by John Sweeney
She didn’t question his story. That wasn’t so bad, because what he had told her wasn’t a lie. Nor was it the whole truth.
‘And you, Katya?’
‘I was born on the day the Berlin Wall fell down in 1989. For many people, maybe, this was a great day – the East Germans, the Poles, blah blah blah – but for us Chechens, the end of the old empire wasn’t so wonderful. My grandfather told me that in the days of the old Soviet Union, some Russians could be prejudiced against us because of history, our religion, Islam, the Pushkin lullaby . . .’
‘What’s that?’
‘Roughly translated, it goes: “Go to sleep my little one, because if you don’t a Chechen will come with a dagger and slit your throat.”’
‘Nice.’
‘But most people didn’t give, as you like to say, monkeys.’
Joe smiled but said nothing.
‘Our people had been cruelly treated by Stalin. When the Nazis came near to Chechnya in 1943, the Cheka feared they would rise up, so our people were deported to the steppes of Kazakhstan. We’re mountain people – to be dumped in the wastes of Kazakhstan, nothing but sand and barren lands, this was a terrible fate. But when Stalin died in 1953, we were allowed to return home, and there were more Chechens then than before. We outbred Stalin.’
‘Katya, you’re giving me a history lesson. I want to know about you.’
‘The First Chechen War, from 1994, we won. In 1999, bombs blew up two blocks of flats in Moscow. We were blamed. Zoba invaded. This, the Second Chechen War, we lost.’
‘That’s a history lesson. You’ve told me nothing about you.’
‘There is nothing worth knowing.’
‘Come on. Have you any brothers or sisters?’
The silence that followed was prickly, difficult.
‘You’re an only child? That explains a lot.’
She jabbed him in the ribs, unplayfully.
‘Ow!’
‘There were four of us. Two sisters, me, I was the third, my little brother the youngest. My father was an engineer, my mother a teacher. We lived in a block of flats on the edge of Grozny. By good luck our area had survived the first war, pretty much intact. The second war was different. My father was shot dead on the street like a dog, my mother blown to bits by a Russian fighter’s bomb, her and a whole bread queue. The four of us lived on for a while, food becoming more and more scarce. My older sisters arranged for us to go, not to school, that had been closed for a long time, but to a neighbour who lived in a wooden house, an old teacher, long retired. It was 2000. I was eleven.
‘The Russian Air Force, they bombed our block. We could see it from the teacher’s house. We ran home, scrambled through the rubble. Our home, it was still on fire. My sisters, they had been scorched, burnt flesh, tails of charred bones where the backbones had been. We put them in two blankets and went to the cemetery. There, they laughed at us. Me, an eleven-year-old girl, my brother was four. “No room, we’re full up.”
‘We tried to dig a grave for them but the ground was too solid. The old teacher found us, shouted at the cemetery people – I’d never heard her swear before – took us in. Auntie Natasha, a good woman, ethnic Russian, we were safe for a while. She taught us English, grammar, theatre – she loved Shakespeare, Keats, the war poets. She’d been a cultural attaché in London in 1971. She was something of a snob, but had moments when she giggled like a little girl. In 1971, she went to a pantomime to see a bad magician and a music show, Top of the Pops. The hits were Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” and a dreadful song about a milkman called Ernie. She made us learn the lyrics to both. She told us she’d even met the Queen. But, in 1971, Top of the Pops was better than the Queen.’
In the darkness, Joe found himself grinning.
‘After my father, mother and two sisters were killed, life could never be good again. But Auntie Natasha cared for us like she was our mother. We became a family for her – no, better to say we became a family again.
‘Then, one day, a Chechen jihadist shot her because she was Russian. The police came. I was fifteen. They raped me, then I was rescued by Reikhman. For a time, he didn’t seem so bad.’
‘And your brother?’
‘His name is Timur. We lost contact after the teacher was killed.’
She paused, hovered over something she dared not say.
‘Tell me.’
‘There is nothing to tell.’
