Mission London

11

The van’s brake-lights glowed eerily in the darkness. Then it reversed, following Kosta’s instructions, and slowly but surely disappeared down the black throat of the garage. Batushka turned off the engine and pointed a powerful torch in Kosta’s face. The cook covered his eyes.

“Molodets!” the Tartar’s voice echoed.

Chavdar quickly opened the back door. Both of them set to, unloading a long object, zipped in a yellow nylon bag. Kosta watched them from one side. The air in the garage stank of petrol and he felt he was going to be sick. Batushka thrust the torch into his hands.

“You lead!” said Chavdar.

They inched down the stairs and across the basement. From time to time, Kosta turned around and gave a hostile look to his accomplices. He could hear them dragging their load and the nylon rustled unpleasantly. Batushka was swearing quietly in some Altaic language.

They came out into the central corridor and found themselves directly in front of the kitchen door. Here the cook stopped and started listening nervously.

“What’s wrong?” asked Chavdar anxiously.

“I thought I heard something inside,” Kosta whispered and continued to listen.

“Coward! You’re going to fill your pants!” This was Chavdar’s idea of encouragement.

The cook curled his lip contemptuously, opened the door and turned on the light. The kitchen was empty.

He made a sign to follow him and headed towards the rear of the premises. In a niche near the fridge lurked a massive, old, padlocked freezer. A glimmering red light indicated that, in theory at least, it was still working. The cook unlocked the padlock and lifted the top. Fog poured out from its innards as the water vapour in the air started to condense and freeze.

“Go on!” he mumbled turning his head towards them.

His face froze. The bag was unzipped, and in the cavity a young woman’s face could be seen. The face was white and still as though made of wax. Dead.

“Allowing me to be presenting,” Batushka still spoke in his uniquely gloomy style, “Diana, Princess of Wales.”

Frightened, Kosta averted his face.

“Easy, man, don’t be afraid,” said Chavdar. “It’s only a corpse. A corpse that costs lots of money. And that money is ours for sure.”

“Wait a minute!” shouted Kosta in despair. “This isn’t what we agreed on!”

“What saying?” Batushka’s brows began to furrow.

“What the hell you are talking about?” Chavdar burst out.

“This is a corpse!” cried the horrified Kosta. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Nothing!” shouted Chavdar “They pay, then we give it back to them.”

“I’m going to be sick!” groaned the cook.

“Pull yourself together! You’re a cook, aren’t you?!” Chavdar chipped in at his most helpful.

“I don’t cook people, you imbecile!” Kosta exploded. “Listen, we didn’t agree on anything about corpses. You can’t leave it here!”

Batushka angrily zipped the bag closed. “Grabbing hold!” he said firmly.

Both men seized the bag from each side and dumped it into the freezer. Batushka quickly covered it with other bags full of ingredients. Then he slammed the top and patted it with his hand. Kosta looked on, effectively a helpless bystander.

“OK.” grinned Batushka, “Let’s scram off.”

Something rang in the brain of the cook and he tried to stop the two men bodily.

“The money? Where’s the money?”

“Aaa! Sorry, forgotting it.” Batushka raised his hands.

“What do you mean — forgotting?!” hissed the cook. “First you bring me a corpse and then you forget the money. I thought we agreed. 100 pounds, cash, up front.”

“Tomorning, Tomorning,” mumbled Batushka with some annoyance.

“Not tomorrow, now!” shouted Kosta.

“Easy, my man,” Chavdar decided to intervene. “The man says tomorning that means tomorrow. We’re doing business for millions here, we’re hardly going to cheat you for small change. Isn’t that right, Batushka?”

“Right, that’s exact right.”

“Why don’t you both go to hell and fuck yourselves,” stormed the cook and started opening the freezer. “Now, you can take her with you, come on!”

At that moment, an iron hand grabbed his neck. The other was pointing a very long, razor-sharp knife at his face. A poisonous, penetrative radiation was oozing from Batushka’s eyes. Very slowly and clearly he uttered some unintelligible phrases in his native language. The meaning of those words could not have been overly complicated and revealed itself spontaneously to the cook: She leaves the freezer, you enter the freezer — no empty freezer here!

