The Restoration Game (26 page)

“Got a black ballpoint pen?”

I rummaged a Fisher space-pen bullet from the depths of my mini-backpack.

“Sign on the back of two of them,” Ross said, passing me the photos and the mag to lean on. “Use the name ‘Emma Taylor.’”

“‘Emma Taylor’?”

“T-A-Y,” Ross confirmed.

“Doesn't sound like me,” I said.

He gave me a look.

“That,” he said, “is what we old hands in the business refer to by the technical term: The. Fucking. Point.”

“Oh!” I said. “I see.”

I scribbled on the back of the mag to dislodge the inevitable unused space-pen initial blob, and awkwardly signed the unfamiliar name in the square inches of white card. When I'd finished, Ross slid the signed and unsigned photos inside the mag.

Before we reached the cafeteria Ross led me up some stairs and across the bridge to the mirror-image building on the other side.

“Going for a slash,” he said, and disappeared into the Gents. He didn't have the mag in his hand when he came out. He wandered into the W H Smith's and bought a Sunday middle-class tabloid. The front page showed a middle-aged, smoke-blackened woman keening in helpless grief, arms out, amid ruins. The headline read: “Victim of the Pipeline War.” In the queue Ross scanned the main section, and—as if absentmindedly—passed me the women's glossy supplement.

We got our trays—coffee and chocolate croissant for me, black tea and bacon roll for him—and sat down at a table near the counter queue. Ross ate and drank while reading the paper as if decoding hidden messages. Seething a little, I peoplewatched in between turning over pages of winter fashion and autumn makeup and yummy mummies' problems. I was halfway down my coffee when I noticed the trucking mag lying on the table at Ross's elbow. A moment later it had vanished inside Ross's Sunday paper as he folded pages back. When we'd finished Ross wiped his mouth with a paper napkin and said under it: “Would you mind sticking the papers in your bag?”

I did so as Ross gathered our empties and litter onto the trays. The bulk and breadth was such that the zips wouldn't close all the way, so the papers and mag stuck half out and I had to carry the lot in my hands. Back we went, across the bridge to the truck.

“That wasn't exactly an inconspicuous way of carrying it,” I complained, as I clambered in.

“The point was so nothing fell out,” said Ross. “Have a look in the mag.”

I pulled out the wodge of newsprint and rummaged out the trucking magazine. Inside were a passport and an Edinburgh University student ID card, both in the name of Emma Taylor and with my photo, not stuck on but reproduced and laminated over. The passport gave me a different 1985 birthday and a 2005 holiday in Lanzarote.

“Good, eh?”

“How the fuck?” I said.

Ross laid a finger to his nose.

“What about the passport number?” I asked. “Don't they scan for numbers?”

“Taken care of,” said Ross. “Don't ask.”

So I didn't.

“And you've got your real passports?”

I took them from the bag.

“Anything else to identify you?”

I rummaged out the little plastic wallet with my credit and debit cards, and a pink Moleskine notebook with my name and address on the front page.

Ross leaned back and reached up to an open, hollow space in the top of the cab, just behind the sunshade. He tugged out a thin, rubber-buffered aluminium case, about the size of a thick hardback book, like a handbag-version Samsonite. He twiddled a combination lock, raised the lid a couple of inches, took my passports and cards and notebook, and slid them inside. Then he clicked the case shut, spun the lock wheels, and stashed the case somewhere in the space behind the seats—I guessed it was in the floor, but the bulk of his body concealed from me the exact location.

“Oh, and here's a Visa and a Switch,” said Ross, sitting back in the seat and taking an envelope from his inside pocket. “Name of Emma Taylor. PINs included. Try and get the signature right.”

I didn't ask about that, either. I did ask about what we were going to do when we got to Krasnod.

“Better you don't know the details until we get there,” said Ross. “On the possibility that we don't get there, and you get, ah, asked.”

I shivered. “If that happens, I'll need
something
to say.”

