Russian Roulette (12 page)

If it hadn’t been for the carpeted floor, I would have broken my nose and ended up looking like Dima. If there was anyone in the apartment, they would certainly have heard me. I lay there for a moment, waiting for the door to open and the lights to go on. It didn’t happen. I remembered the people I had seen beneath their furs in the apartment below. Surely they would have heard the thump and wondered what it was. But there was no sound from below either. I waited another minute. My arm was sticking out at a strange angle and I wondered if I had dislocated my shoulder, but when I shifted my weight and got back into a sensible position, it seemed all right. Dima and the others would have seen me go in. They would be waiting for me to come down and open the front door. It was time to move.

First I examined my surroundings. As my eyes got used to the half-light, I saw that I was in the main living area and that the owner must be as wealthy as Fagin had said. I had never been anywhere like this. The furniture was modern and looked brand-new. Living in a wooden house in a village, I had never seen—I had never even imagined—glass and silver tables, leather sofas, beautiful cabinets with rings hanging off the drawers. Everything I had ever sat on or slept in had been old and shabby. There was a gorgeous rug in front of a fireplace and even to steal that would make this adventure worthwhile. How much more comfortable I would be lying on that than on the lumpy mattress back at the Tverskaya Street apartment!

Paintings in gold frames hung on the walls. I didn’t really understand them. They seemed to be splashes of paint with no subject matter at all. There had been a few framed photographs in my house, a tapestry hanging in my parents’ bedroom, pictures cut out of magazines, but nothing like this. Next to the sitting area there was a dining room table, an oval of wood partly covered by a lace cloth, with four chairs—and beyond it a kitchen that was so clean it had surely never been used. I ran my eye over the electric oven, the sink with its gleaming taps. No need to run down to any wells if you lived here. There was a fridge in one corner. I opened the door and found myself bathed in electric light, staring at shelves stacked with ham, cheese, fruit, salad, pickled mushrooms, and the little pancakes that we called
blinis.
I’m afraid I couldn’t help myself. I reached in and stuffed as much food into my mouth as I could, not caring if it was salty or sweet.

And that was how I was, standing in the kitchen with food in my hands and in my mouth, when a key rattled in the lock, the main door of the apartment opened, and the lights came on.

Fagin had gotten it wrong after all.

A man stood staring at me. I saw his eyes turn instantly from surprise to understanding and then to black, seething fury. He was wearing a black fur coat, black gloves, and the sort of hat you might see on an American gangster. A white silk scarf hung around his shoulders. He was not a huge man, but he was solid and well built and he had a presence about him, a sense of power. I could see it in his extraordinarily intense eyes, heavily lidded, with thick black eyebrows. His flesh had the color and the vitality of a man lying dead in his coffin, and standing there framed in the doorway, he had that same heavy stillness. His face was unlined, his mouth a narrow gash. I could make out the edges of a tattoo on the side of his neck: red flames. It suggested that the whole of his body, underneath his shirt, was on fire. Without knowing anything about him, I knew I was in terrible trouble. If I had met the devil I could not have been more afraid.

“What is it, Vlad?” There was a woman standing behind him. I glimpsed a mink collar and blond hair.

“There is someone in the apartment,” he said. “A boy.”

His eyes briefly left me, darting across the room to the window. He didn’t need to ask any questions. He knew how I had gotten in. He knew that I was alone.

“Do you want me to call the police?”

“No. There’s no need for that.”

His words were measured, uttered with a sort of dull certainty. And they told me the worst thing possible. If he wasn’t calling the police, it was because he had decided to deal with me himself and he wasn’t going to shake my hand and thank me for coming. He was going to kill me. Perhaps there was a gun in his coat pocket. Perhaps he would tear me apart with his bare hands. I had no doubt at all that he could do it.

I didn’t know how to react. My one desire was to get out of the apartment, back onto the street. I wondered if Dima, Roman, and Grigory had seen what had happened, but I knew that even if they had, there was nothing they could do. The front door would be locked. If they were sensible, they would probably be halfway back to Tverskaya. I tried to collect my thoughts. All I had to do was to get past this man and out into the corridor. The woman wouldn’t try to stop me. I looked around me and did perhaps the stupidest thing I could. There was a steak knife on the counter. I picked it up.

