Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

The police made a perfunctory search of the premises around noon on the day they came. Nothing they might have seen would have aroused suspicion. I could see one of them through the keyhole. I could even smell his aftershave. That evening, I slipped out of the house for good. Moving there had been one of those haphazard decisions that we took in haste, but which coloured our whole subsequent lives. Lucius would have been born in the front room, but for a last-minute change of heart that saw Leonora heading via ambulance to St George’s. In that house, Leonora and I raised our children and made the billion mundane bargains out of which family life is constructed, arguing about curtains and bedtimes and whose turn it was to put out the recycling. Two years before, in the spare bedroom, we had made love for the last time before going out to dinner; hasty and almost perfunctory, the act still seemed somehow to hold the possibility of future closeness. Leonora straightened her skirt and smoothed the front of her blouse with both hands.

‘We could always have another child,’ I said.

She gave a wry laugh. We both knew that our resources and our relationship were too tenuous to support it.

Even now, the house was charged with an indefinable, heartbreaking scent that constantly brought to mind my children. And while I was in it, I could still pretend I had some kind of link to my old life.

I called Misha Bykov from a payphone the day I left the house.

He met me in Richmond Park, just inside the Sheen Gate, where two under-eleven teams of boys were playing rugby in hooped shirts.

By the time he arrived, I had been waiting for him on a bench for almost an hour. It was a bright but raw day. I watched him make his way on foot through the gate. He had on a huge overcoat but no hat and his cheeks were inflamed with the cold.

He didn’t acknowledge me, choosing to stand some distance away, smoking a cigarette, as though we had nothing to do with one another. I began by asking if he’d heard anything of Vera.

‘She’s in a psychiatric hospital in Chita.’

‘Chita? Where’s that?’

‘Siberia.’ He shook his head. ‘ Mnogo vody uteklo, ’ he said wearily. It’s one of those deceptively simple but dense expressions that’s characteristic of Russian. It literally means ‘a lot of water has flowed’ but carries the sense of belatedness and irreversible change. His face looked more rumpled and underslept than usual. I took it to mean that he’d concluded that our abortive resistance must come to an end.

‘I have a few things for you,’ he said.

It was money, which I accepted gratefully, and an A4 envelope of papers, which I opened in front of him.

Another grainy photocopied passport, this time of a man called Viktor Koryakin. He had thin, fair hair and was fuller in the face, but I recognised something in the furious intensity of his pale eyes, although for a moment I couldn’t remember where I’d seen them. His place and date of birth were given as Krasnodar, September 19th 1978. There were discharge papers from the army, and some police photographs of the same face, this time with a black eye and a bloodstained shirtfront; close-ups of the familiar tattoos.

‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘A roughneck from the Kuban. A real Cossack.’

I felt strangely empty. ‘Does he have children?’

‘I didn’t know him,’ said Misha.

‘What do I do?’

‘You have to live,’ he said. ‘We all do.’

I could hear shrill voices as one of the boys broke away for a try and the sound of the whistle as he touched the ball down to score.

‘There’s more,’ he said.

The envelope seemed empty, but when I turned it out, what looked like a small clear plastic dogtag dropped into the palm of my hand. It was a polygon about an inch and a half in diameter and roughly a quarter of an inch thick. There was a hole bored through the middle. On closer inspection, it was too heavy to be plastic, and there was a strange iridescence around its edges.

‘Quartz,’ he said.

‘Jewellery?’

‘Your klyuchka. ’

I knew the word — it’s the diminutive of klyuch , which means ‘key’ in Russian, in a range of senses including a key to a door, a musical key and the key to a cipher. It can also mean a clue, and a spring or source of water.

‘To what?’

‘To you,’ he said. ‘It’s your code. The one Vera wrote.’

‘Like a disc?’

‘That kind of thing.’

I turned it over in my hand: my little key, my source, my secret clue. It glittered prettily where the light struck it, magnifying the weak October sun into deep yellow and blue flashes. It was the irreducible content of me, thirty-nine years of my life captured on a three-centimetre disc of quartz. ‘There’s not much to me,’ I said.

‘So it turns out.’

I put it in my pocket. ‘I was attacked in the hospital. The man had a tattoo like mine. Do you think he was a mankurt?’

He nodded.

‘But who was the original?’

Perhaps because he couldn’t shake himself free of the assumption that I was mentally defective, perhaps because Russian wasn’t my first language, he addressed me as though I was a child: slowly and with explanatory hand gestures.

‘No original. There are two variants. Zachot and pyaterka. You’re a pyaterka. ’

‘And Jack?’

‘Also a pyaterka. ’

‘What’s the difference?’

‘ Soznaniye. ’ He enunciated each of the four syllables as he tapped the side of his head. Consciousness. ‘Vera only works with pyaterki, ’ he added with a note of pride in his voice.

‘ Works? ’ I picked him up on his use of the tense.

‘Of course. The others sew mailbags, Vera makes mankurts. No one else can do what she does. They’ll keep her there until she dies, or until I get her out.’

‘You might die trying.’

He smiled ruefully at me and the sun flashed on his gold bridgework. ‘I’ve done terrible things in this life, Nikolai. Terrible things.’ He turned away and narrowed his eyes at the horizon, as though contemplating his past enormities. ‘Yet somehow, I didn’t feel I was a bad person. Do you understand? When Vera told me what they were doing, I understood it was wrong and I understood that God was giving me a chance to make up for my old life. He asked and I obeyed. That’s how it was.’ Listening to him, I understood that both priests and criminals can be men of straightforward morality.

A sharp whistle ended the game. There was a smattering of applause from the handful of watching parents. The boys began filing off the pitch. They looked tiny and knock-kneed.

‘You’re not worried about betraying Sinan?’

He waved his hand in disdain. ‘No way, he’s a moron’ — the Russian word literally means ‘radish’. ‘Sinan’s not someone to worry about. There are some serious people in the upward chain of command, but not him.’

That phrase that sounds so un-Misha-like, upward chain of command, is the best I can do with the evocative noun he used: vertikal’ .

‘Are there many?’

He finished his cigarette. ‘Enough to keep me busy,’ he said. He patted me on the shoulder and got up. ‘Time to go.’

‘One thing,’ I said. ‘Do you know where Hunter is?’

‘I can find out,’ he said. ‘But after that …’ He raised his forefinger to his lips. I understood. It would be our last communication.

‘What will you do?’ I asked.

He winked at me. ‘ Men’she znaesh’, luchshe spish’. ’

The less you know, the better you sleep.

He turned and walked away.