A Darker Place

Kurbsky shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose you will.’

He got out and Bounine drove away. Kurbsky watched him go, turned and went back into the Pierre. The first thing he saw was Monica waiting for a lift and he approached, catching her just in time.

‘Fancy a nightcap, lady?’

She smiled, pleased that he’d turned up. ‘Why not?’

He took her arm and they went to the bar.

There weren’t too many people. They sat in the corner and he had Russian vodka, ice cold, and she contented herself with green tea.

‘Very healthy of you,’ he told her.

‘I wish I could say the same to you, but I’m not sure about that stuff.’

‘You have to be born to it.’

‘Doesn’t it rot the brain?’

‘Not really. Drunk this way, from a glass taken from crushed ice, it freezes the brain, clears it when problems loom.’

‘If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.’

‘No, it’s true. Now, tell me. I know about your academic accomplishments – the Ministry of Arts in Moscow is very thorough when one is attending affairs like this – but nothing about you. I’m puzzled that such a woman would not be married.’

‘I’m a widow, Alex, have been for some years. My husband was a professor at Cambridge, rather older than me and a knight of the realm.’

‘So, no children?’

‘No, a brother, if that helps.’ Her smile faltered for a moment, as she remembered her brother, Harry, recuperating from the terrible knife wounds he had so recently suffered, and, even more, the terrible psychological wounds. To see his wife assassinated in mistake for him – the healing process would take a long time…

She brought the smile back. ‘He’s a Member of Parliament,’ she said, making no mention of what he really did for the Prime Minister.

Of course, Kurbsky actually knew all that, but he kept up the subterfuge.

‘But there must be a man in your life, a woman like you.’

She wasn’t offended in the slightest. ‘Yes, there is such a man.’

‘Then he must count himself lucky.’

He poured another vodka and she said, ‘What about you?’

‘Good heavens, no. The occasional relationship, but it never lasts. I’m a very difficult man, but then, I’ve had a difficult life. You know about me?’

‘A bit. Your aunt raised you, right?’

‘Svetlana was everything. I loved her dearly, but life in Moscow under Communism was difficult. When I was seventeen she got a chance to travel with a theatre group to London – she was an actress – and she met a professor named Patrick Kelly, a good man. For once she had found something for herself, so she refused to return to Moscow, stayed in London and married him.’

‘How was it you managed to join her?’

‘That was my father. As a KGB colonel, he had influence. He arranged for me to visit Svetlana, hoping she’d change her mind.’

‘And your sister?’

‘Tania was at high school and only fifteen. She’d never been close to Svetlana and so she stayed with my father. There were servants, a couple living in my father’s house, to care for her.’

‘And where did the London School of Economics come in?’

He grinned, looking different, like a boy. ‘I always had a love of books and literature, so I didn’t need to study it. I found a new world at the LSE. Svetlana and Kelly had a wonderful Victorian house in Belsize Park, and they felt I should fill my time for a few months, so I took courses. Sociology, psychology, philosophy. The months stretched out.’

‘Two years. What made you return to Moscow?’

‘News from home, bad news. Over fifty-five thousand dead in Afghanistan. Too many body bags. Broken-hearted mothers protesting in the streets. Student groups fighting with the police. Tania was only seventeen, but up to her neck in it. Pitched battles, riot police, many casualties.’ He paused, his face bleak. ‘And Tania among them.’

Her response was so instinctive as to be almost banal. She put a hand on his. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘I returned at once. A waste of time, of course, it was all over. Just a headstone in Minsky Park Military Cemetery. My father used his influence to make things look respectable. She was already dead when he’d got in touch with me in London, so he’d trapped me into returning. I got my revenge on him when I went downtown and joined the paratroopers. He was stuck with that. To pull me out would have looked bad in Communist Party circles.’

‘Then what?’

‘If you’ve read the opening chapters of On the Death of Men, you already know. There was no time to learn how to jump out of a plane with a parachute. I got three months’ basic training, then I was off to Afghanistan. It was eighty-nine, the year everything fell apart, the year we scrambled to get out, and lucky to make it.’

‘It must have been hell.’

‘Something like that, only we didn’t appreciate that Chechnya was to come. Two years of that, and that was just the first war.’

There was a long pause and he poured another vodka with a steady hand. She said, ‘What now – what next?’

‘I’m not sure. Only a handful of writers can achieve great success, and any writer lucky enough to write the special book will tell you the most urgent question is whether you can do it again or it was just some gigantic fluke.’

‘But you answered that question for yourself with Moscow Nights.’

‘I suppose, but…I don’t know. I just feel so…claustrophobic now. Hemmed in by my minders.’

She laughed. ‘You mean the bear-on-the-chain thing? Surely that’s up to you. When Svetlana cast off her chains and refused to return to Moscow, she had to defect. But things are different now. The Russian Federation is not dominated by Communism any longer.’

‘No, but it is dominated by Vladimir Putin. I am just as controlled as I would have been in the old days. I travel in a jet provided by the Ministry of Arts. I am in the hands of GRU minders, wherever I go. I don’t even handle my own passport. They would never let me go willingly.’

‘A terrible pity. Any of the great universities would love to get their hands on you. I’m biased, of course, but Cambridge would lay out the red carpet for you.’

‘An enticing prospect.’

He sat there, frowning slightly, as if considering it. She said, ‘Is there anything particular to hold you in Moscow?’

‘Not a thing. Cancer took my father some years ago, there are cousins here and there. Svetlana is my closest relative. No woman in my life.’ He smiled and shrugged, ‘Not at the moment anyway.’

‘So?’ she said.