Cold

by John Sweeney

  Konstantin was staring into space, zoned out, not there.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Reikhman told her.

  She stood up and backed away, shivering, hastily covering herself. The bully’s penis was fully erect, bobbing up and down stiffly, an actor taking the curtain call at the end of a one-man play.

  Something about the sight of the helpless half-naked man with the elephant face and the hard-on made Iryna look away. What was Reikhman going to do to him?

  Silently, Reikhman walked to the hob, picked up the pan full of spitting fat and the cup of sugar, and moved towards the man, who gave out a soft, low moan.

  ‘This is from the devil’s bastard.’

  And with that Reikhman carefully poured the boiling fat over Pyotr’s erect penis. The fat hissed as it made contact, the skin flaking away. Next he poured the sugar over it, to caramelise the wound. The room filled with the stink of boiling oil, burnt sugar, molten flesh. The bully’s screams were muted by the Elephant; the muffled sound seemed almost inhuman.

  Pyotr’s body threshed around in a spasm of agony; the chair splintered into pieces and he fell, writhing, his hands still handcuffed behind his back. Konstantin dared to steal a look at the half-naked, half-burnt thing on the floor. The eye sockets of the gas mask were filling up from the inside. The old man was drowning – drowning in his own snot and vomit.

  Iryna retched into the sink.

  After a while, Reikhman switched off the camera and returned it to the aluminium case.

  He locked the case, picked it up, nodded to Iryna and Konstantin and walked out. Over his shoulder he said, ‘Burn this dump. I’ll be in the car.’

  SOUTH LONDON

  Joe woke up to discover on the pillow next to him – where his lover had once laid her beautiful head of hair, thick and blonde and lustrous – a large lamb bone, licked clean.

  ‘Stupid dog.’

  He kicked the bed sheets to locate the perpetrator, whose natural place was snoozing at his feet.

  No dog.

  Joe whistled: one long note, one short. Normally he would hear the scratchy pattering of Reilly’s claws upon floorboards, but there was no response. He whistled again. Nothing.

  Joe remembered Wolf Eyes and the weird twins following him in Richmond Park and began to worry. He padded downstairs in his pyjamas, put the kettle on and made himself a cup of tea. Out of the back window of his tiny kitchen he could see his back garden, which Reilly could get to through a dog flap in the back door. The fence was solid, the back gate locked. How on earth? His pushbike was leaning against the fence. Beside it, an upturned flowerpot. A clever dog could use the pot to stand on the saddle and springboard from that to gain the roof of the shed. But Reilly was unutterably stupid.

  Joe threw some clothes on and went to investigate. The snow had gone as suddenly as it had arrived, replaced by a steady, depressing and very English drizzle.

  By standing on the flowerpot he could see the house on the other side of the fence was a 1950s brick build, not Edwardian. A Luftwaffe bomb must have flattened the previous home, leaving a gap like a missing tooth until it was repaired with a filling of modern brick. He walked round the block and found the brick house, its tiny front garden dominated by an imitation wishing well, guarded by a garden gnome, all constructed to conceal a drain cover. After a long pause and a lot of shuffling, the door opened to reveal an elderly space alien, its hair enrobed in silver foil, wearing a coat-length dressing gown of neon pink. Only its tartan slippers were of this earth. The creature clocked Joe’s wonderment.

  ‘I’m dyeing me ’air.’ Vowels marbled in Cockney. ‘No law aginst it. What you want?’

  Joe was matter of fact: ‘Have you seen my dog? A small black dog?’

  Reilly answered the question by bounding out from behind the woman and, standing up on hind legs, giving Joe’s hands a good licking, tail wagging.

  ‘Oh, so ’e’s your dog, is ’e?’ she said. ‘’E’s very thin.’

  ‘He’s half whippet. They’re running dogs and always thin.’

  ‘You should feed a dog like that.’

  ‘I do feed him.’

  ‘I’ve cooked ’im four sausages and ’e’s wolfed the lot.’

  The mystery of Reilly’s disappearing trick was solved. ‘Well, thank you very much. But we ought to be getting on.’

  She looked at him hard. ‘You’re a tinker with that accent,’ she said. ‘They don’t look after their animals proper.’

