Die for Me Page 8

  “How did you know? I mean, I was married, I had a husband, I’d never so much as looked at a woman…”

  “You looked at me. And I looked back.”

  “And what did you see?”

  “You, pchelka.”

  6

  At 5 p.m. Asmat Dzabrati’s family are contacted by officials of Pokrovskaya Hospital with a request to collect his body. There is, apparently, no suggestion that the Pakhan died of anything other than natural causes, although there is some confusion about the fact that two ambulance teams appear to have attended the bathhouse where he suffered a fatal heart attack. This is Russia, however, and such misunderstandings occur. Pokrovskaya is a busy public hospital, and the duty physician who certified Dzabrati dead on arrival from the Elizarova banya, and issued the requisite certificates, saw no reason to authorize a post-mortem examination. Apart from anything else, it appears that the mortuary is full. All of this is relayed to us by Dasha, following her long and difficult phone conversation with Dzabrati’s tearful ex-wife Yelena. Dasha then convenes an emergency meeting of the three other Kupchino Bratva brigadiers, who arrive within the hour.

  Kris, Oxana and I have dinner in the kitchen. After winding herself around me like a cat all afternoon, and practically dragging me into bed, Oxana is now in a simmering fury. When we sit down to eat, she sips Dasha’s vintage Riesling, announces that it tastes like petrol, and helps herself to champagne from the fridge. I know better than to ask why she’s so angry, but I’m certain that it’s because she hasn’t been invited to attend Dasha’s gangster conclave. Though why she thinks she should be invited, I have no idea. So as Kris and I dart anxious glances at each other, Oxana spoons down her borscht with sour cherries, scours out the bowl with a hunk of bread, flips her spoon into the sink, and walks out without a word.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Again.”

  Kris nods. “There are things Dasha doesn’t tell me, but I’m not stupid. I know that you and Oxana were involved in what happened today. I’m not going to ask you about it, but I just want you to know that I know.”

  “OK. Thank you.”

  “Are you all right? Oxana’s obviously dealing with it in her own way, but—”

  “I think I’m OK. I’m not sure.”

  “Was it awful?”

  “Not really. If I’m honest.”

  Kris peels a banana. “She loves you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I wonder. There are times when I think that she just conceivably might. Then there are others when it’s hard to believe that she even likes me.”

  “Eve, you prove to Oxana that she exists. You’re the only reality that she has outside herself. It’s that basic.”

  “You think her insecurity’s that deep?”

  “I do, yeah. You’re going soon, aren’t you?”

  “I guess.”

  “I know. Dasha’s got your passports and money in our room. She’s had them for two days. I’ll miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you too, Kris. How do you feel about Dasha becoming the Pakhan?”

  Kris shrugs her narrow shoulders. “It’s what she wants, although I’ve never understood why. I mean, fuck. Those bratva guys. They’re jackals. You take your eyes off them for a second, and they rip you apart.” She looks away. “I have a lot to be grateful for, Eve, truly. And unlike Zoya, I don’t have to sleep with some horrible old guy to support myself. But I worry. I worry all the time.”

  “About?”

  “About this life. About the vorovskoy mir. Gang leaders don’t grow old.” She winds the banana skin around her finger. “I love Dasha and I don’t want to see her die.”

  “I’d say she can look after herself pretty well, having seen her in action.”

  “At the factory, you mean?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it up. And we did make a mess. I still feel bad about that.”

  “Don’t. The whole place burned down earlier this week. There was literally nothing left, so the insurance claim will be massive. But bring your glass. There’s something I want to show you.”

  She takes me into the bedroom she shares with Dasha. I’ve never been in here before and I look around with amazement. The bed is a four-poster with purple damask curtains, the walls are decorated with framed posters of Amazonian women riding dinosaurs and giant dragonflies, the shelves hold velveteen unicorns, Beanie Babies and statuettes of Marvel Comics heroines.

  “This look is more you than Dasha, isn’t it?”

  “She said I could have it how I wanted. What do you think?”

  “Cool. I’m guessing your side of the bed is the one without the gun.”

