Jack Grimwood - Moskva

‘You go off to get yourself killed,’ Wax Angel said. ‘You take your sister instead of my granddaughter, your sister who has no training. And you expect Sveta to be here to greet you? Sveta refused to come.’

‘She should be here.’

‘Yes,’ Wax Angel said angrily, ‘she should. Instead she’s in Moscow, for all you know crying herself stupid because she believes the idiot she loves is dead.’

‘I’ll telephone her.’ Dennisov scraped back his chair.

The people at the tables nearby stilled and soldiers in smart greatcoats standing round the walls looked over. ‘Sit,’ Wax Angel said firmly.

Dennisov sat.

‘I’ve telephoned already. She hates you. I’m to make sure you know that.’

Into the silence that followed, Alex said, ‘Doesn’t Gorbachev have a dacha near Moscow?’ Yelena looked grateful.

‘A small one,’ said Wax Angel. ‘Two storeys with a green roof, tin cupolas and a terrace overlooking the Moskva. Too small for a dinner this size.’

‘You’ve been there?’ Alex asked.

‘Before it was his.’ Wax Angel squinted at the tables overflowing with drunken, increasingly noisy guests. ‘Still, I doubt that’s the real reason we’re here. The little dacha is where he goes to think, where he goes to feel safe. There are people here Gorbachev wouldn’t want through his door. There are people here the devil wouldn’t want.’ Reaching for her glass, she downed a shot and sighed in satisfaction as Stolichnaya hit her throat and she inhaled the fumes.

‘Don’t let me get drunk,’ she said.

‘You’re drunk already,’ said Alex, then looked worried in case she’d been rude.

‘That isn’t drunk,’ Dennisov said. ‘That’s barely started.’

Pushing aside her plate, Wax Angel reached into the middle of the table, snuffed out a white candle and removed it from its holder, smoke curling like a pig’s tail from the wick as she put it carefully in front of her.

‘You have a knife?’

She tested the blade of Tom’s lock knife against her palm, then cut away an inch from the top of the candle where the wax was still warm. Closing her eyes for a second, she opened them again and began carving with practised ease, curls of wax filling her plate like wood shavings as she released the figure from its prison.

The sword took a while to appear, then an upraised arm, followed by a woman’s head and shoulders, her flowing hair and her other arm, which pointed down. Her body came next, barely hidden beneath her robes. She leaned slightly forward, pitched on the edge of movement, the muscles of her legs tensed, one foot angled to the ground.

Feathered and intricate, her wings were the last things Wax Angel carved. They were tight to her back and on the edge of being unfurled, the carving being circumscribed by the shape and thickness of the stolen candle.

‘That,’ said Wax Angel, ‘is how she’s meant to look.’

Those seated at the top table looked across to see why Alex and Dennisov had started clapping, and the commissar caught Wax Angel’s eye across the room and smiled.

He’d been watching.

‘We’ll get you home tomorrow,’ Tom promised Alex.

‘Do my parents know?’

Tom wondered if Alex realized how she’d just referred to Anna and Sir Edward. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the commissar telephoned them earlier.’

‘How are they?’

‘I’m told your mother cried.’

Alex bit her lip, and Wax Angel lifted a freshly filled vodka from Dennisov’s fingers and put it in front of Alex, grinning when Dennisov opened his mouth to protest and Alex gasped as the alcohol hit her throat. ‘Have another,’ she suggested.

Tom shook his head and the old woman chuckled.

‘What are you, her father?’

‘She already has one of those.’

Alex looked across at him and there were tears in her eyes.

Their plates were taken away and sweetmeats were served. Tom imagined that they’d just skipped several courses, going from first to last and missing out those in the middle. He wasn’t upset by that, and from the look of them neither were the others, although Alex tore at a bread roll with the quiet savagery of someone who’d gone without food for too long. Looking up, she found Tom watching.

‘You all right?’ she asked.

Tom nodded. He was too.

‘Remember this,’ Wax Angel told the girl.

The old woman stared round the room with a quiet intensity, almost as if trying to fix in her memory who was here, where they sat and what they were wearing.

The top table was full of old men, with one slightly younger man in the middle. The President’s face had started appearing in newspapers in the West almost as frequently as it did in the Soviet Union. There were younger men at other tables. Men in uniform and men in suits. A few women. Not as many as Wax Angel would have liked, Tom suspected. Not as many as there should have been.

Alex said, ‘Are you expecting something to happen?’

Wax Angel wrapped her arm round Alex, and after a moment’s hesitation the girl leaned into her hug. ‘No,’ Wax Angel said, ‘I’m not. That’s the beauty of it. This is not the night Stalin fell ill. No one is expecting anything to happen at all.’

She raised her vodka glass.

‘We have your Englishman to thank for that.’

Sveta met them off their flight from Sebastopol, Dennisov walking straight into a slap so hard it echoed off the VIP section’s tiled walls.

‘How dare you not take me?’

Whatever he said in the fierce embrace that followed killed her fury, and when Sveta hugged Yelena in turn, it was more protective than anything else.

Wax Angel and the commissar simply smiled, turning their attention to Yelena when she said she wanted to go home. Sveta tried to insist that she travel with them, but Yelena was firm about taking the bus.

She intended to go food shopping before returning to the bar.

Wax Angel wished her luck with that.

Now Tom and Alex were in the back of a Zil, with Sveta up front and Dennisov stubbornly riding rearguard on a borrowed Ural behind. Their little cavalcade stopped twice. The first time at a Beryozka shop so Alex could buy matryoshka dolls for her mother, a carved wooden bear for her father, and a red scarf to hide her hair until it grew back. She was hoping to find one with a hammer and sickle in the corner.

Since Alex had no hard currency, Tom had to lend it to her. It was the kind of teenage lend where both sides knew the money was never coming back. Buying the presents had been his suggestion so that seemed entirely fair. And he was glad Alex had liked the idea, because he needed a few words with Sveta, and for that Alex needed to be out of the way.

‘Did you know what Dennisov intended?’

‘Who said he intended anything? My grandfather merely fixed the helicopter.’

‘And the strange gun?’

‘The commissar was shocked to find it missing.’

‘I bet… So, why didn’t he ever move against the general himself?’

He watched Sveta wonder if she should answer. ‘You realize,’ she said finally, ‘that General Dennisov died after a long battle against cancer fought with the bravery you’d expect from a Soviet hero? TASS is preparing a broadcast to announce his death. As soon as that’s done, Leningrad’s Channel 5 will start work on a documentary for broadcast in his adopted city… His funeral will be televised. Pravda will run an obituary.’

‘And London will block any of the Berlin reports that mention General Dennisov by name from being released under the forty-year rule.’

‘I have your word?’

‘Yes,’ Tom said, hoping that Caro’s father could deliver.