Penguin Lost (12 page)

They had just knocked back their first, omitting the formality of a toast, when an elderly man, slim and with an unnaturally bronzed face, quietly took his place at their table. Expensively and tastefully dressed, he was clearly concerned not to look his age. Needlessly adjusting the blue bow tie worn with a white shirt, undoing the leather-covered buttons of his single-breasted jacket, crossing his legs and resting his right elbow on the table, he greeted Bim in silence, then turned attentively to Viktor.

“I’m Eldar Ivanovich, and I’m all ears.”

“Tell him all that you told me,” Bim prompted gently in the manner of a schoolteacher.

Reluctantly Viktor retold the story of his penguin, abbreviating it out of sheer weariness.

“Ah!” exclaimed Eldar Ivanovich when he’d finished. “I see now what I’m here for.”

“Eldar Ivanovich acted as liquidator for Sphinx,” Bim explained. “You’ve got questions, he’s got answers. I’ll sit quietly with my aniseed vodka.”

“It’s all straightforward,” said Eldar Ivanovich. “Some of his property, his real estate, is still here in Moscow, but not his zoo where your penguin was. That was taken by Khachayev.”

“Who’s he?” asked Viktor, seeing the prospect of success receding.

“Khachayev is who Sphinx lost his shirt to. Khachayev ran the casino. He and Sphinx were in some business together, but Sphinx came unstuck. Later, when things hotted up for Khachayev, he packed everything in and skipped it to Chechnya.”

“Is that where Misha is now?”

“I wouldn’t be too sure. Somewhere in North Caucasus, with Chechnya a strong possibility. And that’s about the extent of my help. Unless,” he added with a wicked smile, “you’d care to follow him there.”

Chechnya, penguin, penguin, Chechnya – somehow the words refused to match up. Under the stolid gaze of the other two, Viktor helped himself to vodka and drank.

The elderly waiter delivered an enormous dish of rice and smaller servings of meat, shrimps and fish. Earthenware bowls were set before them, and a metal stand of sauces and spices brought from a neighbouring table. Bim served himself a heap of rice, topped it with meat generously sprinkled with brown soy sauce, finished his aniseed vodka and ordered plain. Viktor asked for more vodka, and in a mood of funereal gloom set about eating.

As they ate and drank conversation flowed more freely. Eldar Ivanovich confessed to having had plastic surgery and to be now undergoing sun-ray treatment for the good of his skin. Bim demonstrated the making of a cocktail called “Border Clash”, using vodka, soy sauce and half a lemon.

Viktor tried one, but as a result of his mood or state of fatigue, got no special kick out of it.

“Do you know,” said Bim after a fair number of “Border Clashes”, “if it was your brother or son carted off to Chechnya, I’d understand, and like any Russian I’d go all out to find him. But to be cut up over a penguin is neither manly nor Russian … So how say we drink instead to a victory of Russian arms?”

“You don’t understand, because I didn’t tell you,” Viktor protested, beginning to slur. “He’d had a heart transplant. The donor was a child. He was all set to fly to the Antarctic to end his days there. But I robbed him of his place on the plane.”

“Well, now I’ve heard everything!” exclaimed Eldar Ivanovich, exchanging meaningful looks with Bim. “And if this isn’t just drug talk, let me tell you: Chechnya’s a damned sight closer than the Antarctic. Two nights, and I can have you there, if that’s what you want. But
is
it?”

Viktor sighed. The talk was getting wilder and wilder. There was no point in his speaking further of Misha, and all he held dear.

Eldar Ivanovich thought for a moment, then rang a number on his mobile. “Arthur, old son, got a run on tonight? Pop over, then. The Peking.”

“Listen, Viktor,” he said turning to him, “you’ve got one minute to decide. A no-nonsense yes, and with Bim as my witness, I will, at my own expense, get you to Chechnya to find this heart-transplant penguin of yours, if you’re not shot first.”

This, though it took Viktor time to grasp it, was for real. The wicked gleam in Eldar Ivanovich’s eye fired him with sudden desperate determination, and with only seconds to go, he breathed “Yes.”

“And there were Bim and me thinking
we
were the only real men left,” said Eldar Ivanovich, preparing another “Border Clash”. “My advice to you for the next half hour is drink yourself senseless. Better than sleeping tablets or jabs. So here’s to liberating your penguin,
and the victory of Russian arms!”

