Moskva

15 Drunk Again

He was very drunk when she found him. Drunker than most foreigners manage, lacking the liver, determination and soul of the average Russian. Drunk enough to be a Muscovite. And found wasn’t really the word. She’d been waiting for him on a bench in a little park on the corner. She was Wax Angel, carver of the guardians. It was her job to keep an eye on what was going on.

She put being in the right place to see him abducted down to having once been in such a wrong place – and at such a wrong time – that God had spent most days since making it up to her. As for finding the man now…

If he went in that door, he’d come out the other.

She knew he would. Even men like Erekle Gabashville didn’t abduct victims in broad daylight if they later intended to dump their bodies… Now, the KGB, they’d have no trouble with that at all. Wax Angel shivered with more than cold and gripped the edge of her bench. There’d been two office workers sitting here, collars up and heads down, smoking their cigarettes and reading books when she arrived. But they’d been kind enough to let her have the seat to herself.

She liked this park and she liked this bench.

She’d seen the Boss himself sitting here one Saturday, about ten years after he died. Few others seemed to notice. Although the black cat from the cafe on the corner had refused to come when she called. She’d wondered since what Stalin was doing back in Moscow and decided hell must have been having an open day.

‘So there you are,’ she said.

The Englishman stared at her, owl-eyed.

‘No,’ she said, when he dug his hand into his pocket for change.

He looked even more puzzled. He wasn’t safe to be let out in daylight really, never mind after dark.

Her husband had been like this for a while, in the bad years. So drunk he didn’t know what to do with himself. It had been a clever move. Better to be a drunk than to be suspected of being a conspirator or traitor. Alcohol had never worked for her. The insides of her head were messy enough already without making them worse.

‘This way,’ she said.

He tried to free himself when she took his arm.

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘You need to come over here.’

She led him down a slippery path to where bushes behind low metal railings wore snow like torn blankets, more holes than warmth.

Wax Angel knew how they felt.

‘Careful now…’

When he missed his step, she decided that was far enough.

Since, conveniently, he was now on his hands and knees, she walked round to his side and booted him lightly in the stomach. He vomited so fluently that snow melted, the grass beneath steaming like a spa bath.

The sight of it made him throw up again.

‘Well done,’ Wax Angel said.

She watched him struggle to his feet and helped him the last of the way.

‘Now… you’d better get yourself home.’

‘Embassy,’ he said. ‘Taxi.’

Wax Angel looked at him doubtfully. He was sweating alcohol, his knees were sodden from the snow and he had the shakes. She wouldn’t trust him not to throw up in her taxi, and she didn’t have a taxi.

‘Come with me,’ she said.

Tom’s cab to the embassy wasn’t actually a cab. It was an old and rotting mustard-yellow half-truck, stinking of the onions its owner had been unloading when Wax Angel led Tom into the car park. There was a queue in front of an empty stall, so word must have got out. That was one of Moscow’s basic laws. If you see a queue, join it. If you don’t want what’s being sold, someone will.

The stallholder told Wax Angel to join the line.

‘He needs a lift into town.’

‘Tell him to take the metro like everyone else.’

‘He’s a foreigner.’

‘Dollars or roubles?’

‘Which would you like?’ She hoped the Englishman had dollars. But he was foreign. All foreigners had hard currency of some sort.

‘I’ll just dump these.’ Hefting his sack, he headed for his stall, dropping the sack at the feet of a woman.

‘Follow him then,’ Wax Angel said.

Tom nodded. A few minutes later, it occurred to him that he should have thanked her but when he looked back she was gone.

The Niva was rusty, with broken lights, and looked like the bastard offspring of a Jeep and a Landrover designed by someone who’d seen neither.

‘Where to?’ the man demanded.

‘How much?’

‘Depends.’

Tom chose the route.

He had intended to be dropped on the corner where the Embankment began but the Niva was warm and he was fighting sleep, so he had the driver pull up outside the embassy instead. Both the militsiya and the British guard inside watched with interest.

Dragging a five-rouble note from his pocket, Tom handed it to the man, who opened his mouth to protest and shut it again when his passenger pointed at the floor. Ten dollars lay in the footwell of the Niva, held down by the rubber mat.

