Moskva

21 The Commissar

They pulled up outside a small wooden house with closed shutters. A vegetable garden could be seen to one side, carefully framed by picket fencing but buried under a thick layer of snow. Tom rocked in the wind that ripped across the open space in front of the house.

‘You’d better stand back,’ Svetlana said.

She knocked, knocked again and stood smiling in the bright beam of a torch, apparently undeterred by the double-barrelled shotgun that poked through beneath. It disappeared immediately.

‘Who’s he?’

‘An Englishman.’

An old man peered at Tom from between a heavy moustache and even heavier brows. He looked as Stalin might have if he’d let his hair grow long and go white. He stepped closer and the gun came up again.

‘Not German?’

‘I’m English,’ promised Tom. ‘Honestly.’

‘He speaks Russian. How do you know he’s not a spy?’

‘If he is,’ Svetlana said, ‘at least he’s not a German spy.’

The man grunted and stepped back to let them in. He lit a hurricane lamp, which instantly filled his front room with the stink of paraffin, and pushed a half-burned log back into what was left of the embers of a fire. It glowed and caught along a splinter, and he smiled when Svetlana immediately dropped to her knees and fanned it into flames with a strip of cardboard she found by the wall. He was still smiling when she finally stopped feeding the flames with kindling and put a new log on top.

Climbing to her feet, she said, ‘This is my grandfather.’

When Tom offered his hand, the man glanced at his granddaughter.

‘Really English?’

She nodded and bony fingers closed around Tom’s, reminding him for a second of both the strength and feel of his mother’s, which were also broken at the nails and calloused enough to catch on his skin when she took his hand as a child.

‘You call my grandfather “commissar”,’ Svetlana said.

‘So,’ the commissar said, ‘why are you here?’

‘He needs vodka.’

‘I didn’t say that…’

‘Only one,’ she told her grandfather. ‘Make it big.’

‘And then you’ll be off…?’

‘Unless you’d like us to stay?’

The old man’s expression was unreadable, to Tom at least. Perhaps Svetlana knew her grandfather’s thoughts because she blushed a little, and knelt to push some of the kindling a little further into the flames and add another log.

‘Stay, if you must,’ he said.

‘He can sleep there,’ Svetlana said, nodding to an old sofa covered with a half-bald tapestry blanket of trees and flowers.

‘If he must,’ the old man agreed.

The house was old and small and made from stripped logs on the outside and roughly planed planks within. The room Tom was given obviously did for reading and writing and eating and lazing, everything apart from cooking and sleeping from the look of it. It was comfortable in a way he liked. Small and sparse, as if the shaggy-haired old man had pared his life down to essentials, refusing to let the detritus of a long life overfill the space around him as most old people did.

The vodka Svetlana brought him was huge.

Tom drank it down in one after she’d gone and settled himself on the sofa with the blanket and his thoughts.

Talk to me, Caro used to say.

In the early days, that was. At night, in the darkness.

She never had an answer when he asked, About what?

What could he have told her anyway? Even then, half of what was in his head wasn’t safe for her to know. The other half he didn’t know how to put into words. So they fucked, a lot. And for a while that did instead. He thought of the fucking and the darkness and the silence afterwards. Two people who didn’t know what to say to each other when the Oh Gods and the Oh yeses and the grunting were done.

What Tom didn’t think about…

What he didn’t let himself think about were eleven dead teenagers on a frozen cellar floor and a blue-eyed boy with his chest opened by bullets. Those would lead him straight to Becca, rigid with terror in her final seconds before her white Mini hit its tree. Instant, the police said. Instant, said the coroner.

Instant can be a long time.

It was so cold in the room that he curled into a ball like a hibernating animal and pulled the musty blanket around him and felt himself shiver against the cold, his thoughts and the horror of what he’d seen in that cellar.

He never used to be this weak.

Of course, he could put his jeans and jacket back on, but that would mean throwing off the blanket and losing what little warmth he’d collected. He might not have been anywhere colder but he’d sat out far worse, and was on the edge of despising his own self-pity when a door creaked and he wondered which of them needed the privy outside at the back.

‘Move over,’ Svetlana whispered.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting cold.’ Lifting the blanket, she felt its thinness and sighed. When Svetlana returned, she had another blanket, equally old from the feel of it, although the darkness made it impossible to see. She climbed in beside Tom and he felt the warmth of her hip through a cotton gown as she barged him further over.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I want to see if you cry in your sleep at night too.’

