Moskva (28 page)

‘You look like you’ve just seen a ghost …’

‘Worse,’ Tom said.

Yelena looked worried. ‘What’s worse than a ghost?’

‘What’s left after the ghost is gone.’

She brought him a flask of vodka without being asked and poured the first glass for him. And then, because there was nowhere for that conversation to go, he asked about the three men getting savagely drunk in the corner.

Yelena sighed. ‘The fat one’s getting married.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow. If he can still stand up. Those are his best men.’ She glanced over to where Dennisov glowered from behind his bar. There was no food tonight, apparently. Dennisov had announced that he was sick of the smell of his sister’s cooking. ‘He’s already threatened to throw them out twice.’

‘Dennisov objects to them getting drunk?’

‘He objects to them getting married.’ Without her kitchen and pots and clattering to hide behind, Yelena looked unhappier and jumpier than usual, watching her brother when she hoped he wouldn’t notice, glaring back if he did.

Stamping across, Dennisov said, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Weddings …’

Her brother spat.

For a second Tom thought Yelena would slap him.

‘My sister thinks I should sober up. She thinks I should ask my father to use his influence to find me a suitable job. Something appropriate.’

‘Not him,’ she said sharply. ‘There are others.’

‘I like this bar,’ Dennisov said. ‘I intend to stay.’

‘My brother married young.’

‘Yelena …’

‘It’s a poor excuse. But it’s the only one he’s got.’

Head down, she started for the kitchen and Dennisov put his head in his hands for a second, shook it bitterly and started after her.

‘Let me,’ Tom said.

The kitchen felt wrong with the stove unlit and no steam from the saucepans. In one corner, the fridge still chugged noisily. So Tom slipped past Yelena to thump it, as he’d seen her do. For a moment the coils were silent, and then it started again.

Yelena scowled. ‘You’re going to get my brother into trouble.’

‘They’ve been back?’

‘He’s being watched.’

‘I’ll leave …’

When Yelena’s shoulders slumped, Tom knew that only the chance of a quarrel had been keeping her together. He almost regretted not giving her the fight she needed. But he’d seen families who needed fighting to hold them together. Families held together with belts. Marriages held together with fists.

He shook his head.

When he looked back, Yelena was staring at him. Her voice when she spoke was carefully neutral. ‘My brother said you’re a priest?’

‘Technically.’

‘Are priests allowed to see ghosts?’

‘Yelena …’

She wasn’t much older than the girl in the mortuary, Bec’s age at most. She had a life to live, as the others had. Tom had a sudden vision of her laid out on a slab, another life ended. He closed his eyes against the thought and opened them to find her still staring at him. Looking into her eyes was like looking into a cave and seeing the embers of a fire right at the back.

He wondered how far inside herself she was hiding.

As far back as he’d been hiding at her age? The trouble with coming from where he and Yelena came from was that you couldn’t help recognizing each other.

‘Tell me,’ he said.

‘What should I tell you?’

‘Whatever it is you need to tell me.’

He put his hand to her face without thinking, feeling the warmth of her skin, the blood beneath and the heat of a life yet unlived. Her eyes widened and behind them something changed. The emptiness in her face vanished and Tom felt the air quiver as if someone had drawn a note by brushing past a bell.

The light in the kitchen felt more liquid than he remembered, reminding him of dusk in the tropics. But the only light came from a lamp outside, and that cast a familiar sodium glare. He knew before she asked what she wanted. What everyone like them wanted: absolution. Tom wondered if Dennisov believed too.

It would help explain the man’s despair.

‘Should I kneel?’

‘I’m not sure God cares about stuff like that.’

He thought she was going to kneel anyway, but she simply grabbed a chair, turned it round and sat, with her arms folded across the back.

‘Are you really a priest?’

‘For my sins,’ Tom said.

She looked shocked and he reminded himself to be kinder. She was a kid. How heavy could the sins she carried be? ‘Say those that you remember,’ Tom told her. ‘Start with the one that is most difficult to say …’

‘I killed someone.’

He blinked, and said the first thing that occurred him, which wasn’t at all how it was meant to go. ‘Did they deserve it?’

