by Stevens, Tim
Krupina lit a fresh cigarette and bounced a stream of smoke off the grey, grimy window. Forty nine years old, and deathbed life lessons from her parents all of a sudden meant something.
She picked up her mobile phone, took a moment to work out the buttons.
He answered on the second ring. ‘Tamarkin.’
‘Get in here.’
‘I’m out buying your sandwich –’
‘Just get back in here, for Christ’s sake.’
*
Bartos Blažek’s nieces called him Uncle K without knowing why. Certain family members, and people of his inner circle who weren’t blood, called him the Kodiak. It was his size, of course, but also his beariness. He liked the idea. Hugeness, strength, cuddliness and power, combined. And, yes, he was hairy. Not so much on his head, any more. But his arms, his chest and back and legs, were pelted. He was proud.
Magda had, as usual, organised matters with the skill of the born hostess. The twins squealed and squirmed between the legs of tables and adult guests, dirtying their party clothes within minutes. The handful of school friends giggled, their initial shyness loosening. Their parents either remained frozen to the walls in awe or mingled, chattering too blatantly. Nobody approached Bartos apart from Magda, who squeezed close to him after the drinks had started flowing, rubbing her hip against his. He smiled down at her – she was tall, at five ten, but half a foot shorter than him – and planted a kiss on the side of her mouth.
‘Excellent.’
He doubled over as Karel, the elder of the twins by ten minutes, barrelled headfirst into his gut. Helena dashed to join in, and held her hands up to her father’s face, trying to get the fingers right.
‘No, that’s nine. Yes – eight’s right. Eight years old.’
Bartos knuckled his son’s head and ruffled his daughter’s. He squatted and squeezed each of the twins’ faces against one of his stubbled cheeks. They shrieked and recoiled.
Over their black heads he gazed at his firstborn son, Janos, leaning against the wall across the room. Dressed in one of his trademark skinny Italian suits, he was laughing from the side of his mouth at some inanity his current girlfriend was spewing into his right ear. In his left hand he clasped a balloon of brandy. Bartos thought he could see white grains on the boy’s left nostril.
His eyes were angled across the room, raised halfway.
Bartos turned his head, following Janos’s sightline.
Janos was staring at Magda’s breasts.
Bartos looked back at Janos and at the same instant Janos shifted his gaze to Bartos crouching at his children. For a second Janos’s eyes flickered with primitive embarrassment. With guilt. Then, a flicker of fear kindled into a blaze.
He raised his glass in Bartos’s direction and bared his teeth in what Bartos had heard the Americans call a shit-eating grin.
Bartos watched him. Didn’t smile.
Someone was tapping at his shoulder and he brushed at it. Magda’s voice roused him and he turned his head. She handed him the phone.
He listened.
‘On my way,’ he said.
Bartos clasped his twins close, stood and murmured in his wife’s ear, felt her nod as he pulled her to him and kissed her hair. Then he left, not looking back. He felt Janos’s terror cast after him like a fishing net.
*
The young man – boy, really – was trussed to a flimsy wooden chair at the back of the warehouse, between the standing shapes of two of Bartos’s men. The falling evening light through the window picked out his juddering silhouette. Bartos could smell the boy’s shit from the door.
As Bartos stepped forward a high jabbering started up. One of his men put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, not roughly. Close up, Bartos could see he’d been slapped around a little: lip scabbed, one eye swollen closed.
Bartos dropped to his haunches, one knee cracking, in front of the boy. The jabbering had segued into a low keening.
‘What’s your name, son?’
The boy began to blubber and one of the men backhanded him across the temple, the other grabbing the chair before it could tip over. Bartos frowned and shook his head at the man.
‘What’s your name?’
‘K-k-k-k –’
‘A little louder?’
‘K-Kaspar. Sir.’
‘I’m Bartos, Kaspar. You seem a nice enough guy. Sorry to meet you in these circumstances.’
Bartos frowned at the ground for a moment, then looked up at the boy. ‘You know why you’re here, of course.’
The nods came rapidly, guilt eager to confess itself.
‘You tried to take something that didn’t belong to you.’
