Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Because we’re going to be friends. Perhaps.’

  Reaching for a plastic box, Erekle Gabashville opened it to reveal a bottle on ice, and two tiny shot glasses. He handed one to Tom, filled it to the brim, smiled and poured one for himself. ‘Chacha,’ he said. ‘Clear brandy. Stalin gave a bottle to Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta. Now, drink. Before it gets warm.’

  The alcohol went down in one.

  ‘Right,’ Gabashville said, ‘tell me about Rebecca.’

  ‘This has to do with Alex?’

  ‘Do you imagine either of us would be here otherwise?’

  ‘You have me forced into a car at knifepoint, brought to a basement in the middle of nowhere, told to strip by a man with a pistol …’

  ‘Petrovka is hardly the middle of nowhere. And it would be absurd to enter a steam room dressed. As for the pistol … sidearms are illegal for private citizens in Moscow. Since my employees have no attachment to any official body, you must be mistaken.’

  ‘I’m meant to be seeing the ambassador.’

  ‘He will do nothing. He hasn’t even reported his stepdaughter missing.’

  ‘There are diplomatic reasons.’

  ‘So his wife tells you.’

  Tom tensed and felt Beziki tense in turn.

  ‘I’ve been watching you. Well, my men have. I’d be a fool not to discover all I could first, wouldn’t I? It has to be obvious I want to talk.’ Dipping for the box, he refilled both glasses. ‘Alcohol,’ he said, ‘makes the truth more bearable.’

  ‘How do you know about Becca?’

  ‘I asked a man I know to ask a man he knew to find out everything there was to know about you. A dead daughter is what I was told. He’s a journalist. One of yours working for us. I mean the USSR, obviously. Or maybe working for you while pretending to work for us. I’m not sure even he knows.’

  ‘What does Becca have to do with Alex?’

  ‘I’m told it’s only six months since your daughter died. I imagine one reminds you of the other.’

  ‘And your interest?’

  For a moment the man looked too furious to answer. But the sudden flare of anger in his eyes was for something else. Something so dark that the fat man held it inside and examined it in the few hot seconds that passed.

  ‘Edvard’s dead,’ he said finally.

  Should Tom know who Edvard was? He made himself wait.

  ‘I have twins. Had twins. One may still be alive.’

  Beziki swept his hand across his skull, wiping sweat from his hair, and as his forehead uncreased and his jowls lifted Tom caught a glimpse of the man he’d once been: fiercer, outwardly harder, less considered.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They left my boy dead below the Kremlin Wall.’

  Opening the cooler box, Tom refilled the man’s glass, watched him drink it down and refilled it again. Then he drank one down himself.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I know. First, Rebecca.’

  Last night’s hangover already tainted the sweat rolling down Tom’s chest to gather in his navel, before dripping between his balls to splash to the floor. He could feel the next wave of alcohol flushing his veins. Eat more and drink less. It was an easy thing for a doctor to say.

  ‘Sometimes it helps to tell,’ Beziki said.

  ‘Have you told anyone?’

  ‘I’m telling you.’

  Leaning back, the thickset man settled his bulk and closed his eyes as if intending to wait him out. Tom didn’t make him wait long. He was shocked to discover that he wanted to talk. He had things to say that he couldn’t begin to say to Caro. Things he couldn’t say to the police, his friends, what passed for his colleagues. And Beziki was right. If it weren’t for Becca, he’d never have spoken to Alex in the first place. ‘We had her young,’ Tom said. ‘It was complicated.’

  ‘You married because of it?’

  ‘I was training to be a Catholic priest. “Tu es sacerdos in aeternum.”’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You’re ordained for ever. Only, not quite. I admired the car in the window, got the brochure, booked a test drive but I never took Catholicism on the road. I was twenty-two, Caro nineteen. Her mother was furious.’

  ‘And yours?’

  ‘Mine died shortly afterwards. My dad was in jail.’

  Beziki opened his eyes with the laziness of a fat cat hearing the scurrying of mice. ‘He was vor v zakone?’

