Dead Centre (7 page)

There were about five others in the bar that morning. Leather jackets weren’t back in vogue as it wasn’t yet spring. For now it was anything that was thick and padded.

At night, it was wall-to-wall Prada. The clubbers I’d seen were a mix of the beautiful, the rich, the well-connected, and those who wanted to be – mostly models, hookers, and girls with cocaine sparkling in their eyes as they scoped the room for ‘sponsors’. And there were always plenty of wealthy men offering.

I was watching one of the six huge plasma screens hung around the walls. Two of them were linked to the ranges, so you could watch people trying to shoot under the influence. The first two tourists to come into view were German, judging by the flags sewn onto their parkas. They had that comfortable look about them, with premature beer bellies and thick moustaches.

The screen I was watching was linked to the English news channel on Russia Today. The girls always made sure it was on for me at ten a.m. so I could watch Anna’s first report of the day. I never had a clue what she said because the sound was kept down, but that didn’t matter. I could see that she was alive, and that she didn’t have loads of holes in her. You could tell that she loved what she was doing, even in the middle of a war zone.

I was a bit early today. The screen was filled with images of Japanese military helicopters dropping water on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as they tried to avert a full meltdown. The number of confirmed dead and missing after the tsunami now stood at nearly thirteen thousand. Some 450,000 people had been staying in temporary shelters amid sub-zero night-time temperatures.

The German comedy show next door was much better viewing. The two lads were about to enjoy some AK action down one of the longer ranges. It wasn’t heated, and their breath condensed around them in clouds. So did the cordite fumes kicking from their muzzles.

The AKs jerked into their shoulders and pushed them backwards. Mong was behind one of them as he fired, pushing the guy forward to try and keep the barrel pointing down the range. Rounds cracked and ricocheted off the concrete. These lads were giving it twenty-round bursts, when they’d have been told to limit them to five. At five euros a round, I doubted Mong cared that much.

He wasn’t really Mong, of course. He just looked like him. Or maybe he didn’t, and it was the endless news footage that made me think back to our time in Aceh. Whatever it was, every time I saw him, I wondered if he had tattoos on his arse.

5

MONG WAS GETTING a bit more pissed off. These two were tearing the arse out of it. They started to Rambo it up, firing from the hip, which made the AKs swing to the right with each burst. It was a total gang-fuck. The real Mong would have banged their heads together.

It always made me sad to think of him. Or maybe I just felt guilty. I’d kept my word after the job. I’d looked after Tracy. Jan had sucked cash out of her like a vacuum cleaner, and Tracy had paid for her mother to have private medical treatment for her cancer and home care afterwards, so I gave her money when I could.

If I was in Hereford I always went to check that things were all right. They weren’t, of course. She was devastated: she’d gone into a deep depression and it was taking her a long time to climb out. The cash I gave helped her pay the bills, but it wasn’t really what she needed. I never stopped telling her to get out of Hereford, to make a new start, but she didn’t want to leave her mum and Jan to fend for themselves.

I got the Glock out and started cleaning the barrel with a small brush. I smiled as I thought about all the times I used to take the piss out of Mong for being soft in the head and sending money to his supermarket woman.

When I’d got out of Russia with a few million dollars of a corrupt company’s money in 2009 and bought the London flat, Tracy was the first person I wrote to. I told her I’d settle the mortgage so at least she had security. If she wanted to sell the house, she could do what the fuck she wanted with the proceeds.

She wrote back. She was really happy to have an address for me at last, and told me thanks, but no thanks. Her mum had died six months earlier and she’d finally taken my advice and got a job as a nanny in the South of France. She’d met a man. A Ukrainian guy called Frank. It didn’t strike me as the commonest name for a Ukrainian, but that was beside the point. Tracy was in love. She’d sold the house and moved to be with him.

There was no return address, just thanks for all I had done. She told me life was wonderful, and how much she wished she’d taken my advice earlier.

I felt happy for her, but the last paragraph choked me up. She thanked me for all I’d done for Mong. I’d been a true friend to him, she said. I’d always watched his back. And she would always be my friend, too. Mong would have wanted it that way.