‘Yes.’
‘A pickpocket. Do you do this for a living?’
The boy, Kaspar, tried to find saliva, his throat clicking.
‘I assume you don’t, because you were quite poor at it. Unlucky for you that you chose one of my people.’
Pavel had phoned him just after breakfast. Somebody had tried to lift his wallet and he’d noticed. The would-be thief had raced off. Pavel had sent two men in pursuit.
‘Call me when,’ Bartos had said before ringing off. An attempted crime against one of his middle-echelon men was something he needed to respond to himself. It implied an attack on him personally.
Bartos duckwalked forwards until his nose was under the boy’s.
‘So, if you’re not a professional pickpocket... why did you do it? Who hired you?’
He flinched from the bubble that swelled at one nostril. The boy was panting.
‘Nobody. I’m out of work, needed money. I tried my hand. I was no good.’
‘Nobody put you up to it.’
‘No.’
The boy was in confessional mode, would shop anybody. Bartos was sure of it. Was sure he was telling the truth.
He sat back on his heels. ‘In that case, I’m left with a problem. What do I do with you?’
Kaspar began to rock in the chair, chattering again. Bartos held up a hand. To his credit, the boy shut up at once.
Bartos stood.
‘I’m hated by many people. But even my worst enemies will concede that I’m nothing if not fair.’
He fished in the hip pocket of his trousers and came up with a koruna piece which he balanced on his thumb tip, letting the light play off the edge.
‘Fairness requires an even chance. So. I spin this coin. You call it. If you win, you walk. No conditions, no harm done, other than a pair of shitty pants. If you lose, I do what I have to.’
The nodding was hectic now, almost mechanical. Bartos wondered whether he himself would view fifty-fifty odds with such enthusiasm.
He flipped the coin high and clapped his hand over his wrist.
The boy stopped shaking. Beside him both men were stone.
‘Call, it, Kaspar.’
‘Tails,’ he blurted.
With a conjuror’s flourish Bartos removed his covering hand, angling his wrist so his two men could peer at the coin. Kaspar let out a whimper. His feet began to jitter and bounce.
‘Well, well.’ Bartos slipped the coin back in his pocket. ‘You’re in luck.’
Behind him the boy’s sobs were indistinguishable from his laughter. Bartos headed for the door, listening to the mutters of his men as they began to unleash their prisoner.
Bartos stopped.
The image of Janos, his firstborn son, flashed back. Staring. Staring at his stepmother, Magda. The drool virtually spooling from his slack lower lip.
Bartos squeezed his eyes tight.
In four steps he was back at the boy, hands hanging open at his side, looking down. The face was weeping and grinning up at him in fawning thanks. After a moment, the first flicker of doubt passed across the eyes. Lodged there.
‘Sorry, Kaspar.’ Bartos moved in, stepping to the side of the boy as his man moved back, shoving one bear paw under the boy’s chin and reaching with the other one across the face from the top so that his fingertips thrust i
nto the boy’s mouth, gripping the upper and lower lips. He kept his nails long, and he felt them bite through the flesh as the boy’s scream echoed through the rafters.
‘It’s been one of those days.’
Bracing himself, feet and shoulders, he pulled his hands apart and peeled the boy’s lips away from his jaws, not stopping when the natural anatomical resistance was met. The upper lip tore off, the lower extending itself down the chin.
The screams went on until Bartos altered his grip to hook his fingers behind the teeth, and prised the lower jaw off the boy’s face.
FOUR
Calvary had chosen a hotel two blocks away from Gaines’s flat. He checked just after eleven in the morning, having taken a tram from the airport and then a Metro train to the northeastern suburbs. The Prague Metro system was a relatively straightforward one and he navigated it with ease. Prague was chilly, the April wind rawer than it had been in London. Calvary was wearing a pullover and jacket which threatened not to be enough.
The hotel was a three-star affair, part of a chain and somewhere he was less likely to be remembered than a family-run bed and breakfast. Calvary slung the holdall in a cupboard, splashed water on his face, and went for a walk.
