Moskva (11 page)

Steam rose through grills in the floor, condensed on the ceiling and ran down the walls into gutters that edged the room. The man watched Tom look around him and smiled. ‘A wise man always gathers his thoughts.’

Tom snorted. It was instinctive.

‘Although you haven’t always been wise, have you?’

‘How do the KGB know about Rebecca? What interest could she be?’

‘KGB?’ The man looked amused. ‘They’d be very upset to find I’d been mistaken for one of them. The KGB are the pillar of the state. Good Party members.’ He tossed his huge towel aside, revealing eight-pointed stars at his knees and shoulders. ‘I, on the other hand, am
vor v zakone
, a thief in law. What you would call mafia. Entirely undesirable. A very successful undesirable, admittedly. When one becomes this successful, it leaves the state with two choices. Reach a compromise or kill.’

‘Why haven’t they killed you then?’

‘Like your one-legged friend, I have influence in all the right places.’

‘You know about Dennisov’s father?’

‘A bitter little fool who’d crush me underfoot if he could. He survived Stalin by feeding his superiors to the machine.’

‘Why didn’t he get fed to the machine in turn?’

‘Because the Boss died. You know there are those who say
he was murdered? Think of that. Besides, Dennisov was good at picking patrons. You’ve heard of Golubtsov? Beria’s deputy? Dennisov took Golubtsov’s son’s place after the boy died in Berlin. Such a stroke of luck …’

‘You were in Berlin?’

‘We all were.’ The man patted the wooden bench beside him. ‘Gabashville,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘Erekle Gabashville.’

When Tom’s hand stayed by his side, he smiled.

‘A wise man is always cautious. You may call me Beziki.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because we’re going to be friends. Perhaps.’

Reaching for a plastic box, Erekle Gabashville opened it to reveal a bottle on ice, and two tiny shot glasses. He handed one to Tom, filled it to the brim, smiled and poured one for himself. ‘
Chacha
,’ he said. ‘Clear brandy. Stalin gave a bottle to Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta. Now, drink. Before it gets warm.’

The alcohol went down in one.

‘Right,’ Gabashville said, ‘tell me about Rebecca.’

‘This has to do with Alex?’

‘Do you imagine either of us would be here otherwise?’

‘You have me forced into a car at knifepoint, brought to a basement in the middle of nowhere, told to strip by a man with a pistol …’

‘Petrovka is hardly the middle of nowhere. And it would be absurd to enter a steam room dressed. As for the pistol … sidearms are illegal for private citizens in Moscow. Since my employees have no attachment to any official body, you must be mistaken.’

‘I’m meant to be seeing the ambassador.’

‘He will do nothing. He hasn’t even reported his stepdaughter missing.’

‘There are diplomatic reasons.’

‘So his wife tells you.’

Tom tensed and felt Beziki tense in turn.

‘I’ve been watching you. Well, my men have. I’d be a fool not to discover all I could first, wouldn’t I? It has to be obvious I want to talk.’ Dipping for the box, he refilled both glasses. ‘Alcohol,’ he said, ‘makes the truth more bearable.’

‘How do you know about Becca?’

‘I asked a man I know to ask a man he knew to find out everything there was to know about you. A dead daughter is what I was told. He’s a journalist. One of yours working for us. I mean the USSR, obviously. Or maybe working for you while pretending to work for us. I’m not sure even he knows.’

‘What does Becca have to do with Alex?’

‘I’m told it’s only six months since your daughter died. I imagine one reminds you of the other.’

‘And your interest?’

For a moment the man looked too furious to answer. But the sudden flare of anger in his eyes was for something else. Something so dark that the fat man held it inside and examined it in the few hot seconds that passed.

‘Edvard’s dead,’ he said finally.

Should Tom know who Edvard was? He made himself wait.

‘I have twins. Had twins. One may still be alive.’

Beziki swept his hand across his skull, wiping sweat from his hair, and as his forehead uncreased and his jowls lifted Tom caught a glimpse of the man he’d once been: fiercer, outwardly harder, less considered.

‘What happened?’

‘They left my boy dead below the Kremlin Wall.’

Opening the cooler box, Tom refilled the man’s glass, watched him drink it down and refilled it again. Then he drank one down himself.

