Moskva (7 page)

The boy believed every word.

Tom left him curled on the floor and found his own way out of the overblown concrete cake, Stalin’s idea of how a skyscraper should look. Outside, an old woman sat in the shelter of its steps being ignored by students, a black scarf tied tightly round her head to protect her from the wind. He wondered how many old women there were in Moscow selling wax figurines.

Tomorrow he’d have a new shadow, one better suited to dealing with someone trained in tradecraft. Tom didn’t regret losing the rat-faced little KGB man. He had an address for the party and, anyway, it was worth it for a morning of walking free.

Snow glittered on the distant roofs of the Kremlin, and the ice on the Moskva had been broken and healed so often that shards lay scattered across its surface like shattered glass. The balustrades of the bridge he used were glazed with virgin snow. Tom barely noticed. His thoughts were locked tight inside.

Alex was sad and lonely? He knew that already. She hated school and had problems at home? He could tell that by looking round her room. If he could do that for a teenager he’d barely met, why hadn’t he been able to do it for his own daughter?

Why hadn’t anyone?

‘No work today …?’

‘This is work,’ Tom said.

Narrowing his eyes, Ivan Petrovich Dennisov put a flask of vodka in front of the Englishman without being asked, shouted to the kitchen for some food and found a cold can of beer that left a ring on the zinc.

‘What’s this?’ Tom asked.

‘The produce of our wonderful democratic neighbours.’

Picking up the can, Tom examined it. East German and past its drink-by date.

‘Drink up,’ said Dennisov, punching holes in the top.

It was eleven in the morning and Tom had already eaten borscht at a stall by the metro but he took the bowl slapped down in front of him by the lumpy teenager in her badly fitting knitted dress, knocked back his vodka, glugged from the can and offered Dennisov a cigarette.

They smoked in silence for a few minutes.

The hours the bar kept were written by the door. Six a.m. until nine thirty. Eleven until two. Seven until eleven at night. It could be local regulations. It might simply be Dennisov. ‘How’s the leg?’ Tom asked.

‘It got blown off.’

‘You’ve got painkillers?’

‘Morphine,’ he said. ‘Reserved for glorious veterans.’

Behind them the teenager who’d slammed down the bowl muttered something.

‘Yelena,’ Dennisov said, sketching an introduction. ‘Ignore her. She blames me for going. Also for losing my leg. At least she didn’t blame me for coming back. There are those who do …’

The girl looked ten years younger than Dennisov. But pain had etched so many lines into the helicopter pilot’s face it was hard to say how old Dennisov really was.

‘You found coming home hard?’ Tom asked.

‘You never come home,’ Dennisov said. ‘You know that. A little bit of you always gets left behind.’ He regarded his leg sourly. ‘Sometimes a big bit. You know how many alcoholics we have in our glorious state? Forty million. Those are just the ones we admit to. I tell Yelena it could be worse, I could be an opium addict.’ He squinted at Tom. ‘What’s this about work?’

‘My boss needs a favour.’

Dennisov dragged harder on his cigarette, winced as he hit its cardboard filter and ground it underfoot. His face was oily, he sweated vodka and a tightly wound unhappiness tightened the sinews in his neck. ‘Let me guess,’ he said. ‘He wants to buy icons? Preferably old ones?’

‘Not icons.’

‘Foreigners always want icons.’

‘Not this one.’

‘If he wants roubles for dollars, I’m the wrong man.’

‘Britain doesn’t use dollars.’

‘No wonder you’re fucked. Not drugs. He’ll get into trouble for drugs. Unless he’s got a doctor like mine. That’s the secret. Then you can have anything. I’m not sure my doctor’s allowed to treat foreigners though.’

‘Not drugs either. I’m looking for a girl …’

Before Dennisov could do more than grin, Tom pulled a 5x4 from his pocket and put it on the counter, wiping up spilt beer with his sleeve first.

‘Young,’ Dennisov said.

‘Too young.’

The picture had been taken, according to Lady Masterton, the day her daughter turned fifteen. Alex was silhouetted against an English sky. Scowling, inevitably. A shaggy pony munched grass beside her. A large white-painted rectory stood behind. She looked as self-conscious and uncomfortable in her own body as she did in her brand-new body warmer, jodhpurs and shiny riding boots.

The teenager from the kitchen stopped at the sight of the photograph.

‘This girl,’ she said, ‘she’s missing?’

Tom nodded.

‘In Moscow?’

He nodded again.

‘Your boss has gone to the authorities?’

‘I imagine they know. But until he asks for help officially, they can’t approach him. He won’t ask unless he has to. He feels he should handle it himself.’

