His shoes were sodden before he reached halfway.
At the top, he stopped and lit a papirosa, stared down at the spa below and wondered the obvious. How the fuck did he come to find himself here? In Russia, in the middle of winter, alone on a bench, miles outside Moscow, jagged up on painkillers, staring down at what seemed to be a clinic in name only.
There was no obvious answer.
Not even when he lit a second cigarette.
Money, sex, violence … Call them love, banking and politics if you must. Most crimes were birthed by one of the three. Most revenge, if revenge was what Alex was, began with them. High overhead a hawk circled in the cold air, spiralling higher and higher, with its gaze fixed on a particular spot. The sun was already low and the bird’s underside glowed as if coals filled its belly.
Follow the money.
Few currencies came softer than the rouble. What did you follow in a state where money was printed to order by the people who ruled, and it bought nothing in non-Soviet states anyway? If he couldn’t follow the money, he should follow the power.
Tom was wondering whether he should be getting back when he saw the commissar’s driver start up the hill towards him, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched and head down. He guessed that meant the answer was yes. Taking a last drag at his papirosa, Tom ground it into the snow and stood up from his bench.
As he did so, the young man’s hand left his pocket and gunmetal glinted in the winter light. Only instinct threw Tom sideways. Pain from his wounded shoulder drove a scream from his body as he rolled, knowing his stitches had burst. The first shot passed overhead. The second hit the snow beside him and Tom rolled again, waiting for a third shot that didn’t come. The boy’s automatic had jammed.
When the waves of pain receded, the Russian was almost on him.
The young man’s boot kicked out and Tom rolled away, managing to avoid a blow that would have smashed his collarbone. He rolled again, saved by slush his attacker slipped slightly on the mud beneath the snow. Then the boy steadied himself and headed straight for Tom. He was younger, stronger, uninjured.
It was, Tom realized bleakly, going to be an uneven fight.
Down below, Sveta yelled and his attacker hesitated. Her shout came again and Tom saw Sveta and then her grandfather, the maître d’ and a fat man in white who had to be the cook. The cook had a frying pan in his hand.
Sveta ordered the boy to drop his weapon.
When Tom’s attacker went back to wrestling with the gun’s slide, she asked if he was mad. Did he know who her grandfather was? He would be executed. His family would be arrested, sent to the gulags. Still the boy struggled with his weapon, swearing as Tom climbed unsteadily to his feet.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Shit …’
‘Give me the gun,’ Tom ordered.
The boy yanked at the Makarov. ‘You can’t have her.’
And the round jammed in the chamber was ejected, the hammer cocked as the slide jacked back, and another round rose in the magazine and slid itself into place. For a second, when the boy spun away, Tom thought he intended to shoot Sveta. Instead he raised the automatic in one fluid gesture, opened his mouth and swallowed the barrel, firing without giving himself time to think.
Bone, blood and brains rose in a fountain from the back of his head, splattering themselves over Tom. The boy’s body crumpled and lay shuddering in the snow as nerves twitched and life left him. The commissar looked horrified, but Sveta was already racing uphill towards them. A pistol in her hand that Tom hadn’t known she’d been carrying.
30
Back at the Dacha
You can’t have her …
The things Tom was to remember about that night were not those he felt he should remember. He should have been worrying at the boy’s last words, running through all their possible meanings.
He, Tom, couldn’t have her?
Nobody could have her?
What if the boy hadn’t been talking about Alex? His accent had been strange. Definitely not Muscovite, perhaps Baltic. He might have been speaking colloquially and talking about his weapon.
Give me the gun.
You can’t have her.
It was the second time in days Tom had stared death in the face.
He should be more frightened. At the very least he should feel grateful that he’d been granted more time to find out what had happened to Alex.
Actually, he did feel that. He simply didn’t feel anything for himself.
What he was to remember were the little things, the fragile and illusive threads that held the fabric of those hours together. The sound of an unexpectedly loud clock striking after midnight, the little dacha falling back into what he’d thought was silence until he noticed the creak of its walls and the tap of a branch against the window of a different room. The scuttle of a mouse, so different to the skittering of the rat in the cellar before he was shot. The pad of an elderly tomcat checking all was right with the world. All these. And a slowly growing sense that those words had to refer to Alex.
She was still alive. What else could You can’t have her mean?
Against that, he was no closer to finding her.
Sveta’s grandfather had settled back into his little dacha as if it was a second skin, drinking brandy from a heavy goblet, fussing over his mog, telling Sveta to take Tom outside and see to his shoulder, while he made a telephone call.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Sveta said, when Tom asked who he was calling.
‘Can you find out?’
‘It’s not my business,’ she said. ‘It’s not your business either.’
‘Then why am I here?’
In answer, Sveta tipped neat vodka on to a rag and began wiping dried blood from Tom’s shoulder. When he yelped, she raised her eyebrows and Tom kept his jaw clamped after that while she tacked his wound shut with a stitch of ordinary thread.
‘Where did you learn that?’
She glanced towards the dacha. ‘Where do you think?’
