The Restoration Game (28 page)

Likewise with sounds: traffic noises, the thump or click of feet, voices. But every so often, from the people around those sidewalk tables, I heard raised angry voices, and among the footsteps I heard running feet, and in the traffic hum I heard a deeper note that made me look up from my cup and page to see a six-wheeled armoured personnel carrier cruise by.

From the papers, I didn't learn much: there was, of course, a lot of coverage of the aftermath of the Georgia—Russia War (to me a tedious rehash of the kind of claim and counterclaim and conspiracy theory that I'd heard and read over the past ten days) with the government paper taking the Russian POV, and the opposition the Georgian. I didn't know enough about the local politicians to disentangle the domestic coverage: the contested political issues were taken as read, or to be inferred between the lines, and the reported arguments consisted of mutual, indistinguishable, and (from my POV) undecidable accusations of dirty tricks with the electoral roll or the ballot-counting arrangements, made by and against individuals whose names, let alone affiliations, I had great difficulty keeping in the correct columns of the score-sheet.

So far, so familiar, for an outsider like me: I'd had much the same experience several times in the past few years, trying to follow the ins and outs of Georgia's Rose Revolution, Ukraine's Orange Revolution, and all the rest. It was while I sat pondering all that and thinking it was about time I made contact with the Maple Revolution—or at least with the guy whose name Ross had given me—that an anomaly-detecting switch in my head tripped and I started consciously noticing a phenomenon whose separate instances I'd seen but not summed. Lots of women here had red hair. Young women, mostly, but also some middle-aged and (my guess, based on clothes and bearing) middle-class women. It wasn't what I thought of as natural red hair, at least not the carroty gingery colour I'd covered with Julie's Clairol dye. It was more Natural Bright Auburn red, Giselle in
Enchanted
red, Bree in
Desperate Housewives
red, like there'd been a run on henna.

Now that I came to notice it, the colour was so common among women my age and general look (I wished I'd thought to pull on my denim skirt and purple leggings and pixie boots this morning instead of the jeans and Kickers) that it was my mousey-brown cover-up hair colour that stood out. I felt suddenly noticeable, as if a badge I'd thoughtlessly stuck on to accessorise a jacket had turned out to be making a strong political statement. (That sort of thing in my case usually goes the other way—over the years I've had lots of channel interrupts with people wearing vintage Soviet badges.) I rather suspected all this unnatural red hair was a political statement, but I couldn't parse it.

There was only one way to find out.

I stood up, left the papers and a one-lari tip, and headed for a side street I'd already walked past and glanced down, above one café which bore a sign in three scripts and one language: Internet.

In case you're wondering about Ross Stewart: we'd gone over a few more details—how to meet my local contact, the URL for the local version of the game, the lock combination for the aluminium case, the route on the map, how to hire a car and not get robbed, and so on—before we went out for stuffed vine leaves, mint yoghurt, and sticky wine in a dark restaurant. I'd almost fallen asleep over my plate. Ross had seen me to my room, carried off my pillowcase of manky clothes, and returned them laundered when I woke bleary-eyed to his knock on the door at eight that morning.

“Thank you,” I'd mumbled, all foul breath and gummy lips.

He'd stood in the passageway for a moment, back in his trucker gear, out of place.

“You'll be all right?” he'd asked, just as if the whole thing of leaving me to fend for myself was my idea and not his.

“I'll be fine,” I'd told him.

He'd looked at me as if trying to read some small print on my face, stuck out an abrupt hand to shake, and left. I'd heard his boots thump on the steps and the plastic buckle of a stray strap on his black bag tick against the bannisters as he hurried down the stairs.

I'd closed the door, locked it, and thrown myself back on the bed and stared at the ceiling for about a quarter of an hour.

3.

The Internet café was a real café, with coffee. And cigarette smoke, which metaphorically took me back and literally almost sent me back, out the door. I blinked hard a few times and recovered, but not before my missed step at the threshold had turned a dozen pairs of eyes from two sides of a long table lined with recent-looking flat screens and keyboards and tangled with cable in between cups and cola cans and ashtrays. I hadn't even summoned a glare before all the heads jerked quickly back to the screens. I walked to the counter and asked, in Krassnian, for a cup of black coffee and a half hour on one of the machines.

