Jack Grimwood - Moskva

‘He’s dead,’ she said finally.

The last photograph Tom simply burned without giving Alex a chance to describe it. She had no need to see four children her own age, their heads twisted half off by wire as they hung from a tree.

‘Come here,’ General Dennisov ordered.

Alex returned to the parapet.

‘If you kill her,’ Tom said, ‘my father-in-law will release files from our Administration in Berlin, files that mention you by name. All this will have been for nothing. Your reputation will be ruined.’

‘Rumours,’ the general said. ‘Filthy propaganda, lies… What we’d expect from the West. Anyway, where’s your proof now?’

‘What files?’ Dennisov asked.

‘Kyukov flayed a girl,’ Tom told him, ‘the daughter of a German scientist who moved to Moscow. Your father framed the son of an NKVD general in his place, and persuaded his comrades to help kill the boy. Then he blamed his murder on four German teenagers and hung them from a tree. You’ve seen the photographs.’

‘He didn’t kill her himself?’

‘Not that one.’

‘There were others?’

‘The girl at Patriarch’s Ponds,’ Tom said. ‘The dead children in the ruined house. Beziki’s sons. Who knows how many –’

‘Nobodies.’ The general’s voice was brutal, his eyes dark with hate. God knows, Tom thought, he’d been bad enough as a parent. He could barely imagine what it must have been like to have this man for a father. ‘And I don’t flay them. What do you think I am?’

‘Who shaved your head?’ Yelena looked at Alex, naked but for Tom’s shirt, hugging herself against the cold, her hair cropped to nothing.

Alex glanced at the general.

‘You,’ Yelena told Tom, ‘stand beside her.’

Tom didn’t recognize the woman Yelena had become.

Her face was harder, her cheekbones sharper. She stood, gripping the strange rifle as if she knew how to use it. One flare barrel, one shotgun, one that looked like it belonged on an SLR. Tom suddenly remembered where he’d seen it: propped in a corner of the commissar’s study. It had been Sveta’s husband’s.

‘So,’ said Yelena, when Tom had climbed up, ‘the truth. Do you really believe forgiveness of sins is possible?’

‘Yes,’ Tom replied, surprising himself.

‘Even for what I’m about to do?’

‘If you know you’re going to it,’ Tom said, ‘and you know it’s wrong, then you can stop yourself doing it.’

Even he knew it didn’t really work like that.

‘What if I can’t?’

‘Then you’re forgiven.’

‘Please,’ Alex said.

‘My mother was a nobody.’ Yelena said. ‘Please was a word she used often.’

‘Do it or don’t do it,’ her brother said.

Yelena looked at Alex and the English girl’s eyes widened.

Stepping down, she grabbed the general’s wrist, locking him in place. The entire world shifted. Out on the edge, beyond the burning huts, a wolf howled and Tom felt a shiver akin to shock.

Swivelling to face her father, Yelena fired.

At the noise, the wolf at the wire turned for the trees.

It was old, and its haunches hurt, and one hip was sore from a wound that wouldn’t heal. But habits learned young are hard to break, and here was where winter had taught it to find food. In its childhood, bodies from inside had been dumped beyond the wire, always pointing away, so the guards could say they died escaping. The wolf knew now, because it was old enough to know these things, that no one ever escaped.

Alex had a bath on the plane.

She hadn’t known planes could have baths. This one had a bath and not just any bath. It was an iron bath held up on legs that ended in lion’s claws. The plane also had a shower and two round basins side by side, in front of a real mirror, not one of those slabs of silvered glass you found screwed to the wall of lavatories in ordinary planes. She’d asked how long she could take. The Russian girl told her to take as long as she liked, and then glared at her brother and Major Tom from the embassy, daring them to disagree.

‘Whose plane is it?’

‘Everyone’s,’ her brother said. ‘It belongs to the people.’

He said it in such a way, and with such a twist to his lips, that Alex didn’t know if he was joking.

‘Go,’ the girl said.

Alex went and lay in hot water up to her chin for an hour.

She would have emptied the bath and run another if Major Fox hadn’t knocked to tell her they’d soon be landing. He said that Yelena, who had to be the Russian girl, had found her something to wear, since she thought Alex wouldn’t want to put back on the shirt she’d been wearing. She was right.

Alex wondered how Yelena knew.

Dismissing the thought, as she’d been dismissing all thoughts of what happened on the roof, Alex opened the bathroom door a little and found a neatly folded dressing gown outside. So that was how she came to land in Sebastopol, wearing a man’s silk dressing gown, heading down the steps from the plane with it flapping round her knees, while hard-eyed young men in smart uniforms stared straight ahead.

A long, low black car had been parked near the plane, with a chauffeur, or perhaps a soldier, waiting by the rear door. He opened it as Alex approached.

‘I thought we were going home?’ Alex said.

‘We have something to do first,’ Major Fox told her.

There was something affectionate in his gaze, as if he felt he knew Alex well, for all she didn’t really know him. He might be an uncle she rarely saw, an old friend of her mother’s, something like that. ‘What?’ she asked.

‘We have to go to a banquet. Are you going to be all right?’

‘You mean, can I manage to be quiet, not draw attention to myself, remember that I’m not meant to drink alcohol, and only speak when I’m spoken to?’

‘Something like that.’

Alex rolled her eyes and wondered why he grinned.

The meal was in full swing when Tom stepped back to let Alex and Yelena enter. Dennisov waved Tom on and shut the door behind them all. From the look of the tables, with their platters of food, picked-at plates and dozens of guests wearing expressions that suggested they’d long since reached capacity, the eating part of the evening was nearly over.

The smoke from candles mixed with that from cigars, and from logs and pine cones smouldering in a fireplace far more modern than Tom had expected. He thought of dachas as wooden. Official ones being perhaps a little grander than private ones.

This one, from what he could see of it on arriving, was made of sandstone, possibly concrete, the National Theatre in London, if someone had welded circular balconies to one edge so that they hung in space like parked flying saucers.

‘You all right?’ Tom asked.

‘I’m fine,’ Alex replied.

Tom realized it might not be the first time he’d asked.

She wore a simple white dress, with complicated embroidery across the bust, also in white so it could only be seen when light caught it. Her shaved head was hidden beneath a blue scarf, tied at the back.

‘A woman’s waving,’ she said.

Pushing back her chair, Wax Angel examined Dennisov crossly, nodded to Yelena and kissed Alex on both cheeks. ‘Such a commotion you’ve caused.’

When Alex blushed, Wax Angel laughed.

‘If you can’t cause a commotion at your age, when can you?’

She indicated the seat beside her and Alex sat, Dennisov taking the place on Wax Angel’s other side, leaving Yelena and Tom to take seats opposite. Food appeared instantly, helpings of lamb plov with rice, onions, carrots and spices. Looking up, Tom realized Dennisov’s plate was untouched.

‘I can’t see Sveta,’ he said.