Cold

by John Sweeney

  His phone beeped with a text message: Where are the Irish and the Russian? Text us. Or your mother and boyfriend die. You have one minute. The boyfriend first.

  They would, of course, be watching him. Lightfoot picked up a remote and suddenly the house was full of Maria Callas singing Madame Butterfly.

  Walking quickly but not running – stiff upper lip and all that – he went to the kitchen. He felt he didn’t have time to find himself a proper glass but, curse his shaking hands, reached out for a mug and poured himself a slug of Ardbeg, the best, peatiest Scotch whisky in the whole of creation. No ice. Ice was for second-hand-car salesmen.

  He lifted up a tartan knitted tea cosy, under which he routinely hid his father’s service revolver, walked back to the sitting room and sat down in an armchair. The second hand on his watch told him forty-three seconds to go. He swirled the Ardbeg in the mug, savoured its aroma, glanced at his watch again, closed his eyes and listened to Maria’s heavenly voice. Half a minute. Better not dally too long, he thought, said ‘Cheers, everyone’ to Maria, to the empty room, swigged the Scotch and uttered a final aah of pleasure as he drained the Ardbeg. Then Lightfoot placed the revolver’s muzzle to his temple and blew his brains out, smearing blood, bone and grey matter on an oil painting of Wellington’s defeat of the French at the Battle of Salamanca. He’d always hated it.

  MOSCOW

  The pain inside Reikhman’s head seemed elastic. If he moved an inch, it hurt cruelly. If he stayed absolutely still, it moderated to a dull ache. He closed his eyes and felt sick, opened them and felt slightly less grim. Staring upwards, he realised he couldn’t figure out the shape of the cell he’d woken up in.

  Unblinking, he lay on the simple iron bed, trying to give a name to its strange, curiously familiar proportions. Walls of whitewashed concrete led to a skylight far above his head. Through that, he could see the light was turning grey, so he’d already passed much of the day here. The cell was narrow at his end and widened out a tad before tapering back to fit the door. Just by the door was a small pot, which, even though it was empty, didn’t smell good.

  His cell, Reikhman realised, was shaped like a coffin. Tongue clacking on the floor of his mouth, arid, he got up and banged on the door, calling out, ‘Hey! Can I have some water in here! Hey!’

  No reply.

  He started yelling at the top of his voice: ‘Water, please, help, I need some water!’

  No reply.

  ‘Come on you scum! Come on, you don’t scare me.’

  No reply.

  Reikhman was not and never had been a fearful man. But he stared up at the coffin ceiling and began to feel an edge of terror, that they might abandon him for good. He pounded on the old steel door of his cell.

  Still, no reply.

  ‘Please, Uncle, some water.’

  A metal slot in the door opened and a small metal box, the size of a tin of sardines, was slipped through. It was not quite full of water, and what there was tasted rusty and stale, but he lapped it up greedily.

  They came for him an hour later. Bolts were pulled back, a key turned and three guards in uniform, all of them hefty, marched in. They started beating him with weighted coshes, on his kidneys, his belly, his back, but never his face. Reikhman curled into a ball, arms and legs trying to cover himself. They stopped and left as suddenly as they had come. The key was again turned, the bolts drawn.

  He got up to piss in the pot and he pissed blood. The suggestion of day from the skylight high above faded and died; the electric lights above him seemed to burn more brightly than before. Muffled sounds came to him through the door, which must, he felt, have been soundproofed – odd thunks and slammings, once a scream, cut short, then a return to a silence so heavy it felt weighted down with lead.

  I know what is going on, thought Reikhman, I know what they are doing to me, what Uncle Grozhov is doing to me. Hell, Reikhman himself had engineered the same sequence for dozens of victims: the waiting, the beatings; the absence of food, of water, of natural light. Above all, the isolation got to people. Why bother to torture a prisoner if their very own imagination works against them, eating up their courage? Once softened, the weak-minded would talk, would gabble out their pathetic confessions.

  Reikhman reflected that it was one thing to know that you were being tricked; quite another not to be affected by the trick. Force, isolation, the threat of force returning – crude and brutal, oh yes, but as Reikhman lay on his bed, waiting for their next visit, effective.

