'He was taken to an underground room,' she said, 'and executed without trial.'
Her father.
'Why?'
'For his ideals.'
I listened to the siren. People were still coming in, and the thin boy — an orderly — was standing by the big entrance door, slamming it shut after them. A man went reeling to the end of the queue, blood caked at the side of his head, the neck of a bottle sticking out of his pocket. The woman with the baby kept her distance from him; the baby's face was pinched, colourless, a wax doll's face; its mother's was haunted, her hollowed eyes looking from the child to the women at the admissions desk as she thought about going straight past all the other people because this was urgent, her baby was ill.
'When was this?' I asked Tanya.
'Four years ago.'
'Four.'
'You needn't think,' she said with a look at me,' that everything like that stopped when Gorbachev took over. Even now there are secret executions. The worst of the Stalinists and hardliners have been sacked from the KGB, but they've gone underground, and there are still scores to settle.' she made an effort to sit up straight, pulling the hem of her white polo-neck sweater down, leaning her head against the wall. 'It's always like that, when a new regime takes over.'
The siren was loud now, and lights coloured the windows.
'You're talking about the Podpolia?'
She looked at me again. 'Yes.'
I'd seen intelligence reports going through the fax machines in London for a year now, since the days of the coup. The Podpolia — the new underground — was thought to have thousands of members, possibly tens of thousands, a lot of them still in office, going through the motions of embracing democracy and being reinstated. 'Who the hell knows how many there are?' I'd heard Croder saying as he watched the signals coming in.' How can you count the heads in the cellars on foreign soil?'
'Was General Velichko in the Podpolia?' I asked Tanya.
'Yes.'
'But that isn't why your — why he was killed tonight.'
'No. It was because he'd ordered our father shot. They were his orders.' she straightened her right leg, spread her hands across her thighs, looking down at them, and a shudder went through her. 'I thought it was going to — to liberate me, seeing him die, helping to make it happen. I thought the act of revenge would give me relief — I wanted to see it happen: my brother told me that all he wanted me to do was identify that man, make sure there wouldn't be any mistake, and then run away. But I wanted to stay there, and when the shots began I felt — I felt just a flash of the most bitter satisfaction, but then when I went on watching — ' she broke off and squeezed her eyes shut and her body began shaking again.
'It was your father you saw.'
Her head came lower and she clawed suddenly at her thighs. 'Yes — yes — it was my father I saw…'
A door banged open somewhere and the thin young orderly went scurrying past the line of people and into the corridor; the engine of the ambulance throbbed for a minute and then stopped, and I saw two men go past the doorway with a stretcher, a third holding a drip feed above it. I didn't know whether the hospital was normally as busy as this at two o'clock in the morning or whether the storm had brought accidents into the streets; it was too far north to take in people from the wreck of the Rossiya. I'd seen the lighted windsock of the helipad on the roof of this building when we'd passed the Hotel Siberian, and noted it; a hospital was about the only place that could give us shelter.
'What is your brother's name?' I asked Tanya. She didn't hear, was watching the man against the wall with the bullets going into him, her father, understanding for the first time that he was not only dead but had died, and like that.
The woman with the baby had made up her mind and gone to the admissions desk, and a couple of youths in black leather coats were chivvying her, one with an arm in a sling; then some women began going for the youths in support of the mother, and I caught a glimpse of the waxen face of the child in the midst of the scuffle, its closed eyelids calm, as if it hadn't the strength to squeeze them tight against the light and the voices.
"Then my mother died,' I heard Tanya saying. I didn't think it mattered to her if I were listening or not; she needed to say these things, hear them again for herself.' she drank cleaning fluid, a year ago, a year ago this month, on the fourteenth. They couldn't save her; she didn't want them to.'
'It had been a long marriage,' I said.
She turned her head, I think surprised to hear that I was listening.' they'd been together thirty-nine years when my father was killed.'
'And she missed him too much.'
'We all missed him too much,' Tanya said, 'or my brother couldn't have done what he did tonight. And nor could I. He — '
'What is your brother's name?' I asked her again.
She hesitated. 'Vadim.'
'You can trust me with everything,' I said. 'For your own sake, and for his, you have to understand that.'
She stared at me for a moment and then looked down.' I want you to know that he is not the kind of man who — who kills other men without thinking about it. When — '
'As a soldier, he hasn't seen action?'
She didn't look at me but her mouth tightened: was there nothing I didn't know? 'He was in Afghanistan, yes. But he has never taken a life in peacetime. It was a very — emotional thing for us, very impulsive.' she swung her head to look at me. 'He heard that that man was coming here to Novosibirsk, where Vadim is stationed, and he wrote to me, asking if I wanted to help him, and I said yes, of course I said yes. It was only afterwards, tonight, when I realized what we had done. I — '
'You destroyed a brute,' I said, 'and not only for yourselves. Your father wasn't the only one to suffer for his ideals, he couldn't have been, you know that. You did a great job, and so did Vadim. You're to be honoured.'
She watched me for a moment, and for the first time, I thought, there was no dislike, no distrust in the lambent green eyes. 'I can't think of it like that,' she said.
'I know, but you've got to try.'
I got up and went across to the payphone, telling her not to move. There'd been a man there for the past ten minutes trying to get through to someone, wanting to tell them where he was.
'There are lines down,' he told me as he came away from the phone, 'lines down everywhere.'
But I put two kopeks into the slot and dialled for the Hotel Karasevo for the third time since we'd got here, and stood waiting, looking across at the young woman in the fur hat and the white polo-sweater, one leg straight and the other bent a little, her head down as she went over it all again, giving herself no peace, and I knew I'd have to let her see her brother Vadim as soon as it was possible, as soon as it was safe, because only he could do anything for her, help her battle the phantoms.
I checked the environment again: main doors, an archway behind the admissions desk — forget that one — the archway into the passage where I'd seen the stretcher case go by, the opening of the corridor six feet from the bench where Tanya was sitting now. They were the only exits; the huge windows were high in the wall with their catches rusted solid.
There was nothing but a faint crackling on the line and I pushed the coin return and went back to the bench. We had, with luck, until daylight before I would need to do something dramatic to get us both off the streets without Ferris's help if I still couldn't raise him; the three matrons at the admissions desk had got their hands full and no one was likely to come across here and ask any questions. There were some other people along the walls, two or three of them lying on the benches trying to sleep until they could get some kind of attention, one of them a drunk spreadeagled on the worn linoleum with a bottle of blackish wine locked in the crook of his arm.