Another man in a smart grey suit was standing next to a rough trestle table placed in the middle of the room. Victor was sitting behind it. He had the same sandy fair hair as Valentin, and once George saw him he remembered that he’d met the man a couple of times in much the same circumstances. He realised immediately, though, that this was different. Victor had shifted in his chair as they came in, but he didn’t get up and he didn’t meet their eyes. The man standing next to him watched them impassively, his black eyes shining through the gloom. Behind him George heard the door close and the gatekeeper’s footsteps descending the stairs.
‘This is Konstantine,’ Victor said.
‘Who the fuck is he?’ Valentin asked, peering down at him, speaking as if the other man wasn’t present.
‘Konstantine Patiashvili,’ the man uttered in a calm, even tone, and from the first syllable George’s guess hardened into certainty. These were Georgians; and it wasn’t only their height, colouring and dress which marked them out. George could barely understand what was being said, but he knew enough to be able to distinguish the marching rhythm and the heavily aspirated sound of Konstantine’s voice from the drawl of Muscovite speech.
‘What is happening, Victor?’ Valentin asked.
George could feel the other man behind him and he shifted a little so that he could see him out of the corner of his eye. Then he thought to hell with it and took a good look. The Georgian was watching him impassively, hands folded in front of him. Konstantine put his hand on Victor’s shoulder.
‘We came to talk,’ he said. ‘We have a business deal for you.’
‘Zdyelka?’
Valentin repeated the word with no particular emphasis, and Konstantine’s face made a tight grimace which George took to be a smile.
‘Sit down, please,’ he said.
They sat on opposite sides of the table. As they sat down Konstantine looked directly at George for the first time.
‘Americansky?’
George shook his head, not trusting himself to reply in Russian. Konstantine waited until it was clear that there would be no answer, then he shrugged and sat down.
‘The paintings you stole,’ he said, ‘came from Tbilisi. Did you know that?’
Valentin spread his hands as if denying any knowledge. Konstantine gave a real smile this time.
‘Paratroopers.’ He made a nasal growl of the word. ‘If you were as good at fighting as you were at being thieves you would have beaten us.’
‘What do you want?’ Valentin asked him.
‘You’ve been selling our national treasures for a couple of years.’ He smiled. ‘Everybody is doing it. You must have made a lot of money out there. You stole that money from us.’ He paused, as if waiting for a reply or some kind of justification. When Valentin didn’t stir, he went on. ‘But these are different times. We are businessmen, and there is an easy way of compensating us. You continue your work and from now on we’ll be your partners.’
‘We don’t need partners.’ Valentin’s voice sounded calm and measured. ‘We don’t need this business either. You don’t need us. Anyone can sell their goods in the West.’
Konstantine put his hand in his pocket and put a packet on the table. It was about the size of a small envelope.
‘You can be useful in other ways,’ he said. He pointed. ‘Open it.’
Valentin unwrapped the package slowly. It was full of brown powder. He shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘This has been between Victor and me. Now it’s finished.’
The expression on Konstantine’s face changed suddenly, his features transforming in an instant into an angry snarling mask.
‘It finishes when we tell you it’s finished.’ He shifted his gaze away from Valentin, his hot black eyes burning into George’s face.
‘You, chornim.’ George wasn’t sure whether or not the word was meant to be insulting, so he stopped himself from reacting. ‘Look.’
For some crazy reason Konstantine was unbuttoning his shirt. George tensed himself for an attack, but the Georgian simply opened his shirtfront, baring his chest, which was covered with a straggle of longish black hair. He’d have hair on his back and shoulders, George thought. His own skin was a smooth hairless beige colour, and the sight of Konstantine’s sallow and hairy skin gave him a twinge of distaste that he could hardly conceal. The man was pointing to a spot below his prominent nipples, where George could just discern what looked like a tangle of curved white lines which he guessed were scars.
‘I was on my knees in Rustaveli Prospekt when the paratroopers came. They beat us with spades. Grooshya. Grooshya. Grooshya.’ His voice was higher and quicker as he chanted. George was beginning to follow his intonation and he noticed that he softened the G at the start of the words so that they came out sounding almost like an aitch. He pointed to his chest again. ‘These are the marks. Then they sprayed us with cheryomukha.’ He clutched his throat mimicking suffocation, his face contorted. There was nothing funny about the sight. He took his hand down and his black eyes struck at George. ‘Afterwards my sister was dead, suffocated by the gas. And after that they went through the town stealing everything they could put their filthy hands on.’
‘I was not there,’ George said carefully.
Konstantine buttoned his shirt and straightened his collar. Then he looked up at George.
‘But you must pay. Nothing is finished.’
He got up abruptly and George braced himself again.
‘Stand,’ Konstantine said.
George heard Valentin draw his breath in sharply and he saw that there was a gun in Konstantine’s hand. They stood in unison, and immediately George felt the other Georgian come up behind him to begin patting and stroking his body. In a moment he moved on, and when he found the gun in Valentin’s belt he grunted and held it up in the air.
‘We’ll leave you to think it over,’ Konstantine said. ‘You can have a committee meeting. Discuss it like good comrades.’ He smiled. ‘When I come back we can talk about the details.’
