Cold

by John Sweeney

  ‘Shush yourself, Zeke. I prayed for you wherever you were, and the Angel Moroni delivered you back every time.’

  ‘Mary-Lou, I—’

  ‘Shush yourself,’ she said. ‘And I do declare that you were the handsomest, bravest, most God-fearing Mormon in the whole valley and I felt so honoured to be your woman.’

  She had never spoken to him like this, not in the half-century he had known and loved her.

  ‘Grandma, please.’

  ‘Shush. And you retire from that thing and finally I’ve got you where I want you. And what do you do? You repay me for my whole life of loving you and stitching up your hand, best as I could do.’

  ‘You did it amazing, Mary-Lou.’

  ‘Shut your mouth, Ezekiel Chandler. And you repay me by going rogue, by turning your back on our Church and becoming an apostate. And I do declare that much as I love every fibre of your being, if you go ahead with this silly nonsense that seems to be in your head today, I and my children and their grandchildren will have nothing to do with you from this day forth to the end of the world.’

  ‘I – I . . .’

  ‘Tell them you’ve changed your mind. Tell them you’ve had second thoughts.’

  ‘I can’t, Mary-Lou.’

  ‘Then we’d better get going.’

  He turned the key in the ignition and the pickup lurched back onto the road and headed down the mountain towards the city. He couldn’t think about the desolation that would follow the meeting. He might never see his children and grandchildren again. Instead, he quoted his favourite passage from Lermontov, which earned a rebuke from Mary-Lou.

  ‘Hush your mumbling, Grandpa.’

  He rolled the phrase over in his mind, first in Russian, then in English:

  Restless, he begs for storms,

  As though in storms there is rest.

  It summed up his decades of service with the CIA. His mind wound back to the late 1970s and his very first mission, in Katanga Province in Congo. He’d been as green as a lime, only just arrived in Lubumbashi in the heart of the copper belt, a centre of resistance to President Mobutu, whom Uncle Sam had backed for reasons Zeke never understood then nor got to understand since. He was in the consulate, still acclimatising to the easy-goingness of the locals and the prickliness of the heat, when he got a flash message to go to the main police station. They’d caught a Soviet agent and they needed a Russian speaker, pretty damn fast.

  To say Zeke had a gift for languages was like suggesting that Isaac Newton was not bad at maths. A Mormon from the hicks, he could speak gulag slang as if he’d got out of Kolyma the day before yesterday. That was because of a deep friendship he’d struck up with an old Russian fisherman who’d spent two decades as a prisoner – a zek – in Stalin’s prison camps. Zeke had met the fisherman while serving his two years as a Mormon missionary with the Ainu people in the Kuril Islands, where Japan peters out and the Soviet Union began. The fisherman had said precious little about his past life to Zeke for a whole year – listening, but saying nothing.

  One Orthodox Christmas, when the memory of the home he could never return to seized him, he opened up. Arrested for nothing, sentenced to twenty years because his father, long dead, had been an Orthodox priest, the old fisherman told of how the criminals in the gulag used to slit the throats of the newly arrived politicals for their fur-lined boots; how the zeks had to wait until the spring thaw in April before they could dig mass graves to bury the dead, who’d been stacked together outside like so much dead wood; how he and a friend had trekked out of Siberia and eventually, after crossing the Sea of Okhotsk in a rusty tub they’d stolen, made landfall on a Japanese-held island. When they came across an apple orchard on the island, they’d eaten so many apples they fell ill. His friend’s stomach burst wide open and he died; the fisherman had only just survived.

  ‘I think of Josef Stalin and all those lives, blunted, snuffed out for no good reason,’ said the fisherman into his vodka. ‘People cried when the old bastard died. Well, not me, not me.’ Zeke had never forgotten it.

  Thanks to his Mormon posting, Zeke had been the only recruit in the CIA who, on joining the Agency, already spoke Japanese with a Russian accent and Russian with a zek accent, and Ainu, which hardly anyone spoke at all.

  In Congo, the consular car left Zeke at the front door of the police station and it took a while before he was pointed down some steps to a dank basement. The smell of shit and blood was all but unbearable. From somewhere he couldn’t quite make out came the sound of clocks chiming, so loud it dinned into his ears. The basement was dark, apart from a bulb illuminating a naked man lying belly up on a table, his arms and legs pinioned by straps, his head clamped in a vice. A soiled white towel was stuffed in his mouth.

