‘It’s a good story,’ Anna said.
‘A true one.’
Having finished his wine, Beziki suffered Tom to pour him another glass and downed that just as fast, then he put his wine firmly aside and a flask of chacha appeared without him asking. Anna had just put her knife and fork neatly together when a massive silver dish of shashlik chicken was carried in.
‘Dear God,’ she muttered.
Beziki scooped half of it into his own bowl.
Then he produced a snapshot from his pocket and put it in front of Anna. ‘These are my boys.’ He seemed pleased that she examined the photograph carefully, before passing it to Tom.
‘Tell her,’ Beziki said, ‘that what I’m about to say is for her alone. Not you. Not her husband. If I could say it without needing you to translate, I would. Tell her I know what it is to have a child vanish. Tell her I have good connections. The kind of connections that should be able to discover who would dare do such a thing. They have discovered nothing about my child or hers.’
The fat man waited for Tom to put it into English.
‘I have no idea what her husband has been asked for. It is not my business to know. Apparently, since you don’t know, it is not yours either. He will, however, have been asked for something …’
Beziki stopped.
‘Please translate that exactly.’
Tom did.
‘What they wanted was for me to betray my friends, old comrades from the darkest days of the war. These are not people I can give up. They are not people it is safe to give up. They also asked for money. I collected double the amount requested. I intended to offer it in place of my friends. The kidnappers never made contact. They didn’t need me to tell them my decision. They already knew.’
‘So now,’ Anna said, ‘you don’t know who to trust?’
‘So now I talk to you.’
Anna ate and drank very little after that and Beziki conceded defeat and signalled to the manager that pudding should be skipped. He sat while Anna sipped coffee the consistency of silt, and stood the moment she pushed back her chair. ‘My car is at your disposal. Or a taxi is waiting if you prefer. The driver knows where to go.’
Glancing between the two men, Anna’s eyes narrowed.
‘Major Fox is staying here?’
‘It would seem so,’ Tom said.
‘Perhaps a little highly strung,’ Beziki said, after the taxi pulled away, ‘but charming. Now, this husband of hers … He tells you Alex wrote a note but can’t produce it. He admits things were difficult between them. He asks you to find her. Then he tells you to stop. Teenage stepdaughters can be tricky for some men. I imagine that’s occurred to you?’
17
Dennisov’s Bar
‘Where are your customers?’
‘I threw them out.’
‘You’re closing early?’
‘It’s late. Even cripples need sleep.’
Dennisov shook out a rag with a snap like gunshot and fragments of bread flicked over the counter he’d just cleaned. Sneering at the mess, he tossed the rag on to the zinc and reached for a vodka flask. It was empty.
‘Are you all right?’
The Russian glared at Tom. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not. And Yelena is terrified. You should know I’ve been offered a lot of money to kill you. Real money.’
‘Sterling?’
‘Dollars.’
‘Are you planning to take it?’
Grunting, Dennisov gestured around his bar, which looked shabbier than ever under the brightness of its cheap strip lighting. ‘Why would I need American money? Now, if they’d offered me a bootleg of The Clash in Victoria Park …’ He reached for a Stoli bottle, not bothering to decant the vodka first.
‘Who offered you this money?’
‘People came.’
‘Ex-service? Maybe still serving?’ When Dennisov didn’t contradict him, Tom said, ‘Perhaps you should accept.’
‘They accused me of disloyalty.’ Dennisov tapped his leg with the Stoli bottle and it rang like a cracked bell. ‘I told them to get out and come the fuck back when they could do this.’
‘Who’d accuse a one-legged veteran of disloyalty?’
‘Russia’s changing.’
‘Says who?’
‘Those who want it to stay the same. If you don’t throw scraps at the dogs, they bite you. To survive requires compromises. Gabashville’s dangerous, remember that. These people, they don’t like Gabashville. They like what you’re doing even less. If I were you I’d start worrying about why they don’t want this girl found. Whether Gabashville is really helping.’
‘You think he’s behind her kidnap?’
‘Who says it’s kidnap?’