Yelena nodded.

‘Would someone have died if you hadn’t?’

Her eyes became distant.

‘Yelena?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘You?’

She nodded again.

‘Say it.’

‘Me.’

To save yourself was no sin. Tom considered saying that but he knew it wouldn’t be enough for her. She was waiting for his reaction.

‘Are you planning to kill again?’

Yelena shook her head.

‘Good,’ Tom said. ‘You’re forgiven.’

‘You can’t …’

‘I just did. You took a life to save a life. It makes no difference to God that the life you saved was yours.’

‘You’re sure?’

There were words to be said, ritual to be observed. A whole series of responses he doubted she’d ever been taught. This was enough. This would do. ‘Yes,’ he said, kissing her forehead, ‘I’m certain.’

If God existed, he wouldn’t mind, and if he didn’t, it wouldn’t matter.

In Tom’s experience, the hardest part of forgiveness was learning how to forgive yourself. He knew that wasn’t theologically sound, but he didn’t actually give a shit at this point. She’d needed absolution. God knows, he could recognize that.

He told Yelena her penance was to live well.

Not piously, not meekly. Well.

Before she could open her mouth to object, he told her she had no idea how hard it would be. She stood, words unborn in her mouth. Then her face crumpled and her shoulders shook. And Tom dragged her to him, wrapping his arms tightly around her. Her hair smelled sour and felt oily under his fingers when he stroked it, as he would for a sobbing child. ‘It’s all right,’ he promised. ‘You’re going to be all right.’

They were like that when Dennisov found them.

‘What the fuck?’

He would have said more if all talk in the bar hadn’t abruptly stilled, leaving only Moya Brennan’s ethereal voice. His customers might as well have vanished, so suddenly did all conversation stop. Although if they had, a solitary ghost would be clicking skeletal fingers against the keyboard.

‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘What now?’

Straightening his shoulders, he pushed his way back through the curtains and Tom expected to hear him bark a question. Instead, he became part of the silence.

‘All right if I …?’

Yelena wiped her eyes crossly. ‘I’m coming too,’ she said.

Instead of the KGB they found Dennisov frozen behind his bar, looking uncertainly at Sveta, who’d come in full uniform and was staring around as if wondering who to arrest. Everyone she stared at looked away except Dennisov. Her gaze locked on his and he turned bright red.

‘You should have taken the job my grandfather offered you,’ she said.

‘I’ve already had this argument tonight.’

‘Not with me. Not about this job you haven’t.’

‘No,’ Dennisov said. ‘With her.’ He nodded at his sister.

Yelena stared at her brother. ‘You were offered a job?’

He ran a hand across his skull.

‘A desk job. Nothing I wanted.’

Sveta glared at him and he looked away.

In his filthy T-shirt and cut-down trousers, his stubble almost long enough to be a beard, his prosthetic leg as rusty as the ruined jeep from which it had been cut, he shuffled his feet like an adolescent, the metal one squeaking on the floor. ‘I was talking about the job,’ he said suddenly. ‘All right? I was talking about the job.’

‘Introduce me,’ Yelena ordered.

When her brother just stood there, she marched across and introduced herself. Sveta and Yelena’s handshake was wary, their body language stuttering awkwardness. But something clicked, because Sveta nodded and went to stand at the zinc counter while Dennisov’s sister filled a flask with vodka, found a glass, rejected it as being too dirty, found a cleaner one and put it in front of her visitor. Then, and this was something Tom had never seen, she found a glass for herself and filled that too.

‘He’s a fool,’ she said.

Sveta nodded.

The two women clinked glasses in silence.

Killing hers, Sveta shook her head when Yelena offered her a refill, and stamped across to where the Tetris screen was filling faster than the player’s frenzied fingers could clear. He stepped back as the blocks overwhelmed him.

‘You shouldn’t give up,’ Sveta said sternly.

The man turned, the only person in the bar not to know she was there.

‘Not until you’re dead. Not even then.’