They clinked glasses.

“And, as both sides are using them, there’s bound to be!”

Either
he
was starting to sway, or everything else was. Putting his empty glass down and gripping the table with both hands, he managed to steady it, and felt calmer. Eldar Ivanovich was mixing another “Border Clash” for him. Bim was telling the waiter to bring tea and mineral water.

He was finding it harder and harder to keep his eyes open, but for the moment was equal to the struggle and contriving to hold the restaurant in his field of vision, only it was a diminishing field from which waiters and neighbouring tables were gradually slipping. He saw a young man in a short leather jacket arrive at the table. Taking him aside, Eldar Ivanovich pointed once or twice in Viktor’s direction. What happened next he neither saw nor knew, his eyes being closed. One after another his senses switched themselves off, yielding to alcoholic befuddlement. His head lay on the tablecloth beside his bowl of sauce-laced shrimps and rice.

Brown Jacket drank a little vodka, made a call on his mobile, and 20 minutes later, crew-cut men turned up to half-arm, half-carry Viktor out. “He’s got a jacket in the cloakroom,” Bim called. “You’ll find the ticket in his pocket.”

What befell him in the next six hours escaped him entirely. As often as he managed to open his eyes in response to some violent physical jolt, what he saw was unfocused and without shape. He was given something bitter to drink from a throw-away glass, and fell back
into the depths from which he had been struggling to rise.

Meanwhile the minibus, a typical bull-dog-nosed product of the Pavlovo Motor Works, drove slowly and steadily on, windows hung with the homely plush curtains of the long-distance trains of yore, two feeble headlamps lighting the way. In the blacked-out passenger compartment twelve men of varying ages were asleep. Two others armed with thermos flasks of drugged tea saw to it that they remained so.

Coming to the warning state vehicle inspection post 300m, the driver retrieved from his feet a plate reading saratov – novocherkassk which he placed against the windscreen. But the SVI hut on stilts was in darkness, its officers either sleeping or elsewhere.

On the left, the dawn of a new day was breaking.

“Twenty kilometres on there’s a bit of forest for a halt,” one of the men told the driver.

Half-sitting, half-lying on an upholstered double seat in a world of utter silence, Viktor came to. Straightening his aching back, he looked about him. Of the dozen or so other passengers, some were still asleep. Across the gangway an old man was eating meat from a tin, indifferent to Viktor’s awakening.

The driver had disappeared. They were parked in a forest. He could hear birds.

He got to his feet, made his way to the open door and looked out.

Sun shafting through pines. Shading his eyes, he was overcome with a paralysing sense of unreality. Where the hell was he? Beyond Bim, Eldar and talk of Sphinx, he remembered nothing. He checked his pockets. Passports and credit card were still there. He got out.

A short way off three men in leather jackets were sitting round a fire toasting mushrooms speared on twigs.

Going round to the front of the bus he read the destination board, then, in the grass at his feet, noticed a tiny snail slowly
climbing a blade until, bending under his weight, it returned him to the ground.

Novocherkassk was near Rostov-on-Don. Both were North Caucasus.

“Here!” called one of the men by the fire.

He went over and was given a tin of meat, an aluminium spoon and a hunting knife.

“There’s no bread.”

Squatting on the ground, Viktor opened the tin with the knife and ate.

By the fire a ring tone sounded, and putting a mobile to his ear, one of the men spoke in a language Viktor did not recognize.

Just then his companion from across the aisle stepped down from the bus, hurled his empty tin into the trees, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his quilted jacket, squinted up at the sun, then came and joined Viktor.

“Got the time, boy?”

“Half past twelve.”

The old man nodded, sat on the grass beside him and watched the trio enjoying their mushroom kebabs.

“Been there before, boy?”

“Where?”

“Chechnya.”

He shook his head. He wanted to ask about Chechnya, but hesitated to betray the extent of his ignorance.

“Have you?”

“No.” The old man looked around. “Could do with some water … It’s meant selling the cow and slaughtering the two pigs to pay for this … So I’ll be glad to die … I’ve decided to trick them,” his voice dropped to a whisper, “by taking my son’s place. They’ve promised to let him go if I’ll work the debt off. I’ve nothing to ransom
him with, even
they
can see that. Bloody parasites,” he gestured towards the fire, “they’ve bled me dry. The old woman’s left with damn all except potatoes to live on.”

