Cold

by John Sweeney

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I have a suggestion.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Joe asked.

  They listened as Lightfoot spelled it out.

  ‘That’s absurd,’ said Joe.

  ‘I love it,’ said Katya.

  ‘That’s settled then,’ said Lightfoot and stood up. ‘See you in the morning. And if either of you ever breathes a word about this, I will come track you down and—’

  ‘Oh, join the queue,’ said Joe.

  Long before dawn this morning, they’d found themselves walking along a subterranean brick passage from the lodge to a large garage. Lightfoot led them past a number of Rolls limousines of various vintages and a London taxi, to a large black Bentley with thick, armoured glass. He opened the boot and directed Joe, Katya and Reilly inside. The boot closed and all was dark. Then the Bentley started to move.

  Two hours later, they heard cheering. The Bentley stopped; the doors opened and closed. The Bentley moved on, stopped again, and then the boot was opened. Light flooded in. They were in the basement of an underground car park.

  Lightfoot helped them out, pointed to a door on the far side of the car park: ‘Go through that door. It’s unlocked. The barge is on the other side of the door. The engine’s on, there’s a map. You go north-west, get to Liverpool. How you get across the Irish Sea, that’s up to you.’

  ‘Thank you, George,’ said Katya. ‘You are a true English gentleman.’

  Lightfoot beamed. Joe shook his head at a phrase he could – would – never articulate.

  ‘By the way,’ said Lightfoot, ‘I’ve posted your passports on somewhere. It should buy you some time.’

  ‘Where’s that?’ asked Joe.

  ‘Not Torremolinos.’

  They started walking towards the door. As they opened it, they glanced back, but the Bentley had already crept silently away.

  At dusk the wooden doors of the Daisy’s stern hatch opened, and two long slender arms emerged, proffering a cup of tea in a blue-and-white striped mug.

  Reilly, who hated the cold, popped his snout out, surveyed the bleak weather and returned to his berth to coil like a fossil.

  ‘This is soooo slow,’ said Katya, wrapped up in a duvet.

  ‘We are heading west. For an Irishman, that’s good.’

  ‘Reikhman had a motor yacht with its own swimming pool, jet skis. We went to St Tropez and everything.’

  ‘Well, you were snoozing when we went through Wolverhampton.’

  ‘What is it like?’

  ‘Very much like St Tropez.’

  She pulled a face, not believing him.

  ‘Where are we? It feels like nowhere.’

  ‘Staffordshire. I love the slowness of it,’ said Joe.

  ‘Cold,’ said Katya with an edge of complaint to her voice – like it was somehow his fault – as she let the duvet fall.

  ‘That’s because you haven’t got any clothes on.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘So bourgeois.’

  Wine-dark clouds were banking up in the east, daylight a fading memory to the west. Fields of darkening snow stretched up to low, uneven hills on either side of the canal. Lights from a farmhouse blinked a mile away. Joe was navigating the boat by judging the obsidian black of the canal against the lighter dark of the banks, but soon he would have to moor up for the night.

  They were alone, but even so what Katya did next thrilled him. Climbing out of the hatch, she knelt before him, shivering, unzipped him, her nipples proud in the freezing air, then sucked his penis until it was hard. She swivelled round, steadied herself against the hatch and arched her buttocks at him. He drove into her, again and again.

  The barge, with no one at the tiller, shunted into the canal bank, quivering and shuddering, as Katya quivered and Joe shuddered; they both climaxed, magically, at the same time; she moaned softly, he howled like a wolf and the moon rose, casting its unearthly pale over the night.

  They both collapsed, giggling, onto the deck, bathed in the moonlight.

  ‘They say canal boats are only for old people,’ said Joe. ‘Bollocks to that.’

  They tied up for the night and began exploring the barge. Under one seat they found candles, matches, a bottle of peroxide hair dye, scissors, a toiletry kit, two mugs decorated with photographs of the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana. In the fridge, chilled meals and a bottle of champagne. Joe lit the candles, poured each of them a slug of bubbly, and they clinked mugs and sat down at a spindly table opposite each other, while Reilly watched, his snout resting on his front paws.

