Exit Wound (27 page)

97

We sat in a bar filled with people, smoke and music. It doubled as a kebab shop, and that was what she bought me to eat. I filled my face and lifted the Pepsi Max can to my mouth. She gunned down Baltika beer from the bottle. I was sure I’d never seen Agnetha do that.

‘Remember, we got a busy time ahead.’

She put down the bottle and picked up her cigarette. She blew the smoke towards the ceiling, as if that was going to stop the nicotine getting anywhere near me. ‘Do not patronize me. If I want a drink I’ll have one. You are not my father.’

‘Is Semyon?’

The cigarette went down and the beer came up. ‘No, he is not. But he is special – perhaps more so, even, than my own father.’

I looked at the ring on her right hand. ‘What about your husband?’

The beer bottle smacked down on the tabletop. ‘Do I ask anything from you? I don’t even know if James Manley is your real name. IranEx is full of people with unreal names. Are you a spy, Jim? I imagine you are.’

I couldn’t help laughing. She didn’t know how much I wished I was. I’d been brought up on old Bond films. ‘No.’

‘I don’t believe you. But that’s OK.’ She nodded at the two remaining kebabs. ‘They will get cold.’

As I kept eating she drank and smoked, deep in her own world. She ordered more drinks and tapped another stick from the pack.

‘What about you? Are you a spy?’ I wiped grease from my mouth. ‘Your Arabic’s good. And your English is better than mine.’

‘I am what I say I am. I like languages, that’s all. Besides, Arabic pretty much came with the territory.’

‘Chechnya?’

‘Yes, and Bosnia, and Afghanistan . . .’

‘I thought your thing was anti-corruption.’

‘It is. Where do you think M3C sells its weaponry?’

‘Does your source work for them?’

‘Semyon . . . Semyon is a very trusted friend.’ She spoke the words slowly to emphasize just how much she meant them.

I picked up a piece of pitta bread and got stuck into the last kebab. ‘How do you know him? I mean, M3C are the enemy, aren’t they?’

She didn’t answer. Neither did she fire up another cigarette as I ate. She just stared at me, her mind buzzing. ‘OK, Jim, we’ll talk . . .’ She sat back and took a deep breath. ‘I’m not married.’ She lifted her right hand. ‘I wear it to keep men out of my way. This is Russia, after all. But it is also there to remind me that I was going to marry once, years ago. Semyon was going to be my father-in-law. I love him deeply. He is the only family I have now.’

Her hand came down and played with the cigarette packet.

‘My boyfriend was older than me. My father didn’t approve.’

‘What was his name?’

‘Grisha. We used to go to that place you were aiming for, to escape the eyes of my family. It’s a young person’s hang-out – always has been. He always said it served the best
shashlik
in Moscow.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was 1987. We were young. We were in love. And then he went to Afghanistan. I waved goodbye to him at the station . . . and the next time I saw him he was in a coffin. Now Semyon and I have only pictures of Grisha to remind us of what he was like.’

I watched a tear form and trickle down her cheek. She fumbled to get another cigarette out of the pack. I took it from her and helped.

She sniffed. ‘I still go there sometimes when I want to remember him.’

The firebrand who’d gobbed off at the press conference didn’t square with the person I was with now. In Tehran she’d seemed utterly driven. The girl in front of me was vulnerable. But if you’d lost the love of your life in a war? The picture was steadying a little. ‘Grisha’s death still drives you.’

She looked at me. Her eyes narrowed. ‘Yes. But not, I suspect, for the reasons you think.’

I passed her the cigarette and she took it and lit up. ‘Grisha used to write a lot when he was in Afghanistan. Then, one day, February ’eighty-nine, the letters stopped. They told us he was missing, presumed dead. We wrote requesting further information, but the army never replied. It was like he’d never existed.’

In the wake of the Chechen war, I’d helped a number of families who’d tried to find out what had happened to their dead or missing sons. But during the Soviet era it would have been dangerous even asking the question.

‘It must have been – must still be – difficult.’

‘What?’

‘Not knowing what happened.’

‘But we do.’

98

Anna toyed awkwardly with her Baltika. ‘Almost a year after we lost the war, Semyon got a call from a man who claimed to be the colonel of the military forensic medical laboratory that had performed an autopsy on Grisha’s body.’

She saw something in my face. ‘You’re thinking the army didn’t carry out autopsies on ordinary soldiers? Sometimes they did. In certain circumstances.’

I didn’t need to ask her what they were. I knew she was going to tell me soon enough.

She took a swig. ‘The colonel told Semyon that he wanted to meet, that there was something he needed to ask. But Grisha’s father was scared to meet him.’

‘Why?’

‘This was Soviet Russia.’

‘So you said you’d go.’

‘I had nothing to lose. I’d left school and was waiting to go to university. I met this man – this colonel – at a café. He told me about himself – told me that he had served in Afghanistan and what an utter, godforsaken waste of life it had been. People like Grisha, he said, deserved better. It was then that he showed me the pictures.

