by R. J. Dillon
‘Stay there,’ decided Nick.
‘Can we… you know… can we keep this to ourselves,’ Foula pleaded, his rapid breath steaming a square on the windscreen.
‘Give me ten minutes no longer,’ Nick insisted. Leaning forward he took out his Yarygin, checked it over and replaced it before doing up his leather jacket.
‘If things should… you know… if…’
‘I’m compromised, rounded up,’ said Nick, finishing for Foula. ‘You don’t wait, you go for the fallback and the escape route.’ Nick hooked a crumpled packet of Capitals from his pocket. Three cigarettes on a loose bed of tobacco that would have to last him back over the border. He lit another as two cars slowly passed them, driving slowly down a road built for taking tanks abreast, their headlights playing along the shabby concrete, hard searchlights seeking a living target. Nick watched them drive by the family, no slowing down, no sign from the pavement. Then that would have been too unprofessional he decided.
‘I’m sorry, I really am…’ Foula started, his voice wavering. ‘I … I’ve been out of the field too long.’
‘Listen to me Alistair,’ Nick urged him, shaking Foula by the shoulder. ‘I’ll get us home, but you have to help.’
Beside him, Foula stared at Nick, his blank eyes barely able to focus. ‘Don’t leave me, you promise, you won’t leave me behind,’ Foula pleaded, his request drifting out of the window along with the smoke from Nick’s cigarette. Nick tasted the sourness of the Latvian brand stick to his tongue.
‘No, I won’t leave you,’ Nick assured him. ‘What’s the approach?’
‘Approach?’
‘The entry to make the collection, what was agreed?’
As though speaking on behalf of someone else, Foula uttered numbly, ‘You tell her you have a taxi waiting.’
Giving his hands one last nourishing boost of warmth from the car’s lacklustre heater, Nick was out beside the Gaz tucking up his collar and crossing the road. The evening air hit him hard after the car’s heat. Pellets of snow whirled in his face, dribbling down his neck past the collar on his jacket. Pulling on his fur hat, its brim twisted for effect, Nick continued his long walk aware of the isolation and the distance.
Taking smart strides he headed towards a block as indistinct as the next, tall and glistening against a sky tinted pink. A colour for the mental scrapbook he was compiling; oddments, facts, memories: the outline of a hill, the touch of sea on his skin, what normal people called sanity. All of it amassed for a day when he’d outgrow this dangerous trade and stick to his Devon cottage, where he’d pull all his collected trivia together in paint or words. As he neared the block, he waited for the hand on his shoulder the rifle butt in his back, but they never came. He saw them before even opening the stiff doors, a gang of seven, four male and three female no older than nineteen. Members of Nashi decided Nick, a youth movement loyal to the Kremlin, or another splinter group of young fanatical patriots. Sitting on a banquette its red leather ripped and scarred by knives and cigarettes, they smoked impassively, assessing him as soon as he stepped in.
In one corner someone had dumped one of the old large silver framed prams, this one minus its wheels; next to it lay a washing machine and fridge, looking as if as they’d been rolled all the way down the stairs from the top floor. Across from the gang, posters were taped across split green tiles; scuffed, frayed at the edges from the passing of bodies. Monthly communal committee edicts were hung in rows running at eye level to the lifts. One of them advertised the residents’ committee, with a much abused Lefortovo Administrative District logo in its top right corner.
Along the bottom a list of absentees from the last meeting, the names printed large by a neat official hand, the red ink already fading. He scanned the list halting at the thirteenth name, matching the one supplied by RUS/OPS. Unchanged and bold it confirmed the address and bid him welcome. As Nick started up the stairs some of the gang glared at him, but none of them made a move.
Steep and wide, the stairs were stale and in poor repair with not enough air and too little light from strip lights spluttering with age. He came out on a bare landing never quite finished. Somewhere above him he heard footsteps clatter in the gloom, hollow and unwanted. Starting on the next flight Nick came across two drunks blocking his way, sitting shoulder to shoulder. In their thirties, both reeked of cheap vodka, both reluctantly leaning apart to let him pass, the heavier set drunk spitting in disgust, his comrade challenging Nick with a drunk’s mean stare. Nick moved on to the sound of babies screaming, and the stunted music of mass entertainment echoing round dull halls.
