Moskva (24 page)

Cancer of the spirit takes you two ways. Those who do terrible things barely notice it eating away at them. Those to whom terrible things are done never forget and rarely get over it. Sometimes, rarely, perhaps not so rarely, you don’t even know which kind you’ve got, which kind you are … It was an army psychologist who told Tom that.

The man was mostly full of shit but he got that right.

At least, as Tom told Sveta, he got it right enough for it to stick in Tom’s head like chewed gum to the bottom of his shoe. If he was going to be this depressing when drunk, she replied, he might as well be Russian. In case he hadn’t noticed, she had her pick of Russians, or would have if her grandfather didn’t scare them all off. Tom might want to try being more English. How were the English when drunk?

Sentimental or violent, Tom told her. If she was really unlucky, both.

They were in the House of Lions, the mansion block Stalin had Zholtovsky design for his marshals. It was essentially retirement quarters for the most senior military figures in the Soviet Union, an overpowering yellow building facing Patriarch’s Ponds. Sveta’s grandfather not only had an apartment there, he had the biggest. The old man was asleep, after the funeral.

‘Going to change,’ Tom said.

After waiting fifteen minutes for him to return, she went
searching and found him still fully dressed and asleep on a narrow bed she’d used when staying there as a child. So now they sat, by themselves, in the old man’s study, a room so completely panelled with dark wood it was like squatting in a cigar box.

Lighting a papirosa, Tom looked around for an ashtray and nodded his thanks when Sveta pushed across a heavy alabaster monstrosity.

‘I thought you were taking me back to hospital?’

She shrugged. ‘This is close enough.’

‘You want a cigarette?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t. Smoking is bad for you.’

‘So is getting shot.’

‘With smoking there is a choice.’

They sat in silence for a while after that.

The demi-god in a large oil painting, staring across a rolling plain of T-34 tanks towards the fires of hell, had to be her grandfather, Tom realized. He’d already worked out it must be her grandfather’s sword on the wall. Overhead, a little chandelier hung heavy with tears. There was a feeling of emptiness, old memories and ghosts too tired to leave about the musty room.

‘Venetian glass,’ Sveta said, following Tom’s gaze. ‘A present from one of his mistresses. She had the sense to leave him.’

‘I heard that.’ Shouldering the door open as if it had personally insulted him, the commissar came in and slumped into a leather chair so ruined that flakes came off on his elbows.

‘Doesn’t make it untrue …’ Sveta hesitated, which was unlike her. ‘Where did you find that?’ she asked, indicating a tiny wax angel that was standing on the mantle. She looked at her grandfather, who stared back impassively. Neither given
nor denied permission, Sveta picked it up anyway, turning it over.

She looked troubled.

‘Granny …’

‘Would have loved it. Yes, I know.’

The wax angel’s face was blank-eyed but beautiful.

‘You’d better put it down,’ the commissar said. ‘It’s evidence.’

‘
Really?
In what?’ Standing up, Tom held out his hand and instantly regretted removing his sling as pain lanced his shoulder.

‘Careful,’ Sveta said crossly.

She handed him the figurine and Tom turned it over in his fingers, as he turned his memory of the ragged woman selling those figures over in his head. It was possible that beggars selling wax angels were commonplace in Moscow.

Then again, possibly not.

Before Tom could decide whether or not to say that he’d seen something like it, the old man growled, ‘That dead boy’s part of this.’

‘Beziki’s son. From the cult house?’

‘Gabashville’s other boy. The one found in Red Square. He was frozen, you know. That’s where this began.’ The old man scowled. ‘And don’t call him Beziki. He’s a bad man. Only his friends call him Beziki.’

‘Sometimes bad men are the only friends to have.’

The commissar’s laugh was sharp as a fox’s bark. Nodding at the sideboard, he ordered his granddaughter to pour him a brandy. Adding please only when the sudden set of her jaw suggested she was going to refuse.

‘His eyes were frozen,’ the old man said suddenly.

Tom waited. The first Beziki had seen of his boy was in the mortuary. Until now, Tom hadn’t even known the
commissar had been at the original crime scene. A dark thought curled like smoke. How many people had as much power as the commissar …?

‘I like him,’ the old man said. ‘Believe it or not.’

Sveta looked shocked.

