Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

  ‘I can’t leave.’

  ‘Try?’ Dennisov suggested.

  Have you? Tom wondered.

  He knew the answer. For all Dennisov bristled at every mention of his wife, he’d probably never stopped trying. Dennisov drunk in his bar was the tip of the emotional iceberg. The bulk of the man’s misery lay below water.

  As for Tom, how could he explain that he’d pinned his entire hope of redemption on finding Alex? He needed redemption as much as she needed saving. If she was still alive to be saved. If there was enough of him left to be redeemed. He wouldn’t allow himself to leave the Soviet Union until that was done. He couldn’t …

  Tom knew how absurd that was, how arrogant, how messianic.

  He didn’t care.

  ‘They’ll kill you,’ Dennisov warned.

  He didn’t care about that either. When Tom shrugged, Yelena looked as if she wanted to slap him, so he turned to go. Dennisov grabbed him.

  ‘We still have beer,’ Dennisov said.

  ‘Out of date? From your glorious neighbours?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Yelena sighed. ‘Tell my brother what you want this time.’

  The Ural was a rip-off of a 1940s BMW flat-twin, still turned out in the thousands by at least three factories in the Soviet Union. The plans were found when the Red Army took Berlin. The electrics were poor, the headlight weak and the drum brakes virtually useless over fifty. Not that that was a problem, since the bike hated going over fifty anyway. Dennisov kept it in a little courtyard at the back of the bar.

  On first kick, the starter was soft.

  The second built pressure and the flat-twin fired on Tom’s third kick, ticking over with a satisfying if smoky thud. Before Dennisov had let him kick the bike into life he’d insisted that Tom build a small fire under the crankcase. When Yelena protested that it wasn’t necessary, he told her that knowing how to warm oil was an essential skill for an honorary Russian to have.

  ‘Bring the bloody thing back in one piece,’ Yelena said. ‘He likes it, all right? It doesn’t matter that it cripples his stump to ride. It’s his. From the old days.’

  ‘When he still had a leg?’

  ‘No,’ said Dennisov. ‘When I was with Sophia.’

  ‘His wife.’ Yelena spat.

  ‘My sister doesn’t like her,’ Dennisov said, as if that wasn’t obvious.

  ‘No one likes her,’ Yelena said.

  24

  Back to the House

  Caro’s family probably said the same about him, Tom decided. He was on the road out of Moscow and replaying Yelena’s final comments in his head. Her certainty, her brother’s hurt. She’d put her arms round Dennisov, hugging him. It was as close as she could get to an apology without taking her words back. Then she’d found a can of petrol, begged Tom for the use of his lighter and disappeared.

  The next thing Tom knew, a pile of waste in the corner, which he would’ve thought too damp or cold to burn, went up in a whoosh of flame that reached the bare branches of a sad-looking tree, before falling back to a fierce roil of suddenly black smoke.

  ‘I like flames,’ she said, when Dennisov sighed.

  Taking the Ural’s toolkit from his hand, she extracted the screwdriver and trotted out to the main road, nodding politely to Tom’s shadow before stabbing the front wheel of his rusting Moskvitch. When the man swore, she shrugged.

  ‘Always the delinquent,’ Dennisov said with pride.

  The shadow was on his knees in the slush, fitting a jack under the car, with his spare tyre leant against the sill, when Tom thudded round the corner in goggles and helmet, wrapped in Dennisov’s flying jacket, Alex’s enamel badges pinned to its lapel. He doubted the kneeling man even knew the man on the Ural motorbike was him.

  Tom was beyond the turn-off to Sveta’s grandfather’s and way beyond the limit permitted to foreigners before his absurd and self-inflicted anger at what Caro’s family might say subsided and he relaxed his shoulders and began riding more safely. If he was stopped out here by militsiya, he was on his own. Mary Batten’s parting comments had made that clear.

  Dennisov had made it clear too.

  If Tom was stopped, he’d taken the bike without approval.

