Anna had a word for their disease: anomie. ‘It means a breakdown of social norms or values, Nicholas. Distance from home puts personal values out of mind.’
It was just the kind of thing her favourite Russian authors banged on about. My new best mate Fyodor Dostoevsky certainly went for it in Crime and Punishment. The main character was trying to justify murder by saying it was not people he was killing but a principle.
Good luck to them. Why not? It didn’t bother me. I just got on with my own life and let those jokers get on with theirs.
Mitchell, the well-fed one with the side parting, turned to me. ‘You’re a Brit, aren’t you?’
I looked up from reassembling the weapon. ‘Yep.’
‘We are too.’
He pointed at the Glock. ‘We like them. That your own?’
I nodded.
‘I’ve seen you shoot a couple of times. We’re thinking of joining, buying some Glocks, having some fun.’
Webb, taller, with dirty-blond hair, was concentrating on the TV. RT ran the intro to the ten o’clock news.
‘Yeah, that’d be good.’
‘What do you do with the gun? Do you have it locked up at home, or is it better to leave them here? Is it a drama carrying a pistol across town?’
The RT announcer was a very bland-looking guy with thinning hair and rimless glasses. The headlines kicked off with Libya. Anna would be on soon. Gaddafi had launched his first bombing raids on Benghazi. The West had called for a no-fly zone and Russia was sitting back and laughing at it all.
‘I just leave mine here, mate. I don’t need it at home. And I don’t want it burning a hole in my pocket.’
I glanced at the screen above his head. Anna was gobbing off into her mike, with crowds of chanting Libyans around her.
Mitchell got the hint and went back to his showbiz partner, who was now watching Mong get even more pissed off with the Germans. They were larging it in front of an increasingly long queue of tourists waiting their turn.
7
Anna looked as good as ever. The water in Benghazi must have been back on. The last email I’d got from her, the day before yesterday, told me the water had been cut off and she hadn’t washed her hair for a week. Her two-minute piece was done. I’d watch the full-length version when it came on later. The three o’clock news was more in-depth.
I zipped my Glock back into its case and handed it in to the armoury. I didn’t bother saying goodbye to my new showbiz mates. I got my coat and headed outside into –8 °C.
The Russian media took the piss out of the UK continuously for grinding to a halt at the first hint of a snowflake. Moscow hadn’t seen a winter like this one for well over forty years, but it was still functioning. The mayor had gripped the situation. He’d raised an army of six thousand street cleaners.
The city was covered with gloomy grey and black slush but nowhere was impassable. Ladas and Mercedes spun a bit and people slid, but it was business as normal. There was very little grumbling about it. Some people just forgot about their cars until spring. They took the Metro, the same as I did.
The only problem was ice falling from rooftops. Two kids had been seriously injured yesterday. In St Petersburg, the roofs of a hospital and a hypermarket had collapsed under the weight of snow. They’d probably been built in the 1980s when Putin was mayor and subbing jobs out to the Mafia.
Unless there was an icicle with my name on it, I was weatherproof. I wore a North Face parka with a huge hood well and truly done up. I looked out at the world through a little circle of fur a few inches in front of my face. The hood was so big it didn’t move when I turned my head. I looked like Kenny out of South Park. On my feet I had a pair of Dubarrys, the Gore-Tex and leather boots that were all the rage in this city. They looked like posh wellies. Anna had bought me a pair as a present for my first winter here.
According to the mayor, this was going to be the last time the city ever suffered from snow. The grey stuff reflected badly on its image, and he was going to do something about it. This boy had more money at his disposal than many a nation’s GDP. He probably spent more in a day than Boris did in a year.
He’d decided to ban snow from the city. He was going to invest in the same cloud-sealing programme the city rolled out on all the major holidays to ensure the citizens of Moscow didn’t get rained on. When had it ever rained on a May Day parade? Never. The city paid for jets to get up there and spray silver iodine into any clouds heading Moscow’s way so they’d dump their rain upwind well before it could spoil things in Red Square. I wouldn’t be needing the Dubarrys next May Day.
Alongside the biggest collection of billionaires on earth there was a massive migrant population, as well as millions of the poor, the old, the dying and the drugged. These people were all fucked big-time. I passed a collection of Soviet concrete blocks where they scraped a living.
Portable paraffin heaters provided their only warmth, but gave off so much moisture that their windows were still frozen solid on the inside — unless the residents had sold the glass and shoved up plywood in its place. In Putin’s Russia, everyone was an entrepreneur.
8
One of the promises I’d made myself during my dying days was to take the time to ‘stand and stare’, as Anna called it — to look at trees and plants, walk through gardens, shit like that. So every time I came out of Gunslingers, I turned left through Victory Park, along ‘Years of War’, its central avenue. Then I got the trolleybus home.
Victory Park was a new creation. It was only finished after years of fuck-ups in the mid-1990s. Poklonnaya Gora, the hill it sat on, was where Napoleon had waited to be given the keys to the city when his troops surrounded it in 1812. He’d waited in vain.
The park was finished just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of what we called the Second World War and the Russians called the Great Patriotic War. They had little interest in what had happened elsewhere. Fair one — more Russians were killed between ’41 and ’45 than all the other Allies put together. And eight out of ten Germans killed were dropped by the Soviets. In Western history books, those little details always seem to get lost in the footnotes.
The ‘Years of War’ had five terraces, one for each year of the conflict, and 1,418 fountains, one for every day. They weren’t working at the moment because everything was frozen. But there were chapels, mosques, statues, rockets, all sorts of shit — and then, right at the centre, one big fuck-off statue of Nike, the goddess of victory. I kept meaning to ask Anna the Russian for ‘Just do it’.
She was going to take me there on Victory Day, 9 May. Veterans, survivors, kids, everybody turned out. I was looking forward to seeing the old and bold. They’d be wearing more medals than Gaddafi. And it wouldn’t be raining.
I was nearly at the main gate, head down, nose running, hands in pockets, making sure I didn’t slip on the ice, when the front panel and an alloy wheel with the Range Rover logo appeared in what little peripheral vision my hood allowed.
‘Hey, fella, want a lift?’ It was the gunslinger without the side parting.
My head turned but my hood stayed where it was. I pulled the fur aside. Webb was at the driver’s window of a white wagon stained grey by today’s slush.
‘Where are you going? We’ll take you. It’s fucking freezing out there.’
‘Nah, it’s all right — I need the exercise.’
I turned through a set of fancy iron gates. The Range Rover’s engine revved behind me, but instead of driving away it turned into the park. The wagon swept past and pulled up about three metres ahead of me. Even the number plate spelt drama. The back door swung open. Mitchell, in a big black Puffa, beckoned me inside. But he wasn’t smiling. ‘Come on, my friend. It’s a lot warmer in here.’