Vagabond (20 page)

Frankie McKinney had been at the airport for an hour. She knew all of the menu tariffs at the fast-food places. She had felt, without reason, that she stood out. Her throat was dry. She had arrived as drunken British kids were arguing in the taxi queue, had had two coffees and had seen the cameras that covered the concourse. She had been told by Maude that she should watch carefully when he came through for tails on him. There were three possibilities, but Maude had dismissed them: he was a tout and worked for the intelligence service; he was honest in his dealings with them but had aroused suspicion and was therefore being watched; he was clean, had no tail and was to be trusted. Her hotel was out to the south of the city, massive and impersonal, and her room had a view of the bridges that spanned the Vltava river; the man from Tyrone, the fighter, had the room booked next to hers for the following night and onwards. She knew his name, Ralph Exton, and readied herself. He would stay in the centre, on Stepanska, but the Radisson was beyond her budget. They had told her how to greet him. She would come forward, holding a newspaper, and look past him. She would seem not to see him and they’d bump into each other. A good enough excuse for half a dozen words. She could see no tail.

Ralph Exton, to her, was insignificant. She knew about the weapons, and their importance, the difference they would make when imported. Recruiting would climb, and in the wake of it more money could be raised. With firepower the administration would rock, crumble. Maude had talked about it. A big breath. She made the calculation of where, at his pace and hers, they would collide. She began to walk, holding the newspaper loosely. He loomed towards her. She did not know what description he had been given: a black trouser suit, a Vuitton bag her parents had given her, a loosely tied silk scarf, grey, and her hair pulled back. It was the moment they’d meet and—

Ralph Exton sidestepped her. He did a little swerve and she’d gone past him. She stood alone while men and women, passengers and airport staff, went by and round her, and more flights were announced. She took another five steps. Shit. She turned. Frankie saw his back as he went out into the night. She glimpsed him take a taxi. Her phone – the one Maude had given her – rang. She snapped it open.

‘Sorry and all that, just didn’t think it was a good place. I’m a bit bushed. Tomorrow morning, yes?’

When he had been in the queue a taxi had accelerated past and he had seen Gabrielle’s face in a window seat. He thought his loyalties were fractured, his allegiance uncertain. He had seen Frankie as soon as he had come into Arrivals. A great-looking kid, taut and upright, like a bloody lighthouse – a fair chance that the sharp-eyed Gabrielle would have spotted any contact. God, they were thin on the ground if they’d sent an apprentice in street craft. He owed her nothing, but had protected her. All about self-preservation, Ralph. The taxi brought him into a city clogged with evening traffic and they crossed the river north of Charles Bridge.

It was quiet at the hotel desk, soft music playing, and the rate he’d be charged was confirmed to him, which made him shudder.

He went to his floor. Ralph Exton, one-time entrepreneur and prodigious salesman of second-hand and dubious merchandise – furniture, fags, china ornaments, computers, vegetables, pirate DVDs, and top-label clothing that came from sweat shops on the slopes of Vesuvius – could enter a first in his CV. He had never before tried to broker a deal for machine-guns that fired 50-calibre rounds, Russian-built sniper rifles, warheads that could take out a vehicle with armour plating, modern military detonators, explosives and assault rifles. It was a new world.

What had he told them when they had threatened him with the drill and the burning cigarette?
I need the money
. He went past her door and heard the British TV news.

He came to his room. He wondered where his wife was, and with whom, and where his daughter was, then grimaced and flicked the key card in and out. This job would be a good earner, had to be. His bag landed on the bed, and he kicked the door shut. He dealt with people he regarded as exceptionally ruthless, who would do to him things that were best left without description. All of them were good for business and at the apex of danger.

Rosie Bentinick had made a shrine at the back of the first floor. It was where she came each evening. She walked into the room at the time when her daughter would have got in from school, a south-west London comprehensive, and later from the college where she had trained as a teacher, specialising in remedial.

The room was as it had been on the day that her daughter loaded the bulging canvas bag into the car and they had set off for the airport. The parents had seen their girl through the gates, and had watched as they had closed on her.

He’d gone to work the next morning as if nothing had changed.

She worked part-time for the British Legion in the heart of the town, a red-brick edifice that sprang to life each autumn with the approach of Remembrance Day. They paid a pittance. She had had time to climb the stairs, go into the back room and tidy it so that when their girl came back it would be exactly as she had left it – except that the bed was made, the washing basket cleared, the clothes ironed and put away, the picture frames dusted.

That first night, flowers had been put in their daughter’s tooth mug from the bathroom, then changed at the end of the first week of her absence and every week, on Thursday, for the last seven years. The pain never lessened, not for Rosie or her husband.

There was a chair by the window and part of the seat was filled with teddy bears, but there was room enough for one of them to sit during the evening vigil. Then a candle was lit, summer or winter. The cat would likely be asleep on the bed and the dog, older and arthritic, would be across her feet or her husband’s. Visiting was worse.

The only light would be the candle and it would play on a photograph on the dressing-table that showed the girl, blonde and happy, with the children around her.

Timofey Simonov lay in his bed and his mind wandered. He thought of the hood who would be in the darkness inside the lock-up garage. The cement from the bags would now have solidified around his legs and ankles. His toes would be numb and the weight of the cement would drag at his knee joints.

He thought of his father, a junior officer in the Interior Ministry force that had had responsibility for the security of the camps for convicts. His father went to work each morning in a threadbare uniform at the camp that was Perm 35, and his memories were of the stories his father told him.