The two Georgians walked to the door and went out, their footsteps creaking on the stairs as they climbed down.
As soon as the door closed Victor got up and went over to the corner of the room. He knelt down and began unscrewing the floorboards. As he did this he talked rapidly, his tone urgent but somehow matter-of-fact.
‘They killed Anastas and Mikhail and maybe a couple more. I don’t know,’ he said, ‘and they intend to kill me after they make a deal with you, and after they get what they want they’ll kill you.’
Valentin had got up out of his chair and was standing, leaning against the table, watching Victor intently.
‘Valentin,’ George called. He was struggling with the sense that this was unreal, some kind of practical joke, a performance which would come to an end if he protested. At the same time he knew that this was exactly what he had been expecting from the moment the Georgian had opened the street door.
Victor was levering up the floorboards, and George wondered for a moment whether the idea was that they should somehow escape through the gap. Valentin hadn’t spoken since Konstantine had left the room, and George felt a sudden rush of anger, the urge to demand an explanation.
‘Valentin,’ he called out. ‘What are we doing?’
‘We’re going to stay alive,’ Valentin said tersely, without turning round. ‘We were in Tbilisi. Both of us. These chicken fuckers know that.’
Victor reached inside the hole he’d made in the floor and took out a long parcel wrapped in waxy brown paper. He laid it down behind him and Valentin picked it up and ripped the paper away, revealing the blunt, stubby shape of a kalashnikov.
‘Go to the window,’ he told George. ‘Tell me when they come.’
George moved towards the window, hearing as he went the familiar metallic snap as they loaded the cartridges. Down in the yard Konstantine and the other two Georgians were standing together in a huddle. They were all smoking cigarettes, a faint blue cloud eddy
ing round them like a halo. In other circumstances, George thought, they would look like a group of office workers escaping for a break. Almost immediately Konstantine flicked his cigarette away and turned towards the stairs. George pulled back from the window.
‘They’re coming,’ he said.
Victor and Valentin were sitting on the same side of the table, their hands out of sight.
‘Sit there,’ Valentin told George, pointing with his chin to the corner of the table. ‘When the door opens, hit the floor.’
George sat facing Valentin and Victor. Their faces were impassive, relaxed but focused. His own hand trembled a little, and he took it off the table and gripped his thigh. Listening to Konstantine’s footsteps coming up the stairs he tried to calm his nerves by thinking back to his own days as a soldier, but it had never been like this. Even sitting in a guard tower at midnight he had been part of a routine, a cog in the machinery. This was different.
The door opened slowly, Konstantine peering round it, the gun in his hand outstretched and ready, his eyes swivelling around the room, locating each of them. Gradually he shuffled into the doorway, the other two Georgians out of sight behind him.
‘Stand up,’ he ordered.
George hadn’t moved so far, caught in a moment of indecision by the way that Konstantine had entered the room, but now, in the corner of his eye he saw a flicker on Valentin’s face and, without thinking, he dived for the floor. In the same instant Valentin and Victor fired from under the table. George didn’t realise what had happened immediately, because he’d been expecting the sound that the rifles made on the shooting range or out in the open across a field, the way he’d heard them in the past. Instead of the familiar stutter, the noise sounded like a deafening, percussive roar. Simultaneously, the table crashed over, banging into his calves, and, feeling the impact, he had the shocking sense that he’d been hit. In the next moment there was a whoosh of movement, so that he felt, rather than saw, Valentin hurdling over his body. He turned his head and saw his cousin, erect at the window firing a burst, his arms swinging in a short arc. Victor was kneeling in the doorway firing down into the yard. Then it stopped. George felt a hand clutch his ankle and, startled into reflex, he drew his leg up and kicked out, hitting something soft and heavy. He heard a deep, laboured groan and he sat up on the floor, looking around. The hand belonged to Konstantine. There was blood leaking from his legs and belly, flowing in gentle spurts, like water from a pipe. Victor turned away from the door, got up and stood over the Georgian.
‘Svolach,’ he grunted. ‘Chort staboy. To hell with you.’
He fired a single shot, and Konstantine’s head exploded in a splatter of blood and brains, which sprayed over George’s trousers, drenching them red.
‘Scheisse!’ George shouted involuntarily, pulling his legs away, and he heard Valentin laugh.
He reached the door just in time to splash a gout of vomit over the landing. Down below in the yard he could see the bodies of the other Georgians, both of them surrounded by pools of welling blood. The man who had opened the street door for them had almost reached the cover of the vaulted passageway before he was hit and he lay with arms outstretched as if trying to drag himself away from the bullets.
‘Come on, George,’ Valentin said behind him. ‘Help us clean up this shit.’
Prague
September 1999
TWO
The first time Joseph Coker saw George he had the peculiar feeling that he was looking at a jumbled up version of himself, and, as it happened, this wasn’t far from the truth. A careful observer might have noted that their skins were both the same shade of light burnt ochre, that they were roughly the same height and weight, that they had the same straight, broad nose, and the same long upper lip, with a little peak in the middle, the sort of feature that Joseph’s wife had pronounced cute in the days when they first got together. Joseph must have noticed, but, oddly enough, when he looked back at his memories of that first time none of these characteristics came to mind, and, during the months which followed that first meeting, he was never quite able to admit that they looked very much alike. On the contrary what he remembered later about his first sight of George was his hair.