Kosta woke with a plaintive groan. The wiry fingers of Batushka still fixed around his throat. His legs, stretched out on the little table in front of the television had pins and needles. His back was aching. He had fallen asleep in the chair. The duty room bell was buzzing insistently. The screens, monitoring the streets around the entrances to the Embassy were flickering with bluish light. The figure of Chavdar Tolomanov could be seen quite clearly on one of them, he was nervously stamping his feet in front of the back entrance of the Embassy. The cook got up, puffing, from the chair, dragged his body near to the button of the automatic door-release and pressed it.

Chavdar pushed the door and entered. He found himself in a small squalid corridor, leading to a second door. The automatic lock buzzed again and he walked through. Kosta greeted him, dopey and pale.

“Hey, Pastry, why didn’t you open the door?!” shouted Chavdar.

“I was asleep,” muttered the cook. “And as for you, why are you late?”

“Who’s late?” Chavdar practically rammed his watch into the cook’s nose. “Ten minutes I’ve been ringing!”

Kosta scratched behind his ear. “Well, I’ve been dreaming…” he started and stopped uncertainly.

“About girls, again?”

“She was a princess… Diana… Her corpse, to be precise…”

“No kidding! You pervert!”

“You had stolen it,” continued Kosta gloomily “and dragged it to the Embassy. Then hid it in the freezer. Just like Charlie Chaplin’s story…”

“I see,” the actor scratched his head. “The thought hadn’t occurred to me…Well, too late now! Let’s go and get the job done …because Batushka is going to lose his nerve.” He concluded.

“Okay then, wait for me around the back,” the cook moaned.

He came back to the room with the monitors: the street and the main entrance were clear. Only Chavdar’s figure appeared in one of them as he ran quickly towards a van, parked to one side of the Embassy. Then the van reversed and disappeared from the screen. The cook switched off the light, left the door slightly open and plunged into the depths of the Embassy. He got down into the basement, walked through a maze of old corridors, stuffed with old junk and then up some narrow metal stairs, twisting in the dark. He had to put some effort into opening the rusty lock. The small, heavy metal door opened finally and he entered into a spacious compartment filled with the pervasive, heavy smell of machine oils. The light switch clicked; light crawled across the surface of a long greasy puddle. The garage was empty with the sole exception of a pile of old scrap in one corner. Carefully, so as not to stumble into the inspection pit, Kosta stepped around the puddle and reached the door. Turning the switch off again, he unlocked the padlock and lifted the latch. The two sections of the door opened with a heart-stopping squeak.

The van’s brake-lights glowed eerily in the darkness. The van reversed, following Kosta’s instructions and slowly but surely disappeared down the black throat of the garage.

Batushka turned off the engine and pointed a powerful torch in Kosta’s face. The cook covered his eyes.

“Molodets!” the Tartar’s voice echoed.

Chavdar quickly opened the back door. Both of them set to, unloading some large nylon bags. Kosta watched them from one side with the unpleasant feeling that he had witnessed the scene before. The air in the garage stank of petrol and he felt sick. Batushka looked at him discontentedly, “What you being stare at?!” He thrust the torch at him and forced him to carry one of the bags.

They inched down the stairs and across the basement, then came out into the corridor, turned left and found themselves directly in front of the kitchen door. Here the cook stopped and started listening nervously.

“What’s wrong?” asked Chavdar anxiously.

“I thought I heard something inside,” Kosta whispered and continued to listen.

“Coward! You’re going to fill your pants!”

The cook curled his lip contemptuously, opened the door and turned on the light.

Batushka whistled in surprise. The kitchen was vast; one might assume that they were cooking for entire regiments down there. Which incidentally was not very far from the truth, especially in the not so distant totalitarian past when the life in the Embassy had been flying high. Now, social life was dribbling, squeezed drop by drop through the needle’s eye of the market economy, and stagnation had settled in the kitchen. Some of the crockery had been stolen. The basins were covered with mould. The tiles around them were yellowish and cracked. Kosta drifted like a phantom between the cold ovens and the empty fridges. He rarely had to cook now; the only things left to do were the sandwiches and various nibbles, made from convenience products. From time to time he prepared the traditional Bulgarian pastry called ‘banitsa’, which was received by the guests with exclamations of ‘Oh, banitsa!’ A mixture of grief, nostalgia and hope still hid in his heart for a more substantial order, like a saddle of lamb, for example. Alas, the era of saddles was long gone, buried beneath a mountain of gnawed bones. A piece of sausage and a slice of gherkin speared with a tooth pick was the only thing he could hope for now. Without blinking, Kosta emptied the contents of the bag onto the long metal table. Around ten well-fed ducks fell out of it. Their necks were broken, twisted without pity. He noticed, on the leg of each one of them, a small silver ring.

