Cold

by John Sweeney

  Green Park beckoned. He had time and enough to get some fresh air, grab a sandwich and then return to hear his fate. He rang Terri, his union official. No answer. He left a message about the preliminary being the fact-finder, then rang off.

  The park was damp and grubby, the grass slick and wet, the soil overused, the ground so hard-packed by tens of thousands of tourists and office workers that it had the feel of concrete. The air, too, throbbed with chaotic sound. Perhaps he’d had enough of London, its noise and dark energy. Yet as he walked deeper into the park, the great trees still dripping fat raindrops lifted his spirits. Vanessa’s great hero was Orwell, who’d written something about loving the surface of the planet. She liked to quote him, word for word.

  He stopped and typed Orwell and surface into his phone, and out the answer popped:

  So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the Earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

  He smiled with delight at the clever tricks his mobile could do, and fondness, too, for the wonder of Vanessa’s intellect.

  He walked on, heading for the south-east corner of the park, where it met The Mall. For the first time that day, he felt a tiny wave of happiness, and at that very moment he saw the two shadows who had stalked him. One hundred yards ahead of them was Wolf Eyes, and one hundred yards ahead of her, splashing in and out of the puddles, was Reilly.

  UTAH

  It was gone midnight when Sergeant William Chivers stared into the styrofoam cup holding his coffee, trying to block out the modern world. Twenty-three years he’d been with the Salt Lake City Police Department, and none of it was getting easier. Instead of enjoying a bit of downtime, taking pleasure in doing not very much for five minutes, the kid sitting next to him in the cruiser, Officer Luiz Alvarez, was messing about jumping between radio stations, hitting on a tune half played out and using some clever thingamajig on his phone to work out what the song was before the DJ got to tell the world.

  A thudding bass riff? ‘“All That She Wants” by Ace of Base,’ called out Alvarez. A saxophone pumping out a threnody of exquisite melancholy: ‘“Baker Street”, Gerry Rafferty.’

  It was beyond irritating.

  Chivers didn’t want to come over a bore, but he was about to call on Alvarez to give it a rest when the cruiser’s police radio crackled. An affray of some sort: an elderly man, slight, described as being the worse for drink, set upon by five assailants in the alley at the back of Harry’s Bar. The sergeant gunned the cruiser, hit the siren and flicked on the light. They became their own mobile storm, flickering electric-blue lightning as they rolled along.

  Hatches of light from windows shone on brick walls and a steel fire staircase high above; puddles reflected the blue flash-flash from the cruiser underfoot; but at street level, the alley was cast in gloom.

  The officers switched on their torches, illuminating a scene beyond strange. Five men, ne’er-do-wells, some of whom Chivers recognised – crackheads, scammers, winos – lying on top of each other like logs, their hands, feet and midriffs trussed up by plastic tape. Sitting on top of the heap of humanity, singing to himself, was a senior citizen, hog-whimperingly drunk.

  ‘Sir, are you all right?’ Chivers asked the old man. He sang his tune and stared into space as if the two police officers and the criminal pyramid beneath did not exist. Close up, his breath stank of booze.

  ‘What’s your name, sir?’

  ‘Archibald Sayce. Professor Archibald Sayce.’

  ‘Hey, Archibald, could you tell me: how did you end up sitting on these men?’

  Archibald Sayce returned to his singing: ‘Druzhby narodov nadyozhnyy oplot!’

  ‘Archibald . . . sir . . . ?’

  ‘Partiya Lenina – sila narodnaya. Nas k torzhestvu kommunizma vedyot!’

  For the first time ever, Chivers realised that Alvarez might not be entirely useless as a police officer.

  ‘Officer Alvarez.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Can you use that thingamabob on your phone and work out what Archibald here is singing?’

  Alvarez pushed a few buttons on his phone and held it towards the singer, oblivious to the detective work going on in front of his face.

  ‘OK, Alvarez, so what’s the tune?’

  There was a delay while the thing on the phone worked it out.

  ‘It’s the Russian national anthem, sir. No, it’s correcting . . . it’s the old Soviet one.’