  I get it, Tom thought. No one approves. He was pretty sure he didn’t approve of himself either. The road was different in daylight, harder to recognize. He pulled in at the same petrol station, taking his turn in the queue and handing over a wad of roubles in silence. He bought a meat-filled potato at a truck stop a dozen miles later, pissed behind the canvas screen and shook his head apologetically at a very tired and very cold prostitute who offered him company.

  An officer of the traffic police was examining the Ural when he got back.

  Tom hesitated and his hesitation proved enough to catch the man’s attention. Tom was way beyond the limit for foreigners and travelling without the right papers. Indeed, without any papers at all. The officer stared at Tom’s goggles, his helmet, flying jacket and borrowed army boots, and only relaxed when Tom threw a lazy salute.

  Slinging his leg over the saddle, and with his heart pounding, Tom kicked the engine into life and managed a tight turn without being stopped, asked for his papers or dropping Dennisov’s bike on the gravel.

  The Ural might look like a BMW but it accelerated like a tractor.

  So Tom tucked himself into the slipstream of a lorry heading for Leningrad, used its drag to protect him from the side winds howling across the open fields and fell into a familiar reverie. Riding instinctively, his movements fluid and without thought, he let his mind spin off into memories of how he and Caro began and why they had married. Although that was obvious: Becca. She’d been conceived behind a hedge on the A31.

  The Hogsback had become Tom’s favourite run out of London the moment he bought his first bike. Caro liked the greasy spoon on the southbound side, with its bacon sandwiches and parked-up trucks and chipped mugs of hot sweet tea. She’d asked him to give her a lift down to her parents’ place. He discovered later that the local station was less than two miles from her gate but she’d wanted to arrive wearing his biker jacket and riding on the back of his Honda 450cc Black Bomber.

  To wind up her father most likely.

  Her first real boyfriend, with all that entailed – and for a well-brought-up girl of eighteen, just out of boarding school, it entailed everything – was Japanese. He had a proverb: Even a cracked pot has a lid that fits.

  Caro had changed boyfriends and kept the proverb. Tom never knew if she was the pot and he the lid or the other way round. It didn’t much matter now.

  He was still a diversion in those days.

  At least that’s what he’d thought he was.

  They’d met outside the American Embassy during a protest march. He’d dragged her out of a riot seconds before some sergeant could split her head with his truncheon. Tom told her to go home, Caro told him to get lost and they went from there. Friends only, they agreed. The first time he kissed her she’d been surprised.

  Not shocked; he was the one who’d been shocked.

  ‘I thought you were queer.’

  He’d looked at her, doubly shocked.

  ‘That moustache. Those black leather jackets. Isn’t that why most men go into the Church these days?’

  ‘Not this one,’ he said.

  ‘What’s the reason for this one?’

  He should have had an answer. For weeks afterwards he’d worried about not having an answer. And then he’d worried that an easy answer would be wrong. But he should have had a ready answer. So he made one up. Well, worked one out.

  In case anyone asked again.

  Three months later, half hidden under his leather jacket, his vow of abstinence in shreds and his hand helping Caro with his flies, she lay on her side giving him a blowjob at the edge of a field beside the A31. It wasn’t the first time they’d done that. It was the first time they went further.

  She was already pregnant when she climbed from his bike, os
tentatiously tucked her arm through his and led him up the biggest run of steps he’d seen outside a town hall. The first thing her father did, after pecking his daughter on the cheek and reluctantly shaking Tom’s hand, was ask him to take his motorbike round the back and park it by the stables.

  Three months after that they came down again, by train this time.

  And the machine that was Caro’s family kicked into gear as Tom and Caro’s future was remade around them. The 450cc Honda was one of the first things to go, along with the tattered remains of his Catholic faith. Tom’s bishop was surprisingly understanding. A quick word with a friend of Caro’s father became an interview at the Officer Selection Board in Westbury, initial training at the Chaplaincy Centre in Bagshot, a few months in Belize with an infantry unit, followed by a short course at Mons, with the offer of military intelligence afterwards. At some point someone up the line decided he’d make a better intelligence officer than a chaplain. Since he made a crap chaplain, it was hard to disagree.

