Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

The bar owner looked doubtful.

  ‘Promise you,’ Tom said. ‘English.’

  The man brought Tom another beer and a fresh flask of vodka, waving the payment away. ‘What brings someone like you to a bar like this?’

  ‘I like this bar.’

  ‘So do I. I own it. That doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘I was at a party …’ Tom hesitated. ‘I left.’

  ‘You didn’t like the other guests?’

  ‘I wanted to punch them.’

  The man smiled sympathetically.

  ‘Ivan Petrovich Dennisov,’ he said, putting out his hand.

  ‘Tovarishch.’

  ‘You call me Dennisov.’

  ‘Tom Fox,’ Tom said. ‘Major Tom Fox.’

  Dennisov grinned. ‘David Bowie. “Space Oddity”. Also “Ashes to Ashes”, “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)”.’ He put a fresh flask of vodka in front of Tom, helped himself to a glassful and raised it in salute.

  ‘Major Tom.’

  Tom looked at him.

  ‘You have to say “Ground Control”.’

  A copy of that day’s Pravda had been dumped on the zinc and Tom read it, as much to keep his Russian sharp as for any information it might contain. Victories in Afghanistan, a new dam beyond the Urals, advances in Soviet computing. The police in the Yakut autonomous republic were investigating a spate of horrific murders with all diligence. An arrest was imminently expected.

  A famous dissident had been rehabilitated. A poet had been unbanned. An amnesty granted state-wide in five categories for politicals jailed before 1953.

  ‘Things are getting better?’ Tom suggested.

  ‘They could hardly get worse.’

  Later, as dawn threatened, while the teenager clattered around her tiny kitchen, the man came out from behind his bar with a mop to rid the floor of spilt beer. Seeing Tom glance at his leg, he said suspiciously, ‘You sure you’re not American?’

  ‘Quite sure. I have friends who’d be impressed by that.’

  ‘Friends who crashed helicopters?’

  ‘Who tripped wires on mines. Met bombs beside the road. Bombs in bins.’

  ‘You never met bombs in bins?’

  ‘No,’ said Tom. ‘I just got shot.’

  ‘Me too,’ the man said. ‘But by a missile. An American one. Three friends died instantly. One man lived. One died later.’

  ‘What happened next?’

  ‘Me? Airlifted to Kabul. My countrymen? They went in with gunships and lost another Mi-24 reducing some shithole to rubble. Now … It’s time you went home.’

  What home? Tom wanted to ask. The man was right though. Looking around, Tom realized the room was empty; he was the last.

  4

  Wax Angel, 6 January 1986

  She’d danced once. Danced the greatest roles by the greatest composers in front of the greatest men in the Soviet Union. In Moscow at the Bolshoi. In Leningrad at the Kirov. She’d looked after the young ones on the beautiful and perfect and disastrous tour where everyone danced wonderfully at the Palais Garnier in Paris, and the orchestra were at their finest, and Nureyev defected to the enemy, and the tour and everyone else’s careers fell apart around him.

  Her body was old and battered now.

  Not as old as her face made her look. Not as old as those who swept past her on the street with families and flats and places to go imagined. But older than she liked and battered certainly. She hurt from sleeping in doorways and the crypts of those few churches still open at night. It was nothing to the pain of training though: the blood-soaked points to her ballet shoes, the agony in her groin where she stretched and split and twisted her body in a way no man had dared.

  They had doctors at the Bolshoi.

  She could remember the relief morphine brought when her injuries threatened to prevent her going on stage. The strong hands of the physios kneading the knots from her locked muscles. She’d lived on champagne, caviar and the admiration of her lovers, male and female. No prison had been more luxurious.

  It was a different kind of hard on the street.

  No fun in summer and worse in winter. A new pair of boots would have made all the difference but who would give new boots to an old parasite like her? There’d been the year she wanted to hang herself but didn’t have a rope. When she eventually found a rope, she decided to cut her wrists instead. Broken glass wasn’t good enough. It had to be a knife. When she found one and still didn’t kill herself, she decided she must want to live after all.

