We left a little while later, hurrying out of the apartment block and down the wet street towards the tram stop.
‘You realise,’ Zena said, breathing heavily as we hurried, ‘that I was putting Aisha in some danger taking you to see her. She was worried that I had brought you.’
‘Why did you take me, then?’ I asked, puzzled.
She stopped at the side of the road, the water running across the toes of her shoes, her hair plastered against her skull, dripping from her cheeks.
‘I wanted you to understand the gulf between us,’ she said, ‘the risk we pose to each other.’
‘I would never do anything to harm you,’ I said. ‘Or your friends.’
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I trust you. That is why I took you.’
I pulled her close to me, felt her sodden clothes against me, smelt the wetness of her hair, kissed her skin slick with rain, salty.
‘Aisha is a member of Rawa◦– the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan,’ Zena told me as she towelled her hair dry, later, in her room. ‘Earlier this year Meena, who founded the organisation, was murdered in Quetta, in Pakistan. The police there have done nothing to discover who killed her. Some claim it was KHAD agents, others the mujahidin. They were probably working together.’
‘And you?’ I asked, sitting on the edge of her bed, wrapped in a towel, while my clothes dried. Zena shook her head.
‘Her organisation can do little here around Jalalabad, there is too much opposition. It’s ridiculous for them to be taking a stand against the communist government; they are tying their arms behind their backs. It makes more sense to work with you Soviets.’
‘Is that why you were willing to see me?’ I joked.
‘No,’ she said, softly. She reached over and stroked my cheek. ‘I have missed you.’
‘There is a small school in a village,’ she said later, as we lay in the darkness, our bodies close, illuminated by a sliver of moon that had broken through the thick covering of cloud. ‘The village is called Ghazis. I will be going out with the Agitprop Brigade. I’ll take books and paper out to the teacher there. It’s not a big deal, but it really does make a difference.’
I left her early the next morning to meet Vassily. She called me back as I opened the door.
‘I can trust you?’ she whispered, seriously.
I stroked her ruffled hair, and kissed her.
‘Zena,’ I said, ‘you know you can trust me.’
She smiled. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’
Vassily was drinking coffee and smoking when I pushed open the door of the café. In the corner Kirov was talking with a small Afghani, dressed in shabby Western clothes. They looked up when I entered, and seeing me glanced over towards Vassily. I slipped into the chair opposite Vassily and nodded across towards the dark corner of the café where Kirov was sitting.
‘Who’s the shady character Kirov is with?’
Vassily turned, as if he had been unaware that Kirov was sitting behind him. He shrugged but said nothing.
‘Why are you such a friend of Kirov?’ I asked him.
‘He’s an evil bastard, but he has his uses,’ Vassily said. He exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. ‘He has his uses.’
Chapter 26
‘Do you have any money to pay for a taxi?’ Kolya asked, as we left the apartment block, slipping out through the back door again.
‘A little,’ I said.
We walked down to the railway station, keeping to the damp darkness of the backstreets, our eyes and ears alert for signs that we were being followed. In front of the station Kolya found a taxi cab. The driver was sleeping on the back seat and Kolya rapped on the window, waking him.
‘Zverynas district,’ Kolya said, reading Vassily’s scribble. ‘Birutes Street, by the bridge.’
I climbed into the cab behind him. The driver, wiping the sleep from his eyes, started the engine.
‘It was the bracelet that was the start of it,’ Kolya said.
‘The start of what?’
‘Of everything. Of what happened in Ghazis.’
‘How so?’
‘What did Vassily tell you about the bracelet?’
‘He did not tell me much. Only that he got it in Ghazis, from a merchant there.’
The taxi slipped into the thin stream of cars rounding the traffic island outside the railway station and sped down the hill towards Pylimo. As we passed the apartment where I had met Kolya, I noticed the young woman he had been with opening the door of the block. Kolya did not seem to see her.
‘It was Hashim, of course, who set up the deal,’ Kolya continued. ‘Normally Hashim would approach Vassily directly. This time, however, it was Kirov who came to Vassily with news of the bracelet.’
There was little traffic on the road and we made good progress, driving out across the river on Jasinskio, and into Zverynas.
‘If we had known from the beginning the true cost, I am sure Vassily would have had nothing to do with it. Kirov, of course, was not going to reveal the nature of the deal until Vassily was well and truly hooked.
‘Hashim teased Vassily when Kirov took us to see him. “This piece I have found,” he said, “it will wet your dick.”
‘Vassily was sceptical and wanted to know what kind of piece it was, but when Hashim tried to speak about it, Kirov stopped him. It came at a good time, Kirov explained. The piece was, at that moment, in a village to the east of Jalalabad, having been intercepted before it was smuggled over the border into Pakistan. Kirov had never been too interested in the jewellery◦– it was just one of the many things he was involved in, and was not as profitable as prostitution or drugs◦– but he had some other business in Ghazis that made the jewel useful.
‘When Vassily pressed them to tell him more about the jewel, Hashim told him it was an amber bracelet that was thought to have belonged to the Amir Timor◦– to Tamerlane. This immediately excited Vassily.
‘The Agitprop Brigade were going out to the villages along the Peshawar road, Kirov told us, and Zhuralev would have to put together a division to escort them. It ‘ was easy enough to volunteer; nobody wanted the job.
‘When Vassily asked what they were expected to pay for the jewel, Hashim told him they wanted an AGS-17 automatic grenade launcher, mortars and a 12.7-millimetre heavy machine gun. Vassily snorted, but Hashim raised his hands, as if the demands were nothing to do with him. Finally Vassily sighed and shrugged his shoulders. “This stuff your friends have unearthed had better be worth my while,” he said.
‘“It will make you ejaculate,” Hashim told him with a grin.’
The taxi stopped at the end of Birutes. The road was quiet. Few lights illuminated the windows of the large houses. A dog barked, woken by the noise of the taxi. I paid the driver.
‘Should I wait?’ he asked.
Kolya shook his head.
The earth sloped away from the road, down towards the river, invisible in the pitch darkness. It was possible to hear its faint murmur as it flowed swiftly around the edge of the forest. On the high footbridge spanning the river, street lamps burnt dimly. The trees of Vingis Park were darkly visible against the gloom of the cloudy night sky. After looking at Vassily’s instructions a moment longer, Kolya waved his hand in the direction of the other side of the river.
‘We need to go over there,’ he said.
The taxi pulled away from the side of the road and drove slowly back down the hill towards the centre of the Old Town. Above the sound of its engine, the bark of the dog and the ripple of water washing against the muddy bank, I heard the sound of another car engine approaching. It turned into Birutes, at the bottom of the hill, and, pulling up at the side of the road beneath the trees, cut its lights.