by Alex Dryden
‘Why all of a sudden?’ He moved in front of her, blocking her way past him. Close up, she smelled his sweat and the topped-up alcohol on his breath. ‘Why not have a drink with me?’ he said in a voice that contained no invitation, just command. ‘That’ll warm you up.’
He drew a bottle of vodka from the pocket of his coat like a weapon from a sheath. Then he grinned in the darkness at her and she saw his yellow teeth in the moonlight.
She looked down at the label-free bottle in his hand. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a drink with you. But I’ll get my own bottle.’ She turned to go past him. She heard his hollow laugh. But she couldn’t make out his expression in the blackness. Then she felt his big hand stop her passing him as he placed it deliberately across her chest. She tensed to strike him, but he spoke.
‘I’ve got another bottle,’ he said triumphantly. ‘If you drink this, you’re a real hard case, Valentina,’ he added. He drew out another bottle from deep inside his thick jacket, ceremonially, as before. ‘Take it. Home-made vodka,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t say it was the best, but…’ He uncorked his bottle and raised it to her. She took the second bottle, felt its cold, brittle glass in her hand, and looked past him.
Anna watched the silhouettes of the men further along the deck. She saw their shadow shapes hauling themselves to their feet. A shake of hands. Quietness. As she looked, she saw they were leaving. Was that Ivan’s intention? No witnesses for what he planned to do? Were they under his orders? Highly likely. Whatever the case, she was going to have to deal with Ivan on her own and there would be no witnesses to what she would have to do with him, either way.
She clutched on to the bottle he had given her and slowly uncorked it, popping the cork in the darkness with a sound like a child’s toy gun. ‘So what are we drinking to?’ she asked slowly. As far as she could see behind him, they were now completely alone on the deck.
‘Why not to us?’ he said, yellow teeth bared like an animal, and she felt his intent like a bad smell.
‘Why not,’ she replied. ‘To us, then.’
They both tipped the bottles to their lips and drank. She felt the raw, home-made vodka sear her throat.
She saw now that he’d brought two blankets with him that were draped over his shoulders. They were what had made him look even bigger. ‘Get under these,’ he commanded, throwing them on the deck against the bulkhead. ‘Stay nice and warm,’ he added in the same leering tone of voice.
She did as she was told and he pushed in beside her underneath the thin warmth the blankets offered.
‘We’ll keep each other warm,’ he said.
They both leaned against the bulkhead. There were no words between them. Ivan drank steadily and in big gulps, like a man who intended to get very drunk. The silence between them lifted the noise of the ship into her consciousness for the first time since the first twelve hours of the voyage. Theirs was a long silence. The great, dark, empty land passed by in silent witness.
‘Either we can make this easy,’ he said at last, ‘or you’ll pay the price.’
She didn’t reply immediately, as if she were giving his proposal some thought. ‘All right then,’ she said finally. ‘When we finish the vodka, you can do what you like.’
‘That’s better,’ he snarled, and drank hugely.
They sat with the kind of silence between them that only presaged some violent act.
Finally, when he was halfway down the vodka in his bottle, he said, ‘I bet you want to know who that was I was talking to. At the village.’
‘No. What does it matter?’
‘You’re not curious enough, that’s why,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t pay to be curious,’ she replied. ‘I saw his badge, if that’s what you want to know. If it was a real one.’
‘Oh, it was real.’
‘So what’s he doing in this dump, then?’
He laughed again, a reckless, cruel sound. ‘The SOBR unit of OMON elite commandos. He’s on an assignment tracking some highly dangerous criminals.’
‘Has there been another Siberian serial killer out here?’ she asked facetiously. ‘Gorging himself on human flesh?’
‘You really are a tough bitch, aren’t you,’ he replied and tried to see her expression in the darkness.
Then when she didn’t respond he drank and looked around the dark, empty deck. ‘He didn’t say exactly why he was here…’ He paused. ‘But don’t worry, I didn’t show him the picture of you.’
‘I’m not a highly dangerous criminal, am I?’ she answered. But it was good, she thought, that he hadn’t shown the man with the wolf on his shoulder her picture – if, that is, he was telling her the truth. If he was, then there was only Ivan who had seen it. And only Ivan she would have to deal with. ‘So it doesn’t matter if you did show him, does it?’ she said.
He tilted the last dregs of the vodka into his wide, broken mouth and threw the bottle sideways over the guard rail. He didn’t see where it went and, above the ship’s noise, they didn’t hear the cracking of the glass as it bounced on the rail or the splash it made in the river.
Then he reached over her, roughly shoving her against the bulkhead. He came up into a kneeling position over her, towering above her head, his legs either side of hers, and he began trying to pull the quilt jacket off her shoulders. With his other hand he started to loosen the belt around his trousers. ‘You’d better make this easy,’ he said.
Anna raised the free hand that held the bottle by its neck and smashed the glass against the bulkhead behind her. Whipping the bottle round with all her force, she drove the jagged edges into his face.
