This is the kind of power that people might literally die for, and he’s just spilling it behind him as he walks, like a petrol leak. As he approaches, I can see the dark, raccoon-like circles around his eyes.
Ivan Vasiliev. The man who got me and Mum out of Russia; who saved us. Or at least that’s how it felt at the time.
In his study, the colonel seats himself behind a large desk and puts on his eyeglasses. Lev has been made to wait out in the living room.
‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ Colonel Vasiliev begins. He doesn’t sound it. ‘There’s an important matter you and I must discuss. Are you in Moscow long? Where are you staying?’
‘For the summer. I can give you my information. I’ve come to ask a favour,’ I say in a rush, before I lose my nerve. ‘I’m looking for Eduard Dayneko.’
‘Eduard—’ The colonel pulls up short. ‘No. No, Raisa. I won’t help you find that man.’
I’m almost relieved to hear the colonel say that man, like it’s that man to him, and to everyone. Like it’s normal, that I think about this person every day, like it’s fine, that I never sleep a whole night through, like it’s OK, being haunted by a dead sister.
‘He left something behind,’ I say.
In 1977, Eduard Dayneko was a well-known hitman for a burgeoning criminal organisation. He’d been in and out of prison for years. He’d been spotted earlier in the day in our neighbourhood, and the lady who let him into our building later picked him out from a series of mugshots. Indeed, identifying him was never the problem. The problem was that the police seemed to hold him in unreservedly high regard. They spoke of him as if we’d been graced with a rare sighting of a god, as if he’d taken human form for just that one night, to commit those murders.
I still don’t believe they wanted to catch him.
Ivan Vasiliev was the one who created that god, or at least taught him to kill. In his youth, Dayneko had been the colonel’s gifted protégé. He’d been trained as a sniper in the GRU Spetsnaz, the Special Forces. Vasiliev posted him all over the map before letting him slip into the clutches of a criminal bratva.
I know the colonel still feels responsible for what happened. I try not to hold him responsible. I try to think it isn’t his fault any more than it is mine, just because I didn’t enter the living room earlier, or do something differently.
Just because I survived.
Vasiliev is looking unconvinced, so I try again. ‘That night. Dayneko saw me and he left something.’
He sighs. ‘Why didn’t you tell the police? Or me, when I approached you and your mother?’
‘I didn’t trust the police not to destroy it.’ I reach for my bag. ‘But most of all, I guess, I didn’t want my mother to take it away. She has, she had, this thing about dolls—’
‘Dolls?’
I place it flat on his desk.
The colonel frowns. He picks up the half-a-foot-long toy and pulls at one strand of the golden mohair, which curls sharply around his finger. He examines the painted rainbow-arch eyebrows, the lacquered sheen of the porcelain, the brocaded white dress hiding the booted feet. The doll’s hands are bare, stretched too far, as if it wants to be held.
It has never been held. I’ve been keeping it in a box for a decade and a half.
‘So you will chase a professional assassin around Moscow, just because of this thing,’ says Vasiliev, untwisting his finger from the grotesque grasp of the doll’s hair.
‘If Dayneko wanted to kill me, he would have done it that night, but he didn’t. It was different than all his other jobs. You said yourself that the motive had to be personal, that he was after us, that he’d never stop coming after us. That nobody knew why. Well, I know it had to do with my mother! He knew her – he left this for her. I just want to understand, that’s all. Why he did what he did.’
‘How do you know it was for Katya? Why would he leave her a doll?’
‘She had a collection of dolls just like these!’
‘Why didn’t you just ask her, Raisa?’ Ivan Vasiliev plants the doll face down on his desk. He might be a colonel in the Soviet Armed Forces, he might have fought guerrilla rebels in Afghanistan, he might know how to go a week without sleep and walk with his boots on backwards to leave a false trail. But even he is no match for a child’s plaything whose dead eyes never break contact.
‘I tried. She refused to talk about that night. She pretended it never happened.’ I push the doll back into my bag. ‘And now she’s dead. She died last month of liver disease.’
‘I am aware,’ says Vasiliev, in a measured tone. ‘And very sorry. But I still don’t see—’
‘You told us that we had to leave Moscow. You told us that we had to be different people. Well, it worked. My mother became so different that I didn’t even know her.’
And me, is what I want to add, but don’t. Can’t you see what’s happened to me? I became this.
Ivan Vasiliev takes off his eyeglasses, sighs again. Behind him the window is half open, letting in a murmur of sound. The trebly chirp of summer crickets; the caterwaul of an animal; the stifled static of his soldiers’ radios.
‘You’re not a child any more,’ he says. ‘It’s your choice. I can tell you how to find him.’
Alexey’s maps are stored in a birchwood trunk with a brass clasp. The maps are large and unwieldy. Disorganised, too, as much so as the rest of the apartment. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any Popovkas besides the one Alexey mentioned.
Just how small was this village?
While Alexey is out at dinner with friends, Lev joins me on the floor. I spread out one of the remaining maps that include Moscow and Tula provinces and ask him to have a look, because my brain is swimming. He bends his head to read off the quaint, quintessentially Russian names of the towns that dot the area, and I catch myself studying him.
Attractive, very much so, in that unnerving way. A sliver of sunlight through the window falls across his face, and the effect is almost transfixing. Trying to look elsewhere, I notice a scar on his neck, along the hairline; thin, white and deep, it stands out more now that he’s no longer clean-shaven.
‘Combat knife,’ he says.
My own neck feels hot. We stare at one another for a moment.
‘Have you ever been to Tula?’ I ask, awkwardly.
‘To Yasnaya Polyana.’
Yasnaya Polyana. Leo Tolstoy’s former home, now kept as a museum in his honour. My mother and father used to argue about making the trip out there. Mum worshipped Tolstoy, had read everything he ever wrote. Papa only ever wanted to take our one annual holiday to the Black Sea. He would not waste time looking at a dead man’s dinner plates, he would say to Mum, before leaving for the secondary school where he taught, putting a real damper on the row.
I think Mum would have rather he heaved some of our own dinner plates at the wall to make his point, but my father was not that kind of person. He never shouted, never snapped. Mum had double the emotional charge of most people and he had none.
‘What are you looking for?’ asks Lev.
‘Popovka, in Tula, but not the one in Aleksinsky,’ I reply, pointing to the map. ‘That would have been much too easy.’
‘There is part of a map of Tula in your mother’s notebook. It shows a different Popovka.’
‘What?’
‘It fell out while I was reading to you the other night,’ he says, stretching his legs.
‘My mother’s never been to Tula,’ I say blankly.
‘People sometimes keep maps of places they’ve never been.’
Was that an attempt at humour? I look at him, but he’s unreadable. Worse than Mum’s cursive. ‘Why didn’t you show me?’