Dead Centre (6 page)

I’d misjudged Moscow, too. It had taken me a while to realize it was just an extreme version of New York. You knew where you stood with the Muscovites. People didn’t open doors for each other. When you wanted something you said, ‘Give me.’ And as long as you had the roubles, you got. It was very clear-cut.

Muscovites had a live-for-today attitude that was infectious. Nothing you did in Moscow had consequences. It was a bit like the Wild West. The government was a dictatorship. The police were mostly corrupt. The crime rate was one of the highest on the planet. Most Russians were either unfriendly or downright hostile, especially if they were manning the doors of nightclubs. Moscow bouncers administered Face Control (Feis Kontrol). It didn’t matter if you were male or female, if you were a minger they wouldn’t admit you – unless you were rich. I’d even seen them split couples or groups. They were OK with my ugly face at Gunslingers, but only because I paid my membership on time.

The main reason I liked Moscow was that Anna lived there. It was nine months now since I’d taken the lease on the penthouse overlooking the Moskva River. To the right was the Borodinsky Bridge. Behind that, the Russian Federation’s government buildings. It was a great place just to sit and gaze out at the city, especially at night, when the streets were full of pissed-off mingers who’d been face controlled chuntering to themselves on the way home.

Anna had been right. Moscow looked great in summer. I must have walked in every one of the city’s ninety-six parks. Gorky Park had been the first. It was the only one I’d heard of. Then I discovered there was more green stuff here than in New York, and New York had more of it than London. It almost made me glad I’d left.

As the days got longer and warmer, Anna and I had headed for Serebryany Bor, an island just a trolleybus ride away. It could be walked at any time of day, but it was especially great in the evening when the late-setting sun bathed the
dacha
s, the woods and the river.

I checked out the spring buds and flowers, kids on bikes with stabilizers, all the normal shit that now made sense to me. These were people who were getting on with their lives. I was getting on with mine too. It was all right. It wasn’t as if I jumped up every morning and ran outside to kiss the flowers and hug the trees, but I’d been taking the time to stand and stare. For a while, anyway. Then I’d started to get itchy feet.

The more I got to know Anna, the more I realized how alike we were. We gave each other loads of space and got on with our own lives, knowing that made us both happy.

She was certainly giving me enough space at the moment. She’d just arrived in Libya, after a four-week stint covering the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt for RT news. Since January, the only time I’d seen her was on the screen.

2

ACCORDING TO HER reports, beamed out every day on Russia Today, Gaddafi wasn’t giving up without a fight. He had just begun bombing rebel-held Benghazi. And, of course, the Brits were still having the piss taken out of them by the Russian and the German media for the fucked-up evacuation of British nationals. The Russians – and everyone else for that matter – had sent in their ships and planes and got their people out, well before the British FCO had decided to have a think about it over a nice cup of tea one morning.

I liked it when she went away. Reporting, for her, was a matter of doing the right thing. I knew it made her happy. Maybe it was the only way that a relationship would work for me, by having gaps and then coming back together. We’d probably get on each other’s tits if we lived a conventional lifestyle.

I was looking forward to her coming home. Not only because I’d get to see her, but also because it’d mean she was out of harm’s way. Far too many reporters were getting dropped. Russia, together with many other countries, showed the horror of war much more than we tended to in the UK and US.

Instead of a doll being placed on the rubble of a bombed-out building and some bland report voiced over, Russians got to see the mangled body of the child.

Al-Jazeera and RT reporters stood in the line of fire rather than watching from the rooftop of a distant hotel. Russians got to see dogs eating the dead. They got to see it as it was. Which was why Anna and her team were in more danger.

I didn’t mind being on my own. I felt comfortable with my own company, just as Anna did. I’d been alone most of my life. I’d had lots of mates and always been around people, but I’d felt like an outsider. That was OK: I knew that was the way it was for me. I just got on with what I was doing.

I spent a lot of time in the basement gym of our condominium. For me, the gym had always been famine or feast. I did nothing for months on end because I was busy, working or injured, but when I had the time, I was in there every day.

