He wished now he had not told Yuri: could not understand why he had. It had always been a promise to himself – and to Olga who had never known the baby was to be a boy – that the child should never know. It had been a mistake, a ridiculous weakness to blurt it out.
At least, Malik tried to reassure himself, Yuri did not know it all. Nor would he ever know.
The cross street by which Malik was limping to regain the broader thoroughfare to Kutuzovsky was dark and ill-lighted, hardly more than an alley, and enclosed in himself as he was Malik was abruptly disorientated. His first outward impression was of light going to darkness, which could not be right because it was already night and therefore dark. His continuing reaction was that he’d suffered some optical aberration, having come so recently from such a highly illuminated highway into a street sombre in comparison. And then he realized, further confused and not understanding, that it was not an optical aberration at all and that behind him a vehicle had entered the alley with its lights full on. But that now they were extinguished, plunging the car into an indistinguishable gloom, so indistinguishable that it was difficult to delineate it as a car at alclass="underline" certainly it was not possible to see precisely where it was or guess the direction it was taking. And clumsy as his injury made him, it was quite impossible for him to attempt to get out of the way.
The following seconds – those last, brief seconds – were a chaos of thoughts too quickly brought together to form any cohesive sense. There was the horror of an approaching black mass and the recollection of a conversation with Yuri, about killing, which he knew the boy had not believed, and an instant fear of pain, of agony, and then there was agony, a searing, tearing anguish which incredibly – miraculously – lasted only seconds, hardly sufficient for the scream blocked in his throat to burst out. He had the disembodied sensation of being thrown against something solid – a wall, his mind was clear enough to guess – but there was no fresh jab of hurt. Rather he was suffused with a feeling of heat, a warmth almost too hot to bear. Black was crowding in and he did not feel himself fall, although there was another sensation of hardness and the black became blacker and he thought it was the vehicle again, because there was an enormous, crushing pressure, which was the last conscious awareness that Vasili Dmitrevich Malik had before he died.
There had been a shouted argument between Levin and the boy after Bowden’s warning of Petr’s refusal to cooperate with his tutor and another yelling dispute when Bowden reported no improvement after a fortnight, and Levin was worriedly aware that the hostility hardening between himself and his son was stretching to create a deeper division between himself and Galina. He was desperate for something with which to break down the barriers and so he was fervently grateful to Proctor for delivering at once the letter from Natalia. He bore it like a talisman before him into the kitchen in which it had become their custom to live, in some unacknowledged preference to the other, more comfortable rooms of the safe house.
‘From Natalia!’ he announced.
For the first time since that outburst on the night of the defection Petr’s attitude faltered in his inability to control the excitement at contact from his sister. Father and son deferred to Galina to open it. Levin discerned almost at once Galina’s near-tearful collapse and Petr’s instant retreat behind the accustomed wall of antagonism when the boy became aware of the effect upon his mother.
Galina tried her best at control, unspeakingly handing the letter to Levin, whose own eyes misted when he read it and who then gave it, again without speaking, to the boy.
‘Abandoned!’ accused Petr, the letter half read, at once picking up Natalia’s accusation.
‘I have not abandoned her!’ said Levin. He knew it was quite the wrong reaction but felt a boredom at the persistently repeated defence.
‘Convince her!’ sneered the boy.
‘We’ve written to do just that.’
‘I bet that’ll be a terrific comfort to her.’
‘Don’t you realize what this correspondence means, you stupid little idiot!’ exploded Levin, exasperated.
Petr smirked, happy to have angered his father. ‘Why don’t you tell me!’
‘It means she’s not being victimized…’ Levin snatched the letter back, gesturing to the address. ‘She’s being allowed to stay where she is, without any pressure being exerted upon her… she’s being allowed to write to us and we are being allowed to write to her, in return.
Which is a concession which further indicates that no pressure is going to be imposed upon her…’
‘Big deal…!’
Levin lashed out, stopping the renewed, Americanized sneer. It was an unthinking action, fury moving him, shuddering both at what he’d done and at the physical pain as the flat of his hand slapped against the side of Petr’s face, which whitened and then almost at once reddened, at the force of the blow. The boy’s eyes flooded at the pain and he clamped his lips between his teeth, literally biting against a breakdown. Just one tear escaped, meandering lonely down his cheek, and Petr ignored it, pretending it wasn’t there.
It was Galina who was openly crying, the sobs groaning throughout the room and careless of the FBI-approved staff who remained quiet and apparently embarrassed near the stove area. Galina rocked back and forth, physically holding herself, saying ‘No, oh no!’ over and over again.
‘Don’t question me!’ hissed Levin to the boy, inwardly conscious of the danger of an anger he’d been trained always to subdue. ‘Don’t question me or treat me with contempt or doubt it when I say that a way will be found for Natalia to come here, to us!’
For several moments Petr remained staring at his father, arms tight to his sides against the impulse to reach up to the sting in his flushed face.
‘Fuck you!’ he said at last. And he intended to, thought the boy: he intended to fuck his father completely for what he’d done to wreck the family as he had.
21
By the time Alexandr Bogaty arrived at the scene the street was sealed, with closed-sided trucks drawn across either end and the technicians of death, the forensic experts and photographers and a pathologist, busy around the body, scraping and measuring and picturing and examining. There were two uniformed militia men at either end of the street, reinforcing its closure, and four more by the body. Accustomed to unexpected and violent death, they were uninterested in the mechanics of its cause: two were smoking cardboard-tubed Prima cigarettes and the other two huddled close together, stamping their feet against the cold, breath puffing whitely from them as if they were smoking, too.
The captain, one of the two who was not smoking, saw Bogaty’s approach and broke away from the group to meet him.
‘Thought you should see this from the beginning, Comrade investigator,’ he said.
The man’s name was Aliev, Bogaty remembered: a good policeman but nervous of responsibility and so inclined to summon superior officers when something appeared difficult. Bogaty said: ‘If it’s important, I’m glad you did.’
‘It’s important,’ insisted Aliev.
Bogaty moved past him, towards Vasili Malik’s body. Arc lamps flooded everything in harsh white light and Bogaty saw from the chalked outline how the man had lain when he had been found: the body was shifted on its side now for some pathological probe. There had been a lot of bleeding. Bogaty said: ‘What’s it look like?’
‘Struck from behind,’ recounted Aliev. He gestured to a bloodstain that Bogaty had missed. ‘Thrown against the wall, hard, then fell where the outline is…’ As the man spoke the pathologist returned the body to its original position and Aliev said: ‘It was the tyre marks… see?’