Moskva

40 The Oak Tree

The bed was a mess. One of them, probably Sveta, had had the decency to strip the bottom sheet and put it on the cotton cycle in the Candy in the kitchen. It had been spun but was still damp when Tom got back to his flat around noon. So he looped it between two chairs like a makeshift tent, and that made him think of Charlie, which didn’t help.

The rest of the flat was suspiciously clean.

Everything in the kitchen had been washed and put away. The bath had been wiped down and was free of suds. That said, both Tom’s towels and his bathmat were sodden, most of the loo roll was gone, his champagne had been drunk and the bottle was missing. So they’d either taken it as a souvenir or dumped it with the rubbish outside.

Talking to Caro had thrown him.

Much of his protective anger was gone and without it he felt unshelled, rolled by events through the grit of his misery. In part through desperation, in part because he couldn’t put it off any longer, he made himself a jug of coffee using the real Colombian he’d brought from London, ripped open a fresh packet of papirosa and borrowed the cracked saucer from under the cactus for an ashtray. Then he put Beziki’s file on his living-room table, laid the photographs out like cards, with their backs to him, and began with the bank statements.

Beziki had kept money in the Bahamas.

The idea that a Soviet gangster would have a Western bank account stunned Tom but it was the truth. The man had also had accounts in Prague, Budapest and West Berlin. The money he had with the Royal Bahaman was several times Tom’s salary. He checked the figure again to be sure. And having made sure, he slid that bank book and that one only into his pocket, leaving the others where they were.

It was slow going sorting through the rest.

Beziki’s handwriting was atrocious and he’d kept all the accounts himself. You would, wouldn’t you? Tom thought. This wasn’t simply extortion and money laundering. This was extortion and money laundering in a country where both were punishable by death.

From a land deed on file it looked as if he’d owned a farm in Latvia and a vineyard in Georgia. Tom hadn’t even known private citizens could own land in the USSR. Account books for the farm and vineyard came next. Money in and money out, money loaned to neighbours and money repaid, rates of interest, new loans opened, old loans closed. A list of restaurants and companies in Moscow, Leningrad and Tbilisi came after that. Money loaned and money repaid. Sometimes, increasingly often, simply money paid in. Money went in monthly, the same sums every time. Occasional red dashes indicated a sum not paid. An occasional line through a name indicated an account closed. It was dark by the time Tom finished with the bank statements, land deeds and the flimsy little account books with their spidery notation, obviously written by someone who came to literacy late.

A brown envelope held pages torn from notebooks, mixed in with badly typed forms and reports, some so old they related to the secret police in the days, immediately after the Revolution, when it was still known as the Cheka. Most were later, though.

They all related to the Tsaritsyn Monastery.

It took Tom an entire packet of papirosa to translate the comments about traitors, kulaks, recidivists and duty done, and work out what was actually being said. In the late twenties and early thirties, in the aftermath of a failed kulak rebellion, the monastery had been a clearing house for those involved, the families of those involved, those who might have known those involved.

The net widened.

The numbers killed ran into hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. Brothers were forced to kill brothers, sons their fathers, daughters their mothers. Those who refused died with those they refused to kill. The descriptions were cold, almost clinical. The state was diseased.

Stalin’s purges were at their height.

They had a duty to reduce the contagion.

Two supposedly trustworthy locals carried out the work of organizing the slaughter. An ex-officer of the Imperial Veterinary Service, Pavel Nikolayevich Dennisov, and his ex-sergeant, Aslam Arkanovitch Kyukov. In time they had proved themselves untrustworthy and had been dispatched in their turn.

Tom read the two names again.

To find a Dennisov or a Kyukov might mean nothing.

To find both, linked like this… He needed to see what else, if anything, he could discover about the place. The last piece of paper was a newspaper clipping, yellow with age, ripped in two and glued together. The monastery was to be bulldozed and an orphanage built on its ruins.

Tom almost left it there, but then he made himself start on the photographs.

The first showed Gabashville’s boy dead in the ruined house. The curtain covering him had been yanked back and camera flash bleached his features.

The next showed him post autopsy, the Y-shaped incision across his chest sewn clumsily shut, the bullet wounds clearly visible. The photograph was official, or copied from an official one. Autopsy notes were glued to the back.

I should have realized it’s been hard for you too.

For you too. He’d given no thought to how grim it was for Caro.