The guy behind the counter looked as if he'd have been much more in his element working in a butcher's shop, though no self-respecting butcher would have allowed a white apron to get that dirty. He gave me a look of pitying suspicion and rattled off a phrase far too quickly for my out-of-practice conversational Krassnian.

“Sorry?”

“Filter coffee or Nes Coffay?” he said slowly.

“Uh, filter, thank you.”

Again with the pitying look. I glanced at the board and realised that instant, that is, Nes Coffay (sic), was the more expensive and doubtless stylish option. After I'd taken the mug to the machine whose number matched my chit, I discovered that the plus side of the Nes Coffay might very well be that instant coffee, however vile, can't be simmered.

It was as well that I hadn't been expecting the Internet café to be full of fresh-faced young democrats plotting insurrection in the safe spaces of Dark Krassnia, because if I had I'd have been disappointed. The twenty or so people there all looked like
elitny
spoiled brats, and—from my sidelong glances at the screens as I walked from the counter to my seat—the handful playing Dark Krassnia were too busy slaughtering orcs to do any plotting, and everyone else was lost in World of Warcraft or updating their Livejournals.

I fought the temptation to check my Google Mail account and my friends' Livejournals and went straight to the game. The opening screen at dark-krassnia.ru gave me a pang of nostalgia for Edinburgh and Digital Damage and the lads. I resisted another temptation to get back in contact with everyone and signed in, using a string from my months of testing that gave me command-level privileges, and an avatar that placed me as a low-level grunt in the barbarian horde. I swivelled the avatar's head, in the hindmost ranks of the welter. Suresh's algorithm was being worked hard. In the café's low bandwidth every avatar was a wire sketch and the scenery was blocky monochrome.

I teleported to a secure location, the privy at the back of the Inn of Unrighteousness, and scribbled a message on the wall. More literally, I typed a message and it appeared on the wall, while my avatar's arm gestured a scrawl. Almost at once, another avatar appeared beside mine, facing the wall. This proximity gave me the oddest feeling, like I suppose guys get when they stand side by side pissing. My writing faded and a new message came up while the other grunt handwaved at the blank partition in front of us:
Gemarov St off Freedom Sq 10 min?

OK
, I wrote back.

The other avatar vanished and I did likewise, backing out of the game with (I noticed) two experience points for just turning up.

“Where the fuck is Freedom Square?” I wondered frantically, and was on the point of Google-Earthing it when I remembered that it was what I'd always known as Revolution Square, in front of the offices of the regional Soviet—formerly of the Zemstvo, and now of the Krassnian parliament—at the far end of Kommunisticheskii Prospekt.

I logged out, took the almost-full mug of almost-cool coffee back to the counter for safe disposal, and left.

Freedom Square turned out to be where it was all happening.

It's a pleasant, open space, about a hundred metres by fifty. Along one side there's an Orthodox church. At the top there's the parliament, a still impressive Tsarist pile, crusted with Soviet add-ons and scarred by democratic deletions. At the bottom there's the end of the Prospekt, and the final side is lined with low buildings with pillared frontages. Within its perimeter of road it's more like a park than a square. Scrubby patches of grass alternate with cracked expanses of paving shaded by century-old trees.

As I entered the square I passed a statue at one corner of a barbarian warrior, dated 1992 and nameless, but bearing a suspicious resemblance to the traditional depiction of Duram. That statue was diametrically opposite the one I was familiar with, in the corner beside the parliament. A small group of people stood holding a huge pictorial banner beneath a clump of red flags around the farther statue's plinth: Stalin, still there. (It's a Georgian pride thing, even in Krassnia.) The pictorial banner showed Stalin too, in a row of overlapping profiles: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and a dapper chap I guessed was Enver Hoxha. It looked like an illustration from a history of shaving.

