Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

  ‘Hello, Maya,’ he said.

  ‘Hello Comrade Commissar.’

  Stepping forward, he swept her up in an embrace that seemed fierce for his age. He smelled as he’d always smelled, of sweat and soap and cigarettes. The dressing gown smelled as she remembered too, of mothballs that had done too little to keep the moths at bay if the state of his collar was anything to go by.

  ‘You look like you,’ he said.

  ‘About time,’ she said.

  Behind him stood her granddaughter, wide-eyed and fully grown, Dennisov’s drunken brat at her side. When Sveta put her hand to her mouth, the young man wrapped his arm tightly round her shoulders.

  ‘Remember me?’ Wax Angel asked.

  Sveta burst into tears.

  Wax Angel sighed. She should have realized the girl might be shocked.

  ‘The commissar picked Lenin up and dumped him on a grenade. Your grandfather’s first and last romantic gesture. The blast cracked most of his ribs, put a hole through a rotten floor too. Just as well. If the floor had been concrete, he’d be dead. Daft bastard.’ Turning to the guard, Wax Angel said, ‘You can go.’

  The young man went without checking with the marshal first.

  To Sveta, Wax Angel said, ‘Come on then. Let’s have a proper look at you.’

  Sveta glanced at Dennisov, who nodded her forward.

  ‘A major, eh? Better than I managed.’ The ragged woman walked slowly round Sveta and nodded approvingly. ‘Good profile. Good posture. Good boots.’

  ‘As for him …’ She took a long hard look at Dennisov, in particular his rusting leg. ‘Stands straight for a cripple, meets your eye. He’ll do, if you must. Your grandfather was a slouch too. Except on parade. On parade no one’s a slouch.’

  ‘Maya, what are you doing here?’

  ‘I could ask the same.’

  ‘I live here.’

  The ragged woman glanced at his waterfall of greying hair and snorted. ‘Call this living? Some day you’ll have to tell me if the House of Lions is a mausoleum or a zoo. Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

  ‘I’m on my way to the Hotel National.’

  ‘Planning to set up a provisional government?’

  For a moment she thought he was going to say that her remark was in bad taste. She was glad he didn’t; that would have made her cross. She imagined that setting up governments, provisional or otherwise, had been on his mind a lot lately.

  Instead he said, ‘An Englishwoman wants to see me.’

  ‘So do I. And I’ve brought you a present.’

  She tossed what looked like a lump of rancid jerky at his feet. From the shock on the commissar’s face, you’d think he’d never seen anyone castrated.

  ‘Vedenin?’ he said.

  ‘Should have done it years ago.’

  It was surprising how much better one could feel after killing the bastard who bedded your underage daughter. Sveta’s mother had been beautiful and fragile and too innocent not to trust the man who ruined her. Too fragile not to take her own life.

  ‘Maya …’

  ‘You know I should have done it years ago.’

  He wasn’t bad for his age, the commissar. Slightly too impressed with himself, but men always were. At least he wasn’t fat like Vedenin. Fat people bleed so badly. Vedenin had bled like a pig as she peeled the fat from his body.

  Squealed like one, too.

  ‘We talked a little about the old days,’ Wax Angel said. ‘About his habits. About who might have been leaving bodies around Moscow. And then I asked him what was really going on. We got to the English girl eventually. You know who has her now?’

  She looked her husband in the eye, smiled grudgingly.

  ‘Yes, I thought you might.’

  49

  An Ordinary Train

  Tom watched the KGB officer’s gaze slide over him, barely taking in his turned-up collar and pulled-down cap. Half the passengers were dressed in similar fashion. The choice was suffer the cold in this carriage or swelter in the one behind, which had heating enough for the entire train. The young man who’d followed Tom from the Hotel National opened his mouth to object, shut it again and let the officer lead him from the Moscow–Volgograd express at the first station outside the city.

  ‘Black market,’ someone muttered.

  ‘Roubles for dollars.’

