The Restoration Game (11 page)

This guy might or might not be my father, but he sure sounded married to my mother.

He returned the phone.

“You deal with her,” he said, and picked up his fork.

“Explain yourself,” said Amanda.

I took a deep breath. “I take it you've just spoken to Ross Stewart?”

“Yes, Lucy,” Amanda said, sounding burdened. “The guy in the pic you sent me.” Her voice dropped, like that would make a difference. “I'd rather you didn't use his name over the phone.”

“It's done now,” I said.

“Oh, for God's sake, Lucy!” she cried, loud enough for me to flinch the phone away from my ear. “Don't pretend to be so
fucking
naive. If you ever pull a stunt like this again you're off the fucking case, you hear me?”

“I didn't know I was
on
a case, Mom,” I said, and immediately regretted sounding like a sulky teen.

“Lucy!” Amanda hissed (no exaggeration—I'm blessed with a name that
can
be hissed). “Stop this right now! You're on a case, you're
on
, and it's about time you cottoned on to that. There's a lot riding on you, OK?”

“Not anything
I
asked for,” I said (that instant regret again, but come on). “Or anything that anyone's thought to explain to me, you know?”

“Listen, Lucy. You have to trust me.” Her indrawn breath made the phone crackle. “This is not the time or the place. I can't explain. That guy can…tell you some things.”

“And can I trust him?”

Long pause. “About as far as you can throw him, Lucy. To be honest. That's as far as I would. But we're all on the same side.” Another long pause. “For what that's worth. But listen to what he has to say.” “Thanks, Mom,” I said. “Goodnight.” “It's day here,” she said.

I gave what I hoped was a bitter laugh and closed the call.

I looked at the man across the table.

“Well…”I said. “That was—”

“Eat,” said Ross Stewart.

We pushed our plates back at the same time.

“Coffee?” Ross asked.

“Cappucino,” I said.

He took his briefcase with him to the counter; carried it awkwardly under his elbow when he came back. My cappucino had slopped a little. I dabbed in the saucer with the paper napkin.

“All right,” Ross said. “Questions?”

I took a deep breath. “Uh, just to get this one…out of the way, you know? Are you my father?”

His double espresso cup rattled. He rubbed under the septum of his nose with his wrist, as if there was an itch there. “I don't know,” he said.

It took me a moment to process this.

“Ah,” I said.

Ross nodded. “Well, that was…part of what made the situation awkward for all concerned. I can give you some detail later, if you like. I'm sure you have more pressing questions than that.”

“Would you be willing to take a DNA test?” I asked.

He rocked back in his seat. “I would not,” he said. “Not without anything less than a court order.”

“I have a right to know,” I said. “An actual, legal right.”

“You do, of course. Yes. And if you were to assert it…ah, look, Lucianne, could this not wait until…this whole thing is over?”

“Stop calling me Lucianne,” I said. “I'm called Lucy.”

“All right.”

“As for waiting—how long are you talking about?”

He shrugged. “Matter of months.”

“OK,” I said. “And what is ‘this whole thing,’ if I may ask? A colour revolution?”

I expected him to react with the same sort of security rant that Amanda had given me. Instead, he smiled and nodded.

“‘The Maple Revolution,’ they're calling it,” he said. “You heard it here first.”

“And who's ‘they’?”

“Oh, the Agency, of course.”

“Are you…?”

Ross shook his head, looking amused. “Not so much as an asset, Lucy,” he said. “Just a freelance operator who happens to be on the same side of this particular hoo-hah.”

“What are you?” I asked. “Like, what do you do?”

“Ah,” he said. “Now there you have me worried about being overheard. I can say with some certainty that not one ear within what limited earshot there is in this crowded and noisy establishment is likely to prick up at a mention of Krassnia, or the Agency, or for that matter my contestable paternity. I could tell you, truthfully enough, that I'm the owner and manager of an importexport business, but that wouldn't be fair to you and wouldn't be in the least useful to either of us.”

He took out his pipe, unscrewed the bowl, and with his used paper napkin began wiping a thin disgusting brown liquid from the small metal cup into which the bowl had fitted.

“Shall we go outside?” he said, reassembling the pipe without looking. “We could walk back towards your flat, and along the way I can tell you what I do.”

A thin rain was falling. Ross stood for a moment under the Filmhouse's eaves to light his pipe, then took a folding umbrella from his briefcase, opened it, and held it over me as we set off.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You know,” said Ross, through teeth clenched on his pipe, “I blame your boyfriend's bad example for starting me again on the habit.”

I almost collided with the umbrella. “What? How long have you been stalking me?”

“It's not a question of stalking,” he said, sounding quite unperturbed. “I've been keeping an eye on you, one way and another, since the day before your mother called to ask you about the game. She asked me to watch out for you, you see.”

“How?” I demanded.

He sighed, sending a cloud of smoke in front of us.

“Let's just say I have eyes on the street. I had to make sure you weren't under unfriendly surveillance.”

“What sort of unfriendly—?”

“Russian,” he said.

“Ah,” I said. “You're wrong there. Our computers got hacked a couple of weeks ago by the Russian Business Network.”

“That was me,” he said. “Just checking your security—now wait a minute, I can explain!”

I'd jumped away from under the brolly, and stayed away, though the drizzle was now what we in Scotland call “wetting.”

“It better be good.”

Ross, evidently embarrassed to be seen not sharing his umbrella, collapsed it and strode along beside me in the rain.

“You asked what I do,” he said. “I do a lot of things. I have a stake in a good number of businesses, import-export as I think I mentioned, mostly long-haul trucking to and from Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the western parts of the former Soviet Union.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

He said nothing for a few paces, until we were on a stretch of pavement with no one within ten yards or so.

