Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

  ‘I imagine General Dennisov will be pleased.’

  ‘Why?’ Sveta said. ‘Would you want someone bat-shit insane as your self-professed best friend? I imagine he’s terrified of the man.’

  ‘He wasn’t behind Kyukov’s release?’

  ‘Gorbachev declared an amnesty for politicals. Kyukov qualified. By the time anyone realized he’d be on the list he was gone.’

  Tom considered that.

  ‘Should you find him …’ Sveta said.

  ‘Your grandfather would like to know?’

  ‘My grandfather would like him dead.’ Sweeping up Kyukov’s file, Sveta thrust it almost angrily into her satchel, pushed back her chair and glanced instinctively at her reflection in the window before straightening her collar.

  Tom was too early for the bar to be open for lunch, and the blind was down over the door and the windows so steamy their glass looked frosted. He hammered on the door anyway. Yelena allowed herself almost a smile when she realized who it was.

  Glancing both ways along the concrete walkway, she hurried him inside and shut the door firmly behind her. ‘My brother’s out,’ she said. ‘He’ll be back soon.’

  Tom had to fight the urge to ask where he’d been.

  Dumplings boiled in a steel pan in the kitchen, the steam turning to condensation and running down the wall Tom leaned against, trying to stay out of Yelena’s way as she chopped onions and piled them into a bowl. ‘What are you making?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll decide later.’ Having finished chopping, she glanced across at him. ‘Need vodka?’

  Tom shook his head. ‘I’ve got a question.’

  ‘For me?’ she said. ‘Or for my brother?’

  ‘Three Sisters.’

  ‘Chekov? The play?’

  ‘It’s where Alex is being held.’

  Yelena’s face was unreadable. ‘Beziki told you this?’ she asked finally.

  ‘Before he shot himself.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us this before?’

  Because I was trying to work out if I could really trust you didn’t seem the right answer. Any more than I’m still not entirely sure was an acceptable rider to that thought. The problem was that he had to trust someone. The alternative was to reach a point where he wasn’t even sure that he trusted himself.

  Outside, Dennisov rattled his key in the lock and the sound of a woman shouting and a child crying on the walkway entered with him, fragments of misery that ended the moment he shut the door and headed for the kitchen.

  ‘You okay?’ Dennisov asked.

  ‘He’s asking about Three Sisters.’

  Coming to stand beside his sister, Dennisov wrapped his arm round her and hugged her tight until she leaned her head into his shoulder.

  ‘They’re rocks,’ he said.

  Yelena nodded. ‘There’s a boathouse.’

  ‘With steps down from the Cormorant’s Nest.’

  ‘There are two sets of rocks,’ Yelena said. ‘The Big Sisters and the Little Sisters. The Little Sisters are below the Cormorant’s Nest … That’s a castle in the Crimea,’ she added. ‘A little castle.’

  Dennisov nodded. ‘It used to be ours.’

  ‘What happened?’ Tom asked.

  ‘It became someone else’s.’

  ‘Beziki’s?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dennisov said. ‘Gabashville’s.’

  Letting go of his sister, he retrieved a tatty school atlas from the box room and found a double-page spread of the Crimea, peering at it closely. When he couldn’t find what he wanted, he turned to the index and then back to the spread, trying to find the coordinates.

  ‘Give it to me,’ Yelena demanded.

  Tom wasn’t even sure she looked at the page properly. But she jabbed her finger with such certainty that he went to stand by her side and peered at the jagged shoreline she indicated. There were few roads and no big ones. The colouring of the map and the tightness of the contour lines said she was pointing at cliffs.

  ‘How do I get there?’ Tom asked.

  ‘You don’t,’ Dennisov said. ‘Sebastopol’s a closed city. You’d have no chance of getting travel papers. Even if you got to Sebastopol, you’d have no way of reaching the house. Tell your embassy. Let them tell the police.’

  ‘The embassy aren’t taking my calls.’

  ‘You know …’ Yelena said.