  The old woman begging on the steps of the Church of Our Saviour always told the police she bought the candles she carved from an Uzbek in the market near the motorway. She couldn’t say where the Uzbek got the candles. That wasn’t her business and you never knew with Uzbeks …

  It was only new recruits who questioned her.

  Bumpkins in uniform.

  There was no crime in Moscow. At least, very little.

  That was the official version. No crime, and what crime there was was the fault of gypsies and Jews. Occasionally a good Russian got drunk and killed his wife in a temper, and wept in remorse come morning. Mostly he simply turned himself in. Every imperfect society had recidivists, of course. And the Soviet Union was not yet perfect. It would be in time but until then the militsiya were here to help keep it honest. She didn’t really buy her candles at the market by the motorway. How would she get up there with her poor legs and how could she afford the sort of prices an Uzbek would ask? She was given the candles by a priest she’d known when he was a boy. He probably rationalized the candles as Christian charity. She knew it as guilt for something forgotten by everyone except them.

  She didn’t carve wax angels either.

  At least, not as far as the militsiya were concerned.

  If, after explaining where the candles came from, the old woman was asked why she carved angels, she was careful to correct the questioner. Angels were religious, and although freedom of religion was enshrined in Soviet law, belief itself could lead to complications. In her view, belief in anything led to complications, but she kept that thought to herself. She carved the Spirit of Moscow. Wouldn’t her questioner agree the spirit of a city as great as Moscow deserved wings?

  They didn’t believe her.

  They weren’t required to believe her.

  She was simply required to tell the lie.

  She denied that she carved angels so often that Wax Angel became what they called her among themselves, and how she started to think of herself. It wasn’t as if anyone remembered her real name anyway.

  The militsiya left her alone, mostly. In return she told them things now and then. For all she knew, everyone in Moscow told them things. The secret was to tell them as little as possible and very definitely nothing they needed to know.

  5

  Telephone

  Tom Fox woke a week into the New Year to the sound of a telephone. He was grateful for its ring. He’d been in the Bogside on a dark and unwelcoming street, with light in pools from the few street lamps not yet broken and republican songs echoing from a pub on the corner. Before that he’d been on the hills near the border, with a cottage in flames behind him. In the Bogside, he’d been plastering an upstairs wall. Plastering was his cover but this was for himself. He was skimming a false wall beside a fireplace. Behind it was the L96A1 he’d used to kill the man in the cottage.

  For all he knew, the rifle was still there.

  It took Tom a moment to recognize his flat, to shake away one world and acknowledge another. The telephone was on a table by the front door and he went there naked, freed by waking alone and not bothered by the sight of himself in a mirror in the tiny hall. ‘Fox …’

  ‘Is my stepdaughter with you?’ The voice was imperious.

  ‘What?’ Shutting his eyes, Tom squeezed away the last of his nightmare and focused on the receiver in his hand.

  ‘This is Edward Masterton. Is my stepdaughter with you?’

  ‘Of course not … Sir, this is an
open line.’

  ‘I know it’s an open line. There’s a car on its way and I want you here now. Apparently you’re the last known person to talk to her. I want to know what she said. I want to know if she told you where she was going.’

  ‘She’s vanished?’

  ‘Obviously she’s vanished.’

  Alert now, and shivering in the chill hallway, Tom said, ‘Did she leave a note?’

  ‘What makes you ask that?’

  ‘Isn’t that what teenagers do? Leave notes.’

  ‘Here, Fox. Now.’

  The line went dead, followed a moment later by a second click and then silence. Tom put down his receiver, picked it up again and listened to the lazy tone. Whichever KGB clerk had the job of transcribing his calls would pass that up the line the moment he realized the significance of what had just been said. Tom imagined that the Soviet Committee for State Security operated like every other intelligence agency he’d ever come across. Rule One was cover your back.

  The ambassador’s response shocked him, though. Either Sir Edward believed the Soviets already knew, or he was too angry to worry.