  ‘I’m Irish.’

  ‘Half-starved, poor doggy.’

  ‘I cooked a leg of lamb yesterday. He ate more of it than me.’

  ‘And ’e’s all nerves, too. He shivers. Should be ashamed of yourself. Bloody tinkers.’

  Joe could feel a cold rage build within him.

  ‘We must be going,’ he said quietly. ‘Thanks for looking after him.’

  ‘Bloody tinkers!’ she shouted, and slammed the door shut.

  Joe’s hands were trembling. One more piece of bigotry from her and he would have ripped the head off her garden gnome with his teeth. ‘Biting frightens the enemy’ had been one of Mr Chong’s favourite sayings. But this old biddy with the tin hair, she wasn’t the enemy. He knew whatever was eating at him – Vanessa running off with the banker, his job going down the pan, the fact that he had no choice but to run, again – wasn’t her fault. For the thousandth time, he told himself that he had to control his anger.

  He took Reilly’s lead out of his coat, snapped the hook onto a ring on the collar, and led him to his Transit van and opened the door. Reilly leapt up onto the passenger seat, coiled himself into a fossil and fell asleep.

  Rubber on drizzle, the windscreen wipers flicking this way and that, drizzle on rubber. The radio proffered a song of unrelenting happiness; South London, all concrete and asphalt, seemed anything but. Easing off the main road, Joe went under a concrete arch on stilts into the vast car park of the Scandinavian furniture megastore and parked. Reilly’s black eyes studied him, his ears sticking out – a silent, sardonic, doggy plea for his master not to split the pack.

  ‘Sorry, pal.’ The dog let out a little sigh and buried his snout in his tail, an expression of grumpy fed-upness that seemed spookily human. Joe clicked the van door shut apologetically, locked it and headed into the store.

  Off work, pending the inquiry, Joe had decided to put up some shelves in the spare room of his flat. Vanessa had always nagged at him to do it; now that she had left him for good, the thought that he was finally submitting to her long-expressed wish half amused him. The shelving necessary for the job was in stock in general, but not in particular. A simple chore that should have taken no more than ten minutes grew longer and longer. Absence of evidence was not evidence of absence. He backtracked from the warehousey bit into the store again, double-checked the aisle, location and product number, then marched forwards again, found the exact location. Nothing. He took out his mobile phone and captured where the shelving should have been. Joe showed it to one of the store workers – a big man with an edge of incivility about him – who grunted.

  ‘Can you not find this?’ Joe’s voice was cold with a kind of controlled anger.

  ‘No,’ said the worker. ‘Don’t snap at me, mate, or I’ll sort you out.’

  Joe clenched his fists tightly but did nothing. The man waited a beat, then called him a ‘pussy’.

  Joe walked off, found an empty aisle and closed his eyes.

  He was back in the hut they slept in at the terrorist training camp, in the mountains north-east of the capital. At five thirty in the morning, the very first thing he saw when the lights came on were the twin photographs of God the Father, the fat one with the Doris Day smile, and God the Son, the weird-looking Elvis impersonator with the bouffant hair and elevator shoes. Then getting dressed, and the six-mile run round the camp in the dark, knowing that whoever came last would spend the day in the pit and they all knew it would be Donnelly, again, and that Donnelly couldn’t, wouldn’t be able to take it.
The pit was twenty feet deep, and so cold it made your bones creak.

  At the end of the run, Donnelly – flabby, whey-faced – was last, again.

  ‘The pit for you,’ said Chong, his stare impenetrable, his lack of humanity all too easy to read. Declan Donnelly was their brigade commander and had been a lion in West Belfast. Donnelly started to weep.

  ‘No pit today,’ said Joe.

  ‘Pit for you, too. All day, all night,’ said Chong.

  ‘I said, no pit today.’

  The others looked on, dry mouthed, fearful where this would end up. Joe was the bigger man, sure, but Chong was a lord of killing. The only sound was that of the breeze, coming down from the mountain tops, stirring through the pine forest.

  Chong moved towards him, angled his right hand and made to chop hard on Joe’s throat, but Joe put up his left hand and blocked him, and the combat started. The pit was on the far side of the camp grounds, a mile or so away from the huts and the other guards, who were out of sight.