Dennisov appeared to believe this. At least to believe it as much as Tom did, which was not at all. There had to be deeper reasons than not wanting to lose face for Sir Edward’s refusal to go to the Soviets.

Tom intended to discover them.

‘Handling it himself meaning asking you?’

‘Yelena …’

‘It’s a fair question. Anyway, how do you know he’s telling the truth? What if he’s hunting the girl for other reasons? He’s a foreigner. What if it’s a trap?’

‘Her mother’s worried. Wouldn’t your mother worry?’

‘My mother’s dead.’

‘
Yelena!
Enough.’

Helping himself to what remained of Tom’s vodka, Dennisov shooed the girl towards the kitchen and reached for the photograph, examining it carefully. He seemed to be paying particular attention to the grandness of the Georgian house behind.

‘There’s a reward?’ he asked.

‘Dollars if you want.’

Dennisov spat on the floor. ‘That for dollars.’

‘He’ll help you anyway.’ Yelena was back with a mug of black coffee, which she put in front of Dennisov, removing Tom’s glass. Before Dennisov could open his mouth to protest, the girl took the photograph, peered at it intently and then placed it in front of Tom, keeping her fingers on the edge. ‘You like her?’

‘It’s not like that.’

‘All the same, for you this is personal?’

The girl’s scrutiny lasted another few seconds, then she nodded as if Tom’s silence was answer enough, lifted her fingers from the photograph’s edge and tried to smooth where it had curled. ‘I hope you find her.’

Tom produced the address Davie had given him.

‘Who’s meant to live here?’ Dennisov asked.

‘A boy she met at the swimming pool.’

Dennisov slid the address along the zinc to the girl.

‘You’re sure this is the place?’ She sounded worried.

‘There’s a problem?’ Tom asked.

She shrugged. ‘As you know, there’s no crime in the USSR. If there was, this is where it would live. Even the
militsiya
walk in pairs.’

‘You don’t mind me borrowing your husband?’

Yelena scowled. ‘I’m not his wife.’

‘Your man then.’

‘I’m his sister.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’

‘His wife left him when he lost his leg.’

A dead bullfinch lay at the edge of an overpass with an illegal car lot beneath. The small bird was frozen solid, eyes closed, orange breast glazed pink by frost. Seeing Tom’s gaze, Dennisov pointed to the corpse of a sparrow.

‘Happens every winter,’ he said.

The overpass was crumbling concrete with squat pillars, and the taxi that Dennisov had ordered and Tom paid for had left them in the shadow of an office block built around the same time. The car lot offered a handful of Ladas, a couple of Moskvitches and a single sleek Volga. The Moskvitches and Ladas were dented and rusting while the Volga looked new.

Tom couldn’t help wondering what had happened to its owner.

When he voiced that thought, Dennisov smiled. ‘Bought new, sold for a profit next day. There’s a five-year waiting list. You know that old fridge Yelena uses? I can get more for it than it would cost me to buy a new one. You know why? Because I can’t buy a new one. You know what else?’

Tom dutifully shook his head.

‘If I could, it wouldn’t work.’

A dark-skinned man, with the collar of his fur coat turned up against the sub-zero temperatures, looked briefly hopeful before losing his smile when he realized they weren’t buying. Dennisov showed him the photograph.

When that produced no flicker of recognition, Dennisov asked about the address and the man jerked his head towards
the far side of the lot, indicating a concrete slum beyond. As they were leaving, he said something Tom missed.

‘What was that?’

‘She’s probably already been sold.’

A bulldozer driver in a puffy orange anorak cleared rubble on a building site, a half-finished cigarette between his lips. He was lost to the scratch of steel on grit and the slow curl of icy rubble his blade drove ahead of him.

When the man glanced up, Dennisov waved.

The driver knew the block well enough, but when Dennisov showed him Alex’s photograph he shook his head, both to say he’d never seen her and at the state of the world. Climbing back into his machine, he clamped his noise-protectors firmly to his ears and returned to scraping rubble.

‘Your boss is important?’

Tom nodded.

‘He might not like what we find.’

When they finally reached the right place, the apartment blocks were even more ruined than Tom had expected. Five-storey Khrushchevkas backing on to a railway track, jerry-built, thrown up in the 1960s as part of a five-year plan to solve the housing shortage. According to Dennisov, the five-year plan never ended, and nor did the housing shortage. Khrushchevkas kept being built. They were still prefabricated, still low-ceilinged and they still leaked.

‘Okay,’ Dennisov said. ‘Now keep your mouth shut.’