  ‘No,’ said Dennisov. ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘They won’t let him into the Crimea alone.’

  ‘They won’t let him in at all,’ Dennisov said firmly.

  ‘So he’ll need a guide.’

  ‘Yelena …’

  ‘We’ll take the train.’

  ‘You really think anyone will sell him a ticket?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘We’ll take the train.’

  Yelena looked stubborn, Dennisov close to tears. Something unspoken passed between them and then it was her turn to put her arms round her brother, hugging him fiercely. ‘You said you’d never go back,’ he said forlornly.

  ‘I said I didn’t think I’d ever be able to. That’s different.’ She looked him. ‘You know it’s different. If I don’t go back now, I’ll know it was because I was afraid and that will be worse. Tom will pretend to be you.’

  ‘Yelena …’

  ‘I’m sad. So very sad I have to see places where I was happier. Places from when I was young. Who could deny me that?’

  Her mouth twisted at the thought.

  44

  The Train

  ‘He goes, I go … We catch the train.’

  Dennisov had lost his nerve about letting his sister take Tom to the Crimea but was losing his battle to stop her. This was a Yelena that Tom hadn’t seen before, stubborn to the point of planting her feet firmly and sticking her fists on her hips. In anyone else it would look childish.

  He doubted she’d even care.

  She’d furiously brushed aside the matter of Tom having two legs to her brother’s one, just as she’d rejected Dennisov’s insistence that he go instead of her. His final offer was that they should both go and leave Tom behind. Her counter-suggestion that Sveta go with Tom he rejected with such force that Yelena laughed.

  ‘I’m an only child,’ Tom said in the taxi heading for the station.

  ‘What makes you tell me that?’

  ‘Watching you argue with your brother.’

  ‘In my family, we’re all only children,’ Yelena said. The taxi driver glanced up at that and Tom realized he was a regular from the bar. Seeing Tom notice, the man concentrated on the road ahead.

  ‘Don’t hurt my brother,’ Yelena said.

  ‘What makes you think I’d hurt him?’

  ‘I don’t think you’d mean to.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m like that too. I don’t mean to. Well, mostly not.’ They went back to watching the traffic and Tom was grateful when the station came into view. ‘Wait here,’ she said.

  She bought two tickets for a local line, and they changed at the next station. Disappearing into the women’s lavatories, she reappeared five minutes later beautifully made-up and dressed as someone else. Her eyes when she saw him examining her were distant. Her face immobile.

  As a child she must have been beautiful.

  The stationmaster, a nervous-looking man in grey uniform, had gone inside, shut the door to his office and dropped the blinds. It seemed quite possible that he’d locked the door. The one time he’d glanced at Yelena, when they came up the steps from the underpass after changing platforms, he apologized.

  ‘Here it is,’ Yelena said.

  The train approaching the platform belonged to another age.

  It had a rocket-like nose that would have looked radical in the thirties and comfortably familiar by the fifties. A red star blazed in the middle. The green of the engine was so deep it could have been enamel. Its power unit was electric but the space behind its nose deserved a funnel. Behind it stretched carriages so dull they might have been cattle trucks. It took Tom a second to realize they were arm
oured. At least, the first five were. The sixth was varnished wood, with an observation platform, and could have been lifted from a Hollywood film about railroad tycoons. A shiny brass rail edged its observation platform. On the platform stood two snow-speckled bay trees in terracotta pots. ‘They’re replaced,’ Yelena said, ‘whenever they die.’

  ‘How often is that?’

  ‘In this weather? Every run I imagine.’

  She flipped up the brass rail, indicating that Tom should unfold steps for her. And a thin man in a dark suit, who carried a walking stick, pushed open the door of the observation car and came to block her way.

  ‘Yelena,’ he said.

  Her hand went to her mouth. ‘I just wanted to …’

  ‘Go somewhere you were happier. I know. You always were a little whore. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out what’s going on? I should have never let your mother have you.’

  Yelena’s chin came up. ‘Well, she did. After you had her.’