She folded his arm across her as if it was the most natural thing in the world, shaped her body to his and curled in tight, her warmth warming him until he began producing warmth of his own She removed his hand when it found her breast and placed it firmly on her hip, which was hard and muscled and badly ridged just above the wing of her hipbone. ‘Bullet?’ Tom asked.

She nodded and he put her hand to his leg.

‘Pistol?’ she said.

‘Rifle.’

Her finger traced the scar.

‘Small calibre,’ she said doubtfully.

A moment later she was so deeply asleep her breath sounded like waves stroking shingle. He woke once in the night and found her gone, rolling into her space, which was still warm. When Tom woke again, she was back and he found they’d shifted sides. A shutter was folded back to show streaks of red. He thought it early morning until he looked at his watch. It was morning right enough, just not early. The ambassador would be wondering where he was. Looking around him, Tom wondered where he was too.

‘You don’t,’ said Svetlana from behind him. ‘Cry, that is. Well, not when I was watching. Now I must use the privy.’

‘You’re awake.’ If the old man glanced towards the double blankets, that was all he did. Shuffling to the kitchen, he left the door open and Tom saw him tip two spoons of coffee into a saucepan, fill it with water from a jug and put it on to boil. He put out a mug, hesitated and found another two, and looked beyond Tom to where his granddaughter was coming in from the cold. Her nightdress was thick but her nipples still stood out and she crossed her arms reflexively.

‘Just coffee,’ she said, as if he’d asked.

The commissar cut bread, grilled it, added a slice from a slab of cheese and put it in front of her. ‘Eat,’ he said.

Dragging on his jeans, Tom found his jacket and took himself outside, deciding it was best to leave them to it. The old man was eating toast and Svetlana was pouring coffee when he returned. ‘Sit down,’ she said.

Tom glanced at her and she scowled.

‘It’s my country.’

Her grandfather grinned sympathetically as Tom took his place. Leaning forward, he said, ‘She’s never brought anyone back here before…’

Svetlana spun round.

‘Well, have you?’

‘It’s a working relationship,’ she said stiffly.

He glanced at the crumpled sofa. ‘Of course it is. Now tell me why you’re really here. You could have driven another hour and spared yourself this.’

‘I like it here. I like seeing you.’

‘The second of those is true,’ he told Tom. ‘The first is not.’ Reaching for his coffee, he winced at its heat or maybe its taste, which was bitter as ground acorn. ‘She doesn’t lie,’ he said. ‘Not usually. Only about that. So, ask what you came here to ask. Or say what you came to say…’

Svetlana told him everything.

She began with Alex going missing, Tom’s search beyond the ring road and his trip out to the university before that. Where, she told her grandfather, he’d talked to one foreign student and beaten up another. Things Tom didn’t know she knew. She ended with the drive out to Vedenin’s dacha and the storming of the ruined house. She was frank about the stupidity of the attack.

‘Apparent stupidity,’ the old man corrected.

He made her start again from the beginning and asked questions that Svetlana had Tom fill in when she didn’t know the answer herself. Then he had Tom describe the attack and listened for discrepancies. He asked about internal politics at the embassy, the ambassador’s popularity, his competence.

Tom told him about the note Alex was meant to have left, and the one Sir Edward received later, while stressing that he’d seen neither, only knew what he’d been told about the first, and had been informed by Sir Edward that he didn’t have sufficient security clearance for the contents of the second.

‘Sir Edward,’ the old man said contemptuously. ‘That’s the English. Still clinging to their titles.’

Svetlana looked at him.

‘Commissar is different,’ he said. ‘Commissar is a rank.’

‘Which has been abolished.’

‘Not while I’m alive it hasn’t.’ Her grandfather lifted toast crumbs from his plate to his mouth with his thumb and shuffled himself and his thoughts into some sort of order. ‘You sure you want him to hear this?’

Tom was the him, obviously. The jerk of the old man’s chin was dismissive enough to render him invisible.

‘He was at the siege.’

‘That would never have been allowed in the old days.’

‘Things change.’

‘Usually for the worst.’

‘You know that’s not true.’ Svetlana’s voice was sharp.

