Jack Grimwood - Moskva

‘She’s disappeared,’ Siân said.

‘Maybe she wanted to disappear.’

‘Maybe she did,’ Tom agreed. ‘Her family are still worried.’

‘You’re family?’

Tom knew the chain would snap with a single kick. All the same, he pulled his ID from his pocket and held it up so Davie could examine it. ‘I’m from her embassy.’ The door closed a little, but only so the boy on the far side could slide the chain free and open it properly.

‘I’ll find my own way out,’ Tom said to Siân.

She nodded, glanced once at the nervous boy in the doorway and kept whatever she’d been about to say to herself. She left without looking back.

‘Friend of yours?’ Tom asked.

‘She’s nice.’

He said it so sadly Tom wondered if he was simple.

The room stank of piss, and shit stained one wall. The window was wide open despite it being less than zero outside. A torn copy of Pushkin lay face down on a locker, the shredded halves touching as if the boy hoped they’d heal. A Praktica SLR sat on the windowsill with film ripped from its back. The front of its leather case had been torn off and the Zeiss lens cracked.

‘Christ. Who have you upset?’

Davie Wong said nothing.

His eyes were huge and brown, and fearful behind the tiny wire spectacles he put on to examine Tom. His lashes were long enough to make a girl jealous. He wouldn’t have lasted a day at Tom’s school.

Remembering the postcard, Tom wondered if the ‘She’ in ‘You will hear thunder & remember me & think: She wanted storms’ had been referring to Alex at all. Perhaps Davie had been talking about himself.

‘Anna Akhmatova,’ the boy said when Tom fed him the line. ‘You’ve been through Alex’s things then…’

‘As I said, her family are worried.’

‘Bit late now.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘A few days before New Year.’

‘You didn’t fly home over the holidays?’

‘My parents can’t afford it. The university let me stay.’

‘Ask them for the money and go home. Don’t stay here. If the Russians are being this nasty, there’s little point. It’ll only get worse.’

‘The Komsomol keep an eye on us, you know? One Uzbek boy wanted to be friends. I didn’t dare.’ Davie reddened, realizing he shouldn’t have said that. ‘It’s not the Russians though. They’re not my problem.’

‘Who is?’

‘I thought you wanted to talk about Alex?’

‘I do. I’m just getting a picture of how things work here.’

‘Has Alex really run away?’

‘I’m told that her note said she’d be staying with a friend. I was hoping that was you. She’s not your girlfriend then?’

Davie Wong looked so shocked Tom smiled.

‘Didn’t think so. How did you meet?’

‘At the swimming pool.’

‘The big one opposite the Pushkin?’

The boy nodded. ‘She was smart and funny and suggested we get a coffee after we got changed. So that’s what we did. We met a few times. Nothing happened.’

‘Not your type.’

Davie Wong glanced at him sharply.

‘My uncle was a stoker on destroyers,’ Tom said. ‘These days he lives in Portsmouth with a P&O steward he met in Singapore in the sixties. They’re just friends, obviously. Two bachelors sharing a small mews house outside the dockyard because it’s easier than living alone.’

The boy grinned.

‘So, if you weren’t going out with Alex, who was? I mean, she’s smart and pretty and about to turn sixteen. There has to be some boy on the horizon. Unless her tastes don’t run in that direction.’

‘They do,’ Davie said.

Seeing Tom’s look, he added. ‘We used to ogle Russian boys at the pool and in the cafe afterwards. She likes brooding and dark or blond and angular. I’m a bit less dramatic . It’s difficult here though. I mean, it’s not just illegal, it’s an illness. Did you know they put you in a mental hospital?’

Yeah, Tom did know that.

The wrong politics. The wrong public pronouncements. The wrong kinds of religion. The wrong sexual orientation. They put you in a mental hospital for a lot of things in the Soviet Union, although these days it was getting better.

‘There was a Russian boy at the pool,’ Davie said suddenly. ‘Thin, good-looking, very intense. He came over and introduced himself. I thought…’ Davie hesitated. ‘I thought he was interested in me. We went out as a group for a coffee and he took us to Patriarch’s Ponds to sit on the bench from The Master and Margarita . I didn’t see him again. Alex might have done.’

‘Might have done?’

Davie blushed. ‘She cancelled me the next week. She was nice about it but we both knew why. She was going swimming with K.’

‘What does the K stand for?’

‘Kotik. But that’s just Russian for…’

Little cat. Yeah, Tom knew.

‘Did Alex mention a New Year’s Eve party?’

Tom watched the boy wrestle with his conscience and the good angel win. Looking round the ruins of his room, the boy found a paperback of Cocteau sketches that had escaped destruction and flipped towards the back, extracting an address not that far from Tom’s flat.

‘It was going to be great, Alex said. She said I should go. Her new friends were cool, they’d like me.’ Davie shrugged, looking briefly puzzled. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘Alex didn’t do friends, not really. She hated school. Things were horrid at home. Her mother drank. Her stepfather hated her. I’d never met anyone so lonely.’

Tom wondered if Davie realized that he kept referring to Alex in the past.

The student room Tom wanted was right at the end.

‘Who is it?’

He knocked again.

‘I said, who is it?’

A third knock produced swearing, more swearing and the clatter of someone stamping to the door. It was thrown open and filled with the bulk of the sneering jock who’d been persecuting Davie for being different.

Tom’s punch was low, fast and dirty.

The boy was twenty, maybe twenty-one. Not used to being on the wrong side of the equation. Not used to being the one on the floor. Once the Texan had his breath back, Tom hooked two fingers into his nose, yanked back his head and gripped his throat. The list of nasty things he promised to do if the boy trashed Davie Wong’s room again, or indeed went anywhere near him, was long and very detailed.

The boy believed every word.

Tom left him curled on the floor and found his own way out of the overblown concrete cake, Stalin’s idea of how a skyscraper should look. Outside, an old woman sat in the shelter of its steps being ignored by students, a black scarf tied tightly round her head to protect her from the wind. He wondered how many old women there were in Moscow selling wax figurines.

Tomorrow he’d have a new shadow, one better suited to dealing with someone trained in tradecraft. Tom didn’t regret losing the rat-faced little KGB man. He had an address for the party and, anyway, it was worth it for a morning of walking free.

Snow glittered on the distant roofs of the Kremlin, and the ice on the Moskva had been broken and healed so often that shards lay scattered across its surface like shattered glass. The balustrades of the bridge he used were glazed with virgin snow. Tom barely noticed. His thoughts were locked tight inside.

Alex was sad and lonely? He knew that already. She hated school and had problems at home? He could tell that by looking round her room. If he could do that for a teenager he’d barely met, why hadn’t he been able to do it for his own daughter?

Why hadn’t anyone?

‘No work today…?’

‘This is work,’ Tom said.