Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

  As the commissar undoubtedly knew, the responsibilities of the NKVD went far beyond simple anti-partisan operations and the apprehension of turncoats, deserters, cowards and malingerers. They included the creation of sharashkas, secret defence establishments, and the future protection of the Soviet state.

  ‘You understand?’ the NKVD man said.

  ‘Yes, Comrade General.’

  ‘We will pick you a team.’

  ‘Comrade General …’ Major Milov hesitated, but only for a second. ‘I’d like to keep my old team. I command good soldiers. We fight well, we work together and our luck has held.’

  The general flipped open a file.

  ‘Your particular friends being Maya Grossman? Vasily Gusakovsky? Pyotr Dennisov? Ilyich Vedenin, Rustam Kyukov? And Erekle Gabashville, that wretched urchin who travels with you?’

  ‘He’s our luck.’

  Sharp eyes examined him through tiny wire-framed glasses. ‘You believe he contributes to your success?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then you’d better look after him, hadn’t you? Now, Dennisov. You know his father was a tsarist?’

  ‘He doesn’t talk about his family.’

  ‘He doesn’t have a family. His mother died, his father was shot.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Does it matter? Kyukov’s the same. Same occasion.’

  ‘Kyukov and Dennisov grew up together?’

  The NKVD general sat back, looked at a file on his desk and fixed his gaze on the commissar. ‘Did you bother reading their files?’

  ‘It must have slipped my mind.’

  ‘Indeed. Well, they’ve both been useful on occasion. You’ll be able to tell me when this is over whether it’s time the state gave them a little more trust.’

  ‘May I ask what the job entails, Comrade General?’

  ‘Reaching Berlin before the Americans for a start. Oh, don’t worry. They’re bogged down in …’ He consulted a piece of paper. ‘The Ardennes. A forest in Belgium. You’ll be there long before they’re even close. But that’s what this is about. There’s a man we want in Berlin. The Americans want him too. Your job is to make sure we get him.’

  ‘A high-ranking Nazi?’

  ‘One of their best scientists.’

  He paused and after a second Major Milov realized the general was waiting to see if he would have something to say. In staying silent he seemed to have passed some sort of test. The NKVD general smiled.

  ‘Keep your team then. Although we’re going to give you an extra man. He’s there to look at the scientist’s papers, check that they’re the real thing. Only then will you make him an offer. Amnesty for all past crimes. Safety for his family. Free travel to the Soviet Union. His own lab. His choice of staff. A dacha.’

  ‘May I ask …?’

  ‘A bomb,’ the general said, scratching at the side of his nose with his pen, ‘to end all bombs. We can’t let the Americans have it. Stalin himself has told Beria to make sure we get there first. Stalin …’

  There was a baby-faced lieutenant waiting by a brand-new US lend-lease Jeep, looking deeply uncomfortable in a uniform so new Major Milov doubted it even had lice. His hair was too long and he looked too clean. When he saw the commissar, he shuffled to attention, looked as if he was wondering whether to salute, hesitated and did so anyway. Badly.

  ‘You must be …’ The commissar consulted his orders. ‘Golubtsov?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, yes, Comrade Colonel.’

  ‘I’m a major.’

  ‘I was told you were a colonel.’

  Colonel Milov skim-read the rest of his orders and it turned out the boy was right. ‘Stand straight,’ he said. ‘Let me look at you.’

  Thin face, high cheekbones, slightly sallow skin and Asiatic eyes behind thick lenses held in place by wire frames. He was slight enough to be a child and visibly trembling under the older man’s gaze.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-three, Comrade Colonel.’

  The commissar would have put him at seventeen at the most. ‘And how long have you been in uniform?’

  The boy flushed. ‘They gave me this an hour ago.’

  ‘What did you wear on the march?’

  Golubtsov looked apologetic. ‘They sent me by train.’

  ‘From Moscow?’

  The boy nodded.

  ‘All right. You drive.’

