Cold (15 page)

‘Suicide? Suicide, you say?’ Ludmilla spat on the floor. ‘In 1933 the same scum came here. People were starving. My father just told the truth, but they took him away and we never saw or heard from him ever again. In the fifties, after that scum Stalin died, they told us he’d passed away in a camp, somewhere in Siberia. So, the scum are still with us. What they did to him down there’ – she gestured towards the half-burnt shack down the lane – ‘it’s wrong. I’m an old lady, I can’t do nothing about it, but you, you can do something.’

‘They’ll kill me stone dead. I’m just a simple plod. If I don’t do exactly as I’m told, it will not be good for me.’

‘They were big shots, a fancy car. NKVD, whatever you call them these days. Another drop?’

Oblamov sank the hooch and held out his teacup for a refill. Ludmilla poured him a third cup and sat down in front of him.

‘I took down their number plate. Do you want to know it?’

‘Mother, these people, they eat folk like us and spit us out like cherry pips. If I write a report, the truth, whoever did this will come and find me and kill me, as sure as snow is snow.’

By way of answer Ludmilla opened the door to her woodburning stove and threw a fresh birch log onto the fire. She kept the door open, studying the flames as they licked the wood. The heat found the sap, and the wood crackled in the silence between the two of them.

‘So,’ the old lady said, ‘they kill a poor man something horrible, and us Russians, we do nothing. Just like it’s always been. And this talk of democracy, that’s just pig shit, yes?’

She bent down and started fiddling with the carpet beneath her feet. She peeled the carpet back and exposed an old wooden plank, broken in two. She put one half to the side and leaned down and came out with an old Leica camera.

‘My brother took this off a German corpse in Stalingrad. Then he drank himself to death. Everything he’d seen, he couldn’t live with it. Nobody’s touched it since the seventies but there’s still some film in it.’

‘Mother, are you listening? I can’t put a photograph in my suicide report.’

‘I’m not asking you to be a martyr. You take a photograph of that poor man.’

‘Why, mother, why?’

‘To tell the truth about what happened here. Too many lies have been told down the years. I’m sick of them. Let’s try and make history honest.’

Oblamov looked around him with a sardonic expression. ‘Where are we? Is this some high and mighty university?’

‘All I ask is that you take a photograph of that poor man. I’ll keep it safe and I won’t blab. If someone good comes looking for it, then they can have it.’

Oblamov considered that idea in an uncomfortable silence for a time.

‘Well, then’ – the skin on Ludmilla’s hand clutching the Leica was cobwebbed with veins – ‘are you going to take the photograph or not?’

This old lady
, Oblamov thought,
she will be the death of me
.

He cursed himself for his own foolishness, cursed her for conning him into doing this. Halfway down the lane, he all but stopped and turned back. Thing is, he’d lived long enough to know something: that he wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if he did nothing, if he went along with their big, stinking lie.
Suicide
, the bosses said. Screw them. He could take a few photos, send them to his daughter, and then maybe nothing would happen. But at least he would have tried to do something for the poor man.

He removed the blanket he’d placed on the corpse, took out the old Leica and framed the shot. Not enough light. He walked through the kitchen, sidestepping the thing, and pushed open the back door. It was overcast outside, but even so enough daylight flooded in. A wide shot, a medium shot, then close-ups. The stench rose in his nostrils until he almost gagged, but he kept on shooting until the roll of film no longer turned.

The soul of Mother Russia
, he thought to himself as he climbed back up the lane, the darkening sky to the west.
Not quite dead yet
.

LONDON

N
aked apart from his underpants, blindfolded, Joe shivered on a hard chair, his arms locked behind his back by metal handcuffs that bit into his wrists, his feet tied together somehow, his chest pounding. He had never felt so afraid in all his life. And yet some part of his brain was still working coolly, noting the weight of sodium glow coming through the blindfold, so it must be night and he must still be in London or a city, not the countryside, near somewhere with lots of windows, maybe an attic.

They’d killed three people in the blink of an eye. But they’d taken him alive. What for? His cover story was simple: he was a nobody, a special educational needs teacher, for God’s sake. He had nothing and knew nothing. If they knew his true identity, that was a different matter. But the IRA wanted him dead. So why kill the others but leave him alive?

