by Craig Thomas
'He wants to change the history of Russia — just as Lenin did,' she said, concentrating.
'Is that a clue to help me?'
he asked, forcing himself to smile, stifling impatience. He had broken through, had only to sustain the artificiality — and ignore the cold part of his head that mocked his anxiety to learn the ignorant guess of a half-senile old woman who lived alone. 'Give me another due, Anna?' She had adopted that almost foetal position of consciousness that prisoners under interrogation often discovered and utilised. A child knows nothing. The interrogators call it 'Hide-and-Seek'. He would have to continue with the game.
'He would want to watch it — whatever is going to happen, he would want to watch it.' She was staring at the carpet just in front of her feet as she spoke. Of course! So bloody obvious! She did know Gorochenko better than he did.
Red — Square — his mind spelt out carefully.
'You think so?
'Oh, yes.'
A room with a view of Red Square. Vorontsyev closed his eyes, tried to be a rooftop camera, and to sense the best perch a camera might adopt. Where best — ? Then he had it.
The History Museum.
He was in the History Museum! 'To change the history of Russia,' the old woman murmured again. Vorontsyev trembled with understanding. Gorochenko would have chosen his vantage-point cleverly, and with fitting, appropriate irony. A room at the top of the History Museum, watching Valenkov's tanks make history.
He was about to pat her hand with his own, as if to wake her from some light hypnotic trance, about to speak, when the doorbell damaged, broke the silence. Anna Dostoyevna's eyes went bright with immediacy, then her face collapsed into a look fossilised from thirty years ago. Terror. She glanced at him, then at the door of the lounge, then back to him, her eyes wide with guilt and fear.
'It is them,' he said, dropping the words like pebbles into the distressed water of her awareness. 'Hide me. Quickly!'
Seventeen: Young and Old
The doorbell rang again, longer this time.
'Where can I hide?' he asked.
'What?
'Hide!'
'The bedroom — please don't make a sound. Yes, I'll hide you…' She started for the bedroom, eager to propitiate him, as if by so doing she was pleasing the people at the door.
He entered the dim room, banging his shin against the leg of the bed as he took his third step. She opened a cheap fitted wardrobe, a thin sheet of plywood poorly stained — he could perceive its quality as he flicked on the light, then switched it off again almost immediately. The doorbell rang again — three separate summonses.
'Quick, quick!'
He stepped into the wardrobe, his face brushing against an out-of-fashion dress that reeked of tobacco, and the rough material of three skirts on the same hanger. The door squeaked to behind him.
'Pull yourself together or you'll kill us both!' he barked. He heard the sob of fear in her throat. Then he reached into his jacket and unholstered the Stechkin. He pumped a round into the breech, and slipped off the safety.
He heard her open the door, and a man's voice. He leaned against the cheap, thin plywood, listening to the voice as it moved nearer, down the corridor until its quality changed, un-confined in the lounge. It was Kapustin himself.
His mouth was dry, and he sucked spit from his cheeks. He found it difficult to distinguish what was being said, but he could sense the different voices, even apprehend the changes in tone that coloured each voice.
Kapustin had another man with him — there was a murmur of introduction — but only two voices continued the conversation. Kapustin was looking for Gorochenko. There was no mention of himself at the outset, at least.
Strangely, he experienced little fear beyond imagining the physical sensations of a light being switched on, the thin door being pulled back noisily, a man with a gun motioning him out — or opening his eyes and mouth with bleak fear as he saw Vorontsyev's own gun, before it deafened him. Perhaps some residue of office clung to him — he knew the man in the next room, and was a trusted subordinate. It was difficult to consider such familiar concepts in the past tense. Moscow Centre was his place of work; he was not an ordinary Soviet citizen.
The face of his watch glowed as he moved his wrist to inspect the time. Perhaps five minutes had passed. An interrogative colour to Kapustin's voice, and Vorontsyev strained to catch the tone in the woman's reply. It seemed satisfactorily neutral, and he hoped the question had been about himself.