Absorbed in watching two tiny snails engaged in the senseless blade of grass ascent he’d seen earlier, Viktor asked who the men by the fire were.

“Two are Chechen. The driver’s Russian like us.”

“Are the others for Chechnya?”

“They are, boy. Some looking for the missing, some hoping to bargain … I’m being taken as an act of kindness. They told me first I couldn’t go till November, then gave me this date. And you – who’ve you got over there, a brother?”

“No,” said Viktor, looking into weary, deep blue eyes, “a friend.”

It occurred to him suddenly that a miracle was what he’d been expecting of his restaurant meeting with Bim and Eldar Ivanovich, rather as, when a child, he’d been told by his father to close, then open his eyes. Now it was to see with amazement the effect of Bim and Eldar Ivanovich’s magic. But would he, knowingly, have set off for Chechnya in search of Misha? Or sought an opportunity for so doing? Yes, should have been the answer, but to his shame he could not say that it would have been, or yet wouldn’t.

One of the two tiny snails on the same blade of grass dislodged the other and climbed on, until dislodged by Viktor.

“God send you find your friend,” said the old man, getting to his feet.

“May I ask your name?”

“Matvey Vasilyevich. Just going for a piss.” Viktor finished his tin, took the spoon and hunting knife back, thanked the man and asked when they were moving on.

“When it’s dark.”

“Is it far?”

“Weren’t you told?” asked the man in surprise, and with the merest trace of foreign accent.

“No.”

“Well, seeing you’re one of Eldar’s, I’ll tell you … I’m Rezvan.”

Their destination was Achkhoy-Yurt, he said, and they’d be there the day after tomorrow. The seven road blocks were no problem. They did the run every week. They had friends amongst the Russian Feds with their own interest in promoting trouble-free transit. At Achkhoy-Yurt the Green Cross would get to work. They were a good lot, Chechens prepared to trace the missing, dead and captured, help negotiate, and whatever.

“Last time we got out eight for one ransom,” Rezvan added proudly. “True, we lost one, though. His fault. Wouldn’t be told. Fatal in the mountains. Given a photo have you?”

“Photo?”

“Of who you’re looking for?”

Viktor ignored the question.

“Can I get back with you?”

“You’ve a choice, but we’re the cheaper. $300 is the Fed charge by helicopter.”

Again the musical ring tone, and producing his mobile, Rezvan moved away.

Returning to the minibus, Viktor drew the plush curtains towards him, and resting his head against the window, fell asleep.

As darkness fell they continued their journey. The passenger compartment
was unlit, and Viktor’s eyes soon tired of counting oncoming headlights. After sleeping during the day, he was now in a state of nervy wakefulness. Added to which he was feeling increasingly hungry. Rezvan’s Chechen companion came round with a thermos of drugged tea which Viktor refused and later wished he hadn’t, artificially induced sleep being preferable to abnormal alertness.

Matvey Vasilyevich was asleep, head against the window. Luckiest of their number was a tall dapper man in an Alaska jacket stretched out on the rear bench seat, snoring loudly, while the rest dozed in semi-recumbent postures. At last he relapsed into a state verging on sleep which, though far from ideal, left him registering no more than the noise of the engine, the snoring of other passengers, exchanges in Chechen and terse remarks to the driver, until at last he slept.

Pulling onto the verge, the minibus flashed its warning lights. Ten minutes later a Volga drove up. Two men in battle fatigues heaved two fat sacks into the minibus, then, as the Volga drove off, returned carrying Kalashnikovs.

Light went on in the passenger compartment, the Chechens shook sleepers awake, and pulling from his sack a warm camouflage top and trousers and tossing them onto Viktor’s lap, told him to change into them. The driver replaced the destination board with one bearing the letters MoES in red, which also adorned Viktor’s jacket. They now all looked more or less alike, except for Matvey who with his desiccated, deeply lined face, continued to look very much himself, Ministry of Emergency Services disguise notwithstanding.

Transformations complete, the minibus drove on, the rear bench seat now occupied by the two newcomers. Ahead, the lights of a village. The road was utterly deserted.

His far from deep slumbers were fitfully invaded by distant conversation, first in Russian, later in impenetrable Chechen, by which time he was aboard a yacht way, way out at sea, gently rocked by the faintest of breezes. Suddenly the wind strengthened, the sails filled, the boat heeled sharply over throwing him against what proved to be the seat in front. The bus had braked.