Perhaps he would have paid more attention if he’d been prepared for the encounter, but his only warning had been a phone call from the reception desk which came just after he had walked into the hotel room and tossed his jacket on the bed.
‘Mr,’ the receptionist hesitated over the pronunciation, ‘Mr Cocker,’ she said eventually. ‘Your visitor is here.’
She put the phone down before he could ask who it was, and after a moment of indecision he shrugged the jacket back on and set out for the lobby.
The organisers had put him in a hotel ‘on the outskirts’ of the city, perhaps because his had been a late invitation. Most of the other film makers seemed to have been accommodated in the hotels clustered around Wenceslas Square, and at first Joseph had been irritated by the prospect of being out of touch with the action. During the odd moments when his colleagues would be dropping into the cafés to rap with the local movers and shakers, he thought, he’d be struggling out to the suburbs. On the other hand, even though he already knew it would be very different, the mental image he’d had of the city was of somewhere the size of London, where a trip to the outskirts would have taken at least an hour; but to his astonishment the drive from his hotel to the centre of Prague had been a matter of less than fifteen minutes. It had seemed shorter because he was busy looking around, trying to fix in his mind the qualities of the scene through which he was moving. He had also been nervous, anxious about how the film would be received, and what he would say afterwards.
He needn’t have worried. He had imagined his film up on the screen of a cinema, with rows of upturned faces following every move, but the showing actually took place in a large room on the first floor of a building sandwiched between a hotel and a shopping mall. The audience consisted of hardly more than a dozen people, and all the way through their attention was distracted by the sound of music from somewhere outside. The problem was, as one of the organisers explained to him later on, that his film had been scheduled at the same time as The Exorcist. The director was in the city that day, and everyone wanted to be at the session where he would speak. Hearing this, Joseph had to admit that he would have preferred to meet the famous director rather than watch his own film once again, and he had the depressing feeling that his audience were mainly people who had not been able to secure tickets for the main event, or festival staff whose duty it was to be there.
In the circumstances, after that day’s session at the festival he felt more or less relieved to be at a distance from the crowd of students, cinéastes and journalists swarming like wasps around the group of writers and directors whose films were on show. Even so, he guessed that, for some reason, one of them had managed to track him and was now lying in wait for him downstairs. The idea was curiously annoying.
In the lift he wondered about the way the receptionist had pronounced Coker. He had told them his name at the desk when he checked in, emphasising the long vowel, and he was surprised that she had found it difficult. After all it sounded not unlike Coca Cola, and that had to be one of the more familiar brand names in Prague. But Jarvis Cocker might have toured the area, or maybe his near namesake, old Joe Cocker. That would account for it. He’d recognised the voice of the receptionist, a stocky blonde whose broad features had a battered look, and he remembered that, out of all the women who worked on the desk, she was the one who spoke the most fluent English. Perhaps he’d ask her why she had said his name that way.
Stepping out of the lift he’d begun framing the words in which he would put the question, but when she saw him she merely smiled and pointed towards the far end of the lobby. Looking in that direction he saw a group of middle-aged Germans sitting together, but he’d already seen them all in the morning, or perhaps it was an exactly similar group, plump, pink and noisy, moving with a pon
derous speed towards the buffet tables. He looked back at the receptionist and she pointed again. This time he followed the line of the gesture and saw an armchair next to the windows, facing away from the room. Poking over the top of it was a tuft of blond curls.
Immediately Joseph began riffling through his memory of the day, searching for a woman whose hair was cut in this dramatic style, then the head moved, turning to face him, and he saw that the curls belonged to a man. The hairstyle was actually a fairly conventional fade, with the two sides of the head cut short and the middle part fluffed up and dyed blond with an auburn undertone which he suspected was natural, since his own hair was patched with the same light streaks. In the same instant he saw that the man’s skin was light brown, like his own, and it struck him that this was a black man with a white parent, like himself. Another visitor from England, he guessed. Perhaps a tourist who had seen him enter the hotel and stopped in to say hello. He must be on some kind of business, Joseph thought, because his clothes had none of the casual flavour that most of the tourists affected. Unusually, he was dressed in a neat dark suit and a white shirt with an open collar; and even with the punky hairdo, he looked stylish, almost elegant.
‘Hiya man,’ Joseph called out, ‘what are you doing here?’
In reply the man stood up and stuck his hand out in greeting.
‘Hello mister,’ he said.
Joseph couldn’t place the accent, and for a moment he thought it was a joke. Then, looking at the expression of polite diffidence on the man’s face, it struck him that this must be a black man who belonged to the region. He felt a surge of excitement at the idea. He knew that there would be mixed-race people dotted around various parts of Europe, but meeting one made him feel a bit like an explorer encountering another one of his own kind in the middle of an uncharted wilderness.
A Shadow of Myself Page 5