An old woman protested as they pushed through a front door reinforced with sheets of blue-painted steel. A crop-haired boy in the hallway took one look and turned for the stairs. Dennisov grabbed him, shook his head and jerked his thumb towards the door. The boy took himself outside.

Inside the communal kitchen, an old Georgian in a string
vest sat by a saucepan boiling beef shank. A red onion stood on a butcher’s block next to three carrots and the air was thick with sour steam. He stood when he saw Dennisov, and then sat again. A teenage girl, breastfeeding a newborn, with a toddler at her hip, turned away to cover herself and then shrugged.

Dennisov showed her the photograph.

She shook her head firmly. ‘
Nyet.
’

The man boiling meat reached for the picture, examining it carefully. He too shook his head. Without being asked, he went to the door and shouted into the stairwell. A minute later, two Tartar women came down. Neither had seen Alex. Nor had the old Russian woman who appeared after that, grumbling about her husband’s shouting.

It was the crop-haired boy outside who gave Dennisov the lead.

One of the men in the block had been having a New Year’s Eve party. The boy couldn’t say it was the right party. It didn’t seem the sort of party a girl like that would go to, but all the same. It had been quite near here.

What did this man do?

Military. Kept himself to himself.

What time did the boy think he’d be home?

Who could say? He hadn’t been seen for two days.

Dennisov asked if anyone else had come looking for him and the boy’s face closed down for a second, then he realized he was too far in to back out and he’d already said too much, or not enough.

‘The police came.’

‘
Militsiya
. Here?’ Dennisov looked around him.

‘Different police. They took everything. Even his bedding.’

The boy took the packet of papirosa Tom tossed across and gave them the address for the party he’d mentioned.
There were no Khrushchevkas there. Only a smoking warehouse beside a shop selling second-hand water heaters. The shop was a scorched ruin, still smoking in places; half the warehouse had fallen in, taking the party wall with it.

A
militsiya
man stood at the corner, staring uninterestedly at a half-broiled rat that had made it to the road before dying.

‘You’d better wait here,’ Dennisov said.

Taking up position by a fence, Tom tapped a Russian cigarette from its paper packet and glanced casually in both directions. His new shadow was threading his way between an oil drum and a doorless fridge. He stopped the moment Tom looked at him and dipped to tie his shoelace.

Then Dennisov was back, his face grim.

‘There’s a body,’ he said.

Tom was moving before Dennisov could stop him, heading for the door into the smoking ruin. When the
militsiya
man moved to stop him, Dennisov barked something and the policeman hesitated, shrugged and stood back.

‘What did you just say?’

‘I told him you were KGB.’

The ground under their feet was sodden and the walls damp. There were patches of smouldering rubble but the fire itself was out. The ceiling had fallen in halfway along, leaving a cathedral-like gap to stone beams.

The warehouse was far older and better built than the buildings around it, and its brick walls had helped keep the flames in check. There’d been a party, according to the
militsiya
man. A three-day party no one had dared ring in to the police.

‘The body’s at the back,’ Dennisov said.

On the floor, almost against a wall, a carbonized figure twisted in agony. Tom knew its apparent anguish was down to muscle contraction but he looked away just the same and
had to make himself look back. Fire had eaten eyes, ears, lips and hair. The head was thrown back, the mouth open in a teeth-baring scream.

If there had been any clothes, and Tom’s instinct said not, they’d wicked fat from the body as it burned and long since turned to ash. Even given the state the corpse was in, Tom could see there was something wrong with its arms.

Dropping to a crouch, knowing that he was contaminating a crime scene, Tom supported himself on the wall, finding the brick still warm to his touch.

The figure’s wrists were tied with wire.

Fire had eaten the hands and finger bones had fallen away.

As Tom sat back, a circle of metal caught the daylight coming in from above. Tom shook it free from bone, knowing he shouldn’t, and a half-circle of jade dropped away from the cheap steel beneath.

He was holding Alex’s ring.

He
knew
it was Alex’s ring. It was the one she’d been wearing on New Year’s Eve … Retrieving the half-circle of burned jade, Tom looked for the other half and realized it would take several hours and a sieve to sort through the rubble on which he knelt. Dennisov was waiting behind him.

‘You think it’s her?’ Dennisov said finally.

Tom did, but he made himself look again.

Then, before he could give himself time to reject the idea, he lay down in the dirt beside the body to judge its height against his and felt relief sweep through him so fast he had to fight back tears. He’d been wrong. It wasn’t her.

‘You all right?’ Dennisov asked.