A Damned Serious Business

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘Fireworks?’

  ‘Yes, Major, fireworks. With low cloud, and in heavy rain. Mostly rockets, but wasted because of poor visibility. A display of several minutes, considerable expense . . . reported from a watch-tower. Should I go further back, Major?’

  He paused, a frown cutting his forehead. He asked where the fireworks had been launched. He was shown the map, then the satellite image, then a zoom took the picture to the river bank, the Estonian side, and the ground below a steep bank behind which was an open space marked as the location of a German military cemetery. The Major was told that the graves had been bulldozed in the Soviet era, but then landscaped following the new régime taking power in Tallinn. The Major was told also that the screen operator’s grandmother had fought on that front in the Great Patriotic War and . . . A quiet click of his tongue ended the anecdote.

  ‘And it was raining hard when they were fired?’

  ‘So they reported in the tower. It was registered because it was strange to launch fireworks in such conditions. They saw no party in progress and no audience. That was all.’

  And he was again shown the location, and he had a print-out done of that sector, and of the river banks closer to the town of Narva and also further downstream and towards the estuary to the Baltic. The significance of this? The Major was uncertain. Uncertain also whether an American journalist asking for entry to Ivangorod to investigate the condition of a mediaeval castle was relevant, or excessive smuggling, or two pensioners who were armed with veteran shotguns and had with them in their boat a spaniel and three dead ducks. He raised his head, sniffed and caught the waft of the recycled air and searched for a scent. He left with a promise that anything further would be passed to him.

  Past midnight, the night deep over the city, and reports on the radio spoke of an explosion, probably the result of a faulty gas installation, on the premises of a small company dealing with chemical exports and imports. He demanded that the sergeant who had done surveillance on Yekaterina the previous afternoon and evening – now assigned to him – should go to the location of the explosion. He felt little sense of outrage but rather a considerable pleasure that he had acquired – right place and right time – what was, without doubt, the most prestigious investigation of his professional life.

  She said they were within five kilometres of the town of Kingisepp. Added that there was an ammonium plant there.

  He said there was a road-block at Kingisepp, with a chicane. She said that the men on the block, at Kingisepp, would be dozy bastards, and stupid. He said ‘dozy bastards and stupid’ ones were dangerous if armed with automatic weapons. Perhaps that weighed heavy with the boys in front. A road sign directed traffic towards a lay-by, and Martin was indicating the turn-off, then pulling in, and she followed.

  She asked, ‘How do we go?’

  Merc answered, ‘Not with them.’

  ‘And . . .?’

  ‘We are too far back now. When you need to know I will tell you. But we have to be beyond the block, on the far side of it.’

  ‘And I have an opinion?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because it is what I was sent for, to get your brother across the Narva river. Instead of him it is you. Sufficient.’

  She persisted. ‘And I don’t get to sanction how? Don’t have an opinion?’

  ‘No.’ He laughed. She was a failed concert pianist, and a failed activist, and Merc was a Gun for Hire and brought out of somewhere near nowhere to do a job. Miracle, she laughed with him, touched his arm, then drove off the road and into the lay-by, and bushes screened the empty piece of road. She stopped behind the boys, killed her lights. Merc opened his door. He was climbing out, his coat in his hand, and the rain was now sheeting. She asked if she should come. ‘No.’

  The door was opened for him. He eased in beside Kristjan. Cigarettes were passed. No preamble.

  ‘The block down the road . . .’ Martin said.

  ‘Which you have to get through,’ Toomas said.

  ‘Get through or you lose. You cannot come with us because the girl does not have the papers – and we don’t know what is the degree of alert . . . Or you can ditch her, be with us, take the chance.’ Kristjan punched him, lightly, as if he’d made a joke, a good one.

  ‘Whose opinion first?’ Merc asked, and the smoke eddied among them.

