“Do they hurt?” He asked.
“Sometimes the skin stretches or tightens. But no, I don’t usually hurt. I ache…”
“And right now?”
“My bones are a little tired. My bones always talk to me when they are tired. It has been a long day.”
He kissed her belly and she instinctively pressed his face against herself.
She had not imagined that could be so nice…
“We should turn off the light,” she gasped.
In the darkness she lay on the bed and he kissed her again, except this time in a place where she had heard that men sometimes kissed a woman but never actually expected her husband to kiss her. It was very nearly unbearably stimulating and momentarily, she worried she would lose control of her bodily functions.
Presently, the man moved up in the bed and circled her in his arms.
They kissed, increasingly wetly, breathlessly.
Long before she rolled onto her back and he looked down on her beneath him she realised that everything was going to be all right.
Chapter 32
In his five days as a guest of the Turkish Naval Forces — his hosts were very particular about being ‘Turkish’ not ‘Ruski’ — Nicolae Ceaușescu and the other three survivors from the small, leaky fishing boat that the battlecruiser had run down in the night off Samothrace, had been treated with perplexing respect and courtesy. However, Ceaușescu did not think that was going to go on for much longer.
“Get that woman out of here!” The thin, cold-eyed man in the uniform of a Second-Captain in the Soviet Navy growled, waving an angry hand at the plain middle-aged woman dressed in the fatigues of a Turkish naval rating who was at Nicolae Ceaușescu’s side whenever he regained consciousness. In the last day or so he had started forcing a smile each time he awakened and discovered her sitting like a sentinel by his sick bay cot. Her expression was invariably impassive but sometimes he saw a flicker of acknowledgement in her green-brown eyes. Her name was Eleni and her ministrations had been the only thing that had kept him alive back on Samothrace.
Eleni viewed the newcomer blankly, unmoving in her chair.
“Get out!” The Russian barked.
Still she did not move.
“She doesn’t speak Russian, you idiot!” Nicolae Ceaușescu croaked in what he hoped sounded like a Moskva accent. The other man wore the tabs of a Political Officer on his immaculate uniform lapels. “Who the fuck are you?”
For a moment he thought the man — whom he guessed to be in his thirties and had spoken with a clipped Leningrad twang, as if he was affecting airs and graces that did not come naturally to him — was going to hit him. So apparently, had the ship’s doctor and the young Turkish officer at his shoulder both of whom had stiffened with disgust and made half a step towards the Russian.
The crew of the TNF Yavuz did not like Russians. Whenever they were within earshot of a Russian, they fell silent.
“I am Second Captain Dmitry Kolokoltsev of the Political Directorate of the Red Navy,” the Russian said, struggling not to lose his temper.
Ceaușescu was propped up on pillows in the narrow cot, his thoughts muddled by the regular doses of morphine the orderlies spooned into him to keep the pain from his butchered right leg at bay. He had no idea how long he had bobbed up and down on the upturned hull of the fishing boat; nor any notion of how he had come to be on it, or how he why he had not slipped off it and drowned in the sea. When the sun had come up the next morning he had been lashed to the waterlogged, wallowing wreck with Eleni, the Greek fisherman called Andris and the teenage boy called Miklos. The destroyer which had plucked the four sun-burned, dying survivors aboard like four lifeless fish the next day had looked vaguely American. Sometime that second night the destroyer had bumped alongside a much bigger ship, unloaded the survivors and a gang of other civilians and departed. Three days ago he had blinked awake clean, he had been in pain but nothing like before and his surroundings had smelled of bleach and antiseptics. There were six cots in the sick bay; two of the others were occupied by Turkish seamen; one with some kind of head injury, the other with a leg in traction. The cots nearest to Ceaușescu were empty.
“Stand up straight when you address a superior officer, Comrade Kolokoltsev,” Ceaușescu snarled, his strength ebbing. Knowing that the big lie was always the hardest to unpick he stuck to the story he had rehearsed back in Bucharest as soon as he realised the mistake Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej had made — the mistake was already Gheorghe’s not his — in betraying the Soviet Troika. He gestured at the stump of his right thigh beneath the pristine white Turkish Navy sheets. “I only just got out of Thessalonika alive. I don’t have to take this shit from some jumped up little fucker like you!”
Second-Captain Kolokoltsev’s brow began to furrow.
“Your superiors,” Ceaușescu went on, his words slurring from exhaustion, “will hear of your insolence…”
“Comrade, I…”
“I am Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov,” Ceaușescu hissed, his strength gone. If Kolokoltsev had ever met the now — probably dead — Head of Station of the KGB in Thessalonika, he was a dead man. He would have worried about it if he had not just wanted to sleep. Ceaușescu shared a vague physical resemblance the KGB man, and they were of an age, give or take a year. It probably helped his subterfuge that the way he looked now his own mother would probably not recognise him. Nonetheless, if Kolokoltsev had ever actually met Major-General Nikolai Fyodorov what remained of Ceaușescu’s miserable life was likely to be very short and painful. “My name is Nikolai Vasilyevich Fyodorov…”
He must have passed out because the Political Officer had gone when he awakened,
Eleni gabbled something to him.
He did not understand a single word.
The Turkish seaman with his leg in traction coughed.
“She said that whatever you said to that shithead,” the sailor, a man in his late twenties bit his tongue, knowing that it was the morphine talking and that this was dangerous, “frightened him,” he concluded weakly.
“You understand what she says?” Ceaușescu asked like an idiot before he too, remembered the perils of letting the morphine coursing through his veins do his talking for him.
“Only bits and pieces. She talks very fast.”
“Tell her I am a very senior and very powerful Soviet KGB officer and that I will protect her.”
This was laboriously translated.
Eleni looked mortally offended.
She whispered a string of urgent interrogatives towards the seaman.
“She wants to know what’s happened to her cousin and to his son?”
Ceaușescu’s drug-addled mind slowly circumnavigated this question. He came to a decision.
“Call somebody.”
There was a delay of some minutes.
Presently, the ship’s surgeon, a lean man in his fifties with a bushy moustache stood over Ceaușescu’s bed. The man spoke pigeon-Russian, which was a mercy.
“Doctor,” Ceaușescu asked, his voice a strangled whisper. “There were two men rescued with me and the woman. What happened to them?”
“They are quite well.” The other man’s face told the patient that he did not know why he would ask a thing like that. “They are,” he searched for the right words, “paying their way,” he frowned, “cleaning decks?”