The old man’s hand found hers for a second. ‘Not always true,’ he agreed. ‘I’m old enough to remember Ilyich… Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,’ he told Tom, who was apparently back in the conversation. ‘And the early days of the Boss. Stalin wasn’t bad then. It was only towards the end…’

Svetlana sucked her teeth.

‘Sveta disagrees. But I was there.’

Pushing back his chair, he left and returned a few seconds later with a rack of medals that he tossed clatteringly on to the little table. ‘The usual,’ he said, ‘plus some extra.’ Putting a Communist Party card next to them, he added a KGB card and finally a fading NKVD card, from the days when the People’s Commissariat enforced the Party’s will.

The man pictured on the last of those was just about recognizable in the white-haired pensioner in front of Tom.

‘My granddaughter comes to me for advice occasionally. Usually alone. Eventually I hope to understand what is different about this time.’

‘The missing girl is English,’ Svetlana said.

‘That is not enough.’

‘Did you know a man called Golubtsov?’ Tom asked.

The old man looked at his granddaughter and his glance was sharp. ‘You brought him here to ask that?’

‘He was NKVD,’ Tom said. ‘His son died in Berlin.’

‘I know who he was. Everyone knew who he was. Marshal Beria’s deputy. As for his son…’ The old man looked sour. ‘Have you any idea how many young men died for Berlin? We lost a hundred thousand, three hundred thousand wounded or too sick to stand. Two thousand armoured vehicles destroyed. The enemy lost more.’

He sat back and Tom watched Svetlana make herself wait. She looked younger in her nightgown, with one of the blankets from his sofa thrown round her shoulders. When it became obvious the old man intended to say no more, she shrugged and turned to Tom. ‘Who mentioned this man to you?’

‘Someone I met.’

‘It was Gabashville,’ she told her grandfather.

When Tom looked at her, she added, ‘We have every word you said to him in that steam room on tape.’

‘Then why ask me if you already know?’

‘To see how often you lie. Now,’ she said, ‘introduce yourself.’

Pulling his embassy pass from his jacket, Tom added his military ID, and then, because he still carried them, dipped into the back of his wallet to extract four or five tiny photographs, shuffling them to find the one he wanted.

Not Caro in a pair of Levi 501s, with his Honda 450cc in the background. Not Charlie in gumboots on a tractor. Not even the snapshot of Caro holding Becca the week she was born. The photo Tom wanted showed him in a cassock, in the days before he met Caro and changed denomination. He looked very young indeed to be training for the priesthood. Younger than he had remembered.

‘Now I understand,’ the old man said.

‘I didn’t know this,’ Svetlana said. ‘This was not in his file.’

The old man’s smile was grim. ‘Then it is a lucky coincidence. I too trained in a seminary. Outside Tsaritsyn, which became Stalingrad, then Volgograd. Now, I’ve reached an age when some days I wonder if it will become Tsaritsyn again.’

He smiled at his granddaughter’s shock.

‘Allow an old man his thoughts.’ To Tom, the commissar said, ‘Stalin trained in a seminary too. So that’s three of us who found another faith. In the end, I suspect, faith fades, then perhaps comes back transmuted. Now, tell me about Minister Vedenin. How he behaved. How he reacted.’

The commissar shut his eyes to listen.

At one point Svetlana got up to boil another saucepan for coffee, but Tom could see her listening, matching her reactions to his.

‘Now the actual attack.’

The more Tom told the commissar the less sense it made.

An elite force of VV shock troops, the Soviet Union’s gendarmerie, perfectly able to take up position in the snow and lie motionless until darkness but shocked to discover a ruined house protected by one teenage boy with a rabbit gun.

They hadn’t been expecting resistance.

It made Tom wonder what they had been expecting.

‘See,’ the commissar told his granddaughter. ‘Your friend doesn’t need me.’

She slammed a mug of coffee down in front of Tom, slopping it over the edges of the mug. She banged another down in front of her grandfather, and gripped her own mug so tightly Tom thought she’d crush it. Her glare when she looked at Tom said she regretted bringing him, that she wished he wasn’t there. ‘Vedenin believed she was there, didn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ Tom said.

‘Did he?’ The commissar asked.

‘I think so,’ Tom replied.

‘Then you should ask yourself two questions.’

Tom already knew what they were. What made Minister Vedenin think Alex was there? And why wasn’t she?

More to the point… had she ever been there?

If so, and if she had been taken from the house before the attack could begin, Tom needed to ask himself who had her now.