Cold

by John Sweeney

  ‘Thank you, Masha, thank you from the bottom of my heart,’ said Joe. He and Katya emerged from the wardrobe, Reilly giving them extra licks because he had clearly enjoyed the unusual game. Katya embraced the old lady. But Joe had something else to say: ‘If they come here and find us with you, you’re not safe. None of us is safe. We must leave the ship.’

  ‘And go where?’ snapped Masha. ‘You reckon you can hang out in this godforsaken dump? The next port is Halifax, Nova Scotia – four days’ sailing. In Canada, you might have a chance. Greenland? No way.’

  The wisdom of that hit home.

  ‘We can’t keep on hiding here,’ said Joe. ‘They know we’re on the ship.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘The dog show. The photo of Reilly biting the MC, I’m in the background. It’s in the ship’s newspaper, and that’s online. They have face-recognition programmes, they would have been searching the Internet for weeks. And now they’ve found us. Just now I was walking Reilly on the deck and a drone was following me around, filming me. It could only be them.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We don’t sleep here. Not tonight. If we don’t think they’re on the ship, then we can come back tomorrow night.’

  ‘Where are you going to hide?’ asked Masha.

  ‘Somewhere else on the ship. It’s better that you don’t know. You can smuggle food for us. And look after Reilly.’

  ‘OK. By the way, some of the staff know you’re here.’

  ‘What?’ Joe could not hide the astonishment from his voice.

  ‘The maids, the staff who clean the suite. Listen, I’ve been on this damn thing for a year. Miami, Rio, Cape Town, Morocco, Venice, London, Amsterdam, whatever. I know them like family. I give ’em good tips – best tipper on the boat, they say. I told them to keep shtum about you. They will for my sake, but if people start asking questions – well, folk talk, don’t they?’

  ‘All the more reason for us to hide. We’ll be gone by the time you come back from breakfast. But we’ll leave Reilly here.’

  ‘You sure that’s a good idea?’

  ‘It’s not going to be easy hiding the two of us until we get to Canada.’

  ‘OK,’ Masha said, ‘I’d better get dressed. Paid all this money, don’t want to miss out on breakfast. I’ll bring you my leftovers.’

  ‘We’ll be gone by then. Give them to Reilly. He prefers sausages.’

  ‘So, is this goodbye?’

  Joe tried to shake his head but Katya brushed forwards and hugged her and kissed her, and then the old lady left and they were on their own.

  Joe studied her, silently.

  ‘Say it,’ said Katya.

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to stay alive.’

  Head cast down, she said something in Russian.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Something my Auntie Natasha used to say. “Before you die, you cannot get enough of breathing.”’

  ‘So, second thoughts?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t . . . I don’t want you to die.’

  ‘And what about my foolish dog?’

  ‘Nor your foolish dog,’ she said and glanced at Reilly, who wagged his tail, somehow picking up that he was the subject of the conversation. How dogs did that, Joe didn’t know.

  ‘Well,’ said Joe, ‘that’s something.’ And he stared out of the porthole and wondered to himself where on the ship they were going to hide.

  YAKUTSK PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL

  Every muscle ached from the Calvary of electricity-tricked spasm, his throat was parched dry, his head pulsed with a scouring pain, ebbing and surging, in step with the rhythm of his heartbeat. Added to that, a vague yet certain knowledge that they had twisted the cords of his mind. But worst of all was the light, a glare of unbearable brightness bearing down on his eyeballs, so overpowering it made his retinas fizz and spin. He turned his head away from the glare and saw something that made him both burst into tears and vomit – vomit intensely, vomit unremittingly – until his stomach was empty and he could only retch up bile.

  The woman lay on a stretcher beside his; like him, her hands and feet were handcuffed to it, but unlike him she was quite still. Her face was a peculiar grey colour.

  Someone came and wheeled the stretcher back to his cell and unlocked the cuffs. He stood groggily, then collapsed, losing consciousness. Time froze, then galloped ahead, then moved at the pace of a rockface eroding. Two days, three days, ten days . . . he lost all sense of time and place.