  Chong recovered quickly and danced behind Joe’s back. Twisting suddenly, he caught Joe in an armlock and now his thumbs were edging towards Joe’s eyeballs. Joe gripped Chong’s wrists, but the master was too strong for him. Through clouds of mist, the sun was finally clearing the Rangrim Mountains to the east, the darkness ebbing into a dawn sky the hue of spilt blood.

  Joe could feel Chong’s fingers pressing against his eye sockets. He would be blind in five seconds, dead in ten. Sightless, but using the light of the rising sun to guide him, he charged straight ahead, carrying Chong on his back, and leapt into the pit. As he fell, he kicked outwards against the far wall of the pit, so that Chong landed first, with the entire heft of Joe’s body on top of him. The pressure on Joe’s eyeballs stopped.

  Winded, Joe rolled off Chong, who lay on the floor of the pit. Chong had been knocked out, but was still very much alive. When he came round, Joe knew, Chong would kill him, and Donnelly too, and anyone else who stood up to him. So Joe broke his neck and waited, shivering in the pit, until he was certain Chong was dead.

  His friends used the ladder left close to the pit to get him out.

  Donnelly told the others, ‘If any one of you breathes a word of what happened here, I will have you shot. This was an accident. Chong overbalanced and fell in the pit. That is what we all saw. We’re going home, boys. We’ve had enough of this place. We’re leaving North Korea.’

  The others nodded, one by one.

  ‘One more thing,’ said Donnelly. ‘Joseph Tiplady, you’re a fecking idiot and the maddest, bravest man I’ve ever met, and I owe you my life.’

  When the time came for them to leave the camp for good, Roxy was standing where he knew she would be, in their secret place, on a small bluff in the pine trees, holding hands with her two half-American, golden-haired boys. They couldn’t say goodbye. Only she knew that Chong wasn’t the first man Joe had killed in North Korea. It was a secret between them never to be thought, let alone told. He knew that they would never, ever, let her leave.

  Joe surfaced from his reflection. He decided to give up on the store and go home. Fed up with himself for the waste of time, Joe headed past the queues of people buying flat-pack sofas and pot plants and cheap plastic trays, and the great glass doors parted and he was out in the drizzle once more. The van was exactly where he had left it.

  Only Reilly wasn’t in it.

  SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH

  The prickly, mock-Gothic porcupine of the temple was smaller than the cheese-grater office blocks that cluttered the sky, but even so, its spirit dominated the centre of Salt Lake City. In the middle of a barren desert, Zeke’s people had written this city in stone, and here he was casting doubt on what had empowered that achievement. Still, here he was.

  The Strengthening Church Members Committee was housed in the church’s main administration building, an anonymous concrete ziggurat. Zeke was ushered into a lift that took him up to the seventeenth floor, where he was shown by a stone-faced man into a waiting room with a fine panoramic view of the Rockies. The room was overheated and stuffy, the atmosphere oppressive. Zeke sat down and stared into space. The combination of his fear of what was to come, the heat, the mountains, took him back to that other time when he almost gave up on life.

  The stink from his skin burning – it must have been forty degrees outside, up the stairs from the basement garage where they were working on him – the acrid, metallic tang of electricity. But worst of all an emetic blend of sickly sweat and a powerful perfume, some kind of lavender. Back then, in 1986, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan wasn’t going so well and it was not a good time to be an American in Kabul. The KGB had caught him at a safe house. He had been betrayed – but by who? He was not quite sure.

  ‘Tell me, why are you in Kabul? Who did you come to see? Just answer a few questions and it will stop.’ The voice of his interrogator: high-pitched, wheedling. They hadn’t bothered to blindfold him. He couldn’t make the man out clearly because of the spotlight raging in his eyeballs, but he could tell he was fat – very fat – and his lavender aftershave couldn’t hide his stink. The fat man had a Tbilisi accent. So a Georgian – like Beria, like Stalin.

  The pain was becoming too much for him to bear.

  Cover stories, they’d told him at Langley, were like the skin of an onion. You unpeeled each layer, one by one. His first layer was that he was a radical Canadian journalist, intent on exposing American imperialism; the second was that he was a geologist, wanting to stake a claim on a natural gas reservoir under the Hindu Kush. Both were so thin, he could no longer sustain them.

