by John Sweeney
Reilly wagged his tail on Joe’s arrival, but elsewhere the scene was far from happy. Masha, with her back to Joe, sat in her wheelchair, disconsolate, tears of frustration ruining her mascara, arguing with a effete young man in a white dinner jacket, sporting a quiff that rose from his forehead like the angled deck of an aircraft carrier.
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Cohen,’ said Mr Quiffy, ‘but unfortunately a dog must be taken onstage by its owner and there is no wheelchair access on the stage. I’m so sorry but Reilly here’ – he patted Reilly’s rump, provoking the dog to try and nip him – ‘can’t enter the competition.’
‘Masha, we’d better go.’ But Joe’s intervention had entirely the opposite consequence of the desired effect.
‘Oh, Joe, thank goodness you’re here. You can take Reilly onstage.’
‘Ah . . . ah . . . ah . . .’ Joe couldn’t find the right words to express his reluctance.
‘Ah, come on Joe, you can’t cheat an old lady out of her last chance of a bit of showbiz.’ Masha gripped his hand with hers, which looked as fragile as bone china but had the tensile strength of precision steel.
‘Ah . . . ah . . . ah . . .’ Joe repeated, wholly inadequately.
‘That’s settled then,’ said Mr Quiffy, earning him a look from Joe that was sour as rancid cream. Had he been a dog, Joe would have nipped him.
Mr Quiffy clapped his hands, called out ‘Onstage now, please!’ and walked back down the line to lead owners and animals up a steep flight of steps onto the stage. The audience in the ship’s theatre seemed to Joe to be astonishingly large. The truth was, it was an otherwise dreary Monday, the weather rough, the world cruise was long and there was very little else to do.
Six owners and dogs made it onto the stage in a seemly fashion, Mr Quiffy announcing man and beast in turn; the seventh, the last owner and dog, did not. The seventh owner – a craggy-faced, youngish man called Joe, with dark hair unconvincingly dyed blond, at least half a century younger than the other contestants – seemed lost and out of sorts.
The moment Joe appeared in front of the audience, he blinked at the ferocity of the footlights, stumbled, and in doing so dropped the lead. Reilly – black, curly-haired, as lean as a whippet but with a poodle’s vaultingly high opinion of itself – scampered off to the far edge of the stage, cocked a leg over a footlight and let loose a long stream of piss. The light shorted with a loud bang, setting the audience off into gales of laughter. The dog show was turning out to be far more entertaining than expected.
The young man roared ‘Reilly!’ and chased after him, causing the dog to ricochet in and out of the line of dogs, knotting a red-bow-tied chihuahua to a bichon frise, winding a Pekinese’s lead around the ankles of his very elderly owner. Mr Quiffy lost his spray-on smile and set off to apprehend the rogue dog, but only succeeding in falling over a lead connecting a stray dachshund to a woman with neon-blue hair. The crowd clacked their dentures with abandon and a dozen camera phones snapped the high point of disaster as the black dog nipped Mr Quiffy on the bottom while his owner looked on, mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.
They loaded the images of the dog show chaos up on their Facebook pages and Twitter feeds to amuse their friends and family in New York, Miami, London, Tel Aviv, Stuttgart, Stockholm, wherever.
He had the whole world to search, but then he had enough brontobytes of computing power at his disposal to skim through one billion faces in record time, matching fuzzy and shadowy images against the target. The match popped up on the grid eleven seconds after a pensioner from Birmingham, Alabama posted it on his Facebook page, some kind of silly dog show on a cruise ship. He picked up his secure phone – none securer on the whole planet – and dialled a Moscow number.
YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
When you go blind – not in infancy but in later life – they say that, after the blackness descends, your powers of hearing become dramatically more acute. The same was true, Gennady reflected, of any lock-up where sight – or at least things to see – was routinely denied, even this fancy chemical prison they called a psychiatric hospital.
By now his ears had become attuned to the regular early-morning bashes and crashes, the swish of cleaning mops, the slosh of buckets, the rattle of iron in metal as the turnkeys went about their dull-minded routines. But this morning, he heard something irregular, different, high-pitched – an edgy whimpering, rising and falling, sometimes disappearing completely for several minutes at a time before coming back, stronger, more persistent than before. The pitch raised and then the sound became far more defined: a woman’s scream, piercing, unnatural, utterly terrifying. Then it stopped as mysteriously as it had begun.