  The candles flickered, playing with the harmony of Katya’s face, the shadows deepening her innate melancholy.

  ‘What’s going on inside that beautiful head of yours?’

  She inspected her mug, the royal couple smiling on the balcony at Buckingham Palace on their wedding day. ‘They looked so happy back then. He loved someone else – she died in a car crash. Not so happy.’

  Joe pulled a sourish face, unhappy that she dwelled so often on the unhappy.

  ‘Love sometimes goes wrong. That doesn’t mean it always fails.’

  ‘Mr Tiplady is an optimist.’

  ‘Guilty. You can call me Tippy, if you like. But you didn’t really answer my question. What were you thinking then, that made your face look so sad?’

  ‘Them,’ she said, nodding at the royal couple. ‘Us. This cannot last. And . . .’

  ‘ . . . and what?’

  ‘And . . . I don’t want to say it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Sometimes I miss my old life – the ease of it, the comfort. Reikhman was a cruel man but he was away a lot. When he was gone, I had everything.’

  ‘I miss my old life, too,’ said Joe. ‘Then someone stole my dog.’

  ‘I am so sorry. I never meant to ruin your life like this.’

  ‘There wasn’t much of a life to ruin. And we’re both victims in this, you and I – victims of men of power out of control. You haven’t ruined my life. You’ve just made it’ – he hesitated, struggling to find the right words – ‘a little too exciting.’

  She giggled at that, signalling to Joe that she had climbed out of her well of sorrow.

  Tucked up against a bulkhead was a small library of poetry books. Joe opened one at random and started reading:

  Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;

  Breath’s a ware that will not keep.

  Up, lad: when the journey’s over

  There’ll be time enough to sleep.

  ‘Reikhman never read to me,’ said Katya.

  ‘But he did have a jet ski,’ replied Joe.

  ‘Shh. Read me another.’

  ‘Tell me not here, it needs not saying, what tune the enchantress plays . . .’

  As he worked his way through the poems of A Shropshire Lad, and a good many others by A. E. Housman, Katya laboriously shaved off his big shaggy beard. Then she made him hold his head in a washing bowl as she dyed his hair peroxide blond.

  When it was her turn, he cut her long tresses back to a boyish crop, to the sound of her sultry, exotic voice reading Gray’s ‘Elegy’. It made the hacking-off of her beautiful hair somehow less cruel. She kept her hair colour, but used make-up to give her face the colouring of an Indian woman. Together, you’d think they were a Swedish deckhand and a Bengali princess.

  They cleaned up, washed themselves in the pokey, miserable crouch-shower, and then sat down to enjoy a candlelit meal of microwaved lasagne on paper plates, and champagne served in mugs.

  Not far off, a moorhen hooted in alarm.

  Their eyes, soft-lit by the flickering light, toyed with each other.

  ‘I’m not sure our luck can hold for long,’ said Joe.

  ‘But, for the moment, this is not so bad.’

  ‘Not so bad,’ echoed Joe, and they clinked mugs.

  Then to bed, partly because they were still enraptured by each other’s bodies, partly because the wood-burning stove had run out of fuel and they were cold. In the dar
kness, Joe could just make out the outline of her head against his chest.

  After a long time, Joe coughed. ‘The Mormon guy, the CIA man Reikhman was spooked by? Where did you say he lived?’

  ‘Utah,’ she said. ‘I remember the town he talked about that time – Bear Lake, Utah.’

  ‘Utah, then.’

  ‘Where is Utah, exactly?’

  ‘It’s like Kentucky, but only more so.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s in the middle, I think. No – beyond the middle. Where the Rocky Mountains are.’

  She seemed satisfied at that and closed her eyes, and in a while he could hear her breathing deepen. Then he heard a new sound, a light murmuring. The sound, he imagined, of a unicorn snoring. He held her closer to him, locked inside his arms.

  Just before he, too, fell asleep, he thought about Lightfoot, how the lying English bastard had turned out to be not so bad after all. Perhaps, one day, after all of this was over, he’d meet him again and buy him a pint of Guinness, and thank him for what he’d done.

