‘Ah,’ said Kelso. ‘The sabotage. Of course.’
‘It began with the poisoning of the sturgeon. This was soon after the trial of the foreign spies. Late in the summer this was. We came out one morning and there they were – white bellies floating in the river. And time without number we discovered that food had been taken from the traps and yet no animals were caught. The mushrooms were shrivelled, useless things – scarcely a pood to be had all year – and that had never happened before, either. Even the berries on the two-verst track were gone before we could pick them. I discussed the crisis confidentially with Comrade Chizhikov – I was older now, you understand, and able to take a hand – and his analysis was identical to mine: that this was a classic outbreak of Trotskyite wreckerism. And when Yezhov was discovered with a flashlight – out walking, after curfew: the swine – the case was made. And this,’ he held up a thick pile of barely legible scrawl and slapped it against the table, ‘this is his confession – you can see it, here, in his own hand – how he received his signals by torch-transmission from some spiderish associates he had made contact with while out fishing.’
‘And Yezhov – ?’
‘His widow hanged herself. They had a child.’ He looked away. ‘I don’t know what became of it. They’re all dead now, of course. Even Chizhikov.’
More silence. Kelso felt like Scheherazade: as long as he could keep talking, there was a chance. Death lay in the silences.
‘Comrade Chizhikov,’ he said. ‘He must have been a –’ he nearly said ‘a monster’‘– a formidable man?’
‘A shock-worker,’ said the Russian, ‘a Stakhanovite, a soldier and a hunter, a red expert and a theoretician of the highest calibre.’ His eyes were almost closed. His voice fell to a whisper. ‘Oh, and he beat me, comrade. He beat me and he beat me, until I was weeping blood! On instructions that were given to him, as to the manner of my upbringing, by the highest organs: “You are to give him a good shaking every now and again!” All that I am, he made me.’
‘When did Comrade Chizhikov die?’
‘Two winters ago. He was clumsy and half-blind by then. He stepped into one of his own traps. The wound turned black. His leg turned black and stank like maggoty meat. There was delirium. He raged. In the end, he begged us to leave him outside overnight, in the snow. A dog’s death.’
‘And his wife – she died soon afterwards?’
‘Within the week.’
‘She must have been like a mother to you?’
‘She was. But she was old. She couldn’t work. It was a hard thing to have to do – but it was for the best.’
‘He never ever loved a human being,’ said his schoolfriend, Iremashvili. ‘He was incapable of feeling pity for man or beast, and I never knew him cry …’
A hard thing –
For the best –
He opened one yellow eye.
‘You are shifty, comrade. I can tell.’
Kelso’s throat was dry. He looked at his watch. ‘I was wondering what had become of my colleague –’
It was now more than half an hour since he had left O’Brian by the river.
‘The Yankee? Take my tip there, comrade. Don’t trust him. You’ll see.’
He winked again, put his finger to his lips and stood. And then he moved across the cabin with an extraordinary speed and agility – it was grace, really: one, two, three steps, yet the soles of his boots barely seemed to connect with the boards – and he flung open the door and there was O’Brian.
And later Kelso was to wonder what might have happened next. Would it all have been treated as some terrific joke? (‘Your ears must be flapping like boards in this cold, comrade!’) Or would O’Brian have been the next interloper in the miniature Stalinist state required to sign a confession?
But it was impossible to say what might have happened, because what did happen was that the Russian suddenly pulled O’Brian roughly into the cabin. Then he stood alone at the open door, his head tilted to one side, nostrils dilated, sniffing the air, listening.
SUVORIN never even saw the smoke. It was Major Kretov who spotted it.
He braked and pointed to it, put the snow plough into first gear, and they crawled forwards for a couple of hundred yards until they drew level with the entrance to the track. Halfway along it, the sharp white outline of the Toyota’s roof showed up clear against the shadows of the trees.
