Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

As Fabiana started to examine him, she realized with a shock that he had been shot, and that his shirt was wet. She wondered if he was going to die. Instantly she set to work, cutting his clothes off him and attending to the wound in the shoulder. She had no orderly so she had to do it all herself. She lifted his shoulder. There was no exit wound which meant the bullet was still within.

I am going to call him Patient Number One, Fabiana decided, Il Primo. ‘Whoever you are, whatever you’ve done,’ she said aloud to him, ‘you’re my new beginning, my rebirth, the first patient I have cared for on my own, and you are going to live.’

Benya was dreaming. He was in Kolyma on 22 June 1941, the day the Germans had invaded Russia. After he had finished work with Dr Kapto in the clinic, he found Deathless waiting for him.

‘The Boss wants you,’ said Deathless, who held his hands like trowels.

In Jaba’s barracks, most of the prisoners were lying exhausted in their bunks, peering down the aisle of the dormitory towards Jaba’s section where the Criminals held court, playing cards and boasting about heists and shootouts, girls and money. Benya noticed a new arrival on the bunk by the door, a dark boy smoking. Probably a transfer from a neighbouring Camp.

As usual, Jaba was shirtless, and playing cards with two females and another Criminal nicknamed ‘Poxy’ – for his scarred face. No wonder every man was almost falling off his bunk to watch this card game, thought Benya. Except for nurses, there were not meant to be women in a men’s Camp.

Opposite Jaba sat a slim woman whose skin was as dark as a gypsy. Her hair was jet black, her eyes kindled coals, and she radiated such an aura of darkness that it glowed. She was smoking a cigarette, pursing her sinewy lips as she inhaled. She examined her cards with total concentration, and she did not look up when Benya arrived.

‘Sit and watch,’ said Jaba. Benya sat on the edge of a bunk. He couldn’t take his eyes off the woman.

‘You know who that is?’ hissed Deathless in his ear. ‘The Atamansha!’

Everyone knew that the Atamansha was the Cossack boss of the neighbouring women’s Camp, which she ran just as Jaba ran this one. Ataman was the title of a Cossack general – but, as far as Benya knew, this woman was the first female chieftain. He thought her gypsyish looks were quite beautiful, and all the more so when she put down the cigarette and absent-mindedly ran her hand through the hair of the nurse Nyushka, who was sitting next to her.

‘She’s here for a card game?’ asked Benya.

‘She’s asking a favour,’ said Deathless, ‘and the Boss said he’d play for it.’

They were playing Camp poker with special rules. Twice they showed their cards and it seemed the Atamansha had won but Jaba, narrowing his eyes and ruffling his plumage of grey spiky hair, somehow raised the stakes and they played on.

‘Is that your storyteller, Jaba?’

It took Benya a moment to realize the Atamansha was suddenly looking at him.

‘He’s my teacher,’ said Jaba.

‘You’re the book-writer, the ink-shitter?’ She addressed him directly in such a strong Don accent that it sounded absurdly quaint.

‘Yes,’ said Benya.

‘Well then, storyteller, sit beside me,’ said the Atamansha. ‘Maybe your blue eyes will bring me luck.’

‘A cunning gambit, Atamansha,’ said Jaba, ‘but those belong to me.’

‘All right, throw in the peach,’ said the Atamansha. Nyushka looked down.

‘I didn’t know you liked peaches,’ said Jaba.

‘I like everything,’ replied the Atamansha.

Jaba gestured at Benya, who obediently sat next to her on the chair. Without looking at him again, she showed him her cards. It had been two years since he had been this close to a woman. His leg was close to her leg and he could smell her skin and feel the spicy warmth radiating from her. He took in her britches in their tight boots, her blue Zek shirt open at the neck, her skin dark like baked earth, and he amazed himself by imagining what it might be like to make love to her. He was certain that he could handle her. She offered him a cigarette and he took it. Deathless lit it with a smirk. When she moved, she let her hands brush him; as she smoked, she blew the blue smoke into his face; and Benya started to imagine how this very scenario in the Boss’s barracks could lead to his kissing her coarse lips, to his unclipping her britches and reaching for her thighs…

He was alive again, he realized suddenly. After his arrest and sentencing, he had no longer felt such things. He had been ground into Camp dust. I had become a eunuch, he thought, a neuter, a husk. He had lost all sexual desire. He had ceased to be Benya Golden. But now here it was again on the very day the war started.

‘Show your cards,’ said Jaba quietly. He did everything quietly and never raised his voice.

The Atamansha threw down her hand.

‘You win,’ Jaba said.

‘I collect,’ she said.

‘All right,’ replied Jaba, nodding at Deathless, who suddenly locked his arms around Poxy, who couldn’t move. Smiley grabbed his hand and, quickly, wielding a pair of wire-clippers, sliced off Poxy’s pinkie finger. Poxy howled and convulsed with the agony. Deathless released him and led him away. Smiley tossed the finger on to the table in front of the Atamansha. Benya jumped up in horror.

‘Finally,’ she said. ‘Now can I have what I came for?’

‘In return for a diamond,’ Jaba said.

‘What do you want to know?’

Jaba’s smile was dazzling when he wanted it to be. ‘Something about your friend.’

‘All right, Batono Jaba,’ and, using the Georgian for ‘Lord Jaba’, she whispered in his ear for a while.

‘Thank you Atamansha,’ said Jaba.

She got up. Jaba rose too. She turned back to Benya.

‘I have a feeling we’ll meet again,’ he said, surprising himself. The gangsters snorted at his impertinence.

‘I doubt it,’ replied the Atamansha, showing her teeth, one of them gold. ‘We break fresh ponies where I come from. Go back to your books!’

Jaba stood up and bowed, every bit the mock Georgian nobleman. Deathless led the way out, followed by Jaba. The Atamansha looked at Nyushka, held out her arm and Nyushka took it, eyes cast down like a bashful bride. Finally the Atamansha and Nyushka proceeded slowly down the aisle as if they were at a gypsy wedding.

‘You want to fuck the Atamansha?’ sneered Smiley, husky breath on Benya’s ear. ‘Careful! She wanted to play for your blue eyes but had to make do with Poxy’s finger.’

Benya swallowed hard, finally understanding what had been going on.

‘You know how she killed her lovers in Rostov?’ Smiley said. ‘She cut them while they fucked her, throat to groin, like you gut a fish.’

‘What was that she said about her friend and the diamond?’

‘She’s the mistress of Shpigelglas, the Zone Commandant, and a diamond is a priceless piece of information that can be used against someone.’

The Atamansha had reached the door – but she hesitated and then looked over at the young man on the last bunk. The new arrival.

‘Is it you, Mikhail Cherkin?’ she said.

The man looked up in surprise. ‘Yes, but I don’t think…’

‘No, we haven’t met,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But I hope you like your new home here?’ Before he could agree, she added, ‘Did you watch the game?’

‘Yes.’ He was sitting up now, nervously. ‘What were you playing for?’

She gave a piratical smile, a flash of gold. ‘You,’ she said.

Cherkin’s face was still swinging between uneasiness and bewilderment when Deathless lifted a board that was hanging on the wall by the door and in one unbroken movement of intense force smashed it on to the top of Cherkin’s head and removed it with the same gusto, hanging it back where it came from. It happened so fast that Benya had scarcely processed the popping sound, but he knew there was a long nail in the middle of the board. Cherkin, without altering his uncertain expression, raised his hands to his temples as if trying on a hat that did not quite fit, then two neat lines of blood began to run like treacle down his forehead. The men in the bunks stared for a moment and then started to look away as, very slowly, Cherkin toppled sideways on his bunk and began to twitch in his death throes.