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I stepped inside, to be greeted by four bare walls and the kind of shiny, IKEA-type furniture that looked as though it had just been unwrapped. The only remotely personal touch in the whole place was a photo of her and Anna pinned to a bulletin board above her telephone. I think Sasha must have taken it in the clinic canteen. I was just visible in the background, sorting out a brew. I wasn’t comfortable with it, but Anna liked it, and the two girls looked happier in it than I’d seen either of them for quite a while. Katya was in full Jennifer Lopez mode, hair scraped back in a jet-black bun.

She’d thrown her coat over a nearby chair. Beside it was a mug of coffee.

She appeared from her bedroom, looking flustered, scrambling to throw on a pair of sunglasses.

‘Nick! What are you …? I’ve only just got back.’ She did her best to treat me to a welcome grin. ‘I think I have an eye infection, maybe. I—’

I didn’t have time to fuck around. ‘Didn’t you get my messages? Anna’s had the baby. She’s in Seventy. It’s not good – the baby’s sick and the place is like a
gulag
. They need your help.’

She stared at me, blank-faced, like none of this made sense. Maybe the Jackie Kennedy look was to hide a hangover.

‘Hospital Seventy?’ She jerked herself back to something approaching reality. ‘Is Anna OK?’

‘I don’t know. I only saw her through an upstairs window. They won’t let me go anywhere near either of them. We’ve got to get her out of there. You make the call – do whatever you have to do. She needs you. They both need you.’

I grabbed her coat and handed her the phone, answering-machine light still blinking. ‘You need to sort an ambulance, or we pick them up. I don’t want them stuck in that shit-hole.’

She tapped out some numbers and was soon waffling away in Russian as I got the rest of her brew down my neck.

She finished the call and reached for her coat. ‘There’s no guarantee we can move her, I’m afraid. Pre-term, there are always problems.’ Her expression softened. ‘I never asked: girl or boy?’

I gave her a grin. ‘Boy.’

‘What will you call him?’

‘I was thinking Dostoevsky, but I reckon Anna prefers Tolstoy.’

She didn’t have much to say as we headed through the old industrial zone towards Proletarskaya Metro. The sun-gigs were still firmly in place.

I led her past State Ball-bearing Plant Number One, now a memorial to the dead who’d worked there during the Great Patriotic War against the Germans. Historic-monument status hadn’t stopped the factory walls decaying. Rusty steel rods stuck out of crumbling concrete, like rotten teeth. The whole area had been earmarked for redevelopment, but I guessed they were still waiting for the right oligarch to come along and make a killing.

We crossed the car park alongside what was left of the Dubrovka Theatre – just one more featureless concrete mess, but the scene of a terrorist gangfuck in 2002, when forty or fifty Chechens had taken control of an 850-strong audience and demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from their homeland and an end to the Second Chechen War. The message from the Kremlin was, ‘Dream on.’ After a two-and-a-half-day siege Spetsnaz pumped a chemical agent through the ventilation system, then stormed the building. Thirty-nine of the kidnappers and at least 129 hostages were killed. The Russian authorities didn’t turn a hair. While the West’s stated objective would have been to rescue the hostage, theirs was: kill the terrorist.

The Metro station was a riot of shiny granite pillars, black-and-white ceramic tiles and anodized aluminium hammer-and-sickle
motifs. The train was almost deserted: everybody was heading in the opposite direction at the end of the working day.

We drew a few quizzical glances from some of the older women. They were clearly trying to work out if the tall olive-skinned woman in the shades was my girlfriend or a whore. And if she was a whore, why would I want a foreign one when there were thousands of beautiful porcelain-white Russians to choose from? That was how the older generation here thought. And why was she wearing sunglasses on the Metro? To hide her identity? Or had I been giving her a good slapping?

We sat in silence, rocking with the train. Katya held her arms rigid on her thighs. I could feel the tension coming off her like nerve gas, fuck knew why. I’d leave her to deal with whatever was going on in her little world. Right now I just needed her to sort out what was going wrong in mine.

The doors opened to let a group of office workers on board. They took a sneaky look at Katya and gave me the stink-eye. I couldn’t tell if they were sneering at me or simply jealous of the way she looked.