Footsteps working their way towards him, up some stairs. Heavy tread. Two, three men. Maybe a fourth, he couldn’t be sure. The sound of the door opening. The smell of expensive perfume mixed with the dried blood in his nose. He sensed somebody behind him. A man’s voice, soft but commanding, from farther away. He was speaking in a language Joe didn’t recognise. A chair scraping on wood. The man’s voice again. A stillness in the air.

Someone was by his feet. He smelt the perfume clearly now: subtle, feminine, expensive. The next thing was utterly unexpected. A woman’s fingers started massaging his toes, one by one, taking her time.

It was shockingly erotic. He couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t control it, his penis was hardening. Please, please, God no . . . Soft fingertips trailed up the inside of his legs, floated across his groin, away and back, away and back. He moaned, softly, then bit his tongue. At another time, the sensation would have been entirely gratifying, but the metal biting into his wrists was a sharp reminder that he was someone else’s sex toy.

He heard her shuffle in front of him, one hand resting lightly on his navel, then he felt her hair brush against his cheek, her lips press against his ear. A finger touched the tip of his penis through the thin cotton of his underpants. A woman’s voice, foreign accented, very soft: ‘Where is he?’

‘What?’ Joe’s voice was normally deep but the tension in him did something weird to his larynx, making him sound like a twelve-year-old choirboy.

‘Where is he?’ The same question breathed into his ear. Her English was beautifully enunciated – the product of expensive tutors or a great teacher somewhere – but not native British, not Irish, not American. Two fingers now, lightly holding the tip of his penis. Again: ‘Where is he?’ This time there was the tiniest, playful squeeze, the lightest of pressures on his penis and yet he found it, handcuffed and tied as he was, utterly terrifying.

‘Where’s who?’

‘Where is the dog?’

‘I have no idea.’

This was the wrong answer. Her grip on his penis tightened. In any other context, it would have made him writhe with pleasure. But like this? Joe remembered that Vanessa had once told him that some ancient bloke – Sophocles, Socrates, one of those chaps – had said that the beauty of turning seventy was that your libido failed, and that it was like being unchained from a monster.
Count me in
, he thought, as she yanked down his underpants and let them fall by his ankles. Her fingers toyed with him, up and down his shaft, then came to a rest, cupping his testicles.

‘What have you done with the dog?’ The pressure on his testicles grew. Infuriatingly, he could feel his penis throb with delight. He couldn’t control himself.

‘I got to Greenwich, one of your creepy twins gave me some knockout potion. I haven’t seen Reilly since.’

‘The dog ran away. So he must have run back to you.’

‘No, he didn’t.’

The man called out something. Not so far away, he heard what sounded like a gas hob being ignited. It didn’t sound good. She said something in the foreign language, and then he felt her mouth against his ear: ‘Please tell me, tell me where the dog is. Or else he will hurt you.’

‘I don’t know.’

She squeezed his balls so tightly he gasped out loud.

‘Listen, I haven’t got him.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

She pressed her lips to his ear even closer this time, whispering so quietly he could barely hear her: ‘The dog vanished. They think you must have got him back.’

‘No, I haven’t got him.’

The man said something. Her fingers were back on his penis again, coiling around the tip.

‘What is this? What are you doing to me? I’m not a sodding swinger.’

‘Tell me where the dog is.’

There was a spitting, popping noise in the room he couldn’t work out. And a smell, again something familiar, but he couldn’t think straight.

‘Where’s the dog?’

‘Listen, I’ve told you,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where he is.’ Joe, despite his fear, couldn’t bear the curved logic, as round and smooth and dumb as a billiard ball. ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know!’ He shouted out the last of these words.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, and he felt her fingers run along the edge of his jaw, then sensed her moving away. A chair scraped on the floor and he heard heavy, male breathing, very close.

‘Where is dog?’ A man’s voice, distant, cold, foreign.

‘I’ve told you, I don’t know.’

