“Maybe they both sent you. The British and the Russians. In the great new spirit of entente.”
“No.”
“Maybe the world’s only superpower sent you. I like that. America the great policeman: Punish the thieves, quell the rebels, restore order, restore peace. There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace not a stone will remain standing. You remember that very funny joke from the Cold War?”
I didn’t but said yes.
“The Russians are asking the West for peacekeeping money. Did you hear that joke also?”
“I believe I read something of the sort.”
“It’s true. A real-life joke. And the West is giving it. That’s an even better joke. For the purposes of peacekeeping in the former Soviet Union. The West supplies the money, Moscow supplies the troops and the ethnic cleansing. The graveyards are full of peace, everybody’s happy. How much are they paying you?”
“Who?”
“Whoever sent you.”
“Nobody sent me. Therefore nothing.”
“So you’re freelance. A bounty hunter in the spirit of free enterprise. You are here to represent market forces. How much are we worth on the open market, Larry and Checheyev? Do you have a contract? Did your lawyer negotiate the deal?”
“Nobody’s paying me, nobody sent me. I’m not taking orders from anyone, I’m not reporting to anyone. I came under my own power to find Larry. I’m not proposing to sell you. Even if I could. I’m a free agent.”
He dragged a flask from his pocket and took a pull from it. It was dull and battered by use, but in design it was the same flask that Zorin had given me, with the same garish red insignia of his former service.
“I hate my name. My dirty, bloody name. If they had stamped it on me with a hot iron, I would not hate it more.”
“Why?”
“ ‘Hey, blackarse, how do you like Checheyev?’ ‘No problem,’
I say. ‘It’s a nice name. It’s a blackarse name, but it’s not too black. Got a nice ring to it.’ Any other Ingush, you call him a blackarse to his face, he kills you. But me? I’m a concession man, a comedian. Their white nigger. I use their insults before they do. ‘So how about Konstantin?’ they ask. ‘No problem,’ I say. ‘Great emperor, big lover.’ Wasn’t till they got to the patronymic that they had their fun. ‘Hey, blackarse, maybe we should make you a bit of a Jew,’ they say, ‘lead them off the scent. Abraham had a lot of sons. One more he won’t notice.’ So I’m a blackarse, and I’m a Jew, and I’m still smiling.”
But he wasn’t. He was in furious despair.
“What will you do if you find him?” he asked, wiping the neck of his flask on his sleeve.
“I’ll tell him he’s embarked on a trail of disaster and dragged his girl with him. I’ll tell him that in England three people have already been murdered—”
He cut me short. “Three? Three already! A disaster? Remember that joke Stalin liked? Three people dead in a ditch after a motor accident, that’s a national tragedy. But a whole nation deported and half of them exterminated, that’s a statistic. Stalin was a great guy. Better than Konstantin.”
I kept talking determinedly. “They’ve committed grand larceny, they’ve got themselves up to the neck in illegal arms dealing, they’ve placed themselves outside the law—”
He had risen and, with his hands behind his back, was standing centre stage. “What law?” he demanded. “What law, please? What law has Larry broken, please?”
I was losing patience. The cold was making me desperate.
“Whose law do you throw at me? British law? Russian law? American law? International law? United Nations law? The law of gravity? The law of the jungle? I don’t understand whose law. Is that why they sent you—your Office—my Office—the sensitive and altruistic Colonel Zorin: to preach to me about the law? They’ve broken every law they ever made! Every promise to us: broken! Every pat on the back for the last three hundred years: a lie! They’re killing us, in the villages, in the mountains, in the towns, in the valleys, and they want you to talk to me about the law?”
His anger kindled my own. “Nobody sent me! Do you hear me? I found the house in Cambridge Street. I heard that you’d been visiting Larry in Bath. I put it all together. I went north and found the bodies. Then I had to leave the country!”
“Why?”
“Because of you. CC. And your intrigues. And Larry’s intrigues.
And Emma’s. Because I was suspected of being CC’s accomplice. I was about to be arrested, like Zorin. Because of you. I need to see him. I love him.” As a good Englishman, I hastened to qualify this. “I owe him.”