Another ten minutes passed. Filled with awareness of an itch in his left calf, the texture of clothes against the skin of his hands and face, the smell of moth-balls, and the dry mustiness of old flesh; and the reek of stale tobacco in the clothes. He was appalled, gradually, and felt revulsion that he should be confined in the woman's wardrobe. It was as if he had seen her naked, or made love to her, the proximity of scents and odours that were hers.
'Come out.'
He heard the woman's voice, whispering like the rustle of paper, and incautiously he slid back the door. She had not switched on the light, and he said, 'They've gone?'
'Yes.'
'What did they want?1 As he joined her in the lounge, he saw how drained she appeared, the skin taut as stretched hide, grey with wasted health. She seemed unsteady on her feet, and he took her elbow and guided her to the sofa. It sagged as she sat, as if in imitation of the bonelessness of her posture. He thought she might fall sideways at any moment, like a small baby.
'Thank you,' he said. She looked at him vehemently.
'Leave me alone!' she breathed venomously, her hand fiddling with the stuff of her woollen jumper, clutching it into a third breast, releasing it again in creases. She was badly frightened. Kapustin had a quality of quiet menace, and authority to make the threat real 'What did he say to you?'
'I told him nothing!' she cried desperately.
'I know that, Anna.' But, whether Kapustin had believed her or not, he would have posted at least one man somewhere in the foyer of the building, or outside in a car.
Vorontsyev got up and went to the door. Then he looked back at the old woman. She seemed quiet and self-possessed, and only the movement of her lips indicated the furious mental activity as she tried to rid herself of her recent experiences. He knew it would not be long before she was able to do it. He looked at his watch. Almost five. The Museum dosed at five-thirty. He would have to hurry.
He opened the front door of the apartment carefully, and looked out. No one in the corridor. He slipped out. The narrow hall of each floor of the block, much like an hotel corridor, was uncarpeted. Lino squeaked softly under his shoes as he crossed to the window at the nearer end of the ill-lit corridor.
As he had guessed, there was a fire-escape passing the window. Ugly ironwork already frosty in the light of a street lamp a little further down the Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He unlatched the window, and slid it up. It protested, and his head spun round as if he had been shouted at. The corridor was still empty.
He heard a child coughing behind a nearby door. And, even as the cold air flowed on his face, he smelt cabbage cooking. He had not noticed before. He swung one leg over the sill, touching his toe gently on the platform of the fire-escape. Then he stepped out, shutting the window behind him, He paused for a moment, looking down. One or two cars, and a lot of traffic on the Prospekt, already heading out of the city; trolleys and buses mainly, some cars. Congealing on the road which was shining with frost. He could see no one in wait for him, and he clattered down the first flight of steps. Three floors down was the street. Three minutes, if he ran, to the Metro. His feet slipped, and he clutched the icy rail of the fire-escape to steady himself. The clutter of sound rang above the noise of the traffic. He paused, then hurried on, the few moments of swift movement down the steps becoming an imperative, a surge of action like flight.
'Identify yourself!' The order came from below him — a dark shadow, the light behind it, seen through the trellis-work of the last twist of the fire-esca
pe. 'Come down slowly!'
Vorontsyev could not see the gun, but he knew it would be there. It had been too easy. Kapustin had left a man in the foyer, and a man near the fire-escape. He prayed it was no one he knew; not one of his team…
He knelt, firing through the gap between two steps, into the centre of the dark shape. The gun was very loud in the cold air, seeming to halt the traffic. Something plucked away from the rail beside his head in the same moment as there was a little spit of flame from the shadow of the man's coat. Then a purpled face as it caught the light of the street lamp, and the body falling backwards, something metallic skittering away across the frosty concrete of the path. He clattered down the last flight, the Stechkin making separate flat concussions as he held it and the rail in one gloved hand, steadying himself.