I was cleaning the barrel a bit too vigorously. I felt the same way I had the first time I’d read the letter. That she wouldn’t have had to go through all this shit if Mong was still alive. And he would have been, if I’d stood firm about him not going to help BB.

6

TWO BRITS I’D seen there a couple of times before came into the coffee shop and ordered espressos. They reminded me of the comedians Mitchell and Webb. Their accents were almost posh, the sort estate agents might develop after a few years’ running around in designer Minis selling overpriced properties to Sloanes or the Notting Hill mob.

Their hair was well cut but over-gelled, and they were cleanshaven. They wore Armani jeans and shirts, with rugby-ball cufflinks. You saw a lot of guys like them around town, with money to burn and plenty of drop-dead beautiful Svetlanas and Nadias happy to help them – for a suitable fee. These were sex-pats. They’d be down here later tonight, no doubt, watching the women who danced in cages, and buying shots from the ones wearing bikinis and vodka bottles slung in hip-holsters.

The ex-pat women didn’t get left out. There were plenty of Russian men looking to provide the same service. This was an equal-opportunities town.

Companies that sent staff to dangerous places showered them with incentives. Forget bankers’ bonuses. On top of their monster salaries, these guys got free rent, foreign service premiums, and cost-of-living allowances. No wonder money lost its meaning for them. After a thousand-dollar dinner at the Café Pushkin, they went to clubs like Gunslingers and ordered vodka tonics at thirty dollars a time. Then they’d select their sofas and wait for the girls to come say hi. Behind each was a private room. The menu on the table – in Russian, Japanese and English – helped you budget for what happened in there:
Intercourse 30 minutes: $500
.

Then they all turned up at their banks and law firms the next morning after about half an hour’s sleep. By lunchtime they’d be having the first one of the day in the company bar or snorting a line of coke on their desk to steady their nerves.

Anna had a word for their disease: anomie. ‘It means a breakdown of social norms or values, Nicholas. Distance from home puts personal values out of mind.’

It was just the kind of thing her favourite Russian authors banged on about. My new best mate Fyodor Dostoevsky certainly went for it in
Crime and Punishment
. The main character was trying to justify murder by saying it was not people he was killing but a principle.

Good luck to them. Why not? It didn’t bother me. I just got on with my own life and let those jokers get on with theirs.

Mitchell, the well-fed one with the side parting, turned to me. ‘You’re a Brit, aren’t you?’

I looked up from reassembling the weapon. ‘Yep.’

‘We are too.’

He pointed at the Glock. ‘We like them. That your own?’

I nodded.

‘I’ve seen you shoot a couple of times. We’re thinking of joining, buying some Glocks, having some fun.’

Webb, taller, with dirty-blond hair, was concentrating on the TV. RT ran the intro to the ten o’clock news.

‘Yeah, that’d be good.’

‘What do you do with the gun? Do you have it locked up at home, or is it better to leave them here? Is it a drama carrying a pistol across town?’

The RT announcer was a very bland-looking guy with thinning hair and rimless glasses. The headlines kicked off with Libya. Anna would be on soon. Gaddafi had launched his first bombing raids on Benghazi. The West had called for a no-fly zone and Russia was sitting back and laughing at it all.

‘I just leave mine here, mate. I don’t need it at home. And I don’t want it burning a hole in my pocket.’

I glanced at the screen above his head. Anna was gobbing off into her mike, with crowds of chanting Libyans around her.

Mitchell got the hint and went back to his showbiz partner, who was now watching Mong get even more pissed off with the Germans. They were larging it in front of an increasingly long queue of tourists waiting their turn.

7

ANNA LOOKED AS good as ever. The water in Benghazi must have been back on. The last email I’d got from her, the day before yesterday, told me the water had been cut off and she hadn’t washed her hair for a week. Her two-minute piece was done. I’d watch the full-length version when it came on later. The three o’clock news was more in-depth.

I zipped my Glock back into its case and handed it in to the armoury. I didn’t bother saying goodbye to my new showbiz mates. I got my coat and headed outside into –8°C.