The name was the same as he’d read down in the lobby, Evgeniya Vrangelya. Written at speed in loose unsteady characters on a yellow sliver of card, jammed carelessly into a slot beside the ninth door along. He pressed the bell once, then twice in quick succession and followed this up by hammering on the faded panel door.
She opened the door in a single movement framed in its shadow, a silk wrap creased with its newness hardly covering her. Evgeniya stood with her hands punched onto her hips, her nose flaring and her lips parted in a hiss. Nick, his Russian firm, announced that he had a taxi waiting. She nodded and he followed her in, into a darkened passage with a hard polished floor, the odour of cooking lapping against perfume worn for the day. He kicked the door closed, grabbed her forearm and dragged her into the middle of the room.
‘Where is he?’ He had to shout over the television and radio.
She stood square to him, defiant, rubbing her arms, a gauche face lifted up to him burning with hate. The silk wrap strayed open but she made no attempt to cover her small rounded breasts. Her eyes signalled a determined resoluteness, moist and swollen by tears she refused to release. Plain, without make-up, Nick put her in her late-thirties and she mocked him with taught brown eyes. Evgeniya Vrangelya lifted her hands and dropped them, too weighty to support. She had a shoulder-length bob parted on the right, and from its wild strands Nick guessed she hadn’t long been out of bed. Her lips and nose somehow looked a touch too big for her face, giving her a sense of severity. Around her neck she wore a cross and a medallion on heavy gold chains. Belatedly she clutched at the silk to cover her breasts.
‘I’m leaving…right now,’ shouted Nick.
Vrangelya inspected him slowly, judging him critically as neither handsome nor ugly. A clean scar over the right eye prompted her to think of a fighter for some reason. Out of a childhood game grown to a habit, she classed people according to the respect they deserved. She took two uncertain steps back, crossing aimlessly to the window, terribly pale against the night.
A door opened and a short, thin figure emerged.
‘I am Lubov,’ he announced, taking in the scene.
Christ, thought Nick this is all I need, Foula over the edge and an agent who gives me his surname. Vasily Lubov stepped forward to meet them, his small face cluttered by wire-rimmed spectacles and an old-style walrus moustache. He’s an accountant or a bookkeeper of some sort, Nick decided as Lubov proudly squeezed between an upright piano and a walnut bureau loaded down with sheet music. In a tight awkward walk, conscious of his clothes, Lubov seemed as though he’d got himself a new skin that needed to be broken in.
A loose lick of hair refused to stay in place and Lubov brushed it back onto his forehead with practised ease. There was a frailness about him; an inward acceptance that his life thus far had been marked by failures, of which he had a considerable list. At Vrangelya’s side he stood a good seven inches shorter than his mistress and he gripped her hand for support, but this only emphasised the disparity and he stepped forward out of embarrassment or chivalric honour.
‘I have decided to defect,’ he said in a bold declaration.
A hundred things happened in Nick’s head at that moment and all of them were mirrored by the shock on Evgeniya’s face, how she clasped her hands to her cheeks in the perfect symmetry of Munch’s screamer and let out a small sob.
‘That’s not the deal,’ Ni
ck told him wearily.
‘If you want what I offer, you will have to take me,’ insisted Lubov.
‘What about me, Vasily? You are going to leave me?’ Evgeniya cried.
Nick thought Lubov and his mistress were going to have a full-on tiff and he’d have to separate them until Lubov’s next statement changed everything.
‘I am sure, maybe ninety-seven per cent that I am a suspect,’ Lubov confessed, launching into his hazy grasp of English. ‘My superiors, I think have been watching me,’ he added, turning to Evgeniya for support but she simply stared at him, not out of anger but pure surprise, dumbstruck.
Great, thought Nick. Absolutely marvellous news, the best I’ve heard all month and if we get out of this it’d be a miracle.
‘I haven’t room for a passenger,’ Nick said. ‘I’m leaving in one minute and I need to make the collection, discuss terms.’
Lubov’s shoulders shrank, his face suggesting he was close to surrender, only his eyes appeared bright and fierce.
‘The deal has changed.’
‘Changed, what’d you mean changed?’ Nick demanded.
