The Oktober Projekt (2 page)

‘It’s your call whether you make the collection,’ Nick reminded
Foula. ‘I’m not here to make that decision.’

Glaring straight ahead Foula didn’t respond. A slight dry cough
they both knew to be nerves racked his whole body. A couple in their thirties
dragged a sullen child and a pair of suitcases through the snow. At a communal
foyer the man read from a scrap of paper in his massive hand. Opposite Foula’s
door the child pulled towards the car, forcing Nick to slip his hand inside his
jacket pocket to rest on the 9mm Yarygin PYa he’d illicitly collected in
Latvia. Nick stared at their blank faces as they passed the car, the mother’s
small round brittle eyes as hard as beads.
 

Meeting Nick’s stare she turned quickly away. Welcome to
wonderland, he thought. Welcome to a world gone mad. In another ten years a
different team would be waiting for a kid like that to pull a stunt, trying to
get a trainer on life’s up-ramp. All you needed was the right start and
guidance, he remembered. Sometimes, depending on the country, they even gave
kids a helping hand with a grenade, maybe an improvised explosive device or
automatic weapon.
 

‘Any reason for this address?’ Nick asked abruptly.

‘A halfway house, for safety,’ snapped Foula, his nerves
frayed. ‘And no I don’t know who she is either. His sister, mother, lover…
Parfrey didn’t say.’

Rolling back his sleeve Nick checked the time. ‘You ready to
make the collection?’

Something happened to Foula at that precise moment; stiffening
in his seat as though he’d been caught by a painful spasm, his shoulders sank,
his whole body sagged. ‘You do it,’ he muttered.

‘What?’

‘I can’t go in… I can’t handle it… I…,’ Foula stumbled over his
excuses, unable to look at Nick.

‘Stay there,’ decided Nick.

‘Can we… you know… can we keep this to ourselves,’ Foula
pleaded, his rapid breath steaming a square on the windscreen.

‘Give me ten minutes no longer,’ Nick insisted. Leaning forward
he took out his Yarygin, checked it over and replaced it before doing up his
leather jacket.

‘If things should… you know… if…’

‘I’m compromised, rounded up,’ said Nick, finishing for Foula.
‘You don’t wait, you go for the fallback and the escape route.’ Nick hooked a
crumpled packet of Capitals from his pocket. Three cigarettes on a loose bed of
tobacco that would have to last him back over the border. He lit another as two
cars slowly passed them, driving slowly down a road built for taking tanks
abreast, their headlights playing along the shabby concrete, hard searchlights
seeking a living target. Nick watched them drive by the family, no slowing
down, no sign from the pavement. Then that would have been too unprofessional
he decided.

‘I’m sorry, I really am…’ Foula started, his voice wavering. ‘I
… I’ve been out of the field too long.’

‘Listen to me Alistair,’ Nick urged him, shaking Foula by the
shoulder. ‘I’ll get us home, but you have to help.’

Beside him, Foula stared at Nick, his blank eyes barely able to
focus. ‘Don’t leave me, you promise, you won’t leave me behind,’ Foula pleaded,
his request drifting out of the window along with the smoke from Nick’s
cigarette. Nick tasted the sourness of the Latvian brand stick to his tongue.
   

‘No, I won’t leave you,’ Nick assured him. ‘What’s the
approach?’

‘Approach?’

‘The entry to make the collection, what was agreed?’

As though speaking on behalf of someone else, Foula uttered
numbly, ‘You tell her you have a taxi waiting.’

Giving his hands one last nourishing boost of warmth from the
car’s lacklustre heater, Nick was out beside the Gaz tucking up his collar and
crossing the road. The evening air hit him hard after the car’s heat. Pellets
of snow whirled in his face, dribbling down his neck past the collar on his
jacket. Pulling on his fur hat, its brim twisted for effect, Nick continued his
long walk aware of the isolation and the distance.