‘Kat, please don’t ruin things by lying to me.’
‘He was locked up. They tortured him, electricity to the balls, this kind of shit, but he was so young they didn’t kill him. In prison, he became radicalised. I hate this, I hate what they did to him. What they turned him into.’
‘Which is?’
‘He became a Chechen jihadi. Last I heard, from a second cousin, he was in Syria, fighting for ISIS. He is lost to me, lost to the world.’
She fell silent.
‘Kat,’ said Joe, ‘the reason you got in touch with the British, why you ran from Reikhman, why you saved my life, it’s something to do with Timur, isn’t it?’
‘Clever Irish.’
‘You’ve got to tell me.’
She shuddered uncontrollably. At that same moment, the sun disappeared behind a cloud and the whole world seemed to become darker. She gripped his hand and held it against her breast, and placed her lips close to his ear and began to whisper urgently: ‘Timur was, is, extraordinarily clever. Even as a small boy he would take a radio apart and when he put it back together again, it worked better than ever. He was a genius with computers. He developed a way of getting in touch with me. A month ago, he sent me a message, that he was close to a major player in Islamic State that he called Picasso. Picasso was so sick, psychologically, that Timur was willing to defect.’
‘And Reikhman said yes?’
‘Initially, he was excited. Then he spoke to his bosses.’ She shook her head. ‘The bosses were not at all interested. I couldn’t understand it. Timur was offering them information on Picasso and they couldn’t care less.’
‘So?’
‘Last week I got another message from Timur. It was that he now knew why the Russians would not be interested in anything he had to offer on Picasso, and I must make the offer to the British.’
‘And did you?’ asked Joe.
‘Last night. That’s why they raided. Lucky for you, they saved you into the bargain.’
‘And what did the British say about Timur’s offer?’
‘Lightfoot said that he’d kicked it upstairs. You know how he talks, but I felt he was interested, very interested. And then you lip-read Lightfoot on the phone, how there was no interest in Picasso and we were to be traded for Comolli.’
‘Katya, who is Picasso?’
‘I can’t say . . .’
‘For fuck’s sake, we’re running for our lives. I won’t know where to run if I don’t know what I’m running from.’
‘Picasso is the Caliph, Joe. Picasso is al-Baghdadi, the Caliph of Islamic State.’
‘Why would the British, the CIA not want to know about al-Baghdadi?’
‘I don’t know, Joe, I don’t know.’
They stared into space for a long time.
‘And now?’ asked Katya. ‘What do we do? Where do we go?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s no good.’
‘I know. No good at all.’ He looked to the left and right, leaned forward and was about to kiss her when a man with a thick Liverpudlian accent broke in: ‘Aye, aye, look what we’ve got here.’
Three guardsmen were pointing their rifles at them, looking all the more forbidding in their bright-red jackets and black bearskins. The lead soldier had dead eyes. Very slowly, he shook his rifle and said, ‘You’d better put your hands up and come quietly. Just because we’re in fancy dress doesn’t mean we won’t shoot you.’
SOUTHERN RUSSIA
No lights shone from the morgue block. Gennady tried the main door. It was not locked. He stu
mbled in and a voice called out quietly, ‘Best not use a torch. It’s better that you’re not seen here.’
Venny emerged from the darkness and gripped his hand.
‘Where’s your car?’ she said.
‘I parked it two hundred yards away, by some trees.’
‘OK. What kind of car?’
‘Volga. Black. As old as Methuselah and then some. Oh’ – he sounded embarrassed – ‘there’s furry dice hanging from the rear-view mirror.’
‘Very classy. Go to the main train station, but park by the quieter, northern exit. I’ll see you there in, say, half an hour. I’ll bring a picnic.’
