Vagabond (30 page)

Not bad. He rubbed his arm over his face. Not bad at all. He had both of them, a level of fear and a level of allegiance. Attached to each was the name of Timofey Simonov, his friend.

He heard, below and at the back of the house, the door, then the dogs stampeding up the stairs. It was the brigadier’s task to take them out late at night, sometimes into the woods at the back of the property and sometimes on the pavements. If they went into the little park opposite, dedicated to the memory of Anna Politkovskaya – troublemaker – who had been assassinated in Moscow, and if the dogs crapped on the grass he would leave it. The Weimaraners appeared, and the brigadier came a few minutes after them with a tray of hot milk and biscuits.

Timofey said he had spoken to his friend. The brigadier would collect him from Prague, bring him to Karlovy Vary for the night and take him back on Thursday morning. He had told his friend that they would meet in the new forest that had grown over the old base, Milovice, on the following evening, Friday. They would do business where he had been a junior officer, and the brigadier had been in a position of authority. He made the pilgrimage regularly, and it was a good place to be. Few, he believed, knew the routes to the hangars as well as he did. Some were frightened of it. To Timofey Simonov it was as familiar as an old home, which it had been.

Happy days, after a fashion. As a member of GRU staff, Timofey had lived on the base in a dormitory for essential staff. The generals who conducted exercises from the underground command bunker had known his name and loved to banter with a bright, committed young man, for whom no job was too great, no shift too long. Exemplary work always left his desk for theirs. And around him there had been the entrenched power of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Great days bordering on magical. The long lines of tanks heading towards the live firing ranges, the power and thunder of their engines, the belch of diesel smoke . . . The deafening noise when the fighter bombers came onto the runways, raced for speed, then lifted off. He was Military Intelligence so he was privileged to stand with the senior officers on a viewing platform and watch the tanks manoeuvring. He could go to the control tower when the aircraft were scrambled in a mock emergency. In the command bunker, at the great table where the maps were spread and the counters moved to designate red and blue forces, his opinion was sought: ‘What is their speed of reaction, Timofey?’; ‘If they push into Poland, having breached the German lines, is that a feint or the main thrust?’; ‘Their armoured crews, Timofey, how much battle preparation have they had?’; ‘I leave on the train for Moscow the day after tomorrow, Timofey, and would like to have with me a crate of good champagne, if possible.’ He had known all of the answers – could quote statistics and intelligence debriefs with brevity and clarity, and could produce champagne, perfume or silk, whatever. He had loved Milovice. It was not mentioned there that his father was a gulag security officer, that his mother treated criminals for typhoid, TB and knife wounds in a gulag hospital. Everybody who had any degree of influence or importance knew him on the base, as he walked, jogged or drove around it in his assigned open-top jeep. He had thought himself a part of the great power that was Milovice.

It had first shocked but now disgusted him that in all of the many visits he had made to the old base he had never met another Russian. Why not? There were no monuments either, or veterans’ reunions. Timofey went there and took the brigadier with him.

He drank his milk. Tomorrow evening he would be with his friend, and they would laugh till they cried. It was always good to be with a friend. He had reason to be grateful to Ralph Exton.

That night, in the room that had become a shrine, Rosie Bentinick had lit the candle. It had been a long, busy day. The cat slept on the bed and the dog’s head lay across her ankles. She spoke aloud, telling the stories she thought would be of interest, as the cat purred and the dog snored. It was hardest for Rosie when she looked at the pillows on the bed: empty. She couldn’t escape the photograph on the dressing-table: the excitement of the children and the contentment of her daughter. It was a painful ritual and it would be her husband’s turn tomorrow. They couldn’t move on. The day after tomorrow, Thursday, they would visit, she and her husband. They always did on that evening, never missed.

A tale was told. A summer evening recalled . . . Karol Pilar had walked at the speed of the target. He had been led away from the main streets, the lights of the bars and fast-food places, and was among old buildings and narrow lanes. They were dark. Several times, without lighting he had lost sight of his target – the man’s shoes must have been rubber-soled because they were silent on the paving.

No warning – pain creased his shoulder and back. The blow, from a lead-tipped cosh or wooden truncheon, had come down with full force on the bone between his neck and his shoulder socket. He swayed, lost balance and wheezed out a small cry. The second strike was to the other side of his neck. He went down and the kicking started. One had builders’ boots, steel-toe-capped, another had conventional lace-ups and a third wore light leather shoes – they might have been snakeskin or crocodile. The blows caught his stomach, testicles, kidneys and the base of the spine. His face was not touched. Nothing was said.

Nothing was taken from him except his police pistol, the CZ 75, locally manufactured with a good reputation. One said, ‘Enough.’ They walked away.

No one came near him. A man approached with a torch, identified his shape, then crossed to the far side of the street. He lay there and the pain soaked through him, then the disgrace that he had been so vulnerable. He recognised that he had been warned. One word only had been spoken: Russian language, European dialect.

It might have been an hour later that he started to move. He crawled, a great effort, and found the pistol in the gutter. He used his phone to call his girlfriend. She came for him in her small car. Its lights found him because he had talked her there on the phone. Her shock: had he called an ambulance? He didn’t want one. Where were the police? He hadn’t called them.

How had a target, moving late at night between cafés and bars, spreading word of deals done and arrangements pending, known that a single officer was on his tail? He hadn’t shown out – he was certain of it. Who in his office, in his unit, had taken money in an envelope? A target could be untouchable. Which senior officer nurtured hopes of a villa in the countryside, with forests, quality fishing and early retirement because a meagre police pension had been augmented?