‘Who are
they
?’

‘I’ll tell you when I know. First, Rebecca.’

Last night’s hangover already tainted the sweat rolling down Tom’s chest to gather in his navel, before dripping between his balls to splash to the floor. He could feel the next wave of alcohol flushing his veins. Eat more and drink less. It was an easy thing for a doctor to say.

‘Sometimes it helps to tell,’ Beziki said.

‘Have you told anyone?’

‘I’m telling you.’

Leaning back, the thickset man settled his bulk and closed his eyes as if intending to wait him out. Tom didn’t make him wait long. He was shocked to discover that he wanted to talk. He had things to say that he couldn’t begin to say to Caro. Things he couldn’t say to the police, his friends, what passed for his colleagues. And Beziki was right. If it weren’t for Becca, he’d never have spoken to Alex in the first place. ‘We had her young,’ Tom said. ‘It was complicated.’

‘You married because of it?’

‘I was training to be a Catholic priest. “
Tu es sacerdos in aeternum.
”’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You’re ordained for ever. Only, not quite. I admired the car in the window, got the brochure, booked a test drive but I never took Catholicism on the road. I was twenty-two, Caro nineteen. Her mother was furious.’

‘And yours?’

‘Mine died shortly afterwards. My dad was in jail.’

Beziki opened his eyes with the laziness of a fat cat hearing the scurrying of mice. ‘He was
vor v zakone
?’

‘He was a thief. And he was in the law. But nothing so grand. Bent copper.’

‘Copper?’

‘Military police …’

Beziki’s nod was carefully neutral. ‘Let’s get back to your daughter. What happened?’

‘Her car hit a tree. She was seventeen.’ Tom no longer cared that Beziki knew. He simply wanted to tell someone the truth.

‘A traffic accident?’

‘The police wondered if she’d been drinking. I told them no way. She was too careful to drink and drive.’

‘Another car was involved then?’

‘Maybe she swerved to avoid an accident? That was one of their suggestions. There was no paint from another vehicle on the Mini we’d bought her. No skid marks to say she’d been braking when she went off the road.’

‘She was racing?’

‘The police suggested that. Perhaps, if she’d been a boy … But not Bec. She was quiet. Stubborn as hell but a nervous driver, not the racing kind. The police wondered if someone had been tailgating her, or maybe she was being chased. Did we know of any reason someone might have been chasing her?’

‘Did you?’

‘She was seventeen and three months. A model student. She’d had the same boyfriend since she was fifteen.’

‘The weather was good?’

‘A clear night and a full moon. The headlights were working. The tyres were good. We’d insisted the garage give us a new set. The Mini was MOTed, taxed, newly serviced and insured. The police asked if she took drugs, if she’d been acting strangely, how college had been going, if we knew of any reason she might be upset …’

‘And the answers?’

‘Her marks were great. She occasionally quarrelled with
her boyfriend but it was never serious. She didn’t seem any different. She certainly didn’t seem upset.’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘I know what happened. She killed herself.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘I don’t know.’ Tom chewed at his lip. ‘I’ve asked myself over and over. The answer is …
I don’t know
. But she put her Mini into a tree at eighty miles an hour on a straight dry road. She died instantly. So the police were careful to tell us.’

‘What aren’t you saying?’

They’d got to the bit Caro didn’t know.

Taking a deep breath, Tom said, ‘We’d already told the police she barely drank and said dope made people stupid, but they had to be certain. My father-in-law arranged for a pathologist he knew to do the autopsy. His report …’ Tom paused, then kept going. Safer that way. ‘His report was to the point. It consisted mostly of a list of broken bones and ruptured organs. Like the police, he said that she died instantly. Unlike with the police, we believed him. There was no alcohol in her blood. No drugs. Nothing to suggest an aneurism. Her blood count was down, her haemoglobin low. A few other clues suggested she’d been tired at the time … So the coroner recorded his opinion that she’d dozed off at the wheel and only woken at the very end.’

‘You don’t believe him?’

‘Becca was three months’ pregnant. That was what was left out of the report my wife was given. I thanked the pathologist for his discretion, went straight round to Bec’s boyfriend and put him through a wall. When his dad tried to stop me, I punched him out. With his mum screaming that I’d got it wrong, I dragged the little shit into the garden and began hurting him. By the time the police arrived he’d pissed himself. It took three coppers to pull me off.’