A stirring in the shadows, or perhaps a wish to escape the intensity of his fury, caused me to glance round the shed. Magomed and Issa were seated by the door, their heads close together while they watched us. Two other men guarded the windows, a third was making tea on a primus. I looked back at Checheyev. His exhausted gaze was still fixed on me.
“Perhaps you haven’t got the clout,” I suggested, thinking I might taunt him into action. “Should I talk to somebody who can say ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’? Perhaps you should take me to your Chief Leader. Perhaps you should take me to Bashir Haji and let me explain myself to him.”
Speaking this name, I felt a tensing in the room, like a tightening of the air. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a sentry at the window turn his head and the barrel of his Kalashnikov swing gently round with him.
“Bashir Haji is dead. Many of our people were killed with him. We don’t know who. We’re in mourning. Tends to make us bad-tempered. Perhaps you should be in mourning too.”
A terrible tiredness had descended over me. The cold seemed not worth fighting anymore. Checheyev had leaned himself in a corner of the stage, his hands deep in his pockets, his bearded head sunk inside the collar of his long coat. Magomed and Issa had lapsed into a kind of trance. Only the boys at the windows seemed to be awake. I tried to speak, but there was no breath in me. But I must have spoken all the same, for I heard Checheyev’s answer, either in English or in Russian.
“We don’t know,” he repeated. “It was a village high up. First they say twenty dead, now they say two hundred. The tragedy is becoming a statistic. The Russians are using stuff we’ve never seen before. It’s like air guns against stealth bombers. You don’t even get the bullet in the air before they’ve fried you. The people around are so scared they don’t know how to count anymore. Want some?”
He was offering me the flask. I took a long pull.
Somehow it was dusk and we were seated round a table, waiting to go on a journey. Checheyev sat at the head, I sat beside him, mystified by my feelings.
“And all those fine subsources he had,” he was saying. “You invented them?”
“Yes.”
“You personally? Your own professional ingenuity?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Not bad. For a middle-class destiny, not bad. Maybe you’re more of an artist than you know.”
I had a sudden sense of Larry’s proximity.
Magomed was squatting to an army radio set. It spoke only occasionally, in a furtive staccato. Issa had his hands folded over his Kalashnikov. Checheyev sat with his head in his hands, peering into the gloom with eyes half closed or half open.
“You’ll find no Islamic demons here,” he said in English, as much to himself as to me. “If that’s what they’ve sent you for, forget it. No fundamentalists, no crazies, no bomb throwers, no dreamers of the great Islamic superstate. Ask Larry.”
“What’s Larry doing for you?”
“Knitting socks.”
He seemed to drop off for a while.
“You know another joke? We’re peaceful people.”
“The casual observer could be excused for not noticing this, however.”
“We had Jews among us for hundreds of years. Ask Konstantin Abramovich. They were welcome. Just another tribe. Another sect. I don’t mean that we should be thanked for not persecuting them
. I’m telling you we are peaceful people with a lot of peaceful history that we don’t get any marks for.”
We enjoyed an agreed respite, like two tired boxers.
“Did you never suspect Larry,” I asked him, “deep down?”
“I was a bureaucrat. Larry was prime beef. Half the stupid Praesidium was reading his reports. You think I wanted to be the first to go in there and tell them, He’s bad, and he’s been bad for twenty years—me, a blackarse, on sufferance?”
He resumed his meandering. “Okay, we’re a pugnacious lot of savages. Not as bad as Cossacks. Cossacks are the pits. Not as bad as Georgians. Georgians are worse than Cossacks. Not as bad as Russians, for sure. Let’s say the Ingush have a selective approach to right and wrong. We’re religious—but not so religious we aren’t secular.” His head fell forward, and he lifted it sharply. “And if some crazy policeman ever tried to enforce the criminal code among us, half of us would be in gaol, and the other half would be standing in the street with Kalashnikovs, getting us out.” He drank. “We’re a bunch of unruly mountaineers who love God, drink, fight, boast, steal, forge a little money, push a little gold, wage blood feuds, and can’t be organised into groups of more than one. Want some more?”
I again took the flask from him.