  ‘He was a thief. And he was in the law. But nothing so grand. Bent copper.’

  ‘Copper?’

  ‘Military police …’

  Beziki’s nod was carefully neutral. ‘Let’s get back to your daughter. What happened?’

  ‘Her car hit a tree. She was seventeen.’ Tom no longer cared that Beziki knew. He simply wanted to tell someone the truth.

  ‘A traffic accident?’

  ‘The police wondered if she’d been drinking. I told them no way. She was too careful to drink and drive.’

  ‘Another car was involved then?’

  ‘Maybe she swerved to avoid an accident? That was one of their suggestions. There was no paint from another vehicle on the Mini we’d bought her. No skid marks to say she’d been braking when she went off the road.’

  ‘She was racing?’

  ‘The police suggested that. Perhaps, if she’d been a boy … But not Bec. She was quiet. Stubborn as hell but a nervous driver, not the racing kind. The police wondered if someone had been tailgating her, or maybe she was being chased. Did we know of any reason someone might have been chasing her?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘She was seventeen and three months. A model student. She’d had the same boyfriend since she was fifteen.’

  ‘The weather was good?’

  ‘A clear night and a full moon. The headlights were working. The tyres were good. We’d insisted the garage give us a new set. The Mini was MOTed, taxed, newly serviced and insured. The police asked if she took drugs, if she’d been acting strangely, how college had been going, if we knew of any reason she might be upset …’

  ‘And the answers?’

  ‘Her marks were great. She occasionally quarrelled with her boyfriend but it was never serious. She didn’t seem any different. She certainly didn’t seem upset.’

  ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘I know what happened. She killed herself.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Tom chewed at his lip. ‘I’ve asked myself over and over. The answer is … I don’t know. But she put her Mini into a tree at eighty miles an hour on a straight dry road. She died instantly. So the police were careful to tell us.’

  ‘What aren’t you saying?’

  They’d got to the bit Caro didn’t know.

  Taking a deep breath, Tom said, ‘We’d already told the police she barely drank and said dope made people stupid, but they had to be certain. My father-in-law arranged for a pathologist he knew to do the autopsy. His report …’ Tom paused, then kept going. Safer that way. ‘His report was to the point. It consisted mostly of a list of broken bones and ruptured organs. Like the police, he said that she died instantly. Unlike with the police, we believed him. There was no alcohol in her blood. No drugs. Nothing to suggest an aneurism. Her blood count was down, her haemoglobin low. A few other clues suggested she’d been tired at the time … So the coroner recorded his opinion that she’d dozed off at the wheel and only woken at the very end.’

  ‘You don’t believe him?’

  ‘Becca was three months’ pregnant. That was what was left out of the report my wife was given. I thanked the pathologist for his discretion, went straight round to Bec’s boyfriend and put him through a wall. When his dad tried to stop me, I punched him out. With his mum screaming that I’d got it wrong, I dragged the little shit into the garden and began hurting him. By the time the police arrived he’d pissed himself. It took three coppers to pull m
e off.’

  ‘How old was this boy?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  ‘Old enough. You have friends in the police?’

  ‘My father-in-law does. The family agreed not to press charges in return for a promise I’d never go near them again … Wounded in Northern Ireland. Back on leave from Belfast. Hush-hush work. Distraught at the tragic death of his daughter. The police suggested they let the matter drop. My marriage was in ruins by then. Charlie off to boarding school. My wife decided it was the best place for him. I moved into a hotel a week later.’

  ‘So you’re divorced?’

  ‘Temporary separation while we see how it goes.’

  Beziki opened one eye. ‘And how is it going?’

  ‘As badly as you’d expect.’

  ‘In Russia, your daughter would have had an abortion.’

  ‘In the UK too. We’d have stood by her. We’d have been unhappy about it. Furious even. But we’d have stood by her.’

  ‘And the boy … Would his family have helped?’