Gennady hated picnics but he didn’t argue. He left the morgue, got into his Volga and sat in the dark, listening to the sound of the engine pant in the cold. Why on earth had she said she was going to bring a picnic? He’d spent far too much of his army life sitting in shitholes being shot at, eating whatever they could find, to ever enjoy eating outside. The smart people had invented restaurants for a reason. A roof, good food, wine, table, chairs, a toilet, chefs, waitresses. Civilisation. Fool of an old soldier he may be, but why hadn’t he told her the truth? That any Afgantsy worth his salt would rather die than eat some sandwiches outside? Bah.
He slotted a tape into the Volga’s antique cassette player and the hymn of the Afgantsy rang out, tinny, but to him extraordinarily moving:
Farewell, bright world, Afghanistan,
Perhaps we should forget you now.
But sadness grips us as we go:
We’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving.
He found himself crying, and he wiped his tears away and cursed Venny and her stupid picnic, cursed this dump, and cursed the reason why he was here in the first place. A rear door of the Volga clicked open.
‘Drive,’ she said, softly.
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere. Check the mirror to see if you’re being followed.’
‘Isn’t this a bit paranoid?’
‘Shut up and drive.’
He didn’t know Venny well, but enough to realise that this was a departure from her natural graciousness. Holding his tongue, he crunched the Volga into gear, going south under the tracks, then west for five miles, parallel with the railway line. The moment they passed a long goods train going in the opposite direction, Gennady turned sharply to take a country road across the tracks. He came to a halt on a low rise. It was a bitterly cold, clear night. He could see the stars above and the road ahead and, through the rear-view mirror, the track behind.
‘Anything?’
Gennady’s eyes followed a point of light whizzing across the night sky. ‘Only the International Space Station.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, sitting up. Deftly, with the elegance and grace of a woman half her age, she slid into the front seat of the Volga, the starlight reflecting on her face. She looked unbearably gloomy.
‘So?’
‘What I found out earlier this evening has made me a little afraid.’
‘So?’
‘The old lady was poisoned, no question. I have a good boss at the university who has, well at least in the past, allowed me to use their laboratory equipment. So I took a swab from the old lady’s nose and was able to run it through an electrochromatograph and, as well as the arsenoids, there were protein transmitters, too.’ She stopped and there was a short silence. If she had been expecting applause, she was mistaken.
‘I’m an old soldier, Venny. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’
‘OK. She was poisoned by an organic chemical from the arsenic family.’
‘Arsenic was used by the ancients.’
‘But this wasn’t ordinary arsenic. It’s an entirely new compound. Not in the textbooks, not online, nowhere. And somehow they’ve managed to insert it into the protein chain.’
‘You’re losing me again.’
‘Poisons are like bullets. This poison bullet wasn’t normal, like you’d find in a Kalashnikov. This was a bullet made of gold – no, of a new kind of precious metal no one’s ever seen before. Not platinum, entirely new. After I did the chromatography, I phoned a friend in St Petersburg who knows more about poisons than anyone in Russia outside the Cheka. He’s an old-fashioned gentleman. I phoned him up – how are you, how are your kids, blah blah blah. We were at Moscow State together in the seventies. We’ve been friends for decades. I told him what I had found and then he said, “Leave me alone, you stupid bitch!” and put the phone down. Totally unlike him.’
‘So?’
‘He didn’t ask a single question. Not one.’
‘So?’
‘He knows exactly what it is. He was rude to me on the phone to try and protect me.’
‘Protect you from who?’
‘The Cheka. Only they would have the power to make something like this and terrify my friend.’
‘I still don’t really understand what this poison is.’
‘I’m being too academic. In soldier’s terms, this is a nerve agent, a chemical weapon, a twenty-first-century version of the mustard gas they used in the First World War.’
‘Christ.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And the only people with the authority to make this stuff . . .’
‘Exactly.’
Gennady let that sink in. Outside, a car’s headlights came into view at the bottom of the rise but turned right and parked by a little wooden house. The driver switched the lights out and then they were alone again in the night.
‘Let’s eat,’ said Venny.
‘I meant to tell you, I hate picnics.’
‘Oh.’