Kretov stopped, reversed a short distance, and left the engine idling as he scanned the way ahead. Then he swung the wheel hard and the big vehicle lurched forwards again, off the road and down the track, clearing a path to within a few paces of the empty car. He turned the engine off and for a few moments Suvorin heard again that unnatural silence.
He said, ‘Major, what are your orders, exactly?’
Kretov was opening the door. ‘My orders are plain Russian good sense. “To stuff the cork back in to the bottle at the narrowest point.”’ He jumped down easily into the snow and reached back for his AK-74. He stuffed an extra magazine into his jacket. He checked his pistol.
‘And this is the narrowest point?’
‘Stay here and keep your backside warm, why don’t you? This won’t take us long.’
‘I won’t be a party to anything illegal,’ said Suvorin. The words sounded absurdly prim and official, even to his ears, and Kretov took no notice. He was already beginning to move off with his men. ‘The westerners, at least,’ Suvorin called after them, ‘are not to be harmed!’
He sat there for a few more seconds, watching the backs of the soldiers as they fanned out across the track. Then, cursing, he shoved the front seat forwards and squeezed himself into the open door. The cab was unexpectedly high off the ground. He leapt and felt himself jerked backwards, heard a tearing sound. The lining of his coat had snagged on a bit of metal. He swore again and detached himself.
It was hard to keep up with the other three. They were fit and he was not. They had army boots and he had leather-soled brogues. It was difficult to maintain his footing in the snow and he wouldn’t have caught them at all if they hadn’t stopped to inspect something on the ground beside the track.
Kretov smoothed out the screwed-up yellow paper and turned it this way and that. It was blank. He balled it up again and dropped it. He inserted a small, flesh-coloured miniature receiver, like a hearing-aid, into his right ear. From his pocket he took out a black ski-mask and pulled it over his head. The others did the same. Kretov made a chopping motion with his gloved hand towards the forest and they set off again: Kretov first with his assault rifle held before him, turning as he walked, ducking this way and that, ready to rake the trees with bullets; then one soldier, then another, both keeping up the same wary surveillance, their faces like skulls in the masks; and finally Suvorin in his civilian clothes – stumbling, slipping, in every way absurd.
CALMLY the Russian closed the door and collected his rifle. He pulled out a wooden box from beneath the table and filled his pockets with bullets. In the same unhurried manner, he rolled back the carpet, lifted the trapdoor and leapt, cat-like, into the space.
‘We stand for peace and champion the cause of peace,’ he said. ‘But we are not afraid of threats and are prepared to answer the instigators of war blow for blow. Those who try to attack us will receive a crushing repulse to teach them not to poke their pig snouts into our Soviet garden. Replace the carpet, comrade.’
He disappeared, closing the trapdoor after him.
O’Brian gaped at the floorboards and then at Kelso.
‘What the fuck –?’
‘And where the hell have you been?’ Kelso grabbed the satchel and quickly stuffed it back into his jacket. ‘Never mind him,’ he said, rolling back the carpet. ‘Let’s just get out of here.’
But before either of them could move a skull appeared at the cabin windows – two round eyes and a slit for a mouth. A boot kicked wood. The door splintered.
THEY were made to stand against the wall – shoved against the rough planked wall –
and Kelso felt cold metal jabbed into the nape of his neck. O’Brian was a bit too slow on the uptake so he had his forehead banged against the planking, just to mend his manners and teach him a little Russian.
Their wrists were trussed tightly behind their backs with thin plastic.
A man said roughly, ‘Where’s the other?’ He raised the butt of his rifle.
‘Under the floorboards!’ shouted O’Brian. ‘Tell ’em, Fluke, he’s under the fucking floorboards!’
‘He’s under the floorboards,’ said a well-educated voice in Russian that Kelso thought he recognised.