‘The autopsy had been carried out at a military medical laboratory in Kazan. They’d flown the bodies there, the bodies of everybody who’d been in Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier. The first picture showed him almost as I remembered him: he was face up, eyes closed, like he was sleeping.’

The tears were really flowing now. She didn’t even bother wiping them away.

‘I asked the colonel what had happened and he told me Grisha’s armoured personnel carrier had been hit by an antitank rocket. A fragment had pierced his eye, hit bone and tumbled, removing the back of his skull. In the next picture, I saw the exit wound. There was nothing left of the back of his head – just a big black congealed mass of blood, brains, bone fragments and matted hair.’

She steadied herself.

‘The fragment that had killed Grisha had come from an antitank missile that had only just entered service with the Soviet Army. It was effectively brand new. Someone had sold it to the
mujahideen
. Never mind that it would kill Russians. To the people who’d done the deal, the only thing that was important was the money.’

‘So why did this pathologist approach Semyon?’

‘Oh, that bit was easy. In exchange for the information, he wanted a job.’

Caught in the pool of light cast by the street-lamp outside, a couple of peaked caps and heavy trench coats walked past the window. They stopped to look through the glass. She watched and waited until they moved on.

The stub of her cigarette joined the others in the ashtray. ‘Jim, we should go.’

99

We were on a main drag – a long
prospect
heading westwards, the direction we needed to go. Traffic streamed in both directions. I turned to Anna as she took my arm. ‘Tell me about Grisha.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘As much as you want to tell.’

She wrapped her coat more tightly around her against the wind that was blowing along the
prospekt
. With it came a few spots of rain.

‘Grisha was an idealist. He loved poetry. That’s how we met. His family lived in the same apartment block as mine. One evening, when I came back from school, I found him sitting on the front steps. He was reading Pushkin. I loved Pushkin. We got talking. He wanted to go to university to study literature, but his family didn’t have the money or the influence to send him – in those days you couldn’t do it any other way. That’s why he joined the army.

‘He would have been conscripted anyway to fight in Afghanistan, so why not get a university education from the army as well as fight for them? It meant signing up for five years, but then he’d be free of it. He wanted to become a teacher. But to do that he first had to become a soldier.’

‘What was he? An engineer, an officer?’

‘No, he was nothing special. Just a normal infantry soldier. One of the thousands our government sent to be slaughtered out there.’

‘I had a friend, a British soldier. He’s just been killed in Afghanistan.’

‘Did you love him?’

I had to think about that one. ‘There were four of us who were close – we’d done a lot together. I’m the only one left now. You know what? I think I cared for all three of them. I miss them very much.’

She looked away. Her tear-stained cheeks glistened in the glow of a street-lamp.

I’d surprised myself talking about Tenny, Dex and Red Ken like that. I decided to cut away before it happened again. I didn’t like not being in control. ‘So, how much older than you was Grisha when you met? Was he old-enough-to-be-your-dad sort of old?’

‘No, no.’ She gave a giggle, which surprised her even more than it surprised me. ‘We’d started dating when I was just sixteen – a schoolgirl. He was almost nineteen. Like I said, my father did not approve of the relationship. But by then my father did not approve of anything much.’

She paused.

‘He was an alcoholic. The Soviet system killed his love of life. He worked in a factory that made machine tools. He hated it. My mother was scared of him. I was his only child. He wanted me to make something of my life, and study, study, study, he said, was the only way to achieve it. Grisha and I had to see each other in secret. Thank God he had a motorbike, a Ural, so we could escape every so often for a few hours on our own.’

For a second she seemed lost. ‘When he joined the army Grisha went away for almost a year. In that time I saw him only once. He didn’t talk about his training, but I could see that it had affected him deeply. It was only years later, through my work, that I found out what they do to recruits. Systematic abuse. Punishments have nothing to do with your performance. If the officers and the NCOs in charge are having a bad day, they beat you. If they are bored, they beat you. When Grisha came home that summer, he was a changed person. He didn’t want to talk about the army, just kept telling me that it wouldn’t be long – another four years – and then he’d be free of it. I had just turned eighteen so we decided to hand in our application.’

‘For what?’

‘To get married. Russians do not have engagements and rings. We just apply to ZAGS, the department of registration. They furnish a date when you can marry.’

The rain was falling harder now. She unwrapped the scarf from her neck and tied it round her head. ‘It was stupid – I was so young – but I wanted to let him know that I would wait for him. I couldn’t tell my father. But Semyon was very supportive. He became like a father to me, too. It was he who bought the Ural, a beat-up old thing from the Great Patriotic War, and restored it for Grisha. The only times I saw Grisha happy that summer – his old self – was when he and his father worked on that bike and when we were out riding on it.’

I didn’t say it, but Grisha was lucky to have had her – and Semyon. I’d never had a dad who cared enough about me to buy me a skateboard, let alone restore a motorbike.

‘We bought the rings . . .’ She gently played with hers, twisting it around her finger. ‘But the wedding never happened. He was sent to Afghanistan before ZAGS would give us a date . . .’

