Moskva

by Jack Grimwood

  ‘Vaguely.’

  ‘She said she thought I should know …’ The tightness in Caro’s voice suggested she didn’t believe her motives were that simple. ‘She’d overheard his housemaster say …’ Caro’s mouth collapsed in misery. ‘That there was nothing wrong with Charlie that having different parents couldn’t cure.’

  ‘God. I’m sorry, Caro.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Pushing herself out of her chair, she took the seat next to him.

  Instinctively, Tom’s arm went round her, her head came to rest on his shoulder and he stroked her hair as she cried. Silently at first, then swallowed sobs that shook her body and soaked his shirt. She sniffled and snuffled and gulped her way out of the tears. And Tom’s hand, which had been stroking her hair, held her tight until a waitress came to clear their table and Caro retook her original seat as if nothing had happened.

  ‘I miss her,’ Caro said, once the waitress was gone.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Tom said, his certainty surprising both of them.

  Her hand reached across to grip his wrist. ‘You don’t mind me asking you to write to Charlie? I was worried you’d be cross.’

  ‘You think it will help?’

  ‘It would show him we’re not enemies. It would show the school.’

  ‘I’ll do it tonight.’

  She half stood, leaning across the table to kiss his cheek and seal his promise. She smelled, as she’d always done, of Dior and sandalwood soap and hairspray. But though she smelled like the woman he remembered, Tom knew she was already somebody else.

  Later, in the bar, they talked about supper without actually eating any, and drank a bottle of Soviet Riesling and decided it wasn’t worth ordering another and left it at that. At the lift, Caro reached out and put her hand on Tom’s wrist.

  He could nod goodnight, extract his arm and peck her on the cheek, pretend her fingers had never reached for him. Instead, he looked at her and the gloom had softened the lines on her face, as it undoubtedly had his, and he realized that the strangeness of the day had sanded the brittle edges between them, for the moment anyway.

  Tom had no real desire to go back to Sad Sam, and there were things he needed to say. Things it was important for Caro to hear.

  ‘This means nothing,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  Undressing, Caro hesitated only once, when she saw the two plasters crisscrossing Tom’s shoulder. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Someone shot me. With a crossbow.’

  She sighed, looked at him and moved in for a proper kiss.

  The sex was slow and quiet. They stood in the window with the curtains drawn back, the room lights off, snow falling in fat flakes past their window and Manezhka Square spread out below them. Her body was as perfect as ever. She let him raise her foot on to a stool and slide into her, her breasts lifting in time with his thrusts. She had cried the very first time they made love, and she cried this time. Tom had no more idea why she’d cried then than now and knew that was his failure, not hers.

  Before they slept, when all Tom really wanted was sleep, when his happiness was losing out to loneliness and he’d decided he didn’t need to say the things he’d thought he needed to say, she asked about Alex. He couldn’t even remember mentioning Alex. But apparently he had, the night she telephoned after he’d called Charlie.

  ‘Tell me,’ Caro ordered.

  So Tom did.

  From Alex cadging a cigarette on the balcony at the party, and what he’d said about cutting her wrists, through to his being arrested as he tried to board Yelena’s train and Sir Edward’s fury afterwards. Then, because he’d started being honest and didn’t know how to stop, he told her about Northern Ireland, about what he really did for military intelligence, about the people he pretended to be.

  He touched her fingers to bullet scars in his leg and back, and they both understood what her not knowing said about when they’d last seen each other naked. And she lay, very still and very quiet, as he told her about being hunted across the hills above Crossmaglen and why he really hated multi-storey car parks. What she said when he was finished was not what he expected her to say.

  ‘Did it ever occur to you that Becca’s death might have been accidental? That she might genuinely have dozed off and hit a tree? That her being pregnant could have had nothing to do with it, that she simply hadn’t told us yet?’