Other, older photographs followed. An old man with a young boy. Two serious and thickset women on a fur rug in front of a fire with a wall of books behind. A girl, with ribs like a rack of lamb, with a girl younger still. A poster above the bed showed the older girl in Giselle.

Tom went back to the first and looked more closely.

Not at what was being shown, an old man in a leather chair, smoking a cigar, while a naked boy knelt in front of him. He looked at the background: high ceiling and tall windows, paintings of windblown steppes and photographs of men in uniform. The commissar’s generation or the one below.

And if it wasn’t taken in the House of Lions, then it had been somewhere similar. There were a handful of others like this, some old, some new. One showed a young, smiling Vladimir Vedenin. There was a photograph of his father too, smiling across a cafe table at a young blonde girl Tom found unsettlingly familiar.

If the photograph hadn’t been old, he would have said he’d seen her recently.

Trying to work out where gave Tom such a headache he washed down a handful of codeine with bad East German beer, and topped the painkillers off with a couple of sleeping pills. Then he made himself drink a pint of water against tomorrow’s hangover and went to bed early, betting against sleep. He lost.

When the phone rang at dawn, Tom ignored it. He ignored it again when he was down to the dregs of his morning coffee and Beziki’s photographs were spread untidily across the table in a fan in front of him. The same boys, the same old men, the same girl across a cafe table. If he stopped now, he’d find excuses to avoid looking at the last few.

The photographs in this envelope were older than the rest, smaller in format and taken with a 35mm fixed-lens camera, a good one. There were twenty-four shots, with the negatives included. The two yellowing strips of celluloid were so friable their perforated edges had begun to break away.

The first photograph showed the Reichstag, the streets around it bombed back to ruins, seven very young soldiers and a boy clutching a sniper’s rifle in the foreground. The men had forage caps, the boy a cloth budenovka with the flaps tied up. It wasn’t hard to recognize Beziki in the skinny urchin grinning for the camera.

In the second, a smiling officer pointed at a newspaper. It showed a blonde girl with complicated plaits proudly clutching a sniper rifle. The four or five photographs after that had the same snapshot feel. Young men pointing at Berlin street signs, or drinking from beer steins. Young men astride captured BMWs, grinning from the seats of an open-topped Mercedes, sitting fully clothed in a row of enamel baths holding champagne bottles. There was one of Kyukov, with his arm round a German girl, whose eyes were flat and smile tight. Another of the same girl naked in a tub, with suds too thin to hide her breasts. A photograph taken at her family flat, showing an old man, a small boy, the girl from the tub and a hollow-faced woman who might be her mother. They sat at a table laden with rations. Kyukov stood behind the girl, grinning from under his forage cap. The photographs changed after that.

Everything changed. The buildings were different, the skies less grey.

Tom couldn’t work out if it was a different city a few months later or simply a different part of Berlin. The smiles were gone, replaced by sullen anger. The baby-faced boy looked haunted. The jackets of the other officers no longer hung open. There were no girls, no motorbikes, no champagne bottles. Their senior officer – who Tom knew was Sveta’s grandfather – looked thoughtful, more than thoughtful, brooding.

The last eight photographs told a dark story.

The baby-faced lieutenant was bare-chested and tied to a chair. He had a gash across his upper chest and a forage cap stuffed in his mouth. His lips were broken, his face bruised and one of his ears bleeding. In the next photograph, he had a second gash. His eyes were wide, he was straining against his ropes, flesh bulging between twists of hemp as he struggled to break free. A sliver of Russian uniform stepped out of the photograph as another stepped in. In the photograph that came next, those entering and leaving the picture were gone but there was a third cut, deep enough for flesh to gape. Butchery, pure and simple.

So it went on, photograph by photograph, cut by cut. In the second to last, the man was dead, or as good as. The blood on the floor had already started to congeal. He’d long since pissed himself. On the back of each photograph was a smudged thumbprint. It took Tom a while to realize each one was different.

The last photograph…

Tom looked at it. He looked at it for a long time.

When the entryphone buzzed, he ignored it, as he’d ignored the house phone earlier. By the time there was an actual knock at his door he’d translated the splashes of semi-literate Russian on the plank held by Dennisov and his rather long-haired, disconcertingly beautiful Tartar friend.

The Tsaritsyn Boys.

Four German teenagers hung from the tree that formed the last photograph’s centrepiece. A second plank, nailed to its trunk, stated that they’d been executed for the horrific murder of a Soviet officer.

Dennisov looked pious. Kyukov was grinning.