“Say we were going to meet an old man, whose name and address you don't know, and that he lives outside of town.” Ross chuckled grimly. “That'll narrow it down.”

After that the journey is something of a blur in my memory, or rather a series of blurs. We travelled through England, the Channel Tunnel, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria to Turkey. I know that because the Emma Taylor passport has the stamps. Several times, we changed containers. The final load, hauled along the coastal roads over two days from Istanbul to the muggy plain just beyond Kobuleti, and then up through mountain roads and passes to Krasnod, was of cigarettes. Ross explained that it wasn't smuggling, exactly, more of a tax scam. He seemed to have a lot of explaining to do at the border post between Turkey and Georgia at Sapri, and I don't think that was the explanation he gave.

Sometimes we slept in truck-stop motels. Wherever there was Internet access, Ross would buy some time, call up Google Earth images of Krassnia, and stand behind me while he pointed out the route to the secret site and the landmarks along the way. He seemed to have it in his memory, and he burned it into mine.

Increasingly, as the journey continued, we slept in the narrow shelves at the back of the cab. Ross hadn't driven a truck himself for several years. His own false passport, in the name of Hamish MacDonald, was one of the new biometric ones, and a fresh ID, not renewed from any he'd used before. He told me he enjoyed being back behind the wheel, and as far as I could see, he did. For every hardship and inconvenience, he had a tale of worse. Every so often he'd use a payphone to call his business, or home. His mobile—it wasn't the iPhone I'd seen earlier, just a thin blue-anodised tinny flashy slidy one like a kids's first—didn't ring once. I learned that he had a wife, two teenage sons, and a younger daughter, and that they thought he was on holiday, or had at least been told that. The only people who knew where he was really going were Amanda (and whoever she reported to, presumably) and his business partner, still Colin Byrne, aka Cairds. Ross never let slip any other name, of anyone in his business or in his family. Though I inquired curiously after my possible half-siblings, he told me just enough to get a notion of their personalities (quite unlike mine, I have to say) and nothing by which I could have identified them.

Apart from that, I thought I got to know him reasonably well. You can't live in a confined space with someone for over a week without getting to know them at some level. The thing that struck me about Ross Stewart was that he was mature and deliberate: a very self-controlled, self-possessed guy. He never lost his temper, even when I whinged (which was more often than I like to remember). In the whole awkward everyday business of climbing over and stepping around and averting eyes from each other inside a space of about four cubic metres, like astronauts with the added drag of gravity, he treated me like a rather distant father might an adult daughter: considerate, confiding rather than intimate, correct.

While driving, though, whether going far too fast along an autobahn or far too slowly up a mountain road, he talked to me like…well, not like any man had talked to me before, with cheerful cynicism and open uncertainty. It was like I was a girl he wasn't trying to impress. At less reflective moments he'd point out sights, sometimes connecting them to an event in history or an adventure or misadventure of his own; then he'd listen to what I had to say, even if it had no connection with what he'd been talking about, or answer questions I came up with. We followed the progress of the Georgia—Russia war and the uneasy, fragile peace on conflicting shortwaves, and bristled into wariness at what distant glimpses we had of it: a jet fighter flashing past us about ten metres above the road, a grey irregularity of naval vessels on the sea's horizon, a tank nosing through conifers on the other side of a valley, a column of tractors with trailers stacked with furniture and lined with impassive, sun-cracked faces.

We had become so used to the long drive that it came almost as a surprise when on the evening of Tuesday, August 19, we topped a low rise at the end of an ascending series of foothills and there before and below us was a plain, patchworked with fields and meadows and vineyards, with beyond it a snow-capped peak standing a little away from the great mountain range, and, in the middle of the plain, Krasnod. Straight in front of us, a hundred metres down the road, was the border post. It looked like a little flying saucer done in white concrete and plate glass, said UFO being held to the ground by a somewhat larger, wedge-shaped space freighter made from grey concrete and corrugated asbestos. Shadowy humanoid shapes sat looking out from behind the little saucer's big windows. Two container trucks and a dozen or so cars queued in front of it, beside a bullet-riddled billboard with the same message in Latin, Cyrillic, and Georgian script.