‘I know, I know. He personifies the worst of our antisocial elements. But once upon a time we’d have found an outlet for that.’

‘The eyes?’ Tom prompted.

‘Frozen white. Unseeing.’

Sveta snorted. ‘The dead see nothing.’

‘They see everything,’ her grandfather corrected. ‘It’s their mouths that disappoint. They never reveal what the eyes see.’ He held out his glass. Sveta didn’t protest but she scowled. ‘I ordered an autopsy,’ he said.

‘On the frozen boy?’

‘On the children from the deserted house.’

‘I thought they’d been buried?’

‘I had them dug up.’

‘Chlorine?’ asked Tom, remembering a sourness to the air.

Prising himself out of the rotting chair, the old man headed for the kitchen and rooted in an under-sink cupboard, handing Tom a cereal-sized packet with a rat’s face behind heavy cross hairs. ‘This is usually the people’s choice.’

‘They used strychnine?’

‘They used nothing,’ he said flatly.

‘Your pathologists couldn’t identify the poison?’

The commissar’s eyes flared. ‘There was no poison. No poison, no stab wounds, no bullets to the back of the head, no bruises around the neck, no water in the lungs, no reddening to the skin where their mouths had been held shut. Nothing.’

‘So … something your people haven’t met before?’

Tom watched the commissar consider this. It didn’t make him any happier.

What were the options, though? Short of magic – and Tom was discounting magic – you had something so new or subtle that the pathologist couldn’t identify it, or else a pathologist’s report based entirely on lies. And who’d dare lie to the commissar?

This was a question demanding further thought.

‘Something military,’ Tom said. ‘Something new. That’s the most obvious answer.’

‘Vladimir doesn’t have that kind of reach,’ Sveta protested.

‘I doubt it was him,’ her grandfather said.

‘Who then?’

‘My guess is his father.’

‘But why? Why would the minister do something like that?’

‘Major Fox?’ the old man said to Tom.

Because they were both staring at him, he thought about it, remembering the party at Vedenin’s dacha on the night of the attack, the boy’s childishness, the way the minister fussed. If he’d decided Vladimir was guilty, the answer was obvious.

‘He was protecting his son.’

‘I’d probably say,’ the old man said, ‘he
thought
or
believed
he was protecting his son. Vladimir’s always been his weakness. Now, let’s get this out of the way. Did you make Vladimir drive across the ice or not?’

Sveta froze at her grandfather’s question.

‘Yes,’ Tom said.

‘Why?’ The old man’s question was bald, his tone neutral.

‘He kidnapped Alex.’

‘You think.’

‘I know.’

‘How do you know?’

‘In the same way Vedenin knows I killed his son.’

‘He doesn’t know,’ the commissar said. ‘He believes.’

‘When has belief ever been less dangerous than knowledge?’

The commissar looked at his granddaughter and smiled. ‘He’s not a fool, your friend. That’s something.’

‘When have I ever brought a fool home?’

‘You’re comparing him to Nicolai?’

She bit her lip and looked away. When Sveta looked back, the commissar was smiling and there was pride, exasperation, perhaps worry in his gaze. Her cheeks reddened until he laughed and she got up to take his brandy glass and pour him another, but really to touch her grandfather’s hand as she gave it back. There was a closeness Tom wouldn’t have thought either capable of showing, a fondness he wouldn’t know how to display himself.

How do you judge your father if his father was more monstrous still?

Tom didn’t slam his son’s head into a wall, tell him his ma was stupid and he shouldn’t have been born. He didn’t make his own father’s mistakes. But he knew he’d made more than enough of his own.

Tom drank too heavily that evening, washing down codeine with tumblers of the old man’s brandy, and spent a dark and painful night in a single bed in a cold box room that overlooked a road rather than the snow-covered pond. He counted off the hours until morning while dodging the worst of his thoughts and wondering where Alex was being held now. In the few moments he did manage to sleep, he dreamed of Alex, buried in a box and running out of air. She wanted to know why he wasn’t digging faster. It didn’t seem right to say,
I’m digging as fast as I can …

‘You look terrible.’

‘Dreams.’

The old man nodded as if he understood.

Sveta and her grandfather were up and breakfasted when Tom joined them. The commissar pointed at a plate of pastries. ‘Take a couple of those if you’re hungry.’ He looked sympathetic when Tom shook his head.

