Moskva (31 page)

The revolver was thrown in one direction, Beziki’s head in the other.

The flash inside the small room was so bright its edges were etched on the inside of Tom’s eyes. There would be muzzle burn. A star-shaped wound where flaming gases peeled away Beziki’s scalp. Tom was too blind from the brightness to see Beziki slump sideways and then slip from his chair.

Tom was out of his seat without knowing it, hunched below the edge of the window as if the shot had come from there. He knew the smell of death and cordite, because it was a smell you never forgot. It was the hammering of his heart that was unexpected.

He didn’t turn on the desk light.

That shot had to have been heard and a sudden light in the window would attract attention. And what was there in that room that Tom needed to see more clearly than it could already be seen? If hell had a colour, it was the sickly glow of cheap sodium.

He pushed the
chacha
bottle into the pocket of his Belstaff.

‘Damn you,’ he muttered.

Then again, that wasn’t his job these days.

Making do with a prayer short enough to be indecent, Tom suggested that God give Beziki a pass on the bits of his life he’d been worried wouldn’t pass muster. Then he shut the man’s eyes from habit, picked up the bottle cap he’d used
for a shot glass and slipped it into his other pocket. He wiped the ashtray just in case.

Beziki’s file went into the front of his jacket.

As yet, no one was hammering at the window. No sirens were racing towards him down the street outside.
He killed himself. Yes, I know my fingerprints are all over the room. We were playing Russian roulette. A very one-sided version.

No, I don’t really know why.

Tom had no idea whether offices occupied the building opposite. He just didn’t want to still be here if anyone came to investigate. Nor did he want anyone to see a light go on after the shot, think it was odd and remember to tell the police when they started going door to door. He let Beziki’s little office stay in darkness, and retreated through empty spaces tinged not with blood, emptied bowels or cordite but sawdust and the flat smell of emulsion, until the cold freshness of night welcomed him.

‘Don’t fall,’ a voice said.

He spun round, already prepared to fight.

‘I mean, alone, at night, in the middle of winter …’

Slowly, very slowly, he turned to find bright eyes watching from the darkness of a church doorway. Wax Angel unfolded herself, layer after layer of rags, her frayed clothes fluttering in the night wind.

‘Those are the kind of conditions in which a man can fall.’

Tom gaped at her.

‘Believe me,’ she smiled encouragingly, ‘I know … Your friend in there was a good man, for a bad man. I’ve known good men who were much worse.’

Tom glanced in both directions.

‘It’ll take them ten minutes,’ Wax Angel said. ‘Possibly longer. Do you need my help?’

Tom shook his head mutely, found his voice and thanked
her for her offer. Sharp eyes glanced at the door behind him and she looked thoughtful.

‘Better get going then. Let me know when you do.’

Tom understood. He really did. Two children dead … How could Beziki go on living having let that happen? But what had he meant,
I did
?

If he took Alex from Vladimir, where was she now?

Or had he lost her, and if so to whom? It seemed to Tom that an increasingly brutal game was being played and he only hoped the commissar was right.

That Alex was still more useful alive.

In his first befuddled steps, before the bitter wind sweeping Gorky Street sobered him up, he knew he had to dump the bottle, find a telephone and check on his own son; everything else came second to that. Only, calls from Moscow went through a central exchange that noted who wanted to make the call, to whom and the number dialled.

He couldn’t simply check into a hotel and use their telephone because foreigners couldn’t simply check into hotels. Hotels had to be booked in advance through Intourist, and just turning up and demanding a room would probably get him arrested.

Tom’s only choice was the embassy.

A place he’d been trying to avoid.

Putting his head down, and trying to look as anonymous as possible, he stamped his way south, listening for sirens and finally hearing them break the night far behind him. They rose and fell and stopped, and he breathed a huge sigh of relief when they remained stopped and didn’t come closer or start up again.

He was just another drunk in a country full of drunks, as careful to avoid walking into lamp posts and slipping off an
icy pavement as the next man. That probably helped, he realized. No one looking at him would have taken a second glance.

