For the evil done by his father a punishment had been handed down to him. It was never out of the mind of Tadeuz Komiski. And he was responsible. It was him, the six-year-old, who had run back to the house, fleet-footed, and told his father what he had seen. And perhaps then his father had not believed him because he had hesitated, but his mother had spoken of the reward on offer. He had led his father back into the forest, and the evil was done in the hope of gaining that reward: two kilos of sugar. That day the curse had been set in place as the rain fell softly in the forest.
He could see the shape of the man’s shoulders, and if he moved his head there was a suspicion of his pale skin colour. The man never coughed, never fidgeted, except to scratch one place on his arm below the right shoulder — but insects from the forest floor would by now have found him and would be crawling over him. He never stretched or cracked his finger joints. Earlier, he had seen him walk slowly, carefully, weighing his steps, on the needle and compost carpet, and Tadeuz Komiski believed he searched for the grave that was the mark of the evil done and the cause of the curse … And his father had never been given the reward.
Behind the man, sitting against the tree trunk, there was another. Two hundred metres back towards the monument, another watched and listened but lit cigarettes.
Only the owl shouted and only the rain fell, and he waited for them to leave. But the lesson of the curse told Tadeuz Komiski that if they left he would still find no peace — they would return. He thought the grave cried to them … The curse had maddened him, made hallucinations … What he had done at the age of six had destroyed his life.
Now they moved on.
‘Your car, Major, is like the story of our lives.’
‘Our lives, Colonel, are shit. I accept it, my car’s the same.’
‘A broken car and broken lives — agreed. Both shit.’
‘When I first took possession of a Polonez, in 1986, I thought it an accolade, like the award of a medal. A car driven by a man of importance, a mark of personal success. Four cylinders, 1500cc version, top-of-the-range, four-speed transmission, the quality of Fiat technology. When I first had it, and drove through the main gate each morning — forgive me the indulgence, my friend — I was proud to be the owner of such a vehicle.’
‘It’s still a piece of shit.’
They had lost four hours, and it was only the first day of the journey.
Halfway up, the punctured tyre not yet clear of the road, the jack had collapsed, corroded by the same rust that afflicted the coachwork and doors. The car had subsided on to the flat rear left tyre. Molenkov had dragged the jack clear, Yashkin had hurled it into the lake and it had disappeared into a reed bed. They had sat together beside the tilted Polonez, on the spare tyre, and had waited for help. Each vehicle that came they greeted with shouts, waved arms and pleas for help. The first four had ignored them. The fifth was a van, and had stopped, but the driver had commented immediately on the weight the Polonez carried under the tarpaulin and the bags, and had seemed curious to know what two old fools carried that was so heavy; they’d sent him on his way. It was nearly dark when a saloon car had pulled up behind them. A schoolteacher, with a life history to be told but also a jack that fitted the Polonez. By the time they knew his name, and where he taught, the names of his wife and children, the success of his pupils at indoor soccer and his hobbies, the spare was in place. They’d waved him on his way, both exhausted from the effort of listening … and four hours had been lost.
‘There are winners in this world and losers, Igor, and …’
‘A profound psychological analysis of the state of society, Oleg, and of the quality I would expect from a retired political officer. A zampolit would be expected to demonstrate such insights.’
‘You sarcastic bastard — and it was your tyre that was shit, and your car. I would have said that winners and losers have little contact in our state today. A very few win, a great many lose … We’re in a particularly rare situation. We’ve been losers, dismissed from our work after years of dedicated service, the victims of total disrespect. Our pensions are at best erratic and at worst unpaid, shit identical to your car. But we leap a chasm to a new world, to that of the winners. Doesn’t that cheer you? It should.’
Yashkin frowned, pondered, then asked the question that had long been in his mind. ‘Is it greed that motivates me — pure greed and envy of others?’
The former zampolit was certain. ‘No, not greed and not envy. I was a judge of men — the political officer’s work. I looked for weakness, but with you I never found such a base condition. They betrayed us. They made a state that is criminalized, corrupt, riddled with disgusting disease, a state in which loyalty is no longer recognized. You have done nothing to feel ashamed of, or me … I remember the night you told me what lay buried in your garden, and you were nervous of confiding your secret. I thought then how greatly I admired your skill at removing it from the Zone and your opportunism. Now we have set off. The talking’s done.’
Yashkin grinned and turned to his friend. He saw his tired, worn features and the long greying hair caught at the back of his neck with an elastic band, the worry lines at his eyes and the stubble on his cheeks. He knew the hardship of his friend’s life as it ticked towards its close and remained unrewarded — as his did. The grin split his face wider. ‘I have a feeling that the Polonez — as shit as we are — will get us there.’
They clasped hands. The headlights speared the road running past wide lakes, over rattling wood bridges and through forests. Behind them was the cargo they would deliver, shielded by the tarpaulin and their bags. Two old, thin, calloused hands were held tight, and the road was clear in front of them.
She had been warned about the man she would meet. Her line manager had said that Christopher Lawson had a reputation for verbal violence on an unacceptable scale. With the cardboard file-holder close to her chest, she’d walked down Millbank, along the north side of the river, past the high tower, the Tate Gallery and the Army Medical School, then strode across the bridge. In front of her she saw the hideous floodlit mass of the sister organization.
The main crowds, commuters going home at the end of their day and spilling towards Vauxhall station, had thinned. She saw him easily. Not particularly tall, without horns growing from his forehead. She smiled to herself because he looked twice at his watch and it did not concern her: she knew she would make the rendezvous a full thirty seconds before the scheduled time.
He was looking over her shoulder, maybe expecting someone older, a man, peering down the length of the bridge. She’d been told he’d be wearing a raincoat and a trilby — as if he’d been dug out of the Ark, her line manager had said — and it was, truth to tell, damn strange to meet face to face on a bloody cold bridge when the age of email communication had arrived and there were closet rooms for shielded meetings back at the Box and at his place. But it was where she had been told to come, and she thought this was the way that unreconstructed veterans did their business.
She wasn’t tall, she was young, and probably fitted no stereotype he’d made — which cheered her. She walked up to his shoulder, saw a thin aquiline face and the growth from a careless early-morning shave. ‘Mr Lawson? It’s Mr Lawson, isn’t it?’