  ‘Caro. How do you –’

  ‘How do you think I know? I demanded a copy of the report. Tom, I don’t need protecting. Rebecca was mine too. She could have been waiting for the right time to tell us. She might have had a clinic fixed. Ten weeks is early days.’

  ‘It wasn’t her boyfriend.’

  ‘I know, I asked him.’

  ‘I bet you didn’t kick the living shit out of him first.’

  ‘Charlie says Becca talks to him. He wakes up and she’s on the end of his bed. They have to keep their voices down so as not to wake the other boys.’

  ‘Dreams,’ Tom said.

  ‘You don’t think …’

  ‘That it’s somehow true? No,’ he said, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘He says he thinks about her all the time.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘How can you possibly –’

  ‘Because I do too. And if I do, you two must.’ Tom thought about it a little more. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I like the idea of Becca talking to Charlie. If you talk to him, and it seems appropriate, please tell him to send my love.’

  ‘You’ve changed.’

  ‘After something like that, how can anyone stay the same?’

  ‘Becca told me once that she didn’t believe in time. Days were dams that failed, hours sticks thrown into the water to measure its speed. Minutes little better than seconds, dust on life’s surface, swept away before we could notice.’

  ‘Caro, what happened?’

  ‘To Becca? I don’t know.’ She buried her head in Tom’s shoulder while he pretended not to feel her tears. ‘Who knows? A stupid argument with … A party he didn’t go to. It could have been a one-night stand.’

  ‘She didn’t drink.’

  ‘You can have them without drinking.’

  ‘It helps,’ Tom said, feeling her withdraw slightly, and then her hand reached for his and gripped it tight.

  He said, ‘I worry that …’

  ‘I have to believe she’d have told us if that had happened.’

  ‘Told you …’

  ‘Told one of us,’ Caro said, smoothing the creases from Tom’s face and kissing his neck as if the bad years had never been. Tom wanted to ask – so badly that he framed the words in three different ways, and held them all back because none were right – if the tenderness behind her kiss meant I remember you or goodbye.

  ‘Go back to Alex,’ Caro said.

  So he described searching her room, his voice breaking as he told Caro about taking Alex’s Smash Hits, Jackies and NMEs from her bedside cupboard, then carefully replacing them. How he’d found the postcard, D and five kisses. How Davie Wong turned out to be a dead end, in not being her boyfriend, but how he’d given Tom an address for the party. How Alex had been long gone, but what remained of the boyfriend was there, tied with wire and quite possibly burned alive …

  ‘Tom,’ Caro sounded scared. ‘Who are these people?’

  ‘Monsters,’ Tom told her.

  She hugged him tighter. ‘Don’t be so blasé about it.’

  ‘I’m not. But monsters are what I do.’

  Sighing, Caro said, ‘I think I preferred it when I thought you were wasting your time with computers, microfiche and old books …’

  He told her about being shot by Vladimir Vedenin with a crossbow. How he’d been moved from hospital to hospital, until the commissar had extracted him and had him put, under guard, in a hospital for senior KGB officers. Tom even told her about making Vladimir Vedenin drive across the ice.
That surprised him.

  He hadn’t intended to tell her that.

  ‘He died?’

  ‘He drowned.’

  ‘Do you regret it?’

  She listened in silence as Tom told her why not. His points weren’t always in order. He doubted that many of them were very clear. He ended with what he’d been trying not to remember, what he’d originally thought the ultimate dead end, the reason he’d gone back to the supposed cult house.

  The dead children in the cellar.

  Then it was his turn to cry.

  She held his head against her breasts, and when he was done, she asked if there was anything else. So he told her about Beziki’s suicide. The way Beziki had spun the revolver’s cylinder before he fired, the photographs of a boy being tortured to death in Berlin, and the sins of the fathers being visited on their children.

  About the dead girl dumped in front of the House of Lions. How badly that had shaken the commissar. How badly that had shaken him.

  About attending her autopsy.