  Hard to be sure, but it felt like three o’clock in the morning when they came for him again. He was blindfolded, half pushed and half dragged down a series of corridors until he found himself being forced down to lie, belly up, on some sort of cushioned table that sagged in the middle. His arms and legs were pinioned – he suspected with plastic handcuffs, that’s what he would use. The portion of the table supporting his head and neck dropped gently. They had him on a dentist’s chair.

  Oh sweet Christ, thought Reikhman.

  A whirring sound, soft, gentle, not a drill, very close to his head. He could see nothing because of the blindfold. Slowly, not uncomfortably, he felt both sides of his face being gripped, not by human hand, but some kind of a machine, the grips cushioned and shaped for the human head, protecting but not covering his ears. The pressure grew too much and Reikhman gasped with pain. The whirring stopped and it eased a fraction.

  They filled in his nostrils first: gooey, plastic-smelling stuff that blocked the airways. He had to open his mouth to breathe; the moment he did that he felt two plastic straps tugging at his upper and lower jaw, forcing them apart until his muscles ached. Then a hard plastic contraption was inserted into his mouth, forcing it to stay open. The straps were extracted. He could breathe through the contraption.

  Steps, heavy and slow. Through the blindfold he sensed the lights dimming. Then they started injecting goo into his mouth, filling up the cavity behind his teeth, restricting his ability to breathe deeply. When the goo touched his palate he tried to retch. The gagging mechanism was involuntary, uncontrollable. The muscles at the back of his mouth went into spasm, his arms and legs threshing against the plastic ties. The goo in his nostrils had solidified completely, blocking all passage of air. In his mouth, his airway was becoming more and more constricted, the goo beginning to firm up. This wasn’t waterboarding. He was being drowned in plastic.

  ‘Dental alginate, little Anatoly.’ The voice was soothing, kindly, Grozhov at his most avuncular. ‘It’s only seaweed, chemically processed. Within another minute it will harden like concrete in your mouth and you will no longer be able to breathe. Such a shame. Remember our time together after I took you out of the orphanage? You were such a beautiful boy. Happy times. You should not have done what you did.’

  His lips were pulled back and more alginate injected, this time into the sides of his mouth, first left, then right.

  ‘I want to ask you about your insurance policy, Anatoly. The pilot told us about how he filmed the packages, how he gave the film cards to you. The insurance policy, Anatoly? Where did you hide it? Tell your uncle.’

  A noise – what might have been a sentence – emerged, but it conveyed no meaning. The alginate had rendered Reikhman quite dumb, as effectively as if they had sliced off his tongue with a knife.

  ‘What was that, little Anatoly? I can’t make you out. Tell Uncle again.’

  Again a constricted, muffled, catarrhal yelping – a subhuman sound.

  ‘Little Anatoly, perhaps you need to cough.’

  Yet more alginate was inserted into his mouth, spilling out onto and covering his lips, running down his chin. It was hardening by the second.

  ‘Little Anatoly, remember this. In Russia, at our level, words weigh too much. Words are bullets. Words might as well be made with lead. Do you understand me, little Anatoly?’

  He couldn’t speak and his face was locked in the cushioned vice, so he could neither move nor shake his head. His eyelids fluttered uncontrollably,
his lungs heaved as they tried to gain more oxygen, but above all the terror of being drowned in plastic engulfed him, breaking him utterly.

  ‘Here, information is not yours. It does not belong to you. Do you agree? Please tell me, little Anatoly, what is on your mind?’

  His airway closed completely, the alginate beginning to slip down into his throat. Reikhman’s chest and abdomen were heaving in spasms, his head pounding with the pressure of too much blood, his heart–lung cycle choked.

  ‘Lift your right hand if you’re going to tell your uncle where you’ve hidden the insurance policy. If you don’t care to, I had better go. I have a lot of work to get through.’

