by John Sweeney
‘I’d say that he is extraordinarily well connected, to be honest with you, Miss Koremedova. What did he tell you he did?’
‘Officially, he is a tax man, with an interest in modern art. He has a joke, that he collects Klee, Klimt, Koremedova. But the modern art, that’s a pretence. The paintings are, to him, like bars of gold. He likes the money they represent, not the art. But what does he really do? He keeps everything to himself and tells – told me very little. But you live with someone, you find out some things, a phone call overheard. I think Reikhman is a reider, he reids for the connected.’
Lightfoot said, ‘Yes. We think that, too.’
‘A what?’ asked Joe.
Lightfoot explained: ‘Quite the most common form of stealing – sorry, corporate takeover – in Russia these days is reiding. Businessman A wants to take over businessman B’s company. Rather than offering to buy it, A gets the tax police or the FSB, the secret police, to arrest B on false charges. While B is locked up, A moves in, uses its corporate seals to rebaptise the company, shifts the money elsewhere, sometimes through multiple jurisdictions. When B finally pays off the officials who have locked him up, he gets out to discover that his company is now an empty shell, the value of it magicked elsewhere. The very best reiders are the ones closest to power, who can resolve disputes in what they call the power vertical, and Reikhman is, by all accounts, very good at that.’
‘But that’s just stealing.’
‘Stealing billions. And some of the time, the reider has to kill to close the deal. Reikhman has people killed, or does he kill people?’
The wolf eyes considered Lightfoot for a second or two, then: ‘Both.’ She paused. ‘He likes killing.’
‘Fuck,’ said Joe.
Lightfoot ignored the interruption. ‘So no one ever scares Reikhman, not even a little bit?’
‘A man called Grozhov, a high-up, somebody in the Kremlin. He is fat and . . . strange. A couple of times, on the phone with him, I could see Reikhman getting nervous.’
‘He’s of no use to us. Not if he’s in the Kremlin.’
Reilly crept a dog’s length closer to the fire, arched his hindquarters up, dog yoga, stretched and then coiled himself into his favourite fossil position.
Katya tapped the side of her head. ‘I almost forgot. An American. We met him in Moscow. He said something to Reikhman that he found very troubling. It made him bite his finger.’
‘Go on,’ said Lightfoot.
‘I can’t remember his name. Such a strange little man, physically nothing to be afraid of. Old, maybe in his sixties, a beard but no moustache, and a big gap between his teeth. When he smiled – he smiled a lot – he appeared a bit stupid. For an American, he spoke Russian beautifully, but bad Russian, common Russian, like a prisoner, like a zek, with a funny Siberian accent. You wouldn’t know he was a foreigner at all. Oh, I remember—’
‘His name?’ snapped Lightfoot.
‘No, sorry, I remember that he was one of those Mormon people from Utah. Reikhman was mocking him, laughing at him, saying that he believed Jesus Christ came to America and he got some silly angel, Moron, to leave golden plates, and that he was a moron himself to believe in such made-up nonsense.’
Her mind flashed back to the old man smiling that simple, clever smile of his and saying to Reikhman, ‘Yes, you’re probably right. What I believe in may be foolish. But what do you believe in? You believe what you do is right and if someone gets in your way, you kill them. And there is no future in that. Because one day someone will end up killing you.’
Reikhman had laughed at him, as if he were pathetic. And then the American said, ‘I’m not psychic and I’m no gambler. But my guess is the man who will kill you is Grozhov, even though he loves you. No, because he loves you. Enjoy the rest of your evening.’
‘And then he left,’ Katya said. ‘Reikhman, he couldn’t sleep that night. He bit his finger so bad it ended up bleeding, and then he hurt me, because he was so angry with the Mormon guy. He knew something about Grozhov and Reikhman, some big secret. He got to Reikhman in a way I’d never seen before or since.’
‘Did you get an email? A phone number?’
She stared at the floor, shaking her head.
‘What about Picasso?’ asked Joe.
Lightfoot’s eyes floated across to the closed door, with the watchers on the other side of it, then swept the room. His voice grew quieter: ‘Rubbish artist, horrible junk, my mother could do better.’