My brain was getting a bit of a workout, too. I was reading the books I’d promised myself I was going to get through last year when I’d thought I was dying from a falsely diagnosed tumour. I did Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
first, seeing as I was in Russia and Anna had suggested I started on the local lads’ classics. She tested me on them, just to make sure I had done exactly what I’d promised myself. She didn’t warn me the first fucking thing was over twelve hundred pages long. It had taken me longer to read than it took Napoleon to reach Moscow.

I’d just finished Fadeyev’s
The Young Guard
, about the Russians’ fight against the Nazis in the Second World War. Stalin had loved that guy. Now I was into Dostoevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
. A poverty-stricken young man, who views himself as intellectually superior, comes up with the idea of murdering a rich money-lender he hates. I’d read as far as the crime, so I supposed the punishment bit was coming up. I couldn’t wait to bore Anna to death about it when she got back.

I’d given the art galleries a pounding as well, and she’d taken me to
Swan Lake
at the Bolshoi ballet, and
Così Fan Tutte
at the opera house. I’d always thought it was a kind of ice cream.

I didn’t feel I’d entered a world that I’d been missing. When I’d thought I was dying, I’d felt like I had some kind of hole that needed filling. Now it was just great to know something new. But it wasn’t going to take over my life. That was why I still needed to keep my eye in on the range.

3

IT’S EASY TO shoot well, in theory. If the weapon is correctly aimed, the trigger is squeezed and the shot released without moving it, then the round will hit the target. However, the perfect or ‘lucky’ shot that is going to save your life is the result of years of practice. It’s like building muscle at the gym: use it or lose it.

I started loading the seventeen-round magazine. A couple of punters to my left pressed their return buttons and man-shaped targets of Russian hoods with knives slid towards them. Lots of Russian piss-taking came from their cubicles as they checked each other’s hits.

Gaston Glock was a genius. He’d had no experience with firearms when he entered a design competition for a new pistol for the Austrian Army in the 1980s, but he’d come up with the idea and built a prototype within a couple of months. He might have known jack about weapons, but he knew a lot about synthetic polymers, and that was one of the things that made this gun so different. The Glock’s plastic frame made it much lighter and easier to handle, but it was also what made it so hard for people – myself included – to accept initially. But in the last thirty years it had proved reliable and durable, and old Gaston had done all right for himself.

I liked it here at Gunslingers. There was always a great mixture of police and Mafia, as well as gun nuts and European tourists doing the ‘Russian military experience’. They paid the equivalent of five euros a round to fire weapons, and up to 16,000 to fly in a MiG 23. Some of these guys, mostly the Germans, blew off about thirty grand in euros over a long weekend.

It wasn’t as if I talked to any of them or had mates there. Apart from anything else, I’d only learnt a phrase or two of Russian in the time I’d been in the country. There wasn’t much point. Moscow was one of the big tourist destinations these days and most people knew enough English for me not to have to learn Russian. If they didn’t understand me I’d do the British thing of pointing and shouting. It seemed to do the trick. I’d nod at the regulars, but only if they nodded at me first. Police and Mafia tend not to be the most sociable of people, and that was the way I liked it. I also liked coming in early, before the first tourists Rambo’d in and the place got packed.

Standing in my cubicle, I put the target out at about ten metres. I loaded a mag, pulled back on the top slide, and let go so it rammed a 9mm round into the chamber.

In the movies, when actors load semi- or automatic weapons they always pull back the top slide and keep hold of it as it goes forward. It looks good, but it’s bollocks. You’ve got to let the top slide go. The spring then forces the next round out of the magazine and into the chamber. Hamper this action and you’re going to have stoppages. Law-enforcement agencies all over the world have trouble training recruits because of how they’ve seen the likes of Russell Crowe fuck it up on screen. When a Hollywood hard guy takes cover against a wall, the camera shows him with his weapon up, barrel near his face and pointing at the sky. It’s yet more bollocks. The weapon’s got to be pointing out towards the threat. The reason directors show it the way they do is so you can see the sexy weapon very close up, so it’s next to the actor’s head and you can register his emotion before they cut to the next scene.

