Cold (41 page)

‘Poor critter,’ said Masha, shivering despite being warmly wrapped up. ‘He’s been hollering since you left. I’m afraid I couldn’t sleep.’

Despite the coming difficulty of getting Reilly into the lifeboat, Joe was pleased to see his foolish dog.

‘No worries. I’ll take him.’

‘Where are you hiding?’ the old lady asked.

‘Shh, not telling you.’ She looked up at the line of lifeboats above them, but Joe did his best to keep his face severe, trying to give nothing away.

The night sky fizzed like a badly opened bottle of dark-green champagne.

‘Wow! I never dreamt the Northern Lights could be so beautiful,’ she said.

‘Worth the price of the ticket?’

‘Hell no.’

Smiling, he leaned forwards and kissed her on the forehead, and turned his head and whispered into her ear, ‘You’ve been so good to us. Thank you.’

‘Yeah, leave that for the fairies.’ But there was a catch in her voice as she said it. She flicked her thumb, put her wheelchair into a tight circle, and whirred off to be swallowed up by a deeper shade of green.

Joe stood for a while in silence, unmoored, and was looking up at the lifeboats, thinking through the problem of getting Reilly up there, when he became vaguely aware of a presence out there, watching him. Man and dog, bathed in green, stood frozen to the spot, waiting for the watcher to make the first move. One deck above, he heard a few steps, a soft click. His eyes logged the memory of a movement, perhaps a door closing.

‘Come on, Reilly,’ he whispered, and they jogged up one flight of stairs, edged off to the side of the ship and located their lifeboat. He scooped up the dog, one hand under the barrel of Reilly’s ribcage, securing him while swinging his legs over the barrier, keeping steady with the other hand and dropping down onto their hiding place. He scrabbled around the bilges, opened the door and let Reilly free so that he could scamper up to Katya and greet her like a long-lost friend.

BLACK WATER LAKE, YAKUTSK

D
ark and darker, so cold it scoured his head, he turned when his hands touched tentacles of weed, kicked his feet off the sandy floor of the lake and shot up. When he broke surface, he sucked in great gasps of air, the oxygen hitting his brain, and he felt something that had almost died within him: the exhilaration of being alive.

While Gennady had been locked up in the madhouse, the seasons had turned. Spring, pretty much like everything else in Russia, punched you in the face so that you’d take notice. Remnants of crystalline snow, dirty yellow, lay where the shadows were deep, but elsewhere nature was bursting with life. Birds warbled and chirruped from the budding trees, a flying squirrel popped its head out of a tree, tasted the air, and popped back in again. Clouds shifted across the sky and suddenly the sun burst out, bathing the lake in glorious light.

Uygulaan was cooking fish over a fire, his Kalashnikov propped up against a birch tree. The Yakut threw him a towel, and as Gennady dried himself Uygulaan retrieved two bottles of beer, cooling in the lake mud, and popped them open against his teeth. He handed one to his guest and took a sip from his own.

‘To the Zinky Boys,’ said Uygulaan. Gennady clinked his bottle against Uygulaan’s and drank. Cold, tingly, good.

‘To the Zinky Boys,’ said Gennady, his eyes sparkling in the sunlight, remembering Afghanistan.

‘No dukhi here, boss.’

‘And the Cheka?’

‘They’re not here, either.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘Taste the air. It’s good, yeah? If they were here, you could smell the stink ten miles away.’

Gennady smiled. Uygulaan poked his fire with a twig, seemed satisfied, created a set of tongs with two sticks, then extracted two packets of silver foil from the flames. He opened the foil, took out his great knife, found some flat kebab breads in his knapsack, sliced the bread open and slotted the fish into them. The fish was perfectly cooked in buttered wild garlic. It was the best meal Gennady had eaten – well, since his picnic with Venny. At the thought of that, a dullness clouded his eyes.

‘We were looking for you,’ said Uygulaan. ‘You’d vanished. The moment I heard where you were, I came to get you out.’

Out in the lake, a fish broke the surface to take a fly. Gennady missed that moment, but caught the ripple.

‘They killed my doctor friend. They killed my daughter, too,’ he said.

‘In the loony bin?’