  He should have been grateful, he supposed.

  The other options had been Christie’s or the production department at Jonathan Cape. His departure for a state-run boarding school in Kent, which was one up from a children’s home and several down from a real boarding school, had split him from his sister. Getting Caro pregnant had upset his mother; Tom turning into a Protestant destroyed her.

  She died too soon afterwards for peace to be made.

  The Ural was tucked so tightly behind the lorry Tom almost missed his lay-by, skidding to a halt fifty paces beyond and walking the bike backwards because he was too cold and the road too icy for him to turn it round. Parking out of sight, he pulled the Ural on to its centre stand, draped Dennisov’s helmet over its handlebars and set his collar against the wind.

  Snow filled the previous night’s tyre tracks, ageing them to memories.

  The footprints of the paramedics were similarly faded; Tom’s own were starkly obvious as he set off through the woods that screened the house from the road. The hide the Vnutrenniye Voiska had built for Vedenin was gone. There was blood out on the ice, pale, but darker when Tom kicked away new snow above.

  He felt shamed by how badly he simply wanted to get back on Dennisov’s bike and ride away. The house spoke of hollowness where there should have been activity. Where was the crime scene team? Why had no one come to challenge him?

  Tom forced himself to the middle of the lake, staring at the derelict building. And then, when he could put it off no more, he crossed what remained of the ice, feeling every freezing inch of the water beneath his feet. Shattered windows glared like eye sockets in a skull. Casings for plastic bullets looked like dropped toys in the snow.

  He could swear the house was watching him approach.

  Its gaze was cold and flinty as he crossed the last few yards of ice and clambered on to the lawn where the paramedics had gathered. What could be darker than the deaths of twelve children? Whatever it was, he felt it watching him.

  Unable to face the cellar, he headed first for the turret.

  The body of Beziki’s boy was gone, obviously. The curtain used to cover him was tossed to one side. Bullet holes in broken plaster showed where he’d been shot, bloodstains on rotting carpet where he’d fallen. The crime scene team hadn’t even bothered to collect all the brass. Two small-calibre cases remained by the wall where they’d rolled after the boy ejected them.

  He pocketed them both.

  Someone would have told Beziki by now. Tom doubted they’d been gentle.

  It was cold in the turret. Far colder inside than out. So cold that when Tom muttered a prayer for those who had died that day each word formed a wisping trail. His teeth were chattering by the time the prayer was done, his fingernails purple. He was cold enough in his bones to need a hot bath, cold enough in his soul to regret not bringing a hip flask to fill the emptiness.

  Looking out of the window through which Beziki’s boy had fired, Tom saw flitting shadows and looked again. He saw nothing. He felt his guts tighten and his resolve waver. Trauma. Post-trauma. Shock. You can put names to behaviour. If you’re a psychiatrist, that’s your job. His decision to come here alone hadn’t been a conscious one. Not even consciously unconscious. If you could put it like that.

  Nothing moved beyond the window that shouldn’t.

  The wind creaked branches and rattled shutters. Clouds scudded across a gunmetal sky, slab on slab, thick as sheet armour. The far edge of the narrow lake, where the hide had been, fell in and out of shadow. He thought he saw a figure where the hide had been but when he blinked, it was gone.

  The wind was rising, no doubt about it.

  A shutter on the floor below flung itself back, hit the wall and blew closed again, as if the house was self-harming. And Tom knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. He had to go down to the cellar, because why else had he come? After one last look from the turret, he forced himself down the stairs and stopped, standing to the side of a different window. Nothing out there. Nothing to justify this fear.

  Do it, he told himself.

  The door was sealed, which was something.

  Someone at least regarded the cellar as a crime scene.

  Cutting the seal with his pocketknife, Tom pulled a torch he’d borrowed from Dennisov out of his jacket pocket and shone it into the darkness. Unable to do anything else, he followed after.

  A scratching from below made him flick off the beam.