  They might have read him already. It seemed so. It would have been his opinion first, then second and third. Only his opinion. He did not know why they had turned back and waited at the entrance to the Kentucky Fried Chicken, why they had led himself and Kat away through the traffic, nor why they were here now and allowing him to flesh out an idea. It was like a combat situation, fast moving, on shifting ground, as in any of the places where he had done time. He did not like to spread trust but accepted times, places, when the options ran short. He would not argue, not debate. He said what he wanted of them. Merc waited for a small avalanche of rejection, all of them bunched together in turning away from what he said.

  ‘What we thought,’ Martin said.

  ‘Near to where we were,’ Toomas said.

  Merc reached into his jacket and found the weight, solid and comforting, of the Makarov – already loaded – and his fingers grasped the spare magazine and lifted it out of his pocket and held it between them. Kristjan took it.

  A little grimace and Kristjan said, ‘You haven’t, but you ask why? Entitled to ask . . . I stack the shelves in the Fama supermarket off the Tallina manatee, address 19C, and my woman has gone with her mother, and I have no one I call a friend, and I am not held in respect, and I am a bum and I do not think that my grandfather dribbled excuses or cried to be spared. I think he spat in their fucking faces. Is that good for why? Good enough? I hope to do the casino tonight, do the roulette, then go home.’

  Toomas said, ‘I am a Teutonic knight, a fantasy. All of my life is fantasy, not this.’

  Martin said, ‘On Monday, I will be painting in an apartment, the bog end of Haapsalu, and I want something to remember if I am not to die from boredom. Exhilaration, like it was for us many years ago, and our grandfathers. Stay safe, and her.’

  He was kissed on each cheek, all of them in turn. The car flooded with light when he opened the rear door and saw the ugliness of the pistol that lay on Kristjan’s lap. Merc went back to the Polo. He told her he would drive. The lights came on in front of him and he flicked the ignition. Should have changed her seat setting, hadn’t time, wasn’t bothered. They went forward out of the lay-by, and turned on to the main road. He said nothing.

  Chapter 13

  Engines idling, lights dead, he and the boys sat in their respective vehicles, and waited for the hands of their watches to reach the point agreed. The last delay, and ahead of them were the illuminated streets of a small town he had never heard of before the briefing. Chemicals and open-cast mines, and he remembered the smell from the day before. The boys had pulled in just short of the first street lights and nothing moved on the road or the pavement.

  He’d asked her, ‘This is where the block will be?’

  ‘Here, where you came through the last morning. Inevitable after the explosion, but you knew that.’

  ‘And it is Kingisepp?’

  A small and brittle laugh. ‘You should have the name and say it?’

  ‘Why should I have the name?’

  ‘Because it is where you die – or where you, we, are taken. Does it concern you? Die, or taken – at this place, so you must have the name of it.’

  Merc thought she spoke the truth. He knew most of the hard yards on the Route Irish run, and also where the diplomats from the embassy compound in the Green Zone would go to in downtown Baghdad on an excursion – behind a wall of guns – to reach a ministry. Knew the routes that the escorted convoys would take, and where the bad places were for the IEDs or ambush points, had codename calls for the street intersections and all the roundabouts where they might slow. And had lodged in his mind all the places
either side, north or south, of Hill 425, and Brad and Rob in Command and Control had the call signs and – if luck shone bright – might get the Warthogs in, circling and then diving to dump the ordnance, or the fast jets. He had no one here, at Kingisepp, other than her, and the boys in the car ahead who had stayed behind, earning the cash they’d pocketed, and flaky at best. Not a good place to be, but better for having a name.

  Thinking about death? A bit. Usually did when the stakes were high.