That evening, after her grandfather had retired to bed, she showed Tom the stars. They seemed colder and clearer in a sky that was darker and wider than any he remembered. There was no moon and no cloud cover. The nearest town was too small to cast any light and the capital far enough away to be a haze on the horizon.
On nights like this, she told him, she expected Mongols to ride out of the darkness on their shaggy ponies, with their bows over their shoulders. At least with enemies like that you knew where you stood. She smiled when she said that. Then told him it was time he went to bed, because tomorrow her grandfather would want to talk again about what happened when the house was stormed.
‘He thinks Alex is alive?’
‘Probably. Until she’s more useful dead.’
Tom didn’t find that reassuring.
Shutting the front door behind them, he shot the bolts at the top and the bottom while Sveta looked on amused. She checked the windows herself and pointed up the narrow stairs, telling him to turn right. No sofa this time. He had a box room at the end. Her bedroom was at the other end. Even from downstairs they could hear her grandfather in the room between, his snore as slow and regular as a blunt saw across dry wood.
You can’t have her.
Should he tell Sveta what the boy had said?
To turn it round, why hadn’t he told Sveta already? Why hadn’t he told her grandfather? Because he didn’t trust a man who’d send Sveta and him outside while he made a telephone call? But if he couldn’t trust the commissar, who among the Soviets could he trust? That thought brought its own questions. And then he remembered Dennisov.
He trusted Dennisov.
‘That boy who tried to shoot me …’
Sveta hushed Tom into silence. They’d left the boy on the hill in the snow and kept going, with Sveta in the driving seat. The spa would take care of it, Tom had been told. It hadn’t happened. It was not to be discussed.
He would be wise to remember that.
She indicat
ed that he should climb the stairs ahead of her and they went up together, pausing for Tom to get his breath at the top.
‘Your shoulder hurts?’
He nodded.
‘If Vedenin sent him, my grandfather will find out.’
Sveta shut her door without looking back and Tom went to the box room he’d been assigned and halted, looking for the bed. It was in a cupboard. Rather, it was the cupboard. A set of drawers beneath supported a coffin-like frame on which sat a rolled-up mattress. Unrolled, it fitted exactly.
Painted roses curled inside the doors, which were pierced by heart-shaped air holes.
The wooden wall at his feet showed a naïf painting of the forest behind the hut. The cupboard roof above had the stars he’d seen outside. The only wall unpainted was behind Tom’s head. This was lined with copies of Pravda so old they showed pictures of Khrushchev. Curiosity made him peel back a corner. Behind Khrushchev he found Stalin and behind Stalin the edge of a saint’s halo. In pain or not, Tom was grinning as he turned out the light.
The dreams came in hard and fast and he found himself in a valley, a house on fire behind him and a bastard with a sniper rifle coming after. They hunted him through dark drizzle across a sodden hill under a moonless sky and only the lack of a moon saved him. He dreamed of a white Mini crashing into an oak tree on a dry road under a bright moon, and wept because he could do nothing to stop it.
He knew the man being hunted was himself and didn’t care enough to want him to escape. He knew the girl in tears inside the Mini was his daughter and no matter how much he cared her car still carved a brutal scar into the trunk of the oak tree.
He could describe the scar it had carved precisely.
When the Mongols on their ponies appeared, burning villages, nailing priests to doors and filling the mouths of princes with molten silver, he was grateful for their kindness. They were riding away as they rode in, to the sound of waves on shingle, or a blunt saw across dry wood, when Tom woke with a jolt.
The lights were off, the dacha quiet and the doors to his cupboard shut. But someone else was definitely there. Silent and still. Not touching but crouched above him. They were good. They had to be. It must hurt like hell to hold yourself up by digging your knees into the sharp edges of the bed’s box frame.
Clenching his fist, Tom readied to strike.
‘Don’t,’ Sveta said.
A hand found his face, wiping away tears he hadn’t known were there.
‘Always so sad,’ she said.
With her knees still on the frame, she pulled the blanket from his chest and dipped forward to kiss him almost quizzically. Her breasts were heavy against his ribs and Tom realized she was naked; then she reached under the blanket and found him.
‘Sveta …’
‘Good Marxists …’
Tom felt her fingers tighten.
‘Always seize the means of production. That was a joke,’ she added, in case he hadn’t realized. ‘From my school.’
Very slowly, very precisely, she stroked him.
And then, with her knees still on the cot’s sharp edges, she lowered herself on to him, lifted herself off and lowered herself again. Her movements carried a precision he’d never imagined anyone could bring to sex.
Only the fact she suddenly gripped his shoulders while her insides quivered told him she’d come. Then she lifted herself away and moved her knees from the cot’s edge to crouch by his feet. ‘Did that hurt?’ she asked.
‘Everything hurts.’
‘Welcome to Russia.’
When Tom went downstairs the next morning, Sveta’s grandfather was sitting at a tiny table in the hall, which had been laid for breakfast with a patched white tablecloth and mismatched china. An Oxford Book of English Verse lay open on the table, a dictionary beside it.
‘Know this one?’ the old man asked. ‘“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings …”’
‘“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair”?’
‘Indeed. My colleagues would say the Soviet Union is the rock on which history has broken, perhaps even ended.’
