Moskva (8 page)

Clambering to his knees, Tom brushed off his trousers and brushed half-effectually at his coat. ‘Can you find out when the fire started?’

Dennisov vanished to ask.

Tom had regained control of himself by the time Dennisov returned.

‘The coroner’s van’s on its way,’ Dennisov said. ‘I’ll tell you the rest when we’re out of here.’ Without waiting to see if Tom followed, he limped for the street, not wanting to be found at a crime scene, and nodded as he passed the
militsiya
man, who watched him go with interest. Dennisov might have changed his metal leg for something more discreet but his limp was still noticeable. Tom passed by without acknowledging the man at all.

As he imagined a KGB officer might do.

‘It was called in yesterday by a passing police car,’ Dennisov said. ‘The fire brigade were here until an hour ago. They put out what was left of the fire, called in the body and left.’ He shrugged. ‘This area falls between three districts and is full of undesirables. Our friend back there imagines everyone hoped someone else would deal with it.’

‘How do I find out if it’s Kotik, a teenage boy who liked swimming?’

Dennisov shot him a sideways glance.

‘I was given the name,’ Tom said hastily. ‘By the person who gave me this address. Well, the last address. Kotik is a friend of the missing girl.’

‘Who had enemies.’

‘Someone did, definitely,’ Tom said. ‘Now, how?’

‘Your boss will have to ask the authorities.’

‘What are his other options?’

‘They’ll cost.’

‘Of course.’

‘The KGB don’t drink at my bar. Not that I know. The ordinary police, on the other hand …’

Tom pulled out his wallet.

‘Not here! Your shadow will think I’m changing dollars. America is our enemy. Changing dollars is a crime. Also, their president is a shit who sells missiles to savages.’ Dennisov headed into an alley so overhung with balconies that snow barely reached its floor. ‘I’ll give back what I don’t use.’

‘Keep –’

‘I’ll give it back,’ Dennisov growled.

They parted at a metro station and Tom headed for Red Square, walking the last leg across a bridge over the frozen river. The sun was lower than ever, the horizon darkening and lights were coming on around him.

In reception, Tom asked to be put through to the ambassador, feeling pompous as he added that Sir Edward would want to take the call. It was the kind of thing his brother-in-law would say. Tom was halfway up the stairs when he met Anna Masterton coming down. ‘Any news?’ she demanded.

‘I’m on my way to see your husband.’

‘You can’t tell me?’

‘I should probably tell both of you.’

Anna turned on her heels and headed upstairs before Tom could say that it wasn’t as bad as it could be. She rapped on the inner door to her husband’s office before his secretary had time to do more than look up. The noise of her golf-ball typewriter stuttering to a halt sounded like the dying throes of a small revolution.

The knock drew a tight-lipped ‘Come in’.

Sir Edward looked no happier to see her than he did Tom, although he took off his spectacles and put down what he was reading.

‘You found the address?’

‘Alex wasn’t there.’

‘Told you,’ Sir Edward said. ‘She’s sulking with some friend.’

He sounded so relieved that Tom glanced sharply across and Sir Edward looked away, checking the time on a wall clock against the watch he was wearing as if that had always been his intention.

‘No one else knew anything?’ Anna asked.

‘We went to a warehouse too. But it was burned out. The police recovered a body … Not Alex,’ Tom added, as Anna threw a hand to her mouth.

‘How do you know?’ she demanded.

Tom prayed he had remembered right. ‘How tall is your daughter?’

‘Five foot three.’

‘Then it definitely wasn’t her. Burned bodies shrink, but even shrunken this one was taller.’

‘Anna …’ Sir Edward sounded as if he was trying to be soothing. ‘It’s going to be fine. She probably wasn’t even there.’

‘I’m afraid she probably was, sir. I found this in the rubble.’

Tom put the remains of the jade ring on Sir Edward’s desk, the half-circle of burned stone coming loose and falling away.

Anna Masterton vomited.

Tom left, having decided not to mention that the body might be Alex’s boyfriend. He’d find a way to tell Sir Edward later, or maybe he’d tell Mary Batten, who would find her own way to let the ambassador know.

Neither Mary nor Sir Edward would need telling that anyone who could wire a boy’s hands behind his back and burn him to death was not someone you wanted to have hold of a fifteen-year-old English girl for long.