  When Tom’s phone rang again, it was to say a car was waiting. Leaving Sad Sam, he stepped over the stray cat that spent its days guarding the gate, passed the bored KGB man in his little box and opened the rear door of a blue embassy Jaguar. In the back, on the shiny leather seat, sat Sir Edward’s head of security. First glance would have told you he was an ex-serviceman. Second glance might have suggested he needed to exercise his body less and his mind more. A flint-like sharpness suggested that second glance would be wrong.

  ‘Morning,’ Tom said.

  The ex-serviceman stared at him.

  ‘Here to make sure I don’t abscond?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  The man nodded at the driver’s mirror and the V12 purred into life. As the Jaguar turned south, a sleek Volga fell into place behind it.

  ‘Subtle,’ Tom said.

  ‘There’s a hierarchy. Sir Edward merits a Volga. I merit a new Moskvitch. You merit an old one. That’s also how you tell the services apart. The KGB drive Volgas, the police Moskvitches.’

  ‘I had a Volga the other night.’

  ‘You must have got that wrong.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘I don’t get things like that wrong.’

  The man looked at him. A long considered stare until Tom glanced away. He had no wish to get into a pissing contest with an ex-paratrooper. Unless he wanted to go home, of course. Because that’s where the Second Secretary could send him. ‘Do you know where she is?’ the man asked finally.

  ‘Why the hell would I –’

  ‘Do you know where she is?’

  ‘No,’ Tom said. ‘I have no idea where she is.’

  The man sat back and considered his next question carefully. When he spoke, his voice was less clipped and there was a trace of an accent. Something northern, Yorkshire maybe. ‘Any idea why Sir Edward thinks you might?’

  ‘Because he’s clutching at straws?’

  ‘There has to be more to it than that.’

  Tom shrugged. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘You see Sir Edward.’

  ‘Have we told the Soviets?’

  ‘Sir Edward’s rather hoping she’ll come back on her own.’

  ‘Does London know?’

  ‘Fox. You don’t seem particularly concerned.’

  ‘For the kid? Of course I’m concerned.’

  ‘For yourself. When I left, Sir Edward was raging. Apparently you gave his stepdaughter a lesson in how to commit suicide.’

  Tom inhaled sharply. ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

  The car trailing them stopped outside, as if the embassy’s high gates and wrought-iron railings were enough to make its engine fail. In a way they were. Inside was Great Britain. Outside, Soviet Russia.

  ‘He’s in his office,’ a woman at the reception desk told the head of security, who nodded and headed for the stairs. Across the hallway, two guards were watching, but casually. They knew something was going on. They didn’t know what. Ex-soldiers, possibly still serving. One caught Tom’s eye and shrugged.

  Sir Edward’s office was as big as Tom remembered.

  The desk was impressively huge and largely empty. There was the obligatory Annigoni portrait of the Queen as a young woman on the wall behind it. On a side table sat a photograph of Sir Edward with the PM. Before the door had even shut, the woman at Sir Edward’s side strode over and slapped Tom so hard his head jerked sideways.

  ‘Anna!’ Sir Edward protested.

  ‘How could you?’ she shouted. ‘How could you be so stupid? What kind of monster says Wrist to elbow if you’re serious?’

  ‘Did you know?’ Tom asked. ‘Did you know what your daughter was doing?’

  For a moment Anna Masterton’s face was hollow as a mask and, as the anger went out of her, Tom knew that she had.

  ‘What’s this about?’ Sir Edward demanded.

  ‘Your stepdaughter had dragged something sharp across her wrists. Not for the first time from the look of it. I told her to roll her sleeves up or roll them down. Have the fight or …’

  ‘Not?’ Sir Edward asked.

  ‘Was there a fight to have, sir?’

  ‘With Alex there’s always a fight to have.’

  ‘What did her note say?’ Tom asked.

  ‘There wasn’t one,’ Sir Edward said crossly. ‘We went up to her room when we got back from Borodino to see if she was still sulking and half her things were gone. She’ll be back,’ he added. ‘We’ve barely been out here six months. She’s spent most of those at school. Not to mention half this holiday moping upstairs. Where’s the wretched child going to go? Anna just needs to ring round Alex’s friends …’ Running his hand through silvering hair, Sir Edward looked at the pen on his desk and then at files piled in his in tray.