“Alliances and politics, forget them. You can make us any promise you like, break it, and we’ll believe you again tomorrow. We’ve got a diaspora no one’s heard of and suffering you can’t get on television even with a special aerial. We don’t like bullies, we don’t have hereditary peerages, and we haven’t produced a despot in a thousand years. Here’s to Konstantin.”
He drank to Konstantin, and for a while I thought he was asleep, until his head lifted and he stabbed his finger at me.
“And when you Western whitearses decide it’s time for us to be crushed—which you will, Mr. Timothy, you will, because no compromise is beyond your English grasp—part of you will die. Because what we have is what you used to fight for when you were men. Ask Larry.”
The radio gave a shrill yell. Magomed sprang to his feet; Issa spoke an order to the boys at the windows. Checheyev walked me towards the door.
“Larry knows everything. Or he did.”
A bus conveyed us: Magomed, Issa, two Murids, Checheyev, and myself. An army bus with small steel windows, and kit bags that weren’t ours on the roof. And a shield at the front and back that said it was bus 964. A fat man in army uniform drove us, the Murids sat behind him in their flak jackets, their Kalashnikovs held low in the aisle. A few rows back from them sat Magomed and Issa, whispering like thieves. The fat man drove fast and seemed to take pleasure in edging cars off the icy country road.
“I was a clever boy for a blackarse,” Checheyev confided to me, half-heartedly pushing his battered flask at me and taking it away again. We were sitting on the bench seat at the back. We were speaking English and nothing but English. I had a feeling that as far as Checheyev was concerned, Russian was the language of the enemy. “And you were a clever boy for a whitearse.”
“Not particularly.”
By the blue light inside the bus, his haggard face was a death mask. His cavernous eyes, fixed upon me, had a violent dependence.
“You ever suspend your intellect?” he enquired.
I didn’t answer. He drank. I changed my mind and drank too, suspending my intellect.
“You know what I said to him when I got over the shock? Larry? After he told me, ‘I’m Cranmer’s child, not yours’?”
“No.”
“Why I started laughing?”
He laughed now, a choking, arid laugh.
“ ‘Listen,’ I told him. ‘Until October ’92, I forgot how much I hated Russians. Today, anybody who spied on Moscow is my friend.’ ”
Larry’s dead, I thought. Killed with Bashir Haji. Shot while escap-ing his middle-class destiny.
He’s lying in the water, faceup or facedown, it doesn’t matter anymore which.
He’s a tragedy, not a statistic. He’s found his Byronic death.
Checheyev was delivering another mordant monologue. He had drawn his collar high around his face and was talking at the seat in front of him.
“When I came home to my village, my friends and relations still liked me. Okay, I was KGB. But I wasn’t KGB back home in Ingushetia. My brothers and sisters were proud of me. For my sake, they forgot they hated the Russians.” He made a grim show of enthusiasm. “ ‘Maybe it wasn’t the Russians who deported us to Kazakhstan,’ they said. ‘Maybe they never shot our father. And look here, didn’t they educate our great brother, turn him into a Westerner?’ I hate that kind of sweetness. Why don’t they listen to the damn radio, read the damn papers, grow up? Why didn’t they throw rocks at me, shoot me, put a knife in me—why didn’t they scream damn traitor at me? Who wants to be loved when he’s betraying his own people? You got an idea on that? Who did you betray? Everyone. But you’re English. It’s okay.”
He was excited: “And when the great Soviet Empire fell on its white arse, you know what they did, my friends and relations? They comforted me! They told me don’t worry! ‘This Yeltsin, he’s a good fellow, you’ll see. Now that we haven’t got Communism, Yeltsin will give us justice.’ ” He drank again, whispering some insult at himself as he did so. “You know what? I’d told them the same stupid story when Khrushchev came to power. How many times can you be that kind of idiot? You want to hear them. Zorin. All the Zorins. Sitting in the canteen. Dropping their voices when the white nigger comes too close. The Soviet Empire not even dead in its grave, and the Russian Empire already climbing out. ‘Our precious Ukraine, gone! Our precious Transcaucasia, gone! Our beloved Baltics, gone! Look, look, the virus is moving south! Our Georgia, going! Nagorno Karabakh, going! Armenia, Azerbaijan, going! Chechenia, gone! The whole Caucasus, going! Our gateway to the Middle East, going! Our route to the Indian Ocean, going! Our naked southern flank exposed to Turkey! Everybody raping Mother Russia!’ ” The bus slowed down. “Pretend you’re asleep. Put your head forward, close your eyes. Show them your nice fur hat.”