The man in the garage who had shown disrespect would survive the night but not the following day. Timofey Simonov, who regarded himself as a successful businessman, had long been fascinated by the ways, habits and punishments of criminals.

His father could have moved on from Perm 35, gone back into the main ranks of the Interior Ministry force and sat at a more comfortable desk. He could have been away from the awful damp, perpetual cold and misery of winter, when light was barely visible above the trees around the camp, and the summers of heat, flies and mosquitoes. But his father would not move, and his mother had not demanded that he transfer or quit, and all the time that Perm 35, the logging camp, was open, he had stayed. His mother had been a bureaucrat in the administration of the camp’s hospital. He remembered, from the stories told him, the obsession of his father.

The criminals would have understood why it was appropriate for a man to go into the river, feet in set cement, as a punishment for disrespect. They would have recognised the retribution of death by shooting, at long range by a marksman, against a man who had broken the rules of conduct. But he did not see himself as a criminal, merely as a businessman whose value was recognised in the corridors of power. The town of Karlovy Vary was the right place for a businessman to be, and he did not seek out the company of criminals.

He thought of his father’s obsession: the security of the camp. The man had become deranged in the isolation of Perm 35, 1,600 kilometres to the east of the capital. He had feared a breakout and was unwilling to relinquish control. Timofey Simonov had watched his father’s growing madness. His whole childhood had been spent in the garrison part of the camp with criminals, whose faces showed no hope, and horizons of endless forests. The breakout had not taken place at a camp where his father had served, but his father had been called there when reinforcements were required.

Timofey Simonov would have been angered had it been suggested to him that he, too, was a criminal.

The camp was at Kengir in Kazakhstan. It was in the spring of 1954 that a guard had killed a prisoner, whose friends had called it murder. An uprising had followed and unchecked anarchy. The guards were slaughtered or had fled. For forty days the prisoners had ruled their own ghetto camp, formed a provisional government, attempted to barter for freedom with the Interior Ministry force commander, who led the military surrounding the perimeter. It was suppressed. Intermittent negotiations were entered into and bought time for the transfer to the nearest railhead of tanks and artillery pieces. When they were in place, talks were suspended. The military had attacked the camp. His father said that only a few dozen of the convicts died as the camp was retaken: the convicts had claimed between five and seven hundred were put to death. Timofey Simonov liked the stories of the mutiny and its suppression. He was grateful to his father for telling them. The lesson he took from Kengir more than half a century later: the prisoners had not shown sufficient respect for the administration of their camp. That was intolerable – and the convicts, grudgingly, knew it. For lack of respect a sniper could shoot to kill, or feet could be put into an oil drum as cement hardened.

Timofey Simonov had great wealth. He owned a villa overlooking Karlovy Vary with fine views, and the road was the most sought after in the town of Russian
émigrés
. He had accounts in discreet banks scattered across the globe. He had the protection of a man who had once been a brigadier. Soon an old friend from the days when he’d struggled would be close to him. None of that lulled him to sleep. He lay in his bed, listening to distant traffic and the quiet of his home.

The key, his father said, to retaking the camp was recruiting informers. They had been among the convicts, but slipped out notes detailing the names of the leadership, where the weapons were and the weak points. Informers, traitors, were a danger to convicts, the state, and to any businessman who traded at the edge.

It would be a long night. Many were.

‘It’s a city of the dead. It has a history of brutal killing. Can I say that to a visitor?’

‘Feel free.’

‘Here, where we stand, by this plaque, twenty-seven revolutionary leaders were put to death, noblemen, four hundred years ago. Twenty-four died at the hand of the same executioner. Perhaps he was too tired to deal with the last three.’

‘Tiring work, killing people,’ Danny Curnow said softly.

The night was cold. It was past two, the stag parties were gone and the sightseers from across Europe had dispersed. The policeman stood close to him, then took his arm, and they moved across the wide space of the Old Town Square, stopping by a huge memorial, a man of God, in greening bronze. An hour and a half before, Danny had come down from his room, sleep having evaded him, and found Karol Pilar dozing on a sofa in the hotel lobby. Why was he there? ‘It’s my job to be here.’ Wasn’t there a girl, someone important, he should be with? ‘She understands – I thought you or Mr Bentinick might need me. It is a privilege for me to work with you.’ Danny had thought him sincere. They had gone out into the night and tramped the emptying streets, a chill wind gripping him. It had been his intention merely to go round the block, then head back to his room. He was shown the sights, had his own guide. When he was on the battlefield tours some of the guides held bright parasols aloft. The policeman stayed close to him. When a beggar had loomed from the shadows, Karol Pilar had pushed him aside.

‘The statue is of Jan Hus. Two centuries before those nobles were slaughtered he was burned alive for spreading heresy. In this square more than fifty of his prime supporters were put to death.’

Danny Curnow imagined, where he stood, brave men dying, not giving those who killed them the satisfaction of showing fear.

They walked on. There was a wide old pedestrian bridge, the river flowing briskly through the arches below.

‘Charles Bridge. A saint of the Czech people died here, John of Nepomuk, the Queen’s confessor. In 1393 Wenceslas the Fourth had him thrown off the bridge and drowned because he would not tell the King what she had said to him in the confessional box. You good to walk further?’

‘Fine.’

They looked up at the huge illuminated wall of the castle.

‘It was the custom in Prague, six hundred years ago, for the mob to attack the seat of power. Officials of the Crown or tax gatherers were thrown from the upper windows – those windows. Come on.’