Moskva

58 Banquet

Alex had a bath on the plane.

She hadn’t known planes could have baths. This one had a bath and not just any bath. It was an iron bath held up on legs that ended in lion’s claws. The plane also had a shower and two round basins side by side, in front of a real mirror, not one of those slabs of silvered glass you found screwed to the wall of lavatories in ordinary planes. She’d asked how long she could take. The Russian girl told her to take as long as she liked, and then glared at her brother and Major Tom from the embassy, daring them to disagree.

‘Whose plane is it?’

‘Everyone’s,’ her brother said. ‘It belongs to the people.’

He said it in such a way, and with such a twist to his lips, that Alex didn’t know if he was joking.

‘Go,’ the girl said.

Alex went and lay in hot water up to her chin for an hour.

She would have emptied the bath and run another if Major Fox hadn’t knocked to tell her they’d soon be landing. He said that Yelena, who had to be the Russian girl, had found her something to wear, since she thought Alex wouldn’t want to put back on the shirt she’d been wearing. She was right.

Alex wondered how Yelena knew.

Dismissing the thought, as she’d been dismissing all thoughts of what happened on the roof, Alex opened the bathroom door a little and found a neatly folded dressing gown outside. So that was how she came to land in Sebastopol, wearing a man’s silk dressing gown, heading down the steps from the plane with it flapping round her knees, while hard-eyed young men in smart uniforms stared straight ahead.

A long, low black car had been parked near the plane, with a chauffeur, or perhaps a soldier, waiting by the rear door. He opened it as Alex approached.

‘I thought we were going home?’ Alex said.

‘We have something to do first,’ Major Fox told her.

There was something affectionate in his gaze, as if he felt he knew Alex well, for all she didn’t really know him. He might be an uncle she rarely saw, an old friend of her mother’s, something like that. ‘What?’ she asked.

‘We have to go to a banquet. Are you going to be all right?’

‘You mean, can I manage to be quiet, not draw attention to myself, remember that I’m not meant to drink alcohol, and only speak when I’m spoken to?’

‘Something like that.’

Alex rolled her eyes and wondered why he grinned.

The meal was in full swing when Tom stepped back to let Alex and Yelena enter. Dennisov waved Tom on and shut the door behind them all. From the look of the tables, with their platters of food, picked-at plates and dozens of guests wearing expressions that suggested they’d long since reached capacity, the eating part of the evening was nearly over.

The smoke from candles mixed with that from cigars, and from logs and pine cones smouldering in a fireplace far more modern than Tom had expected. He thought of dachas as wooden. Official ones being perhaps a little grander than private ones.

This one, from what he could see of it on arriving, was made of sandstone, possibly concrete, the National Theatre in London, if someone had welded circular balconies to one edge so that they hung in space like parked flying saucers.

‘You all right?’ Tom asked.

‘I’m fine,’ Alex replied.

Tom realized it might not be the first time he’d asked.

She wore a simple white dress, with complicated embroidery across the bust, also in white so it could only be seen when light caught it. Her shaved head was hidden beneath a blue scarf, tied at the back.

‘A woman’s waving,’ she said.

Pushing back her chair, Wax Angel examined Dennisov crossly, nodded to Yelena and kissed Alex on both cheeks. ‘Such a commotion you’ve caused.’

When Alex blushed, Wax Angel laughed.

‘If you can’t cause a commotion at your age, when can you?’

She indicated the seat beside her and Alex sat, Dennisov taking the place on Wax Angel’s other side, leaving Yelena and Tom to take seats opposite. Food appeared instantly, helpings of lamb plov with rice, onions, carrots and spices. Looking up, Tom realized Dennisov’s plate was untouched.

‘I can’t see Sveta,’ he said.

‘You go off to get yourself killed,’ Wax Angel said. ‘You take your sister instead of my granddaughter, your sister who has no training. And you expect Sveta to be here to greet you? Sveta refused to come.’

‘She should be here.’

‘Yes,’ Wax Angel said angrily, ‘she should. Instead she’s in Moscow, for all you know crying herself stupid because she believes the idiot she loves is dead.’

‘I’ll telephone her.’ Dennisov scraped back his chair.