I checked the map above their heads. Two more stops to Novogireevo.

I cupped my hands around my mouth, as if that was going to help me be heard above the din of the other long-range conversations. ‘Anna! Anna!’ It was like being a little kid again, calling up from the square in my housing estate to see if a mate would come out to play.

There was no sign of movement at her window. We both hollered in unison. Then I let Katya have a go on her own: maybe a woman’s voice would pierce the male chorus.

Eventually, a shadow crossed the window and Anna leaned out. The colour of her skin echoed the strange green apron she now wore, but at least she was up, she was standing, she was breathing.

I part yelled, part mimed: ‘You seen the boy?’

I hoped she could lip-read, because a volley of shouts drowned me out.

Anna shook her head. ‘Intensive Care …’

Katya gave her a wave. ‘Sasha’s told them you’re one of our patients … Go and tell whoever is on your floor that your obstetrician is here. Tell them she wants to see the infant.’

Anna caught my eye and we nodded at each other. She was going to do exactly what she was told.

Katya and I started along the path towards the main entrance. ‘Nick, they won’t want to let Anna be with the child. And they
won’t let you near him either. It’s the Russian way. They’re paranoid about infection.’

As we walked through the large main wooden doors, I crunched a Pepsi Max carton underfoot, crushing the ice that was still inside; a stream of diluted cola spewed out. ‘You’ve
got
to be joking. They’re worried about infection – in this shit-hole?’

She gestured towards Reception. ‘Bureaucracy and prejudice – a dynamite combination. This won’t be plain sailing either. Private obstetricians seem to antagonize them – I’m not one of
them
.’

‘So what are you telling me? I’ve got to go and steal the baby?’

She stopped, not sure if I was serious. ‘No, no, no …’

A couple of nurses sauntered past, chatting and smoking, followed almost immediately by a couple of half-size chef’s hats tapping a piece of paper and shouting at each other.

Katya leaned closer to me. ‘I’m just telling you that the system is still stuck in the old ways. They might decide your baby isn’t fit enough to be moved. And they have the final say. I can’t overrule them.’

‘But you’re going to sort it out, yeah?’

She gave me a gleaming smile. ‘Wait here and let me get on with it.’ She pointed to one of the three wooden chairs that stood like islands in a sea of discarded cigarette packets and food wrappers. ‘They won’t allow you to come with me, and I could be an hour or so.’

She hesitated. ‘And don’t forget, you might have to make a contribution.’

A contribution. That was the best word for it I’d heard yet.

She got back on her mobile and I headed for the chairs. As soon as she was out of sight I turned towards the fire door.

I needed to do something. I wasn’t sure what, but I couldn’t just sit there and pick my arse.

I sheltered by the exit, out of the drizzle, and didn’t have long to wait before one of the staff emerged, helmet in hand. I was through the door without him even noticing.

You could have died of smoke inhalation in the narrow corridor I found myself in. A comedy show blared from a distant TV, complete with bad canned laughter. There was a faint smell of coffee from somewhere.

Banks of lockers lined the walls on each side of me, some of them open. White coats and chef’s hats in all shapes and sizes. I helped myself to one of each, not forgetting the clipboard, switched on my internal GPS and headed in what I hoped was the direction of Anna’s window. The occasional nurse and doctor cast me a sidelong glance, but I carried on walking. I was in undercover-ops mode. I was a fully functioning medic; I had a reason to be there. If you can convince yourself of that, you convince those around you too. And the further you are behind the lines, the easier it becomes. No one expects the enemy to be at the heart of their world.

I pushed through yet another set of heavy wooden swing doors. Years of grey men had worn away layers of grey paint before me. The ward stank like a school canteen. There were twenty beds, maybe, ten on each side. No privacy curtains,
nothing like that, they were just separated by a bedside locker. Three women whose faces I recognized were still shouting from the windows.

Anna was about halfway down on the left, huddled in an orange furry blanket.

She didn’t look up as I approached. She was too busy staring at her feet. Her sweat-soaked hair was tied back at the nape of her neck. Dried blood caked her calves.

I leaned over her as two nurses walked past, leaving a cloud of cigarette smoke in their wake. ‘Hello.’

Anna was too switched on to show excitement. We didn’t kiss either – not that we’d done that for a while.