  ‘Well, blow me.’

  They called in backup and took all six in for fingerprinting, ID’ing and photographs. All five bound in tape had previous, some of them for nasty stuff. They couldn’t get anything out of the old guy, Professor Archibald Sayce. No one of that name lived in the continental United States. He just kept humming his Stalin tune. His prints were clean for the whole of Utah, but Chivers was worried that he might be a Communist sympathiser, what with his choice of song and all. He sent a copy upstairs to the night duty supervisor, a Captain Hackman, who could log on to an FBI database for a federal check.

  An hour later, the door to the charge room swung open and the captain beckoned him over.

  ‘Can I have a quiet word, Sergeant Chivers?’

  ‘Yes, Captain.’

  ‘The old guy – his prints have popped up on the grid.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘What name did he give you?’

  ‘Archibald Sayce. Professor Archibald Sayce.’

  ‘That’s not his real name and he’s not a real professor. He’s Ezekiel Chandler, and he’s sixty-three years of age and he’s a Mormon.’

  ‘He’s a Jack Mormon, sir – full of liquor. Drunk as a skunk.’

  Hackman ignored him. ‘The FBI are telling me his former occupation.’

  Chivers shrugged. ‘Farmer?’

  ‘No, sergeant. You told me that when you found him, he was singing the old Soviet anthem. How many farmers from these parts know that song?’

  The sergeant started to blush.

  ‘Our wino in the drunk tank is a former deputy director of counterintelligence, Central Intelligence Agency. The FBI say it’s our call, but they kindly suggest that it might be better if we let him go with a personal caution, and they kindly suggest that I call them back the moment we’ve come to our decision, and they kindly suggest that that might take two minutes, if that. You comfortable with that, sergeant?’

  ‘Sir, my recommendation is that we let him go with a personal caution, sir.’

  ‘My thinking, too. And the FBI also kindly suggest that we should give him a lift home. Bear Lake.’

  ‘Sir, that’s close to the Idaho line. That’s three hours driving. I . . . er . . .’

  Hackman gave him a cold look.

  ‘Will do, sir.’

  Chivers spent a full five hours making the trip up to Bear Lake, because the first big snowfall of the winter came clunking down. The snow deadened sound and both men, lost in their own thoughts, were engulfed by a sense of wilderness reborn. Archibald – that’s how he thought of the old guy – must have a pretty sore head, Chivers reckoned, but he didn’t complain. Barely said a word the whole way. Apart from one sentence when they stopped for a break: ‘I shouldn’t have drunk the coffee.’

  When they got to a log cabin up in the mountains, an old Ford pickup was standing outside, keys in the ignition. Smoke was coming out of the cabin chimney. The old man invited him in for refreshment but the sergeant declined.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve used up your time, sergeant, and thank you very much for your patience.’

  ‘No problem, sir. You just look after yourself.’

  Zeke shook the sergeant’s hand and walked up to the shack, opened the unlocked door and called, ‘Mary-Lou?’

  No one was home. On the kitchen table was a letter addressed to him in her copperplate handwriting. He opened the envelope, knowing that the judgement of the Strengthening Church Members Committee would have been in
stantly communicated to Mary-Lou. He read her letter; as he feared, she was asking him for a divorce.

  Zeke felt a stab of pain in his weak wrist. The cold got to it, always had. Still, she had done a damn good job fixing him up, and now, damn fool that he was, she’d gone. He leant against the doorframe of the cabin and his eyes began to well up.

  On the long journey back to Salt Lake, Chivers reflected that there was something special about the old guy. He was old Mormon, they said, and clearly in trouble of some kind, sure – ending up that drunk – but Chivers reckoned that he deserved a bit of a break. Though about that, others were not so sure.

  Chivers booked out a whole shift in lieu because of the long drive home through the snow. When a few days later he caught up with Alvarez, he heard that it had been decided to free the five men who’d been trussed up, with a personal caution.