  Outside, a stiffening breeze rocked the Daisy, but the ropes securing the barge to the bank were sound. It was a sweet and gentle cradling, thought Joe, but how long would it last?

  NOVO-DZERZHINSKY

  Yellow Face’s drawing of the killing of Pyotr lay on the passenger seat of the Volga, the moment of death frozen in pencil. The mind behind that, thought Gennady, must be truly sick, twisted out of all humanity. The worst of it was, he couldn’t come up with a motive for it. It was a senseless act of sadism.

  Gennady went to turn the drawing face down when a detail in the background triggered a fresh line of thought. The icon on the wall showed that Pyotr had not been without some sense of the numinous. Aha! When someone died, it was not only the state that made a record of the death. The Church would do so, too – for a believer. He turned the key of the motor, and the Volga grumbled into life.

  Stalin’s men had long since knocked down the oldest church in town, but a concrete millionaire, worried about his immortal soul, had paid for and built a brand-new version, complete with gilded roof.

  Gennady got out of the Volga and closed the driver’s door softly, but hesitated for a moment on the far side of the street. Like every other institution in Zoba’s Russia – the cops, the judges, the newspapers – the Church had made an arrangement with the authorities. They were allowed to do their God thing, so long as the pulpit was not used to question how things worked. The idea that his enquiry might not receive an honest-to-God answer checked him. Still, he had no choice.

  The church doors were closed against the cold but not locked. Inside, the light was crepuscular, and it took some moments before Gennady’s eyes adjusted to the gloom. At a side altar, an elderly priest in black robes and a kamilavka, the Orthodox clerical stovepipe hat with no brim, was fussing over some candles – lighting some, snuffing out others. His beard was quite white, his glasses pebble-thick, his robes threadbare. He didn’t look as if he was in the pay of the rich and powerful; or, if he was, he wasn’t spending it on how he dressed.

  Gennady approached him, coughed, explained that he was a lawyer and that he wanted to check the church’s birth, marriage and death records. It was a sensitive matter, he said, but he was on the trail of a suspected bigamist and his enquiries had led him to this church. His work would only take ten minutes, if that, and he would happily make a contribution to church funds for any inconvenience he might cause.

  The priest stared at him for a good twenty seconds, took off his glasses, stuttered forwards, and peered into his eyes. ‘Don’t look like a lawyer to me. Look like a general, name of Dozhd, fought in Afghanistan. I buried quite a few of your men, General, though their families said nice things about you. For the sake of them, I’ll forgive you lying to me. What do you want and how can I help you?’

  Gennady hoped the concrete floor beneath his feet would swallow him up. He told the priest the truth – most of it, anyway – and that to find out what might have happened to his daughter, he needed to establish the identity of the mystery old woman buried in her grave. To do so, he would like to see the church’s record of deaths for the pages for 28 and 29 December. ‘I will show you our book of records. But first, I want you to light a candle to say sorry to God for lying to a priest in church.’

  ‘I’m not a believer, Father.’

  ‘You don’t light the candle, you don’t see the book.’

  The churches in Russia were getting busier, people said. Perhaps, like Gennady, the churchgoers had all been blackmailed. Candlelit, Gennady closed his eyes and mumbled a non-prayer to himself. Satisfied, the priest led the way to the sacristy, and through that to a small office beyond.

  On a desk sat a fat black book, opened. Gennady thumbed through its pages, scanning it quickly. On 28 December, there was a death listed for Maria Kudasheva, aged eighty-three; her address was a block of flats not far from the centre of Novo-Dzerzhinsky. Gennady took out a scrap of paper and scribbled the name and address on it. He thanked the priest, who said nothing but led him back through the sacristy to the church proper.

  At the doors of the church, Gennady turned to the priest, who told him: ‘We’ve been waiting for someone to ask questions about Maria. No one from the authorities has done a thing. She was a good woman and a good daughter of the Church. General, keep on doing what you’re doing.’