  ‘He wrote to me. He wanted me to know he’d told the truth. He never slept with Becs. As far as he knew she’d never slept with anyone. He was sorry she was dead. He’d loved her. He always would.’

  ‘Who was the father?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I sorted through her record collection afterwards. Caro couldn’t bring herself to do it. “All Cried Out”, “Tainted Love”, “King of Pain”. It was as if Bec wanted to tell us something.’ Tom shook his head.

  There was no as if about it.

  Reaching for the cooler box, he refilled his glass and tossed it back. Chacha burned his throat. A burn to match the sting in his eyes. It was true that he had no idea who the father was, no idea what had happened in the last six months of his daughter’s life. Since Becca’s death, he’d come to wonder if he’d known her at all.

  ‘My wife died young,’ Beziki said.

  ‘And left you with two boys?’

  ‘You know how precious boys are.’

  ‘Bec was precious.’

  ‘Girls are different.’

  Tom couldn’t argue with that. Bec was very different. He’d seen no trace of himself when he looked at her, and precious little of her mother. Bec was bright, studious, stubborn. She’d intended to go to Oxford. She’d found herself work in a greengrocer’s for the holidays. When Caro said shop work was vulgar, Tom pointed out Bec could be pulling pints in the village pub.

  That hadn’t helped Bec’s case.

  ‘You’re remembering her?’

  ‘Yes. She was very beautiful. Very clever.’

  Beziki sighed. ‘Edvard was very beautiful. Not so clever.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’ Tom asked. ‘Why am I really here?’

  Erekle Gabashville leaned forward and settled his bulk like one of those huge Japanese sumo wrestlers preparing for a bout, his weight balanced, his hands over the eight-pointed stars on his knees. ‘There was a letter.’

  He held up his hand to halt Tom’s question.

  ‘After the boys were taken … It should not have been possible to take them. I want to say that. They were at my dacha. There were guards. The guards died.’ He shrugged. ‘Just as well. I would have had to kill them otherwise. They were good men and I would have disliked that.’

  Beziki dragged his thoughts back to the letter.

  ‘Russians don’t trust Georgians but we’re useful and Stalin trusted us, obviously enough, which is maybe why others don’t now. As a boy, I found a rifle and shot Germans. The partisans could have killed me but they made me their mascot instead. Later, the Red Army gave me a uniform and a family. We were young. Very young. We drank, we shared German women, we stood in Berlin’s ruins and took photographs. We did good things, bad things. Bonds like that bind you. I’ll show you the photographs one day.’

  ‘This has to do with the letter?’

  The man nodded heavily. ‘It demanded money for the return of my sons, a huge amount in American dollars. If that was all, I’d have paid. Maybe made them wait a little while I tried to find out who had the balls for this. Although the fact they dared should have been warning enough. It wasn’t about dollars though. They also wanted information, information they had already, they said. Sending it would merely confirm what they knew.’

  ‘You didn’t send them the information?’

  ‘I said I needed a week to think about it. Their answer was to leave Edvard naked below the Kremlin Wall. He was frozen like ice.’

  ‘It was that cold?’

  ‘No. I have men asking questions in factory units and food-processing plants all over Moscow. Anywhere with industrial freezers. No one’s seen or heard anything suspicious.’

  ‘You’ve sent the information since?’

  ‘How can I?’ Beziki said. ‘It risks betraying my oldest friends.’

  ‘How long do you have to comply?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s what worries me. Since Edvard died, I haven’t heard a word. No contact. No notes left. I have the dollars ready. Twice the amount they asked for, in case that’s enough. And nowhere to send it.’

  ‘You intend to kill them, of course?’

  ‘I would say yes. However, I ask myself, who would dare do this? And I don’t like any of the answers. So I ask myself what was being said when his body was left by the Kremlin and I like that answer even less. It was a warning, obviously. I’m just not sure it was a warning for me.’

  ‘For who then?’

  ‘Those inside? Except who else has the power to do this? No one outside the Presidium, the high command, would dare.’ Beziki shook his head. ‘That worries me. What do you know of Andropov?’