  All the guys did. The men who took the money, the Guns for Hire, had written wills and lodged them with the embassy’s consular people, and had taken to fingering the phones with the pictures of divorced wives and kids who were growing up without them. All the guys who congregated round the pool in the Green Zone, or lived in a supposed secure compound in Kabul, had a hotel room and a barracks billet in Erbil, when things were likely to get ‘difficult’ took a cloak of the sentimental, and then would push the pictures round. ‘Great girl . . . super kids . . . really well, she looks . . . lovely, lovely kids . . . must be proud of them . . .’ That’s how it was supposed to be. Everyone had an eyeful of the one-time wife, and the kids who are now trying to sleep while she’s getting a decent shafting from the new bloke on the block and the sounds are creaking through the thin walls. No one says that the ex-woman and the brats look just like everyone else’s. Off the next morning and might be the day to die, or the day to get a bloody awful mutilation wound, or the day to get taken and face big music.

  It could be the day Merc died.

  He had no phone with pictures on it. Did it concern him?

  Her challenge, and the mischief in her face. The lights came on in front. Kristjan – ten or fifteen years older than Merc and the girl beside him – had given the thumbs-up. Might have been to wish them luck . . . Might need it.

  Merc said, ‘You do what I tell you, exactly that. Remember my promise.’

  Bombast seconds earlier, but all of it flushed out. ‘What did you promise?’

  ‘To take you out – why he stayed in there, your brother. Because of my promise.’

  ‘How do we do it?’

  He did not answer. She had seemed to shrivel. Had been bold and sat up straight, and had now subsided. They were rolling. The Polo had good power. He stayed close to the fender in front and used only the side lights. Merc no longer considered a situation at the ‘end game’ and how it would be when they hit the block. No more dreaming. His forehead was lined with the ruts of concentration. He would have liked to have had the pistol on his own lap, but he had no weapon. Beside him, she was starting to pant, like the stress had reached her. They went at speed and Martin, in front, had lifted the pace and they probably broke most of the speed limits in the municipality of Kingispill, where he might die and might not.

  A sense of age gripped him. Close to the ‘sometime’ when he should have jacked it. Packed a kit bag. Handed a weapon into the armoury. Sold off everything that he owned in Erbil, and Rob and Brad would drive him to the airport and grip his hand, hug him. Age caught all of them, might now have hacked into him. Might have reckoned himself past his sharpest, reactions a fraction slower, and no way to retrieve one-time youth: knew it and was frightened of it. She was close to him and he smelt her, thought it was her fear, did not think less of her, and closer as he felt the pressure of her arms.

  She had lived off her brother who had been a criminal. She had wanted to be a concert pianist. She had thought of herself as a revolutionary, and had so little credibility that to be groped by the self-styled Leader had seemed worthwhile for an entry ticket to the movement. Her ‘enemy’ had thought her so worthless that he’d offered her freedom in exchange for touting, informing. She had believed herself brave. She clung to a stranger, and to give herself courage had taunted him, and was ashamed. They went towards the road-block, where he said there were guns and petrol drums in a chicane to prevent a car speeding through.

  Kat could not hold his hand on the wheel, or his arm that swung with the motion of the wheel. She sank down to the rubbish and dirt on the floor, and hooked her arms around his leg, hands clasped tight underneath his thigh.

  The town was a place of ghosts.

  She saw, through the bottom of the open window, shadows on bicycles, most without lights or reflectors, looming from the darkness. A van was parked and two men threw bin bags in through the rear door. A woman, a winter coat covering her dressing-gown, swept the step of a shop front that was not yet lit. A police vehicle overtook them, blue lights rotating on the roof, and would beat them to the bridge where the drums were, and the guns . . . A drunk, or an acid addict, was sprawled half on the pavement and across the gutter and half in the road, and might – perhaps – have survived the night in the rain . . . Kat had been loved only by her brother, and she had seen the scale of the explosion, and he had not come running towards the car in the minutes before the detonation. She knew the story – and the lesson – of the Wolf’s Lair. There was a road off to the right that went to the heart of the town, and a timber truck and heavy trailer, loaded with pit-prop lengths of pine, emerged from it and was nearly across the road. The boys pulled out and Merc followed. She sensed oncoming headlights and heard the scream of tyres and the yell of horns, and they missed it. She held his leg, clung to it.

