Stephan Collishaw - Amber

He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray, twisting it around absently, grinding it into the ash. He leant a little closer to me.

‘What happened to us, Antoshka? What happened?’

I shook my head.

He laughed. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I even had this crazy idea Liuba would come and live with me. A fisherman’s wife. It was something we daydreamt about, idly, when we were kids.’

He paused to pour himself another drink. The sardonic smile slipped from his face as he knocked it back, wincing.

‘When I got back from Afghanistan, I was so fucked up…’ His voice trailed away. I gazed across the table at him, at the wreck of his body, already an old man’s, crumbling away from the sagging structure of his bones.

‘I went to see her, you know,’ he said.

‘Liuba?’

‘It was a stupid thing to do. I wasn’t fit to see anybody. I had to have a few drinks to get up the courage. She was married. Some university prick that never had to do his national service. They called the police. Can you believe that? Liuba called the fucking police.’ I could see the hurt still in his eyes.

‘That was just before I went to Kaliningrad.’

Not knowing what to say, I allowed a few moments’ silence before I said, ‘Vassily died.’

Kolya looked up. A range of emotions seemed to flicker across his face. Sitting back, he poured himself another drink.

‘Well, here’s to Vassily,’ he said bitterly.

He emptied the glass and slammed it back down on the table. For a few moments he gazed at it, his face dark with rancour.

‘You know, don’t you, that Vassily, Kirov and I smuggled jewellery, among other things, out of Afghanistan,’ he went on. ‘We stuffed the goods into the coffins, flew them back on the black tulips. When the stuff got to Moscow it was sold and the money was shared between us. It didn’t come to that much.’ He flicked his arm ruefully. ‘Most of the money I made went in here.’ His shirtsleeves were buttoned down at his wrists.

‘Vassily mentioned one piece to me,’ I said. ‘A bracelet.’

‘The bracelet?’ Kolya paused and gazed at me malevolently. ‘It must have been worth a small fortune. We got it in Ghazis, but the whole thing went disastrously wrong. Kirov and I ended up in prison, “complicity in the sale of Soviet supplies to the enemy”. When I got back to Vilnius I went to see Vassily but he would not talk about the bracelet. I was angry; I needed the money. Like I said, I was in a state at that time and perhaps I said some stuff I shouldn’t have. Vassily was furious. In the end he gave me some money and warned me to stay away. He threatened to kill me if I went anywhere near you.’

‘Vassily threatened to kill you?’ I said incredulously.

Kolya nodded aggressively, as if challenging me to disbelieve him. ‘I suppose Zinotis had already sold the bracelet for him,’ he added.

‘Zinotis?’ I said, sitting up. ‘What does Zinotis have to do with it?’

‘Zinotis was our contact here. He sold the stuff once we got it out of Afghanistan. He knew the market, he had the contacts. It meant a four-way split, and that meant less money for each of us, but Zinotis was always going to get a better price and so it was worthwhile having him in on it.’

‘You’re telling me,’ I said, stunned, ‘that Zinotis knew about the bracelet?’

Kolya nodded. He rubbed his face and poured himself a fourth large vodka. ‘I have no doubt about it,’ he said. ‘How else would Vassily sell the bracelet? Zinotis sold all of the stuff we smuggled. To sell things like that you have to know private collectors. You can’t just take it down to the local market.’

My mind reeled. I thought about the way Zinotis had behaved, how he had been interested in seeing the bracelet. How he had kept turning up, digging for information.

‘I talked to Zinotis about the bracelet,’ I said to Kolya. ‘Yesterday. Today. He denied all knowledge of it. He didn’t seem to remember you.’

Kolya laughed. ‘He’s a bastard. You should be careful, he will double-cross you at the first opportunity.’

‘I told Zinotis I was coming to see you,’ I said, Kolya’s revelation reverberating around my head, rearranging the events of the previous couple of days.

Kolya looked at me, his eyes dark and sunken, his forehead creased. For one moment he reminded me of the serious boy I had met in the garden of the children’s home just over twenty years before.

‘Why were you talking to Zinotis?’ he asked.

‘Vassily wanted me to find you. I thought Zinotis might know where you were.’

Kolya chuckled darkly. ‘Not if I can help it. He is too close to Kirov. It was Kirov who introduced us to him in the first place; they had been involved in some business together in the early eighties. Drugs from Afghanistan. Zinotis plays up his respectable image as a university professor, but he’s more crooked than a politician. When Kirov is finally released from prison, Zinotis will be the first person he contacts.’

‘But he has been,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Kirov came to see me a couple of days ago,’ I told him.

Kolya’s face wrinkled, perplexed. He glanced across at me, his watery eyes examining me.

‘I was in my workshop when he burst in,’ I said.

Kolya got up. He paced across to the sink, spat in it, then turned back to look at me.

‘What are you talking about?’

His breathing was laboured, I noticed, and fine beads of perspiration had broken out across the top of his lip, glistening among the bristles.

‘He’s looking for you. For the bracelet. He came to the workshop and threatened me.’

Kolya slumped back into his chair. ‘Well, tovarich , you really are the bearer of good tidings today.’ He ran a hand across his face, and when he looked at me his eyes were alight with weary fury.

‘I had no desire to get mixed up in this,’ I said, angrily.

‘When Kirov and I were put away,’ Kolya said, ‘in the Pol-e-Tcharkhi, Kirov tried to kill me. He blamed me for him getting caught. There were fights in there continually, murders happened all the time.’ Kolya pulled up his shirt, revealing an ugly scar that ripped up from his belly to his chest. ‘He failed, though. He was transferred to a maximum-security prison in Russia and had five more years added to his sentence.’

‘I told Vassily I wasn’t interested in the bracelet,’ I said. ‘He insisted on sending me after you. “Find Kolya,” he told me, “he will tell you about what happened.” I shouldn’t have listened to him. Tanya pressed me.’

‘Vassily wanted me to tell you what happened?’

I pulled the letter Vassily had given me from my pocket, unfolded it and pushed it across the table to him. Picking it up, he gazed at it for some moments before letting it fall back on to the table. He looked at me over the top of his glass.

‘How do you come to have this?’ he asked.

‘Vassily gave it to me before he went into hospital. Before he died he made me promise to find you. He told me there was a story about the bracelet you must tell me. I have had enough of thinking about those years, but it seemed important to Vassily that I know.’ I turned over the letter and indicated Vassily’s scrawled instructions in pencil across the back of it. ‘He wrote here how you can find the bracelet. He decided after all that you should have it, if you told me the story of how he came to get it.’

Kolya picked up the letter again and examined the writing.

‘You mean to say,’ he said, ‘it’s written here where the bracelet is?’

I nodded. ‘Vassily never sold it. He buried it. He wanted to forget about it◦– the whole thing, the bracelet, what had happened. But he couldn’t. It haunted him right up to his death.’