‘I meant—’ started Joe.
‘Shut up.’ Lightfoot rolled his eyes around the room, then leaned into Joe and whispered, ‘Don’t mention that name. Don’t.’
‘We’re not being bugged here, are we?’ asked Joe.
‘To ask the question without knowing the answer is to show the depth of your stupidity.’
Joe wanted to hit him, but held himself in check.
‘Mr Tiplady—’
‘Call me Joe . . .’
‘Mr Tiplady, a lot of this stuff is going on way above my head. I’m in personal protection, that’s my speciality. I have a one hundred per cent record, of which I am rather proud, and that gives me a certain independence from the office. To begin with, the office was most interested in that artist Katya mentioned to us and they wanted the best for you, which is how I was called in to look after things. Now, it seems, that decision has been rather dramatically reversed. No interest in the rubbish artist – the trade is on. The challenge is that it’s not just the Russians who are after you. The Americans are so desperate to get their hands on their traitor in Moscow – that’s how they see it, they might be wrong, not the first time, they bombed my father on D-Day – that they are happy to send you east. And Her Majesty’s Government pretty much does what Washington wants.’
‘So we’re screwed.’
‘Quite.’ In Lightfoot’s marbled diction, the word sounded like a pistol shot.
‘Can you figure it out? Have you some idea of what’s going on?’ asked Joe.
‘No. The Russians are taking fake brass and giving up silver. But they – and now we – are being offered a pot of gold and no one is interested. It’s mad. And maddening.’
‘When?’ asked Joe.
‘The handover is at noon tomorrow, at a cargo bay at Heathrow. You will arrive in a large wooden box, effectively a coffin for two.’
Lightfoot’s phone rang again.
‘Sorry, I’m going to have to take this.’
‘I do hope it’s from somebody important,’ said Joe, coldly furious that their fate took lesser importance than a phone call.
‘It is, actually. It’s the Queen.’
NOVO-DZERZHINSKY, SOUTHERN RUSSIA
A goods train clank-clanked through Gennady’s brain. Sleepless, he lay prone on the bed of his overheated room, the curtains drawn, telling himself that he’d slept in better style in Jalalabad. There he goes again, he argued with his restless self, bringing up the good old, bad old days of Afghanistan. Why couldn’t he give it a rest? Why couldn’t he accept that he was no longer a warrior, merely a bad-tempered old librarian whose daughter had gone missing? His un-sleep was interrupted by a row down the hallway, a woman laughing, shouting ‘You’ve got such a small prick I need a magnifying glass’, a slap, hard, a scream, then the sound of someone vomiting.
Saving money for God knows what, he’d checked into one of the cheapest hotels in town, part brothel, part goods yard. The only virtue was that the hotel receptionist wasn’t in the least bit interested in checking the name he’d given – fake – against his ID card – real. Just a thousand roubles in cash in return for a key.
The vomiting from down the hallway eased and the train was gone, its whistle blowing from a mile off, maybe two, a long, mournful sound that pierced the quiet of the night.
Gennady remembered not sleeping at night when he was a boy, seven, eight years old. His mother had checked up on him, and brought him a glass of milk, and then they heard that sound, a train whistle, from far off and sh
e started crying. Tough as nails, his mother was, but her whole body had quivered with grief.
‘Mum, what’s the matter? Please, Mummy, tell me,’ said Gennady, and eventually she had wiped away her tears with a musty-smelling old handkerchief and started to talk.
‘Back in 1933 I was little, as young as you are today, Gennady. The police came in the morning and assessed our farm. We had three cows, not one, and they said that meant we were kulaks, enemies of the state. They took my grandfather and grandmother, my father, my uncle Sasha and my aunt Maria, and all my seven cousins, including Evgeny, a sweet little boy with beautiful blond curly hair who I had a crush on, my first love.’
‘Why didn’t they take you?’ asked Gennady.