  Golubtsov was more embarrassed than ever. ‘I can’t, sir. That is, no one’s ever taught me the practicalities. I understand the theory of course.’

  ‘Of course. What can you do?’

  ‘I’m good at sums in my head. I can see shapes too.’

  ‘In your head?’

  ‘The shapes the sums make.’

  ‘Get in,’ the commissar said. ‘And shut up. You give me a headache.’

  Back at base, Dennisov, Kyukov and Maya came out to look at the Jeep and quickly switched their attention to the baby-faced lieutenant. The commissar could tell that Maya was taken with him. In a sisterly fashion, which had her hacking at his hair with a knife until he looked as unkempt as the rest of them, and stamping his cap into the slush, slapping it against a nearby wall to make it scruffy. After which, she slashed the top button from his jacket and told him to get some dirt under his nails.

  She laughed when he dropped to a crouch and took her order literally.

  ‘Someone’s son?’ she asked as soon as they were alone.

  ‘Undoubtedly …’ Colonel Milov slid the orders over and watched her read them twice, the first time quickly, second time slowly, going back over the last few lines as if puzzling something out.

  ‘No more fighting? We’re leaving the front line?’

  ‘For the moment. Do you mind?’

  ‘I thought you might.’

  He pushed across the glass of brandy he’d poured himself and looked around the farmhouse kitchen. Germany was a strange mix of the untouched and the utterly ruined. There’d been more food in the last few weeks than he could have imagined, in the countryside at least, where people could grow their own crops, kill their own animals and store grain. He’d been through towns where the inhabitants’ faces were skull-like with starvation, and the only males over seventy or under twelve.

  Would he mind being out of the war?

  Not really. It was already won.

  He didn’t doubt they’d reach Berlin first.

  There would be brutal battles on the outskirts, worse ones in the centre. But it wouldn’t be Stalingrad, where all the USSR had had in its favour was boys to sacrifice.

  ‘If they want us to capture this Nazi scientist of theirs, then he must be important.’

  ‘And the order comes from Stalin?’

  ‘Beria, at least. And I doubt he’d do anything without Stalin’s say-so. So yes, the order to hunt down this Schultz comes from the Boss. You’d rather be in the sniper division?’

  Maya hesitated.

  ‘I could say you’re too good at the job to be wasted like this, that we’ll need marksmen of your calibre to take the city.’

  ‘It would break up the group.’

  ‘Giving us Golubtsov changes things anyway.’

  ‘You won’t mind?’

  ‘Of course I’ll mind. I’ll miss you.’

  The look she gave him was so shocked the commissar realized he’d never admitted anything even close to that before.

  28

  Burying Vladimir

  Who knew so many dead men would turn up to watch Vladimir Vedenin be buried? Now, if they were burying his father, that would be different. Wax Angel could imagine the dead turning up to watch that. Although she doubted they’d be that keen to have his company.

  Not that some of the living were that keen either.

  Wax Angel pretended not to see the dead in their ragged uniforms flitting between the trees. She’d been pretending for so long she sometimes wondered why they didn’t simply give up and go home. There’d be gaps in the ground waiting for
them, mounds in fields and forests that were missing their centres. A lot of her friends and enemies, lovers and family had gone into unmarked graves. You couldn’t really bury that many properly; you’d never have time for anything else.

  Be practical, give a coffin this Christmas.

  That had been a German joke in the winter of ’44. Before the Red Army arrived to abolish Christmas for ever. She wondered how many of the old men pretending not to notice her remembered it. The commissar would.

  Men like him never forgot.

  Snow had fallen in flurries but the paths in the cemetery had been cleared overnight. Dead birds had been collected from beneath their trees and tossed into a bin near the entrance. It was always the small birds that died. Their faster metabolism meant they burned more energy, and they had shorter lives anyway. In summer she was happy to feed the birds on the rare occasions she had food to spare. In winter, never … She moved too often and starved too regularly to allow winter birds to come to depend on her. They might come back to where she’d been, find her missing and lack the strength to fly elsewhere. She had enough on her conscience already without that.