He did not bother to inspect the form on the ground, but ran away from it, his feet uncertain, the momentum threatening to spill him on the ground at any moment. He skidded round the side of the flats into the wall of lights and noise of the Kutuzovsky Prospekt. He thought he had heard a summons behind him, but could not be certain. He slipped the gun into the pocket of his coat where he could reach it easily, and weaved his way through the thick flow of traffic. In front of a bus, the lights glaring in his face, then a car screeching as the brakes were applied — suddenly the traffic coming from the opposite direction, and a moment of disorientation. Then three lanes of halted traffic, and he was a minute from the Kievskaia Metro station.
He began to walk, head bowed, fur hat settled firmly on his head, hands in the pockets of his thick overcoat. He was on his way home, an ordinary citizen.
Behind him, the dark stain of the overcoat lumped on the path had decided everything. Now, he was irrevocably determined upon a course of action. He was an outlaw now, a murderer. The single act gleamed in his confusion like a beacon. It did not matter, his moral assessment of the act. This had moulded his mental proportions like the hands of a potter; he had to find Gorochenko, and stop him, and help him escape.
He passed through the barrier, a marble bust of Lenin in a small alcove just beyond it, and descended the escalator to the platform. The station was crowded with home-going workers, and he saw the KGB men, two of them, eyes swivelling hopelessly as they tried to identify and assimilate each face that passed them. They would know that now, for perhaps an hour and a half, they had very little chance of sighting him and making a positive ID.
He stood against the wall on the platform, the crowd washing in front of him, bunching like seaweed moved by a gentle sea, keeping warm, staring at the map of the metro on the opposite wall, reading the paper, talking. They were only, in his eyes, camouflage. Only he was real in the scene.
The train sighed into the station, strips of bright light from the crowded, fuggy carriages elongating, separating as the carriages slowed. The doors slid open. He glanced swiftly along the platform in both directions. He was so far ahead of them, there was no disturbance. Even though, by the time he reached Revolution Square station, they might have sealed the exits.
He had no time to worry about it. The doors slid shut behind him.
A woman, against whom his side pressed as the train jogged, sensed the imprint of the gun for what it was, and looked up at him. His face was set, his eyes staring, and she knew that he must be KGB. She never looked at him again. Rather, she tried to edge a little from him in the packed compartment.
Darkness — Arbatskaia — darkness.
No evidence of special, concentrated activity. They were slow, too slow. The violent death of the man on watch had caught them unprepared Anna Dostoyevna was a name on a long list, and they were looking for Gorochenko there. Instead, they had found him, and he had killed one of them. Orders were needed. Kapustin was in a car somewhere, being fed the information that a KGB man at the Vosstaniya flats was dead, and had undoubtedly been killed by Vorontsyev. Units all over the centre of the city would have to be alerted.
He bent his knees slightly, as if urging the train to greater speed, his body suddenly possessed by his race against the unwieldy net dosing round him.
A bright glare of platform lights, and the name sliding as if in oil past the window — Revolution Square. He grimaced at the appropriateness of his destination. He pushed to the door, panicking momentarily as his arms were jammed into his pockets by the pressure of bodies. Someone glanced round at the pressure of the Stechkin's ugly shape, then looked ahead as they saw his eyes. He stumbled on to the platform, hemmed in by the crowd, a bobbing mass of fur caps and hats and woollen scarves ahead and alongside him.
He turned left with the crowd's momentum, then broke from them as they passed through to another platform, for another train. He looked up. A few individuals, strung loosely like irregular beads on the necklace of the escalator. He stepped on, watched his feet as the stairway froze into steps, and then kept his eyes ahead of him, up the long steep flight towards the exit. He could feel the colder air of the street above, and the gun was hard in his hand.
He walked up perhaps a dozen steps, until he was close behind a middle-aged man with a battered briefcase and wool len mittens, and a woman in a shapeless brown coat. Then the stairs smoothed to a run, and he was on the tiles of the foyer. Slowly, it seemed to him, he moved behind the man and the woman towards the exit, a narrow space between two glass booths. The occupants of the booths wore Metro staff uniforms. There was no policeman at the foot of the steps to the street.