Lubov stretched for a faded canvas bag, caught at the neck by a frayed cord. ‘I must speak to senior ex-officer in London. Only me, we are in danger unless I do this.’
Nick shook his head in total dismay. ‘Then we go. Now.’
‘You promise that when I’m safe and you have material, Evgeniya can come too?’ he asked, turning his watery eyes on his mistress.
‘Sure, why not,’ said Nick. ‘Invite the whole block.’
‘See,’ Lubov told her, giving her a long embrace. ‘We will be together again soon.’
She touched his arm and in the same movement turned her broad face towards him, a paper lantern burning with a steady blush, watching her lover go knowing he’d never come back.
‘I’ll be here,’ she called as they moved to the door. Only her eyes told of the lie.
Listening at the door as their feet slapped down the concrete steps, Evgeniya made herself count to thirty just to be safe. The surprise that Vasily Lubov had decided to defect had genuinely caught her off guard, she had not seen that coming or that he, little Vasily, must posses all the evidence himself. How sweet that he wanted her to join him in London she thought, punching in a number on a mobile phone so she could call in her report, inform her commanding officer that Lubov had at last shown his hand, had flown the nest.
• • •
They moved in total silence. Nick leading the way down the stairs, past plaster littered with lover’s names boldly hacked in for eternity. A girl’s laugh flew past them up the stairwell like a rocket. A door snapped closed behind them with a dull steel echo leaving nothing but a distant hum.
Together they set out for the car, in Nick’s mind a thousand things to go wrong. The snow had slackened but not stopped which for Nick constituted one small blessing. If a car happened to come out of the distance he would pause, sensing Lubov behind him doing the same. They kept close to the apartment walls for what little protection they offered, but in the end they were out in the open approaching the Gaz fast. Nick bundled Lubov into the back without ceremony and dumped himself next to Foula in the front.
‘Go,’ Nick ordered, his eyes fixed squarely ahead though Foula was twisted in his seat, his face in a wild grimace, his eyes frozen on Lubov.
‘What…?’
‘Don’t ask,’ Nick told him, ‘Just go.’
In his haste to be off and away Foula fumbled with the ignition key, started the engine then messed the gears, the clutch, finally bucking the Gaz clumsily out into the slack traffic.
‘Keep it steady,’ Nick insisted, ‘he’s coming home with us,’ he added, cocking a thumb towards Lubov in the rear.
‘He can’t,’ roared Foula, glaring through his rear-view mirror at the uninvited passenger, then quickly swerved as an on-coming taxi driver protested at his erratic driving with rapid blasts from his Skoda’s horn. ‘We won’t make it,’ he said, seeming to regain some composure.
Ignoring the chaos unfolding around him, Nick had his mobile to his ear. ‘Hi dear it’s me,’ he began, holding his hand up for silence. ‘I’m going to be a little late, you know, things have changed. Tell Bethany I’m glad she’s been chosen for the nativity play, she’ll enjoy meeting the Three Kings. Sure… Oh, I also had an unexpected call from my mother. That’s right. There’s been another domestic so she’s coming to stay. She’ll probably travel on her usual route, the one she just took on her last visit. Will do, you too, take care.’
‘Dear God, you’re utterly mad,’ Foula snapped, his words forced through compressed lips.
‘Watch our back,’ Nick insisted, slumping back.
‘We must make stop first, we collect key to material,’ said Lubov, rooting in his canvas bag, looking for something that he couldn’t find or maybe had forgotten to pack.
‘You don’t have it on you?’ Nick demanded incredulously. ‘Does your mistress know? Back there, is she aware that the product is a separate item?’
‘I disclose nothing to her.’
Where did you meet her? Your girlfriend, your mistress, where?’ Nick wanted to know and he wanted to know fast.
‘At work, at Defence Ministry, she was transferred two months ago. Vrangelya I do not totally trust,’ Lubov confessed.
‘Great, wonderful.’ Through the wing mirror Nick had been tracking a set of headlights from an Audi that had sat on their tail since they’d set off, diligently following each turn they’d made. ‘Pull in,’ Nick said abruptly, ‘I’m driving.’
