Jack Grimwood - Moskva

If Wax Angel hadn’t known better, she’d have said it was relief.

‘Hello, Maya,’ he said.

‘Hello Comrade Commissar.’

Stepping forward, he swept her up in an embrace that seemed fierce for his age. He smelled as he’d always smelled, of sweat and soap and cigarettes. The dressing gown smelled as she remembered too, of mothballs that had done too little to keep the moths at bay if the state of his collar was anything to go by.

‘You look like you,’ he said.

‘About time,’ she said.

Behind him stood her granddaughter, wide-eyed and fully grown, Dennisov’s drunken brat at her side. When Sveta put her hand to her mouth, the young man wrapped his arm tightly round her shoulders.

‘Remember me?’ Wax Angel asked.

Sveta burst into tears.

Wax Angel sighed. She should have realized the girl might be shocked.

‘The commissar picked Lenin up and dumped him on a grenade. Your grandfather’s first and last romantic gesture. The blast cracked most of his ribs, put a hole through a rotten floor too. Just as well. If the floor had been concrete, he’d be dead. Daft bastard.’ Turning to the guard, Wax Angel said, ‘You can go.’

The young man went without checking with the marshal first.

To Sveta, Wax Angel said, ‘Come on then. Let’s have a proper look at you.’

Sveta glanced at Dennisov, who nodded her forward.

‘A major, eh? Better than I managed.’ The ragged woman walked slowly round Sveta and nodded approvingly. ‘Good profile. Good posture. Good boots.’

‘As for him…’ She took a long hard look at Dennisov, in particular his rusting leg. ‘Stands straight for a cripple, meets your eye. He’ll do, if you must. Your grandfather was a slouch too. Except on parade. On parade no one’s a slouch.’

‘Maya, what are you doing here?’

‘I could ask the same.’

‘I live here.’

The ragged woman glanced at his waterfall of greying hair and snorted. ‘Call this living? Some day you’ll have to tell me if the House of Lions is a mausoleum or a zoo. Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

‘I’m on my way to the Hotel National.’

‘Planning to set up a provisional government?’

For a moment she thought he was going to say that her remark was in bad taste . She was glad he didn’t; that would have made her cross. She imagined that setting up governments, provisional or otherwise, had been on his mind a lot lately.

Instead he said, ‘An Englishwoman wants to see me.’

‘So do I. And I’ve brought you a present.’

She tossed what looked like a lump of rancid jerky at his feet. From the shock on the commissar’s face, you’d think he’d never seen anyone castrated.

‘Vedenin?’ he said.

‘Should have done it years ago.’

It was surprising how much better one could feel after killing the bastard who bedded your underage daughter. Sveta’s mother had been beautiful and fragile and too innocent not to trust the man who ruined her. Too fragile not to take her own life.

‘Maya…’

‘You know I should have done it years ago.’

He wasn’t bad for his age, the commissar. Slightly too impressed with himself, but men always were. At least he wasn’t fat like Vedenin. Fat people bleed so badly. Vedenin had bled like a pig as she peeled the fat from his body.

Squealed like one, too.

‘We talked a little about the old days,’ Wax Angel said. ‘About his habits. About who might have been leaving bodies around Moscow. And then I asked him what was really going on. We got to the English girl eventually. You know who has her now?’

She looked her husband in the eye, smiled grudgingly.

‘Yes, I thought you might.’

Tom watched the KGB officer’s gaze slide over him, barely taking in his turned-up collar and pulled-down cap. Half the passengers were dressed in similar fashion. The choice was suffer the cold in this carriage or swelter in the one behind, which had heating enough for the entire train. The young man who’d followed Tom from the Hotel National opened his mouth to object, shut it again and let the officer lead him from the Moscow–Volgograd express at the first station outside the city.

‘Black market,’ someone muttered.

‘Roubles for dollars.’

They looked out at Tom’s shadow protesting loudly on the platform that he needed to be let back on to the train and watched him grow flustered when the doors were slammed and the diesel growled back into life.

As the train pulled away, Tom looked around, wondering who was watching him now. Someone would be. Unless General Dennisov was simply relying on Tom to deliver himself. That was always possible. As before, he was travelling without proper papers. Once again, he was headed for a city about which he knew almost nothing. There the similarity ended.

This train couldn’t be more different. Yelena’s had been luxurious, a gilded relic of an imperial mindset. This one couldn’t have been more utilitarian. It rattled and stank, and the windows let in the cold and squeaked so badly that Tom wanted to find a screwdriver and tighten the screws himself because he wasn’t sure he could stand another twenty hours of this.

After a while, he pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and kept it angled to the window in case the fat woman next to him woke and wondered why her neighbour was reading something foreign.

No mention was made of the Tsaritsyn Monastery in any of the guidebooks for sale in the foyer of Caro’s hotel. But Tom had a photocopy of an entry from the old Guide to the Russian Empire that Mary Batten had lifted for him from the embassy library.

Published three months before the Great War began, it said little about the monastery except that it was remote, rarely visited by tourists, and while a boat trip on the Volga was well worth the effort, Tsaritsyn Monastery itself had little architectural merit, certainly not enough to balance the inconvenience of two days’ travel along rough cart tracks through unkempt forest.

A note in the margin, handwritten by someone taught letters in the old fashion, by endless repetition between ruled lines, agreed and disagreed.

The monastery itself was nothing, crude even by provincial standards.

But its medieval rood screen, originally from Kiev and presented by the local governor fifty years before, was a work of art, if not by Andrei Rublev, at the very least by a direct disciple.

When Tom next looked at his watch, four hours had gone by and most of the others had joined the woman next to him in dozing. Only an old woman and a whining child seemed resolutely awake. Tom noticed that though she gave the boy regular cups of tea from a tatty Komsomol thermos, and slices of bread and sausage, she drank and ate almost nothing herself and looked anxious when she saw Tom notice. He nodded, and after a moment, as if afraid of being rude, she nodded back.

Stations came and went.

A few people got off. A few got on.

At one station, the young woman Tom had decided was shadowing him clambered stiff-legged from her seat, dragged a cheap cardboard case from the rack overhead and left without looking back. No one replaced her. At least, if they did, they didn’t sit in that carriage. He was left to memories and thoughts and found neither welcome.

Caro had cried when he said goodbye.

That was unexpected. He’d have said she’d grown to dislike him too much to be anything but grateful to have him out of her life. But he’d never been good with that stuff. And he was, he imagined, out of her life now, one way or another.

‘Take care,’ she’d said.

She’d gripped his shoulders in the foyer hard enough to make the desk staff stare and kissed him fiercely. ‘Russia suits you.’