second World War victory. It was the Lenin badge that made Dennisov pause.

  Tom had seen dozens like it. At least he thought he had.

  ‘What’s different about this one?’

  Dennisov glanced around.

  A dozen men swayed and sweated in the warm fug of his bar. The floor was slippery from melted snow and the windows steamy enough to reduce Tom’s shadow to a shivering memory. Having checked that everyone who needed vodka had it, Dennisov poured Tom a large shot, poured himself an even larger one and dragged Tom through the wall of records to the kitchen.