I looked down at her legs. She followed my gaze. ‘The shower’s broken. Where’s Katya?’

‘Downstairs, doing the paperwork. I wanted to come on ahead in case we need a Plan B.’ I paused. ‘What about you? You OK?’

‘Nicholas, they say he’s stable. But he’s in the ICU. They won’t let me see him because I’m not feeding him. He’s too small to breastfeed.’ She grabbed my arm. ‘They keep saying he’s fine, but …’

The woman in the next bed smiled conspiratorially. Anna tilted her head towards her. ‘This is her third time, poor girl, so she knows where they take them. He’s on the fourth floor. I’ve tried to go up there, but they won’t let me.’

‘They still got your mobile?’

‘They said it was a source of contamination.’

I reached into my jeans and left her my iPhone. ‘Keep it on vibrate. Soon as I know, you’ll know.’ I gripped her hand. ‘I’ll find him. We’re getting you both out of here.’

She pointed at a sequence of numbers on her wristband. ‘That’s what he’s called.’

I reached the fourth floor and scanned the signage. An icon of a baby and an arrow sent me down a corridor to the left of a pair of thick plastic doors that must once have been transparent.

The sound of crying drew me into a room full of plastic cots with clipboards at their feet. I could read Anna’s name in Cyrillic, but didn’t see anything I recognized on the first board. I checked the next one, then noticed that each baby had an ID band with a serial number on one hand and foot.

I suddenly realized these guys were all too old, and none of them was in an incubator. At least someone had given the place a splash of disinfectant. It smelt clean, even if it wasn’t.

I carried on to the next ward. There wasn’t much clipboard activity in here; a few nurses sitting down, reading, and another bent over an incubator. I couldn’t see inside it, just the mass of tubes leading to the monitors. She turned away and I caught a glimpse of purple skin through the Perspex. Fuck, was that him?

The nurse shuffled further down the ward. Mine wasn’t the only baby in Intensive Care.

A couple of guys in white coats walked past, one offering the other a cigarette. What was it with the Russians and nicotine? Somewhere along the corridor, a woman yelled in pain. The white coats didn’t even look up. The lunatics really were running the asylum.

The babies were all tightly wrapped in blankets. Some had their chests exposed and plastered with ECG sensors. Every little head had been tucked into a Tubigrip beanie.

I started checking clipboards, looking for the last four numbers of Anna’s sequence. It was like being back in the army.

At last I found it: 8564.

I stood at the foot of the cot, staring down at this very small bundle. A ventilating tube was taped into his mouth, a feed tube through his nose. Two ECG leads disappeared under his blanket and poked out near his chest. Machinery all around us made more pinging noises than Kraftwerk. I caught a glimpse of a blue and mottled face among the apparatus.

I stood there looking at him. My son. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting – it had been so much hassle getting to this point. I knew my life had changed: this little blob in a Perspex bubble was depending on me. I just hoped we’d have the chance to get to know each other.

I cut away from all that.

There were more important things to worry about than how I felt. Right now it was all about him and Anna, and getting them out of there.

I headed back out into the corridor, binning the white kit on top of a shelf-load of ceramic bed-pans. Katya was still in the reception area, alongside a doctor in the full Gordon Ramsay, Russian-style.

‘I’ve just seen Anna. You got your mobile with you?’

She nodded and pulled it out of her pocket. ‘This is Dr Potznik. If all goes well, we should be able to get them back to the clinic tonight.’

The doc’s swarthy features tagged him as East Russian. He looked like life in Putinworld was suiting him: he had the kind of comfortable, three-good-meals-a-day-and-plenty-of-vodka look that matched his bushy grey moustache.

‘One of our ambulances is on its way here now.’

‘The boy’s last four digits are eight five six four. Make sure the doc picks up the right one, yeah? I’ll wait here.’

I left them to it and tapped my number into Katya’s mobile. It took Anna a while to answer.

‘Katya?’

‘No, it’s me. Listen. It’s all good. As long as he can be moved, you’ll both be in the clinic tonight.’

‘Have you seen him?’

‘You bet. He’s a beautiful little blue lump. He weighs two thousand and six grams, and he’s forty-eight centimetres long. Is that good?’