Her tears returned, and I thought about the three I’d lost. I’d never dwelt on how much those fuckers meant to me. It wasn’t as if we’d lived in each other’s pockets but just being with them again, even fleetingly, had made me feel good. They were my family, or as close as I was ever likely to get.

‘Anna, you still have family. There is still someone who . . .’

Ahead of us, lit by a flickering street-lamp, was a bus shelter. Anna stepped into it and I followed. The shelter stank of the things bus stops normally stink of. The rain drummed on the roof.

She smiled sadly and removed her scarf as I reached out and touched the ragged bruise on her neck.

An image filled my mind – of a twenty-one-year-old kid lying on a mortuary slab with the back of his head removed by a tumbling missile fragment. ‘So Semyon works for M3C. He was working in one of the companies sucked up by Brin? Weapons that Semyon had helped to build killed his son?’

She gave a shallow nod. ‘That’s why Semyon and I do what we do.’ She checked her watch. ‘Come, time to go and see him.’

Her wheelie-case bounced behind her as we carried on towards the station in silence. I could see the lights of the metro up ahead. I’d been keeping one eye on it. In the couple of minutes since I’d last looked, the crowd outside had almost doubled in size. Anna had noticed it too. In the harsh light of the entrance, over the heads of the people waiting to get in, I could see two grey peaked caps. Police were checking everyone returning from the flea-market as they passed through the turnstiles.

‘What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe they are searching for drugs. It happens sometimes . . .’

‘Let’s walk to another station, yeah?’

We edged around the back of the crowd and onto a main drag.

At the time Grisha was killed, everything was still for sale. Now it was more organized, and that made it more dangerous. It was easy to see why she was a woman with a mission.

But I had one too.

And if Semyon had found out where they were staying in the city, I could be done and out of here by the morning.

100

2348 hrs

Grey apartment blocks loomed either side of us. We kept in their shadows while holding the trigger on Semyon’s equally drab concrete building. Lights pushed through net curtains on two of the five windows that made up his second-floor flat.

An old diesel truck, a product of some ancient Soviet factory, belched fumes as it trundled past. We were about eight K away from the Gucci and Prada stores off Red Square. The tarmac was cracked and potholed. Areas of hard-packed mud that had once been turf were covered with a layer of dogshit and rubbish.

‘It’s a company apartment, Jim. He has done very well. The higher he has gone, the more information he has been able to discover.’ Anna told me this was a middle-class area, but it was like the old USSR had never gone away. Communism had produced generations that couldn’t have cared less about public areas. Why should they? The Party told them they’d take care of everything. Anything the other side of their own front door meant nothing to them. They weren’t even allowed to feel any responsibility for it.

‘Do you two have any tell-tales? You know – a sign to show it’s OK to go up?’

‘Yes – it’s always at night, so he has the kitchen light on, the one to the far right.’

I checked again to see if anyone else was watching his windows. ‘You sure that’s the only way in and out?’

‘Yes, Jim, it’s an apartment block. Just the one entrance and exit. And before you ask, those are the only windows. He has none facing the back of the building.’

She was getting a little bit crisp, but so what? Questions like these kept you alive.

‘He got a car? You see his car out here?’

‘No. He uses Grisha’s motorbike. It will be in the garage.’

She dug about in her pocket and replaced the battery. ‘Let me call him.’ She started pressing away.

‘How come you use a mobile if you two need to be so disconnected?’

‘It’s a pay-as-you-go. We both bought them for cash and only use them between us.’ She closed down the mobile. ‘His isn’t on.’

I took a breath and started to move.

‘No, Jim, it’s OK. He often forgets. He is getting old, that’s all. Come, we’ll check if his bike is there. Will that make you happy?’

I took her arm and we walked down an alleyway. The long, one-level strip of concertina garage doors ahead was covered with graffiti.

She led me to one about two-thirds of the way down, stood on tiptoe and pulled out a piece of broken concrete to retrieve a key. We lifted the door together. The smell of petrol and oily rags hit my nostrils.

Once inside and the door was down again she hit the power. A dull orange bulb hanging from a dodgy wire sparked up in the middle of the ceiling. Anna walked over to the bike. As she ran her hand over the metal it was as if her memories returned.

I knew about Urals. I’d blown a few up in Afghanistan with our IEDs. They were big, clunky pieces of Soviet engineering, a little underpowered but solid, and ideal over rough terrain, which was why the Red Army had bought them in their tens of thousands. This one still had its bullet-shaped sidecar fixed on the right-hand side, and was a mass of immaculate, gleaming chrome and black gloss – Semyon’s mobile shrine to his dead son.

Anna walked around the machine, reliving old times. ‘I come here by myself sometimes . . . birthdays, anniversaries . . .’

I felt the working parts while she sat in an old cane chair pouring her heart out. They were warm. Semyon had been using the Ural less than an hour ago.

‘I know this is stupid, but we called this old thing “Cuckoo”, after a song we loved. It was a hit when we met. Everyone used to sing it and . . .’ She stared into the sidecar for a few more seconds, before reluctantly getting up. We closed down the garage and headed for the apartment.