The bus stopped. A draught of icy air ripped through it as the driver’s door slammed open and Checheyev pushed past me. From beneath lowered lids I saw a figure in a long grey overcoat step aboard and grasp Checheyev in a swift embrace. I heard confidential murmurs and saw a fat envelope change hands. The overcoat departed, the door slammed shut, the bus eased forward. Checheyev remained standing at the driver’s side. We passed a barracks and a floodlit football field. Men in tracksuits were playing six-a-side in the snow. We passed a canteen and saw Russian soldiers eating under fluorescent lighting. They were enemy to me in a way they had never been before. Our driver advanced at a leisurely pace, nothing guilty, nothing rushed. Checheyev remained at his side, one hand in his pocket. A checkpoint came towards us. A red-and-white boom blocked our path. The two Murids laid their Kalashnikovs across their knees. The boom rose.
Suddenly we were careering towards the dark side of the airfield, following black tyre tracks in the snow. Any moment, I was certain, we would feel the wincing of the bus as bullets began to strike it. A battered twin-engined transport plane appeared suddenly in our headlights, doors open, gangway in place. Our bus skidded to a sideways halt, and we jumped into the freezing night, no bullets pursuing us. The plane’s props were turning, its landing lights switched on. In the cockpit, three white faces were yelling at us to get a move on. I scurried up the rickety steps and from old habit memorised the registration number on the fin, then thought myself a bloody fool. The belly of the plane was bare except for a stack of brown cardboard boxes strapped with webbing, and steel crates for seats lashed to the side bars. We taxied a few yards, climbed, the engine cut and we sank again, and I saw by a stray shaft of moonlight three onion domes of a church rising at me from a hillside, the largest gilded, the other two encased in scaffolding. We climbed again and banked so steeply that I wondered whether we were upside down.
“Did Magomed give you that cr
ap about the English prophecy?” Checheyev yelled as he flopped beside me and handed me the flask.
“Yes.”
“Those chickenheads will believe anything.”
Larry, I thought. Your kind of journey. Fly to Baku, sneak up the coast a bit, turn left, piece of cake. The danger consoled me. If Larry survived this journey, he survived everything.
Crouched on his steel crate, Checheyev was talking about the autumn of two years ago.
“We thought the Russians wouldn’t shoot. This isn’t happening to us. Yeltsin’s not Stalin. Sure he isn’t. He’s Yeltsin. The Ossetians had tanks and helicopters, but the Russians came along all the same, to make sure no Ossetians got hurt. Their propaganda machine was great. Ingush were bloodthirsty savages, the Russians and Ossetians were good cops. I really felt I knew the great scholars who were writing it. The Ossetians shot the daylights out of us, and the Russians stood around and laughed while sixty thousand Ingush ran for their lives. Most of the Russians were Terek Cossacks, so they knew a good joke when they saw one. The Russians had brought up extra Ossetians from the south who’d already been ethnically cleansed by the Georgians, so they knew how to do it. The Russians sealed off the region with tanks and declared military rule in Ingushetia. Not in Ossetia, because Ossetians are civilised guys, old Kremlin clients, Christians.” He drank and again handed me the flask. I waved it away, but he didn’t notice.
“That was when you reconverted,” I suggested. “Came home.”
“The Ingush appealed to the world, and the world was too damn busy,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. He recited the world’s reasons for being busy: “ ‘Who the hell are the Ingush? Hey, that’s the Russians’ backyard, isn’t it? Hey, listen, all this fragmentation’s going too far. While we’re pulling down the economic borders, these ethnic crazies are putting up national borders. They’re dissidents, aren’t they? They’re Muslims, aren’t they? And criminals. I mean forget Russian criminals, these blackarses are the real thing. Don’t they know that justice is for big guys? Best let Boris handle it.’ ”