On the street, a familiar but different crop-haired boy waited by a Zil. Familiar, in the sense that crop-haired drivers are largely interchangeable. Different, in that he wasn’t the one Sveta’s grandfather wanted.

The old man saw no irony in announcing he was going to fire his usual driver for calling in sick. Even when Sveta pointed out that if he was prepared to fire him he could hardly claim he wasn’t willing to be driven by anyone else.

‘Open the bloody door then.’

The commissar clambered painfully into the back, glared at the young man shutting his door for him and waited for Sveta to climb in the other side. Tom took a seat in the front and opened his own door, earning a glare from the driver.

The Zil kept to the central lane, even when the roads were clear, and ran red lights as if they weren’t there. They stopped only once, beyond Moscow’s edge, having suddenly turned off the main road at the commissar’s orders on to a snowy track that delivered them, twenty sick-making minutes later, to what announced itself as a Health Spa for Heroes of the Soviet Union.

It looked like a Swiss hunting lodge, with the skull of a huge ram fixed over the door, and the single black Volga parked out front suggested that the clientele was limited. A path from the car park to the front door had been salted and all that remained of last night’s snow were patches of slush, surrounded by red mud or puddles.

Sveta sighed. ‘Should have known you’d want to stop here.’

‘Come on then …’

The maître d’ blinked at the sight of Sveta’s grandfather and escorted him past a dozen empty tables to one in the far corner, pulling back his chair.

‘It’s been too long, commissar. Too long.’

‘You know what I want.’

Bowls of peppery soup, platters of fresh white bread, saucers of creamy butter and coffee as good as any Tom had ever tried arrived in sequence. From the taste of it, the coffee was heavily laced with brandy.

‘Good for hangovers,’ the commissar told him. ‘Have another.’

Yellow-tusked boars glared down at the nearly empty room from either side of a stone fireplace filled with a raging fire. A spread of antlers so huge they looked almost prehistoric hung above the mantel. The only other diner finished his meal, glanced at their table and came across, stopping a few feet away.

‘Fyodorov,’ he said, introducing himself. ‘Leonid Nikolayevich …’

‘I remember who you are,’ Sveta’s grandfather said without looking up.

‘So sad, Vladimir Vedenin’s funeral.’

‘What do you want?’

The man swallowed, obviously wondering if he should simply go. The commissar’s shoulders were stiff with anger, Fyodorov’s face almost pleading. Tom wondered what the story between them was and how far back the enmity went.

‘Well?’ the commissar demanded.

‘Is it true that Gorbachev’s calling a small summit?’

‘Who knows?’ the commissar said. He made it sound like
Who cares
.

‘It’s just … I heard he telephoned you recently.’

The commissar froze, the spoon halfway to his mouth. ‘Can I ask who told you that?’

‘Word gets around. Is it true?’

‘I’m nobody these days,’ the commissar said coldly. ‘The oldest of the old guard.’ He raised his head and for the first time looked at the man who’d interrupted his lunch. It was a bleak and unforgiving glare. ‘Still, I’m sure I can arrange for someone to talk to you about it if you’d like?’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’ The man retreated, walking backwards as if taking his leave from royalty. Sveta’s grandfather sighed.

‘Preserve me from Chernenko’s fools.’

Returning to his soup, the commissar kept at it until his third bowl was empty and he’d scraped the inside clean with the last of the bread. A waiter with a greying moustache removed the bowl and nodded when the old man demanded yet another coffee. When Tom reached into his jacket for his papirosa, the waiter glanced at the old man. ‘You’ll have to go outside.’ Sveta’s grandfather said.

The waiter began to say he knew how unreasonable the rules were, that he regretted they applied even to a guest of someone so important, only hushing when the commissar waved him into silence.

‘This is a health spa,’ he said. ‘Clear mountain air for hard-working Party members. You can hardly expect to smoke over your food.’

When Sveta began to push back her chair, her grandfather put his hand on hers.

‘I’m sure the boy will be fine.’

‘I’m sure I will,’ Tom said.

Having stopped off at the urinals, he took himself through a door marked
Gardens
into the sharp smell of pine needles,
heading up a snowy path towards a circular bench built round a bare oak at the top of a small hill.