  Was Venny dead? He thought over what he had seen, reconstructed the moment he’d seen the woman, lying still, her face deathly grey. It was his memory of the stink of the dead, a smell he knew so well from Afghanistan, that turned his uncertainty into fact. On the twelfth day he concluded Venny must be dead. She would not have been so had he not asked her to identify the old lady they’d found in his daughter’s grave, had she not ended up falling in love with him. Bleak enough for anyone, anywhere – bleak beyond the saying of it for a man who had lost his only child and was banged up in solitary having had his brain fried. But – and at this point he gripped his head in his hands, because the stark newness of the thought hurt him – they had meant to show him her dead body. That must mean they were afraid, somehow, to kill him; their goal was to drive him quite mad. And that was knowledge worth having. He stared at the cell door, wondering what fresh horrors they had in store for him.

  The door opened and a fat Yakut in late middle age wearing medical whites stood over him. The tip of one thumb was missing.

  ‘What the fuck?’ asked Gennady.

  ‘I’m your new psychiatrist.’

  ‘What happened to the old one?’

  ‘He’s a bit tied up,’ said the Yakut and smiled, and as he did so a gold tooth glinted. Then the lights went out.

  LABRADOR SEA

  Twin crescents of witch’s green burned in his irises, flickered, died, then grew stronger. The crescents billowed up into pillars of viridescence, streaming into his eyes, filling their confined living space with a glow of the utmost eeriness. Joe pressed his face against a porthole and gasped in wonder.

  Greenrise.

  The light draped itself across the night sky, towering above them, rendering the great ship and the mighty ocean as small as a toy boat floating on a duck pond.

  ‘What is this?’ asked Katya.

  ‘Northern Lights. You’re from Russia. You should know.’

  ‘Grozny is in Russia’s deep south. I’ve never seen this before.’

  Their new hiding place was a lifeboat, high above the ship’s deck, commodious but cold, their only rules that they must show no lights and stay on the side facing the sea.

  ‘Let’s go out.’ Joe gently worked a thick lever and a door swung open. He secured it against the lifeboat’s bulkhead with a soft click, and the two of them sat on the bilges, cuddled up against the Arctic cold, and took in the greatest light show on earth.

  It was so cold the sea creaked, or so it seemed. They gazed on, rapt, as the great green dragon of light fired up and flickered down, leaving cinders of light on the horizon one second, then pulsing massively across the whole sky the next. The ship itself seemed to fall quiet in awe at the spectacle. The creaking sound gave way to a swishing noise that seemed to echo the changes up above.

  ‘Is it making that sound?’ whispered Katya.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Joe. He tried to remember the last time he felt so much in awe of nature.

  And then they heard an entirely different and very familiar noise, a soft whimpering.

  ‘That’s Reilly,’ said Joe. ‘You stay here, I’ll go.’

  Getting on and off the lifeboat without being noticed was no mean feat. It was held high above the deck by a stanchion at either end. To get off, you went down. Joe walked aft, stood on tiptoes and jumped, gripping the stern stanchion like a monkey at the zoo and slowly slipping down to the main deck. It was empty, not so surprising considering the lateness of the hour, not far off two o’clock in th
e morning. Once on deck, he followed the sound of the whimpering. Reilly was on his lead, held by Masha. The moment Joe hove into view, Reilly’s tail went into overdrive. He leapt up, put his paws on Joe’s thighs and licked his hands. Joe patted him gently on his noodle head.

  ‘Poor critter,’ said Masha, shivering despite being warmly wrapped up. ‘He’s been hollering since you left. I’m afraid I couldn’t sleep.’

  Despite the coming difficulty of getting Reilly into the lifeboat, Joe was pleased to see his foolish dog.

  ‘No worries. I’ll take him.’

  ‘Where are you hiding?’ the old lady asked.

  ‘Shh, not telling you.’ She looked up at the line of lifeboats above them, but Joe did his best to keep his face severe, trying to give nothing away.

  The night sky fizzed like a badly opened bottle of dark-green champagne.

  ‘Wow! I never dreamt the Northern Lights could be so beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘Worth the price of the ticket?’

  ‘Hell no.’

