Moskva

35 Spinning the Wheel

The house he’d been taken to the time they bundled him into Beziki’s car was in darkness. No one answered when Tom leaned on the bell push and listened to an old-fashioned bell ringing deep inside. If Beziki was there, Tom had no sense of him stirring. A light came on in the house next door, and then in a house opposite, and Tom turned up his collar, pulled down the fur hat he’d bought when he’d first arrived in the city and slipped back into the shadows.

He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d lent Dennisov his flat.

Instinct, probably. The same instinct that took him down Gorky Street.

The scaffolding was still up around the restaurant. The sign had been replaced though. It now said that the project would be finished in three months – instead of being late, which was what the previous sign had said. The lights were out behind the glass and the place looked deserted. He knocked on the door anyway and when that failed to produce a response, he walked round to the side and hammered on a window.

A couple on their way home, long coat for the woman and tan leather jacket for the man, looked in from the main street, almost said something, changed their minds and shrugged at each other. It was maybe half ten, maybe just before. Moscow shut earlier than any city Tom knew.

‘Drunk,’ he heard the man say.

They continued on their way and Tom went back to hammering on the side window, wondering how long it would be before the militsiya arrived.

Beziki beat them to it.

A door was thrown open inside and his bulk filled the unlit space. Stamping towards the side window, he peered through the glass, his eyes hooded and his mouth set. When he realized it was Tom, he nodded. Tom waited while he threw back the bolts and dug into his pocket for a key.

‘This is a bad time,’ Beziki said.

A revolver hung from his fingers. He had the fierce sobriety of the God-fearingly sober or the absolutely and unremittingly drunk. He held himself under such tight control that Tom had no idea which it was until Beziki breathed brandy on him.

‘You have company?’ Tom asked, looking at the revolver.

‘Not any longer.’ The fat man hesitated for a second, then shrugged. ‘Strangely enough, I’ve just finished writing to you.’ His eyes were so haunted that Tom was surprised he couldn’t simply see the ghosts behind.

‘I’m sorry,’ Tom said. ‘About your sons.’

‘I always knew. No matter how hard I hoped, I always knew I wouldn’t get the second one back. It was my decision. My stupidity.’

‘You should have given them what they wanted?’

‘What they wanted shouldn’t have existed.’

Stepping back, Beziki gestured him in.

The restaurant floor was filthy, the tables pushed to one side and the chairs stacked against the wall. The room smelled dusty and unused. It looked so desolate in the light coming in through the front windows it was possible to believe Tom had imagined the waiters and endless dishes of his last meal here. They walked through to the back, avoiding a trestle with roller trays full of congealing white emulsion.

‘I sent everyone away,’ Beziki said.

He led Tom to a small, dark and empty room with what looked like a cupboard door at the far end. He tried the handle, swore and dug into his pocket for the Soviet equivalent of a Yale key. The room beyond was in darkness too. A lavishly furnished darkness with the silhouette of a chandelier overhead and the shadows of ornate chairs and the outline of a chaise longue against the far wall.

‘My office,’ Beziki said.

His hand hovered over a light switch and then he decided to do without. Instead he pulled back one heavy curtain to let in the yellow haze from a side street beyond. A truck growled its way along Gorky Street, coughing as it changed gears. ‘Sit,’ he said.

Tom pulled up a chair and waited for Beziki to take his place behind the heavy desk. The man put the revolver down as casually as if it had been a paperweight. Then he opened a folder, slipped out a photograph and pushed it across. It took Tom a moment to work out what he was seeing.

Six Russian soldiers stood round a seventh. Most of them were barely more than boys. The seventh was tied to a chair and clearly terrified. They were in the ruins of a cellar, with half the ceiling fallen in behind them. With a shock, Tom recognized Sveta’s grandfather as the oldest. ‘Berlin?’ he said.

‘Of course. Where else?’

Two of the group stared at the camera.

One looked solemn. The other was grinning.

‘General Dennisov,’ Beziki said. ‘And Kyukov, his attack dog. They grew up together. These days, Kyukov’s in a camp. With luck he’ll die there.’

‘Grew up together where?’ Tom asked.

‘Beyond Volgograd, Stalingrad as was. You heard of the Tsaritsyn Monastery? It was the scene of a massacre. Became an orphanage after that. I bribed the Oblast for the records. They arrived by truck. Boxes of mouldering cards. Kyukov’s were what you’d expect. No mention of Dennisov at all. These days he claims his father was a Cheka officer. I couldn’t even discover when he had the records cleaned.’

