Tom didn’t want to leave.
He wanted to stay in case Alex came back.
Sometimes it was better to stay. Sometimes that got you answers.
The night a foot patrol in Belfast decided to kick the shit out of him he’d been ordered to pull out. He’d have left next day. Instead he made himself a cast-iron cover story. The best thing was the soldiers didn’t even know they’d helped build it. He’d been in a white transit, with a ladder on top, heading up the Falls Road, and he’d put his headlights up the moment he spotted them.
Patrols hated that.
After bringing his van to a halt, they smashed his lights front and back with their rifle butts before starting on him. Two boys, barely older than fourteen, in denim jackets that stank of cigarettes, dragged him up to A&E. Tom told the triage nurse about the patrol and she wrote him down as a drunken fall.
One of the boys’ dads was outside when she was done.
He shook Tom’s hand, took him to the pub, poured a couple of pints down him, told him to keep up the good fight and introduced him to the boys. The pints mixed nicely with the painkillers the nurse had slipped into his pocket as he was leaving. They mixed so nicely he couldn’t …
‘Concentrate,’ Sveta ordered.
‘It’s the injections.’
‘Your records show orally administered analgesics.’
They were using truth drugs. He knew they were using truth drugs.
‘I think it’s sodium …’
She held up her hand before he could add pentothal.
When the light returned, she was gone and a serious-looking man in a white coat stood next to Tom’s bed, a huge syringe in his hand. Tom’s eyes widened and the man looked more serious still. When Tom tried to move, he discovered that his arms were fixed by his sides. A wide leather strap tightened his chest, and from the feel of it there was one across his stomach as well. At an order from the doctor, a nurse hurried forward and fixed a final strap across his ankles. The brass buckles that Tom could see were tarnished, the belt holes stretched.
Not like this, he thought.
His muscles strained as he tried to fight free.
‘It’s only a sedative,’ the doctor said. ‘This won’t hurt.’
He lied. A bruise blossomed where he missed Tom’s vein the first time, his fingers shaking as he stabbed at the crook of Tom’s elbow, too frightened by those waiting outside to do his job properly.
The world spun so fast people thought it stood still.
It spun in orbit around the sun. The day didn’t fade. Night didn’t fall. The angel of death that had hovered so close to Tom’s shoulder in recent years refused to come. Instead, the door opened and Comrade Vedenin entered. He glanced back once and the suited men behind him stayed where they were.
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Constrained.’
Looking at the straps, Vedenin sighed.
With an expression of quiet distaste, he began undoing the buckles and unpeeling the curling leather straps. ‘How are we ever going to take our proper place in the world if we insist on behaving like this?’ Having undone the strap across Tom’s legs, he freed his right wrist before walking round to free his left. By now the room was spinning so fast the syringe might as well have contained neat vodka.
‘You were right,’ Vedenin said. ‘Sodium pentothal. We borrowed the idea from you. More reliable than the old methods. So I’m told.’
He made himself sound ancient.
‘What do you want?’ Tom asked.
‘The truth.’
‘About what?’
‘About anything would be good.’ Pulling a chair from under a desk, he turned it round and sat splay-legged. ‘Let’s start with the obvious. Do you know where your ambassador’s daughter is?’
‘She was here. Earlier.’
‘I doubt that very much.’ Vedenin’s gaze was steady.
‘Do you know?’ Tom asked.
‘No,’ Vedenin said, ‘I don’t.’
Tom believed him.
‘Now. Did you kill my son?’
‘He drove on to the ice.’
‘So I’m told. Why did he drive on to the ice?’
‘Why does anyone do anything?’
‘Please answer the question. Did you kill my son?’
The room was hot. A strip light overhead rotated like a slowly turning ’copter blade. Tom could hear its thud coming across the hills as he clung to damp turf and hoped they’d find him without him needing to stand or wave.
Don’t leave me here.
It was all the man beside him could say.
