Moskva (6 page)

The storm was already in him when Tom opened his eyes. It didn’t need some passing slight or cruel memory to birth it. The damn thing was there and waiting as he rolled out of bed, took a second to balance and knew he was going to do what he’d told Anna Masterton he’d do.

Hunt down David Wright or whatever the little shit was really called.

‘Foreigners will come to Moscow, walk around, and find no skyscrapers …’ As the Great Patriotic War came to a close, Stalin fretted that Moscow was not sufficiently grand for the capital of a victorious world power. His response was to order the construction of the Seven Sisters, huge tower blocks known locally as Stalinskie Vysotki.

The Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building, built as elite flats but re-designated as
kommunalka
, communal apartments, was the third highest. The Hotel Ukraina, until recently the world’s tallest hotel, was the second highest. Top of the list was Moscow State University at Lenin Hills.

The tallest building in Europe, it was unmissable and owed its position on Moscow’s south-west edge in equal parts to Stalin’s paranoia and historical common sense. He didn’t trust the intelligentsia, and Russian history recorded numerous student riots against tsarist policy when the university was in the centre.

What Tom’s
Guide to Moscow
didn’t mention was that
Europe’s tallest building had been built by slaves from the gulags, several thousand of them, housed in the later stages on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth floors to reduce the chance of escape and avoid transportation costs.

Putting the guide away, and hoping he looked suitably academic in a scruffy tweed jacket with elbow patches, Tom tucked a fat hardback under his arm, swung a tatty briefcase he’d scrounged from a man in the embassy comms room and headed not for the main tower, which housed the lecture theatres, but for the furthest of the four wings flanking the tower.

Like the others, it housed students.

A
deshurnaya
at a desk looked up and Tom nodded sharply.

She might have stared after him but she didn’t call him back as he strode towards the stairs. He’d already decided not to use the lifts. If they were anything like the lift at Sadovaya Samotechnaya, he stood a good chance of getting stuck between floors.

A group of Russian boys heading down parted to let him through without noticing. They smelled of damp coats and bad aftershave. Their scarves were home-knitted, their boots stained to the ankle by yesterday’s snow. The strip lighting did nothing for their complexions, their clothes or their expressions.

The student cafeteria on the third floor stank of disinfectant and was spartan even by Soviet standards. Formica tables and moulded orange chairs filled an expanse of plastic tiles. The view over the Moskva was striking, though.

So striking that Tom stopped to admire the ice before heading for the counter, where he ordered a tea, dropping a few kopeks into the gloved hand of a babushka, and then chose a chair that let him watch students enter and leave. Someone had left an issue of
Krokodil
,
which Tom discovered was a month out of date. He read it anyway.

Private Eye
with worse cartoons and better jokes.

Factory management were mocked for their inability to deliver fridges that worked, enough cars to fill showrooms, clothes anybody might actually want to wear. What was most shocking about the shiny new amnesty for political prisoners was that everyone was so shocked. The old guard were dinosaurs, Gorbachev a breath of fresh air.

When it went for political targets, it went for those at a safe distance from Moscow. The head of police in Yakut was too drunk to capture a murderer who’d flayed a teenage boy upriver from Yakutsk, and another approaching Olyokminsk. It had to be obvious even to an idiot the perpetrator was making his way along the River Lena, probably looking for casual work. Tom suspected it wasn’t as simple as that.

He could tell the Western students. They moved in little shoals.

Half a dozen was their preferred number.

And while they might be as damp as the Russian students, their clothes were more expensive, they were better fed and their hair better cut. They mostly stuck to speaking Russian, but Spanish, French or German would creep in, the conversation flipping languages for a sentence or two. When a group of three boys and two girls broke into English, Tom wandered over.

‘Are you from the UK?’

‘Who’s asking?’

‘I am,’ Tom said.

A boy in a leather Lenin hat glanced away, then looked back and made himself hold Tom’s stare. He sucked his teeth theatrically. ‘So,’ he said, ‘what are we meant to have done this time?’

‘What did you do last time?’

One of the girls laughed. Late teens, maybe early twenties.
The boy with the leather cap didn’t like that; his scowl said so.

‘Whatever it was,’ Tom told him, ‘I don’t care.’

The girl said, ‘You aren’t from the embassy?’