  Jed Crone, the Kinshasa station chief, a Harvard man but a Mississippi boy, shifted his heft and picked up a length of hose. A stocky man, he had a thick head of brown hair and was wearing a once-white suit that had gone the colour of cat’s teeth. Crone signalled to an African policeman, who turned a tap. Water surged from the hose as he placed it on the towel, directly over the mouth of the naked man. He squirmed, legs and arms twisting and flexing against the straps, his head fixed, immobilised, by the vice. Muffled by the towel, he was making a curious gargling noise, like that of a man quietly drowning, a sound rendered almost inaudible by the cacophony of clocks.

  On the periphery of the light stood a record player, next to which was an album sleeve, black, with a black triangle, from which flowed a narrow rainbow of light. Zeke lifted the needle, the clocks stopped, and Crone and the African stared at him. With the record player silent, every sound in the room seemed amplified. Water and snot bubbled in the naked man’s larynx, a hideous gargling.

  ‘You need a Russian speaker, sir?’

  ‘We do,’ said Crone, his southern drawl still pronounced.

  ‘I suggest we stop this, sir. Let me talk to him.’ To his ears, Zeke’s voice sounded very loud and very young.

  ‘Fuck you, you Mormon sissy.’

  ‘Stop this, sir. And don’t cuss in front of your betters.’

  ‘Fuck you, and what are you going to do about it?’

  Crone was a head and shoulders taller than Zeke, and the African at the tap was even more massive.

  ‘Because I’m wearing a secret camera and I’ve been filming what you’re doing and I have a moral objection,’ Zeke said. ‘And unless you stop it, that film will be with Senator Frank Church’s committee on the Hill in two days’ time.’

  Crone turned his whole body towards Zeke, the hose in his hand watering the concrete floor. ‘You wouldn’t have the balls.’

  Zeke moved his chin, almost imperceptibly, up and down; he would so.

  ‘You’re bluffing.’

  ‘Are you calling me a gambler, Mr Crone? Because Mormons don’t drink alcohol, don’t drink coffee and we don’t gamble. So stop what you’re doing to the poor brother yon. Or . . .’

  The only sounds were the splashing of water onto the floor, forming a widening puddle, and the muffled spasms of the man, half drowning. Crone gestured to the African and he turned off the water.

  ‘Now give me an hour with this man,’ said Zeke. ‘You can all get out now.’

  Zeke pulled the dirty towel away from the Russian’s mouth and spun the handle of the vice, unlocking the steel biting into his head. The Russian turned and began to retch and Zeke started to talk to him, softly, in his own tongue.

  After a while, the prisoner stopped retching and looked at Zeke. ‘Your Russian, it’s like you’re a zek.’

  ‘That’s the fault of the fisherman who taught me Russian. He used to say, the only motherfucker you can trust in Russia is a zek.’

  A ghost of a smile played on the prisoner’s lips. This American, at least, had the makings of a human being. And so the conversation between the two men began.

  Zeke had been lying about the secret camera. Crone suspected it but didn’t know for sure what kit the Mormon hillbilly, fres
h out of Langley’s training school, had brought with him from the States. What skewered Crone was that the Mormon had got the Russian to talk. He gave up a whole Soviet network in southern Africa. From that day in Lubumbashi on, Zeke’s reputation in the Company grew. Word spread that if you underestimated Ezekiel Chandler, you did so at your cost, and then some; that Zeke could cuss in Russian in a way that made Russians think he was one of them; that Zeke abominated torture; and that he had made a career-long enemy out of Jed Crone.

  Zeke and Mary-Lou had arrived. He parked up and rested his hands on the wheel.

  ‘You’re a damn fool for going ahead with this, Ezekiel Chandler,’ said Mary-Lou.

  ‘Can’t not, Grandma.’

  ‘Git out of my pickup, and I hope me and mine shall never see you again.’

  ‘I know you don’t mean that, Grandma.’

  She had tears in her eyes. ‘How can you doubt that God wants us to live this way, the way the Angel Moroni decreed?’

  Zeke opened the door and closed it softly behind him. A biting wind swept down from the Rockies. He buttoned his coat and shivered involuntarily. In the time it had taken him to do that, she’d driven off. He stared at the old Ford until it took a right three blocks away, and then he walked towards the building of the Strengthening Church Members Committee.