‘Because my mother had an uncle in the police, so he protected her and me, her only daughter. But his protection was only so strong, and eleven of my family, the heart of it, my papa too, were lined up, the police kicking them with their shiny boots and waving their guns. They shot all three cows. Then the town butcher, one of them, a big Soviet he was, came along in his cart and started hauling the carcasses onto it and my grandfather, who was a big man, he’d fought for the tsar against the Germans at Tannenberg in 1914, told the butcher he was a thief and a pig, and was going to hit him and then one of the police shot him dead.
‘And then the rest of the family, ten now, were made to walk to the railway where they were shoved into an old cattle train. Me, I was so young and soft for Evgeny, I followed them at a distance and as the carriage was about to be shut I ran forward and threw in a sausage and a loaf of bread for my family. A policeman picked me up, bodily, and pushed me into the carriage and slammed the door shut. Outside I could hear screaming, it was my mother, she had run after me, and she had found her uncle, the policeman, and eventually the door was opened and the uncle got me out, and I didn’t want to leave my papa and Evgeny and the rest of the family, and the uncle hit me, hard, then threw me off the train and my mother caught me and shrieked at me and the train started to move and blew its whistle and I can’t hear that sound without remembering the worst day in my whole life.
‘And if people say Stalin was good, or Stalin was strong, say nothing but take it from your mother, Stalin was a bad man. With all the good farmers shot or sent to Siberia, there was no food. I ended up so thin my arms and legs were like sticks. God knows how many people died in the war against the kulaks – they called it collectivisation– and the famine that followed. Nine of my family died. Only Evgeny came back, bald, half blind, with no teeth. And by the time he came back, after Stalin died, I had married your father. And, officially, there was no famine.’
That was the first moment when Gennady realised that history was one thing in books, in school, and another thing from the lips of your own mother who lived it.
His phone rang. Yellow Face, as good as her word.
‘Five cops came to the morgue tonight to talk to Malevensky,’ she said. ‘An inspector general, another guy – a real weasel, a bit important – and three ordinary cops. Two had hard faces, nothing doing, but the third seemed soft, a bit fat, flabby. Scared, like he knew something but was desperate for no one to find out. He left the meeting in the morgue to go for a piss. When he came across me in the corridor, he almost fainted. I explained what had happened, that I had drunk the wrong kind of moonshine, but that the people who made money out of it were well connected and nothing would happen to them. He felt sorry for me, said it was wrong, gave me five hundred roubles.’
‘That won’t keep you from being hungry for long.’
‘No. But he was a nice cop. If you’re trying to find something out, he’s the one I would go to.’
‘Did you get his name?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what good is that?’
‘I drew him. Before, before . . .’ Her voice dried up a little and then she came back, stronger, harder: ‘I studied art at college. I was going to be an artist. It’s not a bad likeness.’
‘So?’
‘He’s a cop. He may be based out in the sticks for all I know, but he’s got to go see the boss every now and then. You hang out outside the police station, you see the cop in my drawing, you ask him what’s going on.’
‘That’s a good idea.’
‘What did you use to do?’
‘I was a general.’
‘Keeping the Czechs down, beating up the Poles?’
‘No. Angola, Cuba, Afghanistan.’
‘Well, get with it, General.’
He chuckled. ‘Hey, I’ll see you tomorrow morning, first thing, say nine o’clock. I’d better not go inside the hospital. They might be waiting for me.’
‘Yeah. Everybody’s talking about you, the crazy old guy who beat up the useless pathologist.’
‘Nice. I drive a black Volga with furry dice. By the way, thank you very much for all that you’re doing to help. I don’t even know your name.’
‘Iryna.’ And she rang off.
Gennady hadn’t been able to sleep when the phone had rung. Now that coincidence had drummed in his loss, everything was grim – grimmer than before.
LONDON HEATHROW AIRPORT
At twelve noon on the dot, an inconspicuous green van drove up to a bay in the airside cargo warehouse section of Heathrow Airport. A vast, corrugated metal door, big enough to welcome a passenger jet, started rising, and when the height was sufficient, the van drove into the bay. Close to an office built in the cargo bay’s wall stood three black Range Rovers, beside them thirteen men in black. On the far side of the bay stood a Gulfstream jet with Red Cross signs on its fuselage; by its steps, a uniformed nurse guarded two stretchers on wheels.
