The Blind Spy

aluminium bar, at the appointed spot nearest the entrance—which he preferred to think of as the exit. He wondered briefly how he had even been allowed into the Golden Fleece in the first place. If anyone was designed to be rejected by the thugs on the door, who exercised the strict feis kontrol that excluded the uncool and the obviously unattractive, as well as the gangsters, from such elite nightclubs, it was him. He knew that, and he didn’t care.

As he drank, the huge wall that stretched the width of the club behind the dance floor had turned a pale white. The blur of thumping noise and flashing light was interrupted every half hour by what was, Taras considered, the most bizarre apparition of all on this January night in 2010—the back-projected extraordinarily beautiful face of Yulia Timoshenko. Tonight in the club—and in the previous few weeks more behind the scenes than he was in here—Viktor Aaronovich was repeatedly flaunting his support for her bid to be the next president of Ukraine.

There, up on the wall, the face now appeared and would remain for some minutes, and the cheers from the dance floor at this apparition almost exceeded the noise of the techno-funk.

It was a face that said not just “purity,” but “Ukrainian purity”; not just success, but highly glamorous success; not just money, but shiploads of the stuff. Her pale cream-coloured facial skin drawn over high cheekbones was crowned by a halo of corn-coloured hair plaited severely yet entrancingly over her fine head. It was a look, a hair arrangement, that Halloran had told him was described in the New York Times: “It curls around her head like a golden crown, a rococo flourish that sets her far apart from the jowly men she has challenged.” It was a face—and a body to match—that had appeared on the cover of Ukrainian Elle magazine. A Ukrainian woman’s beauty was judged by the thickness of her braided hair, “like wheat,” he’d explained to Halloran, and this effect had certainly reached its apogee in Yulia Timoshenko. Even to Taras, a happily married man who was sexually satisfied by his wife, she seemed like the Corn Goddess, the Goddess of Fertility, the divinity who would make Ukraine and Ukrainians fertile, rich, and maybe even more sexually appealing.

In what was sure to end up as a two-way election, Yulia Timoshenko was undoubtedly the glamorous choice, but she was not only that. She was also by far the richest of the three main candidates. On both counts she was a natural for the wealthy, fashionable, thrusting youth of Ukraine now cavorting on the dance floor—if anyone in the Golden Fleece this evening bothered to vote at all. Her beauty could be clearly seen, at face value, and during one interview with a cheeky Western press corps, she had even let her hair down when it was suggested that the corn braid was a hairpiece. She had made her fortune in the energy sector back in the 1990s, then joined the political arena during the Orange Revolution of 2004 that saw off the Russian-backed candidate in favour of the current, Western-looking president.

But now, in 2010, she stood against both the failed president from those heady days, with whom she had once been linked, and the returned Russian-backed challenger, the eminence grise of the previous six years who had waited in the wings and was still supported by the Kremlin. Against both this Putinist would-be president and the current incumbent, Yulia Timoshenko’s credentials were immaculate. She was a highly successful businesswoman, she wore the badge of a democratic revolutionary from 2004, and on top of everything she was also a goddess—all this rolled into one. How could she possibly fail? Taras wondered. She’d get the western Ukrainian vote, yet it was looking bad for her in the country as a whole.

The apparition faded once more, like some ethereal being in a science fiction movie, and Taras looked at his watch: 11 P.M. He would wait another half an hour, though he was sure that Masha would not make an appearance now. She must have missed her connection.

A little too relaxed after six beers in a couple of hours, he idly glanced around the waves of throbbing bodies clad in Gucci, Prada, and other, hipper labels he was unfamiliar with.

Would he even notice Masha, if she did arrive? he wondered.

Taras looked towards the exit a few feet from his end of the bar and, for a moment, he, Taras Tur, was the only person in the Golden Fleece who felt a wave of impending doom. It washed over him suddenly and unexpectedly. What was it that he’d seen? Nothing. It was, he realised, something he hadn’t seen and that should have been there. The four thugs on the door who picked out the prettiest girls and the richest, cutest boys had disappeared. All four of them. That was impossible. He looked at his watch a second time: 11:20 P.M. And he decided that now he would go. Something was wrong. That was what his mind was telling him loud and clear.