  ‘This is about Becca, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it’s about Becca.’ Tom reached down to find her hand, holding it tight. ‘Well, it started out being about her. Now …’

  Caro nodded. He didn’t need to say it.

  Now it was about Alex.

  ‘You know what you haven’t told me?’ Caro said first thing next morning, when they woke to daylight streaming through curtains they’d left undrawn. ‘Why it is that you can’t spend the next few days with me in Moscow.’

  So he told her what he’d told no one else.

  About the deal he’d made with General Dennisov on the observation platform of the train. What the general had promised to let Kyukov do to Alex if Tom didn’t give him the photographs.

  ‘He has her then? Definitely?’

  ‘So he says. He brought me a photograph of his own …’

  Slipping from her bed, Tom took his jacket from the back of the chair and dug into a side pocket, finding what he wanted.

  ‘It’s not pretty,’ he said.

  Alex knelt naked on a recent issue of Pravda, her wrists tied behind her back, her head bowed and her hair fallen forward, but not enough to hide her tears.

  ‘She looks like me,’ Caro said.

  ‘No, she doesn’t …’

  ‘Yes, she does. At the beginning. Before I lost weight, before I started having my hair dyed.’ Leaning forward, she kissed Tom gently. ‘My poor boy. Who else knows about this deal?’

  ‘No one else,’ Tom said. ‘Only you.’

  47

  Bearding the Lion

  It was cold but she’d been colder. Inside and outside, she’d been colder and she could stand Moscow’s icy winds and wait, if that’s what it took. The facade of the building she’d been watching was absurd. It had been absurd when it was built and it was absurd now, pharaonic architecture at its worst. Stalin always did have appalling taste. Yellow stone pillars rose like Egyptian obelisks, with windows between that belonged to a Parisian department store. The House of Lions was a mansion block by a set designer for a third-rate provincial opera, and a bad one at that.

  Wax Angel knew she was being bad-tempered.

  At her age she was allowed to be bad-tempered. The wind and the cold and the idiot militsiya man who had tried to move her on earlier were enough to make anyone lose their temper. He’d told her to move and she’d refused. They’d gone through this several times, as if it were a refrain, or responses to prayers, or the chorus to a musical spectacular or question-and-answer from some absurdist play.

  Louder and louder, until everyone was looking.

  That had embarrassed the young man. If he couldn’t move on an old tramp – and a female one at that – how could he ever hope to impose order on the city? In from Azerbaijan, from the sound of him. He’d have done better if he was from Georgia. The crowd gathering might have given him more encouragement, or they might still have just watched in amused contempt, which was what they did.

  ‘Why don’t you just leave her alone?’ a smartly dressed woman in a brown coat had finally shouted.

  The young man had disappeared, promising to be back shortly.

  ‘Shortly’ had come and gone, and they were well into ‘later’ and there was still no sign of him. The crowd thinned too, as crowds always did, after the curtain had come down and the encores were done and the lights went up.

  Pulling her rags more tightly around her, Wax Angel dug into her pocket for a stub of candle, found her pearl-handled knife and began to carve.

  Over the years she’d simplified the outlines, stripped away their detail and individuality, the way the sculptors had done in the thirties, during that brief period when the Soviet Cubist Movement met Monumental Propaganda. The way the KGB did when they wanted to remind you that you were no one really, even if your picture had been on posters for the Bolshoi ballet company.

  Recently she’d started to put the detail back.

  A cheekbone where once she’d have put a flat plane, a wing where she’d have left a curve, eyes where blind indentations might have been.

  She was, she suspected, becoming kinder to herself.

  That or she was running out of time. That was possible. She’d had more of that than she’d ever expected. They all had. The war had withered life expectancies to months and days and sometimes hours. In the cellars of the Lubyanka, even hours had felt like years. That was where she’d learned to fracture herself – to do complicated multiplications of prime numbers, and something called the Fibonacci sequence which an old woman who had briefly shared her cell had taught her – while they did the things they had to do to your body.

