‘Now then, come on, tell your uncle Bog. Who were Viktor’s mates?’ He grinned and pushed his face forward until it intruded into her focus. Her eyes retreated and shot a glance at Kirov.
‘Don’t you talk any more?’ she asked.
‘The nice man can’t hear you,’ Bogdanov answered. ‘He only talks to people who co-operate. Look at him — go on, look at him — can’t you tell he’s deaf?’ She was looking beyond him at Kirov’s impassive face. Knowing what I’m thinking — no — no more than I know what she is thinking: that’s the object of the exercise. He lit another cigarette and returned her gaze through the flame of the lighter. Tumanov stepped to the television and turned the volume to maximum. The crowds cheered. She turned to the noise, distracted in her defence.
‘Terrible noise,’ Tumanov shouted. ‘You could commit murder in here and no one would know.’ He looked to Bogdanov for approval.
Bogdanov said, ‘You look like a girl who’s used to violence. I know Viktor’s type. He’s the kind who beats up his women — am I right? Is that why he doesn’t attract you? Or maybe he does attract you? No sex! You must have driven him wild. Bit of a prick-teaser, are you?’ He gave her hand a vigorous rub. Kirov watched as the skin grew red. She remained silent but her eyes were fixed on his. Pain was in them. But also curiosity. Bogdanov she could understand — but him?
No — I don’t know what she thinks.
‘Do you intend to hit me?’ she asked at last, turning limply.
Bogdanov stopped.
‘Hit you?’ He signalled to Tumanov to switch off the set. He bent over her again, still holding her hand, and said softly, ‘I’ve shown you nothing but affection.’ He let his lips move towards her ear and whispered something.
‘That’s enough,’ Kirov said quietly. ‘Let her go.’
Bogdanov glanced at him with a sharp caution, but Kirov was looking at the woman. The room was silent. The television flickered. Tumanov played with his knuckles like a set of dominoes. There was no evidence of tangible violence.
Yet the look of fear on Nadia Mazurova’s face appalled him.
Bogdanov checked his watch. ‘Another day!’ he said cheerfully. To Tumanov he said, ‘OK, get your coat on.’ He explained to Kirov, ‘I promised my old lady I’d be home on time.’
Kirov was still sitting in the same chair from which he had interviewed the woman. The television continued to flicker silently in the growing darkness. The heating system thumped meditatively. Strains of music came from an adjoining apartment.
Bogdanov put on his coat and wrapped a muffler around his scrawny neck. He studied Kirov thoughtfully. ‘You know, boss,’ he said mildly, ‘you should have let me carry on. It was going fine. She knows Gusev’s contacts, I’ll bet on it. A bit more sugar from you, a bit more shit from me, and she would have given us names.’
‘Except,’ said Kirov, stirring from his seat, ‘that we don’t do things like that any more.’
‘Don’t we? Oh, yeah, sure — I’d forgotten.’ Bogdanov turned to Tumanov and ordered him to see to the car. He returned to Kirov. ‘Leaving aside the rough stuff, why don’t we take her in?’
‘Because she belongs to Petrovka — to Bakradze — at least until Grishin says otherwise.’ Kirov stood up. He turned the television set off. Now it was dark and the rain made a steady drum against the window pane. He could hear Bogdanov panting as he struggled to put on his rubber overshoes. He noticed for the first time a sour smell hanging in the air.
‘Someone turned the power off,’ Bogdanov told him. The smell was from the kitchen. A piece of meat was rotting in the refrigerator and dribbling its stinking juices onto the kitchen floor. There were still a couple of beers hidden behind the meat. Bogdanov opened them, returned to the main room, passed one to Kirov and took a seat opposite him. ‘What’s wrong, boss?’ he asked.
Kirov had asked himself the same question. From somewhere he was dogged by a leaden lassitude.
‘I’m not sleeping well.’
‘No? Still worried about Uncle Kolya?’ Bogdanov paused and took a pull on his bottle. Then, almost gently, he urged, ‘Get yourself another woman. If not Larissa Arkadyevna then someone else.’
‘What did you say to her?’ Kirov asked.
‘To who? Lara? Oh, you mean the other one, Nadia Whatsherface.’ Bogdanov leaned forward, close enough for his features to be clear in the darkness. His mouth was set in the lopsided angle that passed for one of his smiles. ‘It was a guess — a hunch — a reading of her character, isn’t that what they call it, the way they teach it?’ He seemed to insist on an answer. An answer from Kirov who knew the right words.
‘Yes — reading character.’
Bogdanov wiped his lips after taking another drink.
‘I told her that once you had left, young Tumanov was going to rape her.’ He belched softly, begged Kirov’s pardon, and, placing the bottle on the floor, said, ‘I wasn’t serious. Would I do a thing like that? If it wasn’t for hanging around a crook like Gusev, she’d probably be a decent enough kid.’
CHAPTER FOUR
At the Mezhdunarodnaya the door staff were turning away the locals. Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t; getting access to the international hotels could be hit and miss, if you didn’t have a pass. Kirov had indicated to Neville Lucas that he would meet him at about eight; and now it was a quarter past and outside the rain had stopped, it was starting to freeze, the Moskva had a scum of frost on the water, and across the river the Ukraina was piled up like a black wedding cake.
Kirov had no trouble at the door. In the foyer the usual hotel crowd was milling under the great golden egg in the style of Fabergé which passed for a clock. He recognised a couple of journalists, the Reuters representative and the Guardian’s man in Moscow, away from his office in Gruzinsky Perulok. It was unlikely that either was expecting to meet any Soviet citizens other than the few public Russians of whom the KGB approved. The other sort were met in parks and apartments and not in good hotels, though lately that was changing and you couldn’t tell where it would end. Kirov also spotted Archibald Lansdowne, the British Commercial Counsellor, with his thinly acidic wife, Fiona. They were tied up with a party in Western suits, and some connection with the journalists seemed plausible. Whatever the case, the matter was none of Kirov’s business. He searched out Neville Lucas in the ground floor bar and found him holding court from a stool.
The first impression of Neville Lucas was of a slow and peculiar good nature, a combination of his soft wandering eyes and the slouch he adopt to bring his head down to that of ordinary humanity so that his head had a retractable appearance and hung out of his overcoat like that of a family tortoise. The overcoat was a peculiar English garment, a grey duffel coat fastened with wooden toggles. When the visiting English saw it, it provoked a ‘Good God, I haven’t seen one of those since…’ followed by a wistful look that tried to fix the date.
There were plenty of visiting English. Several evenings a week Lucas made the rounds of the hard-currency hotel bars, trawling for businessmen. In his pocket he carried a plastic bag with a Marlboro logo, and he tried to fill it in the course of the night with cigarettes, duty-free Scotch, disposable lighters and the other bric-a-brac of travel. Not that he either needed or lacked access to these things: ‘But because they’re authentic,’ he explained obscurely to anyone who asked.