  Reikhman’s right hand was pinned down at the wrist but he managed to flutter his fingers as best he could. A drill fired up and soon was biting into the hardened alginate. His jaw was forced agonisingly wide, the plastic contraption eased out of his mouth, and a soft jet of water cleared enough of his airway for him to breathe. As the oxygen hit his lungs his whole frame juddered. Spluttering, spitting, he retched, desperate to get the last remaining chunks of alginate out of his mouth, but his head was still locked in the cushioned vice so his vomit returned down his throat. His nostrils remained blocked, his arms and legs stayed tied.

  The dentist’s chair whirred and his head and upper torso shifted upwards, so that he could gasp in some air.

  ‘So?’

  Reikhman told Grozhov where he had hidden his secret copy of the camera footage, of both the quick and the dead.

  ‘Very ingenious, little Anatoly, very ingenious,’ said Grozhov, and nodded for the guards to return him to his cell. Grozhov had broken the man who had once been his little angel in less than three minutes.

  NOVO-DZERZHINSKY

  The prospect of another night in the hotel with mood music by freight trains didn’t delight Gennady, but he had little choice. A loud throbbing caused him to open the curtains of his room. Below, three heavy diesel locomotives chugged past, pulling an unusual cargo.

  Gennady phoned Venny: ‘Guess what I’m counting out of my hotel window?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Tanks. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. And now self-propelled artillery guns, armoured personnel carriers.’

  ‘Which way are they going? East?’

  ‘West, towards Ukraine. The Ghost Army, on the move. Now I’m looking at Grads, maybe a dozen of them. This train ends up where I think it’s heading, there’s going to be a lot of dead Ukrainians.’

  ‘Maybe you’re hallucinating.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He paused for a moment and his voice softened. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Absolutely fine.’ The way she said it told him the opposite.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Gennady, perhaps too abruptly.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on, I can hear it in your voice. Something’s wrong.’

  ‘Not on the phone. When are you back here?’

  ‘Tomorrow evening, with luck.’

  ‘OK, see you then. Please be here tomorrow night. I need your help.’

  Gennady started to say something, but Venny had cut the call.

  In the middle of the night, Iryna – not Yellow Face but his daughter – came to him, her lower face gone, not rotted, but somehow sawn off. He heard screams, deep-voiced – no, it was her, his daughter was screaming at him, screaming at the top of her lungs, but he couldn’t make out a word she was saying, then some police came, their faces indistinguishable, dragging her onto a train of the dead.

  ‘Hey, you in number seventeen!’ said a voice. ‘Keep the noise down. You’re keeping everybody awake.’

  The stranger’s yelling brought him out of the nightmare. Drenched in sweat, shaking, Gennady glanced at his watch, and from the sodium glare of the goods yard outside his window he could make out the time: three o’clock, the very dead of night. When this is over, he promised himself, that will be the time for sleep.

  In the morning, he scraped the night’s frost from the windscreen of the Volga, got in and started her up, driving past a memorial to the dead of the Great Patriotic War. As he passed, he noticed that some twisted scum had daubed a swastika on the memorial, which no one had bothered to clean up.

  Just before the police station in the centre of Novo-Dzerzhinsky, he took a left under two vast heating pipes that turned vertical so that the traffic could pass under them. They had to do it that way because if the pipes lay below ground, the water inside them would freeze.

  Sergei’s information was as reliable as his face was rotten. Twelve miles out of town, Gennady came to a bridge over a stream, and there stood a cop by his Lada, his lollipop in his hand, ready to stop any errant motorist.

  Gennady slowed, wondering what would happen next. The lollipop stayed down, Gennady’s elderly Volga being of no interest to this particular police officer. But Gennady was interested in him. He slowed to a stop. In the rear-view mirror, he saw the police officer, puzzled, motion him on with a rather pitiful flick of the lollipop. Iryna’s drawing was magically accurate. She’d captured Sergeant Oblamov to perfection. Once again, Gennady felt a shudder of sadness that a young artist of such talent had so little time left in the world.

  Gennady got out of the car and walked towards the officer. The snow had gone slushy and grey underfoot, but out here in the countryside the air smelt fresh and pure.

  ‘Sergeant Oblamov? Leonid Leonidovich Oblamov?’