  Smiling, he leaned forwards and kissed her on the forehead, and turned his head and whispered into her ear, ‘You’ve been so good to us. Thank you.’

  ‘Yeah, leave that for the fairies.’ But there was a catch in her voice as she said it. She flicked her thumb, put her wheelchair into a tight circle, and whirred off to be swallowed up by a deeper shade of green.

  Joe stood for a while in silence, unmoored, and was looking up at the lifeboats, thinking through the problem of getting Reilly up there, when he became vaguely aware of a presence out there, watching him. Man and dog, bathed in green, stood frozen to the spot, waiting for the watcher to make the first move. One deck above, he heard a few steps, a soft click. His eyes logged the memory of a movement, perhaps a door closing.

  ‘Come on, Reilly,’ he whispered, and they jogged up one flight of stairs, edged off to the side of the ship and located their lifeboat. He scooped up the dog, one hand under the barrel of Reilly’s ribcage, securing him while swinging his legs over the barrier, keeping steady with the other hand and dropping down onto their hiding place. He scrabbled around the bilges, opened the door and let Reilly free so that he could scamper up to Katya and greet her like a long-lost friend.

  BLACK WATER LAKE, YAKUTSK

  Dark and darker, so cold it scoured his head, he turned when his hands touched tentacles of weed, kicked his feet off the sandy floor of the lake and shot up. When he broke surface, he sucked in great gasps of air, the oxygen hitting his brain, and he felt something that had almost died within him: the exhilaration of being alive.

  While Gennady had been locked up in the madhouse, the seasons had turned. Spring, pretty much like everything else in Russia, punched you in the face so that you’d take notice. Remnants of crystalline snow, dirty yellow, lay where the shadows were deep, but elsewhere nature was bursting with life. Birds warbled and chirruped from the budding trees, a flying squirrel popped its head out of a tree, tasted the air, and popped back in again. Clouds shifted across the sky and suddenly the sun burst out, bathing the lake in glorious light.

  Uygulaan was cooking fish over a fire, his Kalashnikov propped up against a birch tree. The Yakut threw him a towel, and as Gennady dried himself Uygulaan retrieved two bottles of beer, cooling in the lake mud, and popped them open against his teeth. He handed one to his guest and took a sip from his own.

  ‘To the Zinky Boys,’ said Uygulaan. Gennady clinked his bottle against Uygulaan’s and drank. Cold, tingly, good.

  ‘To the Zinky Boys,’ said Gennady, his eyes sparkling in the sunlight, remembering Afghanistan.

  ‘No dukhi here, boss.’

  ‘And the Cheka?’

  ‘They’re not here, either.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Taste the air. It’s good, yeah? If they were here, you could smell the stink ten miles away.’

  Gennady smiled. Uygulaan poked his fire with a twig, seemed satisfied, created a set of tongs with two sticks, then extracted two packets of silver foil from the flames. He opened the foil, took out his great knife, found some flat kebab breads in his knapsack, sliced the bread open and slotted the fish into them. The fish was perfectly cooked in buttered wild garlic. It was the best meal Gennady had eaten – well, since his picnic with Venny. At the thought of that, a dullness clouded his eyes.

  ‘We were looking for you,’ said Uygulaan. ‘You’d vanished. The moment I heard where you were, I came to get you out.’

  Out in the lake, a fish broke the surface to take a fly. Gennady missed that moment, but caught the ripple.

  ‘They killed my doctor friend. They killed my daughter, too,’ he said.

  ‘In the loony bin?’

  ‘No, in the south, near Rostov. She was . . .’ He hesitated. He couldn’t remember ever having such a long conversation with Uygulaan. They didn’t talk much; it had never been their thing.

  ‘She had a future. And they took it from her.’

  The fire crackled and Gennady jumped a little – not much, but more than he would ever have done in Afghanistan. Uygulaan noted it, said nothing.

  ‘And you?’ Gennady continued. ‘Since the end?’

  The end of the war, the end of the old country, the Soviet Union they’d both fought for. It didn’t matter which. To them, the end of one was the end of the other.

  ‘Became a gangster,’ Uygulaan said. ‘Killed people, lots of people. Killed too many. By the way, you know there’s a price on your head?’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Guess.’