  She had made her own life. Dumped by her father, abandoned by her mother, had won her place at the Conservatory. Had ignored those who had warned her of association with ‘negative elements’. Had known best, flouncing away after being told of her dismissal. Had gone to the group and listened to the ‘new warfare’ against the state and had volunteered to paste posters, in the dead of night, to the walls of public buildings . . . Had made her own mistakes. He drove faster. Kept close to the weaving fender in front of him, and it was nearing the time he had said when men on night watch were at their least responsive – half asleep, bored. She had not doubted him. Knew nothing of him, where he came from, but gave him the bundle of her safety, future, life . . . Must believe in him, had no one else.

  ‘I ask you . . . My brother was targeted by the special agencies of Britain, who employ you. Why? He was negligible – a criminal who stole money from banks, from savings accounts. What importance did he have? He gave his life, for what?’

  He did not speak. The car rocked at speed, she clung to him and felt each movement as he shifted in his seat. They were still among buildings, either side of the road, and she did not know how far it would be before they hit the block – and she thought him so calm, and if it were the start of the last minute of his life then she, too, would be dead – a ragdoll corpse and nothing to show from a cut-off life.

  Martin drove, foot down. Toomas, beside him, did the radio. Kristjan held the Makarov. The lights were weak, the red seemed to be the brightest. Once the silhouette of a man passed across the beam, the angle of a rifle barrel jutting away from him. Martin asked them, a hissed question, if it was the right time; a moment of truth and the commitment was made. Whispered agreement from Toomas and a punch on the shoulder from Kristjan behind him. He had his answer, used the wheel stick to shut down the lights, giggled and said it was a rubbish car and that modern versions would not have allowed him to throw the switch. Martin went straight, held the wheel easily, breathed hard.

  Toomas had flicked channels, had found what he wanted. A station from home, beamed out of Tallinn, He’d found the Raadio2 station on the ERR band, what he would have listened to after a day in the heat of the chain-mail armour up by the castle. He had Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’. Freddie Mercury’s foot-stomps and the May guitar blasting. The sound was turned high, like they were in the front row at a concert, right by the speakers. Could not hear, could not think, which was good. Toomas was a middle-aged man and his life was wrecked and he had once wanted to be an academic, and God alone had known in what discipline. None of them had achieved: not Martin as an accountant, nor Kristjan as a fast-footed boxer. They went down the road towards the block and the song hammered at them and gav
e them a cupful of courage.

  Kristjan had the windows down, right and left of him, and had twisted on the back seat and had remembered which side of the heavy oil drums the militia goons had stood and he faced that way and made the pistol ready to fire. The cold wind blew on his face, and he held the weapon in numbed hands.

  A light waved at them, its movement increasingly frantic – and Queen carried them.

  He should not have been there. Pyotr was part-time in the militia, a reservist. He was beyond the drums and halfway down the bridge and heard the thudding of the music and thought it horrible, like a sow in difficult labour. Heard the shouting of the men who had been drafted in along with himself, there to augment the pair of guys assigned the duty.

  Pyotr saw the wild swinging of the light Vladdy held. Vladdy was on the far side of the drums and it was his role to slow vehicles approaching the zigzag among the drums and wave them to a halt so their documents could be examined. Pyotr had received a text message less than an hour before. He had been at his supper, prepared by his mother, then would have been going into Kingisepp to spend the rest of the evening at the home of the widow, Anna, and they might have listened to concert music afterwards, and might have gone to bed and . . . He had not ignored the text message, would never fail to respond. There were two more men, neighbours, and both had hoped to be at home, beside the fire and with the TV bringing them the game from St Petersburg, the top ice hockey fixture, and some Baltika bottles and might have been still awake, slumped in front of the television. He was not warm in the widow’s bed, and they were not sprawled among empty bottles, and Vladdy – he knew – had his uniform on over his pyjamas. The noise rushed towards him but the vehicle was not yet in the cones of light thrown down by the street lamps above the drums.