Was that Venny? he wondered. Was this how her life would end, alone in a prison cell, the beautiful elegance of her mind rendered moronic by chemicals and electricity? And who had done this to her? He had. No one else.
Gennady’s grim, self-hating reverie ended when he heard the rattle of the key in his cell door and the ugly, brutish-seeming, friendly guard entered his cell, put his back to the door, took out a pencil and a scrap of paper and scribbled something on it. Eyes hazy, brain foggy, Gennady struggled to read it at first but then the words came clear and true: Stay strong General.
Gennady shook his head, smiling weakly to himself, and found to his embarrassment that he was wiping away a tear from his eye. The guard noted that Gennady had absorbed the message, then put the paper in his mouth and ate it. His fingers mimed two crocodile clips biting on each other and he let out a soft buzz, barely discernible. They were going to give him the electricity today – that was the message.
Gennady could mourn for Venny, whose cries he’d heard that very morning. But then he recalled something he’d read – that in Stalin’s time, the NKVD would play recordings of a woman’s screams to prisoners, and they would be convinced that they were listening to the agony of their mother, wife, lover, daughter, but it was an actress. That was back then, in the olden days. And today? Today they were going to give an old soldier electricity. His crime was that he hadn’t shut his mouth when someone killed his only daughter in a horrible way. And Venny had only tried to help him.
So, General, he told himself, you’d better keep your back straight and go into battle. But he also knew that the truth was better put the other way round, that the battle, the violence, the pain would, soon enough, be coming to him.
One hour later, the door was unlocked and Dr Penkovsky and Olga, the senior nurse, came into his cell with a posse of heavies, to dose him up prior to the ECT. The atmosphere as they wheeled him to the treatment room was sombre – similar, he imagined, to the mood in prison shortly before an execution.
They bound him hand and foot, rammed some grisly rubber thing in his mouth, attached electrodes to his hands and skull. The moment he heard the electricity begin to hum, he squirted spittle out of his mouth. The horror he felt as his muscles twitched involuntarily in spasm was countered by his foreknowledge – thanks to the werewolf, bless him – of what was in store, that the more he dribbled, the more his eyeballs fluttered in their sockets, the better. But he could only hold out for so long. Waves of electrically contrived chaos grew stronger and stronger, beginning to break against his mind’s defences, already enfeebled by the chemicals. His last thought, just as he was about to lose consciousness, was the note, scribbled and swallowed by the guard: Stay strong General. Someone had recognised him, someone knew that he was here. That thought meant something. But who?
NUUK, GREENLAND
At sunrise, Joe was pacing the promenade deck of the cruise ship with Reilly off his piece of string, prancing and sniffing, sniffing and prancing. This was the only time of day Joe dared to get some fresh air. The two of them were quite alone. He stopped by a guard rail towards the stern, leaned his arms on the rail and took in the northernmost capital in the world as the ship prepared to drop anchor. It was far too big to dock in Nuuk’s small harbour, and day trippers would have to take to the ship’s t
enders to explore Greenland.
Joe and Katya, fearful of a passport check, were to spend the day holed up inside Masha’s cabin as usual, playing and losing at poker with the elderly pensioner, who was more wily at cards than Joe could ever have possibly imagined.
Clatters and bangs and a great splash came from the bow; on top of that, a stranger sound, a thin, high-pitched whine. Joe dismissed it and examined Nuuk. It looked smaller than Skibbereen, more a village than a city, a cluster of brightly painted chalets strewn among outcrops of grey rock, the most prominent building a red, wooden-framed church. All of it timidly cowered in the shelter of a massive mountain called Ukkusissaq, which meant ‘soapstone’. The pointlessness of that piece of knowledge amused him, but he’d only just read about it in the cruise ship newspaper popped underneath the door of the Duchess Suite. But Mount Soapstone wasn’t the thing that was weighing on his mind.