His pleas grew weaker as the flow of blood trickled through tufts of rough grass. He was a good man, the dying man, as wife-beating racist porridge lice went. He’d simply done one tour too many, been in the army too long. Been too close to retirement to think this would happen. Fuck them all, he said.
As last words went it beat Mummy.
‘Shit,’ Vedenin said. ‘How much did that idiot give you?’
The bruise on his arm was yellow. The light above his bed was neither a single bulb on a twisted flex nor a fluorescent tube. It was hidden behind a flat recessed panel, sleek enough to belong in a New York hotel. The walls were pale green, the floor marbled. There was a long line of neatly made-up beds. Occupants: one.
‘Where am I?’
‘The KGB’s new hospital,’ Sveta said.
‘Why am I here?’
‘We don’t trust other hospitals.’
The commissar arrived later that night.
Six soldiers walked behind him. Having confirmed that Tom was still alive, and still here, he told two to guard the door, two to guard the stairs and the last two to stand guard at the hospital’s entrance.
‘Let’s see Vedenin move you now,’ he said.
He kicked at a marble tile with his heel. Complained about the waste of state money. Felt the thickness of the curtains. Sneered at the flowers in a large vase. Criticized the effeteness of the mosaic on the far wall, and asked which idiot had signed off on a black glass desk that belonged in a science-fiction film.
‘As for that …’ he said, pointing at the luminous panel overhead.
‘What about it?’ Sveta demanded.
‘Find out who designed it, so I can have him shot.’
When he saw Tom’s shoulder, he smiled. ‘Been upsetting people, I gather.’
‘Not intentionally.’
The commissar snorted. ‘How do you feel?’
‘I’ve been better.’
‘Believe me, you could be a lot worse.’
‘Don’t doubt it,’ Tom said.
The fact that he could barely feel where the crossbow’s bolt had skewered him meant he had to be on opiates of some sort. He wondered why Sir Edward was letting the Soviets look after him. Then wondered aloud if Sir Edward even knew what had happened.
‘Of course he knows,’ the commissar said. ‘Sveta called the embassy. Said she knew they’d want to help and could they tell her where Sir Edward had been the afternoon you were shot.’
He shrugged. ‘They didn’t think it was funny.’ Glancing at his granddaughter, he added, ‘I’m not sure she meant it to be funny. Now … Let’s get this over with.’
A doctor was summoned. In her hand was yet another syringe. She tapped the shaft to dislodge a bubble, squirted a thin jet of clear liquid to check the needle was full and reached for Tom’s arm.
‘This won’t hurt,’ she promised.
For once it wasn’t a lie.
‘Tell me your name,’ Sveta’s grandfather said.
‘Tom Fox.’
‘Your full name.’
‘Thomas Alan Fox.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Thirty-nine.’
‘Your file says thirty-eight.’
‘It’s probably right.’
The recessed light panel overhead was suddenly less elegant and altogether harder-edged, even blinding. If Sveta’s grandfather had shone a
lamp in Tom’s face, he’d probably have confessed to being any age the old man liked.
‘Why are you in Moscow, Major Fox?’
Tom told him about the select committee and his need to be kept out of sight.
‘What are you likely to tell them?’
‘The truth.’
The commissar laughed.
‘Now. Did you kill the boy?’
‘What was his name?’
The commissar said something and a door slammed.
Tom thought the old man had gone until he heard the scrape of chairs being pulled closer. He could smell soap and hair cream, damp wool and cigarettes. Sveta’s scent was there too, lighter, younger.
‘I’m talking about Vladimir,’ the commissar said.
‘He drove on to the ice.’
‘Why did he drive on to the ice?’
‘We took a short cut.’
‘He’s good,’ her grandfather said.
‘Told you,’ Sveta replied.
The old man did the next injection himself.
Tom wanted darkness but all they gave him was sleep. When he woke, it was to daylight and the commissar asleep in the chair. He wanted it to be Alex. Every time he woke now he wanted it to be Alex. And Tom understood that he hadn’t really been wanting darkness. If he had, he’d have found it months ago.