‘No, in the south, near Rostov. She was . . .’ He hesitated. He couldn’t remember ever having such a long conversation with Uygulaan. They didn’t talk much; it had never been their thing.

‘She had a future. And they took it from her.’

The fire crackled and Gennady jumped a little – not much, but more than he would ever have done in Afghanistan. Uygulaan noted it, said nothing.

‘And you?’ Gennady continued. ‘Since the end?’

The end of the war, the end of the old country, the Soviet Union they’d both fought for. It didn’t matter which. To them, the end of one was the end of the other.

‘Became a gangster,’ Uygulaan said. ‘Killed people, lots of people. Killed too many. By the way, you know there’s a price on your head?’

‘How much?’

‘Guess.’

‘One hundred thousand roubles?’

The Yakut shook his head.

‘I’m too old to play guessing games.’

‘Five million US.’

Gennady let out a long, low whistle. ‘For that kind of money, I’ll do the job myself.’

Uygulaan took out his knife again and flourished it.

‘Unless you’re going to do the honours?’ Gennady said.

Uygulaan reached into his knapsack and pulled out some more bread.

‘Not me, boss. As a killer, I did well. Maybe. Money, cars, women. But it wasn’t like being a Zinky Boy. With you, back there, we fought the fucking dukhi but you made sure we fought fair. We were fighting for a reason. For socialism . . .’ Uygulaan paused, struggling to remember the next phrase of the old mumbo jumbo.

‘For fraternal solidarity,’ Gennady supplied.

‘Yeah, fraternal solidarity – fuck that. But back then, it felt like we had a cause. But killing people for money? I did it, I did it well, but after a while, I lost my taste for it.’

‘Any reason?’

Uygulaan demolished his fish kebab, wiped his mouth, finished his beer and pulled out two fresh bottles from the mud-fridge; he popped them open, handed one to Gennady, and only then spoke.

‘My boy. Bright kid, not like his thick dad. Maybe his mother fucked the postman. God forgive me, she was a good woman – gone now, taken by cancer.’

‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘Yeah. Still, my boy – something amazing going on inside his head. Physics, mathematics, won a scholarship to Moscow State. I waved him goodbye, gave him a wad of notes, a few numbers in Moscow of contacts who could help him out if he got into trouble. He phoned me, he was doing well, straight As, found a nice girl, everything was just lovely.’

Gennady drained his beer. He knew this story wasn’t going to end well. Nothing did, these days. He nodded at the beer bottle and said, ‘This piss is nice, but it’s still piss. Got any vodka?’

‘General hasn’t changed, has he?’ Uygulaan moved his hand into the mud-fridge and brought out a bottle with no label.

‘No vodka.
Samogon
– moonshine. My recipe.’

Gennady took a sip and spluttered. When he’d recovered, he took another sip and spluttered again. He shook his head, ruefully. ‘How the fuck the Americans got to the moon before us with this rocket fuel around I don’t know.’

Uygulaan gave him his golden-tooth smile and took a couple of glugs.

‘So?’ said Gennady. ‘You were talking about your boy.’

‘Knife fight. Some fucking Angolan kid stabbed him in a bar.’

‘I’m sorry, Uygulaan.’

‘Well, that’s what the trash told me. So I go to Moscow and I’m gonna find this African kid and kill him, and I check out the story and it’s all wrong. I buy the CCTV. I find seven witnesses. The CCTV, the witnesses – all say the same thing. The Angolan kid, he was a good friend of my son’s, he’d done nothing wrong. Turns out some Russian kid, son of a high-up from St Petersburg, he shot my boy. My lad was defending his woman. You can see this Russian kid kill my lad on CCTV. The cops just framed the African because they didn’t think anyone would notice.’

‘And the boy who killed your son?’

‘His krysha – his “roof” was better than mine.’

‘How high was the roof?’

‘As high as it gets.’

‘His dad a friend of Zoba’s?’

Uygulaan nodded.

‘I showed the trash the CCTV, showed them the witness statements. I asked too many questions, they locked me up for killing somebody. I did kill the guy, he was a scumbag. But – guilty. In the slammer, I started thinking. I paid the right cop some dough, got out. I paid some more fucking money, and they let the Angolan boy out too. He thinks I’m a fucking saint.’

‘He might not be so wrong about that,’ said Gennady.