The walk from Red Square to Maurice Thorez Embankment took Tom over the bridge but, of course, the river was frozen, which he’d have remembered if his brain had been engaged. Denied an easy option for disposing of the
chacha
bottle, he drank what was left of it, prised up the grill of a storm drain, wiped the bottle and dropped it in, kicking snow over the top and settling the grill. That was when he realized he probably should have pocketed the Party card from Beziki’s desk.

Tom looked round to check whether he’d been seen.

No one in sight, not even his shadow. If he even had a shadow these days, which the commissar had assured him he hadn’t.

He’d never have dared take the risk if he’d been sober, but there wasn’t much chance of that these days. Slipping out of the alley, he turned the corner and saw the embassy lit up ahead.

‘Cold,’ he sympathized.

The Soviet guard grinned. ‘As a fish’s tit.’

He took the papirosa Tom offered and they stared up at the building’s ornate facade. ‘Which sergeant’s wife did you screw to get stuck with this?’

Drawing deeply on his papirosa, the
militsiya
man coughed as he hit cardboard and tossed the charred filter to the snow. It was a cushy job and they both knew it. On the other side of the wrought-iron gate his British counterpart was dead on his feet, kept upright by the wall of his hut.

‘You could probably get in without waking him.’

‘That would be unkind …’

The Brit peered at Tom’s pass blearily.

‘Long night?’ Tom asked.

‘So cold.’

‘You’re newly out?’

‘How did you know?’

‘Haven’t seen you before.’

In reception, Tom asked a young woman who came out from a side room to get him an outside line and gave her the number. She reached for a pad, scrawled it down and read it back. ‘I’ll be in the library,’ Tom said.

‘Is this number a direct line, sir?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Should I ask for anyone in particular?’

‘Ask for Charlie Fox.’

There was nothing Tom needed from the library except silence and access to the telephone in the far corner next to the microfiche reader. For want of anything better to do, he pulled down the Foreign Office list for 1961, which was the most recent there. There was a 1949, a 1946 and a 1938, all bound in fading red leather. He found what he wanted exactly halfway through.

Under M, obviously enough.

Edward James Stought Masterton, b. 15 December 1925. Educated Eton College and Balliol. Married 1945 Nicola Montefiore. Commissioned into the Life Guards February 1944. Military Cross, Juno Beach, Normandy, June 1944. Attaché to the Commandant British Sector, Berlin, July 1945. Granted a certificate as Third Secretary in the Foreign Office 11 October 1946 …

That MC was unexpected.

Tom thought of the slightly fussy, fiercely reserved diplomat and imagined him under fire. He could see Masterton controlling himself, controlling his men, refusing to retreat under withering fire. He could see him in the shattered ruins of Berlin too, ordering work details, helping set up hospitals,
reporting on the state of refugees. Tom knew he’d never look at the man in the same way again.

He’d never like him.

He might respect him from now on, maybe.

The rest of the entry gave the predictable rise of a diplomat who’d found his spiritual home.
Transferred to Paris. Second Secretary in 1950. Transferred to Moscow. Acting First Secretary in 1955, substantive 1959. Transferred to Washington …

His first ambassadorship was Buenos Aires, in the mid 1960s.

Was that a good posting and was Nicola Montefiore still around? Alex would have been born around 1970. A death, a divorce? What had happened to his first wife? Come to that, what about Anna Masterton’s first husband? Tom assumed Anna had been married to Alex’s father.

She struck him as the marrying kind.

Taking down a
Who’s Who
from 1977, he found Sir Edward newly married to Anna Elizabeth Sophie, née Wilde, previously Powell. An earlier edition had a list of Powells and Tom ran down them, looking for someone whose world might have crossed with Sir Edward’s. Although he suspected bitterly that everyone in the damn book crossed with everyone else’s at some point.

Brigadiers, diplomats, industrialists …

Dozens with the right name but none looking more likely than the others. Until right at the end he found an RA, exhibitor at the Summer Exhibition, professor of Art at the Slade. Married to an Anna Elizabeth Sophie, née Wilde. No children. It was 1968; they wouldn’t have done yet.

What was it Anna had said that day on the embassy steps?