He was holding out for absolution.
The old man looked sour when Tom said that.
‘You think I’m not? Let me tell you about darkness,’ he said. ‘It crept across our lives like a shadow. We brought it back with us from Berlin. It’s never gone away …’
27
Vistula, Spring 1945
Knocking woke him from memories of the last days at Stalingrad, during which he had questioned a Waffen-SS officer beside the statue of the crocodile, with its ring of broken children holding hands. The Nazi was on his knees, and the commissar had a pistol to his head. ‘Where are you from?’
The man repeated his name, rank and number.
‘From the city? From the country? From a village? You look like someone who comes from a village.’
The officer glared. ‘Berlin,’ he said finally.
‘Look around you,’ the commissar told him.
Obediently, the man raised his head and stared at the ruined windows, which stared blankly back.
‘See what you’ve done? This is nothing to what we will do.’
And so it proved. The Germans brought their panzers within range of the Red Army guns before the Soviet forces even crossed the Vistula. It was insane. The commissar had begun to wonder if Hitler wanted to lose. Maybe he knew he was going to die and wanted to take his Reich with him, like some barbarian king buried with his chariots, horses and slaves.
Twenty-six months later he still didn’t regret pulling the trigger on the kneeling German. Why would he? Half a million Soviet soldiers had died to hold Stalingrad. At least that many more were wounded. Between them they killed three-quarters of a million fascists and took 91,000 prisoner. A handful of those were generals, who looked surprisingly well fed compared to the emaciated state of their troops. It wasn’t as if one Waffen-SS officer was going to be missed either way.
The knocking continued.
‘What is it?’
A girl put her head round his door and he reached for her warmth on the sheet next to him and felt foolish when she smiled in the light of the candle she was carrying. ‘I’m working,’ Maya said. Across her back was a sniper rifle, its telescopic sight firmly in place. ‘So I’d better go. But the boy thinks there’s something you should see. He didn’t dare wake you himself.’
‘Another suicide?’
But she was gone.
German women began hanging themselves before the Red Army even arrived. Those with families did it only after they’d cut the wrists of the small children, even babies. The commissar had told his men not to requisition buildings without first checking their attics, where such suicides could usually be found, in various states of decay. Things were bad enough without his men going down with fever.
When the men couldn’t find German women to rape, they raped the Ukrainians, Poles and Byelorussians they freed from Nazi slave camps. Three days was the unofficial rule. Three days of raping and looting, drunkenness and murder. After that, the mayhem was meant to stop; but drunken frontoviki with submachine guns were difficult to control and sometimes it was simply safer to allow them extra days.
‘In the stables,’ Dennisov said.
The man with him nodded. ‘We just heard, sir.’
Dennisov and Kyukov were waiting for him by the front door. They looked serious.
The stable was hot, for all that winter lingered outside.
It stank of straw and dung from a nag that the soldiers had slaughtered for food that morning, butchering the carcass and dividing the meat between the tank crews and their support troops. The animal had been stunned with a bullet to the brain and finished with a second bullet, both fired head on. The filleting of the horse had been crude, brutal and swift. The men were hungry.
The butchery inside the stable was altogether more elegant, if you could apply that word to the three family pets skinned and hung in size order by their back legs from a beam. The commissar wasn’t sure you could.
Neat, perhaps.
The scene was mockingly neat.
The flat smell of fresh blood filled Major Milov’s nostrils as he forced himself inside to examine the tableau. Whoever had butchered the family pets had trimmed their carcasses so well it was impossible to tell whether they’d been male or female without getting closer than he wanted. He’d seen his share of dead humans. Soldiers beheaded by grenades and gutted by shrapnel. Family pets, though … The commissar had considered himself inured to feelings of disgust. It seemed he was wrong.
‘Get the others.’
Dennisov would know whom to fetch.