‘You did,’ Tom said. ‘Just now. Tell me about these men.’
Dennisov shook his head. ‘I knew Gabashville when I was a child. He is an old friend of my father’s. He would stay at our house in the Crimea. He is not a nice person.’
Did that make General Dennisov Beziki’s protector? From what Tom could gather of the relationship between the two Dennisovs, anyone the general liked his son was bound to hate. ‘These men,’ Tom said, ‘did you recognize them?’
Dennisov didn’t nod but he didn’t shake his head either.
‘What do they have over you?’
Tom followed Dennisov’s gaze towards the curtain and the box room beyond where Yelena slept. ‘What do you want this time?’ Dennisov asked.
‘Besides vodka? I want to know if a tattoo of a wolf’s head wearing a cap means anything … I forgot to ask last time.’
‘What colour cap?’
‘That makes a difference?’
‘It might,’ said Dennisov. ‘And it’s probably a bear.’
‘All right. A bear’s head. What does it mean?’
‘This has to do with that girl of yours?’ Dennisov sucked his teeth. ‘Of course it has. If the cap’s blue, whoever has the tattoo probably served with the Airborne. That doesn’t look like it makes you happy.’
‘It doesn’t …’ Tom ended up telling Dennisov about going out to the university. About a call that afternoon from Davie to say he’d remembered that the Russian boy Alex liked had a wolf’s head tattoo.
‘You have no proof Kotik and the girl saw each other again.’
‘I have no proof they didn’t.’
‘You think he was the boy who died in that fire?’
Tom nodded. ‘Someone must know.’
Taking a record from a stack, Dennisov slid it from its sleeve and set his deck spinning. Music blasted from the speakers. ‘Nautilus Pompilius,’ he said. ‘We played this before battle. They tried to kill us. We tried to kill them. I liked it when life was simple.’
‘Me too,’ Tom said.
They clinked glasses.
At a shout from behind the curtain, Dennisov turned the sound down slightly, then shrugged and clicked it off. ‘My turn,’ Tom said. He pulled an LP from his bag and put it on the zinc, first wiping away scraps of food with his elbow.
Dennisov slid the record from its sleeve, holding it at an angle to check for scratches and wear. ‘This is punk?’
‘Irish folk music.’
Dennisov snorted. But as soon as Moya Brennan’s haunting voice echoed from the speakers Tom stopped regretting bringing the record and felt a shiver run down his spine, his eyes fill with unexpected tears. He turned away.
‘Your enemy’s music?’
‘And their language,’ Tom said.
‘What does it say?’
‘The obvious. In a war like this no one will stop fighting. In a war like this no one can win, everybody will lose … It’s from a poem.’
‘You’re allowed to own this?’
‘It’s very popular. Well, it was. They still play it on the radio. Of course, most English people don’t understand what it says.’
‘What a country.’
Reaching into his bag again, Tom said, ‘We also produce this.’
�
�And what’s that?’
‘A great British tradition.’
‘Selling slaves? Persecuting workers? Sucking up to America?’
‘Bacon. For sarnies.’
Pulling a pan from under a pile of plates, Tom slopped in oil already used to fry something else, flicked on the gas and lit the ring. While the oil smoked, he hacked slices from a Russian loaf the consistency of sawdust, spread it with Anchor butter and fried four rashers of bacon until almost burned.
Tipping the rashers on to the bread, he slathered Heinz ketchup over the top, sealed the sandwich and handed it to Dennisov.
‘Eat,’ Tom ordered.
Yelena came through to see what the smell was, took one look at the packet of bacon, found herself a knife and began slicing away the rinds, which she piled like worms into a saucer.
‘For the wild birds,’ her brother said.
Tom nodded.
‘I still don’t like you,’ Yelena said.
He made her a sandwich anyway.
‘My brother likes you. But then he’s a fool.’ She shrugged. ‘You’ve seen our customers. When they first come in, they mournfully try to match him glass for glass, then stagger home. Some don’t even make it that far. They never try again. You keep coming back. You keep drinking. Of course he likes you …’
‘We’ve seen the same things.’
