Moskva

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Authors: Jack Grimwood

BOOK: Moskva
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Jack Grimwood
 
 
MOSKVA
 
 
Contents
 

Chapter 1: Red Square, Christmas Eve, December 1985

 

Chapter 2: New Year’s Eve, December 1985

 

Chapter 3: Sadovaya Samotechnaya

 

Chapter 4: Wax Angel, 6 January 1986

 

Chapter 5: Telephone

 

Chapter 6: Kisses for Mayakovsky

 

Chapter 7: Meeting Anna on the Street

 

Chapter 8: Hunting for David

 

Chapter 9: Party Address

 

Chapter 10: Not Enough Room to …

 

Chapter 11: Cross Hairs

 

Chapter 12: A Knock on the Door

 

Chapter 13: Beziki

 

Chapter 14: Chacha Over Ice

 

Chapter 15: Drunk Again

 

Chapter 16: Supper with Beziki

 

Chapter 17: Dennisov’s Bar

 

Chapter 18: Major Milova

 

Chapter 19: Night Attack

 

Chapter 20: In the Cellar

 

Chapter 21: The Commissar

 

Chapter 22: Mary’s Room

 

Chapter 23: Wax Angel

 

Chapter 24: Back to the House

 

Chapter 25: The Ice Beckons

 

Chapter 26: Sisters of Mercy

 

Chapter 27: Vistula, Spring 1945

 

Chapter 28: Burying Vladimir

 

Chapter 29: House of Lions

 

Chapter 30: Back at the Dacha

 

Chapter 31: Ural 650

 

Chapter 32: Return to Moscow

 

Chapter 33: Autopsy

 

Chapter 34: Forgiveness

 

Chapter 35: Spinning the Wheel

 

Chapter 36: Finding Schultz, Berlin, April 1945

 

Chapter 37: Questions and Answers

 

Chapter 38: Phoning Home

 

Chapter 39: Caro Calls

 

Chapter 40: The Oak Tree

 

Chapter 41: Another Knock at the Door

 

Chapter 42: Handing Over the Notebooks

 

Chapter 43: Yelena’s Offer

 

Chapter 44: The Train

 

Chapter 45: Talking to Owls

 

Chapter 46: At the Hotel National

 

Chapter 47: Bearding the Lion

 

Chapter 48: Into the Den

 

Chapter 49: An Ordinary Train

 

Chapter 50: To the Island

 

Chapter 51: Not One Step Back, Stalingrad, Winter 1942

 

Chapter 52: The White Wolf

 

Chapter 53: Crossing the River

 

Chapter 54: Slaughterhouse Now

 

Chapter 55: Hearts of Ice

 

Chapter 56: Voices

 

Chapter 57: Hands in the Fire

 

Chapter 58: Banquet

 

Chapter 59: Going Home

 

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1
 
Red Square, Christmas Eve, December 1985
 

In the same hour that a sergeant in the Moscow police threw a tarpaulin over the naked body of a boy below the Kremlin Wall, a missile pulled by a diesel train a thousand miles away jumped its rails approaching a bend and killed everyone on board. Faced with such a disaster, the local soviet took the only decision it could.

Military bulldozers began gouging a 200-yard trench in the dirt.

In the weeks that followed, any evidence that the track had not been properly fixed was buried, along with twisted rails, the wreckage and the bodies it had contained. Fresh track was laid along the edge of a lake and fixed properly this time. The accident simply ceased to exist.

In Moscow, the truth was harder to hide.

It was six in the morning, not yet dawn, and the old man using the short cut behind Lenin’s Tomb was old enough to remember when Resurrection Gate still guarded the entrance to Red Square; back in the days before Stalin had it demolished to make it easier for tanks to parade.

The old man was unkempt, shaggy-haired. He’d been born to peasants and fought beside Trotsky in his teens. He would be happy to resign his seat on the politburo if only the USSR had someone to replace him.

That fool Andropov, dead after fifteen months. Chernenko didn’t even last that long. Now Gorbachev, practically a child …

How could he possibly step down?

The man only realized something was wrong when a torch momentarily blinded him. It was lowered quickly, lighting trampled snow. The sergeant was apologetic, abjectly so. ‘Comrade Minister. Sorry, Comrade Minister … I didn’t realize it was you.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘A car crashed into a bollard.’

‘What kind?’

‘Sir?’

‘A Zil, a Volga, a Pobeda?’

‘A Volga, sir. A new one.’

The old man frowned. The waiting list for a Volga was so long it could be resold instantly for double the original price. Even in a country where vodka was often the only way to keep out the cold, crashing a new one would be more than unfortunate.

He watched the sergeant shift nervously from foot to foot.

How long would it take him to realize the obvious? There would be tyre tracks in the snow if he was telling the truth. He didn’t blame the man. He’d obviously been ordered to lie.

‘Tell them I insisted on seeing for myself.’

‘Yes, Comrade Minister. Thank you, Comrade Minister.’

They should have been around when Stalin was alive. Then they’d know what real fear was. Ahead, lit by uplights on the Kremlin Wall, a major of the
militsiya
, Moscow’s police, stood bareheaded before a politburo member the old man had never liked. The man’s preening idiot of a son was on the far side.

‘Vedenin,’ the old man said.

‘Comrade Minister? You’ll catch cold.’

That was Ilyich Vedenin for you, the old man thought sourly. Always willing to state the obvious. At their feet, falling snow turned a tarpaulin white.

‘Well, aren’t you going to show me?’

Vedenin’s son yanked back the cover to reveal a boy of twelve or thirteen, apparently asleep. He was naked, his head and any body hair shaved clean. His mouth was very slightly open and his genitals looked tiny. The jelly of his eyes was milky white and he stared so blindly that for a second the old man looked away.

The little finger of the boy’s right hand was missing. The cut was clean, no blood on the snow beneath. Kneeling, the old man touched the boy’s chest and then his face, almost gently. The flesh was hard as ice.

‘Strange,’ he muttered.

‘What is, sir?’

‘He can’t have been here long enough to freeze.’

The old man was readying himself to stand when he paused and covered his action by tapping for a second time the white marble of the frozen boy’s chest, pretending to listen to its dull thud. Then he checked that he’d seen what he thought he’d seen.

Almost entirely hidden in the boy’s mutilated hand was a tiny wax angel.

That was unnerving enough. What was more unnerving still was that the angel had the boy’s face. Glancing up, to make sure he wasn’t being watched, the old man palmed the angel and pocketed it.

There was a message in the whiteness of the wax.

As there was in the frozen state of the body placed so carefully in front of the Supreme Soviet’s centre of power. The old man had to admit he was slightly shocked that the dead boy and the figurine should come together. Not least because the latter could only have come from someone he knew to be dead.

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