  SOUTHERN RUSSIA

  A dawn of rare beauty, a great red sun bursting out from thinning fog. Through the rear window of the Mercedes SUV, Reikhman watched the silver birch go by, then a duck pond, frozen, then little wooden houses with yellow, peach and grey window frames peeping out where roof overhangs prevented the snow from masking them. The houses looked as fragile and make-believe as if wrought from gingerbread. The Mercedes turned off the asphalt road and lurched along a mud track, deeper into the forest, wheels spinning as they tried and failed to gain traction in a sump of snow and mud.

  The driver swore, engaged the handbrake, switched to four-wheel drive, and slowly the Mercedes clawed out of the sump, passing a wooden hovel, all but derelict, no sign of life apart from a faint puff of woodsmoke from an ancient chimney. No one in the Mercedes gave it a second glance.

  Behind a net curtain thick with grime, Ludmilla Estemirova, an ancient widow in her ninety-fourth year, watched the fancy SUV slip and slide in the hollow in front of her house. The NKVD lorry had got stuck in that very hollow in 1933, when they had come to take away her father after he had complained to the local soviet that everyone in the village was starving. No good came of it, all those years ago. No good would come of this fancy car, either.

  She watched it disappear down the lane, and acting on some strange, dimly perceived yet ferociously powerful instinct – that the truth should be told, that history should not lie – she took out pencil and paper and scribbled down the last part of the number plate: EK61. She put the paper in a box, lifted up the floorboard by the stove and stashed it there, where her father had stashed the tsar’s portrait, which had never, ever, been found, and only then did she sit down in the armchair, ordinarily home to a fat old tomcat, and she dabbed her tears with a grimy handkerchief at the memory of her loss.

  ‘How much farther?’ asked Reikhman.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ said the driver, Konstantin, glancing in the rear-view mirror at the passenger in the back seat. Reikhman sensed scrutiny; the driver fixed his gaze on the track ahead. Reikhman noted that Konstantin, a handsome sort with long hair, was trading a lot of smiles with the woman operative, Iryna, who sat up front next to him. Konstantin was local; Iryna was based in Moscow. If something was going on between them, the driver had worked fast.

  ‘He lives alone?’ Reikhman said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replied Iryna. ‘But Pyotr was very talkative last time we saw him.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Iryna was from the Special Directorate, and young, in her late twenties. Dyed blond, slight moustache, but a slim, lithe body and heavy breasts. Her eyes were of the brightest blue; she had a lovely, lazy smile that oozed sex, which is why he had selected her in the first place. She was a trusted operative. Still, even the Special Directorate made mistakes, had their weaknesses. Him too.

  The Mercedes slowed, coming to a halt at a wooden shack in a sorrier state than anything they had seen all morning. God, how Reikhman abominated this human scum, the wretched poor. They triggered memories of what he himself had escaped from, and above all things, he hated being reminded of that.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Pyotr was still the classroom bully, after all these years. A big man, too, with not much fat on him, standing at the door in baggy long johns that had seen better days and then some. But Pyotr knew what a Makarov could do and hissed ‘What the fuck?’ when Reikhman pressed the muzzle of the pistol against his belly.

  ‘Cuff him.’

  They pushed the target back into the shack and sat him down in his overheated kitchen. Iryna closed the door. A bare wooden table dominated the room, complemented by a few chairs, and an icon of the Virgin Mary at her most melancholic hanging from a wall. Frost made the windows opaque. They could do whatever they wanted with him and no one would know. Inside the Directorate, Reikhman had a reputation for being an invisible operator, for leaving no traces. But today that would not be necessary.

  Konstantin handcuffed Pyotr’s hands behind him.

  ‘The musora?’ Reikhman said, using the slang for cops – ‘trash’.

  ‘They wouldn’t dare,’ said Konstantin.

  ‘What is this? Who the fuck are you?’ barked Pyotr.

  ‘You can call me the tax man,’ said Reikhman, and the authority with which he said it silenced Pyotr.

  ‘Boil some fat,’ Reikhman said to Iryna.

