Moskva

28 Burying Vladimir

Who knew so many dead men would turn up to watch Vladimir Vedenin be buried? Now, if they were burying his father, that would be different. Wax Angel could imagine the dead turning up to watch that. Although she doubted they’d be that keen to have his company.

Not that some of the living were that keen either.

Wax Angel pretended not to see the dead in their ragged uniforms flitting between the trees. She’d been pretending for so long she sometimes wondered why they didn’t simply give up and go home. There’d be gaps in the ground waiting for them, mounds in fields and forests that were missing their centres. A lot of her friends and enemies, lovers and family had gone into unmarked graves. You couldn’t really bury that many properly; you’d never have time for anything else.

Be practical, give a coffin this Christmas.

That had been a German joke in the winter of ’44. Before the Red Army arrived to abolish Christmas for ever. She wondered how many of the old men pretending not to notice her remembered it. The commissar would.

Men like him never forgot.

Snow had fallen in flurries but the paths in the cemetery had been cleared overnight. Dead birds had been collected from beneath their trees and tossed into a bin near the entrance. It was always the small birds that died. Their faster metabolism meant they burned more energy, and they had shorter lives anyway. In summer she was happy to feed the birds on the rare occasions she had food to spare. In winter, never… She moved too often and starved too regularly to allow winter birds to come to depend on her. They might come back to where she’d been, find her missing and lack the strength to fly elsewhere. She had enough on her conscience already without that.

Comrade Vedenin, Commissar Milov, Erekle Gabashville. Even General Dennisov, squat and hobbling like some poisonous gnome. At least the general’s best friend wasn’t here. With any luck Kyukov was dead. She hoped he hadn’t expected hell to welcome him.

Even Satan had standards…

Wax Angel watched the old men make their way to the graveside. Judging by the folds in their faces and the swept-back hair that had long since stopped being silver, she was still the youngest of them all. Most of them had been born before the century changed and were alive when Gisbert von Romberg, the Kaiser’s ambassador in Switzerland, had arranged for Lenin to be shipped through Germany to Russia in a sealed one-carriage train. One of the dumber decisions of history.

These were the canny ones.

Brave, wily or timid enough to survive the Stalin years.

The son’s coffin arrived on the shoulders of six officers from the Vnutrenniye Voiska. Dressing up wild dogs didn’t make them any less wild or less canine; but she was prepared to admit they stood straight and looked smart enough to carry a box containing a dead idiot. Minister Vedenin took his place behind.

As worthless a piece of shit as ever lived.

Mind you, you could say that about most of them.

The state paid for funerals and by tradition all were open to the public. Although the earliness of the hour and the suited young men with hard eyes by the cemetery entrance had been sufficient to put off the simply curious.

General Dennisov’s drunken, one-legged son was there. As was the boy’s bastard half-sister, looking as simple as ever. Her brother was in full uniform with a rack of medals. The effect was ruined by the fact that he obviously hadn’t shaved in days. The drunk and his father exchanged glances only once, a cold wintery glare that both held and then broke in the same moment.

The half-sister barely raised her eyes from the ground.

It was the girl beside General Dennisov who interested Wax Angel. Blonde, stiff-faced and beautifully dressed. Western clothes by the look of them.

It took Wax Angel a moment to recognize her.

General Dennisov’s other daughter. The dutiful one. The one who’d been… Wax Angel looked at Vladimir’s coffin, now static on the shoulders of soldiers who stood rigidly to attention, in awe of those who watched them. Vladimir and the girl had been due to marry, Wax Angel was sure she’d heard something about that.

The girl didn’t look broken-hearted.

If anything, she looked relieved. Her father, however, looked furious.

Behind Dennisov’s drunken brat, watching with much the same fury as the son watched his father, was the gangster. That was what the old men labelled Erekle Gabashville, for all that Beziki was more honest than most. He watched them all, and there was something taunting about his gaze. He was stood back, in the shelter of a leaf-stripped tree. The richness of his sable coat was an insult to the uniforms around him, just as his cigar was an insult to their solemnity.

The old woman was impressed.