“But one of my lines of work,” he went on, “the one you have to know about, from me, up front, right now, is that I'm a people-smuggler.”

I nearly tripped. “You're a—”

“I help people to come to this country illegally. Don't get the wrong idea—I'm an ethical people-smuggler. I don't rip people off and I don't deliver them to debt slavery or prostitution or gang-masters. What they do when they get here is up to them, but they always walk away from my delivery depots with enough to keep them going for a day or two, reasonably convincing documentation, and maybe with an introduction in hand to”—an airy wave of the pipe—”a restaurant or a building site that doesn't ask too many questions.”

“I don't believe you,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because if it's true, you're taking a hell of a risk telling me.”

“I'm not,” he said. “For one thing, I know you're not going to go to the police, because that would mess up the job you're doing for Amanda. For another, it would take an absolutely massive police investigation to connect me with the actual trafficking, and meanwhile, I can assure you, I would be putting up legal flak and calling in favours like nobody's business. I'm a very respectable citizen, and I know a lot of other respectable citizens very much better than they know me.”

“I spotted you tailing me,” I said. “That's not what would happen to a man who has all the angles covered.”

“You're right there,” he said, sounding angry. “Ah, fuck it.”

And with that, without breaking stride, he tossed the still-smouldering pipe into the nearest bin.

“There's a lot more I have to tell you,” he said. “But I see we've reached your corner.” He waved a hand up ahead. “I live up in Morningside. Are you going to be in this evening?”

“Yes.”

“Very good.” He rattled off my address. “I'll have a package couriered round within two hours. It'll tell you all you need to know—along with quite a lot that you don't, but that I'm telling you anyway.”

“Why would you do that?”

He stood looking at me, rain slowly drenching his hair and collar.

“You deserve to know. After all this time.”

He raised the umbrella again and walked away.

Julie and Gail looked up from the sofa in front of the telly as I walked into the living room. Empty plates, page-shuffled newspapers, and full wineglasses on the coffee table.

“Lucy, your hair's a
mess,”
Gail observed helpfully.

“Got caught in the rain,” I said, likewise bearing news.

“There's still some pasta and sauce in the pan,” said Julie.

“I've eaten,” I said.

All this talk about food brought Hiro bounding in and twining around my ankles, accusations of neglect and starvation going full bore.

“Has anyone fed him?” I asked.

“Yes, I did,” Gail and Julie chorused, then looked at each other. “Oh!”

“Now, who's Lucy's lying little bastard?” I said, scratching between his ears. The complaints continued. I straightened up. “No.”

Hiro stalked off, too proud to look over his shoulder. I retreated to my room with a mug of coffee and a towel. Hiro soon followed, curling up on the chair I was just about to sit on. I pulled off my damp jeans and sat down at the top of the bed with the pillows behind me and texted Alec. He texted back. This went on for some time.

The door bell buzzed, waking me from a doze.

“I'll get it!” I called through. I flailed into a dressing gown and padded out to the hall and over to the intercom.

“Package for Lucy Stone,” it crackled.

“Come on up,” I said, buzzing open the outer door lock.

Thump thump thump
…up the stairwell. I peered through the fisheye. Definitely a courier, helmet politely in one hand, Jiffy bag in the other.

I opened the door on the chain, scribbled on the courier's handheld screen, and accepted the packet. It was much lighter and floppier than I'd expected.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Cheers, miss.”

Thump thump thump
…
Slam.

“What was that?” Julie called out.

“Delivery,” I said.

Back in the bedroom, I retrieved my Leatherman Juice from my bag and opened the packet. At first it seemed to be empty and I wondered wildly about some mistake. Then I held the packet upside down and pushed the sides together. A two-gigabyte USB memory stick fell out.

The time was about nine thirty. My toes were cold. I changed into PJs and socks and the dressing gown while running a backup of my laptop. I went through to the kitchen and skooshed a tumbler of Namaqua, then stuck my head around the living-room door to wave goodnight to the girls.

Back in my room I dislodged Hiro from the spot at the top of the bed, and arranged tumbler, cushions, light, laptop, and cables to my satisfaction. I curled my feet under me, inserted the USB stick, and opened the directory.

There was only one file, titled “Dossier.pdf.” It had been created and saved at 20:49 that evening.

From the preview, some of the big PDF's contents were pictures; most were scans of handwritten or printed or typed pages. Some of the typed pages were in Russian—I could read them, slowly, but I was relieved to see that each had a parallel page in English, presumably a translation.

The first word that jumped out at me, on the titles of these Russian pages, was “Confession.”

And, also as I skimmed these pages, the following names, instantly recognisable to me even in Cyrillic lettering:

Avram Arbatov

Eugenie Montford

On the pages in English:

Amanda Stone

Ross Stewart

One name that I didn't recognise: Yuri Gusayevich. And one more that I did, from the scariest day in my life: Ilya Klebov.

My hand went to my mouth. The scariest day of my life was now inextricably and inarguably part of, and not just associated with, the Other Thing. I slid my hand down and clutched Hiro's side, too hard. He wriggled out and shot away to the foot of the bed.

I jumped to the beginning, to the handwritten pages, and began to read.

1.

Note by me (Lucy): this part of the dossier was scanned from handwritten notebook pages of unlined A4 paper, presumably Ross Stewart's diary or diaries. Blank spaces, evidently the result of placing another sheet of paper between the page and the plate, are indicated. Other gaps between dates are in the original—Ross was, on this evidence, only an intermittent diary-keeper.

No attempt has been made to reproduce the numerous doodles and scribbles, mostly of a sexual, abstract, or violent nature, that deface the text and its margins
.