by John Sweeney
He was being spared for God knows what.
He gibbered to himself and rolled onto his side, his clean white shirt and fancy interview suit stippled with other people’s blood. The zsssts stopped. He stood up, panting. Nearby, someone was voicing a long, weird, etiolated scream.
Heavy, bloodied, he staggered through the memory of a door and out towards the lift. He pressed the button and the lift pinged its answer, almost instantly. He entered, the normality of that action causing him to doubt what he had just witnessed.
‘Oh, Christ . . .’
The receptionist screamed the moment she saw him, gobbets of other people’s brains and bones and blood bespattering his suit. He stumbled out into the drizzle of Piccadilly and stood on the pavement, breathing furiously, back bent, hands buttressing his knees, out of it, utterly out of it.
A police van screeched to a halt beside him but he was so zonked he had little sense of it. The side door slid open and two officers came out and sucked him in.
Now he was on the floor of the van, his face banging into the metal, his hands being forced behind his back, and with a soft click he was handcuffed.
Someone kicked him, hard, in the head.
‘You’re not the police, are you?’ he said.
He could no more have fought them than a toddler. He felt a stabbing pain in his thigh, and then nothing.
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
The babushka was waiting for him at the top of the lane. She didn’t want to miss the policeman but she didn’t want to go any nearer to Pyotr’s place if she could avoid it. The snow was beginning to thaw, just a little, and the policeman could see that the ruts in the hollow ahead were way too deep for his Lada. He parked the police car well short of the hollow, got out, had a quick chat with the old lady, one Ludmilla Estemirova.
She repeated what she had told him on the phone, pretty much word for word. He watched her return to her little timber home, then started walking towards the place, patting his gun in his holster, just for comfort. He’d never used it, never would, God willing.
Sergeant Leonid Leonidovich Oblamov wasn’t quite the lowest of the low in his division, but he wasn’t far off. He’d been in the old Soviet militia for all his adult life, and when they mucked about with everything and it became the new democratic politsiya, he joined that, too. Still, he did the same damn thing. He’d go out onto the main road and flag down fancy cars, make up an infringement against the law – going too fast, going too slow, not having the right papers – take a few roubles, depending on how fancy the car. His friends, the locals, when they drove by in their old bangers, as fast as you would please, he’d give them a little wave and let them go on their way.
When drunks fell asleep on their way home after a big snowfall, he would try hard to find their bodies, knowing that if he didn’t their families would give him hell until the big spring thaw. Fights, punch-ups, Oblamov did his best to look the other way. He was no Sherlock Holmes, but hey – this place, it wasn’t exactly London either, tucked away in the middle of nowhere.
The stink of it hit him in the nose. Gingerly, he pushed open the door with the tip of his boot. Someone had half-heartedly tried to torch the place. Not that difficult, one would have thought, because it was built of wood, but they’d made a hash of it. A few timbers were blackened by fire but the thing itself was pretty much intact. He crossed himself. Out on the main road, you saw the aftermath of crashes. He’d seen what a big lorry could do when it fell on a family car. This was different.
He’d never seen a sorrier sight. The old man, Pyotr, his face covered in a gas mask – ‘the Elephant’, they called it in the army – but the rest of him naked from the belly down, his cock and everything burnt, boiled somehow. Oblamov had known Pyotr a little: a bit of a bully, his woman ran out on him. Sweet Christ, whoever did this to him was one sick man.
He found a blanket in Pyotr’s bedroom and put it over the corpse, to hide his nakedness, more than anything. When he got back to the station, he’d call the gravedigger, talk him through what he would find, take the shock out of it for him.
Oblamov walked back up the lane and knocked on the old lady’s door. Ludmilla was so old, they said, she could remember the great famine, back in Stalin’s day, before the war. After a bit of scrambling around with the door, she opened it, and somehow what he had seen got to him, and despite his fifty-odd years, he found that he was crying, tears streaming down his cheeks.
‘Mother . . . what they did to that poor man, it’s . . .’
‘ . . . the work of the devil himself,’ she completed his sentence. ‘Do you want a drop? I’ve got some moonshine, if you’d like it. Don’t tell the militia.’
She had a wry way with words, this one, but God, yes.
‘Thank you, mother, I think I could use it.’
The two of them sat in her gloomy kitchen, close to the stove. A big black cat eyed him, disapprovingly. The hooch, when it came in a none-too-clean teacup, scarred his throat. Still, it hit the spot.
‘Another, mother, please.’
Ludmilla poured him a second slug, and as he knocked it back his mobile rang. He stiffened to attention when he heard his boss announce that he was being put through to the regional inspector general of police, no less, a man who had never bothered with lowlifes like him before. The instruction was simple and final. The call ended and he put away his phone and studied the whiskery, threadbare carpet at his feet.
He tried to figure out how they knew what he knew. He hadn’t made a report about finding Pyotr’s body. His mind creaked over the last two hours or so, when he had been sitting in his shabby office, and the phone rang, and it had been the old lady calling.