The people at the tables nearby stilled and soldiers in smart greatcoats standing round the walls looked over. ‘Sit,’ Wax Angel said firmly.

Dennisov sat.

‘I’ve telephoned already. She hates you. I’m to make sure you know that.’

Into the silence that followed, Alex said, ‘Doesn’t Gorbachev have a dacha near Moscow?’ Yelena looked grateful.

‘A small one,’ said Wax Angel. ‘Two storeys with a green roof, tin cupolas and a terrace overlooking the Moskva. Too small for a dinner this size.’

‘You’ve been there?’ Alex asked.

‘Before it was his.’ Wax Angel squinted at the tables overflowing with drunken, increasingly noisy guests. ‘Still, I doubt that’s the real reason we’re here. The little dacha is where he goes to think, where he goes to feel safe. There are people here Gorbachev wouldn’t want through his door. There are people here the devil wouldn’t want.’ Reaching for her glass, she downed a shot and sighed in satisfaction as Stolichnaya hit her throat and she inhaled the fumes.

‘Don’t let me get drunk,’ she said.

‘You’re drunk already,’ said Alex, then looked worried in case she’d been rude.

‘That isn’t drunk,’ Dennisov said. ‘That’s barely started.’

Pushing aside her plate, Wax Angel reached into the middle of the table, snuffed out a white candle and removed it from its holder, smoke curling like a pig’s tail from the wick as she put it carefully in front of her.

‘You have a knife?’

She tested the blade of Tom’s lock knife against her palm, then cut away an inch from the top of the candle where the wax was still warm. Closing her eyes for a second, she opened them again and began carving with practised ease, curls of wax filling her plate like wood shavings as she released the figure from its prison.

The sword took a while to appear, then an upraised arm, followed by a woman’s head and shoulders, her flowing hair and her other arm, which pointed down. Her body came next, barely hidden beneath her robes. She leaned slightly forward, pitched on the edge of movement, the muscles of her legs tensed, one foot angled to the ground.

Feathered and intricate, her wings were the last things Wax Angel carved. They were tight to her back and on the edge of being unfurled, the carving being circumscribed by the shape and thickness of the stolen candle.

‘That,’ said Wax Angel, ‘is how she’s meant to look.’

Those seated at the top table looked across to see why Alex and Dennisov had started clapping, and the commissar caught Wax Angel’s eye across the room and smiled.

He’d been watching.

‘We’ll get you home tomorrow,’ Tom promised Alex.

‘Do my parents know?’

Tom wondered if Alex realized how she’d just referred to Anna and Sir Edward. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the commissar telephoned them earlier.’

‘How are they?’

‘I’m told your mother cried.’

Alex bit her lip, and Wax Angel lifted a freshly filled vodka from Dennisov’s fingers and put it in front of Alex, grinning when Dennisov opened his mouth to protest and Alex gasped as the alcohol hit her throat. ‘Have another,’ she suggested.

Tom shook his head and the old woman chuckled.

‘What are you, her father?’

‘She already has one of those.’

Alex looked across at him and there were tears in her eyes.

Their plates were taken away and sweetmeats were served. Tom imagined that they’d just skipped several courses, going from first to last and missing out those in the middle. He wasn’t upset by that, and from the look of them neither were the others, although Alex tore at a bread roll with the quiet savagery of someone who’d gone without food for too long. Looking up, she found Tom watching.

‘You all right?’ she asked.

Tom nodded. He was too.

‘Remember this,’ Wax Angel told the girl.

The old woman stared round the room with a quiet intensity, almost as if trying to fix in her memory who was here, where they sat and what they were wearing.

The top table was full of old men, with one slightly younger man in the middle. The President’s face had started appearing in newspapers in the West almost as frequently as it did in the Soviet Union. There were younger men at other tables. Men in uniform and men in suits. A few women. Not as many as Wax Angel would have liked, Tom suspected. Not as many as there should have been.

Alex said, ‘Are you expecting something to happen?’

Wax Angel wrapped her arm round Alex, and after a moment’s hesitation the girl leaned into her hug. ‘No,’ Wax Angel said, ‘I’m not. That’s the beauty of it. This is not the night Stalin fell ill. No one is expecting anything to happen at all.’

She raised her vodka glass.

‘We have your Englishman to thank for that.’