  ‘Sergeant,’ said Alvarez, ‘when I let them go, most of them said nothing. One of them, a bum, he told me what happened. They were going to do over the old man, take his wallet and all. The old guy was out of it, it was going to be like stealing candy from a baby.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Well, the bum says this old lady came out of the shadows and she had an elephant gun, and she was real mean and she forced him to bind all the other men up or she’d blow their heads clean off. The bum said he didn’t care to meet that old lady ever again, his whole life.’

  Chivers listened intently and, not for the first time, thought to himself there was no folk stranger than the Mormon people of Utah.

  ARKHANGELSK, RUSSIA

  Every window of the presidential palace burns light. They are not expected. Gennady gives the orders; they scale the walls and move through the gardens under the cover of what splashes of darkness they can find. A peacock squawks in alarm and they freeze; a scimitar-flash of steel shuts up the foolish bird for good.

  They move forwards, one hundred metres from the outlying buildings, maybe less, then some damn fool fires tracer rounds at the palace, and the presidential guards switch on three searchlights, a fraternal gift to bolster security not three months before. Night becomes day; his whole form shines with reflected light.

  ‘Take cover, lads,’ he roars. ‘Hide!’ And he rolls into a hollow of shadow and a machine-gunner opens up, bullets going zip-zish-zish over and into their heads.

  Too many of his boys are dying – dying foolishly for nothing.

  Bam-bam-bam, their Shilka fires at anything, everything, nothing, until the idiot in charge works it out and the little tank takes out the searchlights, one by one, and they can crawl forwards again. But surprise is lost.

  The great doors to the palace are locked and barred, but Uygulaan the Yakut finds a way in: some kind of side door, a steep drop down. They’re in. This Yakut is the craziest, the bravest of all his lads. He will be made up to sergeant if he survives this madness.

  Gennady whistles and his lads follow him until twenty men are packed in a small room in the basement. He nods at Uygulaan, who kicks open the door – nobody there – and they surge out, up the stairs, and then they’re in a great hall with a winding staircase the width of an airport runway – hey, that’s how wide it feels – lit up by seven chandeliers hanging from the ceiling two storeys up.

  The presidential guards are on to them now, lobbing grenades down from a gallery on the first floor, the blasts made more lethal by the smooth marble floor. More boys are hit. Christ, he might be down to a dozen men. One of his lads fancies himself as a sniper. He takes cover behind a statue of an Afghan warrior from the time of Genghis Khan and zeroes in on the first chandelier. The sniper – good lad – sends a bullet that slices the chain holding the chandelier in two and the whole thing comes crashing down, hitting the marble below with an immense crash. And then he does it again and again . . . five, six. The extinguishing of the seventh chandelier casts the palace into a raw and terrifying darkness, broken only by the odd magnesium flare lighting up Kabul, casting its brilliance through the broken windows of the palace.

  They storm the staircase, Uygulaan ahead of him, and now the Afghans are putting their hands up. He’s under orders not to bother too much about prisoners, but he and his lads are warriors, not butchers, and he yells, ‘Watch them closely but if they’re going to surrender, let them.’

  They order the guards to lie on the floor, face down. They count them: one hundred prisoners, and now only nine of his men still unhurt. The president and his little boy, five years of age if that, are in the master bedroom, bigger than his flat back home. They’re cowering in their pyjamas. Both man and boy hold up their hands; the little boy is weeping. Gennady uses his free arm to signal they will be OK, and Uygulaan pats the boy on the head.

  The president takes out a cigarette from a gold case, offers him and Uygulaan one, but they both refuse. They don’t quite know why. A few minutes later comes a detachment of twenty KGB special troops, not a speck of mud or blood on any of their uniforms, and some way behind them waddles a man in his late fifties. He is both immensely fat and immaculately groomed, in a three-piece suit, maroon tie and black leather coat, with hair so dark it must have been dyed. The narcissism and the fat don’t go together so well.

  ‘Good of you to turn up, Grozhov,’ he says, and he can see that his boys find this worth a smirk.

