Peter Higgins - Truth and Fear

The Chaika heaved and dipped, her hull moaning with the low surge of her engine. Khyrbysk threaded his way across the treacherous deck and climbed the companionway. Captain Baburin was waiting up on the platform outside the wheelhouse.

‘There is low pressure coming in, Yakov Arkadyevich,’ said Baburin. ‘Then it will be cold enough for you, I think.’ In the yellow light from the wheelhouse his heavy black beard and the folds of his greatcoat and cap glittered with frost.

‘Is she there?’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Can you see her yet?’

Baburin shrugged towards the starboard bow.

‘She’s there,’ he said. ‘Exactly where she should be. We’ll come up with her soon enough.’

Khyrbysk peered in the same direction. Fog and black water were emerging out of the night. The glimmer of scattered pieces of ice.

‘I can’t see anything,’ he said.

‘She is coming,’ said Baburin.

Khyrbysk waited, leaning on the rail, smoking and watching the grey dawn seep out of the fog and the sea. The day came up empty and sunless. Fog blanked out distance and brought the horizon near. Coal-black swells rose, marbled with foam, and surged forward, shouldering the Chaika ’s prow upwards. She heaved and dipped. Rafts of sea-ice scraped against her hull. Every so often she hit a larger piece and shuddered. This was the grey zone: the crew of the Chaika might see the sun once or twice in three months. If they were lucky. Khyrbysk felt an involuntary surge of excitement. Was he himself not the igniter of a thousand suns?

‘There!’ shouted Baburin from the wheelhouse, pointing. Khyrbysk could just about make out a wedge of darker grey in the fog, a triangle embedded in black water. The triangle loomed larger and resolved itself into a head-on view of the factory ship Musk Ox steaming towards them, twin stacks brimming dark heavy smoke. The blunted prow and swollen skirts of an icebreaker.

Ten minutes, and Baburin had swung the Chaika right in under the lee of the factory ship. The Musk Ox ’s huge hull towered overhead, a sheer and salt-scoured cliff of bleeding rust, battered and dented from twenty years of unloading trawlers in bad weather. Khyrbysk stared down into the narrow channel between the two vessels. The water was so cold it had a thick, sluggish sheen, laced with soft congealing slushice. A shout from above told him the Musk Ox ’s side crane was ready.

The transport cage was descending, swinging gently from its cable, four tyres fixed to the underside to soften the landing. In the cage, Kolya Blegvad rested one gloved hand on the rectangular wooden crate that stood on its end beside him, taller than he was, and with the other he kept a tight grip on the cable chain. A crewman on the Chaika leaned out with a gaff to guide the cage in.

Khyrbysk went to find Zakopan, the Chaika ’s mate.

‘I want the box in my cabin,’ he told him. ‘And quickly. The machinery is delicate. It will not tolerate the cold on the deck.’

In Khyrbysk’s overheated cabin, the crate took up all the space between his bunk and the pale green bulkhead. Khyrbysk locked the door, drew the curtain across the porthole and lit the oil lamp. From the same match he lit another Chernomor. Kolya Blegvad watched him with clever soft brown eyes.

‘You came to meet me, Yakov,’ he said. ‘I am touched.’

‘Were there any difficulties?’ said Khyrbysk.

‘With transit papers signed by Dukhonin himself? No. How could there be? Our friend in Mirgorod was as good as his word.’

‘I want to see it,’ said Khyrbysk. He produced a crowbar.

‘Now?’

‘Now,’ said Khyrbysk. ‘Yes. Now.’

He prised off the lid. Inside the crate was thirty million roubles in used notes of miscellaneous denomination.

In Levrovskaya Square the gendarmes drew their revolvers and moved towards Lom and Maroussia. Lom considered the position. All the angles. Staying calm, staying relaxed. Assess and evaluate. Think and plan. Like he’d been trained to do. It took him a second. Maybe a second and a half.

The misting rain softened edges and blurred distances. He felt in his face and across his shoulders the weight of massive slabs of high cold air sliding in off the sea. The temperature was dropping. Freezing cold snagged at the back of his throat and in his nose. His visible breath flickered. Tiny vanishing ghosts. Stone slabs slick and slippery underfoot. The Marinsky-Voksal Terminus was a double row of tram stops, low raised platforms under wrought-iron canopies. Tramcars were pulled up at three of them, including the one they’d arrived at, and waiting passengers crowded at the other three. Beyond the terminus, Marinsky Square was a grumbling tangle of traffic, street sellers and pedestrians.

Lom wasn’t too worried about the four gendarmes pressed in close around them. Gendarmes, with their uniforms of thick green serge, their shiny peaked caps, polished leather belts and buttoned-down holsters, were street police: efficient enough at traffic and checkpoints and petty crime, but not used to serious trouble. They carried 7.62mm Vagants: heavy service revolvers, the seven-cartridge cylinder unconverted single-action version. Lom had carried a Vagant himself for three years and he’d never liked it: loud and clumsy, with a wild kick, a Vagant made a nasty mess at close range, but it was hopelessly inaccurate over more than ten yards.

These four weren’t the problem. The problem was the other four man patrols at the other five tram halts and the VKBD truck pulled up at the kerb twenty yards away, two men in the cab and an unknown number in the back. Shit. They shouldn’t have stayed on the tram till the end of the line. They should have got off at some suburban stop and walked in. He’d made a mistake. The only thing now was to get out of Marinsky Square as quickly as possible with the minimum number of police in tow. Maroussia had seen that quicker than he had. Second mistake of the day. Wake up. This is serious.

Maroussia was standing silent, upright and fierce, waiting while the gendarmes briefly debated their next move. The one who’d spotted them wanted to take them across to the VKBD truck, but the corporal vetoed it.

‘I’m calling it in myself. We’ll get no thanks from Vryushin if the VKBD gets credit for this. Take them across to the section office. Quickly, no fuss, before anyone notices what’s going on. Move. Now.’

They split into pairs, two walking ahead with Maroussia between them, the corporal and the other one following with Lom. They didn’t wait to search him. Traffic cops.

But the corporal stayed ten feet behind him with his Vagant aimed at the small of Lom’s back. It was efficient enough. Lom might have got away, perhaps, but he couldn’t see a way to take Maroussia with him, so for the moment he rode with it. Things could have been worse. Perhaps.

Something else nagged at him. He couldn’t shake a small insistent pressure at the back of his neck. The familiar feeling that he was being watched.

Two floors above the street on the other side of Marinsky Square, Antoninu Florian crouched on the sill of a bricked-up window, enfolded by scarves of rain-mist drifting down off the roof slates. He licked the living moisture from his upper lip and savoured it on his tongue, sharing with it the city, the engine fumes and sweat and the dark strong silt-green surge of the living River Mir. The mist tasted of fires not yet burning and blood not yet spilled, traces of the passing touch of the living angel in the forest. But there was also the bright sharp resinous hint of something good, scents of earth and green currents stirring: all morning Florian had been following the trail of it, and now with yellow-flecked eyes he watched the woman who mattered walking between policemen. And he watched the man who was with her. He gripped them with the teeth of his gaze, sifting their particular scents out of the city tumult.