  They looked out at Tom’s shadow protesting loudly on the platform that he needed to be let back on to the train and watched him grow flustered when the doors were slammed and the diesel growled back into life.

  As the train pulled away, Tom looked around, wondering who was watching him now. Someone would be. Unless General Dennisov was simply relying on Tom to deliver himself. That was always possible. As before, he was travelling without proper papers. Once again, he was headed for a city about which he knew almost nothing. There the similarity ended.

  This train couldn’t be more different. Yelena’s had been luxurious, a gilded relic of an imperial mindset. This one couldn’t have been more utilitarian. It rattled and stank, and the windows let in the cold and squeaked so badly that Tom wanted to find a screwdriver and tighten the screws himself because he wasn’t sure he could stand another twenty hours of this.

  After a while, he pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and kept it angled to the window in case the fat woman next to him woke and wondered why her neighbour was reading something foreign.

  No mention was made of the Tsaritsyn Monastery in any of the guidebooks for sale in the foyer of Caro’s hotel. But Tom had a photocopy of an entry from the old Guide to the Russian Empire that Mary Batten had lifted for him from the embassy library.

  Published three months before the Great War began, it said little about the monastery except that it was remote, rarely visited by tourists, and while a boat trip on the Volga was well worth the effort, Tsaritsyn Monastery itself had little architectural merit, certainly not enough to balance the inconvenience of two days’ travel along rough cart tracks through unkempt forest.

  A note in the margin, handwritten by someone taught letters in the old fashion, by endless repetition between ruled lines, agreed and disagreed.

  The monastery itself was nothing, crude even by provincial standards.

  But its medieval rood screen, originally from Kiev and presented by the local governor fifty years before, was a work of art, if not by Andrei Rublev, at the very least by a direct disciple.

  When Tom next looked at his watch, four hours had gone by and most of the others had joined the woman next to him in dozing. Only an old woman and a whining child seemed resolutely awake. Tom noticed that though she gave the boy regular cups of tea from a tatty Komsomol thermos, and slices of bread and sausage, she drank and ate almost nothing herself and looked anxious when she saw Tom notice. He nodded, and after a moment, as if afraid of being rude, she nodded back.

  Stations came and went.

  A few people got off. A few got on.

  At one station, the young woman Tom had decided was shadowing him clambered stiff-legged from her seat, dragged a cheap cardboard case from the rack overhead and left without looking back. No one replaced her. At least, if they did, they didn’t sit in that carriage. He was left to memories and thoughts and found neither welcome.

  Caro had cried when he said goodbye.

  That was unexpected. He’d have said she’d grown to dislike him too much to be anything but grateful to have him out of her life. But he’d never been good with that stuff. And he was, he imagined, out of her life now, one way or another.

  ‘Take care,’ she’d said.

  She’d gripped his shoulders in the foyer hard enough to make the desk staff stare and kissed him fiercely. ‘Russia suits you.’

  He’d looked at her, wondering.

  ‘Here,’ the boy opposite suddenly said.

  Several people glanced round to see him offer to share his vodka. A handful of those looked hopeful, perhaps believing the Stolichnaya might come their way. It didn’t. To
m took a hefty swig and let most run back, returning the bottle with a nod.

  ‘Going or returning?’ Tom asked.

  The conscript’s grin was an answer in itself.

  Five minutes later, the boy was deep in a long and one-way conversation about a bar brawl in Minsk. A minute after that, he was showing Tom a scar, which was still raw and curved, a hand’s breadth above his hip from his belly to his back. As night drew in, the passengers settled, the main lights went down and half-lights came on, and the carriage might have been brighter, if most of those hadn’t been broken, stolen or simply never replaced. Like birds roosting, people dropped off to sleep until only Tom, the kid with the scar and a girl who’d moved next to him after he told the story about the knife fight were awake.

  In the end, Tom took pity on them and shut his eyes too.

  The kids were discreet. You had to give them that.