‘He’s back in Luanda now, wherever the fuck that is.’

‘That’s home, for him.’

‘Yeah. I came back here, started to rot. I’ve given up being a gangster now but the competition don’t quite believe it. One of these days they’re going to rub me out, just to be on the safe side. And then I hear some bad stuff about you, that they’d locked you up in the loony house, the special bin for sensitive cases. I figured it out. You’re not a nutter.’

‘And you’re not a psychiatrist.’

‘No.’ Uygulaan took another swig. ‘But nor is the guy who says he’s a fucking psychiatrist.’

‘True. I’m very grateful for what you’ve done.’

‘General, I’ve forgotten how many times you saved my life and the lives of the boys.’

‘Remember that kid in Kabul, the one Grozhov was fucking?’

Uygulaan lifted up his thumb without the tip. ‘I liked my thumb the way it was. How could I forget?’

‘Well, he was going to kill me.’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. General, I got you out of the loony house because of two reasons. One, you’re the General.’

‘And two?’

‘There’s a high-up coming to Yakutsk in two weeks’ time. I don’t have a reason to live that much longer. But this fucking country, we might end up doing it a service, like in the old days. Like fighting the dukhi
.
’

‘Who is it?’

Uygulaan held his tongue.

‘Is it Him?’ asked Gennady.

And Uygulaan looked at his old general square on and said, ‘Yes, it’s Him.’

LABRADOR SEA

T
hey used a stolen key card to access the Duchess Suite. Goggle-eyed with fright, Masha awoke to find two men in her bedroom. One was bald, thickset, the second a slight, strikingly handsome man with intense black eyes. The good-looking one was pointing a silencer at her.

‘So, you must be Reikhman,’ said Masha in Russian. ‘What’s it like to be the worst ex in the world?’

‘Where are they?’ Reikhman asked.

‘Uh-huh,’ she said, and turned her head from them.

In silence, the bald one taped wires from her wheelchair’s electric battery to her left hand, then, gingerly, to her right. The moment the second electrode connected, her limbs started to jiggle, her mouth frothed spittle, the whites of her eyes shone by the dim glow of her bedside light.

Oleg stared at Reikhman, waiting for the command to stop. Reikhman considered, passionlessly, the old lady convulsing in front of him. Eventually he nodded, almost imperceptibly, and Oleg ripped the wire off her right hand, killing the circuit. The old lady gasped, her breathing forced, desperate, and then, after a time, she started to get out what she wanted to say.

‘Go . . . fuck . . . yourselves.’

Something wrong with the handsome one
, Masha thought; he lacked all patience. He shot her once through her left eye, the silenced pistol making no more noise than a wine glass falling on the thick shagpile carpet.

Reikhman told Oleg to wrap the old lady in a sheet. Outside, the sky spangled green and black. They checked that no one was about, then dumped the sheet and its contents over the side.

But they didn’t get rid of the wheelchair or her walking frame, so the mystery of how a frail and disabled eighty-something-year-old lady vanished from her suite in the middle of the night without her only means of locomotion puzzled the cleaner the next morning, and that puzzled the cleaner’s shift manager and, eventually, the ship’s captain.

From the privacy of his cabin, the captain made a satellite-phone call to head office. Should he contact the Mounties, he asked, with this disappearance looking more like a murder than anything else, so they could board the ship when it docked at Halifax, Nova Scotia? The captain was told definitively that murders don’t happen on cruise ships. Accidental deaths and maybe suicides did – but if that were the case, there would be an obligation of confidentiality towards the family.

‘There isn’t a family,’ said the captain.

‘That doesn’t remove our obligation of confidentiality,’ said head office.

To press home the point, head office argued that it wasn’t obligated to renew the contract of any captain who cared to second-guess the authorities when it came to ascribing accidental death as murder without evidence.

The captain gave up, returned to the bridge and demanded that the crew map and visually check all icebergs identified on radar in a fifty-mile vicinity of the ship, whether or not they were on its track. When the first mate demurred, he was told that the captain of the
Titanic
hadn’t done what he was requesting and probably regretted it – and that wasn’t going to happen to him or his ship.

‘Never seen the old man in such a bad mood,’ muttered the wheel hand into his cup of cocoa. No one disagreed.