Jack Grimwood - Moskva

‘I like this bar.’

‘So do I. I own it. That doesn’t answer my question.’

‘I was at a party…’ Tom hesitated. ‘I left.’

‘You didn’t like the other guests?’

‘I wanted to punch them.’

The man smiled sympathetically.

‘Ivan Petrovich Dennisov,’ he said, putting out his hand.

‘ Tovarishch. ’

‘You call me Dennisov.’

‘Tom Fox,’ Tom said. ‘Major Tom Fox.’

Dennisov grinned. ‘David Bowie. “Space Oddity”. Also “Ashes to Ashes”, “Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)”.’ He put a fresh flask of vodka in front of Tom, helped himself to a glassful and raised it in salute.

‘Major Tom.’

Tom looked at him.

‘You have to say “Ground Control”.’

A copy of that day’s Pravda had been dumped on the zinc and Tom read it, as much to keep his Russian sharp as for any information it might contain. Victories in Afghanistan, a new dam beyond the Urals, advances in Soviet computing. The police in the Yakut autonomous republic were investigating a spate of horrific murders with all diligence. An arrest was imminently expected.

A famous dissident had been rehabilitated. A poet had been unbanned. An amnesty granted state-wide in five categories for politicals jailed before 1953.

‘Things are getting better?’ Tom suggested.

‘They could hardly get worse.’

Later, as dawn threatened, while the teenager clattered around her tiny kitchen, the man came out from behind his bar with a mop to rid the floor of spilt beer. Seeing Tom glance at his leg, he said suspiciously, ‘You sure you’re not American?’

‘Quite sure. I have friends who’d be impressed by that.’

‘Friends who crashed helicopters?’

‘Who tripped wires on mines. Met bombs beside the road. Bombs in bins.’

‘You never met bombs in bins?’

‘No,’ said Tom. ‘I just got shot.’

‘Me too,’ the man said. ‘But by a missile. An American one. Three friends died instantly. One man lived. One died later.’

‘What happened next?’

‘Me? Airlifted to Kabul. My countrymen? They went in with gunships and lost another Mi-24 reducing some shithole to rubble. Now… It’s time you went home.’

What home? Tom wanted to ask. The man was right though. Looking around, Tom realized the room was empty; he was the last.

She’d danced once. Danced the greatest roles by the greatest composers in front of the greatest men in the Soviet Union. In Moscow at the Bolshoi. In Leningrad at the Kirov. She’d looked after the young ones on the beautiful and perfect and disastrous tour where everyone danced wonderfully at the Palais Garnier in Paris, and the orchestra were at their finest, and Nureyev defected to the enemy, and the tour and everyone else’s careers fell apart around him.

Her body was old and battered now.

Not as old as her face made her look. Not as old as those who swept past her on the street with families and flats and places to go imagined. But older than she liked and battered certainly. She hurt from sleeping in doorways and the crypts of those few churches still open at night. It was nothing to the pain of training though: the blood-soaked points to her ballet shoes, the agony in her groin where she stretched and split and twisted her body in a way no man had dared.

They had doctors at the Bolshoi.

She could remember the relief morphine brought when her injuries threatened to prevent her going on stage. The strong hands of the physios kneading the knots from her locked muscles. She’d lived on champagne, caviar and the admiration of her lovers, male and female. No prison had been more luxurious.

It was a different kind of hard on the street.

No fun in summer and worse in winter. A new pair of boots would have made all the difference but who would give new boots to an old parasite like her? There’d been the year she wanted to hang herself but didn’t have a rope. When she eventually found a rope, she decided to cut her wrists instead. Broken glass wasn’t good enough. It had to be a knife. When she found one and still didn’t kill herself, she decided she must want to live after all.

The old woman begging on the steps of the Church of Our Saviour always told the police she bought the candles she carved from an Uzbek in the market near the motorway. She couldn’t say where the Uzbek got the candles. That wasn’t her business and you never knew with Uzbeks…

It was only new recruits who questioned her.

Bumpkins in uniform.

There was no crime in Moscow. At least, very little.

That was the official version. No crime, and what crime there was was the fault of gypsies and Jews. Occasionally a good Russian got drunk and killed his wife in a temper, and wept in remorse come morning. Mostly he simply turned himself in. Every imperfect society had recidivists, of course. And the Soviet Union was not yet perfect. It would be in time but until then the militsiya were here to help keep it honest. She didn’t really buy her candles at the market by the motorway. How would she get up there with her poor legs and how could she afford the sort of prices an Uzbek would ask? She was given the candles by a priest she’d known when he was a boy. He probably rationalized the candles as Christian charity. She knew it as guilt for something forgotten by everyone except them.

She didn’t carve wax angels either.

At least, not as far as the militsiya were concerned.

If, after explaining where the candles came from, the old woman was asked why she carved angels, she was careful to correct the questioner. Angels were religious, and although freedom of religion was enshrined in Soviet law, belief itself could lead to complications. In her view, belief in anything led to complications, but she kept that thought to herself. She carved the Spirit of Moscow. Wouldn’t her questioner agree the spirit of a city as great as Moscow deserved wings?

They didn’t believe her.

They weren’t required to believe her.

She was simply required to tell the lie.

She denied that she carved angels so often that Wax Angel became what they called her among themselves, and how she started to think of herself. It wasn’t as if anyone remembered her real name anyway.

The militsiya left her alone, mostly. In return she told them things now and then. For all she knew, everyone in Moscow told them things. The secret was to tell them as little as possible and very definitely nothing they needed to know.

Tom Fox woke a week into the New Year to the sound of a telephone. He was grateful for its ring. He’d been in the Bogside on a dark and unwelcoming street, with light in pools from the few street lamps not yet broken and republican songs echoing from a pub on the corner. Before that he’d been on the hills near the border, with a cottage in flames behind him. In the Bogside, he’d been plastering an upstairs wall. Plastering was his cover but this was for himself. He was skimming a false wall beside a fireplace. Behind it was the L96A1 he’d used to kill the man in the cottage.

For all he knew, the rifle was still there.

It took Tom a moment to recognize his flat, to shake away one world and acknowledge another. The telephone was on a table by the front door and he went there naked, freed by waking alone and not bothered by the sight of himself in a mirror in the tiny hall. ‘Fox…’

‘Is my stepdaughter with you?’ The voice was imperious.

‘What?’ Shutting his eyes, Tom squeezed away the last of his nightmare and focused on the receiver in his hand.

‘This is Edward Masterton. Is my stepdaughter with you?’