There wasn’t one Moscow bar or coffee shop that was what it seemed. Once you were in, they didn’t want you to leave. Almost every bar doubled as a restaurant, a bowling alley, snooker hall, casino, bookshop or, in this case, a gun club. Moscow is so huge and cabs are so expensive that bar owners want their customers to have everything they could possibly want from dawn till dusk — and on from dusk till dawn.
I’d only been to Gunslingers a couple of times in the evening, and only because Anna said I should see Moscow when the cash was really being flashed. All of a sudden there were dancing girls, acrobats and laser light shows. Buying a table, which I didn’t, but which gave you guaranteed entrance, a place to sit and a bar-tab, cost five thousand dollars. That was cheap; in some places it could be more than twenty thousand.
There were about five others in the bar that morning. Leather jackets weren’t back in vogue as it wasn’t yet spring. For now it was anything that was thick and padded.
At night, it was wall-to-wall Prada. The clubbers I’d seen were a mix of the beautiful, the rich, the well-connected, and those who wanted to be — mostly models, hookers, and girls with cocaine sparkling in their eyes as they scoped the room for ‘sponsors’. And there were always plenty of wealthy men offering.
I was watching one of the six huge plasma screens hung around the walls. Two of them were linked to the ranges, so you could watch people trying to shoot under the influence. The first two tourists to come into view were German, judging by the flags sewn onto their parkas. They had that comfortable look about them, with premature beer bellies and thick moustaches.
The screen I was watching was linked to the English news channel on Russia Today. The girls always made sure it was on for me at ten a.m. so I could watch Anna’s first report of the day. I never had a clue what she said because the sound was kept down, but that didn’t matter. I could see that she was alive, and that she didn’t have loads of holes in her. You could tell that she loved what she was doing, even in the middle of a war zone.
I was a bit early today. The screen was filled with images of Japanese military helicopters dropping water on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant as they tried to avert a full meltdown. The number of confirmed dead and missing after the tsunami now stood at nearly thirteen thousand. Some 450,000 people had been staying in temporary shelters amid sub-zero night-time temperatures.
The German comedy show next door was much better viewing. The two lads were about to enjoy some AK action down one of the longer ranges. It wasn’t heated, and their breath condensed around them in clouds. So did the cordite fumes kicking from their muzzles.
The AKs jerked into their shoulders and pushed them backwards. Mong was behind one of them as he fired, pushing the guy forward to try and keep the barrel pointing down the range. Rounds cracked and ricocheted off the concrete. These lads were giving it twenty-round bursts, when they’d have been told to limit them to five. At five euros a round, I doubted Mong cared that much.
He wasn’t really Mong, of course. He just looked like him. Or maybe he didn’t, and it was the endless news footage that made me think back to our time in Aceh. Whatever it was, every time I saw him, I wondered if he had tattoos on his arse.
5
Mong was getting a bit more pissed off. These two were tearing the arse out of it. They started to Rambo it up, firing from the hip, which made the AKs swing to the right with each burst. It was a total gang-fuck. The real Mong would have banged their heads together.
It always made me sad to think of him. Or maybe I just felt guilty. I’d kept my word after the job. I’d looked after Tracy. Jan had sucked cash out of her like a vacuum cleaner, and Tracy had paid for her mother to have private medical treatment for her cancer and home care afterwards, so I gave her money when I could.
If I was in Hereford I always went to check that things were all right. They weren’t, of course. She was devastated: she’d gone into a deep depression and it was taking her a long time to climb out. The cash I gave helped her pay the bills, but it wasn’t really what she needed. I never stopped telling her to get out of Hereford, to make a new start, but she didn’t want to leave her mum and Jan to fend for themselves.
I got the Glock out and started cleaning the barrel with a small brush. I smiled as I thought about all the times I used to take the piss out of Mong for being soft in the head and sending money to his supermarket woman.
When I’d got out of Russia with a few million dollars of a corrupt company’s money in 2009 and bought the London flat, Tracy was the first person I wrote to. I told her I’d settle the mortgage so at least she had security. If she wanted to sell the house, she could do what the fuck she wanted with the proceeds.
She wrote back. She was really happy to have an address for me at last, and told me thanks, but no thanks. Her mum had died six months earlier and she’d finally taken my advice and got a job as a nanny in the South of France. She’d met a man. A Ukrainian guy called Frank. It didn’t strike me as the commonest name for a Ukrainian, but that was beside the point. Tracy was in love. She’d sold the house and moved to be with him.
There was no return address, just thanks for all I had done. She told me life was wonderful, and how much she wished she’d taken my advice earlier.
I felt happy for her, but the last paragraph choked me up. She thanked me for all I’d done for Mong. I’d been a true friend to him, she said. I’d always watched his back. And she would always be my friend, too. Mong would have wanted it that way.
I was cleaning the barrel a bit too vigorously. I felt the same way I had the first time I’d read the letter. That she wouldn’t have had to go through all this shit if Mong was still alive. And he would have been, if I’d stood firm about him not going to help BB.
6
Two brits I’d seen there a couple of times before came into the coffee shop and ordered espressos. They reminded me of the comedians Mitchell and Webb. Their accents were almost posh, the sort estate agents might develop after a few years’ running around in designer Minis selling overpriced properties to Sloanes or the Notting Hill mob.
Their hair was well cut but over-gelled, and they were cleanshaven. They wore Armani jeans and shirts, with rugby-ball cufflinks. You saw a lot of guys like them around town, with money to burn and plenty of drop-dead beautiful Svetlanas and Nadias happy to help them — for a suitable fee. These were sex-pats. They’d be down here later tonight, no doubt, watching the women who danced in cages, and buying shots from the ones wearing bikinis and vodka bottles slung in hip-holsters.
The ex-pat women didn’t get left out. There were plenty of Russian men looking to provide the same service. This was an equal-opportunities town.
Companies that sent staff to dangerous places showered them with incentives. Forget bankers’ bonuses. On top of their monster salaries, these guys got free rent, foreign service premiums, and cost-of-living allowances. No wonder money lost its meaning for them. After a thousand-dollar dinner at the Café Pushkin, they went to clubs like Gunslingers and ordered vodka tonics at thirty dollars a time. Then they’d select their sofas and wait for the girls to come say hi. Behind each was a private room. The menu on the table — in Russian, Japanese and English — helped you budget for what happened in there: Intercourse 30 minutes: $500.
Then they all turned up at their banks and law firms the next morning after about half an hour’s sleep. By lunchtime they’d be having the first one of the day in the company bar or snorting a line of coke on their desk to steady their nerves.