The pain, when it came, was indescribable. A blow of excruciating force – a kick from a heavy boot, perhaps, directly onto his testicles. He howled with agony, roaring with pain, until he felt hands pressing some horrible plastic thing over his face. Instantly, his lungs began straining, his oxygen supply choked. The thing stank foully of old plastic. They must have stuck black tape over the mask’s goggles because no light penetrated. Lightless, the airways to his nose and mouth were constricted, too. He fought hard not to vomit. He couldn’t control his panic.

Again, the man’s voice, this time muffled, as if from another world: ‘Where is dog?’

Joe gasped through the fierce mist of pain. ‘Listen, I’m a special needs teacher. I’ve got nothing, I dunno much. I have no idea who you are or what you want but you’ve got the wrong fucking person. My dog, he’s a mongrel. He cost a tenner. We got him from a tinker in Ireland.’

His last words were lost in a scream of agony as another kick landed on his testicles. The man was shouting now.

‘Where is dog?’

Joe had no answer, only fear. He could feel the vomit curdling in his throat; his second, plastic skin encased him. If he couldn’t get this mask thing off, he would suffocate.

‘Where is dog?’

Joe stayed silent. He suspected where Reilly might be. Somehow he could have made it back to South London – God alone knows how – and found the empty flat. Then he might have jumped over the fence and ended up with the old lady who lived in the house at the end of Joe’s garden, the one who thought Joe was starving Reilly. It was a secret Joe intended to keep. He was good at keeping secrets.

His nose twitched. That smell, he’d worked out, it was fat cooking in a frying pan, cooking on such a high flame it was spitting.

ARKHANGELSK-TO-MOSCOW SLEEPER

A
pig of a journey through the blackness of the Russian night, kids waking up and crying when the train lurched to a halt; too many halts, too many drunks. In the dead hours, sometime after four o’clock, long before dawn, the train came to a dead stop, somewhere, nowhere. Tired but sleepless, Gennady got out of his bunk, slung a jacket around his shoulders and went to the end of the carriage. He opened the door and stood looking out at the snow falling on nothingness. He shivered, because of the cold, because death had touched his own flesh and blood.

Gennady cursed himself for being a fool, having wasted days and nights lost in a fog of alcohol, mourning his loss. What was so stupid was that he didn’t know for sure what had happened to his daughter. Had the phone call been some wretched joke? He doubted that and sensed, somehow, that whoever had called him had taken a great risk to do so. The army had taught Gennady to be unsentimental about life, things, family, friends, because sooner or later they might very well end up blown to bits or run over in some stupid accident. But Iryna . . . lifeless?

They weren’t so very close, but they talked on the phone, saw each other for Orthodox Christmas, toasted her mother who had gone on before. Iryna nagged him about writing his book and he’d done it for her, for history too, and now she’d gone.

Iryna worked for some fancy tax inspectorate in Moscow. She had always been an honest girl and the state needed tax officers, sure, but these days the tax people were little more than gangsters. She hardly ever told him much about it but he’d sensed from her tone that she wasn’t so happy at work.

Missing? Yes. But dead? Gennady couldn’t quite believe that his little Iryna, with her cheeky smile and funny ways of saying things, had become ashes. Hardest to bear was that she had gone first. She had a whole life ahead of her: marriage, for what that was worth, kids, the works. He had nothing to look forward to. Why hadn’t they taken him instead? Whoever they were.

When he had sobered up, he knew he’d have to go to Moscow. He couldn’t work out a damn thing over the phone. Money counted in Russia today; nothing else. He had $20,000 in fresh hundred-dollar bills – none of that North Korean counterfeit shit he’d read about – in a shoebox under his bed, money he’d hoarded for his grandkids, not that that would happen now. He’d placed the shoebox in a rucksack, along with some old clothes, his service Tokarev and three full clips of bullets. He could have flown, but it was cheaper and somehow more Soviet to take the train.

His pension had been worth money when he’d left the army but it had been vastly diminished by the hyperinflation of the early nineties. His work in the archive had kept him afloat but he had never been a rich man, never interested in money for its own sake. He had been a true Communist, a man who had believed in and fought – as best he could, properly and fairly by the rules of war – for an idea and a state that had turned out to be a load of rubbish. But the state that succeeded it was no better. No, it was turning out to be far, far worse.