  ‘I believe your friend has some photographs that interest me,’ General Dennisov said. ‘I’ll deal with you later.’

  Yelena wet herself.

  The blond-haired boy had been waiting since morning, poring over a Kremlin guidebook and examining plaques dedicated to dead Soviet heroes with a fervour unlikely in anyone that young. For those to matter, you had to be old enough to remember the men they named. And he wasn’t.

  He was a thin little thing in a cheap jacket. Still, cheap leather was better than no leather and his jacket looked thick enough to keep out the cold.

  Wax Angel would have swapped, happily.

  It was his shoes that gave him away. It was always the shoes.

  They were too good for his face and his jacket, too well made and too waterproof. You had to be issued with shoes like that. The man watching him stood on the opposite edge of Red Square, too distant to do more than register the other was there. Occasionally they glanced at each other, then looked away, but neither moved. She’d shambled across to examine each. Drab clothes, good shoes.

  You’d think the KGB would have learned by now.

  She liked Red Square. It was here when the war was ended that they brought the flags of the German Wehrmacht and burned them in front of the Lenin Mausoleum. She and the man she loved watched it happen, wearing their uniforms and holding hands. People around them had smiled …

  After a while, a militsiya man moved her on from the doorway of St Basil’s, oblivious to the little drama building up around him. So now she squatted by a wall, with a neatly trimmed little silver fir to act as her windbreak. She had her wax figures laid out on a scarf in front of her.

  You weren’t allowed to sell things in Red Square.

  But then you weren’t allowed to beg either.

  The commissar had come in from his dacha again, delivered to that hideous monstrosity of a flat. He’d come in a week ago, stayed a night and gone. Now he was here again. An old fool he might be, but less so than the other old fools, and she was interested in what would keep bringing a man like him back to a city he hated, a city from which he’d exiled himself so many years before.

  It had begun with the ice boy.

  The moment she’d seen him in the snow she’d known it was a bad omen.

  So beautiful, so cold, so very dead. She could remember boys like that. Ice white. Ice white or deep red. The deep-red ones were bad. The ice-white ones were worse. There had been too many of both.

  The old fool knew soon enough that he’d been played and it was too dangerous to do anything about it. Things in the group had soured pretty quickly after that. She wondered what the drunken Englishman had on General Dennisov that he let the man live.

  Mostly she wondered whether the foreigner would tell her if she asked, whether the old fool in the stupid apartment would if she asked him instead. Perhaps he didn’t know. That would upset him, not knowing something he was afraid she already knew and was simply testing him. He’d been so upset as he knelt beside that body in Red Square she’d almost felt sorry for him.

  Who was she fooling?

  She did feel sorry for him. Old age was brutal enough without watching those you once called friends try to unravel everything you held dear. What use was power when your body grew too weak to obey orders, when those younger than you couldn’t even discern the difference between what you asked for and what you intended?

  It was different for her.

  Her body had been twisted and turned and massaged and pummelled and finally broken. She had no illusions about how fragile it was. It was the spirit that was tough, the spirit that remained when everything else was gone. She’d carved the dead boy’s face on to the angel to see him on his way.

  Tried to wrap the boy’s frozen fingers round it.

  In a world increasingly held together by fraying promises and broken memories and the glue of old glories, someone had to do their job properly. It wasn’t her fault the boy’s little finger had broken.

  As for the commissar finding her offering …

  She should have known that would complicate things.

  He’d known what the wax angel was, of course. They’d all known, the moment it appeared in the sky above Stalingrad. It was an angel. Only angels were forbidden, along with belief in anything but the state. So it became the Spirit of Russia, well, of the Soviet Union. Same thing really.

  They put up a bloody great statue, gave her a sword, took away her wings and stuck her on a hill overlooking the city they’d renamed Volgograd. Two hundred steps to reach her, to represent the two hundred days in which people died defending Stalingrad. If they were that impressed by the sacrifice, they should have kept the city’s name.