Ivan screamed and loosened his grip on her jacket. She threw him off, but he was on her again before she could get completely free, his hand at her throat. In the darkness, with his other hand, he was frantically searching for her arm which held the broken bottle. She jammed it again under his flailing arm, once, twice – maybe more, she didn’t know; she was fighting for her life now. And once, certainly, she felt the broken glass dig into something softer than flesh. She’d struck him in the yielding plasma of his eye socket. As part of the jagged edges of the bottle struck one of his eyes he let out a roar of pain and fury. He lunged wildly at his face for protection. But he still kept his other hand at her throat.
She made a sudden duck and a roll of her body, an instinctive aikido move. Her training was now released in a pent-up flood of aggression. Her move left his hand suddenly loose, without its downward pressure on her throat, and she found she could pull away, half rolling, half kicking against him with her feet like a wild animal. She sprang up immediately, on her feet in a second as he was getting on to his. ‘I’ll kill you, you bitch,’ he shouted. And she knew for sure that he would.
As he got up in the blackness of the deck, she chopped him with the edge of her hand, precisely at the side of his neck, and he dropped like a dead man. Then she kicked the side of his head hard with the heavy working boots.
There was the silence between them again, behind which the engine’s throb was like a distant, reassuring landscape. She crouched back down in the shadow of the bulkhead and listened over the noise of the engines. For the first time in twenty-four hours, as she heard the engines again, and the clank and rattle of the ship, it felt as if the world itself were being shaken to death. But now she was grateful for the noise.
She crouched in the shadows of the moon for maybe a minute or more. When she was sure they were truly alone apart from the nagging, guttural sounds of the ship, she dragged the foreman’s heavy, inert body to the guard rail and leaned it against the rails, supporting it with both her arms. She was up close to his face, slumped forward over it as she dragged the body, and she smelled his rank, animal sweat and felt his blood congealing on her face. Then, with a huge effort, she heaved the considerable bulk of his body on to the rail, swaying momentarily, until she used its weight to drop it over the side. If he wasn’t dead now, she thought, he wouldn’t last more than a minute or two
in the icy water.
Anna crouched down again, hidden this time in the shadow of some davits that leaned over the guard rails like hangman’s posts. She listened again, but could pick out no living sound. Only the friendly engine and the shaking ship made any noise at all. And beyond the banks of the river, the empty, unseeing green of the taiga grinned its all-consuming nothingness in the light of the moon.
As best she could, she gathered the glass fragments together and threw them and the broken bottle into the fast-flowing water after him. Then she wiped her face and the deck around the bulkhead where she guessed the stains of his blood would be, using the blankets to mop up whatever was there in the moon’s darkness. Finally she dropped the blankets too, over the side, and they fell silently into the churning moon-white wash at the Rossiya’s stern.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SHE HAD HIS blood on her sleeve. And she had the spit that dribbled freely from his dying lips as she’d dragged him to the rail. During the night as she lay in the women’s hold, she could almost feel him alive on her arm through his excretions, a crawling, vengeful facsimile of him in blood and mucus.
She hadn’t been able to wash it out properly on the deck and down below in the latrines she couldn’t afford to be seen washing her coat. Not with a missing, dead man around. Or no longer around.
As the dawn of the third day rose at just before three o’clock on the Rossiya, creeping through the cracks in the hatches and glowing through a dirty porthole on the far side of where she lay, she considered her changed circumstances. First, she wondered how long it would be before they found out that the foreman was missing. And then, she wondered if his body would be taken by the current to the side of the river, somewhere remote, where it wouldn’t be discovered for a long while, or ever. Or worse, if it would land up near a village, or be discovered by a hunting or fishing party, or by trappers checking their mink traps, and be found in a matter of days or hours. But, worst of all, she wondered if it would follow the current, a nightmare of a corpse that stayed in the centre of the stream and tracked both her and the ship as it headed north. As she lay on the hard bench, she imagined Ivan’s dead body following her as he had done in life.
She finally got up off the bench and picked her way among the sleeping bodies towards the dirty light of the porthole. In the thin illumination of the early rays of sun, she saw the bloodstains still on her sleeve. They were dry and cracked and she was able to scrape some of the crust of them away with her fingernails. Then she saw some oil leaking from a pipe that led down through the deck, perhaps into the engine room, and she began to wipe the drips of oil with her fingers on to the sleeve of the arm which had held the broken bottle. When she was satisfied the oil concealed the dried blood, she looked out at the flat grey light of dawn.
What she saw through the porthole was a landscape beginning to change as the Russian taiga began to lose its grip and they neared the tundra. The subarctic forest was now different, thicker yet more stark than the country they’d passed so far. Up here, the air had turned colder, dryer, and the forest was even more supreme. She’d felt all that change on the deck the night before as she’d waited for Ivan, drank with him, and then killed him. Now, as she looked out at the landscape, she could see no evidence of man’s existence. No history, even, of man’s presence. The nights of light were now visibly lengthening and would soon become one endless day as they steamed inexorably north.
Though she wanted some clean air, she decided to stay in the sleeping hold as the dawn changed to day and the morning progressed in the semi-gloom of the hold. The other women slowly rose from sleep, in twos and threes, unhurried and apparently untroubled by anything their lives contained. They divided up loaves of bread, brewed tea, talked in low voices. They were completely uninterested in either the bleakness or anything else outside the ship.