‘There are other photographs?’

‘Take them with you when you go. I was going to drop them at Sadovaya Samotechnaya. Do what you want with them.’

‘Who’s in the chair?’

‘Now there’s a question.’

‘Beziki…’

‘He was a junior political.’

‘You had political officers on the ground?’

‘Of course. The colonels told us how to fight, political officers how to think. I was too young. They wouldn’t let me in. I had to wait outside.’

‘Why did they do it?’

‘Ask them. Better still, don’t. Burn the file. Go home, mourn your daughter, comfort your wife, reassure your son. Let the dead bury their own bloody dead…’

‘I have to find Alex.’

‘Ask yourself why she matters more than doing any of that. Now, tell me about yourself. Tell me who Tom Fox really is.’

‘There’s not much to tell.’

‘That’s a lie.’

Tom ended up filling in the gaps.

The brief campaign in Belize where Tom, as a very young lieutenant, found himself drinking in a shack with a machine-gun-toting bishop. His years of walking across Hungerford Bridge from Waterloo to the MOD, mostly in a suit, occasionally in uniform. How far his work for military intelligence took him from what he’d once thought of as God’s business.

‘You know the motto of the chaplaincy?’

Beziki shook his head, stubbed out his cigar with half still to burn and selected another, rolling it between his fingers and listening to it crackle, before biting off the end and reaching for his desk lighter.

‘In this Sign we Conquer.’

‘Justinian.’

Tom looked at him and Beziki shrugged.

‘I believe,’ he said. ‘That’s one of my problems. Get to my age and you begin to wonder what’s waiting. I can justify every dead Nazi. I don’t regret a single one. They invaded and we chased them back to their nest and destroyed it. There are things after that… I’m going to find those harder.’

Tom nodded to show he understood.

‘Do British priests believe in God?’

‘Some of them, perhaps.’

‘I’m not sure ours do. They’re state-appointed. Mind you, it probably beats being a ticket inspector if you’re a smart boy who can keep his nose clean. We have freedom of religion, you know. It’s in our constitution. It’s just that most citizens have the sense not to exercise it. Was that you? A smart boy who didn’t want to inspect tickets?’

‘I need a drink,’ Tom said.

‘I heard you were cutting down.’

‘They lied.’

‘Not from what I hear.’ Pulling open a drawer, Beziki took a fresh bottle of chacha and broke the seal, filling its long metal top until the viscous liquid threatened to overspill the thin metal edge. Pushing it across the desk, he said, ‘Here.’

Tom downed the makeshift shot glass in one.

‘Need another?’

Tom shook his head. ‘I watched a dead girl being disembowelled this morning,’ he said. ‘It was very methodical. Very precise. She began as human and ended up as cuts of meat. And nowhere could I see space for a soul.’

‘You just tell yourself you don’t believe. Now, this vocation of yours…’

‘It wasn’t much of a vocation. Not really.’

And memory took Tom back to a small church on the edge of an army camp where his dad was based, somewhere hot and nasty, where the local gods were darker and stronger and had taken the trappings of the new religion. He’d come, aged seven, looking for answers to the only question that really bothered him.

‘How do you get God to give you something?’

‘You don’t.’ The padre, tired and sweating and ready for retirement, had looked at Tom’s stricken face and softened his words. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

‘What if I offered him something?’

The man had smiled. ‘You have a very Old Testament view of the world. I know people kill cockerels round here, but my advice is pray.’

‘But I could make an offering as well?’

‘Nothing living.’

‘What then?’

‘A promise, if you must.’

‘That would help?’

‘Well,’ said the sweating man, conceding defeat or perhaps humouring the small boy with a swollen lip and bruises on his face, ‘it might.’

Silently, Tom made his promise on the spot.

If God would get rid of his dad, he’d serve him.

A priest was what his mother wanted him to become. He’d always known.

Tom had meant God to kill his dad. Instead, He’d had him arrested. Awaiting court martial for rape and theft wasn’t as good as being dead but it would do. When Tom told his ma he was going to become a priest, she smiled for the first time in a year. It was she who told Social Services when she and Tom got home, and it was Social Services who found a Catholic school in Kent that took boys from difficult backgrounds for boarding.