The man scrawled a number on an old copy of Pravda. ‘Any time,’ he said. ‘Ask for Pyotr. Say you’re the foreigner.’

The snow-covered cobbles between the gate and the steps were as unsteady as a ship’s deck in a storm. Climbing the steps was even worse. Having reached the top, Tom was terrified that if he let go of the doorknob he’d fall over.

‘Christ, you look bad.’

He peered at the man who came out to meet him.

‘Andrew,’ the man said. ‘I’m helping you settle in. Are you drunk, sir?’

‘In the line of duty.’

His mouth twitched. ‘Can you prove that?’

‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘Probably.’

‘Just as well. You’re not popular at the moment.’

‘Sir Edward?’

‘More all the people he’s been shouting at since you weren’t here to be shouted at yourself. It’s been a bit of an afternoon. This morning wasn’t great either. He’s demanded to be told the moment you arrive.’

‘Is the medical officer around?’

‘You mean the doctor? Yes. Usual place.’

When Tom just looked at him, the young attaché sighed.

Tom left the surgery an hour later, having confirmed there was nothing worse than Georgian chacha in his system. He’d drunk what felt like his body weight in soda water, napped for forty minutes, had a partial blood transfusion and swallowed tincture of Hovenia dulcis. He’d also washed his face, brushed his teeth and rinsed his mouth with Listerine. The embassy doctor was ex-medical corps.

He’d been in Belfast too.

Andrew was coming out of the ambassador’s office when Tom appeared in the outer doorway. The woman with him looked away. ‘Ah, I’d heard you were still in the sick bay.’

‘How is Sir Edward?’

‘Incandescent.’

‘No, I mean confident, worried, reticent?’

Tom realized the ambassador’s secretary was listening. She looked back down at her work when he looked over.

‘He’s the ambassador,’ Andrew said.

‘I assume you have a good excuse, Fox.’

‘What did the note say?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The note, sir. What did it say?’

‘We’ve had this discussion. You know what Alex said.’

‘I’m talking about the other note.’

For a second, Sir Edward hovered on the edge of denying there had been another note. Tom watched it happen. Then the fight went out of the man and he sat back, his anger deflating like a ruptured balloon.

‘Who told you about that?’

‘A Georgian. May I ask what the note said?’

Tom knew it was the wrong question the moment the words left his mouth, for all he’d guessed right about there being a second note. A flintiness returned to Sir Edward’s face and his gaze hardened. ‘No,’ he said firmly, ‘you may not.’

‘Too personal?’

The man almost rose to the bait. Then he caught himself and bit down on his anger at Tom’s impertinence. When he sat back, he was in control. ‘What it said is none of your business.’

There were two ways to read that.

The note was personal and Sir Edward was damned if Tom was going to know the contents. Or it was beyond Tom’s competence and pay scale. Either way, the man had known for a while his stepdaughter hadn’t simply run away to sulk.

‘Have you told London, sir?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Who here knows?’

‘About the second note? Nobody.’

‘Who knows about the first?’

‘My wife, and Mary Batten.’

‘With respect, sir, perhaps you should tell Mary Batten about this one.’

‘Wait there,’ Sir Edward said.

He vanished into his outer office and shut the door. All Tom could hear was muted conversation. How much of the embassy was bugged by the Russians? How much, if any, by us? The Americans had found a Soviet bug behind their great seal, that damn eagle in a circle behind their ambassador’s desk.

There was something fitting in that.

On a side table was a photograph of Anna and Alex. Anna looked younger and Alex untroubled, barely into her teens. Both were smiling in the shadow of the Colosseum and their smiles seemed real, despite the tourist backdrop.

‘Rome,’ Sir Edward said. ‘They liked Rome.’

He retook his place behind his desk and said, ‘Mary will join us.’

There was an awkward silence. Sir Edward picked up a file and hid himself in whatever was inside. Mary Batten entered without knocking. She was wearing a blue skirt suit that looked almost mockingly smart. Her dark eyes met Tom’s, and some question was asked that Tom failed to answer, because she looked at him coldly and waited for Sir Edward to put down his file.

‘Thank you for dropping by.’