  ‘Thank you, Colonel, your work here has been noted.’ Grozhov’s voice is high-pitched and prim, almost girlish, the accent Georgian. ‘They’re going to make you a Hero of the Soviet Union. But for the moment, kindly leave us to our discussions.’ Thus bidden, he and Uygulaan walk out of the master bedroom, and an enormous blond KGB sergeant and Grozhov walk in.

  ‘Close the door behind you,’ calls out Grozhov. They do so. Uygulaan sniffs the air and pulls a face and then he smells it, too: Grozhov’s peculiar scent, the lavender perfume not quite masking the stink of a fat man’s sweat. A shot rings out, echoing through the darkness, then a cry, then a second shot.

  The door opens, and Grozhov and his bodyguard are leaving. Beyond them, Gennady sees the president lying dead on a white rug, blood seeping into the fabric, his little boy on top of him, also dead. He walks into the presidential bedroom and goes to yell ‘Killer!’ at Grozhov, but his mouth fills with sand and nothing comes out, and then he is awake and the phone by the bed is ringing, ringing, ringing. Just as he goes to pick it up, it stops.

  Not always the same nightmare, but this one, this was the most common. The stink of lavender and sweat and spent ammo, the sharpness of the shots ringing out, it all seemed so unbelievably real. Gennady hurried to the bathroom, immersed his face in water so cold it made him gasp.

  Still daylight outside. What kind of madness did he have, suffering nightmares in the day? He returned to the bedroom and stared at the phone. It sat silent, by the photograph of the three of them: his wife, now dead, and their only child, his daughter. He threw some clothes on and walked over to the window.

  Coat flapping in an iron breeze, an arm pointing the way to the future of the last century, or maybe the century before that one. Only a fat seagull emptying a Rorschach test of bird shit on Lenin’s bald head robbed the Leader of his revolutionary dignity.

  From the twenty-third storey of the block of flats in the dead centre of Arkhangelsk, you were afforded two views of the great Russian experiment. To the south stood monumental Lenin, always in a hurry, always towering above the little people scurrying this way and that, hiding from the Arctic cold. To the north stood the old – mostly dead – fish docks, sheds of red brick gouged by empty eye sockets of broken windows, garlanded with graffiti, a nest for junkies and drunks rotting out their last winter, if they were lucky; beyond them, rusting hulks waited for the scrap men, cranes angled against the cold; and, farther off, an archipelago of shivering nothingness: the gulag of the far north. Up there, no one knows how many died. No one counted.

  That wasn’t quite true. Gennady turned his back on Lenin, crossed the flat and gazed out due north. He’d fought in A
fghanistan but had ended up out of front-line service, running the military-cum-secret-police archive in Arkhangelsk. It should have been a cushy number but he had become fascinated by the great beast of history locked inside the cage: the evidence, collated and detailed, the lists, the photographs, of hundreds of thousands of the dead and the dead to come. Poles, Americans, but worst of all old Russians would come knocking at his office door, asking for a scrap of information that might help a grandson or niece lay to rest their relative. Gennady would have to shake his head, say nyet.

  He’d sought official permission to put the archive online. That had not been refused. Modern Russia doesn’t work like that, mused the general. But nor had it been permitted. A properly trained archivist would have done nothing. But, seeing that he was an old soldier, he’d thought, Screw it. Perhaps he was being unfair on librarians. Whatever, he’d found he could no longer keep the beast locked up.

  He started counting the dead.

  Gennady would stall a relative’s request for information, then formally say no and watch them shuffle off into the cold, then hurry out of the office on an ‘errand’, to smoke or have a quick nip of vodka and, when no one was looking, hand over a plastic bag of photocopies: most often photographs; sometimes, if they were lucky, a cache of love letters never received, or a hidden diary – but always, always the date of death.

  Pretty soon, word of Gennady’s foolish humanity had got around and he was charged with corruption and misuse of power in a state office. But there was a row about it, articles in the local press were soon picked up by the international media, and the sour-faced paper-pusher at the prosecutor’s office called him in and dropped all the charges. That very day he got a phone call from Moscow saying that his request for early retirement had been approved. So the truth about the dead had been locked up, again.