She looked at him, surprisingly severely. ‘I hope not.’
Tom wondered which of them she thought had seen worse.
Her brother sent her back to bed two sandwiches later, the bruise on her cheek unmentioned, and Tom put the remaining bacon, butter and tomato sauce in her fridge.
‘Bribery?’ Dennisov asked.
‘Soviet butter isn’t better?’
‘We have butter?’
‘You look dreadful,’ Sir Edward said.
‘Insomnia, sir.’
‘Have you seen the embassy doctor?’
‘He suggested sleeping pills, sir. I don’t like sleeping pills. They can cost you your edge.’ Tom was amused by how hard Sir Edward had to work not to ask, ‘What edge?’
‘He’s a doctor, Fox. You should take his advice.’
‘I will if it doesn’t go, sir.’
Sir Edward nodded doubtfully.
Even after Tom arrived twenty minutes late, he got the feeling the ambassador couldn’t decide whether to be irritated or grateful that his unshaven underling had turned up for the meeting at all. Tom had spent forty-five minutes under the shower at Sad Sam trying to turn into something vaguely human. He was clean if not shiny, his suit almost uncreased. He even had a razor in his pocket in case the chance arose.
‘I’m told you want copies of Alex’s photograph?’
If nothing else, he couldn’t fault Sir Edward’s spider’s web. The other reason Tom was late was because he’d wasted time in Photographic trying to persuade a technician that turning a Vivitar enlarger over to making copies of Alex’s photograph came ahead of any other embassy business. That information had reached Sir Edward’s office before Tom did.
‘Can I ask why?’ Sir Edward said.
‘Your stepdaughter was seen in GUM.’
That wasn’t his real reason, but it would have to do. Tom’s real reason was he wanted Dennisov to try to find anybody who’d admit to seeing Alex arrive at or leave the warehouse where the body was burned.
‘Unlikely, as it turns out,’ Sir Edward said. ‘Although Anna told me that too. Unfortunately, she forgot to get the number of the militsiya officer who told her. What were you planning to do with them?’
‘The obvious, sir. Take them down there, go round the stalls and ask them to notify us if she returns. It might help if we can offer a reward.’
‘No need, Fox. The Soviets have found her.’
‘We’re talking to them now?’
‘Yes,’ Sir Edward said. ‘We’re talking to them now. Mary called London and London talked direct. Calls were made. Ground rules set. You know how it works. Alex has been traced to some kind of commune. We have that from Vedenin himself. He wanted to know if we’d like help retrieving her.’
Tom had thought that the ambassador was looking more relaxed than he’d seen him in a while. It wasn’t relaxed, he realized. It was relieved.
‘A commune, sir?’
‘More of a cult really. Didn’t know they had them here. But, as Mary says, these are the people who produced Rasputin.’
Becca’s voice was in his head before Tom could stop it, followed by the memory of discovering her dancing round the kitchen to the radio, how she’d frozen on being caught and retreated into silence as the joy went out of her, becoming the stiff, controlled little thing he remembered. Nothing as simple as a cult for Becca. Nothing so comprehensible.
‘What happens now, sir?’
‘What do you know about the …’ He looked at a sheet of paper. ‘The Vnutrenniye Voiska?’
Tom searched his memory.
‘Soviet equivalent of the French Gendarmerie Nationale,’ Sir Edward said impatiently, ‘but better armed. They deal with internal unrest. Riots. Terrorist outrages. Religious problems. Also cults, apparently. They report to the MVD, the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs.’
‘We’re involving the Internals?’
‘Yes, Fox. The Internal Troops are involved.’
From what Dennisov said, the VV kept an eye on the mullahs in the south, pretty ruthlessly from the sound of it. There’d been a Muslim riot outside Volgograd, Stalingrad as was. When the thing was done and dusted, there hadn’t been enough ringleaders left to put on a show trial. The VV kept an eye on the madder Orthodox sects, too. The ones dedicated to poverty, free love and the establishment of Christ’s Kingdom on Earth, once the Soviet Union was overthrown.