The green van screeched to a stop close to the Gulfstream, its rear doors opened and a big wooden box, the size of two coffins side by side, was shoved out and landed on the concrete with a great clap. The van accelerated and swung out of the bay, sashaying out onto the exit road.
Reikhman was the first to the wooden box. One of the toughs threw him a crowbar; he caught it smoothly and began to prise open the lid. Inside were two plastic mannequins and a stuffed toy dog. Reikhman picked up the toy and squeezed it with iron fingers. It cried out: Woof! Woof!
He used his phone to take a photograph of the contents of the box, emailed it, then punched in a number.
The phone answered: ‘Weaver speaking.’
‘Look what you sent me. Two dolls and a toy dog. The deal is off.’
‘The deal stays on. We had an unexpected internal problem that can easily be rectified.’
‘How?’
Weaver said two sentences and Reikhman, smiling, said, ‘The English are so sentimental. OK. Tomorrow, same time.’ He hit disconnect, then his phone rang.
‘Reikhman speaking.’
‘Where is my little nephew?’ It was Grozhov. ‘You’re two days late. Come home to uncle. Come home. Or things may not go well for you.’
Reikhman turned his back on his men, standing by their vehicles, and walked off a few steps to try and get some privacy for this, the trickiest of phone calls. ‘Grozhov, I have something to attend to. It’s important.’
‘Important to you. But not to us. Come home.’
‘Give me twenty-four hours.’
‘Little Anatoly, you have been trying to trade things you do not own, without authority.’ Reikhman’s heart pumped fast, faster. How on earth did Grozhov know? ‘Anatoly, turn around.’
He did so, to face his men training their weapons on him, seven shotguns and five light machine pistols. He’d left his bazooka in the lead Range Rover. The voice of his old master through the phone was seductive, reassuring, calming: ‘Little Anatoly, we can sort this out, but your loving uncle needs to see you in person, here, at home. Do you see the nurse? She has something for you.’ The call died.
Helpless, tears in his eyes, Reikhman was immobile. The nurse, antiseptically attractive in a white uniform, dark hair pinned severely, walked up to him, gently rolled up his right sleeve and delicately
inserted the tip of a hypodermic needle into his skin. Reikhman leant his weight against one of the stretchers and, still conscious, lay down, his eyes closed.
The pilot of the Gulfstream started the checklist sequence, prior to firing up the engines. On his laptop manifest he deleted Two passengers and one animal, and filled in One passenger, requiring medical attention.
LONDON
The Special Forces Club was tucked away in a back street not far from Knightsbridge, in between a dodgy private bank and an anonymous, high-end brothel. Of the three institutions, the club’s clientele was the seediest, the most ill at ease, and had the manner of men and women most in need of a quiet bung and a quick screw. As he approached the club, Lightfoot knelt down to fix an already beautifully tied shoelace, did an inconspicuous 360-degree inspection of anyone who might be following him – mainly, but not entirely, for old time’s sake – stood up, walked up a couple of steps and pressed a buzzer. The door sprung open and he was greeted by a young woman reading Gazeta Wyborcza on her iPhone and eating a packet of cheese and onion crisps. She held a crisp up to her mouth, paused, clocked Lightfoot, nodded at him, then carried on eating the crisp.
In the old days, you would have had an ex-guardsman on the door of the Special Forces Club. No wonder the country was going to the dogs, thought Lightfoot. But as he mounted the staircase lined by a gallery of photographs of former members, many of them in the Special Operations Executive and executed by the Nazis, he regretted his silent burst of petty English chauvinism. Poles, French, Romanians, Russians – White and Red – Czechoslovakians, Albanians, Dutch, Norwegians, Italians, Greeks and Danes . . . every European nation occupied by the Nazis was represented on that wall. Black-and-white photographs of men with Errol Flynn moustaches and women with Vera Lynn hairdos and impossible-to-spell surnames made him straighten his back and smooth his tie.
Lightfoot had a hunch that the Irishman who said he was a special needs teacher wasn’t telling the whole story, and the man he was going to meet over lunch might be able to tell him something more. He was a retired chief superintendent in what used to be the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and something of a talker.