Free Moskva by Jack Grimwood Page A

road Wax Angel remembered most.
    They were beyond Breslau, with snow piled high against the hedges and a vicious wind ripping across the German fields and through the ruins of farmhouses destroyed in battle or burned by their owners before fleeing. She was young, the woman by the road. Her hair, in a thick blonde plait, was covered by a scarf too expensive to be any use against the cold. When Wax Angel found her she had her back to a hedge. Her skin was marble and her flesh as hard.
    The baby at her frozen breast had died of cold, not hunger.
    The men – heroes all – said what you’d expect.
    All the houses were huge, palaces that turned out to belong to doctors and lawyers. Everyone had fridges. Most people had cars. More cars than anyone could imagine. At first their letters home were censored. Then they were burned in front of them. Finally, they’d been told that writing home would be forbidden if they kept exaggerating what they saw.
    There’d been another nursing mother after Breslau.
    Young and clear-skinned. Very German.
    That had been later, after they’d won another battle.
    The girl had been dragged into a church and raped throughout the day, the same men coming back hours later to take another turn. In the end, her grandfather had gone in tears to Wax Angel’s political officer. He’d begged him to make them stop; not for good, he knew that wouldn’t happen. Simply for long enough to let his granddaughter feed her child, which was hungry and wouldn’t stop crying.
    Wax Angel shot the girls she saw after that.
    The pretty ones first.
    Such things happened because of Stalingrad.
    Life expectancy for a new conscript was a day. Three days for a seasoned officer. Half a day for a junior lieutenant. She’d survived Stalingrad’s full seven and a half months. The lifespans of over two hundred men.

 

12
     
A Knock on the Door
     
    For Soviet citizens, a knock on the door at four in the morning traditionally indicates trouble for whoever quivers behind it, wondering whether to answer. But a knock on the door of an apartment in a block given over to foreigners? Tom took a Tokarev from his bedside cabinet, jacked the slide noisily enough for whoever was outside to hear and kept to one side as he undid the bolt.
    As the door swung open, he grabbed the figure outside and hauled it into the apartment. Flicking on the overhead light, he found Anna Masterton glaring at him. Releasing the Tokarev’s clip, Tom dropped it out and would have put it in his dressing-gown pocket if he hadn’t suddenly realized he was naked. Squeezing the trigger, he supported the hammer with his thumb while it fell into place. He put the sidearm on the table beside the telephone, which began glowing red.
    ‘Why are you here?’ he asked.
    ‘Why are you naked?’
    ‘Anna, why are you here?’
    ‘You’re having an anxiety dream.’
    The knock came a few minutes after Tom woke, as he stood in the flat’s tiny kitchen, boiling a kettle and staring at empty Carlsberg cans, filthy coffee cups and a slick of Vesta curry dried to a crust across the only unchipped plate in the place.
    ‘At least this time I’m wearing a dressing gown.’
    Anna Masterton’s glance was wary.
    ‘I wanted to thank you,’ she said, ‘for letting me know the body was definitely not Alex. Your note said male, early twenties. Do I ask how you found out?’
    ‘A
militsiya
major from the investigator’s office south of the river on Novokuznetskaya Street lives locally and we drink in the same bar. I bought him a flask of vodka and he told me what I wanted to know.’
    ‘You make it sound so obvious.’
    There was more, facts that Tom hadn’t put in his note.
    The boy’s hands had been bound so tightly that his wrist fractured. Also, wounds exposing body fat burn at a different rate. In the coroner’s opinion the boy had been castrated. Given that his genitals had been cut away and his wrists bound tightly enough to crack bone, the balance of probability