Her face tightened at the ambassador’s careful politeness.

‘Major Fox has something to say.’

That wasn’t the way Tom would have put it. All the same, he sat back in his chair to order what thoughts he had and looked up to find Mary Batten watching him.

‘This is about being forced into that car?’

‘You know about…?’ Of course she did; she’d just mentioned it. ‘You’ve been having me followed?’

‘We’re following the man following you.’

Sir Edward stopped reading his memo.

‘You were told about that, sir.’

‘If you say so.’

‘The question,’ Mary Batten said, ‘is why do the Soviets have a KGB colonel shadowing a British major? One who, without wishing to be rude, is expected to retire as a result of recent difficulties.’

‘Difficulties?’ Sir Edward asked.

Tom had an instant picture of two men dead on the floor of a Boston bar. One was an IRA commander, the other black ops for army intelligence and so far under cover Tom doubted even he remembered where his true loyalties lay.

Tom could still hear the crack of his own Browning and the sudden shocked silence of the customers, with only the commentary to a Red Sox game and the rise and fall of a distant cop siren to break it.

Then the breeze from the door as he left.

‘The best that can be said,’ said Mary Batten, ‘is that nothing can be proved. It’s probably wise not to go into it now. Still, I can see why London decided to park you here to decompress. What did Erekle Gabashville want?’

‘You know him?’

‘Of him, certainly.’

‘His sons were kidnapped. One was left dead at the Kremlin Wall, the other is still missing…’ Tom watched Sir Edward glance at Mary, who shook her head. Obviously neither had heard about the body. ‘Gabashville wants his revenge. But mostly, at this point, he simply wants his other boy back.’

‘Who is this man, Mary?’

‘Vor v zakone, sir. Mafia, with connections.’

Sir Edward kept his gaze on her and waited to see if she had anything else to add. When she didn’t, he said, ‘By connections, I’m assuming you mean high-level protectors. Why would anyone murder the child of a gangster with connections?’

‘Maybe his protector’s no longer so powerful,’ Tom said. ‘Perhaps it’s revenge, and the killer’s been waiting for this moment. Apparently the Politburo’s at war with itself. The Soviets are big on fighting wars through proxies. Beziki’s definitely a proxy. Maybe whoever killed his son is too…’

‘Beziki said that?’ Mary’s gaze sharpened. ‘About the Politburo?’

‘As good as.’

‘Interesting choice of location for the body.’

‘Very, sir.’ Mary Batten agreed.

‘You’d better tell Mary how this connects to Alex.’

From the look on her face, Mary was already busy joining the dots between the ambassador’s stepdaughter being missing and Beziki’s son being dead, and not liking where those thoughts led her at all.

‘What Sir Edward’s been keeping private,’ Tom said, ‘is that he received a second note. Not from Alex this time. It contained…’ Tom glanced at the ambassador. ‘I’m not sure what it contained.’

‘When did this one arrive, sir?’

Sir Edward looked worried. ‘Just after Tom told Anna and me about the fire.’

Tom thought of Black Sammy, the Sad Sam cat, hanging flayed in his kitchen, felt the bile rise in his throat and decided he should tell these two about that too.

Mary looked grim.

And Sir Edward… Tom spent the rest of that evening replaying Sir Edward’s reaction. The blood drained from his face. There was no other way to describe it. The man went pale, and he gripped his desk so hard his knuckles turned white.

For a moment, Tom thought he might cry.

‘You don’t tell my wife,’ he said finally. There was a quiet fury in his voice. A steeliness, as if a blade had just been unsheathed. ‘This isn’t something Anna needs to know. You keep it to yourself.’

‘Sir…’ Tom protested.

‘I’m serious, Fox.’

‘But at least tell me what the note said.’

‘It’s secret. I mean that. As in, I don’t know your security clearance off the top of my head, but I very much doubt this is something you’re authorized to know.’

To Mary, the ambassador said, ‘Get me a line to London.’ He nodded towards his door and his secretary beyond. ‘Don’t leave it to Grace. I want you to place the call yourself. Fox, you can go. Mary, you’d better stay behind.’

Tom left. Fury at being cut out of the conversation followed him like a cloud.