He did the dumb act. ‘I don’t know that there’s anything for which you should apologize, sir.’
‘It was necessary to take that time and walk through the Old Town.’
‘If you say so, sir.’
‘It was necessary for Mikhail and Viktor. I have to listen to them because they have been with me since I was no more than a kid. They wanted it. If you had not been what you say you are — I believed you but they were not certain — if you had been an agent of the police or an intelligence agency that targeted me, you would have been followed, to see where I took you, to keep track of me and of you. They are very expert, Viktor and Mikhail, and they did not find a tail on you … but I do not apologize.’
Carrick said quietly, ‘There would not have been a tail because I am not an agent.’
He was hugged. Now exhaustion caught him, and he wobbled on his feet. He was led towards the cars. Josef Goldmann and the polisher waited in one, but Mikhail opened the door of the other — for Carrick.
Carrick thought it the right time for him to stand tall, and said, ‘My man was not shot, sir. You were.’
In the car, in the front passenger seat, with Mikhail driving, they went across the wide, high bridge that spanned the Vistula river, going east. Mikhail leaned across him and tapped the glove compartment in front of Carrick. He dropped the flap and saw what had been placed there for him. He lifted out a Makharov pistol and with it two magazines of ammunition. Further back he found a pancake holster.
They went fast, and new confusions burdened him.
Chapter 15
‘A teacher said I was old before my time, had the body of a child and the mind of a man — do you understand that, Johnny?’
He wasn’t expected to reply, and did not. Carrick sat beside Mikhail in the front, and Reuven Weissberg’s voice was soft behind him, but clear.
‘My father was dead and my mother had gone to do strip-tease in the East at the oil-exploration sites, so I do not think it was remarkable that my mind was old, and I lived with my grandmother. There was no place in my life to be a child, to have such a luxury. My grandmother had fought and she taught me what was necessary. You fight to survive. It was what she told me. She knew … And I was a Jew. I doubt you could understand what it was, is, to be a Jew in yesterday’s or today’s Russia.’
Carrick stared ahead into the night, and the headlights showed the road in front of him. Villages, little towns, fields and forests slipped by and were gone.
‘We had nothing. No saved money, no possessions of value. My grandmother was a cleaner in a ministry building in Perm. She was a Jew and they would not give her regular work, and she had the worst jobs — lavatories and waiting areas for the public where filth came in off the street — and at the end of each month she did not know whether she would work for the next four weeks or not work. I looked at her and saw what it was to be a Jew. She said to me, and it was repeated every morning and every evening, that I must fight to live. It was like I was in the Kama river that flows in Perm and was sinking and the water was in my nostrils and I must struggle and kick and thrash if I am not to sink. That is what it was to be a Jew in Perm. I fought and I survived, and I was a Jew. I could only do business. Business was survival.’
He thought of them as people who meet in a hotel bar, who talk for an evening then separate and go to their rooms and will be gone their different ways by the early morning and will not meet again — but they talk. He remembered himself as a kid, at school and bored, probably messing about, and a teacher had read a poem that had caught his mind. Afterwards he had found the anthology and learned it. The American writer Henry Longfellow:
Little from classroom days had stayed with him, but those few lines had.
‘I did business at school. I am twelve or thirteen years old, I am condemned as a “disruptive influence” and as a “malcontent”, and several times I am beaten by teachers, but more often I am sent home. Each time I was sent home my grandmother returned me to school. She lectured me on how to survive, and I did, and I played at business. To survive is to fight. To fight you must look into the eyes of an opponent and show him you have no comprehension of defeat, no fear of pain, supreme determination. The enemy may be bigger, more muscles, have more friends, but you must find and exploit his weakness — she told me. I did. If a teacher punished me, I went to his house. In the night I broke the teacher’s windows and built a fire at his door, and I would hear his wife scream and his children cry, and in the morning he would smile at me and be polite. If the leader of a gang of kids objected that I tried to take money from those he protected, I fought him. Boots, fists, teeth, nails, I used them. Always I won. When I won — I standing and the other not — his allies, his kids came to me. I grew. I did roofs in the school, and was paid. Children brought me money — stole it from their parents — and for the money they had my protection. I made money and the only other Jew I knew of was Josef Goldmann, and he cared for my money.’
In the darkness, with the motion of the car lulling him, Carrick thought himself exposed to a great truth. He lived a lie, and he believed Reuven Weissberg lived a lie — but a greater one.
‘If you are in business, Johnny, you must always expand, grow bigger. You cannot stand still. I had an empire in Perm, in the district where my grandmother lived, and it was a battlefield while I built my roofs, and took traders from under other roofs. She would treat me when I had fought and was hurt, would bandage me, clean the cuts, and could stitch slashes because she had those skills. I never had to come back to her and tell her of failure. She would have despised me if I had not fought and won. Then I was conscripted. There, I was thrashed, beaten, and I was far from my grandmother, but I never cried out. I did good business in the army, buying and selling, and each week I posted the money back to Josef Goldmann, who was excused the military because his feet had fallen arches. There were great warehouse stores of equipment for selling, and narcotics for buying and trading. That was business, and it prospered. I did well. Even senior officers came to me because I could get for them anything they wanted. I had control of a market. I came back to Perm. You find it interesting, Johnny, my story?’
The lie they shared was about loneliness, isolation and an absence of trust. He could have asked where they were going, and what business took them at hammering pace on the road to the East, but Carrick did not. For himself, he understood what it was to feel the pang of loneliness, the pain of being isolated and the desolation of living without the possibility of having a friend in whom trust was placed.
‘From the army, coming home, I had to re-establish authority in Perm. It was a fight, but I succeeded. Everything I did to regain my business position I talked of first with my grandmother. I had the control of the open market in Perm, which was remarkable for a Jew, and Mikhail and Viktor had joined me. Then the city of Perm had no more for me. One day I was there, and one day I was gone, and my grandmother came with me, and Josef Goldmann, Mikhail and Viktor. It was the same in Moscow. There were powerful business groups in the capital city. I did what I had done before, fought. Then, the rivals in business came and offered accommodation, compromise, because they had no stomach for war. I told you, Johnny, in business you cannot stand still, lean against a wall and let the world pass. You must run — run faster, run a greater distance. Moscow to Berlin. Roofs and deals, more roofs and more deals. Running and never stopping. Do you understand what I say to you, Johnny?’