In other circumstances he would have cased Gaines’s street, looking for potential approach and escape routes, access points. But he wasn’t intending to break in and carry out the hit in the man’s flat. He knew somebody, either SIS or Llewellyn’s minions, had had Gaines under surveillance, and more than likely still did so. Calvary didn’t intend to get caught on camera again, leaving the scene of the killing. Instead he turned and strode in the direction of the city centre, armed with his map.
Calvary wandered for an hour, absorbing the atmosphere of the city, the rhythm of its streets. He didn’t consider himself to be much of a romantic but the city had a distinct, heady aroma that made him think of dense forests. He bought two sausages – jiternice, a local specialty – and a bottle of water from a street kiosk, and ate them on the way back to the hotel.
*
Back at the room he kicked off his boots and lay supine on the bed, hands behind his head. He’d rested well the night before, was killing time more than anything else.
Llewellyn. The man’s face was imprinted in the floral pattern of the dark ceiling, in the skin at the back of Calvary’s eyelids when he closed them. He’d never been a mentor to Calvary, quite. Calvary had been too old for that sort of thing by the time he’d met him. But Llewellyn had offered him salvation of a sort, a chance to earn back his self-respect. No, not quite that. To achieve redemption. Absolution.
Except it hadn’t worked out like that.
The first hit he’d carried out ruthlessly, using a handgun, a SIG-Sauer P226. The target was a high-ranking officer in a dissident Irish Republican outfit who’d been amnestied under some accord or other. The amnesty was a smokescreen, strictly for public consumption. The Chapel had other plans. Calvary had seen photographs of the man’s handiwork. Six innocent people gunned down, three of them children under twelve.
He hadn’t flinched, had emptied half the clip into the astonished face, obliterating it. He was accelerating away almost before the body caromed off the wall of the terraced house. In the drive to Belfast’s airport, on the flight back across the Irish Sea, Calvary had felt nothing. No disgust, no fear, but no exhilaration either. No sense of sins assuaged.
Never mind, he’d told himself. It would take time. He’d accepted a second job, and a third. Llewellyn always took pains to remind him that he could turn down any job, on any grounds – moral, practical – he liked, and no hard feelings would be nurtured. But he’d never felt the need to refuse.
His first twinge of misgiving came with number four.
It was the first hit he’d carried out on continental Europe. Florim Zagreda was a truly vile human being, a trafficker in hard drugs and women – Zagreda’s definition of women included girls as young as eight – who had eluded conviction once too often, thanks to a combination of sharp legal representation and systematic intimidation of witnesses. He was an international problem, but his involvement in the Albanian organised crime networks of East London sealed his fate as far as the Chapel was concerned.
Calvary’s problem hadn’t been with removing Zagreda from the human pool. It had been with the way the hit had played out. Zagreda was at an arms fair in Hamburg, brazenly flaunting his recent acquittal on some charge or another. He normally moved about with a retinue of heavily-armed cronies, and was known always to wear a Kevlar vest in public. Neither of these measures protected him when he was lounging in his hotel bath at four a.m. after a night’s debauch, and Calvary appeared in his bathroom out of the closet he’d been hiding in since purloining the cleaning lady’s key card earlier that day. Before the bodyguards could run through from the bedroom Calvary tossed the most low-tech of improvised weapons, an old-fashioned battery-operated transistor radio, into the bath.
The crackle and scream were eardrum rending, the churning mix of water and blood and effluent like a shark attack. Zagreda didn’t die at once. Calvary was through the bathroom window, every inch of his escape route having been mapped out in advance, but although he couldn’t afford to waste time he stared back in fascination as the head thrashed, lips rolled back to reveal an impossibly huge rictus, and a claw hand grabbed at the air – at the very air – in desperation.
It had nothing to do with sorrow for a life lost. Zagreda deserved to die if anyone did. Nor did Calvary care particularly that the man had suffered. Again, on récolte ce qu’on a semé. No, what unsettled Calvary, left him with a gnawing in his gut all the way back to London and beyond, and through his sleeping as well as waking hours, was the last images of an organism clinging to life. Clawing at it, as though it had never had a right to anything else. Outraged at its being torn away.