  She’d been young then, relatively.

  That old woman in the cell, who had seemed so old, had probably been far younger than she was now. Everything after the war, after those dark days, Wax Angel should have seen as a bonus. Sometimes, though, she wondered if life wouldn’t be easier if it simply matched her fears.

  She’d been watching the House of Lions for a week now. Such a stupid building. Such a stupid name. Most of them hadn’t been lions when they were young and the ones left were rank and mangy with their fur coming out.

  He was in there, though.

  She’d seen him arrive in that car of his.

  The old cars had been properly beautiful. The ZiS 110B, now that was a real car. Great curves that flowed like riverbanks and the weight and strength of a tank. Black as a Steinway piano too, and when polished properly its bodywork glowed like Japanese lacquer. People used to look and point and smile. No one looking at his new car would smile.

  They’d just think, Big, powerful, ugly …

  So many things in the country now fitted that label. It wasn’t meant to be like this. She knew that, and he knew that, and everyone who’d fought through those days knew it too, for all no one was allowed to say it.

  He’d come with the girl.

  She was a solid little thing now, tough as a weightlifter without the bulk and strong as a ballerina without the need to show off. Sometimes when you mixed grape varieties the vintage improved. Other times the wine soured. Occasionally, the results were startling. It was a long time since Wax Angel had drunk wine but she could remember that much.

  It was time.

  If anything, it was long past time.

  At the door of the block, a guard moved towards her.

  She waited until he was close and then locked her gaze on his.

  He was young and pretty and blond in that slightly Baltic sort of way. There’d been a lot of blond and blue-eyed boys in Moscow once, prisoners of war all of them. She wasn’t sure if this monstrosity had been built by prisoners but the university and the block for foreigners out by the flyover had.

  ‘Tell the commissar I want to talk to him.’

  The boy blinked at her. He gripped his rifle like it was his girlfriend’s hand.

  ‘Go on then. Make the call.’

  ‘We have no commissars here.’
/>
  ‘You have one. I watched him arrive with Sveta and that crippled brat of Dennisov’s. Go on, tell Marshal Milov his wife is here.’

  48

  Into the Den

  The hall had been repainted. Of course it had. So many years had passed.

  There was new carpet on the main stairs and Stalin was gone, Khrushchev too. He’d been replaced by a huge painting of the steppe, empty as rhetoric. You knew things were bad when they had to replace heroes with oversized picture postcards. There was not even a sturdy boy or pretty peasant girl to stare at the horizon.

  So much had been hollowed out. So many pillars of the state turned out to be trompe l’oeil or cardboard. Only Lenin survived. God knows how. He’d be the last to go, she imagined.

  This building had three of him.

  A marble bust in the hallway on a porphyry plinth.

  A bronze monstrosity on the half-landing, which had stood in the hallway until it was judged too ugly or vulgar to remain. Iliych’s beard jutted fiercely at the future. His brows were heavy, his eyes all-seeing.

  The final bust was right outside her husband’s apartment.

  Made of spelter, cheap and nasty, mass-produced for school foyers, Party offices and factory canteens. In this case a factory in Stalingrad that had produced tractors until it was converted to making armaments and later bombed flat.

  A crack split Ilyich from shoulder to ear.

  Wax Angel grinned.

  She could remember the grenade that did that.

  ‘Smug bastard,’ she said, patting Lenin’s head.

  The guard from the front door who’d accompanied her this far looked terrified. She could tell the boy a few things about terror. They weren’t born these days. Half of them would die without even realizing they’d been alive.

  ‘Remember me?’ she said to the bust.

  ‘How could he forget?’

  The commissar stood in his doorway, wearing a tatty yellow smoking jacket given to him by the Chinese premier back when Moscow and Peking were still friends. There was a strange look in his eyes.

  If Wax Angel hadn’t known better, she’d have said it was relief.