Now it came back to him. After the phone call, on his way out, the office manager, that creep Prezhinsky, had lifted an eyebrow, and Oblamov had told Prezhinsky what the old lady had said on the phone: a corpse, weird stuff, handcuffs, half naked. Prezhinsky had smirked and gone back to his paperwork. ‘So?’ asked Ludmilla.
‘Suicide.’ He nodded his head in the direction of the house containing the half-boiled corpse with his hands cuffed behind his back. ‘I’ve been ordered to report it as a suicide.’
‘That is a stinking lie and you and I both know that.’
Oblamov studied his boots and said nothing. The silence of Ludmilla’s disapproval lay on him, as heavy as the snow on the birch trees all around.
‘Mother, I don’t know who did this, but they’re bad people, people who don’t give a fuck, God forgive my language.’
‘Suicide? Suicide, you say?’ Ludmilla spat on the floor. ‘In 1933 the same scum came here. People were starving. My father just told the truth, but they took him away and we never saw or heard from him ever again. In the fifties, after that scum Stalin died, they told us he’d passed away in a camp, somewhere in Siberia. So, the scum are still with us. What they did to him down there’ – she gestured towards the half-burnt shack down the lane – ‘it’s wrong. I’m an old lady, I can’t do nothing about it, but you, you can do something.’
‘They’ll kill me stone dead. I’m just a simple plod. If I don’t do exactly as I’m told, it will not be good for me.’
‘They were big shots, a fancy car. NKVD, whatever you call them these days. Another drop?’
Oblamov sank the hooch and held out his teacup for a refill. Ludmilla poured him a third cup and sat down in front of him.
‘I took down their number plate. Do you want to know it?’
‘Mother, these people, they eat folk like us and spit us out like cherry pips. If I write a report, the truth, whoever did this will come and find me and kill me, as sure as snow is snow.’
By way of answer Ludmilla opened the door to her woodburning stove and threw a fresh birch log onto the fire. She kept the door open, studying the flames as they licked the wood. The heat found the sap, and the wood crackled in the silence between the two of them.
‘So,’ the old lady said, ‘they kill a poor man something horrible, and us
Russians, we do nothing. Just like it’s always been. And this talk of democracy, that’s just pig shit, yes?’
She bent down and started fiddling with the carpet beneath her feet. She peeled the carpet back and exposed an old wooden plank, broken in two. She put one half to the side and leaned down and came out with an old Leica camera.
‘My brother took this off a German corpse in Stalingrad. Then he drank himself to death. Everything he’d seen, he couldn’t live with it. Nobody’s touched it since the seventies but there’s still some film in it.’
‘Mother, are you listening? I can’t put a photograph in my suicide report.’
‘I’m not asking you to be a martyr. You take a photograph of that poor man.’
‘Why, mother, why?’
‘To tell the truth about what happened here. Too many lies have been told down the years. I’m sick of them. Let’s try and make history honest.’
Oblamov looked around him with a sardonic expression. ‘Where are we? Is this some high and mighty university?’
‘All I ask is that you take a photograph of that poor man. I’ll keep it safe and I won’t blab. If someone good comes looking for it, then they can have it.’
Oblamov considered that idea in an uncomfortable silence for a time.
‘Well, then’ – the skin on Ludmilla’s hand clutching the Leica was cobwebbed with veins – ‘are you going to take the photograph or not?’
This old lady, Oblamov thought, she will be the death of me.
He cursed himself for his own foolishness, cursed her for conning him into doing this. Halfway down the lane, he all but stopped and turned back. Thing is, he’d lived long enough to know something: that he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if he did nothing, if he went along with their big, stinking lie. Suicide, the bosses said. Screw them. He could take a few photos, send them to his daughter, and then maybe nothing would happen. But at least he would have tried to do something for the poor man.
He removed the blanket he’d placed on the corpse, took out the old Leica and framed the shot. Not enough light. He walked through the kitchen, sidestepping the thing, and pushed open the back door. It was overcast outside, but even so enough daylight flooded in. A wide shot, a medium shot, then close-ups. The stench rose in his nostrils until he almost gagged, but he kept on shooting until the roll of film no longer turned.
The soul of Mother Russia, he thought to himself as he climbed back up the lane, the darkening sky to the west. Not quite dead yet.
LONDON
Naked apart from his underpants, blindfolded, Joe shivered on a hard chair, his arms locked behind his back by metal handcuffs that bit into his wrists, his feet tied together somehow, his chest pounding. He had never felt so afraid in all his life. And yet some part of his brain was still working coolly, noting the weight of sodium glow coming through the blindfold, so it must be night and he must still be in London or a city, not the countryside, near somewhere with lots of windows, maybe an attic.
They’d killed three people in the blink of an eye. But they’d taken him alive. What for? His cover story was simple: he was a nobody, a special educational needs teacher, for God’s sake. He had nothing and knew nothing. If they knew his true identity, that was a different matter. But the IRA wanted him dead. So why kill the others but leave him alive?
Footsteps working their way towards him, up some stairs. Heavy tread. Two, three men. Maybe a fourth, he couldn’t be sure. The sound of the door opening. The smell of expensive perfume mixed with the dried blood in his nose. He sensed somebody behind him. A man’s voice, soft but commanding, from farther away. He was speaking in a language Joe didn’t recognise. A chair scraping on wood. The man’s voice again. A stillness in the air.