Heavy boots clumped on the wooden floor. Turning his head, Kelso saw one of the masked men walk to the end of the cabin, point his gun at the ground and casually begin firing. He flinched at the deafening noise in the confined space and when he looked again the man was walking backwards, spraying bullets into the floor in neat rows, his weapon leaping in his hands like a pneumatic drill. Wood chips sprouted, ricocheted, and Kelso felt something strike the side of his head, just below his ear. Blood started trickling down his neck. He turned the other way and pressed his cheek to the wall. The noise stopped, there was a rattle of a fresh magazine being fitted, then it started again, then stopped. Something crashed to the floor. There was a stink of cordite. Acrid smoke made him clench his eyes and when he opened them again he could see the blond-headed spy from Moscow. The spy shook his head in disgust.
The man who had been firing kicked aside the shredded carpet and lifted the trapdoor. He shone a flashlight down through the rising dust, then clambered into the hole and disappeared. They could hear him moving around beneath their feet. After thirty seconds he reappeared at the door of the cabin, pulling off his mask.
‘There’s a tunnel. He’s got out.’
He produced a pistol and gave it to the blond man.
‘Watch them.’
Then he gestured to the other two and they clattered out into the snow.
Chapter Thirty
SUVORIN FELT WET. He glanced down and saw that he was standing in a puddle of melted snow. His trousers were sodden. So was the bottom of his overcoat. A piece of frayed silk lining trailed on the floor. And his shoes – his shoes were leaking and scuffed – they were ruined.
One of the two bound men – the reporter: O’Brian, wasn’t that his name? – started to turn and say something.
‘Shut up!’ said Suvorin, furiously. He clicked off the safety catch and waved the gun. ‘Shut up and face the wall!’
He sat down at the table and wiped his damp sleeve across his face.
Absolutely ruined …
He noticed Stalin glowering at him. He picked up the framed photograph with his free hand and tilted it to the light. It was signed. And what was all this other stuff? Passports, identity papers, a pipe, old gramophone records, an envelope with a piece of hair in it … It looked as though someone had been trying to perform a conjuring trick. He sprinkled the hair into his palm and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. The fibres were dry, grey, coarse, like a clump of bristles. He let them fall and wiped his hands on his coat. Then he laid the pistol on the table and massaged his eyes.
‘Sit down,’ he said, wearily, ‘why don’t you?’
Outside in the forest there was a long jabbering burst of gunfire.
‘You know, he said sadly to Kelso, ‘you really should have caught that plane.’
*
‘WHAT happens next?’ said the Englishman. It was obviously difficult for them to sit properly. They were on their knees, next to the wall. The stove had gone out. It was getting very cold. Suvorin had slid one of the records out of its paper sleeve and put it on the turntable of the ancient gramophone.
‘It’s a surprise,’ he said.
‘I am an accredited member of the foreign press corps –’ began O’Brian.
The crack-crack of a high velocity rifle was answered by a heavier bang.
‘The American ambassador –’ said O’Brian.
Suvorin wound the handle of the gramophone very fast – anything to block out the noise from outside – and placed the needle on the record. Through a hailstorm of crackles, a tinny orchestra struck up a wavering tune.
More gunfire. Someone was screaming, far away, through the trees. Two shots followed in rapid succession. The screaming stopped and O’Brian started whining, ‘They’re going to shoot us. They’ll shoot us, too!’ He struggled against the plastic wire and tried to rise, but Suvorin put his wet shoe on O’Brian’s chest and gently pushed him down again.
‘Let us,’ he said, in English, ‘at least try to act like civilised men.’
This was not what I dreamed for myself, either, he wanted to say. It formed no part of my life’s dreams, I do assure you, to arrive in some stinking madman’s hovel and hunt him down like an animal. Honestly, I believe you would find me an amusing fellow, if only circumstances were different.
He made an effort to follow the beat of the music, conducting with his forefinger, but he couldn’t find any rhythm, there seemed to be no sense to it.