He took out the newspaper and examined the front page again. The delights of Nuuk and a potted history of Greenland were the second lead, but the main story of the day was Dog Nips Entertainer, illustrated by a photograph showing the twit in the white dinner jacket, ‘Mr Terrence’, having his bottom bitten by Reilly, with Joe staring on, gormless. Ordinarily, the low comedy of the picture would have amused Joe, but what troubled him was a brief line in italics at the bottom of the front page, telling readers that the cruise ship newsletter was available online.
He stared at Greenland as the sun turned the snow on the higher slopes of Ukkusissaq strawberry pink, and returned to scanning the paper. Erik the Red had turned up hereabouts around AD 1000 on the run from a murder rap, it read. A killer and a chancer, Erik had baptised the place with an alluring name but it was a con . . .
And that was when Joe heard that high-pitched whine again, looked up and realised he was being watched. A white plastic tea tray hung thirty feet above in the sky, beneath it a small plastic box with a lens, staring at him. The tea tray had four large holes in its corners, and in the holes the light was milky and fuzzy. They were rotors; that was what was making the whining noise.
A drone.
The moment he started to run, the drone tipped up into the sky twenty feet, then followed him.
‘Reilly!’ he roared. ‘Come here!’ But the dog had never dreamt of such fun, and started ducking and diving from Joe’s grasp. The very last thing he wanted to do was come to heel. Joe cursed himself for never bothering to teach Reilly any tricks apart from the stupid one of offering his paw to be shaken for a treat. He held his legs and arms out as wide as possible, just like Grobbelaar in days of old before a penalty, and tried to box Reilly in, but the fool of a dog was too cute for that and skipped past Joe’s fingertips. Ahead, the drone stared on, sucking in everything it could see and piping it back somewhere – nowhere good, thought Joe.
‘Think dog psychology,’ he muttered to himself. The very worst thing for Reilly was breaking the pack. Got it. Joe opened a door into the ship and closed it behind him. A few seconds later, he reopened the door and Reilly shot in, and Joe caught him and clipped his lead to his collar.
Through the door’s porthole, he could see the drone hanging in the sky, just a few feet on the other side of the glass, its lens eyeing him beadily. Joe recalled that drone operators had to have a licence, had to make sure that they never flew too close to people. Whoever was operating the drone didn’t give a damn about that.
He ran along the ship’s corridors, down two flights of stairs, Reilly bounding along in tow, opened the door to the Duchess Suite and the inner door to the bedroom he shared with Katya. Forming a crescent moon underneath the sheets, she stirred, shifted her head on the pillow a fraction, and settled back into the innocence of sleep.
Oh sweet Christ, thought Joe, I don’t want to wake her. But I must.
He sat down on the bed, tidied a stray coil of hair from her face and kissed her on her forehead, then leaned back and, nervous and afraid, said in a too-loud voice, ‘Katya, you’ve got to get up. Get up, get up!’
He hurried into the bathroom, took the toiletries Masha had bought for them on the ship, and stuffed them in a plastic bag. They had so little stuff that all their possessions could be dumped into one skimpy bit of plastic.
She was awake but she wasn’t moving.
‘We have to go, to leave the ship, now.’
‘There’s no point.’
‘Listen, I saw a drone just now. Up on the deck. It had a camera, it followed me around. It’s them. We’ve got to run.’
In the corner, Reilly started to shiver. He hated it when they rowed.
‘I am sick of running,’ Katya said. ‘Running for what? They will kill us. No question. So, why run?’
Joe felt an extraordinary surge of anger.
‘What have we been doing since London?’ He was desperate to keep his voice quiet, not disturb Masha next door, but he couldn’t contain his contempt for Katya’s mulish abandonment of hope: ‘Your boyfriend had those people killed, he had me kidnapped. They were torturing me – you, too – and then we were lucky, we were given a chance, and now we have a plan, to get to Utah, to find this CIA man, and we’re halfway there and now you’re giving up? What is it? You can’t be bothered? Don’t you want to stay alive?’
‘No. I don’t.’ She said this with such solemnity, such bleakness that it fuelled his fury, so much so that he leapt onto the bed and slammed his right fist into the pine headboard.