‘In a way …’ Tom slid his ID on to the table and took it back before they’d done much more than glance at it. When he had their attention, he sat.

‘Are we in trouble?’ the girl asked. She sounded Welsh.

‘Not yet,’ said Tom, passing Alex’s photograph across.

‘Pretty. Who is she?’

‘Someone who’s missing. You haven’t seen her?’

‘No,’ the Welsh girl said.

‘You sure? Her boyfriend studies here.’

‘Quite sure. I’m Siân,’ she added, as if this was something that needed to be said. ‘I thought I knew most of the girls from the UK. What’s she studying?’

‘She’s home for the holidays.’

‘From boarding school?’

Tom nodded.

‘Tacky.’

Tom glared at Lenin Cap.

‘Not her,’ he said hastily. ‘Whoever’s boffing her.’

Siân peered at the photograph carefully. ‘Upper sixth?’

‘Lower,’ Tom said.

‘Even tackier,’ the boy muttered.

‘What’s her boyfriend’s name?’ That was Siân again.

‘David Wright. I’m told he’s American.’

The friends glanced at each other. The other girl shook her head very slightly. A warning, Tom imagined. Unless she was simply suggesting they stay out of it.

‘Spit it out,’ Tom said.

Only the first girl met his eyes. She looked embarrassed.

‘Mr Right. Davie Wong. It’s a pun.’

‘And a play on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?’ Tom asked.

She nodded gratefully. ‘He’s Canadian, not American, and I very much doubt he’s going out with … What was her name?’

‘Doesn’t matter. Where do I find him?’

‘I’ll take you.’

‘Siân …’ Lenin Cap said.

‘It’s okay. Davie knows me.’

‘Davie knows you?’ Tom asked, when they were on their way out.

He left the others convinced they’d got off lightly, without knowing for what. Moscow probably did that to you after a while.

‘The students halls are self-policing,’ she said. ‘Elected representatives, Komsomol committees. You know, the youth organization of the Communist Party. Every corridor has a
deshurnaya
, one of those old women who sit at a desk and spy on who comes and goes. Some of them have been here for ever. We should be okay. I know most of those in this block.’

Concrete stairs led to a swing door with a corridor beyond. A hard-faced woman looked up from a desk and barked a question when she saw Tom. It was Siân who answered. ‘I told her you were from the embassy.’

‘I speak Russian,’ Tom said.

He watched the girl assess that.

She knocked at a door and waited. There was a sound of scurrying and then silence, as if someone was pretending not to be there. ‘Davie,’ Siân said, ‘it’s okay. It’s me.’ Very slowly the door opened a little and a slim boy peered through.

‘Who’s that?’

‘He needs to talk to you.’

‘About Alex,’ Tom said.

The door opened as wide as its little chain would allow. ‘I haven’t seen her,’ a soft voice said. ‘She only came here twice. Now go away and leave me alone.’

‘She’s disappeared,’ Siân said.

‘Maybe she wanted to disappear.’

‘Maybe she did,’ Tom agreed. ‘Her family are still worried.’

‘You’re family?’

Tom knew the chain would snap with a single kick. All the same, he pulled his ID from his pocket and held it up so Davie could examine it. ‘I’m from her embassy.’ The door closed a little, but only so the boy on the far side could slide the chain free and open it properly.

‘I’ll find my own way out,’ Tom said to Siân.

She nodded, glanced once at the nervous boy in the doorway and kept whatever she’d been about to say to herself. She left without looking back.

‘Friend of yours?’ Tom asked.

‘She’s nice.’

He said it so sadly Tom wondered if he was simple.

The room stank of piss, and shit stained one wall. The window was wide open despite it being less than zero outside. A torn copy of Pushkin lay face down on a locker, the shredded halves touching as if the boy hoped they’d heal. A Praktica SLR sat on the windowsill with film ripped from its back. The front of its leather case had been torn off and the Zeiss lens cracked.

‘Christ. Who have you upset?’

Davie Wong said nothing.

His eyes were huge and brown, and fearful behind the tiny wire spectacles he put on to examine Tom. His lashes were long enough to make a girl jealous. He wouldn’t have lasted a day at Tom’s school.

Remembering the postcard, Tom wondered if the ‘She’ in
‘You will hear thunder & remember me & think: She wanted storms’ had been referring to Alex at all. Perhaps Davie had been talking about himself.

