Mark Blair - Stroika

‘You are good at retreats , General,’ said General Vdovin, breaking the silence.

Yuri counted to ten; losing his temper was just what Vdovin and his supporters wanted.

‘We have been over this, General. This is a political decision. At the moment it’s still a what if . Last time I looked, the Berlin Wall was still standing.’

‘We were never interested in Eastern European government support before,’ scoffed Volkov. He was shorter than Yuri, eagle-eyed and driven. As commander of the Western Group he was the most immediately affected. ‘It is the general secretary who is out of step. He needs to be better advised.’ Volkov meant that he should better advise him, or better still somebody else entirely.

‘I would remind you, General, that the economy is on the brink of collapse. Your soldiers have not even been paid for months.’

‘And whose fault is that?’ added Vdovin.

‘We start with the 2nd Guards Tank Army, followed by the 2nd and 8th Shock Armies,’ continued Yuri, ignoring Vdovin’s remark. He went round the table, eying each general in turn, not breaking contact until they said yes or grunted their assent. Volkov was last. He looked across the table at Vdovin, who had already signalled his agreement.

‘Agreed,’ he said finally. Volkov stood up abruptly and everyone clambered to their feet. The meeting broke up. Two minutes later, only Volkov and Yuri remained in the room.

‘Does it make you proud presiding over the collapse of an empire?’ Volkov said bitterly.

‘General, I don’t see it like that.’

‘Clearly not.’

Volkov opened the door and was gone.

Yuri sat down at his desk and rubbed his temples. The colonel general had told him it would be hard going; he wasn’t wrong. He was taking the lion’s share of the flak for both the general secretary and the general staff. He sensed Volkov and Vdovin were not about to give up that easily, despite their verbal assurances.

He stood up and walked over to the window. Drizzle lightly wetted rooftops and street lanterns. Five floors below, on Arbatskaya Square, next to a canvas-covered stall, a group of hippies tendered Afghan coats and roughly made leather bags to passers-by. Yuri laughed to himself – weren’t they twenty years too late? A seventies song he knew but couldn’t identify drifted upward, piecemeal and incomplete. He felt the sudden need for fresh air, to get out of the defence building he had been cooped up in for most of the day.

He lifted the papers off his desk, placed them in the drawer, locked it, and buzzed through to the outer office.

‘Olga, can you please call my car.’

He stood up, walked over to the coat stand and unhooked his raincoat. His hands went instinctively into his pockets to check for the apartment keys. They were where they should be. But there was something else too, something he had not expected. He pulled out a small folded piece of paper and studied it in the palm of his hand. He had no recollection of putting anything in his pocket. Maybe it was Natasha? She had put a love note in his pocket when he was in the shower. It brought back memories of the previous night. He must give her a call. Yuri walked over to the window and idly unfolded what he assumed must be a note.

In neat handwriting it read: TONIGHT 8.00 P.M. BARFLY, PUSHKINSKAYA PLOSHCHAD. There was no signature, nothing that would indicate who might have written it.

He wracked his brains. Who could have put it there and when? To have put it in his coat pocket inside the defence headquarters, they would have had to run the gauntlet of security and Olga, who was herself not to be underestimated in this. She had successfully guarded him from a myriad of unwelcome callers. It had to be someone with easy access to his office. He stood there a minute wondering whether to respond. He reckoned that rubbing a three-star general up the wrong way by inviting him on a pointless clandestine meeting was unlikely to improve their position in life. It could, of course, be some sort of trap. He looked at his watch. It was only seven fifteen and he could make it easily, but he would need to throw off whoever had been following him… if indeed he was being followed.

‘Tervaskaya,’ was all Yuri said to his driver. Ten minutes later they had slogged their way through heavy traffic to the front entrance of his apartment building. Acting as he did every day, he checked for messages before taking the lift to the seventh floor and his apartment. Quickly changing out of uniform, he donned jeans, an everyday jacket and silk scarf, which he wrapped loosely around his lower face, covering his mouth.

Ignoring the lift, he descended the emergency stairwell to the first floor and exited onto the landing. The corridor was empty. He followed it round to the rear of the building and an unmarked door, used in Stalinist times as a bolthole, and took a narrow staircase down to the ground. A janitor shifted bins ready for the morning collection.

Yuri walked up the long incline to the main street and continued for a couple of blocks before stepping off the kerb and holding out his hand. A car pulled up, a government employee out to make some extra money on his way home.

‘Pushkinskaya metro.’

The driver named a price. Yuri nodded and climbed in, ignoring attempts to engage him in small talk. The drizzle had thankfully stopped. Residents swept clean the entrance to their buildings as a construction brigade attended a burst water main.

‘Here’s Pushkinskaya.’ The driver pointed to a sign two hundred metres ahead. ‘Where do you want to be dropped?’

Yuri recognised Barfly on the opposite side less than one hundred metres away.

‘This will do fine.’

Outside, a photograph pinned to a cracked and broken glass frame displayed a poorly lit, smoke-filled interior. A girl, sidestepping puddles in her high heels, passed him and gingerly took the steps down to the basement entrance. He looked at his watch: five minutes before eight. He followed her down. A flat-nosed, shaven-headed bouncer blocked Yuri’s way.

‘I have to search you,’ he said bluntly. Yuri noticed he was wearing an old military jacket and heavy army boots. The tattoo of a claw crawled up his neck.

Yuri stood still while the bouncer patted him from head to foot. At least this way, Yuri thought, it would only be the bar staff that carried guns. The bouncer nodded; he was free to go.

A heavily made-up girl in a small cloakroom cubicle took his coat and handed him a ticket. He pocketed it, drew back the curtain and stepped into the bar. The photo outside did not do it a disservice. Cigarette smoke hung thick and pungent, draining what small light and oxygen there was in the room.

Negotiating low tables, Yuri made his way over to the bar, grabbed a stool and ordered a beer. It took a minute for his eyes to adjust. A woman, sitting at the far end of the bar, caught his eye, held it and smiled an invitation; around the room, men and women, both single or together, sat at small circular tables under outsized revolutionary posters that decorated the red-painted brick walls: a virile-looking man driving a sparkling new tractor in a sun-filled scape, his adoring wife looking on; a woman with her index finger at her zipped mouth; a man at dinner, his hand up, refusing a proffered glass of vodka. Yuri smiled; if only life were like art.

He looked at his watch again and wondered who he should be looking for: a man, a woman, someone he would recognise? He looked again at the woman at the bar. What was it that was so important that he be dragged out here? The bartender caught his eye and cast a look to the back of the room. A woman was signalling to him. Picking up his beer, he carried it back to her table.

‘May I join you,’ he said, standing over her. She was dyed blonde with thick smokey eye shadow and dark red lipstick. He didn’t recognise her at first. It took a few seconds for his brain to process her image, strip away her make-up. She was Volkov’s adjutant. Not unexpectedly, she looked entirely different out of uniform.