  His third cover was that he was a freelance arms dealer, selling the mujahedin Stingers, surface-to-air missiles that the Soviet choppers couldn’t escape. That begged the question: why take the risk of coming to the heart of the enemy capital if he could discuss everything in the safety of Peshawar in Pakistan? Electricity arced up from his penis through his spine, causing his torso to judder uncontrollably.

  Zeke’s true mission had been to figure out why a full three-quarters of the dollars spent on covert military aid to the rebels wasn’t ending up in Afghanistan at all. Rogue elements of the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, were siphoning off millions of dollars and pocketing them. If Zeke was right, then the CIA was being conned, big time.

  To find proof of that, he’d ended up in Kabul. The lead had been a shipment of one hundred thousand British-designed .303 Lee Enfield rifles and thirty million bullets, which had arrived in Karachi paid for by the CIA, destined for Afghanistan. This particular arms deal had been odd.

  He had found out more in a cheerless strip club by the docks in Copenhagen, dimly lit by flashing blue lights, like being inside a police car. To the relentless upbeat nonsense, to Zeke’s ear, of ABBA’s ‘Waterloo’, a Danish ship’s engineer had told him a story that made no sense.

  ‘Never had a job like it,’ said the big Dane, taking a great swig of beer as a stripper’s bottom synced in his face to the rhythm of the music. Ignoring the buttocks, the Dane set it out for Zeke: ‘We arrive in Karachi just before midnight. With guns and ammunition, there’s a lot of paperwork and that kind of thing. Over there, in Pakistan, it can take a week, maybe two. The bureaucracy, it makes you mad. But with this job, the paperwork is signed off in two minutes, they load the guns, the ammo, in a flash. It’s a hush-hush job. We leave that morning, before dawn. The skipper, he was Ukrainian. I don’t like the guy, he says very little to me, I never work with the guy again. So we sail for three days out into the Indian Ocean, due south, and then turn round and sail the whole way back to Karachi, three days. This time, we arrive midday, it takes ten days to unload, everything is as slow as Christmas. Made no sense.’

  Zeke bought him another beer and stared into his orange juice. It did make sense, of course, if the guns and bullets had been in Pakistan the whole time, if the ISI had loaded up the ship in Karachi with Pakistan’s own military stores, ordered the ship to sail into the middle of the Indian Ocean
and then sail back to Karachi. That way they could make a markup of some three thousand per cent. If the Dane was telling the truth, the ISI was ripping off Uncle Sam.

  The proof of the pudding would be if the shipped bullets were marked ‘POF’ – Pakistan Ordnance Factories. The whole thrust of the CIA’s secret arms supply to the rebels in Afghanistan was based on plausible deniability. If he could find bullets in Afghanistan marked ‘POF’, he was on to something.

  Zeke’s instinct had told him that the ISI – or, more correctly, a secret enclave inside the Pakistani intelligence service, known as Division S – was conning Uncle Sam. It was the equivalent of a raid on Fort Knox.

  Zeke’s urgency, his impatience to be proved right about the robbery, had led him to a basement garage in Kabul and a world of pain scented with lavender. Castration, paralysis . . . there was no limit to the horizon of his bodily fear. But his mind was still working overtime.

  The fat man with the electrodes kept on asking questions about things he should not have had any knowledge of, period. How exactly was the power play between the regional station chiefs – Weaver in Delhi and Crone in Islamabad – being read back at CIA HQ in Langley? Who did the CIA trust the most, Weaver or Crone? Who had told Zeke about the POF cargo that had been shipped out of Karachi only to be shipped back in again? Was it the Danish seaman?

  The only person Zeke had told about the Dane was Jed Crone, to get his sanction for the trip into Afghanistan.

  Zeke did his utmost to hold out. The fat Georgian got serious sexual pleasure from making people suffer intense pain, it was true, but he was also extraordinarily well informed about the inner workings of the Company and Zeke’s mission. And then his torturer switched off the electricity. His whole body heaved with relief but it was short-lived. Now the fat guy was spraying water on his skin. And then the electricity came back on, more unbearable than before.