Tracy dried her eyes as we approached the four-bedroom mock-Tudor that she now owned, or would shortly.
‘I don’t even have any children to be with, Nick. We tried so hard, but we couldn’t.’
She looked at me. A dreadful thought crossed her mind. I could see it in her face. ‘I won’t lose you, Nick, will I? Just because Mong’s gone it doesn’t mean I have to lose you as well, does it?’
I parked up in the drive and pushed the selector to P. ‘I’m not going anywhere. I’ll always make sure you’re OK, no matter what happens.’
PART THREE
1
The extractor fan was working overtime in the low-level, low-lit twenty-five-metre range. There were six hi-tech firing cubicles, each with electric wires that spun out the target between five and twenty-five metres. The fans were there to extract the lead dust that spat from the muzzles as the rounds left the weapons. Over a period of time, that stuff can line your lungs. The fans extracted the smoke and smell of cordite and cigarettes as well. People smoked everywhere in Moscow. I didn’t know if there was a public policy against it, but even if there was, who was going to take the risk of telling you not to?
I pulled my Glock from its padded nylon zip-up. I hadn’t been a fan of these weapons when they first came out. For a start, they incorporated three different safety systems, not one of which I could feel and work with my thumb. But now, like two-thirds of USA law enforcement and many other police and military agencies around the planet, I put my hands up. I’d got it wrong. It was an excellent weapon.
I’d misjudged Moscow, too. It had taken me a while to realize it was just an extreme version of New York. You knew where you stood with the Muscovites. People didn’t open doors for each other. When you wanted something you said, ‘Give me.’ And as long as you had the roubles, you got. It was very clear-cut.
Muscovites had a live-for-today attitude that was infectious. Nothing you did in Moscow had consequences. It was a bit like the Wild West. The government was a dictatorship. The police were mostly corrupt. The crime rate was one of the highest on the planet. Most Russians were either unfriendly or downright hostile, especially if they were manning the doors of nightclubs. Moscow bouncers administered Face Control (Feis Kontrol). It didn’t matter if you were male or female, if you were a minger they wouldn’t admit you — unless you were rich. I’d even seen them split couples or groups. They were OK with my ugly face at Gunslingers, but only because I paid my membership on time.
The main reason I liked Moscow was that Anna lived there. It was nine months now since I’d taken the lease on the penthouse overlooking the Moskva River. To the right was the Borodinsky Bridge. Behind that, the Russian Federation’s government buildings. It was a great place just to sit and gaze out at the city, especially at night, when the streets were full of pissed-off mingers who’d been face controlled chuntering to themselves on the way home.
Anna had been right. Moscow looked great in summer. I must have walked in every one of the city’s ninety-six parks. Gorky Park had been the first. It was the only one I’d heard of. Then I discovered there was more green stuff here than in New York, and New York had more of it than London. It almost made me glad I’d left.
As the days got longer and warmer, Anna and I had headed for Serebryany Bor, an island just a trolleybus ride away. It could be walked at any time of day, but it was especially great in the evening when the late-setting sun bathed the dachas, the woods and the river.
I checked out the spring buds and flowers, kids on bikes with stabilizers, all the normal shit that now made sense to me. These were people who were getting on with their lives. I was getting on with mine too. It was all right. It wasn’t as if I jumped up every morning and ran outside to kiss the flowers and hug the trees, but I’d been taking the time to stand and stare. For a while, anyway. Then I’d started to get itchy feet.
The more I got to know Anna, the more I realized how alike we were. We gave each other loads of space and got on with our own lives, knowing that made us both happy.
She was certainly giving me enough space at the moment. She’d just arrived in Libya, after a four-week stint covering the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt for RT news. Since January, the only time I’d seen her was on the screen.
2
According to her reports, beamed out every day on Russia Today, Gaddafi wasn’t giving up without a fight. He had just begun bombing rebel-held Benghazi. And, of course, the Brits were still having the piss taken out of them by the Russian and the German media for the fucked-up evacuation of British nationals. The Russians — and everyone else for that matter — had sent in their ships and planes and got their people out, well before the British FCO had decided to have a think about it over a nice cup of tea one morning.
I liked it when she went away. Reporting, for her, was a matter of doing the right thing. I knew it made her happy. Maybe it was the only way that a relationship would work for me, by having gaps and then coming back together. We’d probably get on each other’s tits if we lived a conventional lifestyle.
I was looking forward to her coming home. Not only because I’d get to see her, but also because it’d mean she was out of harm’s way. Far too many reporters were getting dropped. Russia, together with many other countries, showed the horror of war much more than we tended to in the UK and US.
Instead of a doll being placed on the rubble of a bombed-out building and some bland report voiced over, Russians got to see the mangled body of the child.
Al-Jazeera and RT reporters stood in the line of fire rather than watching from the rooftop of a distant hotel. Russians got to see dogs eating the dead. They got to see it as it was. Which was why Anna and her team were in more danger.
I didn’t mind being on my own. I felt comfortable with my own company, just as Anna did. I’d been alone most of my life. I’d had lots of mates and always been around people, but I’d felt like an outsider. That was OK: I knew that was the way it was for me. I just got on with what I was doing.
I spent a lot of time in the basement gym of our condominium. For me, the gym had always been famine or feast. I did nothing for months on end because I was busy, working or injured, but when I had the time, I was in there every day.
My brain was getting a bit of a workout, too. I was reading the books I’d promised myself I was going to get through last year when I’d thought I was dying from a falsely diagnosed tumour. I did Tolstoy’s War and Peace first, seeing as I was in Russia and Anna had suggested I started on the local lads’ classics. She tested me on them, just to make sure I had done exactly what I’d promised myself. She didn’t warn me the first fucking thing was over twelve hundred pages long. It had taken me longer to read than it took Napoleon to reach Moscow.
I’d just finished Fadeyev’s The Young Guard, about the Russians’ fight against the Nazis in the Second World War. Stalin had loved that guy. Now I was into Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. A poverty-stricken young man, who views himself as intellectually superior, comes up with the idea of murdering a rich money-lender he hates. I’d read as far as the crime, so I supposed the punishment bit was coming up. I couldn’t wait to bore Anna to death about it when she got back.