The man didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He glanced at the blade with outrage. How could I dare to pick up
his
property and threaten him in
his
home? That was what he said without actually saying anything. Holding the knife didn’t make me feel any stronger. In fact, all the strength drained out of me the moment I had it in my hand, and the silver, jagged blade filled me with horror.

“I don’t want any trouble,” I said, and my voice didn’t sound like my own. “Just let me go and nobody will be hurt.”

He had no intention of doing that. He moved toward me and I jabbed out with the knife without thinking, not meaning to stab him, not really knowing what I was doing. He stopped. I saw the face of the girl behind him, frozen in shock. The man looked down. I followed his eyes and saw that the point of the blade had gone through his coat, into his chest. I was even more horrified. I stepped back, dropping the knife. It fell free and clattered to the floor.

The man didn’t seem to have felt any pain. He brought up a hand and examined the gash in his coat as if it mattered more to him than the flesh underneath. When he brought his hand away, there was blood on the tips of his glove.

He gazed at me. I was unarmed now, trapped by those horrible eyes.

“What have you done?” he demanded.

“I . . .” I didn’t know what to say.

He took one step forward and punched me in the face. I had never been struck so hard. I didn’t even know it was possible for one human to hurt another human so much. It was like being hit by a rod of steel and I felt my cheekbone break. I heard the girl cry out. I was already falling, but as I went down, he hit me again with the other fist so that my head snapped back and my body collapsed in two directions at once. I remember a bolt of white light that seemed to be my own death. I was unconscious before I reached the floor.

I
WOKE UP IN TOTAL
darkness, lying in a cramped space with my legs hunched up, a gag in my mouth, and my hands tied. My first thought was that I was locked inside a box, that I had been buried alive—and for the next sixty seconds I was screaming without making any sound, my heart racing, my muscles straining against the ropes around my wrists, barely able to catch breath. Somehow I got myself under control. It wasn’t a box. I was in the trunk of a car. We had been standing stationary a moment ago, but now I heard the throb of the engine and felt us move off. That still wasn’t good. I was being allowed to live—but for how long?

I was in a bad way. My head was pounding—and by that I mean all of it, inside and out. The whole side of my face was swollen. It hurt me to move my mouth and I couldn’t close one of my eyes. The man’s fist had broken my cheekbone. I had no idea what I looked like, but what did that matter? I did not expect to live.

I presumed that the man was Vladimir Sharkovsky. Fagin had warned me that he was dangerous, but that was only half the story. I had seen enough of the man in the apartment to know that he was a psychopath. No ordinary person had eyes like that. He had been utterly cold when I had attacked him, but when his temper flared up, it had been like a demon leaping out of the craters of hell.
He hadn’t called the police.
That was the worst of it. He was taking me somewhere and when he got there, he could do to me whatever he wanted. I dreaded to think what that might be. Was he planning to torture me as a punishment for what I had done? I had heard that many hundreds of children went missing from the streets of Moscow every year. It might well be my fate to become one of them.

I cannot say how long the journey took. I couldn’t see my watch with my hands tied behind me and after a while I dozed off. I didn’t sleep exactly. I simply drifted out of consciousness. It would have been nice to have dreamed of my parents and of my life in Estrov, to have spent my last hours on this planet reliving happier times, but I was in too much pain. Every few minutes, my eyes would blink open and I would once again find myself struggling for air in this almost airtight compartment, desperately wanting to straighten up, to go to the toilet, to be anywhere but there. The car just rumbled on.

Eventually, we arrived. First, I felt us slowing down. Then we stopped and I heard a man’s voice, a command being given, followed by the click of a metal gate as it was activated. When we set off again, there was a different surface—gravel—beneath the tires. The car stopped and the engine was turned off. The driver’s door opened and shut and I heard footsteps on the gravel. I tensed myself, waiting for the car trunk to be released, but it didn’t happen. The footsteps disappeared into the distance and when, a long time later, they hadn’t come back, I began to think that I was going to be left here all night, like a piece of baggage that nobody needed.