Perhaps Zagreda deserved to lose his life. But did Calvary have the authority to take it?
*
Back at the restaurant, Llewellyn had said: In answer to your unasked question – how can you be sure I’m telling the truth when I say you’ll be left alone after this job – all I can say is, I give you my word. And whatever you think of me, you have to admit... I’ve never lied to you.
Llewellyn was right. He’d never lied to Calvary. And he was right about the other thing, too.
Killing Gaines would kill Calvary’s past. Finally.
Calvary felt grimy after his flight. In the shower a few minutes later he almost laughed out loud. He realised he hadn’t raised the matter of remuneration. Had no idea how much he was being paid for the Gaines hit, or even if he was being paid at all.
*
‘Rise and shine, boss.’
Krupina jerked her forehead off her wrist, squeezed her eyes tight against the dazzle. Through strands of lank fringe she saw a Tamarkin-shaped figure shoving a cup of tea across the desk at her.
His face came into slow focus. He looked cheery, eager even, with no trace of the practised cynicism that usually marred his good looks.
Yes, she had to admit that bit.
He’s twenty years younger than you, you old bat. Get a grip.
‘I wasn’t asleep.’ She was furious: at him for having caught her out, at herself for having been caught napping, literally.
‘Right. Whatever.’ He cracked his knuckles. ‘Lev and Arkady are in position. Oleg’s trying to find suitable vantage points round the back. They can’t agree. You know what they’re like.’ He bounced on the balls of his feet, simmering with energy. ‘Your call.’
God. She knuckled exhaustion from the corners of her eyes. She’d slept wretchedly the night before, the pain and the coughing shaking her awake every few minutes. At nearly fifty, she needed more than three hours’ staccato sleep a night. Deserved it.
No. She didn’t deserve anything of the sort. Not yet.
Krupina spun the mobile phone towards Tamarkin. ‘Get me Oleg. He’s good at this kind of thing.’
The digital
display of the clock radio said it was 12.30 p.m. She didn’t believe it, till she glanced at the window and saw the early afternoon shadows lurking beyond the grime.
*
Tamarkin had been in favour of an immediate swoop, as soon as she’d told him. The impetuosity of youth. She’d considered it, an early morning assault, quick and hard. But this wasn’t Moscow. The neighbours wouldn’t meekly retreat behind their own doors, not wanting to get involved. They’d call the police at the very least. Also, Krupina considered the possibility that Gaines had some sort of bodyguard or watch detail. Sometimes British intelligence provided it for retired people of importance, as the FSB did for her country’s own grandees. An open confrontation with agents of the British state wouldn’t go down well, whatever the immediate outcome.
She’d favoured a few days’ initial surveillance, but tugging at her had been a sense that she was doing what she’d done all her career, all her life. Being overly cautious. And it would mean opportunity would escape her grasp yet again. This time, though, there’d be no recovering.
The message in the diplomatic bag had been unambiguous: Sir Ivor Gaines, British citizen and retired Foreign Office bigwig, knew the identity of the enemy mole, the British mole, within the Kremlin. The existence of TALPA had first been suspected in the mid-eighties, but after 1989 it had been largely forgotten about as more pressing concerns – the wrenching apart of the Empire – had come to the fore. After the Yeltsin victory in 1991 there’d been a feeling amongst some of the higher echelons that TALPA, if he or she existed, didn’t really matter. Britain was our ally, and bygones were bygones. TALPA would either throw in his (or her) lot with the Moscow body politic, or retire quietly back to London.
All that had changed on New Year’s Eve, 1999, when President Yeltsin stood down, the joking was over, and the motherland began the long climb back to self respect.
Her options were three. (Do nothing wasn’t one of them.) She could arrange an immediate abduction of Gaines, assuming he was at home. She could put tags on him and observe him for a few days, a week, on the principle that there was no rush, and a complete picture of his movements would help avoid any complications such as the snatch being observed by any British intelligence agents he might be in contact with. Or, and this was the compromise she settled on, a synthesis of her position and Tamarkin’s: she could grab Gaines later that day, after he emerged from his flat and once preliminary surveillance had made certain the field was clear.