  Reading this man’s face was as easy as reading a comic. Oblamov was smart enough to realise that the Cheka would never come on their own, and never, ever drive a car as unfashionable as a Volga. His face said, Who is this stranger who knows my name?

  ‘Yes, that’s me,’ he said.

  ‘Is there somewhere where we can talk?’

  ‘What about?’

  A yellow Lada, dirty, dented and wheezing, passed them by, the old man within giving Oblamov a friendly wave.

  ‘My daughter’s gone missing,’ Gennady said. ‘Her name is Iryna Dozhd. I found a grave with her name on it but the person in the coffin wasn’t her at all. I went to see the pathologist in Novo-Dzerzhinsky, Dr Malevensky, but I’m afraid he wasn’t very helpful. Someone said that you might be able to help me.’

  ‘Who said that?’ Oblamov was still suspicious.

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘Damn,’ said Oblamov. His face, normally ruddy, epicurean, had gone the colour of whey. ‘Is it about the old man?’

  Now it was Gennady’s turn to be nonplussed. ‘What old man? I’m not interested in an old man. I’ve come about my daughter, Iryna Dozhd.’

  ‘Dozhd, do you say? They’re looking for a Dozhd, a retired general who’s gone psycho. He needs psychiatric treatment.’

  A flicker of unease clouded Gennady’s face.

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ Oblamov said. ‘I recognise your face from the poster at the station. You’re the psycho they’re looking for.’ Oblamov backed away two feet, his hand inching towards his gun holster.

  Gennady, saying nothing, walked slowly back to the Volga, opened the boot, found his rucksack, rummaged through it.

  ‘Hey you! You come back here. I’ve got to arrest you . . .’ The officer’s voice tailed off as he realised that Gennady was aiming a gun straight at him.

  ‘I was in the Spetsnaz before they made me a general,’ Gennady said. ‘I came top of my year for sharpshooting, three years in a row. I’m an old man now. Do you want to take the risk that I’ve forgotten my old tricks?’

  Oblamov shook his head. ‘Listen, psycho—’

  ‘I’m not mad. I’m entirely sane.’

  ‘Listen, General . . . OK, you’re entirely sane. I don’t know anything about your daughter. I can’t help you.’

  Gennady waved his gun, suggesting that wasn’t a good thing to say.

  ‘Tell me about the old man,’ said Gennady. ‘Tell me about him then, instead.’

  Oblamov – troubled, anxious, uncertain – came to a decision.

  ‘If
they find out, they’ll make trouble for me,’ he said.

  ‘Better be in trouble than dead.’

  ‘I can take you to someone else. I’ll say nothing. But there’s an old woman, hereabouts, she found the body. She can tell you.’

  Gennady pondered this for a moment. ‘Do that,’ he said.

  Oblamov got inside his Lada police car. Gennady took the passenger seat, his gun held over his lap. They drove along the main road for a short distance and then turned up a dirt track, full of potholes, the Lada bouncing this way and that like a fishing boat in a choppy sea.

  ‘Screw the minister of transport for not building proper roads,’ said Gennady as the gun almost fell from his fingers.

  The officer grinned. ‘Yes, screw him.’ Oblamov glanced at the general and reflected that this guy didn’t seem so crazy.

  They pulled up just short of a big sump, now covered in ice, and a few yards farther on stood a poor wooden shack with just a thin trickle of woodsmoke emerging from a tin chimney. They got out and Gennady hid his gun in the pocket of his leather jacket, but he let Oblamov see the shape of it and waggled it at him, just in case.

  Ludmilla opened the door, her faced engraved with suspicion. Still, she let them in, sat them down when the fat monster of her cat deigned to give up its rightful place on the chair by the stove, offered moonshine, declined by Gennady, accepted by Oblamov – ‘just a small one, for the road’ – and stared at the two of them.

  Oblamov couldn’t bear silences and started huffing and puffing but said nothing sensible. The old lady sneaked a glance at the officer, who hurriedly shook his head. It was comically obvious to Gennady that they knew something and that, unless he worked hard, they were never going to tell him what it was.

  ‘My name is Gennady Semionovich Dozhd and I am a retired general of the 345th Guards Independent Parachute Assault Regiment.’