Taking smart strides he headed towards a block as indistinct as
the next, tall and glistening against a sky tinted pink. A colour for the
mental scrapbook he was compiling; oddments, facts, memories: the outline of a
hill, the touch of sea on his skin, what normal people called sanity. All of it
amassed for a day when he’d outgrow this dangerous trade and stick to his Devon
cottage, where he’d pull all his collected trivia together in paint or words.
As he neared the block, he waited for the hand on his shoulder the rifle butt
in his back, but they never came. He saw them before even opening the stiff
doors, a gang of seven, four male and three female no older than nineteen.
Members of
Nashi
decided Nick, a youth
movement loyal to the Kremlin, or another splinter group of young fanatical
patriots. Sitting on a banquette its red leather ripped and scarred by knives
and cigarettes, they smoked impassively, assessing him as soon as he stepped
in.

In one corner someone had dumped one of the old large silver
framed prams, this one minus its wheels; next to it lay a washing machine and
fridge, looking as if as they’d been rolled all the way down the stairs from
the top floor. Across from the gang, posters were taped across split green
tiles; scuffed, frayed at the edges from the passing of bodies. Monthly
communal committee edicts were hung in rows running at eye level to the lifts.
One of them advertised the residents’ committee, with a much abused Lefortovo
Administrative District logo in its top right corner.

Along the bottom a list of absentees from the last meeting, the
names printed large by a neat official hand, the red ink already fading. He
scanned the list halting at the thirteenth name, matching the one supplied by
RUS/OPS. Unchanged and bold it confirmed the address and bid him welcome. As
Nick started up the stairs some of the gang glared at him, but none of them
made a move.
 

Steep and wide, the stairs were stale and in poor repair with
not enough air and too little light from strip lights spluttering with age. He
came out on a bare landing never quite finished. Somewhere above him he heard
footsteps clatter in the gloom, hollow and unwanted. Starting on the next
flight Nick came across two drunks blocking his way, sitting shoulder to
shoulder. In their thirties, both reeked of cheap vodka, both reluctantly
leaning apart to let him pass, the heavier set drunk spitting in disgust, his
comrade challenging Nick with a drunk’s mean stare. Nick moved on to the sound
of babies screaming, and the stunted music of mass entertainment echoing round
dull halls.

The name was the same as he’d read down in the lobby, Evgeniya
Vrangelya. Written at speed in loose unsteady characters on a yellow sliver of
card, jammed carelessly into a slot beside the ninth door along. He pressed the
bell once, then twice in quick succession and followed this up by hammering on
the faded panel door.

She opened the door in a single movement framed in its shadow,
a silk wrap creased with its newness hardly covering her. Evgeniya stood with
her hands punched onto her hips, her nose flaring and her lips parted in a
hiss. Nick, his Russian firm, announced that he had a taxi waiting. She nodded
and he followed her in, into a darkened passage with a hard polished floor, the
odour of cooking lapping against perfume worn for the day. He kicked the door
closed, grabbed her forearm and dragged her into the middle of the room.
 

‘Where is he?’ He had to shout over the television and
radio.
 

She stood square to him, defiant, rubbing her arms, a gauche
face lifted up to him burning with hate. The silk wrap strayed open but she
made no attempt to cover her small rounded breasts. Her eyes signalled a determined
resoluteness, moist and swollen by tears she refused to release. Plain, without
make-up, Nick put her in her late-thirties and she mocked him with taught brown
eyes. Evgeniya Vrangelya lifted her hands and dropped them, too weighty to
support. She had a shoulder-length bob parted on the right, and from its wild
strands Nick guessed she hadn’t long been out of bed.
 
Her lips and nose
somehow looked a touch too big for her face, giving her a sense of severity.
Around her neck she wore a cross and a medallion on heavy gold chains.
Belatedly she clutched at the silk to cover her breasts.

‘I’m leaving…right now,’ shouted Nick.

Vrangelya inspected him slowly, judging him critically as
neither handsome nor ugly. A clean scar over the right eye prompted her to think
of a fighter for some reason. Out of a childhood game grown to a habit, she
classed people according to the respect they deserved. She took two uncertain
steps back, crossing aimlessly to the window, terribly pale against the night.

A door opened and a short, thin figure emerged.

‘I am Lubov,’ he announced, taking in the scene.

Christ, thought Nick this is all I need, Foula over the edge
and an agent who gives me his surname. Vasily Lubov stepped forward to meet
them, his small face cluttered by wire-rimmed spectacles and an old-style
walrus moustache. He’s an accountant or a bookkeeper of some sort, Nick decided
as Lubov proudly squeezed between an upright piano and a walnut bureau loaded
down with sheet music. In a tight awkward walk, conscious of his clothes, Lubov
seemed as though he’d got himself a new skin that needed to be broken in.