She took him home and helped him up the stairs. Then she phoned in to the detective unit on Bartolomejska. He had influenza, a nasty strain. He’d had to leave work early the previous evening and apologised for not completing his shift. The influenza had taken a week to clear.

He told the story quietly.

‘And you went back to work?’

‘Yes, Danny. No mark of what they had done showed on me. It was assumed I had learned a lesson, would know my place.’

‘What did you learn?’

‘I learned that the day would come when I would fuck them and the codes we were taught at the academy would go out of a high window.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Twenty months. It was never mentioned in the office – as if nothing had happened. I was not transferred. I did my job, and was sidelined whenever they could assign me elsewhere. Now, it’s liaison on an Irish matter. That’s good. What harm can I do on an Irish matter?’

‘It’s filthy work, Karol.’

‘I think so – and for me it is necessary.’

They were on the third or fourth circuit of Wenceslas Square. They walked at a measured pace, the rain stayed off, and the only eavesdroppers were the homeless people in doorways. The clubs and restaurants were shuttered.

Danny said, ‘It’s what we’re asked to do that people don’t want to know. We’re outside any world that has rules and conventions. The people on the streets, who pay us through their taxes, are happy to know that an element of criminality has been nicked. They’re unhappy to know what had to be done to achieve it. We don’t expect thanks, and if we get hurt we shouldn’t expect sympathy. We’re out of sight. Good to work with you, Karol.’

‘I want to destroy them.’

‘Stick around.’

‘You want a drink now?’

‘I want to get to my bed. They’ll be hurt, and one day you might learn why. Go back to your girlfriend.’

They hugged, maybe too tightly. Karol Pilar gasped, but said nothing about old wounds and pain. Danny Curnow watched him walk away till he was past the museum. He expected no thanks and no sympathy.

Chapter 10

He thought it as pretty a town as he had ever seen. The spook was from the embassy and had driven Danny Curnow and Matthew Bentinick across country along winding roads flanked by fast streams and steep-sided valleys where the trees had turned gold. After a dawn start, they’d made good time in the Freelander. What did he want, Bentinick had been asked. A rough reply had made the spook chuckle: Bentinick wanted only to see the man. They were there by eight, parked the vehicle and walked.

They had gone to an apartment block where the spook had rung a bell and spoken quietly to the grille. Bentinick had lit his pipe and Danny had gazed around at the fine buildings of the spa against the autumn colours. It looked to him like Paradise. The door opened, an elderly woman passed out through the gap with a straining dog on a tight lead. The spook took the dog, a spaniel, and the woman closed the door behind her. The spook said that her father had been at Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire, with the Czech government in exile during the Second World War and that the dog was useful. It was not trained but it led them at speed.

They went past clinics and the spa buildings, saw magnificent old homes and streets from the days of Austro-Hungary. The flowers were in bloom, the river ran clean and the dog led them. Danny approved. The best surveillance people always said a dog was a jewel. He saw the Russian names on the shops, restaurants, mini-marts, and the logos on delivery and builders’ vans. The gold of the orb on a church roof glowed in the first low sunlight. The spook talked to Bentinick – Danny caught snatches. They spoke of ‘endemic corruption’, ‘fear of the Russian bear and its corrosive influence’, the ‘energies, expectations, of young people’, the ‘hold of organised crime’, and ‘. . . no cull happened for the old counter-intelligence men of the Cold War. They’re still around, fêted by the Russians . . .’ He heard what was said, had no interest in it. They went up a road and to their right were huge villas, splendid in their preservation. There was a small park, and they sat on a bench.

Bentinick’s pipe was lit. The sun rose steadily and the shadows shortened. Opposite, there was a detached villa, and a quality Mercedes was parked in front of the steps up to the door. The spook and Bentinick faced it, and Danny was left side on. The spook would have been mid-thirties – moderate height, moderate build, moderate brown hair – and was dressed in jeans, a battered waxed coat and a sweater with loose threads. Bentinick, true to form, was suited, with a waistcoat and his watch chain across it.

The spook said conversationally, ‘The Ivans think we’re yesterday’s stuff. That’s what I find here. We don’t matter and therefore can be ignored. They don’t change, which sort of goes back to Joe Stalin and the Vatican – how many tanks does the Pope have? They have people based on the top floor of a block over there, behind the St Mary Magdalene church, and keep a weather eye on the millionaires and billionaires who favour the town. To the Ivans we’re ready for the scrap heap. I don’t think the Chinese – they’re here – even know we’re still on the planet. The Americans are down by the river. I’m sometimes taken for a coffee, but nothing’s shared. It’s a bit lonely, really, to be a Brit here. Trouble is that it’s a melting pot of views and intelligence gathering. It’s a place where you can, just about, see the changing status of people – whether they’re officials from Moscow or the hoods, the parasites of the
siloviki
, but I only get down once a week. What are we hoping for the end result – not just the sighting to-day?’

Smoke billowed from Bentinick’s pipe. He said, assured, ‘To demonstrate we’re capable of administering a sharp kick to the shin, where it hurts.’

‘You can achieve that?’ Doubt, but respect.

‘I like to think we are still able to direct a steel toecap in the right direction. Cause a bit of grief.’

‘They’d be powerfully angry. There was a charity bash the other night for the nobs of the Russian community. The ambassador had an arm round him. He has status . . . And where does the Irish angle come in?’

Bentinick gave a light laugh, then stiffened: the dog was alert. Danny saw the door open across the road. The spook had pulled his scarf high over his face, natural in the chill. A man came down the steps, two dogs with him, and walked past the Mercedes towards the pavement.