But he swigged from the bottle another time—finish it, why not?—and tried to collect his thoughts. Then he glanced towards the door again in the hope that his unexplained fear would be placated. But the thugs were still not there.

At that moment he went deaf and began to lift into the air. Or maybe it was a second later. Maybe he heard the roar of such extraordinary ferocity it could be heard a mile away—in any case, maybe he heard it for just the split second before it deafened him. He could never quite tell later whether he’d heard it or not. Maybe he saw the ball of flame and the sheets of glass and jagged metal struts that erupted through the dance floor and shot forty feet into the air, first licking up into the cages where the beautifully clipped golden crotches writhed, and then engulfing them completely. Or maybe the blindness, like the deafness, overtook him at once. Again, later, he could never quite tell. But for another split second nothing seemed to happen. The moment froze. And then, movement and sensation returned like a film reel freed from some obstruction in the projector, and he found himself being hurled upwards at great speed, and at the same time blasted backwards by some horrific force, then smashed over the aluminium bar and finally dumped down on its other side with an agonising thud behind a massive refrigerator. Then the refrigerator seemed to explode upwards and disappeared, the bar that protected him caving in completely and seeming to dematerialise, simply vanishing into nothing.

Visions of hell began to swim through all this blindness. A hell beyond anything he had ever experienced. Body parts—that was what the newsmen always called them, using the antiseptic language of the hospital. But amid the crash of falling beams, the explosions of glass, the roar of flame and high explosive, and the screams of people, what he saw was nothing so antiseptic as “body parts,” but severed limbs, ripped chunks of bodies, torched feet and hands freed from their usual places, flaming torsos, flesh-stripped skulls, and, once, a severed head that flew with such force from the direction of where the dance floor had once been that the force of it killed the lone, standing barman stone dead.

As the post-blast furnace began to cook, then melt the club and its occupants, Taras crawled out from behind where the fridge had once been. He felt air on his face—the exit—and began to drag himself blindly towards it. One side of his face was hanging off, he thought. But he carried on, smoke choking his lungs, the heat scorching his back. He’d never get past feis kontrol looking like this, he thought dimly. He reached a once-red velvet curtain that swayed from a collapsed rail, and he felt the roar of angry flame behind him reaching, like him, for the air in the street. A siren in the distance, screams subsiding, new screams beginning, the roar of fire, the fizzes and bangs of cracked pipes, the tearing sounds of structural wreckage—they all swam through his fractured consciousness as he gained first the lobby, then the outer entrance, then an open door and the pavement. Still he crawled. He saw feet around him, feet in heavy fire boots and thankfully attached to legs, and then he saw fire hoses. He dimly glimpsed flashing lights—blue, orange—and he heard shouting, before he slumped finally against a wall and felt a hand place an oxygen mask over his mouth.

He lay, dazed, leaning half to the left against the wall, like a drunk. He felt burned, torn, fractured, frozen—all at once. Terror, he thought, that was what we call a terror attack. Terror, the crasher at the party, the vengeful handmaiden of a modern election. But whose terror? he wondered through the haze of his shattered mind and through the smoke that poured from a hole in the wall to his left. The Russians? Or was it factional, a Ukrainian terror? Or perhaps terror committed by one of the mafias on either side, Russian or Ukrainian? Who knew? And did it matter? Terror was just terror, wasn’t it? Terror terrorised as much by its anonymity as by the exploding bodies that resulted from it. Now, it seemed, it was always terror, the only game in town. Terror that stalked democracy as if both had a compulsive need of each other; terror, against which, in the twenty-first century, freedom was now defined. The alternative to freedom was no longer confinement, it was terror. But terror was also freedom’s corollary. They had joined the same coin, were stamped at the same mint, and apparently were now the world’s only means of barter.

And then he rose from the pavement and found that the pools of blood surrounding him weren’t his own. He walked unsteadily away from the club, declining offers of help and removing the oxygen mask. Thank God Masha hadn’t arrived.