I still used the Weaver stance when I shot. Your body became a firing platform by adopting the stance of a fighter. My legs were shoulder-width apart, left leg forward so my body turned forty-five degrees to the target. Now I was balanced forward and back, left and right.

The eyes are the aiming mechanism and the brain is the decision maker of when to fire, but everything else is used to create stability for the weapon. The web of my right hand was pushed hard and high into the grip. The higher the grip, the better the bore axis, the better the control of the weapon as the muzzle jumped when I fired. That was important. If I had to draw down outside this club it wouldn’t be just one round at a time and at a paper target. Semi-automatic pistols are designed for a high grip. When the top slide comes back to reload after a round is fired, it needs to move against the abutment of a firmly held weapon frame. If not, the top slide may not go all the way back and may not be able to reload. Then I’d be fucked.

My bottom three fingers were like a vice. My thumb was wrapped round the other side of the pistol grip. Only my trigger finger was free. It was the only thing that was allowed to move. Fuck the gentle tremor that I knew would be there as I aimed. This was a lump of metal that had to be controlled if it was to do its job. If I gripped the weapon and aimed correctly, the tremor would be where I wanted to hit.

I brought the weapon up towards the target, my support hand wrapped around the dominant hand. My shoulder was forward so my nose was closer to the target than my toes. My right arm pushed the weapon towards the target as my left exerted rearward pressure so the platform was rigid.

I lifted the weapon to the centre mass of the raging Russian. Both eyes fixed on the target; dead centre of mass. The weapon’s metal foresight came into my vision and became my primary focus. The target and the rear sight were now just blurs. I made sure the split at the back of the rear sight was level with the foresight. Then everything blurred as I focused on the foresight with both eyes.

As I squeezed, I felt the trigger safety with the first crease in my finger, the small lever that released the trigger action.

The foresight rested on the centre of mass and I finished my squeeze. The trigger went back. The round kicked off.

I didn’t check to see where my round had hit. I’d find out soon enough when I retrieved the target. I just carried on firing, bringing the weapon down, then slowly up again into the same point of aim.

The only negative about coming down to Gunslingers was that it gave me itchy feet. Not to get out of Moscow, or away from Anna – far from it. But there was only so much reading, art and opera you could take in one burst. If I wanted to get out there again, it wasn’t because I needed the money. There was still plenty of that left. If Anna had taught me one thing, it was that money isn’t everything. It certainly wasn’t her motivation. It was easy for me to say that money wasn’t mine now that I had plenty of it, but I was starting to understand why Anna did what she did. Besides, going away for a bit of work the next time Anna was on a trip would make me want to come back to her and Moscow even more.

I squeezed off round after round, no double taps, just slow-time singles, making sure my skills and my eye were still in. I was in no rush. I’d bang out a couple of mags, clean my weapon, and take a walk home to get stuck into a bit of
Punishment
.

4

09.45 hrs

THE COFFEE SHOP was further down the corridor, in an area that looked as if it had once been a Cold War nuclear bunker. The new owners had given it a complete makeover. It was warm and welcoming, and did a good trade in coffee and a roaring one in vodka and Baltika beer. Nobody saw a problem with customers having a few looseners before they picked up a weapon.

There wasn’t one Moscow bar or coffee shop that was what it seemed. Once you were in, they didn’t want you to leave. Almost every bar doubled as a restaurant, a bowling alley, snooker hall, casino, bookshop or, in this case, a gun club. Moscow is so huge and cabs are so expensive that bar owners want their customers to have everything they could possibly want from dawn till dusk – and on from dusk till dawn.

I’d only been to Gunslingers a couple of times in the evening, and only because Anna said I should see Moscow when the cash was really being flashed. All of a sudden there were dancing girls, acrobats and laser light shows. Buying a table, which I didn’t, but which gave you guaranteed entrance, a place to sit and a bar-tab, cost five thousand dollars. That was cheap; in some places it could be more than twenty thousand.