Perhaps, moving back into the centre of the hive, he had wrong-footed his pursuers. They would expect him to flee outwards on the metro, flung off from the hub by the centrifugal violence of his action.
Then, as he passed his ticket to the unseeing man in the booth, he saw Alevtina's face in front of him, as if the girl had stepped out from behind some screen or appeared like a camera trick. She was with another man from the Frunze Quay whose name Vorontsyev could not recall. Her mouth opened in a greeting that changed to sudden despair as she remembered her quarry and her duty. Her hand went to her waist, and Vorontsyev saw the holster, and Alevtina reaching for a gun. Someone bumped Vorontsyev in the back, and he turned as if attacked, seeing the bent-headed individual slip past him, a curse on his mouth, rubbing his arm from the collision. By then it was too late.
Alevtina had the Makarov out of the holster, and the other man, moving to one side, was drawing his automatic.
'Please, Major — !' The girl said, her eyes wide with desperation. It was a selfless plea. Vorontsyev, his own gun still buried in his clothing, caught on the lip of the pocket, hurled himself against her, easily knocking her off balance. In the same moment, the gun came free and he fired from behind Alevtina at the man. Someone screamed as the gun went off, and went on screaming as he fired twice more. The man was flung over the barrier near the glass booth, somersaulting backwards into an untidy, graceless heap on the other side.
He heard Alevtina say, 'Put down the gun — put down the gun!' It was a high-pitched voice, shocked and appalled. Vorontsyev looked at her, half-up from the tiles, the gun levelled at him. And he knew he could kill her.
Instead, he ran for the exit, leaping the few steps. Behind him, and distinct from what followed, he heard the explosion of the gun above the screams that were coming from bystanders.
Then his leg went, and he lurched against the wall, gripping the iron gate folded back from the station entrance to support his sudden weakness. He looked down. Nothing. Yet his sock felt wet, and he was certain the shoe squelched as he tried to walk. Pain shot through his leg, burning into thigh and groin. Alevtina had shot him. He whirled round, stumbled, and a man stared at him uncomprehendingly as he passed. She was standing at the foot of the steps.
Vorontsyev shot her twice. The girl seemed surprised rather than hurt. Then she was unmistakably dead. He turned away, stifling the sob in his throat, the extended gun warding off pedestrians. He limped badly almost at once, and the numbness of the bullet's passage had already gone. His nerves shrieked with the pain of his ow
n weight on his left leg.
Across the street, the lights of the Moskva Hotel reached into the darkening sky. He put the gun away. It was as if he had donned a disguise. Now, only the fact that he lurched against people unsteadily attracted their notice. Forty yards from the entrance to the Metro, he was anonymous again.
Even when the siren of the police car seemed to point him out as it wailed past, heading for the scene of the incident. Somewhere in him, he felt a part of him sliding into emptiness, as if he had received a physical blow to the head, and his consciousness lurched sickeningly; but more insistent was the pain in his calf, and the icy wetness in his shoe — the strange sensation of the trouser leg clinging wetly — and more imperative was the lighted bulk of the Historical Museum across the square from him.
It was five-twenty. He was too late, they would already have closed the entrance and be shunting out the last visitors — perhaps another five minutes for a respected academician or historian. But no one would be going in now.
At the traffic-lights of the pedestrian crossing from the Lenin Museum corner to the History Museum, he felt chilled and weak and purposeless. And then he remembered it was a Wednesday. The museum closed at seven, Wednesdays and Fridays. He leaned gratefully against someone's back as relief flooded him. The woman turned her head, and he touched his fur hat in apology, trying to smile and realising how unwell he looked; as if his face had been mirrored in hers.
A green silhouette on the pedestrian lights, fuzzily unclear to his eyes. He stepped out, then was bundled back again as another siren screamed up the scale and a police Zil tore past them, round into Revolution Square. Then the crowd moved forward again, warily watching the stationary traffic.