  Of all the things Tom might have felt, sadness was the most unexpected. Not at what they did but at the youth and innocence that let them do it. You needed both to be them. Tom knew, even before the diesel made an unscheduled stop just outside Volgograd, and the old woman and small boy went to the door to wave to militsiya officers who came aboard to usher Tom off, that if he could buy Alex the chance to be young and behave as badly, he would.

  A Tartar in a tatty flying jacket, with its collar up, was waiting by the entrance. The man was grinning and Tom understood he was the joke. The man’s eyes were black and unblinking, so flat it felt like looking into a void.

  When he nodded to the militsiya, they let go of Tom’s upper arms and stepped back, turning for the exit without saying a word. The man watched them go for a moment, his expression unreadable, then he gestured for Tom to step closer.

  Without losing the grin, he said, ‘You do what I say or we kill the girl. Understand?’

  ‘Of course. I understand.’

  ‘Now. You have the photographs?’

  ‘I have the photographs.’

  ‘Show me.’

  ‘When I’ve seen Alex.’

  ‘One photograph. To prove you have them.’

  ‘You really think I’d come all this way without them?’

  ‘You’d be unwise to.’ The Tartar turned away and an old woman brushing snow off the opposite platform with a twig broom glanced over, hunched her shoulders and hurriedly went back to work. Some things it was safer not to see.

  ‘You liked my present?’

  Tom stared back impassively.

  ‘That cat. I particularly enjoyed my share of the skin. Fiddly, removing all that hair, of course. But worth the effort.’ His grin widened as they headed out of the station.

  ‘Your transport awaits.’

  Tom stared in disbelief at the open-top Jeep the Tartar indicated. It had snow tyres and metal front seats, no seats at all at the back, and its side windows at the front were wound down. There was nothing to protect him from the cold.

  A short drive brought them to an apartment block at the river’s edge.

  ‘Alex is here?’

  ‘You think we’re fools?’

  Broken bricks had been built into a wall that hugged the building’s edge like ivy. Cut into them were the words Not One Step Back.

  ‘You know where we are?’

  Tom shook his head.

  ‘You should. You know why the French surrendered? Because they were weak. You know why the Germans surrendered? Because they were weak. Sergeant Pavlov wasn’t weak. He became what he had to become. We all did. Pavlov held this building against Nazi tanks, bombers and infantry for a month.

  ‘All his food,’ said the Tartar, ‘all his drinking water, ammunition …’ He turned to look at the frozen river. ‘All of it came across that under attack from enemy planes. The Nazis lost more men trying to take this building than taking Paris … Volgograd.’ He spat, phlegm sliding on ice at his feet. ‘What sort of fools rename Stalingrad?’

  ‘You were there?’

  ‘In this house?’ The Tartar shook his head.

  ‘But you were at Stalingrad?’

  There was something hard, entirely inhuman in the man’s stare. He looked again over the frozen waters of the Volga and Tom knew that what he saw himself wasn’t what this man saw. ‘We learned to kill. We learned to like killing. After the war, they wanted us to go back to being who we’d been before.’

  ‘You couldn’t?’

  ‘No one could. You really didn’t recognize me?’

  ‘Not until you mentioned the cat.’

  ‘You’re sure you have the photographs?’

  He was the one grinning at the camera when Golubtsov was tied to a chair. The one holding the board in front of an oak tree from which four German teenagers hung, a board that read The Tsaritsyn Boys. In an earlier, more innocent picture he’d been peering at the engine of a captured Panzer, his hands streaked with oil, while the others simply posed.

  ‘Kyukov,’ Tom said. ‘You were their engineer.’

  ‘Mechanic. I was their mechanic.’

  ‘General Dennisov’s friend.’

  Again that half-look into the distance as if sifting memories or consulting with ghosts. ‘His oldest,’ Kyukov said. ‘His best.’

  Tom shivered.

  50

  To the Island

  Beyond Pavlov’s House, beyond the city, beyond the reach of pylons and factories and other signs of civilization, the river’s edge made the landscape timeless as a faded photograph. Tom was grateful when the forest began. Until the darkness and tightness of the trees started to press in, and he wished they were by the river again, for all the wind blowing across it had been vicious.