‘You’d better have brought an army,’ said the Englishman, ‘because if it’s just three against one out there, they don’t stand a chance.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Suvorin, patriotically. ‘They’re our special forces. They’ll get him. And yes, if necessary, they will send an army.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I work for frightened men, Dr Kelso, some of whom are just about old enough to have been touched by Comrade Stalin.’ He frowned at the gramophone. What a racket. It sounded like howling dogs. ‘Do you know what Lenin called the Tsarovich, when the Bolsheviks were deciding the fate of the Imperial Family? He called the boy “the living banner”. And there’s only one way, Lenin said, to deal with a living banner.’
Kelso shook his head. ‘You don’t understand this man. Believe me – you should see him – he is criminally insane. He’s probably killed half a dozen people over the past thirty years. He’s nobody’s banner. He’s crazy.’
‘Everyone said Zhirinovsky was crazy, remember? His foreign policy towards the Baltic States was to bury nuclear waste along the Lithuanian border and blow it into Vilnius every night using giant fans. He still got twenty-three per cent of the vote in the ninety-three election.’
Suvorin couldn’t stand this unearthly, bestial music a moment more. He lifted the needle.
They heard a solitary shot.
Suvorin held his breath for an answering salvo.
‘Perhaps,’ he said doubtfully, after waiting a long while, ‘I should think about calling up that army –’
‘THERE are traps,’ said Kelso.
‘What?’
Suvorin was at the doorway, peering tentatively into the twilight. He looked back into the cabin. He had looped some rope around their wrists and attached it to the cold stove.
‘He’s put down traps. Be careful where you tread.’
‘Thank you.’ Suvorin planted his foot on the top step. ‘I’ll be back.’
His plan – and that was a good word, he thought, that had a certain ring to it: his plan – was to get back to the snow plough and use the radio to summon reinforcements. So he headed towards the entrance to the clearing, the only fixed point he had. There were good footprints to follow here, although it was getting dark, and he must have been midway along the rough path when he felt the explosion and a second later he heard it, a great rush of snow marking the passage of the shock wave as it travelled through the forest. Cascades of crystal pattered down from the higher branches and bounced off into space, leaving tiny clouds of particles hanging in the air like puffs of breath.
He spun around, the gun held out in a double grip, pointing uselessly in the direction of the blast.
He panicked then and began to run – a comic figure, a jerking marionette – trying to bring his knees up as high as they would go to avoid the sucking, clinging snow. His breath was coming in sobs.
He was so intent on keeping going he almost tripp
ed over the first body.
It was one of the soldiers. He had been caught in a trap – a huge trap: a bear trap, maybe – so big and powerfully sprung, the jaws of it had actually clamped into the bone above his knee. There was a lot of blood smeared around in the flattened snow, blood from the shattered leg and blood from a big head wound that gaped through the back of the knitted ski-mask like a second mouth.
The corpse of the other soldier was a few paces further on. Unlike the first man, he was lying on his back, his arms outstretched, his legs arranged in a perfect figure 4. There was a puddle of blood on his chest.
Suvorin put down his gun, took off his gloves and checked the pulses of both men – although he knew it was useless – pulling aside the layers of clothing to feel their warm, dead wrists.
How had he ambushed them both?
He looked around.
Like this, probably: he had laid the trap on the path, buried in the snow, and had lured them over it; the man in the lead had missed it, somehow, the man in the rear had been caught – that was the screaming – and the lead man had turned to help only to find their quarry behind them – that was what was cunning: they wouldn’t have expected that. And so he had been shot full in the front, and then the second man had been taken out at leisure, executioner-style, with a bullet at point-blank range in the back of the head.
And then he had taken their AK-74s.
What kind of creature was this?
Suvorin knelt by the head of the first soldier and pulled off his ski-mask. He took out his ear-piece and pressed it to his own ear. He thought he could hear something. A rushing sound. He found the little microphone attached to the inside cuff of the dead man’s left hand.
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