  Comrade Vedenin, Commissar Milov, Erekle Gabashville. Even General Dennisov, squat and hobbling like some poisonous gnome. At least the general’s best friend wasn’t here. With any luck Kyukov was dead. She hoped he hadn’t expected hell to welcome him.

  Even Satan had standards …

  Wax Angel watched the old men make their way to the graveside. Judging by the folds in their faces and the swept-back hair that had long since stopped being silver, she was still the youngest of them all. Most of them had been born before the century changed and were alive when Gisbert von Romberg, the Kaiser’s ambassador in Switzerland, had arranged for Lenin to be shipped through Germany to Russia in a sealed one-carriage train. One of the dumber decisions of history.

  These were the canny ones.

  Brave, wily or timid enough to survive the Stalin years.

  The son’s coffin arrived on the shoulders of six officers from the Vnutrenniye Voiska. Dressing up wild dogs didn’t make them any less wild or less canine; but she was prepared to admit they stood straight and looked smart enough to carry a box containing a dead idiot. Minister Vedenin took his place behind.

  As worthless a piece of shit as ever lived.

  Mind you, you could say that about most of them.

  The state paid for funerals and by tradition all were open to the public. Although the earliness of the hour and the suited young men with hard eyes by the cemetery entrance had been sufficient to put off the simply curious.

  General Dennisov’s drunken, one-legged son was there. As was the boy’s bastard half-sister, looking as simple as ever. Her brother was in full uniform with a rack of medals. The effect was ruined by the fact that he obviously hadn’t shaved in days. The drunk and his father exchanged glances only once, a cold wintery glare that both held and then broke in the same moment.

  The half-sister barely raised her eyes from the ground.

  It was the girl beside General Dennisov who interested Wax Angel. Blonde, stiff-faced and beautifully dressed. Western clothes by the look of them.

  It took Wax Angel a moment to recognize her.

  General Dennisov’s other daughter. The dutiful one. The one who’d been … Wax Angel looked at Vladimir’s coffin, now static on the shoulders of soldiers who stood rigidly to attention, in awe of those who watched them. Vladimir and the girl had been due to marry, Wax Angel was sure she’d heard something about that.

  The girl didn’t look broken-hearted.

  If anything, she looked relieved. Her father, however, looked furious.

  Behind Dennisov’s drunken brat, watching with much the same fury as the son watched his father, was the gangster. That was what the old men labelled Erekle Gabashville, for all that Beziki was more honest than most. He watched them all, and there was something taunting about his gaze. He was stood back, in the shelter of a leaf-stripped tree. The richness of his sable coat was an insult to the uniforms around him, just as his cigar was an insult to their solemnity.

  The old woman was impressed.

  She didn’t trust him. She wasn’t even sure she liked him. But she was impressed all the same. It took balls for him to come to this.

  The fool in the coffin would get a red star on his gravestone to mark his service. Just as the state provided a grave plot and paid for the funeral, so it provided the gravestone. With an inlaid motif if one merited it.

  A musician might get staves of music, an artist a brush and palate, a poet a quill or a pen. In one case, a famous novelist got a neatly carved typewriter. When they buried her, Wax Angel doubted they’d even know what name to put, never mind inlay her stone with ballet shoes.

  At a nod from Vedenin, the soldiers began to lower the long box.

  The man’s eyes were unreadable and Tom could barely imagine the feat of will to keep his face impassive. Tom had been so drunk, so numbed by alcohol at his own child’s funeral, that he’d almost passed for sober.

  Vedenin, however, was sober.

  His cheeks were dry.

  His oration, when it came, was measured. The man spoke as slowly and as precisely as the honour guard had marched and the coffin been lowered … His son was a young man taken early. A good Party member. A faithful servant to a state that would miss him. His military service had been exemplary, his loyalty to Soviet ideals fierce. He was too young to be taken from the world by so pointless an accident. But, as the boy’s father, Vedenin was proud of what he had achieved. As proud as he was sad at the thought of the gifts his son would never have a chance to use in the service of the state.