  Colonel Kyukov was dressed for the drive: pale leather jacket with sheepskin lining, dark leather jeans and heavy-heeled boots. He could have stepped from the turret of a T-34 or ridden out from between the trees on a pony with ice clinging to its mane. His flying jacket was good against the wind, and its leather tough enough to turn a blade. Tom’s own jacket was Soviet, chosen to blend in on the train, and next to useless.

  The snowfall began shortly after they left the city, just a few flakes at first, softening the air in front of them. They built up on the windscreen until Kyukov swore and flicked on the wipers, sending clumps of snow into their faces as the screen cleared and he increased speed again.

  ‘Where are we heading?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  The Volga came back into sight where it began a huge turn, the river’s far edge vanishing as it widened. Without signalling, without saying anything, Kyukov turned down a track to a ruined checkpoint, its bar pointed skyward like an accusing finger, its barrel weight buried in fallen snow.

  A sign said go no further.

  Falling snow was meant to make weather warmer. But when Tom began to feel warm, he knew it was the blood retreating from his limbs as his veins narrowed and his body began to shut down to protect its core. When he found himself fighting sleep and a desire to curl into a ball, he realized hypothermia was close.

  ‘Tiring journey?’ Kyukov’s glance was knowing.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Tom said.

  ‘For now.’

  The Tartar returned his attention to the track.

  Beyond the checkpoint, razor wire fenced a landing stage off from the firs. Scrub poking from the snow filled the fifty paces between the woodland’s edge and the fence. Rusting searchlights on sentry towers told Tom guards had once policed that gap. Absolutely No Entry announced a sign.

  Beyond the landing stage, far enough away to look like the opposite bank, was the tip of what Tom realized was an island. The real edge of the river was lost in falling snow. The Volga was wider than most lakes he’d seen.

  Tom could just make out a matching landing stage on the island, with a slight fuzz to its edges that might be razor wire.

  ‘A prison camp?’

  ‘A school,’ the colonel said. ‘My school.’

  ‘How many boys?’

  ‘Hundreds. Thousands.’


  Ramming the Jeep into gear, Kyukov headed for the ice and grinned as Tom suddenly sat upright.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Kyukov said. ‘Poor Vladimir Vedenin.’

  The Jeep bounced heavily on ruts in the ice and then raced across the river at breakneck speed. Kyukov was grinning. But then Tom was coming to realize that Kyukov was usually grinning, except when he was staring.

  The staring somehow felt less dangerous.

  The Jeep raced up an icy bank and through a stand of firs that opened on to a field, with a huge, two-storey building just visible through the falling snow. The building had all the elegance of a nuclear bunker.

  Beyond it were rows of huts, dozens of them.

  The door to the orphanage was missing and a white wolf stood in the gap, the fierceness of its gaze making clear that it regarded the approaching Jeep as the interloper. As Tom watched, it turned and vanished into the darkness inside.

  Kyukov shrugged, as if he expected nothing less.

  ‘They used to pay ten roubles for every one killed,’ he said. ‘No longer. There’s no cattle now for them to kill and no one wears their fur these days.’

  Thin light bled through broken windows into a foyer where a mosaic of blond boys, stripped to the waist and clutching axes, filled the wall behind a rotting reception desk better suited to a hospital.

  Because of the missing front door, frost made the vinyl tiles of the reception area slippery underfoot. Those at the edges curled to meet the walls.

  Tom shivered.

  His school had had hose-down floors too.

  Who knew when the building had last been used? Five years, ten years? It could have been more recently. It was impossible to tell how long it had been empty, how many generations had passed through here for indoctrination or lessons, whether they had hated this building more than the crude dormitory huts outside. There was a sourness to the foyer, a stink as if something monstrous had been left to rot rather than shriven, blessed and decently buried. It coated the inside of his nostrils the way the frost coated the tiles.

  It pulled with smoky fingers at his mind.