A loose lick of hair refused to stay in place and Lubov brushed
it back onto his forehead with practised ease. There was a frailness about him;
an inward acceptance that his life thus far had been marked by failures, of
which he had a considerable list. At Vrangelya’s side he stood a good seven
inches shorter than his mistress and he gripped her hand for support, but this
only emphasised the disparity and he stepped forward out of embarrassment or
chivalric honour.

‘I have decided to defect,’ he said in a bold declaration.

A hundred things happened in Nick’s head at that moment and all
of them were mirrored by the shock on Evgeniya’s face, how she clasped her
hands to her cheeks in the perfect symmetry of Munch’s screamer and let out a
small sob.
 

‘That’s not the deal,’ Nick told him wearily.
              

‘If you want what I offer,
you will have to take me,’ insisted Lubov.

‘What about me, Vasily? You are going to leave me?’ Evgeniya
cried.

Nick thought Lubov and his mistress were going to have a
full-on tiff and he’d have to separate them until Lubov’s next statement
changed everything.

‘I am sure, maybe ninety-seven per cent that I am a suspect,’
Lubov confessed, launching into his hazy grasp of English. ‘My superiors, I
think have been watching me,’ he added, turning to Evgeniya for support but she
simply stared at him, not out of anger but pure surprise, dumbstruck.

Great, thought Nick. Absolutely marvellous news, the best I’ve
heard all month and if we get out of this it’d be a miracle.

‘I haven’t room for a passenger,’ Nick said. ‘I’m leaving in
one minute and I need to make the collection, discuss terms.’

Lubov’s shoulders shrank, his face suggesting he was close to
surrender, only his eyes appeared bright and fierce.

‘The deal has changed.’

‘Changed, what’d you mean changed?’ Nick demanded.

Lubov stretched for a faded canvas bag, caught at the neck by a
frayed cord. ‘I must speak to senior ex-officer in London. Only me, we are in
danger unless I do this.’

Nick shook his head in total dismay. ‘Then we go. Now.’

‘You promise that when I’m safe and you have material, Evgeniya
can come too?’ he asked, turning his watery eyes on his mistress.

‘Sure, why not,’ said Nick. ‘Invite the whole block.’

‘See,’ Lubov told her, giving her a long embrace. ‘We will be
together again soon.’

She touched his arm and in the same movement turned her broad
face towards him, a paper lantern burning with a steady blush, watching her
lover go knowing he’d never come back.

‘I’ll be here,’ she called as they moved to the door. Only her
eyes told of the lie.

Listening at the door as their feet slapped down the concrete
steps, Evgeniya made herself count to thirty just to be safe. The surprise that
Vasily Lubov had decided to defect had genuinely caught her off guard, she had
not seen that coming or that he, little Vasily, must posses all the evidence
himself. How sweet that he wanted her to join him in London she thought,
punching in a number on a mobile phone so she could call in her report, inform
her commanding officer that Lubov had at last shown his hand, had flown the
nest.

• • •

They moved in total silence. Nick
leading the way down the stairs, past plaster littered with lover’s names
boldly hacked in for eternity. A girl’s laugh flew past them up the stairwell
like a rocket. A door snapped closed behind them with a dull steel echo leaving
nothing but a distant hum.

Together they set out for the car, in Nick’s mind a thousand
things to go wrong. The snow had slackened but not stopped which for Nick
constituted one small blessing. If a car happened to come out of the distance
he would pause, sensing Lubov behind him doing the same. They kept close to the
apartment walls for what little protection they offered, but in the end they
were out in the open approaching the Gaz fast. Nick bundled Lubov into the back
without ceremony and dumped himself next to Foula in the front.
 

‘Go,’ Nick ordered, his eyes fixed squarely ahead though Foula
was twisted in his seat, his face in a wild grimace, his eyes frozen on Lubov.

‘What…?’

‘Don’t ask,’ Nick told him, ‘Just go.’

In his haste to be off and away Foula fumbled with the ignition
key, started the engine then messed the gears, the clutch, finally bucking the
Gaz clumsily out into the slack traffic.