Something in his flat was wrong. Tom knew it the moment he opened the door.

It wasn’t the smell, although that was metallic and flat, a slight odour underpinning the sourness of unemptied bins and sheets that needed washing. He’d been planning a bath, hot water allowing, to rid himself of the stink from the warehouse that infected his clothes. But the stench of something older and darker made hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

Later, with a whiskey in his hand and his back to the wall in the living room, sitting on the floor in the dark, he came up with a logical explanation for his split second of atavistic fear of what he’d believed an ancient evil.

He recognized, without realizing it, the smell of blood.

That thought held for the time it took him to sip dry his whiskey, time he spent going back over what he’d found on returning home. If you could call a top-floor flat in a Moscow block reserved for foreigners home.

His living room had been undisturbed.

The ashtrays still overflowed. The cactus he’d inherited looked as miserable as ever. His briefcase, with its combination lock, lay exactly where he’d left it. His bedroom was a mess, but no worse than when he’d dragged himself from sleep and rolled out of bed that morning.

Pillows adrift, duvet thrown back, greying sheets.

Tom knew, because his flat at Sad Sam was tiny, and its
bathroom door was open and nothing looked different in there either, that what awaited him must be in the kitchen.

He was right.

A dead cat hung above his sink.

It was suspended by its back legs from a string tied to the fluorescent tube above. Tom knew it was Black Sammy, the cat he’d seen the night he came back from the New Year’s Eve party, because whoever had skinned it had left its pelt on the worktop.

Thinner than blood and thicker than lymph, the liquid that pooled in his sink told him the animal had been alive when the torture began. Rigor was well set in though, stiffening the carcass. Tom cut it down with scissors.

He used scissors because his only kitchen knife rested on the folded skin, where it had been placed after it had been used to flay the animal. Under the knife was a photograph of Tom on the corner by the Khrushchevka, with his shadow away to one side and an old woman he didn’t remember huddled in a doorway.

Picking it up, Tom took the photograph into the hall where the light was better.

The depth of field was so flat it had to have been taken with a telephoto lens. From high up, looking down. If it was taken from the top of a block of flats, then the photographer must have been there waiting, which meant he had known where Tom was headed. Someone didn’t want questions asked about Alex.

For all Tom knew, that same someone was watching his flat now to see how he’d react. Would he call his embassy? Would he simply wrap the poor bastard cat in newspaper and dump it in the communal bins? He could imagine the children of one of the journalists who lived in a bigger flat below finding it.

Returning to his kitchen, Tom took down the chopping
board left by the previous tenant and ran the cat under cold water to make it less slippery. Then he began with the head, which he removed by putting the knife on the back of its spine and smacking the blunt edge of his blade. It was the most noise Tom would make that evening and the action he found hardest.

Dealing with the carcass was easy enough after that.

Having split the head down the middle, he rinsed and flushed both pieces, before filleting the rest and jointing it cleanly, running each piece under the tap before flushing it down the loo. He opened the ribs with scissors, washed the contents of the stomach down the sink, and flushed out the viscera.

Tom thought he was beyond shock. But unfolding Black Sammy’s pelt, he discovered he had exactly half of it. That was when he realized the pan he’d left dirty had been neatly washed up. As had a spatula and fork. Plus, his olive oil was out, along with his salt and pepper. A neat little threesome on the countertop.

Like a small family.

Tom took care not to clog the lavatory with flesh or fur and to leave long enough between flushes to keep what he was doing from being obvious to those below. What had happened never happened. He wanted anyone watching to know that.

When he was finished, Tom scrubbed the board and hung it back on the wall, washed the knife and the scissors, rinsed out the sink, put away his olive oil and salt and pepper, and poured himself another whiskey, taking it through to the darkness of his sitting room.

The alcohol would help, but it wasn’t enough to dull the rage at what some bastard had done to the poor bloody cat, and he knew he’d still be seeing its carcass hung above his sink as he tried to sleep.

He’d looked lonely in the cross hairs. So lonely that Wax Angel wondered if he’d welcome a bullet. When it came to it, people often did.

‘You …’

‘Me what?’