  It came again, sharp and brittle. Tom waited and the sudden silence waited too, until he wondered if they were trying to wait each other out. When the noise came again, Tom held the torch out to his side to throw off whatever waited and flicked it on, pinning a glittering-eyed rat to the cellar floor in the beam.

  ‘Fucker,’ he hissed.

  Rearing back, it showed yellow teeth.

  For a second they glared at each other, and then the rat scuttled for darkness and Tom let it go. Other than the two of them, the cellar was empty. Everything in there had been collected up and spirited away. The rest of the house was a shambles but the cellar floor was so sterile you could have set up an operating theatre. Whatever Tom had hoped to find, he was too late. The scene had been professionally cleaned and he didn’t believe for one second that the cellar contents had been boxed and bagged as evidence.

  Leaving the rat to its depressingly pristine kingdom, Tom stamped back to ground level, shut the cellar door and turned the key. He was just replacing the lead seal he’d cut from the handle when the hair on the back of his neck prickled and his fingers froze on the handle. Behind him, someone coughed politely.

  A man waited, back-lit in a doorway, his face in darkness.

  ‘English,’ Tom said. Which was true. ‘Police.’ Which wasn’t.

  The man’s arm lifted and Tom saw a crossbow.

  And then the shock was real and a quarrel pinned him to the cellar door, the feathers at its notched end jutting out from below his shoulder joint. The sight of them brought a wave of nausea; pain arrived a second later. The man took a step towards him, his fingers reaching for the Lenin badge pinned to Tom’s jacket.

  ‘Mine, I think.’

  He’d removed it and was about to reload the bow when Tom’s name was shouted loudly from outside, and the man swore, stepping back into the brightness behind him.

  This was not how Tom had expected death to be.

  25

  The Ice Beckons

  If I can make it to the road … The lights of a lorry are away to one side and if I can reach the road before it arrives … If the driver is a Prod or sick enough of the situation … There’s something odd in relying on help from a Protestant.

  I’m going to reach the road, though …

  All I have to do is scramble down this slope and up the other bank and on to the tarmac. I look a mess. My donkey jacket is ripped and stinking of smoke and petrol. I’ve lost a boot somewhere, and three nails from my toes and one of the toes.

  I wouldn’t stop for me.


  I can hobble and hope though. Hobble and crawl and even run if I ignore the pain. The sleet in my eyes saves me the effort of crying. My once-white T-shirt is stained with mud. The lights are closer now. The lorry is so close I can hear the growl of its engine as it drops gears to begin climbing the hill.

  I’m not sure if it’s two men behind me or three, how they’re armed or who told them who I really was. They knew, though. Looking back, I should have known they knew. The whiskey, the hearty clap on the shoulder, the jokes and jibes about friends in common. By the end everyone in the room was faking.

  I’m over the ditch and on the slope and the lorry’s lights are dragon eyes getting closer when the punch comes. I lose my breath as I stumble, winded and suddenly cold. The ground is sodden, the lorry on the road so close I don’t know why the driver doesn’t stop. When the lorry accelerates, I have my answer. I try to stand to face the man behind me; but I can’t stand and there’s no man and my leg won’t work. When the second punch comes, I know there’s a bullet in my back.

  Darkness edges in and the world is fading when the old man and two others come to stand over me. One of them nudges me with his foot.

  ‘Nice shot.’

  ‘Fucking brilliant.’

  ‘And in this light, pal. In this fucking light.’

  ‘Should have known.’ It’s the old man who speaks. The one who doesn’t swear. He kicks my prostrate body hard. Stamps on the side of my head. They leave my body where it is. Leave time and blood loss to do the job.

  For reasons known only to God, they don’t.

  ‘Tom … Tom …’

  When the darkness cleared Tom found himself nailed to the cellar door by an arrow below his shoulder. The world he woke up to wasn’t quite the one he’d left. It never was. The last time he surfaced from something like this, he’d found that colours had changed. Something felt different this time too, although it was too soon to say what. He thought he saw a flash of grey beyond the doorway and wondered if it mattered. When crows rose from trees outside, he wondered what they were trying to say.