And so it was. I was left in the dark, in silence, with no idea how long it was going to last or what would happen when I was released. It was being done on purpose, of course, to break my spirit, to make me suffer. I was the victim of my own worst imaginings. I had nothing to do except to count every single painful minute. Unable to move, to stretch myself, my whole body was in torment. All I could do was try to sleep, fighting back all the dread that came from being tied up and left in this small space. It was a long, hideous night. By the time the trunk was opened, I was no longer afraid of death. I think I would have welcomed it. A short tunnel of horrors followed by release. It would be worth the journey.

There was a man leaning over me—not the one from the Moscow apartment. He was quite simply massive, with oversized shoulders and a thick neck, dressed in a cheap gray suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. His hair was blond and thickly oiled so that it stood up in spikes. He was wearing dark glasses and there was a radio transmitter behind his ear with a wire curling down to a throat mike. His skin was utterly white, as if he had never spent any time in the sun, and it occurred to me that he might have been in a prison or some other institution all his life.

He reached down and with a single movement dragged me out of the trunk, then stood me up so that I was balanced against the back of the car. I would have fallen otherwise. There was no strength in my legs. He looked at me with hardly any expression apart from disgust, and for that I couldn’t blame him. I stank. My clothes were crumpled. My face was caked with blood. He reached into his jacket pocket and I winced as he produced a knife. I was quite ready for him to plunge it into my chest, but he simply leaned over me and cut the cords around my wrists. My hands fell free. They looked horrible. The flesh around my wrists was blue, covered in welts. I couldn’t move my fingers but I felt the pins and needles as the blood supply was restored.

“You are to come with us,” he said. He had a deep, gravelly voice. He spoke without emotion, as if he didn’t actually enjoy speaking.

Us?

I glanced around and saw a second man standing at the side of the car. For a moment, I thought my brain was playing tricks on me after my long captivity. This second man was identical to the first—the same height, the same looks, the same clothes. They were twins . . . just like the two girls I had once known in Estrov. But it was almost as if these two had trained themselves to be indistinguishable. They had the same haircut, the same sunglasses. They even moved at exactly the same time, like mirror images.

The first twin hadn’t asked me my name. He didn’t want to know anything about me.

“Where are we?” I asked. The words came out clumsily because of the damage to my face.

“No questions. Do as you are told.”

He gestured. I began to walk and for the first time I was able to take in my surroundings. I was in what looked like a large and very beautiful park with pathways, neatly cut grass, and trees. The park was surrounded by a brick wall, several meters high with razor wire around the top, and I could make out the tops of more trees on the other side. The car that I had been in was a black Lexus. It had been parked quite close to an arched gateway with a barrier that rose and fell, the only way out, I suspected. A guardhouse stood next to it. This was a wooden construction with a large glass window, and I could see a man in uniform watching us as we walked together. My first thought was that I had been brought to some sort of prison. There were arc lamps and security cameras set at intervals along the wall.

We were heading toward a cluster of eight wooden houses that had been tucked out of sight behind some fir trees, about a hundred meters from the gates. They’d been built on top of each other with external staircases connecting them, and there was a larger, brick building nearby. I looked behind me. Although I hadn’t been given permission, I came to a stumbling halt. Where the hell was I? I had never seen anything like this.

A gravel drive with lamps and flower beds on each side led from the entrance through the parkland and up to a monumental white house. Not a house. A palace . . . and not one that had come out of any fairy tale. It was a modern building, perhaps only a year old, pure white, with two wings stretching out from a central block, which alone must have contained about fifty rooms. There were terraces with white balustrades, white columns with triple-height doorways opening behind, walkways and balconies and above it all a white dome like that of a planetarium or perhaps a cathedral. Half a dozen satellite dishes had been mounted on the roof as well as television antennas and a radio tower. A man stood there, watching me through binoculars. He was wearing the same uniform as the man at the gate—but with a difference. Even at this distance I could see that he had a machine gun strapped to his shoulder.