‘But, maybe—’
‘No, that’s fine. But I am hungry and thirsty. You can sit and watch.’
‘Go ahead.’
Venny leaned over the back seat and produced a basket, from which she procured a bottle of vodka, two shot glasses, a tin of red caviar, a tub of sour cream, and a cylinder of paper in which was wrapped about ten blini, little circles of lightly baked dough. She unstoppered the bottle of vodka, poured two full measures into the shot glasses, smeared the blini with sour cream and then the caviar, and arranged it all on the flattish dashboard of the Volga.
‘Forgive me, I’m hungry,’ she said.
‘Forgive me, I realise that I am an idiot and I love picnics.’
‘An idiot, eh?’ He couldn’t see well in the dark but he knew she was smiling. Venny handed him one glass of vodka, picked up the other herself and proposed a toast: ‘Against darkness.’
‘Against darkness,’ he echoed, and the warmth and power of the alcohol hit him hard and good. The blinis, sour cream and caviar were delicious. When they were done, he found himself saying, ‘That wasn’t a picnic. It was a banquet.’
‘You’re easily pleased,’ she said, and he burped agreement and they laughed. After a while of companionable silence, Gennady coughed, signalling re-entry into the darkness that surrounded them.
‘My daughter? How do I find out what happened to my daughter?’
‘When did you get the call, the tip-off that she was dead?’
He told her the exact date and time. She said nothing.
‘People don’t go missing in modern Russia,’ said Gennady, arguing against his own secret terrors. ‘It isn’t like it was in Stalin’s day.’
‘But if that is absolutely true,’ Venny reflected, ‘then what are you doing here, five hundred miles from home? And why has a stranger been buried in what is supposed to be your daughter’s grave? A stranger killed by a secret nerve agent? Were you invited to the funeral?’
‘I . . .’ Gennady hung his head.
‘I’m sorry. That was too brutal.’
They sat still for a while, listening to the creak of the stars. Then Venny cursed herself softly: ‘Fool that I am.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We’ve got a body but it’s the wrong one. You were right when you said that these days people don’t disappear in Russia. T
here must be another corpse.’
‘Well, you’re the pathologist for the county. If you don’t know of it, there isn’t one.’
‘But there is another pathologist. He’s a drunk and a crook and I’ve complained about his work time and again, but the authorities won’t move against him. He works out of a cottage hospital in a small town at the far western end of the county. His name’s Dr Malevensky.’
‘How would I recognise him?’
‘In his thirties, always a beer in his hand, his hair thick and grey and looks like the stuff you could clean a frying pan with.’
‘Sounds charming.’
‘He isn’t. Anything complicated, he sends it to me.’
‘What’s not complicated?’
‘Old people, car crashes. He does a lot of car crashes.’
‘Ah,’ said Gennady and turned on the ignition. He moved to find the gear stick but his hand came to rest on her knee.
A feeble glow-worm of light came from the Volga’s dashboard; not enough to see clearly.
He shifted his weight a fraction in the seat and found himself saying, ‘Aren’t we getting too old for this?’
‘Genya, think about it a different way,’ she replied. ‘How long do you expect to live?’
‘Well, Venny, if you put it like that,’ he said, and gripped her face with both hands and kissed her, awakening in him a passion for life he’d thought long dead.
THE ROYAL COUNTY OF BERKSHIRE
The light in the sky dulled; a bleak, grey overcastness held its sway over the winter landscape, grimed with a hard frost that had lingered on from the morning. Low cloud in the west was reddening slightly, and the dilettantes were thinking of calling it a day.
They’d had a miserable time of it, the morning ruined after they were spotted by a group of hunt saboteurs, who had laid down false trails of musk and liquorice, leaving the pack hopelessly confused. The hunt had managed to shake off the sabs, but some of the dogs had picked up a scent that had taken them dangerously close to the main London to Cardiff railway line, and the prospect of mass carnage had frightened everybody. Blood sports in the twenty-first century were not getting any easier.