She didn’t trust him. She wasn’t even sure she liked him. But she was impressed all the same. It took balls for him to come to this.

The fool in the coffin would get a red star on his gravestone to mark his service. Just as the state provided a grave plot and paid for the funeral, so it provided the gravestone. With an inlaid motif if one merited it.

A musician might get staves of music, an artist a brush and palate, a poet a quill or a pen. In one case, a famous novelist got a neatly carved typewriter. When they buried her, Wax Angel doubted they’d even know what name to put, never mind inlay her stone with ballet shoes.

At a nod from Vedenin, the soldiers began to lower the long box.

The man’s eyes were unreadable and Tom could barely imagine the feat of will to keep his face impassive. Tom had been so drunk, so numbed by alcohol at his own child’s funeral, that he’d almost passed for sober.

Vedenin, however, was sober.

His cheeks were dry.

His oration, when it came, was measured. The man spoke as slowly and as precisely as the honour guard had marched and the coffin been lowered… His son was a young man taken early. A good Party member. A faithful servant to a state that would miss him. His military service had been exemplary, his loyalty to Soviet ideals fierce. He was too young to be taken from the world by so pointless an accident. But, as the boy’s father, Vedenin was proud of what he had achieved. As proud as he was sad at the thought of the gifts his son would never have a chance to use in the service of the state.

Men, powerful men, for all they were old and shuffling and hunched inside their damp coats, listened intently and nodded at the appropriate places. It was hard to tell whether they agreed, disagreed wildly or were simply thinking of something else entirely.

Their own families, their own deaths?

Their breakfasts?

When the words had been said and handfuls of earth thrown on the coffin, the old men turned to go, and Tom watched Vedenin absent-mindedly wipe his fingers on his trousers. On Vedenin’s lapel was a tiny gold badge with Lenin picked out in red enamel. He saw Tom looking at it and bristled, then caught his anger and swung away.

‘That badge…’ Tom began.

‘The Order of Lenin,’ Sveta said.

Her grandfather had one too. His was also gold, not the platinum from which Dennisov said newer badges were made. If Vladimir had taken his father’s Order to give to someone else, Tom doubted it was Alex.

So who had Vladimir given it to?

And had that person been the one to give it to Alex?

A token of love, probably. What else would it be at that age?

Tom thought of the young man burned alive in the warehouse with his wrists wired behind his back, the jade ring he’d been wearing. Another token of love, if ever there was one. Military. Kept to himself. That was what the crop-haired boy outside the Khrushchevka said when Tom and Dennisov went looking. To get close to someone military, they had to trust you. Certainly to get close enough to kill.

Vladimir had thought himself untouchable.

Spoilt, indulged, motherless. He struck Tom as the jealous kind.

Jealous and murderous even. What was it Mary Batten had said? That he’d accidentally reversed over his father’s chauffeur, killing him.

An accident, obviously.

A dead rent boy in a pool in Chelsea, when Vladimir was doing his year in London at the LSE. No suggestion that they’d known each other, equally obviously.

Tom was beginning to think it went like this…

Someone Vladimir liked, someone young enough not to frighten a fifteen-year-old English girl, falls in love with Alex. Alex decides to run away, being too unhappy and too swept up in her first love to be less stupid.

Vladimir takes it badly. He takes it very badly indeed.

Alex’s boyfriend dies. And Alex…?

Why was a way not found to return her?

Except that it had been found, hadn’t it? The deserted house, the overblown muster of crack troops, Vladimir’s father’s shock when she wasn’t there. Something hadn’t simply gone wrong between the planning and execution.

It had been sabotaged.

The more Tom thought about it the more certain he was that he’d got that right.

Examining the mourners, who looked as if they should be smoking cigars in their clubs, or chain-smoking in dark pubs and complaining about the state of the world, he wondered whether the man who sabotaged Alex’s return was here, whether the others knew who he was or if he was quietly gleeful at remaining hidden.

A double bluff from Vedenin?

That had been Tom’s first thought, once he’d got over thinking Vladimir Vedenin had been behind Alex’s abduction, which wasn’t an abduction anyway. But Vladimir’s father was destroyed. A big beast and dangerous, but hollowed out by the loss of his son.