The
militsiya
man had looked sharply at her dishevelled state. So she’d glanced sharply back and made a point of buttoning the front of her dress. Only when he’d turned away did she return to the ancient Zeiss F-4 sniper’s sight she kept hidden in her clothing. It had been black once but in the last ten years its paint had begun to peel away in scabs. She still had the leather caps that fitted on either end though.

She’d watched the foreigner and his friend move through falling snow, his head down and his shoulders hunched, his thoughts a black cloud above him.

One hundred paces.

Two hundred paces.

If the snow had been heavy, she’d have lost him by now.

If the snow had really been falling, she’d have lost him before he travelled the distance of his own arm. At four hundred paces he’d begun to blur, vanishing at five. And Wax Angel realized the snow settling on her was camouflage. No need now for the white uniforms they’d worn and the sniper rifles wrapped in rags they’d carried through the smoking ruins of Stalingrad.

After the Englishman and his friend had gone, the coroner’s wagon had arrived. The woman driving had glanced over, made to turn away and then headed in Wax Angel’s direction. ‘Are you all right?’ she’d asked.

‘Yes, thank you,’ Wax Angel had said. ‘Are you?’

‘You must be freezing.’

‘This is nothing,’ Wax Angel said. ‘This is practically summer.’

‘Here.’ Digging into her jeans pocket, the woman had found a rouble. ‘Buy yourself something hot. You’ll buy food, right?’

She meant food rather than vodka.

Wax Angel was impressed that she left that part unsaid.

After the coroner’s office took the body, the
militsiya
man abandoned his post without sealing the ruin, or even putting tape across its door. How could Wax Angel not go to investigate? She found the burned-out building to her liking. There was something familiar, almost comfortable about its ruin.

Even better was a smouldering pile in one corner, with enough embers at the bottom to restart the fire once the rubble smothering it was dragged away.

Wax Angel spent a happy hour feeding the growing flames with every unburned scrap of wood she could find and then settled back to enjoy the warmth while snowflakes fluttered down in the sections of the warehouse where the roof had fallen away.

She could remember real blizzards, God wiping the face of the earth until everything was white.

She’d been younger then, of course. Much younger than the girl who’d given her money … And it was a long, long way from here. She’d been a campaign wife, but with a difference. Other ‘campaign wives’ were clerks or signallers. She was a
sniper in her own right, dozens of kills to her record, her photograph in the army newspaper.

He was different too.

A political officer with actual battle experience.

He wasn’t one of those red-badged fools who screamed through a megaphone from the rear that everyone had to advance, that the Motherland was counting on them. He expected everyone to advance, right enough; he expected them to die. He just found that the walking dead fought better if talked to properly.

Not softly but firmly.

He’d been matter-of-fact about shooting anyone who tried to retreat.

It was the woman by the road Wax Angel remembered most.

They were beyond Breslau, with snow piled high against the hedges and a vicious wind ripping across the German fields and through the ruins of farmhouses destroyed in battle or burned by their owners before fleeing. She was young, the woman by the road. Her hair, in a thick blonde plait, was covered by a scarf too expensive to be any use against the cold. When Wax Angel found her she had her back to a hedge. Her skin was marble and her flesh as hard.

The baby at her frozen breast had died of cold, not hunger.

The men – heroes all – said what you’d expect.

All the houses were huge, palaces that turned out to belong to doctors and lawyers. Everyone had fridges. Most people had cars. More cars than anyone could imagine. At first their letters home were censored. Then they were burned in front of them. Finally, they’d been told that writing home would be forbidden if they kept exaggerating what they saw.

There’d been another nursing mother after Breslau.

Young and clear-skinned. Very German.

That had been later, after they’d won another battle.

The girl had been dragged into a church and raped throughout the day, the same men coming back hours later to take another turn. In the end, her grandfather had gone in tears to Wax Angel’s political officer. He’d begged him to make them stop; not for good, he knew that wouldn’t happen. Simply for long enough to let his granddaughter feed her child, which was hungry and wouldn’t stop crying.

Wax Angel shot the girls she saw after that.

The pretty ones first.

Such things happened because of Stalingrad.

Life expectancy for a new conscript was a day. Three days for a seasoned officer. Half a day for a junior lieutenant. She’d survived Stalingrad’s full seven and a half months. The lifespans of over two hundred men.