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I didn’t see many films as a kid but even from half a kilometre away I reckoned City Hospital Number Seventy could have doubled for the workhouse in
Oliver Twist
.

A grime-encrusted, red-and-white barrier blocked our path. The guy in the gatehouse tried to turn us away, as Moscow hospitals do unless you arrive by prior written arrangement, ambulance or with Vladimir Putin in your passenger seat. A local politician had had a heart attack outside one a few months earlier and staggered to the main gate, but rules are rules, security said. You couldn’t just wander in off the street. He turned around, collapsed over the barrier, and headed for the Great Politburo in the Sky.

I wasn’t about to take no for an answer and they didn’t need a grasp of English to understand my thousand-yard stare and all the cash I had on me. The barrier lifted and I raced past signs that showed a baby and red writing.

The hospital wasn’t one big building. It was more like a campus, a maze of rectangular dark-brown brick buildings for different disciplines, set in what had probably been intended to look like parkland. But the rural idyll had well and truly gone out of the window. The ground was dry-packed mud, strewn with dog-ends and takeaway wrappers. It was badly tarmacked in places, with tree roots and weeds pushing through the cracked and buckled surface.

The birth-house block was midway in. I pulled up outside the main doors and ran round to help Anna out. We were greeted by sounds of bedlam. New mothers pleaded and cried from the upper windows; the men below shouted back. Rain started to pepper the mounds of dog-ends, empty beer cans and discarded newspapers that surrounded them.

I half cradled, half carried Anna to the front of the reception queue. Three women in white coats and badly knitted cardigans sat behind the desk. Their eyes were like prison guards’. One look was enough to tell me that the only way for us to avoid extreme bodily injury was to wait in line while they bollocked the people in front of us.

Their fellow staff members buzzed back and forth at warp speed, clipboards at the ready. It reminded me of the British Army: walk around with a purposeful look and a clipboard, and everybody thinks you’re doing something important. I knew plenty of lads who criss-crossed camp all day, doing absolutely nothing.

A couple of guys in doctor’s uniforms – and what looked like half-sized chef’s hats – pushed through a door to our right, and then reappeared some time later in biker’s kit.

We finally reached the front. Receptionist Number One clearly felt the whole thing was a massive inconvenience, but she filled in the admission forms. An orderly appeared with a wheelchair and began whisking Anna away. I made to follow, but the Gorgons at the desk had other ideas. The scariest of the three pressed a buzzer under the desk and two grey-shirted security guards materialized behind them. I got the drift. No partners allowed. No exceptions. What did I think this was? A private clinic?

15.50 hrs

I’d been waiting in the main reception for an hour, maybe two. I still knew nothing about what was happening to Anna and was expecting big things from the change of shift. I let the new cardigans and grey shirts settle in for a moment, then went up to the desk and asked if there was any news. Like the last lot, none of them spoke a word of English, and the look they gave me said they wouldn’t have helped me even if they could.

Anna had warned me about this shit a while back, when I told her there was no point in going private. She said the Russian maternity system was a throwback to Communist days, and in no hurry to join the twenty-first century.

These ‘birth-houses’ were badly run and badly equipped. Up to eight women at a time gave birth in the same room while one doctor zigzagged between them. The Soviet empire had needed to repopulate after Hitler and his mates had wiped out twenty million of them. Now Russia’s population had dropped another two million in the last ten years. The baby conveyor-belt needed to keep running, without people like me getting in the way.

Women in labour were treated like prisoners. Pain relief was a luxury. Mobile phones were forbidden. There were a couple of pay phones down in the lobby. If you had the coins you could make a call; if not, tough shit. Friends and family weren’t allowed
into the ward. Husbands or partners couldn’t help their women through their contractions, and mothers couldn’t even cuddle their new-borns: they were whisked away as soon as they drew breath, and not brought back until feed time.

Anna was still a heavy-duty socialist, but I’d begun to see why she’d been so keen to organize a birth contract with a private clinic.

