He left the station, went down the steps to the U-Bahn, got on a train to the Hauptbahnhof, and there boarded a train for Hannover.
Twenty hours later, he was sitting in an hotel on the Channel coast, a few miles from Dieppe. He was a thousand years older. Looking at himself in the flyblown mirror in his room, he thought it was a miracle that his hair hadn’t turned white.
THE MAN
FROM SIBIR
1.
THIS YEAR WHEN the season ended, Lev decided to kill himself.
He stood on the jetty and watched the last of the tourists being ferried back to their floating country and he put his hand in his pocket and felt the few drachmas and euros and dollars there and knew he couldn’t survive the winter. All of a sudden his legs felt watery. He sat down on a bollard and looked out over the bay and some of the younger fishermen laughed at him. The older ones, though, the ones who knew how quickly and completely a man’s life can fall apart, kept a grim and respectful silence.
The great white ship in the bay was simply called Nation. It was a country for tourists, a country of tourists, making a year-long tour of the Mediterranean and Aegean before wintering in dry-dock in Kiel. It was a nation of the aged and the wealthy from all over the world.
This year, the great vessel brought him Myrna, on a cruise to console herself over the death of her fifth husband. “Did it when Danny died as well,” she told him. “And George. And Charlie.” And she smiled, and Lev felt himself shrink inside. When she smiled, she reminded him of owls. Not the wise owls of legend, but the mouse-destroying birds of prey.
Myrna. Ripped and exercised to the point of mutation, barely an ounce of fat on her, like a woman made entirely of twigs and the tufts of hair left by sheep on barbed wire fences. No way to tell how old she was, but old. She had wined him and dined him and consented to let him pleasure her, but she had been unwilling to bestow any more lasting gifts upon him. Gifts, for instance, which he could sell to pay his rent.
Gods but it was hot, even though winter was howling its way along the Med. This place was no good for Russians. Too hot. Too alien. The food tasted wrong and the alcohol was terrible, although one was able to overlook that if one drank enough of it.
He had come here four years ago, island hopping until his funds ran out and he could no longer afford a ferry fare. In Greek, the island’s name meant something like ‘The Place Where We Forgot Where We Were,’ which seemed appropriate. Lev’s arrival had coincided with Nation dropping anchor in the bay and disgorging its population, including Penny. Penny from Pittsburgh, who had taken a shine to Lev to the extent that when she left he was able to sell all the things she had given him and rent a single filthy room over a taverna in the Old Town and survive, somehow, until the next boatload of tourists came in.
Nation’s next visit had brought Alice. Then Corinne. Between times, Lev scratched a living teaching English and Russian and proofreading guidebooks, although the material return for that was tiny. He began to regard Nation with the fervour of an eighteenth century cargo cultist.
But he supposed he had known, in his heart of hearts, that one day it would all have to end. Either the people who owned and ran Nation would suddenly decide to send her on a round the world cruise instead, or the ship would hit an iceberg and sink, or he would simply latch on to a woman who would take more than she gave. And so it had happened. Myrna, on her way to pastures new, glowing with memories of her Russian lover, while her Russian lover starved and was thrown out of his room and eventually just walked down to the harbour, picked up some very heavy object, and jumped into the water with it.
And why not, if he was going to be honest with himself, do it now? Why go through the inevitable pleading and begging and promising with Mr Eugenides the taverna owner when the result was in no doubt? He looked around the bustling quayside and spotted a small anchor lying on the stones. He wondered if he could hang on to it long enough to do the job. He wondered whether anyone would bother trying to save him.
He was actually in the process of standing to walk over to the anchor when a shadow fell across him.
“Professor Laptev?” asked a voice in Russian. “Professor Lev Semyonovitch Laptev?”
The speaker was a young man wearing jeans and a light cotton shirt, a hemp shoulder bag in one hand. He was leaning on a black cane, one of those things made of innumerable carbon leaves, thin as a little finger but capable of denting the roof of a car. He looked harmless, but Lev’s heart froze like a Siberian pond in winter.
“Who are you?”
The young man smiled. “My name’s Smith. I’m someone who would like to take you for a drink, perhaps even some meze.” His Russian was flawless, but Lev could detect a Baltic accent behind it. Smith indeed.
“Oh?” said Lev.
The Balt spread his hands. “No strings attached. I’d just like to ask your advice. I’m prepared to pay a consulting fee, if that would suit you.”
Fear and desperation fought it out in Lev’s heart. Desperation forged an alliance with hunger and won a bare victory. “Very well,” he said.
THEY WENT TO one of the smarter tavernas over on the new side of the harbour, and Lev immediately felt dirty and dishevelled and out of place. The Balt insisted on ordering a little bit of everything, and when a huge platter was deposited in the middle of their table he smiled broadly and insisted that Lev tuck in, but Lev held back even though he was ravenous.
Had they finally caught up with him? Lev knew they used people like this, spetz operatives, young men with hard eyes and an outer layer of normality carefully shaped over a crystal core of ideology. But this one was different. He looked tired. No, actually, now Lev thought about it, that wasn’t quite right. He looked into the Balt’s eyes and saw a different kind of tired. It was not, he realised, the tired of someone who has stayed awake for a few days, travelled a few hundred kilometres, dealt with a few mildly complicated situations. It was the tired of someone who has gone right over the ragged edge of total exhaustion – physical, mental and emotional – and then somehow has found the space to begin to recover. Not completely yet, but enough to be functional for the moment, enough to do what needs to be done. Lev recognised that look. He had seen it, not all that long ago, in his own shaving mirror. And that was the only thing that made him relax, made him believe he could survive this. If Centre were to send an assassin to tidy up the tiny loose end represented by Lev Semyonovitch Laptev, they would not send someone who looked as though their entire world had been carved away. This boy was not an assassin; he was something else; something much rarer, much scarier.
“Eat,” the boy said. “It looks good.”
Lev looked at the platter. There was almost nothing on it that he would have chosen to eat unless he was, as he was now, utterly starving. “No it doesn’t.”
The boy sighed. “No, it doesn’t, does it. Tourist food. I could do better than this.” He poured them both drinks and put the bottle back on the table and sat back and regarded Lev. “I need a pianist.”
Lev shook his head and drained his glass. “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong person. You see, I’m tone-deaf.”
The Balt smiled. “Not that kind of pianist, Professor Laptev. A pianist.”