  Pyotr had fallen for her, utterly. Iryna and Konstantin had stopped by late one night, saying they had a problem with their motor. Konstantin had left for the next village, but Iryna stayed. ‘Have a vodka,’ Pyotr had said. ‘Have another.’ But his tongue had been far too loose.

  Now Iryna moved behind Pyotr over to the hob, lit the gas, put on a frying pan, poured some cooking oil. Pyotr had to crane his neck to see what she was doing.

  ‘Get my case,’ Reikhman said.

  Konstantin left and returned with an aluminium suitcase. Reikhman unlocked it and took out a Canon 5D and a small, folding tripod. He set up the tripod, fixed the camera to it and switched it to high-definition video, then focused in on Pyotr sitting on the wooden chair, side-on to camera, hands behind his back, and pressed play. On the hob, the fat started to spit.

  ‘What is this?’ repeated Pyotr, but this time with a catch in his voice, a knowledge that whatever was going to happen would not be good.

  ‘Get some sugar.’

  Iryna found a bag of sugar and poured it into a cup.

  ‘The fuck’s going on?’ This time there was a definite whine in Pyotr’s voice, something close to – on the edge of – fear.

  Reikhman took out a mini tape recorder from his coat pocket and turned it on. The kitchen was filled with Pyotr, boasting in a loud voice to Iryna just two nights before: ‘The little chap? Little Zoba? Some other fellow had got his ma up the duff. Then, he disappears. But her new man brought her here, and he hated the little guy. Only one word for it. Bastard. Thing is, he had two funny bumps on his head, covered by hair, but you could feel them. Horns of the devil, see? In the playground, we’d say, “Where’s the devil’s bastard? Let’s hunt the devil’s bastard! Let’s hunt little Zoba!”’

  Pyotr’s sing-song voice recaptured the rhythm of the playground after all these years.

  ‘He’d run, but he was small and I’d catch him and give him a good thumping. No one liked him. He was creepy even then. Once a bastard, always a bastard, eh? Have some more of my hooch . . . hic.’

  Reikhman turned off the micro-recorder.

  Silence. Only the fat jumping in the pan and the faint wheeze of the bully’s breathing.

  Reikhman reached down to his case and took out a gas mask. In the army they called it a slon or �
�the Elephant’, because the grey corrugated cylinder extending from the filter suggested an elephant’s trunk. Unscrewing the filter, he stuffed a cloth up the trunk, then stepped over to Pyotr and placed the gas mask over his head. Reikhman returned to sit behind the camera, checked the focus, the composure of the shot.

  ‘Take off his trousers.’

  ‘What are you doing to me?’ Muffled as his words were through the gas mask, there was nothing indistinct about the tremble in Pyotr’s voice. Now the fear was unmistakable. The red light on the camera watched him, unblinking.

  Konstantin moved forwards, but Reikhman shook his head.

  ‘Not you. You,’ he said motioning to Iryna.

  She knelt down in front of Pyotr and tugged, in vain.

  ‘It’s an all-in-one,’ she said, half laughing.

  ‘Get a knife, scissors. Cut off his trousers.’

  She found some scissors in a drawer and crudely cut away the dirty white fabric, pulling down his trousers, exposing his flaccid penis.

  Iryna turned to Reikhman. She, too, showed fear on her face.

  ‘Now give him a treat,’ Reikhman said. ‘Strip. Show him your tits. Suck him.’

  She shook her head.

  Reikhman pulled out his Magnum hand cannon and pointed it at her. It could fire five shots in less than a second and punch through armour.

  ‘Do it.’

  Her eyes flickered a sidelong glance at Konstantin, who looked away. The two of them knew far too much, Reikhman thought, and worse, they were definitely lovers. He’d have to do something about that later.

  ‘Do it.’ he said. ‘In front of the camera.’

  Iryna stepped into the zone of focus and stared, unsure, at the camera. Reikhman waved the gun at her and she took off her jumper and unbuttoned her blouse. Her arms went behind her back to unhook her bra, in front of the man with the elephant face, a grim parody of a striptease.

  ‘Suck him.’

  ‘What the fuck?’ said a muffled voice from inside the mask.

  Iryna knelt down, her heavy white breasts wobbling, and with some tenderness she began to massage Pyotr’s penis, then she lowered her head and started to suck him, one hand cupping his testicles, the other flicking her hair back behind her ear. The man in the mask gasped – pleasure, terror, something in between.