I glanced down at my iPhone, in case Katya had returned one of my six calls. She hadn’t.

I decided to join the other fathers in the rain. They sheltered under an assortment of umbrellas, carrier bags or newspapers, and smoked like Chernobyl reactors as they waited for their women to press their noses up against the glass.

Each window had a number painted on it. If you knew which room your partner was in, you could holler. If not, it could be hours before you found out what was going on – or days if the birth had gone badly and Mum didn’t have the right change for the pay phone.

I finally spotted a sweat-covered Anna two storeys up. I could tell she was exhausted. She wiped the condensation from the upper pane and looked out. Then she scrawled a message in the lower pane:
Boy – sick – Katya
…

My first almost overpowering instinct was to turn and run back into the lobby. But I knew I wouldn’t get anywhere. The message at the welcome desk was clear: if I kept fucking about, the only people I’d be seeing were the security guards, followed swiftly by the police.

I waved and broke into a run, yelling into my mobile as my call was routed to Katya’s voicemail again.

There was no parking inside the hospital complex, so I’d dumped the people-carrier in a nearby side street. I turned the corner, skidding on the cobbles, to see that it was packed with vehicles – none of which was mine. The Touran had either been stolen or impounded.

I called Katya again and told her to stay put in her apartment. ‘I’m on my way to you now.’

I wasn’t exactly sure where the nearest Metro station was, but knew I’d find one close by. They were all over the place.

I was on the eastern side of the city, on the outer ring road. Heading south-west meant one change.

Moscow trains took their lead from the public hospitals. They were packed and dirty, and the carriage I boarded also had its own welcoming committee – four Judge Dredd lookalikes with white helmets and black, rib-like polymer body armour sorting out a couple of pickpockets.

The far end of the thing had been cleared. Both suspects lay face down, hands cuffed behind their backs, and two of our friendly neighbourhood coppers were emptying the contents of their day-sacks onto the floor while their mates gave the bad boys a good kicking. I watched the mobile phones and wallets they’d been nicking hit the deck and reckoned their day was turning out as badly as mine.

None of the other passengers took much notice. Thieving was part of everyday life down here. In a city riven by gang wars, where private armies took out their opponents with RPGs in shopping malls, this little incident wouldn’t even be worth mentioning to the family when they got home.

I gripped the rail above me with both hands as we swayed from side to side. Everyone was on guard. The cops had nailed
two pickpockets, but those guys hunted in packs, using the motion of the train for cover.

The pickpockets were hauled to their feet and three of the cops pushed them out onto the platform as soon as we stopped at the next station. The fourth stayed behind to reload phones and wallets into the day-sacks, and the cash into his jacket pocket. They had a different way of handling evidence in Russia.

The bystanders mumbled away as the train moved off again, and spread the whole length of the carriage. I made my way down the aisle and leaned against the connecting door, checking the time on my iPhone every few seconds, as if it was going to get me to Katya any quicker.

Katya and Anna had connected six or seven years before I arrived on the scene. Katya was from Cuba. Or, rather, her parents had been. Castro had sent them to study in the Soviet Union. They had decided to stay in Moscow and got married. Her father had held down some nameless job in the Communist hierarchy and they’d had two kids; a younger brother was floating about somewhere among the second-generation Hispanics and Africans that flooded the city, but Katya didn’t like to talk about him. She didn’t talk about much at all, really.

I wasn’t sure what she thought of me, and wasn’t that fussed. All she knew was that I’d met Anna while I was working security for CNN, keeping the news crews’ noses clean. I guess I must have been Anna’s bit of rough.

Katya had trained as an obstetrician and bumped into Anna while she was working for an NGO in Central America. Anna was reporting on the TB epidemic in Mexico City’s slums that Katya was trying to stem. They were the same age, well educated, and both from Moscow. They spoke English in the ‘World America’ accent CNN loved so much, and Katya’s Spanish made her the perfect interpreter.