  Men, powerful men, for all they were old and shuffling and hunched inside their damp coats, listened intently and nodded at the appropriate places. It was hard to tell whether they agreed, disagreed wildly or were simply thinking of something else entirely.

  Their own families, their own deaths?

  Their breakfasts?

  When the words had been said and handfuls of earth thrown on the coffin, the old men turned to go, and Tom watched Vedenin absent-mindedly wipe his fingers on his trousers. On Vedenin’s lapel was a tiny gold badge with Lenin picked out in red enamel. He saw Tom looking at it and bristled, then caught his anger and swung away.

  ‘That badge …’ Tom began.

  ‘The Order of Lenin,’ Sveta said.

  Her grandfather had one too. His was also gold, not the platinum from which Dennisov said newer badges were made. If Vladimir had taken his father’s Order to give to someone else, Tom doubted it was Alex.

  So who had Vladimir given it to?

  And had that person been the one to give it to Alex?

  A token of love, probably. What else would it be at that age?

  Tom thought of the young man burned alive in the warehouse with his wrists wired behind his back, the jade ring he’d been wearing. Another token of love, if ever there was one. Military. Kept to himself. That was what the crop-haired boy outside the Khrushchevka said when Tom and Dennisov went looking. To get close to someone military, they had to trust you. Certainly to get close enough to kill.

  Vladimir had thought himself untouchable.

  Spoilt, indulged, motherless. He struck Tom as the jealous kind.

  Jealous and murderous even. What was it Mary Batten had said? That he’d accidentally reversed over his father’s chauffeur, killing him.

  An accident, obviously.

  A dead rent boy in a pool in Chelsea, when Vladimir was doing his year in London at the LSE. No suggestion that they’d known each other, equally obviously.

  Tom was beginning to think it went like this …

  Someone Vladimir liked, someone young enough not to frighten a fifteen-year-old English girl, falls in love with Alex. Alex decides to run away, being too unhappy and too swept up in her first love to be less stupid.

  Vladimir takes it badly. He takes it very badly indeed.

  Alex’s boyfriend
dies. And Alex …?

  Why was a way not found to return her?

  Except that it had been found, hadn’t it? The deserted house, the overblown muster of crack troops, Vladimir’s father’s shock when she wasn’t there. Something hadn’t simply gone wrong between the planning and execution.

  It had been sabotaged.

  The more Tom thought about it the more certain he was that he’d got that right.

  Examining the mourners, who looked as if they should be smoking cigars in their clubs, or chain-smoking in dark pubs and complaining about the state of the world, he wondered whether the man who sabotaged Alex’s return was here, whether the others knew who he was or if he was quietly gleeful at remaining hidden.

  A double bluff from Vedenin?

  That had been Tom’s first thought, once he’d got over thinking Vladimir Vedenin had been behind Alex’s abduction, which wasn’t an abduction anyway. But Vladimir’s father was destroyed. A big beast and dangerous, but hollowed out by the loss of his son.

  Beziki?

  The way he was watching the others told Tom that his being here had nothing to do with respect. Dennisov’s father? Sour-faced and eaten up by cancer, if the commissar was to be believed. Or the commissar himself, who moved serenely among the mourners as if unaware that every single other person in the graveyard was watching him, his granddaughter included?

  One of these, or someone else entirely?

  It was Beziki’s gaze Tom felt most.

  It wasn’t hard-eyed like Vedenin’s, who still couldn’t bring himself to believe that Tom had had nothing to do with his son’s death. Nor mistrustful like Sir Edward’s, who’d been staring at him on and off since he realized Tom was here.

  It was watchful.

  The gangster seemed to be wondering whether he could manage a word with Tom without having to talk to anyone else, whether he could still trust Tom if they did talk. The Georgian was heading for Tom and Sveta when he suddenly stopped and Tom realized that the commissar had appeared behind them.