A clutch of great leaders had been abruptly removed from supreme office – Gaddafi of Libya, Mubarak of Egypt, and a leader in South Korea and another in Brazil and another in Malaysia, Zuma in South Africa and Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and the president of Ukraine had suffered the rank indignity of fleeing his palace and having to be lifted to safety by Russian helicopters as the mob closed in on him, and Saddam had swung on the end of a rope. And Assad of Syria would have done if Russia had not preserved his rule. A simple lesson to be learned: the regime should be protected if influence and privilege were to be preserved, and there were many lampposts outside the Kremlin walls and in the Arbat district with ornate frames from which ropes could be slung, and many trees with decent branches off the Uspenskoye Highway… His mother was at the door.
“You should come, please. It is rude if you do not.”
She tutted at him for his appearance and his no-show, but would not criticise him to his face. He pushed up from his chair, and doused the TV sound and followed her into a corridor, and along it, then seemed to remember his position and status and walked tall. He would be charming and would be cold. Would be polite and would give nothing. Lavrenti, at thirty-two, had no regular girlfriend nor an identified mistress, nor did he give any sign of latent homosexuality. He followed his mother into the salon. He was introduced to the four ladies, his mother’s guests. He knew them, of course. He knew all of his mother’s friends. They were the wives of the men who had clung to a vestige of influence during the anarchy of the years before the current presidency, then had nailed support to the new man, and were rewarded. He shook hands and his smiles were sparing, and then he was introduced to the two daughters. Easy for Lavrenti to appreciate this was a throw by his mother that had been difficult while he had served in Murmansk, in the far north. One was tall and blonde and the other was short and blonde, and both wore clothes and cosmetics to impress. His mother had had no wedding to organise and no grandchild to swaddle, and his father no chance to see if he would come out from his home on the Uspenskoye Highway and grace a reception with his presence if only for half an hour. Both the girls were pretty, both stared at him and the taller seemed indifferent and the shorter made little pretence of disguising disappointment, and both were at least twelve years younger than he was. He had not spent a night with a woman since he had flown to Syria, had never slept with a woman with mutual affection, not without paying. The girls, would have understood that he had no interest in them and only met them in deference to his mother; perhaps he seemed old beyond his years, perhaps weighed down by some burden; neither competed for his attention. So, both started on a mutual conversation about music, then films, then shopping, then food, and saw him off. He read them. When they went for whores in Murmansk, Mikki drove and Boris selected who he would go with, and paid: never the same one twice.
He was polite. He pleaded workload to his mother’s friends and slipped away. Back in his room, Lavrenti returned to his game show. He took his bag from under his bed, and began to pack the few clothes he would need for his short return to the north. Not the next day but the day after, but he packed anyway. How would any of these women, old and fat, young and skinny, understand if they hadn’t been there, no chance of obliterating the memory…
Love on a wet evening. Timofey panting, and Natacha squealing and pleading for more effort and short of it for months, and the noise from both of them would have barely been obstructed by the thin walls of an apartment, the only one in Murmansk city that understood the significance of Matchless.
Timofey lived with his father in a building that had been put up in the Kruschev era, five storeys high and with brick outer walls, better insulation than the concrete-framed ones of later Soviet days. He knew his father sat outside the door and waited for him to finish, for her to be as satisfied as she ever was. Clothes were scattered and the light burned above them and no curtains were drawn and if neighbours in other blocks feasted on the sight of them then they’d be lucky, what she said. He wore heavy rubber as protection; she might be infected and might not, and neither knew. A final grunt and a last squeal and both sagged.
Matchless was a bell pealing inside the recent history of the family. It was the code word given to his grandfather and to his father and passed down to him, Timofey, with due and secret ceremony inside that same apartment, accompanied by the killing of a full-strength vodka bottle, on his sixteenth birthday. Matchless had stuck with the family. Natacha knew of it because his trust in her was total, and he had no secret from her… and she knew of the bank account and the monies that stacked up there and were added to each quarter. Nothing had been asked of the family since the day the deal was done.
They did not do, never had done, what the books called ‘foreplay’, and did not cuddle and kiss afterwards. She rolled off him, he reached for his cigarettes and for a Zippo lighter, and he lit for both of them, and they would have heard the bell ring at the front door, and then the shuffle of his father’s feet.
The start? The British destroyer, HMS Matchless – crew of around 190 – had sailed as convoy escort to Murmansk. It was 1942, deep midwinter ferocious weather, continuous air and submarine attacks to be fought off, but the cargo of ordnance and equipment had reached the Soviet port and the young sailors were allowed a quick sneak ashore. They had some wounded merchant seamen onboard, plucked from the sea, and local nurses had turned out on the quayside to treat them. An Oerlikon anti-aircraft gunner from Matchless had been told in a mess-room by a chief petty officer that these Russian girls went like ‘fucking rabbits’: aged eighteen, he had been tested in battle and not found wanting and had met one of the girls huddled in the cold, smoking behind a crane stanchion and the price of it had been a bar of soap. Done standing up, and quick because of driving sleet, and done with the minimum of exposed flesh, and he’d thought her a great girl, and she had been his first. She had told him her name, forgotten by the time he struggled back up the well-iced gangway with his trouser buttons still unfastened, and he had egged the description to his mates, and it had seemed unimportant that he had told her his name, Percy Wilkins. A year and a bit later, and while the lad was in the Mediterranean, on resupplies to Malta, a chum had put into Murmansk on a minesweeper. A young woman was on the quay, holding a baby in her arms and asking in fractured English if Percy Wilkins of Matchless was on board. Months later the chum met the Oerlikon gunner and told him of the encounter and they had a good laugh, and the chum had said ‘the little sprog’s as ugly as you, mate, which is saying something’, and it was just a story, good for fifteen minutes of fame. Timofey had heard it all from his grandfather and his father, and they’d have heard from the contact point – vodka swigged – half a century before. The matter moved on to the world of sleepers and clandestine banks – and this, too, the grandfather and father had been told – when the middle-aged one-time gunner, now a factory welder, had boasted of his fast and fumbled shag to a chuckling audience of veterans in a British Legion. Now it was the height of the Cold War, of an arms race, of rabid suspicion, of fertile intelligence gathering and, up a circuitous trail, word of the exploit had reached a Whitehall office, and a bright spark had sensed a possible opportunity for insertion when precious few existed… It had taken some effort to track down the former nurse and her bastard child in the city of Murmansk but a Swedish crane engineer had proved a dogged investigator, and a Finnish naval architect who designed deep-sea trawlers had met Timofey’s grandfather, a dock stevedore and now in his late twenties, had bought him with promises. Had told him the damned obvious: a spy in Soviet Russia would be interrogated, tried in secret, shot or beaten to death. Had shown him a copy of a bank statement from an address on an island in the British Channel, Guernsey, that listed an account and his name, and the first dollop of bribe cash. What did the grandfather of Timofey, the son of Percy Wilkins, have to do? Nothing. Sit tight. As age advanced and already limited faculties failed, the account passed to Timofey’s father. What did he have to do? Nothing, wait. One day – perhaps – the code word would be used, Matchless, then payback time would commence. Timofey’s grandfather had been dead for seven years; his father soon would be as alcohol ravaged him. Every year, a stranger would meet the nominated member of the family and would show a single sheet of paper with a printout of the accrued sum, allow it to be seen, digested, and then a cigarette lighter would be produced and the corner licked by flames and the charred remains dumped.