Moskva

50 To the Island

Beyond Pavlov’s House, beyond the city, beyond the reach of pylons and factories and other signs of civilization, the river’s edge made the landscape timeless as a faded photograph. Tom was grateful when the forest began. Until the darkness and tightness of the trees started to press in, and he wished they were by the river again, for all the wind blowing across it had been vicious.

Colonel Kyukov was dressed for the drive: pale leather jacket with sheepskin lining, dark leather jeans and heavy-heeled boots. He could have stepped from the turret of a T-34 or ridden out from between the trees on a pony with ice clinging to its mane. His flying jacket was good against the wind, and its leather tough enough to turn a blade. Tom’s own jacket was Soviet, chosen to blend in on the train, and next to useless.

The snowfall began shortly after they left the city, just a few flakes at first, softening the air in front of them. They built up on the windscreen until Kyukov swore and flicked on the wipers, sending clumps of snow into their faces as the screen cleared and he increased speed again.

‘Where are we heading?’

‘You’ll see.’

The Volga came back into sight where it began a huge turn, the river’s far edge vanishing as it widened. Without signalling, without saying anything, Kyukov turned down a track to a ruined checkpoint, its bar pointed skyward like an accusing finger, its barrel weight buried in fallen snow.

A sign said go no further.

Falling snow was meant to make weather warmer. But when Tom began to feel warm, he knew it was the blood retreating from his limbs as his veins narrowed and his body began to shut down to protect its core. When he found himself fighting sleep and a desire to curl into a ball, he realized hypothermia was close.

‘Tiring journey?’ Kyukov’s glance was knowing.

‘I’m fine,’ Tom said.

‘For now.’

The Tartar returned his attention to the track.

Beyond the checkpoint, razor wire fenced a landing stage off from the firs. Scrub poking from the snow filled the fifty paces between the woodland’s edge and the fence. Rusting searchlights on sentry towers told Tom guards had once policed that gap. Absolutely No Entry announced a sign.

Beyond the landing stage, far enough away to look like the opposite bank, was the tip of what Tom realized was an island. The real edge of the river was lost in falling snow. The Volga was wider than most lakes he’d seen.

Tom could just make out a matching landing stage on the island, with a slight fuzz to its edges that might be razor wire.

‘A prison camp?’

‘A school,’ the colonel said. ‘My school.’

‘How many boys?’

‘Hundreds. Thousands.’

Ramming the Jeep into gear, Kyukov headed for the ice and grinned as Tom suddenly sat upright.

‘Ah, yes,’ Kyukov said. ‘Poor Vladimir Vedenin.’

The Jeep bounced heavily on ruts in the ice and then raced across the river at breakneck speed. Kyukov was grinning. But then Tom was coming to realize that Kyukov was usually grinning, except when he was staring.

The staring somehow felt less dangerous.

The Jeep raced up an icy bank and through a stand of firs that opened on to a field, with a huge, two-storey building just visible through the falling snow. The building had all the elegance of a nuclear bunker.

Beyond it were rows of huts, dozens of them.

The door to the orphanage was missing and a white wolf stood in the gap, the fierceness of its gaze making clear that it regarded the approaching Jeep as the interloper. As Tom watched, it turned and vanished into the darkness inside.

Kyukov shrugged, as if he expected nothing less.

‘They used to pay ten roubles for every one killed,’ he said. ‘No longer. There’s no cattle now for them to kill and no one wears their fur these days.’

Thin light bled through broken windows into a foyer where a mosaic of blond boys, stripped to the waist and clutching axes, filled the wall behind a rotting reception desk better suited to a hospital.

Because of the missing front door, frost made the vinyl tiles of the reception area slippery underfoot. Those at the edges curled to meet the walls.

Tom shivered.

His school had had hose-down floors too.

Who knew when the building had last been used? Five years, ten years? It could have been more recently. It was impossible to tell how long it had been empty, how many generations had passed through here for indoctrination or lessons, whether they had hated this building more than the crude dormitory huts outside. There was a sourness to the foyer, a stink as if something monstrous had been left to rot rather than shriven, blessed and decently buried. It coated the inside of his nostrils the way the frost coated the tiles.