Closer to the house, the gardens became more ornamental with statues on plinths, marble benches, beautifully tended walkways and arbors, bushes cut into fantastic shapes, more flower beds laid out in intricate patterns. An army of gardeners would have to work the whole year round to keep it all looking like this, and even as I stood there I saw some of them, pushing wheelbarrows or on their knees, weeding. The drive broke in two as it reached the front door, sweeping around a white marble fountain with gods and mermaids all tangled together and water splashing down. I saw two Rolls-Royces, a Bentley, and a Ferrari parked outside. But the owner didn’t just have cars. His private helicopter was parked on a concrete square, discreetly located next to a summer house. It was under canvas with the blades tied down.

“Why are you waiting?” one of the twins demanded.

“Who lives here?” I asked.

His answer was a jab in the side of my stomach. It had been aimed around my kidney and it hurt. “I told you. No questions.”

I was very quickly learning the rules of this place. I was worth nothing. Anyone could do anything to me. I swallowed a grunt of pain and continued to the smallest cabin, right on the edge of the complex. The door was open and I looked into a room with a narrow metal bed, a table, and a chair. There was no carpet, no curtains, nothing in the way of decoration. A second door led into a toilet and shower.

“You have five minutes,” the man said. “Throw those clothes away. You will not need them. Wash yourself and make yourself presentable. Do not leave this room. If you do, the guards will shoot you down.”

He left me on my own. I stripped off my clothes and went into the bathroom. First I used the toilet. Then I had a shower. I knew I was in danger. It was quite likely that I would soon be dead. But that shower was still a wonderful experience. The water was hot and there was enough pressure to soak me completely. There was even a bar of soap. It had been three weeks since I had last washed—that had been in the
banya,
the bathhouse in Moscow—and black dirt seemed to ooze out of my body, disappearing down the plug. Thinking of the bathhouse reminded me of Dima. What would he be doing now? Had he seen me being bundled into the car by Sharkovsky, and if so, might he come looking for me? At least that was something to give me hope.

My face still hurt, though, and when I examined myself in the mirror, it was as bad as I had feared. I barely recognized myself. One eye was half closed. There was a huge bruise all around it. My cheek looked like a rotting fruit with a gash where the man’s fist had caught me. I was lucky I still had all my teeth. Looking at the damage, I was reminded of what lay ahead. I hadn’t been brought here for my own comfort. I was being prepared for something. My punishment was still to come.

I went back into the bedroom. My own clothes had been taken away while I was washing, and with a jolt I realized that the last of my mother’s jewelry had gone with them. Her ring had been in my back pocket. I knew at once that there would be no point asking for it back and I had to hold down a great wave of sadness, the sense that I had lost everything. She had worn that ring and, touching it, I had felt I was touching her. Now that had been taken from me and apart from my old watch, which I was still wearing, nothing of my old life remained.

I had been supplied with a black tracksuit, black socks, and black slip-on shoes. I dried myself using a towel that had been hanging in the bathroom and got dressed. The clothes fit me very well.

“Are you ready?” The twins were standing outside, calling to me. I left the cabin and joined them. They glanced at me, both of them still showing a complete lack of interest.

“Come with us,” one of them said. They appeared to have a fairly limited vocabulary too.

We walked up the drive, all the way to the big house. As we went, we passed another security guard, this one with an Alsatian dog on a leash. Another camera mounted above the front door watched our approach. But we didn’t go in that way. The twins took me in through a side door next to the garbage area and along a corridor. Here the walls were plain and the floor black and white tiles. The servants’ entrance. We passed a laundry room, a boot room, a sort of pantry. I glimpsed a woman in a black dress with a white apron, polishing silver. She didn’t notice me or, if she did, she pretended not to. My feet, in the soft shoes, made no sound as we continued through. I was feeling queasy and I knew why. I was afraid.