Rather aptly, the space between Duram and Stalin was occupied by the revolution. Hundreds of people, mostly young, and a disproportionate number red-haired, milled around a camp of small and large tents, some collapsible tables stacked with leaflets, and a speaker's podium empty at the moment but whose PA system was bouncing Krassnian patriotic songs set to rock music off all sides of the square. Krassnian flags and plastic maple-leaf cutouts on sticks wagged above the crowd here and there or lay in metre-high heaps for any coming demonstration. A few militiamen (the cops, that is, not the scary guys I'd seen at the border or ripping down posters) hung around the periphery, sitting on low parapets, talking on mobile phones and smoking, like bored teenage boys in uniform, which most of them were.

I walked along the side of the square, keeping out of things, smiling and accepting every leaflet offered. Gemarov Street was so narrow its whole width was in shade under the noon sun, and my eyes took a moment to adjust. About ten metres ahead of me the road was occupied by a small bus. Three cops with visored helmets leaned against the front, their heavy shields of curved Perspex and long wooden batons propped beside them. More riot police sat inside the bus. For a moment I almost turned back, but decided that would look suspicious, and in any case my contact had specified this street.

I held my head high and walked forward. As I passed the three cops at the front of the bus the nearest one stuck his truncheon across my path at waist level. I stopped and looked up at my reflection in the visor, and tried to smile. The cop pointed to my mini-backpack with his left hand. I unhitched it from my shoulder and unzipped it, feeling very glad that, after some swithering, I'd decided to leave the aluminium case and its incriminating contents in the hotel room safe.

The cop lowered his impromptu barrier and grabbed the bag, then began to poke around inside it. He found my false passport and took it out, and dangled the bag by one of its straps on his wrist while flicking through the pages. He peered at the passport photo, then at me.

“English?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, in Russian.

“Journalist?” he asked.

For a frantic moment I forgot what the passport showed as my occupation. I shook my head.

“Student,” I said. “Tourist.”

He dropped the passport into the bag and handed the bag back. “You go.”

I went, sidling along the half-metre gap between the side of the bus and the wall. The cops inside the bus watched my every step, heads turning one by one as I went past. The rest of the narrow street had only two shops. The window of one was stacked with pyramids of tins circled in faded pictures of fruit. The other had layers of fresh blue jeans. Music thumped from a Sony speaker over the door. I glanced inside and saw a young woman doing her nails amid shelves and shelves of yet more blue jeans. No customers. I walked on. After a few paces I heard footsteps behind me. I stepped onto the cobbled and empty road. A young man overtook me on the sidewalk, then turned and smiled.

He wore a nylon sports jacket over T-shirt and jeans. I guessed he was about my age, with darker skin and naturally redder hair. Friendly, open face behind rimless glasses.

“Ah, it's you!” he said, in American-accented English. “I almost didn't recognise you.”

“I've recovered from the flu,” I said, feeling very silly.

“Then it's safe to shake hands,” he said, and did.

“I'm Emma,” I said.

“My name is Fyodor,” he said, I guessed probably as truthfully.

We walked on down the street and turned into an even narrower alleyway, which opened out on a much wider street. Fyodor led the way, one step ahead, until he reached a wine bar with round tables outside. No one sat at them. Fyodor gestured.

“Take a seat,” he said. “Would you like a drink?”

“I'd kill for a decent coffee,” I said.

He looked at me, puzzled. “You would kill?”

“British idiom,” I said.

“Ah! Very good. Please wait.”

He disappeared inside. I sat down. The table was metal, and wobbled. I found a beer mat and wedged it under the offending leg. While doing so I cast a quick glance up and down the street. Still very quiet. Fyodor returned with a coffee and a bottle of beer.

He raised the bottle to me. “Welcome to Krasnod!”

“Thank you. Is it safe to talk here?”

“I wouldn't have chosen this place if it wasn't.”

“Yeah, but…” I glanced around.

“The RSB's budget doesn't stretch to directional mikes,” Fydor said. “There is no one inside but the owner, who is reliable. You can see for yourself whether anyone is near.”

All the same, it didn't seem right to ask the question that had been on the tip of my tongue: are you really with the Agency? I wondered for a moment why that question had risen unbidden in my mind, and realised I'd been half-consciously worrying away at the odd thought that had struck me at the pavement cafe, about the ownership of the copper mine. And then I realised: I'd been about to ask Fyodor if he was with the CIA because I
didn't know.