  Lady Masterton caught the glance and her face tightened. Now was when Tom should leave. If he was wise, he’d simply ask permission to go, but a question needed answering. ‘Where was the party?’

  Husband and wife turned, as if they’d forgotten he was there.

  ‘The one she wasn’t allowed to go to.’

  ‘Who told you about that?’ Sir Edward demanded.

  Catching Lady Masterton’s eye, Tom lied. ‘Your stepdaughter, when we were talking on New Year’s Eve. She seemed upset about it. Actually, she seemed upset about everything.’

  ‘So you taught her how to cut her wrists?’

  ‘I wanted to shock her into thinking about what she was doing, sir.’ Tom hesitated. ‘Before she did something really stupid and it was too late.’

  ‘I don’t see what it had to do with you.’

  ‘Nothing, sir. It had nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Sir Edward sat back as if he’d won a debating point.

  ‘I’ll ring round,’ Lady Masterton said. ‘Although I doubt she’s with anyone we know. One of the mothers would have called me by now. Whether Alex wanted her to or not. And yes,’ she added, before her husband had done more than draw breath, ‘I’ll sound everyone out as discreetly as possible.’

  Tom watched her go.

  ‘Fox, I have reports to check.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Wait outside. I’ll call for you if I need you.’

  Lady Masterton looked surprised when Tom joined her.

  ‘Important papers,’ Tom said.

  Taking a Country Life from a side table, he buried himself in the ads at the back. He could buy a two-bedroom mews house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea for £98,000. The same sum would secure a small island in a Scottish loch with a shooting lodge ripe for conversion. If he didn’t like that, there was a cottage in Hampshire with a hundred yards of its own bank and fishing rights. He’d be fifteen miles from Caro’s parents if he bought that.

  Good for seeing Charlie.

  Mind you, being able to afford any of them was only slightly more likely than finding money for the cas
tle in northern Spain, 200 hectares, a vineyard and its own stables. Offers around £500,000.

  When Tom closed the magazine, he realized that Anna was still making calls. She was explaining that Alex had had a sleepover while they were away and like an idiot she’d forgotten where. She didn’t suppose … Anna Masterton was a convincing liar, at least to anyone not looking for the panic in her voice.

  6

  Kisses for Mayakovsky

  A stark black-and-white sticker on the girl’s bedroom door announced Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics. A smiling sun below it declared Atomkraft? Nei Takk. Inside, posters were plastered so thickly they overlapped. A huge fishing net hung from her ceiling. It had been spray-painted black and silver. A poster of a vaguely familiar movie star claimed pride of place on the biggest wall.

  His collar was up, a slash of light lit his eyes.

  ‘Bela Lugosi,’ Anna Masterton said.

  A flyer for Killing Joke, The Pale Fountains and Heist at the Hammersmith Palais rested under the glass sheet that topped her bedside cabinet.

  Anna sighed. ‘We didn’t let her go.’

  Of course you didn’t, Tom thought.

  ‘And that?’ he asked.

  A postcard of a wolf peering through wire with fir trees behind.

  ‘She got it from an East German girl at the swimming pool. The one having the party. We’re caged, you see. It’s free …’

  Turning it over, Tom found a cartoon from Krokodil, Moscow’s satirical magazine, pasted to the back. It showed a Soviet tank exhibiting a bad case of brewer’s droop. The card was made in Leningrad, not East Germany; Tom wondered if Anna realized that.

  ‘You don’t mind Edward asking you to help with this?’

  That wasn’t the question she wanted to ask.

  Even upset, Anna Masterton was far too polite to put the question she really wanted answered. Why the hell would my husband suggest I show you round my daughter’s bedroom?

  ‘I’ve done a certain amount of investigative work,’ Tom said carefully. ‘While seconded to Intelligence. Sir Edward thought I might find something to indicate where this party was held.’