Cancer, prostate. Alex took it badly …

And later,
Alex was six. We were divorcing anyway …

How long had Professor Powell had cancer? More to the
point, when was it diagnosed and when did he start chemo? Tom ran through what he remembered of his own father’s death. A long slow war of attrition, with the cancer winning in the end. First infertility, then impotence, then a loss of strength and temper.

Although the last might just have been his old man.

What if Sir Edward was Alex’s real father? What if Professor Powell wasn’t her father after all? What would that change?

Tom was returning the
Who’s Who
to its place on the bookcase, rather unsteadily, when another thought hit him, delayed by alcohol, tiredness and his shock at Beziki’s death. So he stopped, took down the gazette and found Sir Edward’s entry again, tumblers falling into place.

Sir Edward had been in Berlin at the same time as Beziki, the commissar, General Dennisov and the others.
When the British took over our sector, the bitch went to them and reported her granddaughter’s death as a crime …
That was what Beziki had said.

Reported her granddaughter’s death as a crime.

On a hunch, he found a tatty
Who’s Who in the Politburo.

The copyright page dated it to the late fifties and it was printed on rice paper. Individual entries were solid little blocks of black in tiny text. Ivan Golubtsov, the NKVD official mentioned by Beziki, had been alive. His boss, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, Marshal of the Soviet Union, head of the NKVD, had not … Golubtsov’s entry was brief:
b. Odessa, 1897. Joined the Party in 1919. A deputy to Beria, he survived his master’s fall in 1953, retiring shortly afterwards to live quietly in the Crimea. Married, later divorced …

There it was.

One son, killed in Berlin, 1945.

The city had fallen in May. The British occupied their sector in July.

By the end of that month Golubtsov’s son was dead.

Things got complicated …
Beziki had said that too. Was Sir Edward on the edges of that complication? Was he in fact part of the complication? Tom was nagging at
things got complicated
when the telephone rang, dragging him back to now.

Tom had his line.

‘Charlie …’

‘This is Mr Marcher.’

What kind of people introduced themselves as Mr anything?

Schoolmasters, apparently. In this case, Charlie’s housemaster. ‘It’s Charlie’s father,’ Tom said. ‘Major Fox. Calling from the Moscow embassy.’

Tom could almost hear the hesitation on the line.

‘Forgive me. Is it urgent?’

Beziki slumped at his desk … Beziki’s son dead on the rotting floor of a ruined house … His other son, the one Tom had never seen, dumped at the Kremlin Wall … The girl who was not Alex, white as marble on trampled snow. Gutted and dead on a mortuary slab … A fading photograph of a terrified boy tied to a chair.

He needed to know his own son was safe.

‘It is to me.’

‘Is it something I can deal with?’

‘No,’ Tom said firmly. ‘I need to talk to Charlie.’

‘He’s in bed,’ Mr Marcher said. ‘The smalls have lights out at eight. I’ll ask Matron to wake him.’

‘Thank you.’

Charlie came to the phone and Tom heard him shuffle himself on to a seat, and a creak from the chair as he pulled his legs up under him, which was how he always sat at home. ‘Daddy?’

His voice was strange and Tom realized that the master was still there. He should have asked for Charlie to be left alone.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Of course,’ said Tom, knowing he should be the one asking that. ‘All good. I just wanted to say hello.’

‘Only, it’s after lights out.’

‘I know. Mr Marcher told me. He was kind enough to have Matron wake you.’

‘I was awake anyway. Are you sure you’re all right?’

Charlie’s voice was clipped and polite and more distant than could be blamed on an international line. He was holding himself tight, waiting for his father to come to the point, wondering what he was about to say.

‘It’s okay. Nothing’s wrong. I simply wanted to talk to you.’

‘It’s after lights out.’

‘Charlie, I know that.’

‘I should go back to bed if there’s nothing wrong.’

An adult voice at the other end said something and Tom lost Charlie for a few seconds to a conversation he couldn’t hear because his son put his hand over the receiver. When Charlie came back on the line, he sounded uncertain. ‘Are you sure nothing’s wrong? Mummy’s all right, isn’t she?’