“‘Welcome to Krassnia,’” Ross read: “‘Forgotten jewel of the Caucasus.’ Hah! Forgotten pimple on the arse-end of nowhere, more like.”

We continued in this vein, joking over our tension, and I'd reached “Forgotten bogey in the nostril of democracy” by the time there was just one truck and one car in front of us and we could see the border guards: a couple of guys searching the vehicle at the front, three more casually covering the driver and passengers with hip-slung AKs.

“Uh-oh,” said Ross.

The guards weren't wearing uniforms.

You haven't lived, really, in the wonderful world of the twenty-first century until you've had your passport and possessions examined by a nervy, spotty kid in black bandana, scuffed white trainers, a NATO-surplus camo jacket with an internationally unrecognised flag patch stitched to it by his proud mother and a pewter skull badge on the lapel, a Motörhead T-shirt and Russian army combat pants, with a Russian assault rifle waving toward your waistline to further accessorise the look. It's an experience I can't recommend, but it builds character.

That last is what Ross told me, as we drove down the slope towards Krasnod, our cargo of cigarettes a pallet or ten lighter.

“I couldn't take my eyes off the AK muzzle,” I said. “Blackest hole I've ever looked into.”

“Stop fretting,” said Ross. “You get used to it.”

He steered one-handed for a moment, dangerously on the cracked and pot-holed tarmac, to punch the air.

“And anyway,” he said, the low sun lighting his face as he turned to grin at me, “we
got through.”

“Yay!” I cried, entering into the spirit of the occasion.

“That was the high point,” Ross warned. “It's all downhill from here.”

“That's a bit discouraging.”

Ross waved a hand towards the windshield. “The
road
, I mean.”

If he hadn't been driving I would have clouted him.

1.

The thing that surprised and disconcerted me about Krasnod, I realised as I ambled through the ventricles of its old and stony heart the following morning, was that it had gone on changing while I'd been away. Places from our childhood aren't supposed to do that (we childishly assume). We expect them to stay the same, to match our memories, and we feel vaguely betrayed when they don't, as if they were an old school friend (I'm speaking hypothetically here, you understand, the hypothesis being that I had school friends instead of school enemies, allies, and neutrals) who has not only had the ill grace to grow up but has completely forgotten you in the meantime.

The first shock of nonrecognition had hit me when we arrived the previous evening. Off the main road into town from the south, unpatriotically but unchangeably called Tbilisi Road, and just outside the ring of Sovietera apartment buildings and inside the more spread-out ring of post-Soviet villas, was a broad flat patch of rough grass about five hundred metres square. In the ‘80s it had been an unofficial park—I definitely remember playing there, in among weeds and long grass and the rusting wreck of a bus. Officially the field was the site for a brave new Western-style shopping complex, planned in the ‘70s, proudly displayed on billboards in the ‘80s, and never built.

Now, it was a vast marshalling yard for commercial road traffic. This use had made it a churned-up waste of mud—dry at the moment, with half-metre-deep ruts and a nasty taste in the nostrils as the evening wind came in off the mountain—on which were parked scores of container trucks and articulated lorries, all massive and modern and Western, among which tractor-trailers, Moskvitch flatbeds, Lada pickups, taxis, and minibuses bumped about. Ross hadn't been in Krassnia since the late ‘90s, and this place was new to him, but he seemed to know his way around. He eased our truck onto what looked like and could well have been a wooden barn door laid across the roadside ditch. I could feel the bounce and hear the creak as each pair of wheels passed over the makeshift bridge. About twenty metres of broad dirt track farther, past a file of waiting taxis, a post hammered into the mud on either side of the road marked the entrance. A man in a peaked cap and neat, pressed militia uniform rose from a plastic bucket seat by the lefthand post as we rolled up, and crossed the path to face the driver's side.