It pulled with smoky fingers at his mind.

Without warning, Tom vomited.

‘Can’t you smell it?’

‘No smell,’ Kyukov said. ‘It’s too cold for things to smell. That only happens when the ice begins to thaw. Believe me, I know…’

‘Where’s Dennisov?’

‘You call him “general”.’

‘Where’s the general?’

‘He’ll be along later. I’m to show you the girl and check you have the photographs. Although, as you’ve agreed, you’d have to be stupid to come here without them. The general will do the swap later.’

I have to be stupid to be here at all, Tom thought.

‘How much further?’

‘Save your breath for walking.’

The corridor Kyukov strode down was patched with damp and dirt and decades of misery that had leached into its walls. At the far end, a single door on to a yard was so blocked by falling snow that they had to kick it away to get through. A single set of half-filled-in footprints led to a gymnasium beyond.

The Tartar yanked back a new-looking bolt.

‘You don’t touch anything. All right?’

Tom looked at him.

‘The general will be very unhappy if you touch anything.’

Kyukov stepped back and gestured Tom through. Tom went, his shoulders tensed, half expecting to be clubbed from behind. Instead he heard a bang as the heavy door slammed behind him and its bolt thudded into place.

‘I’m going to get the general now,’ Kyukov called. ‘I’ll be an hour or so. Say hello to the girl for me.’ He went off laughing, leaving Tom on the wrong side of a reinforced glass door.

The left wall of the changing room had toilet cubicles with no doors. Open showers and a long urinal shared the right. A rack for clothes running down the middle of the room had benches either side.

What little light entered came through snow on a skylight above.

The general will be very unhappy if you touch anything.

It was only when Tom stepped into the gymnasium that he understood what Kyukov had been talking about. And when he did, he felt the room lurch and a hot anger rise inside him. He bit down on it, and felt cold fury take its place.

Alex hung by her ankles in the middle of the room.

She was naked, her head shaved and her flesh marble, her hands dangling a foot above the floor. Her hipbones were sharp, her ribs rabbit-like.

Dog tags hung from her neck.

Alex didn’t react when Tom crouched beside her.

Her throat was cold beneath his fingers. She had a pulse, just about. Although her breathing was so shallow that her ribs barely moved. He checked the dog tags without thinking. Her stepfather’s: Edward J. S. Masterton. An army number followed.

Dear God, could it get any messier? He filed that with all the other questions for which he’d only ever found half answers, and dug into his pocket for the lock knife he always carried.

‘I’ll get you down,’ he promised.

She was way beyond hearing, at the very edges of this world.

Sawing savagely at the rope, Tom wrapped his other arm tight around her hips. Even braced, he staggered as the rope fibres parted, only just catching her before she hit the floor. Laid out, with her body shaved and stark naked, eyes closed and barely breathing, she looked terrifyingly like the girl found frozen at Patriarch’s Ponds.

The one he’d watched being cut open.

He couldn’t bear for there to be another laid out on a slab.

Blood pressure. Heart beat. Lung function… Tom tried to remember the dangers of being hung upside down.

Blood had trouble leaving the brain. He knew that much. He was pretty certain being cold was a good thing. Unless she was too cold.

‘Alex. Wake up.’

He slapped her cheek.

Nothing, not even when he did it harder.

Scooping her up, he headed for the changing room and found himself facing the bolted door. The door was sound, the glass reinforced with steel mesh; nothing he could see looked sharp enough or heavy enough to break it.

How long had he been here? Ten minutes, fifteen?

‘Alex. Please.’

He watched one eyelid flutter.

‘That’s it. Come on, wake up.’

Her colour was slightly better, her ribs visibly rising and falling.

He felt for the pulse in her wrist and instinctively closed his fingers around hers, making a promise that he’d do whatever was needed, whatever he could. The promise so instinctive he barely realized that he’d made it.

‘Alex. Please. It’s me.’