‘Rocks can be worn away.’
‘They can split, they can crack, they can sink beneath the waves. Seas can dry, however. Seabeds rise to become mountains in their turn.’
‘That could be poetry.’
The old man looked at him, the sharpness of his gaze softening as he glanced towards the kitchen. ‘I’ve come to believe history scans,’ he said. ‘It very definitely flows.’ Nodding towards the kitchen, he added, ‘I should have you killed. My granddaughter would never know. Vedenin would hardly object. I doubt even your ambassador would make much of a fuss. Sudden fever. Blood poisoning. A fatal reaction to poor-quality Soviet antibiotics.’
‘Why would you do that?’
His gaze returned to where Sveta banged pans, clattered crockery and occasionally paused, looking exasperated as she opened cupboards and drawers she’d never bothered with before. ‘Why do you think?’
‘Frying pan?’ Sveta shouted.
‘Isn’t one,’ the old man shouted back. ‘Use the coffee pan.’
The splash of water in a bowl and grumbling told them she was washing up the saucepan she’d only just finished using.
‘Then why don’t you?’ Tom said.
‘Two reasons,’ the commissar replied. ‘One, she’s not serious. She’d never have let you bed her that quickly if she was.’
‘The second?’ Tom asked, feeling deflated.
‘She’s playing.’
‘At what?’
‘Being happy.’ They watched from the little hall as Sveta broke eggs into the saucepan, accidentally smashing the yolk of one and deciding to turn fried eggs into scrambled while there was still time. ‘You did bed her, didn’t you?’
‘It was the other way round.’
‘You’re the first since her husband died.’
‘I didn’t know she’d been married.’
‘She’ll tell you if she wants to.’
‘It was unhappy?’
‘She adored him. He was a cosmonaut, a good man. The first stage didn’t separate from the second. His rocket exploded shortly after take-off.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘If he’d succeeded, we’d have had our moon landing.’
‘He went alone?’
‘Three others. You know how ground control signed off? “May nothing be left of you, neither down nor feather …” Nothing was, just back to the atoms where everything began.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said, not knowing what else to say.
‘Me too. Now, what was it you wanted to ask?’
‘Were you behind the gunman at the spa?’
The commissar smiled. ‘It’s taken you this long to ask?’ He picked up his coffee, looked at it and put it down again. ‘Would I tell you if I was?’
‘Quite probably.’
The old man grinned. ‘You don’t think it’s Vedenin?’
‘What if that’s too obvious?’
‘Hurt Sveta and I’ll have you killed. Probably do it myself. Other than that, what reason do I have to want you dead? Well, what reason would I have had then?’
31
Ural 650
The bike grinding its way up the darkened track was a 1970s Ural 650, with its famously awful K301 carburettor swapped out and the original 6-volt dynamo replaced by a 12-volt model. Other than that, the machine was original. A bit rusted in places, particularly on the chrome. The black plastic band sealing the seam around the two-part petrol tank had rotted but it didn’t leak, at least not enough to be dangerous. The gearbox leaked though. There hadn’t been a Ural built where the gearbox didn’t leak, and that included the model built by workers wearing white gloves and delivered to Stalin.
The man riding the bike regretted not buying the sidecar model.
It would have given him better balance. On the other hand, what with only 40 horsepower to the flat-twin, the sidecar’s weight would have made the track in f
ront of him impassable. It wasn’t the ice that made the going hard, it was the frayed edges to the road and the sharpness of the bends that had the engine thumping and forced him to change down and down again.
Between a drop in revs and the unhealthy thud of gears meshing, he heard a shot from the woods and flinched, bringing his motorbike to a slithering halt, even as he wondered if he should have accelerated for all he was worth, which obviously enough wasn’t much. At best, he’d give the shooter a slowly moving target.
The woman who stepped from between trees trained her rifle on him almost casually as she crossed the track, twisting slightly to keep it sighted while she lifted a snow rabbit from the ditch where it had tumbled. It kicked twice and then she had it by its back legs, and swung it so the back of its skull caught the edge of her raised heel. She glanced down to check it was properly dead and then she shifted her attention to the Ural, jerking her rifle to indicate that the rider should climb off.
He shook his head.
Working the bolt, she slotted another round into the rabbit rifle, raising its muzzle enough to aim at his knee, which still hugged the petrol tank. The leg out of sight kept the motorbike balanced on the slippery ground.
‘Get off,’ she ordered.
He looked at her and they both knew he’d refuse.
But then the early sun came up from behind the trees and brightness filled a patch of forest that had been dark and Dennisov looked at the young woman holding the rifle and felt his heart lurch as she stared back at him.
She had a serious face.
A face that belonged, it seemed to him, to someone who’d never stopped to wonder if she was plain or attractive, and was all the more attractive for that. It wasn’t that he hadn’t been shot before. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been days he’d have happily shot himself. It was simply that it would be a pity to be shot, even only in the leg, by the girl from his childhood poster, because that was obviously who she was.
So he shrugged to show that sunlight on her braids had changed his mind, considered which leg to swing over the tank, what he should do with the bike afterwards and whether the track was too slippery to let him pull the bike on to its centre stand.
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