After making love, they fell asleep in each other’s arms. An hour or so after midnight, Tom woke to find her missing. He wrapped himself in a towel and went into the lounge. Ekaterina was turned towards the window, her head in her hands.
‘I sent them there’, she was saying. ‘I am responsible.’ Tom stared at her long, straight back, salt tears running through the cracks in her fingers. She waited a few minutes before turning to look at him. ‘And my grandfather, too?’ A question mark hung like a huge wire coat hanger off her lower lip.
‘That was not you. They did that to get at me.’
‘Then it is both of us!’
‘Yes’, he had to admit. ‘It is both of us.’
‘You know’, she said, ‘in 1945, a famous Russian poet fell in love with a professor from Oxford University who visited her one cold November night, and stayed talking with her until the dawn.’ Tom hunched his shoulders. ‘She called him her “Guest from the future”…’
‘Were they happy together?’
‘No, he returned to his dreaming spires, and the Soviets withdrew the writer’s state privileges and banned her poetry.’
There was a long silence as they both looked at the loaded gun on the table. ‘And just like him, you will leave?’ she said, almost accusingly. He felt intimidated. ‘It is said the poet used to stand by the window, waiting for him to return.’
Tom was in front of a firing squad. He moved forward, sweeping her up in his arms, holding her so close that his lonely heart could feel hers beat against his chest.
‘I won’t let you down’, he promised, knowing that he would.
‘Kiss me, you bastard!’ she whispered with that deep, throaty English, barely passing for European, but offering salvation for the West.
Peter Janssen was exasperated by news of the loss of the Vulcari cell. Tossing his trilby on to the bed, he cursed Yuri and Alexei, but having met Ekaterina in the doorway to his apartment block earlier, he fully realised how events had played out. Janssen had already spoken to Alyosha and Grigori, and decided on a course of action. There was no turning back. He moved over to the wardrobe and pulled out a tan leather briefcase, easing the well-oiled zip the full length of the binding so as to lift the lid. Inside was a Tec-9 ‘spray and pay’ machine pistol. Janssen assembled the weapon, twisting on the long graphite sound suppressor with a scratchy, metallic grimace.
Outside, there was a hint of moonglow across the frosted rooftops looking out over the river. Some cloud cover offered the potential for surprise, mostly by smothering the stars to the north with polluted petroleum fumes. Janssen advanced thoughtfully, combing the Nevsky for a taxi ride, wild cats rummaging through garbage, stopping for a moment to scan him with feline eyes that gleamed in car headlights before fading as the motor moved on. It was cold, too cold for love, but just right for killing.
Two Bloc heavies wearing woollen hats pulled down to their eyebrows hovered in the foyer at Ulitsa Egorova. One sat back on a chair, hands in pockets, legs stretched out, ankles crossed, causing his boots to form a V pattern on the uneven tiles. The other was leaning against the wall, slitted eyes flitting all over the hallway. The man in the chair shifted position as a European in a triby and long, black coat entered from off the road, jerking his head lazily at his Tartar companion, who managed an incoherent grunt before pushing himself away from the wall.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked in monosyllabic Russian to a man who spoke no Russian beyond, ‘Da Tovarich, och-en pree-yat-na?’ The muzzle flash from Janssen’s gun punctured the guard’s forehead like a hammer on a nail. The guy on the chair tried to wrestle an MP-446 pistol out of the folds of his jacket. The executioner stepped forward, kicking his jaw and sending him flying backwards, chair sliding, the man toppling, Janssen finishing him with one bullet square to the back of his head.
Stepping around jetting blood, Peter pushed the button in front of him. The lift rose slowly to the floor where Janssen knew Arkady and Bogdan to be hiding. The ping of the elevator’s arrival echoed in the corridor. As the doors slid open, Janssen stepped out just in time to meet a Bloc member coming to check who was there. The Antifa man’s face fell open as the first bullet took off his testicles and the second burst his Adam’s apple like a failed William Tell re-enactment.
Heaving the corpse aside, Janssen shouldered his way through the door frame, subliminally clocking the chipped woodwork where his protégés had met their end. ‘Dobre Vechyre’, he announced to the assembled crowd before easing the Tec-9 into auto and letting off like a threshing machine. Two died instantly. A third, Bogdan, collapsed with a leg wound, whimpering and begging for mercy.
Arkady’s huge body slid across the wooden table, his Stechkin blowing mouse holes in the ceiling. Janssen grinned, inserting a second magazine. He enjoyed killing with impunity. Striding over to where the bald Bloc fanatic lay clutching his shattered knee-cap, he placed the gun barrel to Bogdan’s juddering skull. His opponent’s tears flowed freely, Then he tugged at the trigger triumphantly.
10.
In Petersburg I am a tourist, an observer, not an inhabitant.
Tom walked alone in the heart of the city. Moonlight played on granite. He was caught up in a world-changing event. His eyes darted wildly from the mosque burning in the distance to the Bakhcha-U parked at the side of the road. It was becoming increasingly obvious that he was a man of letters, not action, his world inhabited by characters like Stavrogin and Verkhovensky, Dostoevsky’s political villains, rather than the muscle-bound reality of Bogdan and Arkady. The vision of Ekaterina lying asleep and the metallic click of the door latch dropping made his conscience itch.
He strode on, not knowing or caring where. He circled the canal bridges, lost in thought, up and down, past the Anichkovsky Palace and the sleek horse statues harnessed by straps of bitter starlight. Strings of white globes stretched away down Nevsky, their light casting neon nets over the muddy water flowing to the sea. Carved gargoyles looked down accusingly. Tom kept asking himself what he should do. Should he stay or should he go? He was sweating despite the cold. The ghoulish grandeur rolled out either side of the river before him. Corruption and glamour were covered by a twinkle of silver. He remembered she had told him that in the Russian language, St Petersburg is male whilst Moscow is female. Little sentences and sayings, the sound of her voice reverberated constantly in his head. He leaned against a parapet, steadying himself against the maelstrom loosed about him.
The city was in a hurry. It was as if the residents were recovering from collective amnesia. Granules of snow flittered through car headlights, ice crunched like baby powder underfoot. He knew he had to get back to the hotel. He was so tired that he began to stagger. His moleskin coat was speckled with flakes, and kiss-curls were stuck to his forehead. The lines from Dugin’s alias Hans Zivers came to mind: ‘In a buttoned coat, buttoned frock coat, solemnly kefir he drinks, and the dogs bark, and move black cancers, in the darkness of Soviet apartments’.
• Her Majesty’s Consulate in St Petersburg advises all British citizens to leave Russia as a consequence of the deteriorating political situation;
• Russian nationalists re-capture the radar base at Gabala and launch sporadic attacks amidst the rusting derricks dotted along the Caspian shore, shelling the Bibi Heyat mosque and the new fortress housing Israel’s Kohanim Council of the East;