Flinging the Gaz towards the pavement, Foula did an emergency stop. As Foula got out Nick slid into the driver’s seat, already revving as Foula landed heavily beside him. Hitting the accelerator with meaning, Nick cut straight through three lines of traffic. In the Lefortovo tunnel Nick drove recklessly fast, switching lanes to blasts from the horns on cars, trucks and buses. Taking a junction by the Kristall Distillery on Samokatnaya ulitsa at red, a second Audi joined in the pursuit.
‘An address,’ Nick demanded over his shoulder, ‘Now.’
Lubov hunched into a ball on the back seat insisted, ‘I will deal only with a senior ex-officer in London.’
‘You already told me, but you need to take us to the material,’ Nick yelled, watching the leading Audi’s headlights stick wilfully to their tail as he cut across a busy intersection streaming with traffic by the Casino Mirage.
‘Golyanovo,’ Lubov offered, as Nick hit the brakes on Kutuzovksy Prospekt, swerving around a three-car pile-up where an angry crowd had hauled out a driver too drunk to stand.
‘Hold tight,’ Nick yelled, speeding over the Moskva River on the Crimean Bridge. With Foula gripping the dashboard, Lubov braced in the back, Nick used the handbrake and accelerator to spin the Gaz in the middle of the bridge.
‘Out,’ Nick ordered them, the Gaz at an angle blocking the lanes of traffic.
Marching towards a red Lada that had pulled up short, Nick levelled his Yarygin at the driver’s head. Pulling open the door Nick hauled the driver out as Lubov and Foula scrambled in. Smacking the gears into reverse Nick stamped on the accelerator and wove back across the bridge, clipping nearly every car in his way. Using another handbrake turn, Nick faced the Lada down a wide avenue running from Krymsky Val.
‘How far?’ demanded Nick as shallow bars of fine light from the street lamps played on the windscreens of passing cars, wishing he were in one of them, on his way home instead of having to extract a blown agent who was probably leading them into a trap.
‘Five kilometres, maybe less,’ Lubov stated, positioning his body exactly in the centre of the back seat. ‘Then you will see what a profitable exchange we will all benefit from,’ Lubov added, a glossy sheen spreading out over his skin, as though his mistress had given him a fine coating of baby oil.
Snow hit the windscreen steady and hard, making it difficult to count how many avenues and boulevards they criss-crossed in Nick’s race a
cross Moscow.
‘Tell me when we’re close,’ Nick snapped, not in the mood to make it an issue, not here, not in this city. Nick knew enough heroes and most of them were dead.
‘Here, just here,’ said Lubov by a budget Mapka store in the Golyanovo district.
Leaving Foula in the driver’s seat, Nick took the lead and initiative all the way. Striding past a pre-cast fountain no longer connected to the mains, they entered a narrow alley of shuttered daytime stalls and shops that led to a square with wind twisted saplings bent double under frost and snow. At the very core, grey concrete towers with Lubov’s block sitting solidly on the corner. An empty Audi was drawn up outside the wide main entrance, which Nick took to be neither a coincidence nor an omen, just a sign they were out of luck.
Tucked against an apartment wall Nick signalled to Lubov that they were going in.
‘You stay right behind me,’ Nick warned him and set off in front, working out a strategy as he went, not knowing whether to laugh or cry, calling on all his considerable experience from other operations fighting unconventional dirty wars.
The address Lubov so badly wanted to reach was ten floors up and Nick insisted they do it on foot; the heavy loud throbbing of drum and base from the second floor following them all the way. Holding Lubov back when they’d reached his landing, Nick didn’t have to ask which apartment belonged to the accountant because striding out of it a crop-haired figure in a Puffa jacket brought up his MR-445 Varjag. Nick launched himself at speed, rolling to his left firing once. Falling back in a heap the figure crashed into Lubov’s door. As Nick started to drag the body inside by his jacket collar, the little accountant rushed down the hall slipping past Nick.
The apartment consisted of four rooms and everything radiated off a linoleum-floored hallway, as did the wide trail of blood. Lubov tried twice to run on ahead, but each time Nick pushed him behind, and if he’d had time would have walked him all the way back to his car to prevent him becoming a nuisance.
‘Know him?’ Nick asked Lubov as they stood over the body of a second male in a Puffa jacket, a kitchen knife plunged at a weird angle in his neck.