Beziki?

The way he was watching the others told Tom that his being here had nothing to do with respect. Dennisov’s father? Sour-faced and eaten up by cancer, if the commissar was to be believed. Or the commissar himself, who moved serenely among the mourners as if unaware that every single other person in the graveyard was watching him, his granddaughter included?

One of these, or someone else entirely?

It was Beziki’s gaze Tom felt most.

It wasn’t hard-eyed like Vedenin’s, who still couldn’t bring himself to believe that Tom had had nothing to do with his son’s death. Nor mistrustful like Sir Edward’s, who’d been staring at him on and off since he realized Tom was here.

It was watchful.

The gangster seemed to be wondering whether he could manage a word with Tom without having to talk to anyone else, whether he could still trust Tom if they did talk. The Georgian was heading for Tom and Sveta when he suddenly stopped and Tom realized that the commissar had appeared behind them.

‘So… how’s the sling working?’ the commissar asked.

‘Well enough.’

Looking over to where Sir Edward stood, Sveta’s grandfather smiled.

The commissar had been looking amused since the ambassador arrived. As amused as you can be at a funeral without being openly offensive. ‘I’m told that at Sad Sam you’re the subject of rumours. It would seem Sir Edward’s heard them too.’

‘About Vladimir’s death?’

‘Oh, nothing like that. Poor boy. Such a tragic accident. No, these are far more scandalous. Apparently you’ve defected.’

‘You know that’s not true.’

‘Rumours don’t have to be.’

‘So tell him that.’

‘Why don’t you tell him?’ the commissar said.

Office workers were streaming from a nearby metro station, heading for grey concrete blocks. An orange snowplough rattled its way along the road, followed by impatient cars. As the first of the black sharks parked there growled to life, it simply pulled out ahead of everything else, claiming the lane reserved for it and it alone. Tom turned from watching it depart and saw Anna glaring.

It seemed rude not to go across.

‘How could you?’ Anna demanded.

‘How could I what?’ Tom asked, then couldn’t be bothered to make an argument of it. ‘I haven’t. All right? You’re being played. Well, Sir Edward is.’ He jerked his chin towards her husband.

‘Why would the Soviets do that?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Tom. ‘Why don’t you ask them? Alternatively, Sir Edward could ask them. Or Mary could do it for him, if he’s too gutless.’

‘It’s the drugs,’ Sveta said, appearing at Tom’s elbow.

She shook Anna’s hand, saluted a scurrying Sir Edward with a briskness bordering on contempt and prepared to steer Tom back to where her grandfather was talking to an old man who stood so stiffly Tom decided he must be a general.

‘He’s not defecting,’ Anna told Sir Edward.

‘Is he under arrest?’

Sveta stopped. ‘Why would he be under arrest?’ She sounded genuinely puzzled. For a moment Tom suspected she was wondering whether he should be.

‘If he’s not,’ said Sir Edward, ‘why are you taking him?’

‘He needs to go back to hospital.’

‘We have hospitals of our own.’

‘Our doctors don’t believe he’d survive the flight.’

Sir Edward gave her a disbelieving glare.

Tom thought the ambassador might address him directly, perhaps ask if what Sveta said about him not being a prisoner was true. A question he wasn’t sure he knew how to answer. But Sir Edward simply turned on his heel and took his wife’s elbow, urging her forward when she didn’t move. Tom watched Anna shake free and imagined it would be a long drive home.

‘This missing girl looks like your daughter?’ Sveta asked.

‘No. Bec was blonde, pretty, fine-boned.’

‘You liked her?’

‘I barely knew her.’

‘Do you think your daughter realized that?’

Tom thought of Becca, so neat and private.

So terrifyingly self-contained.

It was six months since Becca had died. Did her mother have equal quantities of despair or fury raging beneath the surface? Did Caro fall asleep at night wondering if tomorrow would be the day she’d drive her Mercedes into a tree?

‘Yes,’ Tom told Sveta, ‘I think she might have done…’