  ‘Little enough.’

  ‘KGB. He died after a year. Chernenko. Also KGB. He lasted a year too. Give Gorbachev a year and he’ll probably be gone, nothing more than another plaque on a wall TASS can’t be bothered to report properly.’

  ‘You’re saying Andropov and Chernenko were killed?’

  ‘Would it matter?’ Beziki touched his forehead, his heart and his balls in a weird parody of crossing himself. ‘They were dead here already.’

  15

  Drunk Again

  He was very drunk when she found him. Drunker than most foreigners manage, lacking the liver, determination and soul of the average Russian. Drunk enough to be a Muscovite. And found wasn’t really the word. She’d been waiting for him on a bench in a little park on the corner. She was Wax Angel, carver of the guardians. It was her job to keep an eye on what was going on.

  She put being in the right place to see him abducted down to having once been in such a wrong place – and at such a wrong time – that God had spent most days since making it up to her. As for finding the man now …

  If he went in that door, he’d come out the other.

  She knew he would. Even men like Erekle Gabashville didn’t abduct victims in broad daylight if they later intended to dump their bodies … Now, the KGB, they’d have no trouble with that at all. Wax Angel shivered with more than cold and gripped the edge of her bench. There’d been two office workers sitting here, collars up and heads down, smoking their cigarettes and reading books when she arrived. But they’d been kind enough to let her have the seat to herself.

  She liked this park and she liked this bench.

  She’d seen the Boss himself sitting here one Saturday, about ten years after he died. Few others seemed to notice. Although the black cat from the cafe on the corner had refused to come when she called. She’d wondered since what Stalin was doing back in Moscow and decided hell must have been having an open day.

  ‘So there you are,’ she said.

  The Englishman stared at her, owl-eyed.

  ‘No,’ she said, when he dug his hand into his pocket for change.

  He looked even more puzzled. He wasn’t safe to be let out in daylight really, never mind after dark.

  Her husband had been like this for a while, in the bad years. So drunk he didn’t know what to do with him
self. It had been a clever move. Better to be a drunk than to be suspected of being a conspirator or traitor. Alcohol had never worked for her. The insides of her head were messy enough already without making them worse.

  ‘This way,’ she said.

  He tried to free himself when she took his arm.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘You need to come over here.’

  She led him down a slippery path to where bushes behind low metal railings wore snow like torn blankets, more holes than warmth.

  Wax Angel knew how they felt.

  ‘Careful now …’

  When he missed his step, she decided that was far enough.

  Since, conveniently, he was now on his hands and knees, she walked round to his side and booted him lightly in the stomach. He vomited so fluently that snow melted, the grass beneath steaming like a spa bath.

  The sight of it made him throw up again.

  ‘Well done,’ Wax Angel said.

  She watched him struggle to his feet and helped him the last of the way.

  ‘Now … you’d better get yourself home.’

  ‘Embassy,’ he said. ‘Taxi.’

  Wax Angel looked at him doubtfully. He was sweating alcohol, his knees were sodden from the snow and he had the shakes. She wouldn’t trust him not to throw up in her taxi, and she didn’t have a taxi.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said.

  Tom’s cab to the embassy wasn’t actually a cab. It was an old and rotting mustard-yellow half-truck, stinking of the onions its owner had been unloading when Wax Angel led Tom into the car park. There was a queue in front of an empty stall, so word must have got out. That was one of Moscow’s basic laws. If you see a queue, join it. If you don’t want what’s being sold, someone will.

  The stallholder told Wax Angel to join the line.

  ‘He needs a lift into town.’

  ‘Tell him to take the metro like everyone else.’

  ‘He’s a foreigner.’

  ‘Dollars or roubles?’

  ‘Which would you like?’ She hoped the Englishman had dollars. But he was foreign. All foreigners had hard currency of some sort.

  ‘I’ll just dump these.’ Hefting his sack, he headed for his stall, dropping the sack at the feet of a woman.