‘Anna Akhmatova,’ the boy said when Tom fed him the line. ‘You’ve been through Alex’s things then …’

‘As I said, her family are worried.’

‘Bit late now.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘A few days before New Year.’

‘You didn’t fly home over the holidays?’

‘My parents can’t afford it. The university let me stay.’

‘Ask them for the money and go home. Don’t stay here. If the Russians are being this nasty, there’s little point. It’ll only get worse.’

‘The Komsomol keep an eye on us, you know? One Uzbek boy wanted to be friends. I didn’t dare.’ Davie reddened, realizing he shouldn’t have said that. ‘It’s not the Russians though. They’re not my problem.’

‘Who is?’

‘I thought you wanted to talk about Alex?’

‘I do. I’m just getting a picture of how things work here.’

‘Has Alex really run away?’

‘I’m told that her note said she’d be staying with a friend. I was hoping that was you. She’s not your girlfriend then?’

Davie Wong looked so shocked Tom smiled.

‘Didn’t think so. How did you meet?’

‘At the swimming pool.’

‘The big one opposite the Pushkin?’

The boy nodded. ‘She was smart and funny and suggested we get a coffee after we got changed. So that’s what we did. We met a few times. Nothing happened.’

‘Not your type.’

Davie Wong glanced at him sharply.

‘My uncle was a stoker on destroyers,’ Tom said. ‘These days he lives in Portsmouth with a P&O steward he met in Singapore in the sixties. They’re just friends, obviously. Two bachelors sharing a small mews house outside the dockyard because it’s easier than living alone.’

The boy grinned.

‘So, if you weren’t going out with Alex, who was? I mean, she’s smart and pretty and about to turn sixteen. There has to be some boy on the horizon. Unless her tastes don’t run in that direction.’

‘They do,’ Davie said.

Seeing Tom’s look, he added. ‘We used to ogle Russian boys at the pool and in the cafe afterwards. She likes brooding and dark or blond and angular. I’m a bit less
dramatic
. It’s difficult here though. I mean, it’s not just illegal, it’s an illness. Did you know they put you in a mental hospital?’

Yeah, Tom did know that.

The wrong politics. The wrong public pronouncements. The wrong kinds of religion. The wrong sexual orientation. They put you in a mental hospital for a lot of things in the Soviet Union, although these days it was getting better.

‘There was a Russian boy at the pool,’ Davie said suddenly. ‘Thin, good-looking, very intense. He came over and introduced himself. I thought …’ Davie hesitated. ‘I thought he was interested in me. We went out as a group for a coffee and he took us to Patriarch’s Ponds to sit on the bench from
The Master and Margarita
. I didn’t see him again. Alex might have done.’

‘Might have done?’

Davie blushed. ‘She cancelled me the next week. She was nice about it but we both knew why. She was going swimming with K.’

‘What does the K stand for?’

‘Kotik. But that’s just Russian for …’

Little cat. Yeah, Tom knew.

‘Did Alex mention a New Year’s Eve party?’

Tom watched the boy wrestle with his conscience and the good angel win. Looking round the ruins of his room, the boy found a paperback of Cocteau sketches that had escaped destruction and flipped towards the back, extracting an address not that far from Tom’s flat.

‘It was going to be great, Alex said. She said I should go. Her new friends were cool, they’d like me.’ Davie shrugged, looking briefly puzzled. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘Alex didn’t
do
friends, not really. She hated school. Things were horrid at home. Her mother drank. Her stepfather hated her. I’d never met anyone so lonely.’

Tom wondered if Davie realized that he kept referring to Alex in the past.

The student room Tom wanted was right at the end.

‘Who is it?’

He knocked again.

‘I said, who is it?’

A third knock produced swearing, more swearing and the clatter of someone stamping to the door. It was thrown open and filled with the bulk of the sneering jock who’d been persecuting Davie for being different.

Tom’s punch was low, fast and dirty.

The boy was twenty, maybe twenty-one. Not used to being on the wrong side of the equation. Not used to being the one on the floor. Once the Texan had his breath back, Tom hooked two fingers into his nose, yanked back his head and gripped his throat. The list of nasty things he promised to do if the boy trashed Davie Wong’s room again, or indeed went anywhere near him, was long and very detailed.