  The statue was massive, far bigger than America’s Statue of Liberty.

  Wax Angel had seen photographs. They’d made her as ugly as you’d expect.

  A tourist drifting past stopped and dropped to a crouch. He said something he couldn’t possibly expect her to understand, then shrugged and pulled a five-rouble note from his pocket, gesturing at the largest of the angels.

  He smiled when she nodded.

  The militsiya man who’d moved her on started towards them, then suddenly decided not to bother. And all the while, the two men with the good shoes watched each other and waited. When a shiny foreign car finally drew up where Resurrection Gate once stood and a soldier bundled the Englishman out of a door in the Kremlin Wall and hurried him across to a grey-haired woman, Wax Angel was grateful. She was cold, the militsiya man was staring at her again and she’d decided there was something she needed to do. Something she should have done years ago. With luck, the commissar would appreciate her gesture. Although, if he didn’t, it would hardly matter.

  She wasn’t doing it for him, not really.

  Sir Edward’s office was exactly as Tom remembered.

  The desk was still impressively huge and largely empty. The same obligatory portrait of the Queen as a young woman hung on the wall behind, and a smug little photograph of Sir Edward and Margaret Thatcher smiling for the cameras. Tom was so tired he could barely find the energy to hate it.

  He was no closer to finding Alex, no closer to bringing her home.

  What was it Sveta had said?

  The commissar thought Alex would be kept alive until she was more use dead. In his heart, Tom had begun to wonder if they’d reached that point, if she’d joined the line of children laid out on marble slabs or lost to unmarked graves.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said. Although he no longer knew to what.

  ‘You should know,’ Sir Edward said. ‘that I’ve had to make a formal apology for your behaviour to the Kremlin, and assure the Soviets you tried to leave Moscow without authority and in complete disregard for standing orders.’

  ‘You can imagine how much Sir Edward enjoyed that.’

  The ambassador glanced at Mary sharply.

  ‘I hope,’ he said, ‘that your stupidity had nothing to do with trying to find my stepdaughter.
When you had direct orders not to interfere further?’

  ‘Of course not, sir.’

  ‘I was asked,’ Mary said, ‘if I knew what might make you act like this. I told them I had no idea. Quite possibly, you were simply drunk. You’d have to be to take a Russian girl with you.’

  ‘You didn’t say he took a woman with him.’

  ‘Russian girls will do anything, sir, if they think there’s a chance of a foreigner marrying them.’ Mary stared at Tom, her eyes unforgiving. ‘Did you consider her safety? Did you think what trouble she’d be in?’

  ‘Dare I ask her age?’ Sir Edward enquired acidly.

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘I imagine it was.’ The ambassador sat back in his chair. There was something dangerous in his gaze, something so contained that Tom remembered his thought about Sir Edward knowing exactly what he was facing. This was a man holding his fury in check with a degree of self-control that was almost brutal.

  There were new lines around the ambassador’s eyes.

  He’d shaved badly that morning, missing a patch of slightly greying bristles under his jaw. The fingernails of one hand looked almost dirty. Sir Edward’s clothes were as beautifully made as ever, but he wore them with less assurance.

  Mary, on the other hand, looked immaculate. Her turnout, as always, was the smartest in the embassy. Her voice, when she spoke, was as clipped as Sir Edward’s and sounded borrowed from the 1940s. Tom wondered again how hard it must be to be black, a woman and senior in an embassy where everybody of any rank was automatically white and male.

  Very, from the flat look of contempt he was earning.

  He’d expected to be shouted at.

  God knows, he deserved their rage.

  Instead he’d been marched in by Mary Batten, who’d sat in a chair to one side and said little until Alex was mentioned. Lady Masterton was nowhere to be seen. This meeting was entirely official. Rather than shouting, Sir Edward was icily polite. That’s how furious he was. Tom could hardly blame him.

  ‘You shouldn’t believe him, sir.’ Mary said. The ambassador glanced at her. ‘That this wasn’t about Alex, sir.’