The door opened and Masha stood there in her dressing gown, her hair wrapped up in a towel like a turban, her porcelain knuckles gripping a wheeled walking frame. Ordinarily, her clothes and make-up cloaked just how old she was, but at this time of the morning she looked every bit of her eight-five years. No hiding her age – no hiding, too, her anger.
‘What in darn’s name is going on here?’ She motioned at Katya. ‘She told me that you were on the run from a jealous boyfriend. So like a fool that I am, I took you in, I’ve sheltered you. But it’s worse than that, isn’t it? The line about the jealous boyfriend, that’s just baloney. You’ve played me for a sucker. Who are you running from?’
The two of them held their tongues and stared into space, neither willing to be the first to tell the old lady how deep in trouble they were.
‘I heard every word,’ the old woman continued. ‘You’ve got a big mouth on you, Irishman. People got killed, you got kidnapped, torture, a drone. What kind of ex-boyfriend sends a drone to Greenland for gawd’s sake? Who is this? Tell me, who are you running from?’
They remained silent.
‘Well, screw you. I’m phoning security. I’m going to have you thrown off this ship. You can tell the police the cat’s got your tongue.’
She moved her walking frame stiffly towards the phone that lay on a small table beside their bed. With infinite slowness, she lowered herself onto the bed and her arthritic hands scrabbled towards the receiver. Never had Joe seen something so undesired take place with such sluggish remorselessness.
He could not bring himself to place a hand on her. But he had to speak out. ‘Do that,’ he said quietly, ‘and we’re both dead. You too, like as not.’
She turned her head to stare at him directly. ‘So who are you running from? Eh?’ He shook his head and the old lady turned her head back, and with infinite slowness dialled a number and said, ‘Hello? I’ve got a problem . . .’ That was as far as she got. Katya leaned over, wrenched the phone from Masha’s hand and replaced it on the cradle and said, ‘Zoba. We’re running from Zoba, or at least Zoba’s men. My former boyfriend, he works for Zoba. We don’t know why, we don’t understand it, but he wants something from us. What it is, we don’t know. You hand us over to the police here, they will find out, get what they want and then kill us.’
The phone started to ring, and ring. Joe and Katya watched as Masha turned her body, slowly picked it up, then put it down without speaking. She turned back to them: ‘Zoba’s people?’
‘Officially, Reikhman is a tax inspector,’ said Katya.
‘Unofficially, he is the state executioner. He’s angry with me and wants me back and would kill Joe, would kill any man, for daring to have me, just once, but there is something more to this. It’s not just Reikhman. Behind him is Zoba, and what he wants from us, we have no idea.’
Masha looked from Katya to Joe and back again, an old lady whose greatest fear was that her loneliness and grief had caused her to be a fool.
‘Are you conning me?’
At that moment, a heavy knocking came from the suite’s outer door. Masha tried to stand up clumsily, Katya helping her, and her gnarled hands gripped the walking frame. She was spinning it round when they heard the outer door unlock and open.
Joe and Katya hurried into the walk-in wardrobe, leaving Reilly scratching at its door with his paws, worrying what new, strange game this was. Then the door to their bedroom opened and the two of them heard a man’s voice, concerned: ‘Ma’am, are you OK? There was a telephone call from this suite. You sounded very anxious. Is there something wrong?’
‘No, I just couldn’t find my hearing aid. I’ve found it now. Thank you for coming and checking up on me, but I must get dressed. Can’t miss breakfast, it being free and all.’
A long pause followed.
‘You’ve got visitors?’
‘Last night. Some friends dropped by. They’ll pick up their stuff later. Thank you for your concern but I’m quite dandy. Now leave me be, or I’ll miss breakfast. It takes me an age to get ready.’
‘Well, any worries, just pick up the phone.’ The voice did not sound too convinced.
After a moment, Joe and Katya heard the outer door click shut and then the wardrobe door opened and Masha was standing over them as they crouched, her head haloed by the bedroom light. ‘My father was shot in 1937,’ she said. ‘Shot for nothing. I remember my mother weeping after they’d taken him away. She remarried a Russian diplomat, they were in Tehran during the war. In 1945, we all had to go back to Moscow. Instead, my stepfather got us out to America. Stalin, Zoba don’t seem much different to me. If you’re running from Zoba, you’re safe with me.’