She opened one eye, the first time she’d done so.

‘I need you to wake up.’

Her eye closed, her eyelids fluttered and then she opened both eyes at once. Her pupils were huge in the gloom of the changing room. Like a fool, Tom tried to stand her upright and grabbed her as she crumpled.

He needed Alex safe.

He needed her out of there.

Awake was what he needed most of all, but both her eyes were now firmly shut and her head lolled from side to side as he tapped first one cheek and then the other. Alex’s breathing was definitely steadier, her ribs rising and falling almost normally, her heartbeat steadying.

She still looked starved, though. A ghost of the girl she’d been. It would take time to cure that.

Stripping off his shirt and jacket, Tom threaded her arms through the jacket’s sleeves, tucked the dog tags inside and zipped it shut. The best that could be said was that it covered her to the thighs and would be warmer than nothing. His shirt he used as a makeshift skirt, tying it round her waist under the jacket.

It felt like he was dressing a small child.

Tom tucked the photographs under his belt, folded his lock knife and slipped it into his jeans pocket. When he looked back, Alex was staring up at him.

‘Who?’ she asked.

‘Tom,’ he said. ‘We met at your stepfather’s party.’

The girl’s eyes focused on the changing room behind him and widened in shock, her question forgotten, his answer unheard. Tears rolled down her face. ‘You’re not meant to move me. He’s going to be so cross.’

‘We’ll be gone before he’s back.’

She tried to shake her head, then she shut her eyes and her head slumped as she slipped to the edge of sleep or unconsciousness.

‘Don’t,’ Tom said. ‘Stay with me.’

A moment later, Alex whispered, ‘He’ll catch us.’ Her chin trembled. ‘You could say you didn’t understand his orders. He might believe that. You made a mistake. You’re sorry…’

‘Alex, I’m going to get you out of here.’

Her mouth twisted in misery. ‘You don’t know him,’ she said.

His father had been a tsarist officer.

Not Kyukov, General Dennisov.

Tom had been told that or read it somewhere.

Criminals, recidivists, tsarists, Jews, separatists, the gulags were at their height in the thirties, filled according to Stalin’s whim or paranoia. Kyukov and Dennisov had made it out of here as children.

This was a man who had survived Stalin by feeding his superiors to the machine.

To do that you had to know where the machine’s hungers lay, what its weaknesses were… The commissar’s entire cadre were compromised in one go by the photographs of the baby-faced officer lashed to a chair. All those threads tying the USSR’s future leaders into one sticky web…

Careful planning or lucky accident?

Either way, the man was unstable, unstable as sweating gelignite with a faulty fuse.

Tom should have felt right at home.

Stepping up on to the double-sided bench running down the middle of the changing room, he clambered on to the bar from which clothes had once hung, balanced there precariously and grabbed for the skylight before he could fall. The window frame was so rotten its lock simply ripped away.

Now he just had to get Alex up there.

‘I can’t,’ she said.

‘You can,’ Tom promised her.

‘You’re just making things worse.’

She was cross. Cross was good. Cross showed Alex was still in there.

When cajoling and encouragement failed, Tom fell back on cruelty.

Threatened with being hauled up by a rope, the girl let herself be balanced on the bench, boosted up to the rail and held upright until she found the edge of the skylight. ‘Up you go,’ Tom said.

He gripped her ankles, intending to lift her, but let go when he heard her whimper and felt blood on his hands from where Kyukov’s rope had lacerated her. He thought for an instant that she was going to crumple, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to catch her properly if she fell.

‘Hold on,’ he said.

‘I’m trying,’ Alex said.

‘I’ll make a stirrup with my hands.’

Shakily she raised one foot for the stirrup and Tom boosted her up, watching her foreshorten and vanish.

‘Alex?’

He needed an answer.

All he got was silence. And then she was staring down, her eyes wide. The wind had roused her and she was hugging herself with one hand, holding the edge of the skylight with the other, and shivering.

‘There’s a Jeep.’ She sounded scared.

‘I’m on my way…’