  ‘One hundred thousand roubles?’

  The Yakut shook his head.

  ‘I’m too old to play guessing games.’

  ‘Five million US.’

  Gennady let out a long, low whistle. ‘For that kind of money, I’ll do the job myself.’

  Uygulaan took out his knife again and flourished it.

  ‘Unless you’re going to do the honours?’ Gennady said.

  Uygulaan reached into his knapsack and pulled out some more bread.

  ‘Not me, boss. As a killer, I did well. Maybe. Money, cars, women. But it wasn’t like being a Zinky Boy. With you, back there, we fought the fucking dukhi but you made sure we fought fair. We were fighting for a reason. For socialism . . .’ Uygulaan paused, struggling to remember the next phrase of the old mumbo jumbo.

  ‘For fraternal solidarity,’ Gennady supplied.

  ‘Yeah, fraternal solidarity – fuck that. But back then, it felt like we had a cause. But killing people for money? I did it, I did it well, but after a while, I lost my taste for it.’

  ‘Any reason?’

  Uygulaan demolished his fish kebab, wiped his mouth, finished his beer and pulled out two fresh bottles from the mud-fridge; he popped them open, handed one to Gennady, and only then spoke.

  ‘My boy. Bright kid, not like his thick dad. Maybe his mother fucked the postman. God forgive me, she was a good woman – gone now, taken by cancer.’

  ‘Sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Yeah. Still, my boy – something amazing going on inside his head. Physics, mathematics, won a scholarship to Moscow State. I waved him goodbye, gave him a wad of notes, a few numbers in Moscow of contacts who could help him out if he got into trouble. He phoned me, he was doing well, straight As, found a nice girl, everything was just lovely.’

  Gennady drained his beer. He knew this story wasn’t going to end well. Nothing did, these days. He nodded at the beer bottle and said, ‘This piss is nice, but it’s still piss. Got any vodka?’

  ‘General hasn’t changed, has he?’ Uygulaan moved his hand into the mud-fridge and brought out a bottle with no label.

  ‘No vodka. Samogon – moonshine. My recipe.’

  Gennady took a sip and spluttered. When he’d recovered, he took another sip and spluttered again. He shook his head, ruefully. ‘How the fuck the Americans got to the moon before us with this rocket fuel around I don’t know.’

  Uygulaan gave him his golden-tooth smile
and took a couple of glugs.

  ‘So?’ said Gennady. ‘You were talking about your boy.’

  ‘Knife fight. Some fucking Angolan kid stabbed him in a bar.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Uygulaan.’

  ‘Well, that’s what the trash told me. So I go to Moscow and I’m gonna find this African kid and kill him, and I check out the story and it’s all wrong. I buy the CCTV. I find seven witnesses. The CCTV, the witnesses – all say the same thing. The Angolan kid, he was a good friend of my son’s, he’d done nothing wrong. Turns out some Russian kid, son of a high-up from St Petersburg, he shot my boy. My lad was defending his woman. You can see this Russian kid kill my lad on CCTV. The cops just framed the African because they didn’t think anyone would notice.’

  ‘And the boy who killed your son?’

  ‘His krysha – his “roof” was better than mine.’

  ‘How high was the roof?’

  ‘As high as it gets.’

  ‘His dad a friend of Zoba’s?’

  Uygulaan nodded.

  ‘I showed the trash the CCTV, showed them the witness statements. I asked too many questions, they locked me up for killing somebody. I did kill the guy, he was a scumbag. But – guilty. In the slammer, I started thinking. I paid the right cop some dough, got out. I paid some more fucking money, and they let the Angolan boy out too. He thinks I’m a fucking saint.’

  ‘He might not be so wrong about that,’ said Gennady.

  ‘He’s back in Luanda now, wherever the fuck that is.’

  ‘That’s home, for him.’

  ‘Yeah. I came back here, started to rot. I’ve given up being a gangster now but the competition don’t quite believe it. One of these days they’re going to rub me out, just to be on the safe side. And then I hear some bad stuff about you, that they’d locked you up in the loony house, the special bin for sensitive cases. I figured it out. You’re not a nutter.’