It was safer now to be in this group of women, she decided. No more going out alone. She needed company and the slow fatalism she felt among the women around her seemed to be of a quality that attracted no attention. If it hadn’t been for Ivan singling her out at the hiring office, she, too, might have passed unnoticed like the others.
She returned to the bench, shared her own few provisions with two women near her, and then she sat or lay listlessly on the bench as the other women did, hour after hour. The day crawled by with punishing slowness.
At just before midday, the metal door to the hold opened and she saw one of the crew members standing in the entrance. He stayed stock still by the door. Behind him the door clanged shut like a brutal announcement.
She watched him looking around the large space, studying the faces of the women. He wasn’t more than nineteen years old and was smoking a cigarette. He wore a blue beret and a heavy wool jacket with big plastic buttons, the informal uniform of the crew. He seemed to Anna to be trying to look arrogant and self-possessed in the roomful of women. But it was a thin attempt at self-confidence. He could have been a youth entering a brothel for the first time, nervously surveying the merchandise.
Like the others, Anna didn’t move.
Finally she heard the youth say in an over-pumped voice, ‘Valentina Asayev!’ It was her name, the name in her papers.
She kept her eyes averted as she stood up. ‘Yes?’
‘You’re to come with me.’
His ill-founded pomposity was absurd, she thought. But another feeling in the pit of her stomach wrenched her back into the situation.
‘Who wants me?’
‘The Captain, that’s who. Come on!’
She walked across the floor among the semi-comatose women and stopped in front of him. She looked him full in the face and he blushed.
‘You’re the one they’re looking for,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
She turned around and saw the eyes of the other women stirring and turned on her, their expressions a mixture of relief and indignation.
Anna didn’t move from the spot in front of him. ‘Why?’ she said insolently and the boy looked momentarily wrong-footed.
There was a ripple of laughter from the other women in the hold at her confidence.
‘Never mind why,’ he said. ‘You’re wanted above.’ Then he stuttered, ‘I don’t know why. I was just sent.’
He was crumbling before her eyes. Then he stepped back and indicated with his hand that he wished her to precede him to the metal door.
Up on the deck, it was a relief to be in the sparkling clean air after a night and a whole morning in the rancid hold. He took her arm above the elbow, not roughly but not gently either.
‘My name is Yuri,’ he said sympathetically.
‘Well, Yuri, it’s a beautiful day,’ she said.
‘Is it?’ he said.
Then he smiled nervously at her and led her up a companionway, along the deck, and stopped outside another metal door beneath the bridge. ‘You’re to go in there,’ he said.
There were three men inside the room. It was a small office, by the look of it. Then she heard the crackling of static and she realised it was the radio room.
All three men sat behind a table. The captain sat to the left, the man she’d seen with Ivan, the man with the embroidered special forces wolf on his shoulder, sat in the centre, and another man she hadn’t seen before sat to the right.
On shelves above where they were sitting were charts of the river, updated every few months to keep up with constant changes in the silting channel, and there were a few bits and pieces of what looked like radio equipment, spares maybe. The room was small. The table was five feet long and there were only two feet at either end of it. There were two steps to the chair that she was to sit on, facing the men across the table.
‘Sit down,’ the captain said. ‘Papers!’
She sat in the chair and reached inside the quilt jacket and took out her identity papers, the internal passport and her qualifications for the saw mill. In the bright sunlight shining through a porthole from the south of where the ship was steaming, he studied the
documents closely, then passed them to the special forces officer. The Wolf. He, too, studied them for a long time and then put them down on the table between them.
‘Why are you here?’ the Wolf said.
For a moment she was confused. Here in the room, or here on the ship?
‘For work,’ she replied, her mind clearing.
‘Where did you learn to be a machine operator?’
‘Bratsk.’
‘Your… birthplace.’
‘Yes.’
The Wolf was silent for a long time, staring at her as if to force her to admit a mistake.
Anna thought back six years to the time before she had defected. Back then, before she had met the Englishman for whom she had left Russia and her past, and before she had faced the final disillusionment with her father, she had dated one of these men in special forces, considerably senior to the one in front of her now. He’d been a man in the Alpha Group, Russia’s most highly specialised military force.
‘Is there a problem with my papers?’ she asked, in order to break the spell of mistrust he was trying to create.
‘Apparently not,’ the Wolf replied. ‘Where is the man who hired you?’ he said casually. ‘The foreman Ivan?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since yesterday on the ship.’
‘You saw him last night,’ he stated.
‘And I hope it’s the last time I see him.’ She decided now to sound defiant.
‘Oh yes? And why is that?’
‘He tried to attack me, that’s why.’
‘Attack?’
‘Rape, then.’
She saw the captain smirk.
The Wolf leaned across the table at her. ‘And what did you do?’
‘I ran away.’
He snorted.
‘You ran away! On a ship! You ran away from a man who’s six-feet four inches and built like a tank!’ The Wolf laughed, then his mouth pursed in an angry line. ‘So it was as easy as that, eh?’ He sat back in his seat, as if the verdict was now clear.