  Kris shoves the butt of the Serdyukov automatic under the pillow. “You guess right. I hate that it’s there, but she insists. Apart from that, I love it in here. It’s where I come when everything gets too much.” She gestures for me to make myself comfortable on the bed, then turns down the light, takes a DVD from a shelf, and slips it into the player. It’s a cartoon, very old-fashioned, about a hedgehog going to meet his friend, a bear cub, so that they can count the stars in the sky. Thinking that he has seen a beautiful white horse, the hedgehog tries to follow it and gets lost in the night.

  The film is short, lasting perhaps ten minutes, and when it ends Kris’s eyes are shining with tears. “What did you think?” she asks me.

  “It’s sweet.”

  “I just love it. I feel like that all the time. Like I’m lost in the fog, and all I can see are the outlines of monsters. But it ends happily. The hedgehog is saved, and he finds his friend, and they count the stars together, like they always do. And that’s all I want to do, really. Count the stars with Dasha.”

  I don’t know what to say, so I reach for her hand. “You will,” I tell her.

  In the bedroom Oxana is asleep in one of my T-shirts. The curtains are undrawn, and on the boulevard outside the fresh snow glitters beneath the street lights. Oxana’s face is turned toward the window, and I watch the flutter of her lashes as she dreams. What stories is her mind creating? Am I there with her?

  I pull the covers over her. Her eyes don’t open but her hand snakes out and her fingers lock around my wrist, strong as steel. “G’night, bitch,” she murmurs, and starts to snore.

  The next morning Dasha joins us for breakfast. “It’s been great having you,” she tells us. “And thank you for your help with my predecessor. But you need to leave St. Petersburg today. I’m the acting Pakhan of the Kupchino Bratva now, so…”

  Dasha doesn’t need to finish. We all know what she means. She’s discharged her duty to us, just as we have to her. Now it is time to go, before our presence makes life complicated for her. “Your passports,” she says, handing Oxana an envelope.

  “Thank you. I won’t forget what you’ve done for us.”

  Dasha gives me one of her sharp little smiles. “Sorry about hanging you up by the wrists. Must have been uncomfortable.”

  “I did punch you on the nose.”

  “You did, didn’t you.”

  Back in our room, Oxana and I pack our rucksacks and inspect the passports. These appear to be new, and issued in the names of Maria Bogomolova and Galina Tagayeva. I’m Galina.

  It takes us very little time to get ready to go. We’ve decided to take the train to Sochi, a modern city on the Black Sea, find a cheap guest house, and review our options. I’m sad to be saying goodbye to Kris. She and I have become good friends in the time we’ve been staying here, and I decide to give her the blue velvet coat from the Mikhailovsky Theatre. Kris is touchingly excited—I know that she wishes she’d seen it first at the Kometa vintage store—and she puts it on at once, posing self-consciously. Dasha accompanies us to the entrance hall of the building. I shake her hand, unsure of the protocol, while she and Oxana exchange a fleeting hug. Kris, looking like a minor character from Anna Karenina in the velvet coat, steps out of the front door. She’s walking with us to the Metro station. There’s been no snowfall this morning, and Kris stands there for a mo
ment, a slight, wistful figure. The wind blows an escaping tendril of hair across her face, and she’s lifting her free hand to brush it away when there’s a smacking sound, not loud, and she lifts from the pavement and flies back through the open door like a blown leaf, landing on her side between Dasha and me.

  “Get inside,” Oxana says, wrenching me away from the entrance. “Dasha, move.” But Dasha’s on her knees, gazing at Kris’s surprised eyes and twitching body. As I back away toward the stairs, I see the fist-sized hole and the mess of blood, bone and velvet below her left shoulder.

  “Dasha,” I say, my voice shaking.

  Still she doesn’t move. Then she slips an arm below her dying lover’s knees and another below her shoulders, and lifts her like a sleeping child from the widening pool of blood.

  “Get upstairs,” Oxana orders. Her Sig Sauer’s in her hand, and her eyes are as flat as a snake’s.

  When they’ve gone, Oxana and I grab our rucksacks and race through unlit corridors to the rear of the building. Outside, visible through heavy glass-paneled doors, is a snow-covered car park and garbage collection area. Oxana gives it a single wary glance and pulls me back the way we came.