She’d faded out of sight until just over a year ago when Anna had got an email out of the blue to say she was coming back to Moscow to work for Magee WomanCare International, the largest non-profit private provider of women’s health services in the
USA. They had an outreach programme, trying to improve healthcare conditions for women and infants in the former Soviet Union.

Almost immediately she was headhunted by one of the new private clinics that had sprung up to cater for the biggest collection of billionaires on the planet. She worked for the Perinatal Clinic in the south-west of the city, and rented a flat nearby. No more poverty, no more rickets and malnutrition, just women too posh to push, whose only problem was working out whether to use the blue birthing pool or the green. And that was where we’d been aiming for when Hospital Number Seventy had got in the way. Now she had to show what she was really made of.

I willed the train to go faster. I drummed my fingers against the glass. I wanted Anna and my boy out of there and down to the posh place, with Katya in charge.

Katya was even harder to pin down than I was. She didn’t drive, didn’t use cabs, kept herself very much to herself. She didn’t seem to have that many mates, and there were Masai tribesmen living in mud huts with more social networking presence. It looked like she was taking NATO’s perception of its threat to global stability very seriously indeed; they ranked the top six players with the power to fuck up the planet as China, India, Facebook, the USA, Twitter and Indonesia. Facebook and Twitter were more connected to their community than any of the other four, and that made them particularly scary. What if they started to have their own ideas about how our world should be run? That was something none of the others liked to think about.

The reason I wasn’t online, however, wasn’t because I didn’t want to be part of the new revolution. I liked not being public property. And I’d fucked up or killed plenty of enemies of the state in my time. I had lots of good reasons to stay hidden. After two years undercover in Derry with 14 Intelligence Group, identifying Provisional IRA active-service units and recruiting sources, it wasn’t just my back I had to watch. I’d worked alongside Special Branch officers. If anyone managed to link my face and my CV to theirs, it would put them and their families at risk.
And it wasn’t just in Northern Ireland that people had long memories. My old mates in the drug cartels did too.

An old woman sitting under the no-smoking sign opposite me lit up a cigarette and gave me a glare that said: ‘It wasn’t like this when Khrushchev was in charge.’ I started to laugh. It was the first time I’d done so all day.

I pressed the button for the old guy to open the door but didn’t hear a buzz. Cupping my hands against the wired glass, I peered into the dimly lit foyer. The little fucker had gone AWOL again. He seemed to spend most of his time tucked away in his back room, and judging by the smell, he didn’t just knock back his own vodka, he brewed it as well.

I gave the door a shove and it swung back on its hinges. Katya’s fellow residents didn’t want to hang around outside for longer than they had to. I walked into the lobby. Harsh white light from the overhead fluorescents was doing the concierge no favours. He was supposed to keep the public areas clean, but the swirls of dirty water where he’d lost interest in mopping up the trail of rain-sodden footprints were plain as day.

There was no lift: the management company had gone out of business before it could be installed. I headed up the stairs to the second floor. It was a boring four-storey block, built of glass and a strange yellow brick, probably a job lot from a factory demo lition. These places had been thrown together in the nineties to cater for the new professionals spreading out of the city centre, with more of an eye on the developer’s margin than the design awards. Any gleam had long gone, and lack of maintenance and bad workmanship had taken its toll. The New
Russia was just like everywhere else: sell ’em dreams, ship ’em shit.

As I walked along the thinly carpeted corridor, my nostrils were assaulted by the stench of the flowery disinfectant Russians love to spray around their houses. Maybe it’s the only way they’ve found to disguise the lingering aroma of boiled cabbage.

I rounded the corner and nearly got knocked off my feet by two big guys in leather jackets. They glanced back at me as I rebounded off the wall, close-mouthed, no smiles, eyes fixed on mine. I got the message: it was my fucking fault.

I raised my hands to shoulder height. ‘
Izvinite, izvinite
…’ I might not know much Russian, but being able to apologize your way out of a difficult situation was useful in any language.

The door to 211 was half open. I knocked. No answer.

‘Katya?’