  Gennady gunned the Volga, if any Volga could be gunned, to the block of flats, impatient to follow this lead wherever it took him. When he got to the block, he called a flat at random, and said into the intercom that he had some questions about Grandma Kudasheva. A woman’s voice said, ‘Come right up.’

  The door was opened by a little dark-haired boy, who shaped the index and middle finger of his right hand into a gun and piped: ‘Bang! Bang! You’re dead!’

  His mother, a young woman in her twenties – long dark hair, a face already etched with care – hurried into view, clucking at her son.

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  Gennady smiled and said, ‘In a gunfight, he who shoots first wins. My name is Gennady Dozhd. I’m trying to find out what’s happened to my daughter.’

  The woman welcomed him in, introduced herself as Kristina and offered him tea. The little boy was placed in front of a television showing a cartoon of a wolf menacing three little pigs. The boy seemed to be on the wolf’s side. Gennady declined the tea, eased down onto a sofa littered with a toy dragon, a space rocket and various monster men, and set out his story: that his daughter had gone missing, that in a grave with her name on it they had found an old lady, whom he suspected might be Maria Kudasheva.

  ‘Can you help me?’

  She tucked a strand of hair back from her face and, not looking at Gennady, said, ‘Maria was a lovely old lady who did her best to help me – help all the people in this block. What happened to her was shocking, wrong.’

  ‘Can you tell me more?’

  ‘Your daughter, have you got a photograph of her?’

  Gennady produced the snap of Iryna in the blue sleeveless dress by Patriarch Ponds.

  Kristina let out a gasp so loud that her little boy swivelled around from the TV, alarmed.

  ‘It’s all right, Sasha.’ The boy returned his attention to the wolf and the pigs, while Kristina stared at the photograph minutely.

  ‘That’s her. That’s the young woman I saw him carrying out of the building. All I saw was a man carrying a young woman. Mr Dozhd, I’m so sorry to tell you, I think – I think your daughter’s dead.’

  Gennady winced as the pigs on the television squealed. He’d known it all along; he’d known that Iryna was dead because otherwise she would have been in touch. Nevertheless, the confirmation of her death by this young mother, an entirely credible and honest witness who had nothing to gain from lying to him, shocked and saddened him more than he thought possible.

  ‘Kristina, may I have that tea after all?’

  ‘Do you want something stronger?’

  ‘No,
tea is fine.’ She got up to make it in a pokey kitchen off the main room. As she did so, he wiped a tear from his eye, then another and another, hoping that she hadn’t noticed. The little boy did, though. ‘Mum, Mum’ – she popped her head around the door – ‘why is the old man crying?’

  Gennady grinned through his tears. This was exactly the thing that Iryna would have loved, would have found endearingly funny. No more jokes to be shared with Iryna. No more Iryna.

  Kristina returned with the tea, sat down and said, ‘Mr Dozhd—’

  ‘Genya, please.’

  ‘Genya, I am so sorry for your loss.’ In a flat voice, as if he were a proper detective from the police, she set down exactly what had happened: ‘It was on the twenty-eight of December, around noon. I was coming back from seeing my mother with my boy when I got to our block. We were almost knocked over by a man carrying a woman’s body. I recognise her in the photograph. She was obviously dead, the way she was so limp. Worse . . . I am afraid to tell you, Gennady.’ She hesitated.

  ‘Tell me everything.’

  ‘There was something wrong with her neck – the angle of it, broken, against nature, like something from a horror movie. This man, I can’t remember much about him, it all happened in a blur. He threatened me, he said something like, “Shut up, or we’ll take your kid.” That’s all I saw.

  ‘Later, my neighbours discovered Maria’s body. I didn’t see it but they said they thought she had been poisoned. Her face had gone all blue. The police came in a hurry, took her away. Later, we heard that the pathologist said she had died of “infirmity of the arteries” or some such rubbish. We all wanted to go to her funeral. She was a much-loved woman around here. The police told us that her family had buried her privately. Thing is, she told me she didn’t have a family, no children of her own, only a much older brother who had passed on before. One of my friends from the next block along said he heard gunshots around the same time. I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘What kind of car was the killer driving?’