‘How old was this boy?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘Old enough. You have friends in the police?’

‘My father-in-law does. The family agreed not to press charges in return for a promise I’d never go near them again … Wounded in Northern Ireland. Back on leave from Belfast. Hush-hush work. Distraught at the tragic death of his daughter. The police suggested they let the matter drop. My marriage was in ruins by then. Charlie off to boarding school. My wife decided it was the best place for him. I moved into a hotel a week later.’

‘So you’re divorced?’

‘Temporary separation while we see how it goes.’

Beziki opened one eye. ‘And how is it going?’

‘As badly as you’d expect.’

‘In Russia, your daughter would have had an abortion.’

‘In the UK too. We’d have stood by her. We’d have been unhappy about it. Furious even. But we’d have stood by her.’

‘And the boy … Would his family have helped?’

‘He wrote to me. He wanted me to know he’d told the truth. He never slept with Becs. As far as he knew she’d never slept with anyone. He was sorry she was dead. He’d loved her. He always would.’

‘Who was the father?’

‘I’ve no idea. I sorted through her record collection afterwards. Caro couldn’t bring herself to do it. “All Cried Out”, “Tainted Love”, “King of Pain”. It was as if Bec wanted to tell us something.’ Tom shook his head.

There was no
as if
about it.

Reaching for the cooler box, he refilled his glass and tossed it back.
Chacha
burned his throat. A burn to match the sting in his eyes. It was true that he had no idea who the father was, no idea what had happened in the last six months of his
daughter’s life. Since Becca’s death, he’d come to wonder if he’d known her at all.

‘My wife died young,’ Beziki said.

‘And left you with two boys?’

‘You know how precious boys are.’

‘Bec was precious.’

‘Girls are different.’

Tom couldn’t argue with that. Bec was very different. He’d seen no trace of himself when he looked at her, and precious little of her mother. Bec was bright, studious, stubborn. She’d intended to go to Oxford. She’d found herself work in a greengrocer’s for the holidays. When Caro said shop work was vulgar, Tom pointed out Bec could be pulling pints in the village pub.

That hadn’t helped Bec’s case.

‘You’re remembering her?’

‘Yes. She was very beautiful. Very clever.’

Beziki sighed. ‘Edvard was very beautiful. Not so clever.’

‘What do you want from me?’ Tom asked. ‘Why am I really here?’

Erekle Gabashville leaned forward and settled his bulk like one of those huge Japanese sumo wrestlers preparing for a bout, his weight balanced, his hands over the eight-pointed stars on his knees. ‘There was a letter.’

He held up his hand to halt Tom’s question.

‘After the boys were taken … It should not have been possible to take them. I want to say that. They were at my dacha. There were guards. The guards died.’ He shrugged. ‘Just as well. I would have had to kill them otherwise. They were good men and I would have disliked that.’

Beziki dragged his thoughts back to the letter.

‘Russians don’t trust Georgians but we’re useful and Stalin trusted us, obviously enough, which is maybe why others
don’t now. As a boy, I found a rifle and shot Germans. The partisans could have killed me but they made me their mascot instead. Later, the Red Army gave me a uniform and a family. We were young. Very young. We drank, we shared German women, we stood in Berlin’s ruins and took photographs. We did good things, bad things. Bonds like that bind you. I’ll show you the photographs one day.’

‘This has to do with the letter?’

The man nodded heavily. ‘It demanded money for the return of my sons, a huge amount in American dollars. If that was all, I’d have paid. Maybe made them wait a little while I tried to find out who had the balls for this. Although the fact they dared should have been warning enough. It wasn’t about dollars though. They also wanted information, information they had already, they said. Sending it would merely confirm what they knew.’

‘You didn’t send them the information?’

‘I said I needed a week to think about it. Their answer was to leave Edvard naked below the Kremlin Wall. He was frozen like ice.’

‘It was that cold?’

‘No. I have men asking questions in factory units and food-processing plants all over Moscow. Anywhere with industrial freezers. No one’s seen or heard anything suspicious.’