They were the ones who’d been with him from the start. The ones who’d made it this far. The ones, although no one really dared think this, who might just make it through to the end. A month now, two months …
Then they’d be in Berlin.
‘Comrade Major?’
Turning, he found Beziki, scruff-haired, half the buttons of his stolen uniform undone, half a loaf of bread pushed inside his shirt. The kid was their mascot, picked up on whim and never put down in case he carried their luck away with him.
‘Leave,’ Major Milov said. ‘This isn’t for you.’
The boy stared at the skinned animals. ‘I’ve seen worse.’ His voice fought for bravado. ‘Much worse.’
‘Of course you have. Now leave.’
The kid saluted clumsily and didn’t even bother to shrug or twist his mouth or protest. He simply slipped out of the barn as Kyukov and Dennisov came back with the others. ‘Fuck,’ Vedenin said.
‘Take a good look.’
The commissar stepped aside so they could all see the three dogs stripped down to red maps of muscle and sinew, forelegs bound, twine threaded behind the tendons in the back legs of each.
‘This one’s alive. It’s quivering.’
Kyukov, obviously. Fearless, almost permanently drunk, quite possibly insane … Major Milov should have known he’d be the one to go close enough to discover that for himself. ‘Probably just post-death spasms,’ he said.
‘No, sir, come and look.’
Kyukov left him no choice but to go closer.
The commissar felt rather than saw Kyukov grin as he forced himself to swallow bile. Then Dennisov – too old to be a lieutenant, apparently incapable of being promoted – pushed in and Kyukov stepped back.
‘There’s something else,’ Dennisov said. ‘Fayzulin’s been found in the pigsty shot through his head.’
‘Anyone with him?’
‘The pig woman.’
The commissar didn’t have to ask what they’d been doing, well, what their dead corporal had been doing. Screams from the outbuildings behind told him others were still d
oing the same. ‘She killed him?’
‘She says not.’
‘You think she’s lying?’
‘There was a Luger hidden under the straw.’
‘Shoot her. Make an example. Shoot the old man too, burn the farmhouse.’ Major Milov looked at the animals hanging from the rafters. ‘Fetch flamethrowers. Burn this place to the ground while you’re at it.’
They left an old woman, her five-year-old grandchild and a shivering aunt, knees to her chest, arms wrapped tightly around herself, alive but dead-eyed beside the smoking ruins of the farm in which they’d lived.
‘You could have been kind,’ Maya said.
He knew what she was saying.
‘I don’t kill women.’
‘You shot the one in the pigsty.’
‘That was different. She killed a soldier.’
‘You think what will happen to them won’t be worse?’
‘It’s not as if they didn’t do it to us.’
Pulling on her leather cap, Maya buckled it tight and clambered up the tank’s side, lowering herself into the cramped compartment below. This model took five and had a radio. It still stored its fuel tanks inside though, and they all understood that a direct hit meant death. It was better that way. You wouldn’t want to live, if you were what crawled from the flames.
It was two weeks before she made peace, and then only because they’d been racing towards Breslau when the order came to wheel left, run back along the banks of the Oder and help flush out the German Seventeenth. She came to find him in the cottage he’d requisitioned, stripped herself naked despite the cold and slipped in beside him, her arms tightening around him as he reached for her.
‘You wouldn’t understand,’ she said.
He guessed she was right.
It was the last major tank battle either of them fought.
Major Milov was pulled out of the line a few days later and taken back the way he’d come to the HQ of an NKVD general fifty miles behind the lines. The general handed him an order signed by Beria himself.
The commissar had been chosen for his loyalty, his bravery in battle, because he had been one of those who defended Stalingrad and because the combination of trained tank commander and political officer had caught the eyes of Stavka. Whether that meant the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Headquarters of the Armed Forces or Stalin himself the commissar didn’t know, and didn’t dare ask. From now on, though, he was outside the military chain of command and would report to those who reported direct to Beria or to the Boss himself.
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