“Wow, where did you catch these?”

“Nearby,” both men chuckled.

One of the birds flapped its wing haplessly; apparently, not completely finished off. Kosta quickly put an end to its suffering. He was now feeling more at home and that reassured him. He took out two whitish aprons and threw them to his accomplices. After a moment of hesitation, they put them on and moved closer to him like apprentices. The cook gave each one of them a big knife and pointed at the stove where a big pot of water had been simmering for some hours.

“You know what to do now?” he asked.

Both men rolled up their sleeves and started.

“You have four hours,” he warned them.

He went back to the duty room and checked his watch. He had been absent for no more than twenty minutes. He sat behind the desk, took out the logbook and signed in the column ‘on duty’, because he expected to forget about it in the morning. In the next column-‘comments’ — he wrote, ‘nothing unusual’. He then closed the logbook and put it back in the drawer.

Night-watch duty was awful, and, on top of that, long. From the cook to the consul — no escape. Everyone was equal as far as that sacred duty was concerned. Every day, around six in the evening, one could see the person on duty trot to the Embassy with his toilet bag, lunch box and some bed sheets. The humiliation recurred three or four times a month, according to the rota. They had to stay in the duty room like spiders in their web until the morning: watch television, answer the phone, open the door if necessary, drink, eat, and sleep. They were guarding the state’s dream. Some even shagged, but the cook was not one of them.

He flumped his body in front of the television, slipped off his shoes and opened a can of beer. Under other circumstances he would have sprawled on the bed and fallen asleep immediately, but now he had to watch. He was alert and quite often looked at the glaring blue screen, hanging on the opposite door. It seemed to him somebody was watching him although the situation was actually the opposite.

The air stank of socks.

He dragged the remote out from beneath his bottom and flicked to the pornography channel, decoded for the people’s use, courtesy of an able Bulgarian student. He gaped at it a bit, but could not concentrate. He thought only of the ducks. Fat birds! Wonder, where they took them from…? If the Chinese don’t buy them, as Chavdar and Batushka swore, we’re going to be eating duck into the next year. For fuck’s sake! Hell of a lot of birds that!

The electronic bleep of the telephone jolted him out of his dream. He picked it up and sleepily said, “Yeah.”

“Bulgarian Embassy?” a distant little voice sang.

“Aha.”

“Excuse me, could you tell me if I need a visa to visit Bulgaria?”

A short pause followed. The cook’s heart lurched into revolt. He hardly spoke a word of English, but the word ‘visa’ was clear enough to pour fat on the fire.

“You cunt!” he hissed maliciously in Bulgarian “What kind of visa are you looking for at this hour in the morning, go and fuck yourself, otherwise I’ll do it for you!!!”

From the other end came a burst of mocking laughter.

“Dozy Pastry! Your old mother!” Chavdar Tolomanov quickly changed his intonation “Stupid Pastry!” He was phoning on his mobile from the kitchen.

“Is that you? Are you taking the piss?” gasped the cook, after he’d calmed down a little. “Are you ready?”

“What do you think?”

“Coming,” he answered shortly.

It was half-four in the morning.

The kitchen was like an abattoir. Chavdar and Batushka were furiously scrubbing under the taps — their hands were sticky with blood, which had seeped deep under their fingernails. The freezer was stuffed with birds. The feathers and the offal had been stuffed back into the bags. Kosta looked underneath the tables and frowned; he would have to mop the floor. On the table top lay a plate, full of silver rings.

“Let us scram the fucking out!” said Batushka wiping his wet hands against the wall.

Something clicked in the cook’s head.

“And the money? Where’s the money?”

“Aaa! Sorry I forgot,” Batushka raised his hands.

“What do you mean — you forgot?!” hissed the cook. “I thought we agreed. 100 pounds, cash, up front.”

“Tomorning, Zavtra,” mumbled Batushka with some annoyance.

“No tomorrow, no zavtra, now!” shouted Kosta.

“Easy, my man,” Chavdar decided to intervene. “Zavtra says the man, That means tomorrow. We’re doing business for millions here, we’re hardly going to cheat you for spare change. Isn’t that right, Batushka?”

“Right, that’s right,” said Batushka scornfully.

The cooked goggled like a zombie. They were pulling the same number on him for the second time. He opened his mouth to speak, but felt he was going to enter the same familiar script. He waved them off and spat on the floor.