Someone was by his feet. He smelt the perfume clearly now: subtle, feminine, expensive. The next thing was utterly unexpected. A woman’s fingers started massaging his toes, one by one, taking her time.
It was shockingly erotic. He couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t control it, his penis was hardening. Please, please, God no . . . Soft fingertips trailed up the inside of his legs, floated across his groin, away and back, away and back. He moaned, softly, then bit his tongue. At another time, the sensation would have been entirely gratifying, but the metal biting into his wrists was a sharp reminder that he was someone else’s sex toy.
He heard her shuffle in front of him, one hand resting lightly on his navel, then he felt her hair brush against his cheek, her lips press against his ear. A finger touched the tip of his penis through the thin cotton of his underpants. A woman’s voice, foreign accented, very soft: ‘Where is he?’
‘What?’ Joe’s voice was normally deep but the tension in him did something weird to his larynx, making him sound like a twelve-year-old choirboy.
‘Where is he?’ The same question breathed into his ear. Her English was beautifully enunciated – the product of expensive tutors or a great teacher somewhere – but not native British, not Irish, not American. Two fingers now, lightly holding the tip of his penis. Again: ‘Where is he?’ This time there was the tiniest, playful squeeze, the lightest of pressures on his penis and yet he found it, handcuffed and tied as he was, utterly terrifying.
‘Where’s who?’
‘Where is the dog?’
‘I have no idea.’
This was the wrong answer. Her grip on his penis tightened. In any other context, it would have made him writhe with pleasure. But like this? Joe remembered that Vanessa had once told him that some ancient bloke – Sophocles, Socrates, one of those chaps – had said that the beauty of turning seventy was that your libido failed, and that it was like being unchained from a monster. Count me in, he thought, as she yanked down his underpants and let them fall by his ankles. Her fingers toyed with him, up and down his shaft, then came to a rest, cupping his testicles.
‘What have you done with the dog?’ The pressure on his testicles grew. Infuriatingly, he could feel his penis throb with delight. He couldn’t control himself.
‘I got to Greenwich, one of your creepy twins gave me some knockout potion. I haven’t seen Reilly since.’
‘The dog ran away. So he must have run back to you.’
‘No, he didn’t.’
The man called out something. Not so far away, he heard what sounded like a gas hob being ignited. It didn’t sound good. She said something in the foreign language, and then he felt her mouth against his ear: ‘Please tell me, tell me where the dog is. Or else he will hurt you.’
‘I don’t know.’
She squeezed his balls so tightly he gasped out loud.
‘Listen, I haven’t got him.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
She pressed her lips to his ear even closer this time, whispering so quietly he could barely hear her: ‘The dog vanished. They think you must have got him back.’
‘No, I haven’t got him.’
The man said something. Her fingers were back on his penis again, coiling around the tip.
‘What is this? What are you doing to me? I’m not a sodding swinger.’
‘Tell me where the dog is.’
There was a spitting, popping noise in the room he couldn’t work out. And a smell, again something familiar, but he couldn’t think straight.
‘Where’s the dog?’
‘Listen, I’ve told you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where he is.’ Joe, despite his fear, couldn’t bear the curved logic, as round and smooth and dumb as a billiard ball. ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!’ He shouted out the last of these words.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, and he felt her fingers run along the edge of his jaw, then sensed her moving away. A chair scraped on the floor and he heard heavy, male breathing, very close.
‘Where is dog?’ A man’s voice, distant, cold, foreign.
‘I’ve told you, I don’t know.’
The pain, when it came, was indescribable. A blow of excruciating force – a kick from a he
avy boot, perhaps, directly onto his testicles. He howled with agony, roaring with pain, until he felt hands pressing some horrible plastic thing over his face. Instantly, his lungs began straining, his oxygen supply choked. The thing stank foully of old plastic. They must have stuck black tape over the mask’s goggles because no light penetrated. Lightless, the airways to his nose and mouth were constricted, too. He fought hard not to vomit. He couldn’t control his panic.
Again, the man’s voice, this time muffled, as if from another world: ‘Where is dog?’
Joe gasped through the fierce mist of pain. ‘Listen, I’m a special needs teacher. I’ve got nothing, I dunno much. I have no idea who you are or what you want but you’ve got the wrong fucking person. My dog, he’s a mongrel. He cost a tenner. We got him from a tinker in Ireland.’
His last words were lost in a scream of agony as another kick landed on his testicles. The man was shouting now.
‘Where is dog?’
Joe had no answer, only fear. He could feel the vomit curdling in his throat; his second, plastic skin encased him. If he couldn’t get this mask thing off, he would suffocate.
‘Where is dog?’
Joe stayed silent. He suspected where Reilly might be. Somehow he could have made it back to South London – God alone knows how – and found the empty flat. Then he might have jumped over the fence and ended up with the old lady who lived in the house at the end of Joe’s garden, the one who thought Joe was starving Reilly. It was a secret Joe intended to keep. He was good at keeping secrets.