  “They’ll have it covered,” she says. “We’ve got to go back up to the apartment. We need the service staircase.”

  “Who are ‘they’?” I ask Oxana, and she just looks at me. We both know who they are.

  The Twelve have found us.

  By the time we get upstairs Kris is dead. Dasha carried her body to their bedroom, and when she emerges, her face like stone, she’s all business. She hits the phone, issuing orders and summoning her soldiers from their various apartments in the building. Oxana, meanwhile, crouches at one of the front-facing windows, scanning the street with a pair of binoculars. I busy myself checking and re-checking my Glock, and keeping out of the others’ way. I’m light-headed with shock. I keep thinking about Kris’s coat. The coat that I’ve worn at least every other day for the last fortnight. The coat that I gave her.

  “We have three men in a black Mercedes,” Oxana says after a couple of minutes. “I’m pretty sure they’re… Yes, they’re all armed. Getting out of the car. Approaching the building now.”

  As she finishes speaking, there’s an urgent triple buzz at the front door of the apartment. It’s three of the boyeviki, carrying automatic weapons and spare magazines. Dasha hurries them in, a heavy Makarov pistol in her hand, and issues a terse series of orders. Two of the soldiers return through the front door to take up position on the stairs and landing outside, the third starts upending tables and heavy furniture in the apartment’s entrance hall. Oxana, meanwhile, runs around switching off lights and pulling curtains closed. In a firefight darkness favors those who know the terrain.

  “It’s me they want,” I tell Dasha, suddenly sure of my words. “They shot Kris because she was wearing my coat. Send me out to them. Please, don’t risk anyone else’s life.”

  Dasha frowns distractedly. “Go to my bedroom,” she says. “Shut yourself in.”

  “Do it, Eve,” Oxana confirms, and I obey. I feel as if I’m sleepwalking, as if I’m no longer in charge of the business of putting one leg in front of the other.

  Kris, her eyes still open, has been laid out on her back on the double bed. The ghastly exit wound can’t be seen. The only visible sign of the shot that killed her is a neat hole in the blue velvet coat, over her heart.

  Seeing her there, surrounded by her fairy posters and unicorn statuettes, I begin to weep. I feel so lost, so useless, so guilty. I know that Oxana, Dasha and the bodyguards know what they’re doing, and that I’d only be in the way, but this powerlessness is horrible, particularly since I’m responsible for Kris’s death. And then there’s Dasha. I don’t warm to her, but Oxana and I have brought nothing into her life except mayhem, and the vengeance of the Twelve. And now Dasha is putting her life on the line to defend us.

  From the street, far below, I hear a faint splintering, as the attackers kick in the front door of the building. It’s followed by a sporadic popping sound, at first distant, but soon rising in volume as the boyeviki engage the attackers. I should feel fear, but I don’t. Sitting on the bed, loaded weapon in hand, I feel nothing except a flat sadness. From the other end of the apartment there’s a shattering crash as the front door gives way, followed by confused shouting and staccato bursts of gunfire. Someone is screaming, and although I know that it’s not Oxana’s voice I’m weak with terror at the thought of losing her. The screaming dies to an intermittent groaning.

  I have to help. Or at least try to.

  Touching my pocket to check for spare Glock magazines, I make for the door, and turn the key with trembling fingers. Outside a passage leads to the darkened reception room where we gathered before dinner with the late Pakhan.

  As I step into the passage, the tears drying on my cheeks, a ringing silence prevails. There’s the crack of a handgun from the entrance hall, shockingly amplified in the enclosed space, and silence again. I creep through the reception room, fearfully hugging the wall, and edge toward the open door and the entrance hall beyond. This is also dark, but I can make out the main features. Just meters in front of me, a marble-topped table has been pushed on its side, spilling a pair of heavy onyx lamps onto the floor, and behind the tabletop, in profile, crouch two men dressed in street clothes and armed with submachine guns. Beyond this pair, his body slumped over the vertical tabletop as if arrested in the course of a dive, is a third man. I can’t see who is facing them at the other end of the hall but I pray that one of them is Oxana.