She pushed him aside, snorting at the filthy screen. Ignoring the line of roubles marking people’s places, she stepped up to the keyboard and when a customer opened his mouth to object, Tom shook his head. Before the man could decide whether Tom had that right, Dennisov was beside him, Sveta’s vodka flask in hand. He put it down on the zinc and stayed to watch.

Yelena glanced between the three of them.

The look she gave her brother was a surprisingly cool appraisal. If she were a soldier, you’d know she was wondering whether she could trust her companion. As it was … perhaps it was the same. Although the slightly protective way she came to stand beside Dennisov told him it was more complicated. Tom was beginning to realize how fiercely they looked out for each other.

‘You have to …’ Dennisov started to say.

‘I can work it out.’ There was no malice in Sveta’s voice. She was simply stating a fact. She wasn’t the type who needed instructions.

Yelena grinned.

The newcomer let the blocks fall, concentrating on speeding them up, slowing them down, shifting them from one side of the screen to the other.

There was no attempt to play.

If anything, Sveta seemed to be memorizing shapes and movements while seeing how fast she could lose. When the screen backed up, she dug into her pocket, slapped down another rouble, planted her feet firmly, twisted her head to release the tension in her neck and nodded to herself.

Having reset the game, Sveta waited for the first block, spun it through 180 degrees, slammed it across to one side of the screen and sped it down, already repositioning the
next piece in her head. She was good. Tom realized how good when the regulars fell silent. It was a new silence, which had nothing to do with her uniform or the strangeness of there being a woman in Dennisov’s bar.

His customers drank as heavily as ever, chain-smoked and coughed and occasionally vanished through a cracked door into the urinal, but mostly they watched blocks building in lines until the lines vanished, two, three, four at a time.

The blocks fell faster and faster and still they vanished.

At one point they built so high it seemed inevitable that she would die. Men shifted and muttered but Sveta simply continued her war of attrition, holding out for another ten minutes. And, all the while, the number in the corner climbed and climbed until it was way above any score anyone else in that bar had known possible.

‘Don’t go to war with this woman,’ Yelena told her brother, when Sveta finally mistimed a move, the screen filled and her game came to an end. ‘You’ll lose.’

Sveta smiled at her.

‘Could you give me a hand?’ Yelena asked.

She was talking to Tom, who followed her through the curtain into the kitchen behind Dennisov’s wall of records. Flicking on the gas, she poured cloudy and overused oil into a frying pan as black as any Tom had ever seen and began slicing sausage directly into the oil, shaking the pan occasionally to stop it sticking.

‘How can I help?’ Tom asked.

‘Answer a question honestly.’ She glanced towards the curtain to check that neither of the others was coming through. ‘You’ve slept with her, haven’t you?’

‘Yelena …’

‘You have. Haven’t you?’

‘Maybe. Perhaps. She slept with me.’

‘There’s a difference?’

‘In my experience.’

‘In mine too. What do you think of her?’

‘Smart, determined, damaged, a little strange.’

Yelena nodded. ‘You think they’d be good together?’

‘You’d try to stop him if not?’

She gave Tom’s question serious thought, and in the silence she scooped slightly charred sausage from the pan and dumped it into a glass bowl, which she held over the flame by its edge with her bare fingers to warm. ‘Maybe. Then again, maybe not. Anything’s got to be better than the bitch.’

‘His wife?’

‘Ex. She got her divorce.’

‘He signed?’

‘Must have done. The decree came through today.’

‘No wonder he’s a mess.’ Digging into his pockets for his flat key, Tom stamped out to where Dennisov was standing next to Sveta and slapped his key on the zinc between them. ‘My place is yours if you want it.’

Dennisov looked at him. Sveta looked at the key.

‘You’ll need to talk your way past the guard.’

Dennisov waved at Sveta’s uniform as if to say that wouldn’t be any trouble and Tom shrugged and told him that
militsiya
major or not, her comings and goings would still be noticed and noted.

‘And you?’ Dennisov asked.

‘He means,’ Yelena said, ‘where will you be sleeping?’

‘I’ll use his bed here.’

Yelena blushed, Dennisov looked torn and Sveta sighed. ‘It’s not you sleeping in
his
bed that bothers him,’ she said.

Tom said it was fine. He had something he needed to do.