Jack Grimwood - Moskva

‘My wife died young,’ Beziki said.

‘And left you with two boys?’

‘You know how precious boys are.’

‘Bec was precious.’

‘Girls are different.’

Tom couldn’t argue with that. Bec was very different. He’d seen no trace of himself when he looked at her, and precious little of her mother. Bec was bright, studious, stubborn. She’d intended to go to Oxford. She’d found herself work in a greengrocer’s for the holidays. When Caro said shop work was vulgar, Tom pointed out Bec could be pulling pints in the village pub.

That hadn’t helped Bec’s case.

‘You’re remembering her?’

‘Yes. She was very beautiful. Very clever.’

Beziki sighed. ‘Edvard was very beautiful. Not so clever.’

‘What do you want from me?’ Tom asked. ‘Why am I really here?’

Erekle Gabashville leaned forward and settled his bulk like one of those huge Japanese sumo wrestlers preparing for a bout, his weight balanced, his hands over the eight-pointed stars on his knees. ‘There was a letter.’

He held up his hand to halt Tom’s question.

‘After the boys were taken… It should not have been possible to take them. I want to say that. They were at my dacha. There were guards. The guards died.’ He shrugged. ‘Just as well. I would have had to kill them otherwise. They were good men and I would have disliked that.’

Beziki dragged his thoughts back to the letter.

‘Russians don’t trust Georgians but we’re useful and Stalin trusted us, obviously enough, which is maybe why others don’t now. As a boy, I found a rifle and shot Germans. The partisans could have killed me but they made me their mascot instead. Later, the Red Army gave me a uniform and a family. We were young. Very young. We drank, we shared German women, we stood in Berlin’s ruins and took photographs. We did good things, bad things. Bonds like that bind you. I’ll show you the photographs one day.’

‘This has to do with the letter?’

The man nodded heavily. ‘It demanded money for the return of my sons, a huge amount in American dollars. If that was all, I’d have paid. Maybe made them wait a little while I tried to find out who had the balls for this. Although the fact they dared should have been warning enough. It wasn’t about dollars though. They also wanted information, information they had already, they said. Sending it would merely confirm what they knew.’

‘You didn’t send them the information?’

‘I said I needed a week to think about it. Their answer was to leave Edvard naked below the Kremlin Wall. He was frozen like ice.’

‘It was that cold?’

‘No. I have men asking questions in factory units and food-processing plants all over Moscow. Anywhere with industrial freezers. No one’s seen or heard anything suspicious.’

‘You’ve sent the information since?’

‘How can I?’ Beziki said. ‘It risks betraying my oldest friends.’

‘How long do you have to comply?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what worries me. Since Edvard died, I haven’t heard a word. No contact. No notes left. I have the dollars ready. Twice the amount they asked for, in case that’s enough. And nowhere to send it.’

‘You intend to kill them, of course?’

‘I would say yes. However, I ask myself, who would dare do this? And I don’t like any of the answers. So I ask myself what was being said when his body was left by the Kremlin and I like that answer even less. It was a warning, obviously. I’m just not sure it was a warning for me.’

‘For who then?’

‘Those inside? Except who else has the power to do this? No one outside the Presidium, the high command, would dare.’ Beziki shook his head. ‘That worries me. What do you know of Andropov?’

‘Little enough.’

‘KGB. He died after a year. Chernenko. Also KGB. He lasted a year too. Give Gorbachev a year and he’ll probably be gone, nothing more than another plaque on a wall TASS can’t be bothered to report properly.’

‘You’re saying Andropov and Chernenko were killed?’

‘Would it matter?’ Beziki touched his forehead, his heart and his balls in a weird parody of crossing himself. ‘They were dead here already.’

He was very drunk when she found him. Drunker than most foreigners manage, lacking the liver, determination and soul of the average Russian. Drunk enough to be a Muscovite. And found wasn’t really the word. She’d been waiting for him on a bench in a little park on the corner. She was Wax Angel, carver of the guardians. It was her job to keep an eye on what was going on.

She put being in the right place to see him abducted down to having once been in such a wrong place – and at such a wrong time – that God had spent most days since making it up to her. As for finding the man now…

If he went in that door, he’d come out the other.

She knew he would. Even men like Erekle Gabashville didn’t abduct victims in broad daylight if they later intended to dump their bodies… Now, the KGB, they’d have no trouble with that at all. Wax Angel shivered with more than cold and gripped the edge of her bench. There’d been two office workers sitting here, collars up and heads down, smoking their cigarettes and reading books when she arrived. But they’d been kind enough to let her have the seat to herself.

She liked this park and she liked this bench.

She’d seen the Boss himself sitting here one Saturday, about ten years after he died. Few others seemed to notice. Although the black cat from the cafe on the corner had refused to come when she called. She’d wondered since what Stalin was doing back in Moscow and decided hell must have been having an open day.

‘So there you are,’ she said.

The Englishman stared at her, owl-eyed.

‘No,’ she said, when he dug his hand into his pocket for change.

He looked even more puzzled. He wasn’t safe to be let out in daylight really, never mind after dark.

Her husband had been like this for a while, in the bad years. So drunk he didn’t know what to do with himself. It had been a clever move. Better to be a drunk than to be suspected of being a conspirator or traitor. Alcohol had never worked for her. The insides of her head were messy enough already without making them worse.

‘This way,’ she said.

He tried to free himself when she took his arm.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘You need to come over here.’

She led him down a slippery path to where bushes behind low metal railings wore snow like torn blankets, more holes than warmth.

Wax Angel knew how they felt.

‘Careful now…’

When he missed his step, she decided that was far enough.

Since, conveniently, he was now on his hands and knees, she walked round to his side and booted him lightly in the stomach. He vomited so fluently that snow melted, the grass beneath steaming like a spa bath.

The sight of it made him throw up again.

‘Well done,’ Wax Angel said.

She watched him struggle to his feet and helped him the last of the way.

‘Now… you’d better get yourself home.’

‘Embassy,’ he said. ‘Taxi.’

Wax Angel looked at him doubtfully. He was sweating alcohol, his knees were sodden from the snow and he had the shakes. She wouldn’t trust him not to throw up in her taxi, and she didn’t have a taxi.

‘Come with me,’ she said.

Tom’s cab to the embassy wasn’t actually a cab. It was an old and rotting mustard-yellow half-truck, stinking of the onions its owner had been unloading when Wax Angel led Tom into the car park. There was a queue in front of an empty stall, so word must have got out. That was one of Moscow’s basic laws. If you see a queue, join it. If you don’t want what’s being sold, someone will.