  Buried in darkness, breathing air sharp with gun smoke, I attempt to take stock. I don’t recognize the man nearest me; he could be one of Dasha’s soldiers. Then I see the pale chevrons of impacted snow on the treads of his combat boots. He’s just come in from the street. He’s an attacker and I decide to kill him, or try to. “… if we’re going to survive, you’re going to have to be a bit more like me.”

  Very slowly, I raise the Glock, lining up foresight, backsight and the man’s ear.

  And the second guy? It’s as if she’s whispering in my ear.

  I’ll deal with him next, I promise her, and squeeze the Glock’s trigger.

  I don’t kill him. The 9mm round smashes a hank of hair and bone from the back of his head, and as he whips round to face me, submachine gun leveled, Oxana rises into view on the far side of the room and fires two shots in fast succession. Both rounds punch through the man’s throat and he sinks to the floor, choking.

  The second man returns fire but Oxana has vanished. He turns to me, and I squeeze off a round that tears through his cheek and rips one ear from his face. There’s a flare of orange at his gun barrel, and a fiery whiplash streaks across my back. I’m dimly aware of the crack of a third weapon—Dasha’s Makarov—and watch detachedly as his knees fold and a slew of brain matter pours from the side of his head.

  Dasha and Oxana rise to their feet, and Oxana races across to where I’m lying. “You dumbass!” she screams. “You fucking idiot.”

  “My back. I’ve been hit.”

  “Sit up. Let me look.” She switches on the reception room lights, pulls off my leather jacket, and wrenches my blood-sodden sweater over my head. Sprawled in front of me in the unlit hall, just a few meters away, the three attackers lie in twisted, grotesque repose. The second attacker is still alive, and his eyes follow Dasha as she walks over to him, slaps a fresh magazine into her pistol, and fires a single shot through the base of his nose. Then she heads for the front door. “I’m going to check the stairs. See if any of my people are still alive.”

  “OK,” Oxana says.

  I’m so sick with guilt I can’t even look at Dasha, let alone respond. I think of Kris, lying lifeless in their bedroom.

  Oxana walks away, returning with a military-issue first-aid box and a wet bath towel. It’s very cold, and as she cleans up my back I feel savage waves of pain. “You were lucky,” she murmurs. “A centimeter deeper and you’d hav
e been paralyzed. Dasha saved your life. What the fuck were you thinking? We told you to—”

  “I know you did. I wanted to help.”

  “And I guess you did help. But Jesus, Eve.”

  “I know. Everything’s fucked.”

  “Just don’t move.” She presses the towel hard against my back. “I thought I’d lost you, you stupid bitch.”

  “I’m sorry,” I repeat.

  “You will be, because I’m going to stitch you.” She kneels beside me and sets to work with a suturing needle. It hurts a lot, but I’m glad of the pain. It means I don’t have to think.

  “Have you done this before?” I murmur.

  “No, but we did sewing at school. I made a crocodile. It had teeth and everything.”

  Dasha walks back into the flat, her face wiped of all expression. She’s accompanied by two men and a woman, and she’s no longer holding the Makarov. That’s now in the right hand of a strongly built young woman with cropped blond hair, broad features, and eyes the color of slate.

  I recognize her instantly from a CCTV clip that we had on file in Goodge Street. Lara Farmanyants, Oxana’s former lover and companion in murder, recently released from Butyrka jail. Beside Lara, cradling a submachine gun, is the man I know as Anton, formerly a squadron commander in the Special Air Service and now the head of the Twelve’s “housekeeping” or assassination department. The second man is Richard Edwards, my former boss at MI6, and a long-term Twelve asset.

  Pain folds into paralyzing despair. It’s over.

  When they’ve disarmed us, the newcomers look around them, registering the upturned furniture, the bodies, the spattered walls and the congealing pools of blood. All three appear entirely at home among the carnage.

  “So,” Oxana says, continuing to stitch my back. “You.”

  “Me,” Lara replies.

  In the clip, sent to us by the Italian police, she and Oxana were strolling down the Calle Vallaresso in Venice, window-shopping. With her straw cowboy hat tilted just so, Lara looked like a catwalk model. In the flesh, with a state-of-the-art sniper rifle slung across her chest and Dasha’s Makarov in her hand, she looks a lot more dangerous.