Gerald Seymour - Beyond Recall

His father had phoned him. Not a happy call. Cold, clipped, demanding an explanation why a roof had not been supplied to a coming man who had the opportunity to exploit mineral and oil deposits. He had blustered, his father had been incisive in his criticism. The situation with the Jew was to be rectified as soon as he returned to Moscow – not a matter of debate. He would sleep badly again that night. His assistant had prepared digests of ongoing cases, investigations that he had worked on, and the following day he would meet his successor and be shot of his responsibilities.

He stared at the desk, then at the empty screen, then at the closed door – and could not forget what he had seen, what he had done. No one in the headquarters building would miss him when he was gone, and the loneliness crushed him.

He had sagged off the sofa bed, and dropped down on to the rug beside it, and his elbow hit a bottle and toppled it… another day had started in the life of the woken sleeper.

The apartment was quiet. Next door, through a thin wall, music played, but the kids had gone for the day and had switched off the radios and the TV, and he had not heard them when they had come out of the one bedroom, his bedroom, and taken any food that was in the old refrigerator. They had enough money, because one was a thief and the other was a whore and both were criminals, but they had not bought a new or even a reconditioned refrigerator. He lived from the scraps they gave him, and most of his money went on cheap booze. He was thin and gaunt, and had dreamed of being even thinner and even more drawn in the face and with his skin hanging off his bones. In his dream, he was shuffling in a line of other zeks , wearing the prisoners’ flimsy uniform, near starved, and coughing half his guts up and labelled as a man who had betrayed his country.

He cared little for his son and cared less for his son’s girl. His wife was long gone, had given birth to the one child – named Timofey which meant ‘Honouring a God’ – and had left him to bring up the brat. And his sisters had gone. Anyone with a brain left Murmansk. He remained, and a few of his drinking partners; he loved them but had never told them, never spoken of a bank account abroad or of a codeword, Matchless . He feared that he might reveal his secret when drunk, pissing against a wall beside them… He would go to a prison camp for the rest of his days if he were caught as an enemy of the state, would rot there, and die there. He loathed his son, but could not drink without the money his son gave him. Loathed the girl who some days would come out of the bedroom – naked – and parade in front of him as he lay on the sofa bed, flaunting her tits and her arse, hated her. He did not wash. Did not eat, and had tipped over the bottle and its contents had slopped on the rug.

On television they showed films of FSB men and women when they charged out from the shadows and surprised traitors, handcuffed them and bundled them into vehicles. The television showed films of traitors in the courts, in a cage and facing justice. The films made it clear that the FSB always caught the spies, the traitors. It was on the television.

He would report the treachery. He would save himself. He would go into town, to the Prospekt, would find an officer, would tell him of the Italian’s visit, would stress his own loyalty – would not go to a penal colony up in the tundra, and would be rewarded, and would have drink – and would get back his own bed. He dressed in what he had worn most of the week and drained what was left in his overturned bottle. He would save himself.

Down by the Stroitel stadium, where they played ice hockey, junior league matches, the kids waited.

In Timofey’s life and in Natacha’s, going down to the stadium and waiting there was as dangerous a time as any. Freedom on a knife-edge because it was the one occasion when they were not in charge; they were there because they were told to be. The stadium, for a reason that neither could explain, was the location chosen by the Chechen boys from St Petersburg who drove up to Murmansk with fresh supplies: they had the best product. They were reliable, their prices were consistent, they were careful with their security. Wild and small and swarthy and from the Caucusus, their cruelty and brutality were unmatched. It was said that even the gangs in St Petersburg and Moscow were nervous of the Chechens. They waited.

Time drifted. The product that the Chechens brought to Murmansk was the best on the market. Timofey and Natacha had their regular customers. Never a complaint about the quality of the cut, never an accusation that the weed was augmented with fine sawdust, domestic flour or dried grass cuttings. If the Chechens in their large black van with privacy windows were late then the kids did not complain. To insult the travelling suppliers, or to antagonise them, would lead to bad consequences. Only a lunatic would trifle with the Chechens. It was the world in which they lived, but in the slow build-up to sex the night before, while the old idiot grunted and heaved and cursed in the living-room and failed to sleep, they had murmured what they would do with the money lodged in the foreign bank account, and that would be increased as a reward for the services they would provide as ‘sleepers’. They considered Red Sea resorts, the Italian coast or the Costas. Timofey carried a thick wad of notes in his hip pocket, she had more in her shoulder-bag. This was more important than where they had pledged to be later in the day; they were in place and with the money, looking out for the arrival of the Chechens, and also for the police.

They sat in the Fiat 500 – and smoked and talked and she nuzzled his neck and his hand lay on her thigh, and they kept a look on the mirror and the road behind the parking area. Maybe, Natacha whispered, there would be an opportunity, later, to get new wheels, something bigger and more comfortable than the Fiat. They had only each other, no one else cared a pinch for them. His father was a drunk and… her father was dead and in a shameful suicide’s grave.

She seldom told the story of how the death of the Kursk had killed her own father, safe on dry land when the explosion had ripped the submarine apart. He had been in the arms of his girl and had not set an alarm, had been in the warmth of a bed when the crew had stumbled from the apartments in the closed naval town of Vidyaevo on an August morning and gone to the buses that would take them to the quay where the submarine was moored. Some vessel. The height of the fourth storey of the building in which she now lived with Timofey, and as long as two football pitches, and they had sailed early with their Shipwreck and Starfish and Stallion missiles to exercise out in the Barents as if the enemy – NATO forces – were targets. First they would make an attack using a torpedo that weighed five tonnes and which was powered by hydrogen peroxide H2 02 propellant… She knew every detail of what had happened. At the moment her father had been stretching, yawning, considering the brilliance of the fuck he had enjoyed, that torpedo had exploded. The Kursk had gone down, its hull broken open. Her father, and his girl – who would be Natacha’s mother – did not learn of the Kursk ’s loss for several hours. He would have pleaded influenza, and there were no telephones for the use of junior crew so he could not call in sick. Her father, after the persistence of the rumours sweeping the garrison town, had realised all his friends, colleagues, the boys with whom he laughed, joked, drank, were dead. He lived because he screwed this girl. He had taken a length of rope and had gone to the edge of the perimeter and had hanged himself. Natacha was a survivor of a sort, and managed, because of Timofey, to stay strong. And, that morning, if they were impatient, if they bugged out because the contact was late, then they would never again have the chance to trade with the Chechens, and might pay a high price for their disrespect – so they waited.