Even after Aleksei has gone I can feel his presence. He's like a character from a Quentin Tarantino film with an aura of violence held barely in check. Although he hides behind his tailored suits and polished English accent, I know where he comes from. I knew kids just like him at school. I can even picture him in his cheap white shirt, clunking shoes and oversize shorts, taking a beating at lunchtimes because of his strange name and his peasant- poor clothes and his strange accent.
I know this because I was just like him—an outsider—the son of a Romany Gypsy, who went to school with
“Beauty cannot be eaten with a spoon,” my mother would tell me. I didn't understand what she meant then. It was just another one of her queer sayings like, “One behind cannot sit on two horses.”
I survived the beatings and the ridicule, just like Aleksei. Unlike him I didn't win a scholarship to Charterhouse, where he lost his Russian accent. None of his classmates were ever invited home and the food parcels his mother sent—with their chocolate dates, gingerbread and milk candy—were kept hidden. How do I know these things? I walked in his shoes.
Aleksei's father, Dimitri Kuznet, was a Russian emigre who started with a single flower barrow in Soho and cultivated a small empire of pitches around the West End. The turf war left three people dead and five unaccounted for.
On Valentine's Day in 1987 a flower seller in Covent Garden was nailed to his barrow, doused in kerosene and set alight. We arrested Dimitri the following day. Aleksei watched from his upstairs bedroom as we led his father away. His mother wailed and screamed, waking half the neighborhood.
Three weeks before the trial Aleksei left school and took over the family business alongside Sacha, his older brother. Within five years Kuznet Brothers controlled every flower barrow in central London. Within a decade it held sway over the entire cut-flower industry in Britain with more influence over prices and availability than Mother Nature herself.
I don't believe the urban myths or bogeyman stories about Aleksei Kuznet but he still frightens me. His brutality and violence are by-products of his upbringing; an ongoing act of defiance against the genetic hand that God dealt him.
We might have both started off the same, suffering the same taunts and humiliation, but I didn't let it lodge like a ball of phlegm in my throat and cut off oxygen to my brain.
Even his brother disappointed him. Perhaps Sacha was too Russian and not English enough. More likely Aleksei disapproved of his cocaine parties and glamour-model girlfriends. A teenage waitress was found floating facedown in the swimming pool after one such party, with semen in her stomach and traces of heroin in her blood.
Sacha didn't face a jury of twelve. Only four men were needed. Dressed in balaclavas they broke into his house one night, smothered his wife, and took Sacha away. Some say Aleksei had him strung up by his wrists and lowered into an acid bath. Others say he took off his head with a wood-splitting ax. For all anyone knows Sacha's still alive, living abroad under a different name.
For Aleksei there are only two proven categories of people in the world—not the rich and the poor or the good and the evil or the talkers and the doers. There are winners and losers. Heads or tails. His universal truth.
Under normal circumstances, better circumstances, I try not to dwell on the past. I don't want to envisage what might have happened to a child like Mickey Carlyle or to the other missing children in my life.
But ever since I woke up in the hospital I can't stop myself going back there, filling in the missing hours with horrible scenarios. I see the Thames littered with corpses that bob along beneath the bridges and tumble in the wake of passing tourist boats. I see blood in the water and guns sinking into the silt.
I look at my watch. It's 5:00 a.m. That's when predators do their hunting and police come knocking. Human beings are more vulnerable at that hour. They wake and wonder, pulling the covers close around them.
Aleksei mentioned a ransom. He and Keebal both knew about the diamonds. I must have been there—on the ransom drop. I wouldn't have gone ahead without proof of life. I must have been sure.
Against the quietness comes commotion—people running and shouting. I can hear a fire alarm.
Maggie appears in the door. “There's been a gas leak. We're evacuating the hospital. I'll get a wheelchair—I don't know how many are left.”
“I can walk.”
She nods approval. “We're taking the sickest patients first. Wait for me. I'll come back.”
In the same breath she has gone. Police and fire sirens wail against the glass. The sound is soon masked by gurneys rattling down the corridors and people shouting instructions.
After twenty minutes the noise level abates and the minutes stretch out. Maybe they've forgotten me. I once got left behind on a school field trip to Morecambe Bay. Someone decided to dare me to walk the eight miles across the mudflats from Arnside to Kents Bank. People drown out there all the time, getting lost in the fog and trapped by the incoming tides.
Of course, I wasn't foolish enough to take up the dare. I spent the afternoon in a cafe eating scones and clotted cream, while the rest of the class studied waders and wildfowl. I convinced everyone that I'd made it. I was fourteen at the time and it almost got me expelled from Cottesloe Park but for the rest of my school days I was famous.
My aluminum crutches are beside the door. Swinging my legs out of bed, I hop sideways until my fingers close around the handles and my upper arms slip into the plastic cuffs.
Leaving the room, I look down a long straight corridor to a set of doors and through the glass panels I see another corridor reaching deeper into the building. There is a faint smell of gas.
Following the exit signs I start walking toward the stairs, glancing into empty rooms with messed-up bedclothes. I pass an abandoned cleaner's cart. Mops and brooms sprout from inside like seventies rock stars.
The stairs are in darkness. I look over the handrail, half expecting to see Maggie on her way up. Turning back I catch sight of something moving at the far end of the corridor, the way I've come. Maybe they're looking for me.
Retracing my steps, I push open closed doors with a raised crutch.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
Behind green-tinted Perspex I find a surgery with a bloodstained paper sheet crumpled on the operating table.
The nursing station is deserted. Files are open on the counter. A mug of coffee is growing cold.
I hear a low moan coming from behind a partition. Maggie is lying motionless on the floor with one leg twisted under her. Blood covers her mouth and nose, dripping onto the floor beneath her head.
A muffled voice makes me turn. “Hey, man, what you still doing here?”
A fireman in a full face mask appears in the doorway. The breathing apparatus makes him look almost alien but he's holding a spray can in his hand.
“She's hurt. Quick. Do something.”
He crouches next to Maggie, pressing his fingers against her neck. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing. I found her like this.”
I can just see his eyes behind the glass but he's looking at me warily. “You shouldn't be here.”
“They left me behind.”
Glancing above my head, he stands suddenly and pushes past me. “I'll get you a wheelchair.”
“I can walk.”
He doesn't seem to hear me. Less than a minute later he reappears through a set of swinging doors.
“What about Maggie?”
“I'll come back for her.”
“But she's hurt—”
“She'll be fine.”
Nursing the aluminum crutches across my lap, I lower myself into the chair. He sets off at a jog down the corridor, turning right and then left toward the main lifts.
His overalls are freshly laundered and his heavy rubber boots slap on the hard polished floor. For some reason I can't hear the flow of oxygen into his mask.