The Russian media took the piss out of the UK continuously for grinding to a halt at the first hint of a snowflake. Moscow hadn’t seen a winter like this one for well over forty years, but it was still functioning. The mayor had gripped the situation. He’d raised an army of six thousand street cleaners.

The city was covered with gloomy grey and black slush but nowhere was impassable. Ladas and Mercedes spun a bit and people slid, but it was business as normal. There was very little grumbling about it. Some people just forgot about their cars until spring. They took the Metro, the same as I did.

The only problem was ice falling from rooftops. Two kids had been seriously injured yesterday. In St Petersburg, the roofs of a hospital and a hypermarket had collapsed under the weight of snow. They’d probably been built in the 1980s when Putin was mayor and subbing jobs out to the Mafia.

Unless there was an icicle with my name on it, I was weatherproof. I wore a North Face parka with a huge hood well and truly done up. I looked out at the world through a little circle of fur a few inches in front of my face. The hood was so big it didn’t move when I turned my head. I looked like Kenny out of
South Park
. On my feet I had a pair of Dubarrys, the Gore-Tex and leather boots that were all the rage in this city. They looked like posh wellies. Anna had bought me a pair as a present for my first winter here.

According to the mayor, this was going to be the last time the city ever suffered from snow. The grey stuff reflected badly on its image, and he was going to do something about it. This boy had more money at his disposal than many a nation’s GDP. He probably spent more in a day than Boris did in a year.

He’d decided to ban snow from the city. He was going to invest in the same cloud-sealing programme the city rolled out on all the major holidays to ensure the citizens of Moscow didn’t get rained on. When had it ever rained on a May Day parade? Never. The city paid for jets to get up there and spray silver iodine into any clouds heading Moscow’s way so they’d dump their rain upwind well before it could spoil things in Red Square. I wouldn’t be needing the Dubarrys next May Day.

Alongside the biggest collection of billionaires on earth there was a massive migrant population, as well as millions of the poor, the old, the dying and the drugged. These people were all fucked big-time. I passed a collection of Soviet concrete blocks where they scraped a living.

Portable paraffin heaters provided their only warmth, but gave off so much moisture that their windows were still frozen solid on the inside – unless the residents had sold the glass and shoved up plywood in its place. In Putin’s Russia, everyone was an entrepreneur.

8

ONE OF THE promises I’d made myself during my dying days was to take the time to ‘stand and stare’, as Anna called it – to look at trees and plants, walk through gardens, shit like that. So every time I came out of Gunslingers, I turned left through Victory Park, along ‘Years of War’, its central avenue. Then I got the trolleybus home.

Victory Park was a new creation. It was only finished after years of fuck-ups in the mid-1990s. Poklonnaya Gora, the hill it sat on, was where Napoleon had waited to be given the keys to the city when his troops surrounded it in 1812. He’d waited in vain.

The park was finished just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of what we called the Second World War and the Russians called the Great Patriotic War. They had little interest in what had happened elsewhere. Fair one – more Russians were killed between ’41 and ’45 than all the other Allies put together. And eight out of ten Germans killed were dropped by the Soviets. In Western history books, those little details always seem to get lost in the footnotes.

The ‘Years of War’ had five terraces, one for each year of the conflict, and 1,418 fountains, one for every day. They weren’t working at the moment because everything was frozen. But there were chapels, mosques, statues, rockets, all sorts of shit – and then, right at the centre, one big fuck-off statue of Nike, the goddess of victory. I kept meaning to ask Anna the Russian for ‘Just do it’.

She was going to take me there on Victory Day, 9 May. Veterans, survivors, kids, everybody turned out. I was looking forward to seeing the old and bold. They’d be wearing more medals than Gaddafi. And it wouldn’t be raining.

I was nearly at the main gate, head down, nose running, hands in pockets, making sure I didn’t slip on the ice, when the front panel and an alloy wheel with the Range Rover logo appeared in what little peripheral vision my hood allowed.

‘Hey, fella, want a lift?’ It was the gunslinger without the side parting.