‘You didn’t have any.’
‘Of course I had some,’ she responded impatiently. ‘But why should I use my supply? If I gave them to Gusev, then someone else would go without because I have no way of replacing them. I guessed that if Gusev was important, then Petrovka would be able to lay its hands on what was needed.’ The amusement died in her eyes and for a second Kirov saw desperation. ‘You know how it is,’ she said and seemed to shrug off the prison and him along with it.
‘I know how it is.’ His hand reached out towards her shoulder, but he thought better of it and let the hand fall.
‘Any time I can help…’ she said.
‘Of course.’
‘Any time.’
‘Yes.’ He searched for something to request. It seemed to him that she needed to give him something to excuse her begging for antibiotics. He suspected that her plea to Antipov had been less flippant and had cost more pain than she admitted. And now like other poor people she looked for an act of generosity that was within her means.
He asked, ‘Do you have anything left from the drugs you gave to Gusev?’
‘Your surgeon, Fomin, took the remains of the vials with him to do the autopsy.’
‘You have nothing left?’
She looked disappointed; then as suddenly brightened up. ‘Wait! I may have the carton they came in.’
‘Can I have it?’
‘I’ll try to find it.’
‘Please.’
She left them again to hunt somewhere for the remains.
‘Poor bitch,’ Bogdanov murmured. He prevented any question from Kirov. ‘I’m just an old softy,’ he said, and pleated his lips over his snaggle teeth.
That night Kirov called Antipov from his apartment. The detective was at home. He was sullenly co-operative. He coughed his fatal cough and answered the question. ‘Of course we supplied the antibiotics. We needed Gusev alive and talking. Without him we’re back to where we started — chasing the small suppliers and hanging around toilets like a bunch of queers.’
‘Where did the antibiotics come from?’ Kirov asked.
But he knew because there was only one answer.
‘From Gusev’s own supply. Where else?’
CHAPTER SIX
As promised, Kirov visited Uncle Kolya again. Tatiana Yurievna warned him that the General was feeling better — warned him because the General had rearmed himself with vodka and cigarettes and was feeling feisty but ill-tempered. He had forced her to relent and allow some daylight into the sickroom. It was pale from the thin day, and washed out the colours from the late wild flowers that the housekeeper had placed in a vase by the invalid’s bed. Kirov asked, ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Not too bad.’
‘Good.’
‘Yes, good.’
They went through the polite preambles in the distant and superficially uninterested fashion that characterises conversations between men when they concern matters of a personal nature. General Prylubin was sitting up in bed and had provided himself with an ashtray that was lost in a mound of stubs and a selection of paperbacks that had failed to hold his interest if the pile on the floor was a guide. Behind his bad temper Kirov detected a note of relief. Death had been deferred and that was cause enough for relief. Both men were aware of this, but neither of them made mention of it. Instead Kirov asked where Uncle Kolya was getting his medication from. There was an ample supply of bottles and tablets.
‘I don’t ask,’ the old man answered. ‘I give the doctor money. How she spends it is her business.’
‘Doesn’t the Service help?’
‘The Service would prefer it if I were dead. I’m an anachronism.’
‘What are you taking?’
‘How should I know? Antibiotics.’
‘Can’t you get them legally?’
‘Who’s to say I’m not doing?’ Uncle Kolya raised an eyebrow wryly, but almost immediately let the makings of a smile turn to a frown. ‘I’m bored,’ he complained. ‘I’ve nothing to do.’
‘You should read.’
‘I never learned to read — not books. The Old Woman plays cards, but so badly it isn’t worthwhile cheating. Can you come more often?’ he asked eagerly; then recognised that he was being unrealistic. Like a child, Kirov thought: his demands had no context other than immediacy. The relationship had inverted. Now Uncle Kolya needed him to satisfy his wants like a parent.
‘Why don’t you work on your memoirs?’ he suggested.
‘Don’t want to.’
‘Not for publication — for your own satisfaction.’
‘Boring.’
‘Everything?’ Kirov humoured the old man. ‘You never did anything interesting? You never met anyone interesting?’ Then suddenly he asked, ‘Tell me about my father.’
Until then Uncle Kolya’s face had been tetchily alive. At the question it fell into a leathery stillness. For a second Kirov wondered whether he had heard. Then, ‘Why?’
‘Isn’t it natural? He’s my father.’
‘He’s dead. He’s in the past. The past is full of dead people — you should stay away from it.’
‘I’ve been dreaming about him,’ Kirov said, and the old man looked shocked, as if Kirov had broken through a security fence that cordoned off the cemetery of dead days.
‘Dreams? What do you have to dream about? You hardly knew him. What do you remember?’
‘I remember that Beria had my father shot.’
I remember that I was born in Minsk in an apartment in Bryanska Street.
No, he didn’t remember that. Instead he had walked with his mother, holding her hand, through the ruins of the city and she had pointed to a space and a pile of rubble and said that there he was born, which made him wonder that anyone could be born in such desolation; so that he asked her whether, like Lenin, he had been born in a stable.
He remembered the Hotel Europa. His father’s high position allowed him to move there during the crisis of the war into a comfortable suite where food could still be procured from the German military commissariat since the hotel was the base for the politicians. The latter were Byelorussian nationalists. They were holding a congress at the Opera House to work out a basis for their country’s independence. They smoked papirossi and wore smelly suits, and, like a collection of seedy uncles, dandled the infant on their knees while they talked treason against the Soviet Union. And even now they bequeathed their smells. Children remember smells. Nationalism smelled of unwashed shirts.
‘It was Genrik Yagoda who first took notice of your father,’ Uncle Kolya said reluctantly. He helped himself to a cigarette and offered one to his visitor. A peacemaking gesture, Kirov thought, though he had no idea why this should be so. ‘This was in 1936. Yagoda was head of NKVD.’ Cigarette ash fell with a hiss into the vase of flowers. ‘Later Stalin had Yagoda shot.
‘The normal rule with Stalin was that when the head of a department went, then his subordinates went with him. When Yagoda was disgraced, there was a wave of arrests inside NKVD. Two, maybe three thousand Chekists followed him into the execution cellars — no one can be sure about the numbers. Your father was among those arrested,’ he threw in, using a subdued voice as if the fact were of minimal relevance.
‘But he survived,’ Kirov said.
‘He survived,’ Uncle Kolya agreed, and with a glimmer of cheer added, ‘How else were you born?’
Kirov did not allow himself to be deflected. ‘How did he manage it?’
‘Chance.’
‘What sort of chance?’
Uncle Kolya stubbed out the cigarette and dumped it in the vase to float among the flower stems.