‘Isn’t that overkill, sir?’
‘Not at all. Vedenin fixes their budget or something. He’s sending an English-speaking major across to talk to us. We have a deal. The minister will give us the major as a liaison. You’ll be the major’s contact. In return, we’ll help with your gangster, if we can.’
Sir Edward sat back with a satisfied smile.
‘My what, sir?’
‘Your gangster.’ He checked the paper. ‘Erekle Gabashville. The Vnutrenniye Voiska have been after him for years. The man’s a separatist, thinks Georgia can go it alone. Georgia gave the USSR Stalin and Shevardnadze, their current foreign minister. Why the hell would they want to go it alone?’
‘How exactly do we help with Gabashville?’
‘You’re friends, aren’t you? More or less? Just tell Mary anything interesting he says and she’ll pass it through.’
18
Major Milova
The elderly Zil parked beyond the gates of the embassy had the profile of a slightly bloated shark and the chrome smile of a limousine escaped from the sixties. Tom thought the woman climbing from the front was a chauffeur until he registered the braid on her shoulders and her peaked hat. Her uniform looked new. Although Tom doubted if anything straight off the peg would come with creases quite that sharp. Her shoes were sensible, though, stretched across the instep and slightly down at the heel. They were polished to a high shine.
She stared at him doubtfully.
‘You’re late.’
‘I was shaving.’
‘Not well, from the look of it.’
Putting his hand to his ear, Tom felt a sticky patch where he’d nicked himself with the dry blade. He should have been another ten minutes late to see the ambassador and done it properly. Did he look as English to the Russian as she looked Russian to him? Not slight like a gymnast, or thickset like a shot-putter, but compact and stern, her fair hair folded into a complicated braid.
‘At the gate. What did that woman say?’
‘Mary? She said not to trust you.’
‘Good advice. We won’t be trusting you.’
Tom grinned despite himself and the woman looked offended. ‘Tom Fox,’ he said, offering his hand. Her shake was every bit as firm
as he had expected.
‘Svetlana Milova, Major.’
‘How do you do.’
‘We should go.’
‘How far is it to your office?’
‘We’re not going to my office.’
‘You’re militsiya?’
‘I’m Vnutrenniye Voiska.’
‘But you are the officer who telephoned Lady Masterton to say her daughter had been spotted shoplifting in GUM?’
‘Telephoned who?’
She lied badly and drove well.
‘Why,’ said Tom, ‘would a militsiya major tell a missing girl’s mother that her daughter had been seen in GUM if it was untrue? Hypothetically speaking.’
‘To see if the mother knew where the girl really was.’
Major Milova ran a red light and hit her horn when a truck threatened to pull out from a side street ahead. Glancing across, she checked to see whether Tom had another question, and when he didn’t, she added, ‘For example, if she dropped everything in hope of finding her daughter, you’d know she didn’t.’
At Sad Sam, the major came up with him, looking around his flat with open interest, and hovered in the bedroom doorway while Tom dragged on heavyweight jeans and a warm leather jacket. When she stepped in after him it was to straighten the trousers he’d just hung on his wardrobe door.
‘Now we should go.’
‘Is it far?’
‘Further than foreigners are usually allowed.’
Since that was sixty kilometres from Moscow it didn’t tell him much. Climbing into the car, Tom winced as Major Milova pulled out in front of a truck, which obediently braked to let her in.
‘They say you’re army,’ she said after a while.
Tom nodded, realized she was too busy negotiating the city’s outskirts to register his answer and left the reply unspoken. She knew anyway. They drove on in silence, until the roads got rougher and the fields bigger, the sky darkened and the Zil turned on to a dual carriageway with signs for Leningrad.
‘You’ve been shot?’
‘Twice,’ Tom said.
The major snorted. ‘Five times.’
She looked as if she meant it too. Her eyes were on the darkness beyond the window, and her cap was low, making an angle with her cheekbones. Tom found it impossible to guess her age. Younger than him. Her blonde braids were so neat they looked artificial.
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