Skirting the inevitable tower leg, he headed for the main door of one of the buildings. He stopped and checked the stenciling, gave me the thumbs up, then turned back toward the Lada to lock up. I got out and waited.
The loud, constant noise of machinery came from behind the wall as I entered a very cold, dimly lit hallway, so narrow I could easily have put my arms out and touched both walls. It stank of boiled cabbage.
Tiles were missing from the floor and the walls were painted blue, apart from the places where big chunks of plaster had fallen to the ground. Nobody had bothered to sweep them up. The apartment doors, which were one- piece sheet metal with three locks and a spy hole, looked so low that you'd have to stoop when entering.
We waited for the elevator by rows of wooden mailboxes. Most of the doors had been ripped from their hinges and the others were just left open. I'd have felt more comfortable walking into a South American jail.
The wall by the elevator was covered with a mass of hand painted instructions, all in Russian. It gave me something to look at while we listened to the motor groaning inside the shaft.
The machinery stopped with a loud shudder and the doors opened. We entered an aluminum box, its paneling dented everywhere it was possible for boots to have connected. It reeked of urine. Eight hit the button for the fourth floor and we lurched upward, the elevator stopping suddenly every few feet, then starting again, as if it had forgotten where to go. Eventually we reached the fourth floor and the doors opened into semidarkness. I let him step out ahead of me. Turning left, Eight stumbled, and as I followed I found out why: a young kid was curled up on the floor.
As the doors slammed shut again, cutting out even more of the dim light, I bent down to examine his small body, bulked out by two or three badly knitted sweaters. By his head lay two empty chip bags, and thick, dried snot hung from his nostrils to his mouth. He was breathing and he wasn't bleeding, but even in the feeble light from the ceiling bulb it was obvious that he was in shit state. Zits covered the area around his mouth and saliva dribbled from his lips. He was about the same age as Kelly; I suddenly thought of her and felt a surge of emotion. As long as I was around she would never be exposed to this kind of shit. As long as I was around? I could see the expression on Dr. Hughes' face.
Eight looked down at the boy with total disinterest. He kicked the bags, turned away, and carried on walking. I dragged the local glue head out of the way of the elevator and followed.
We turned left along a hall, Eight singing some Russian rap song and pulling a string of keys from his jacket. Reaching the door right at the end, he messed about, trying to work out which key went where until finally it opened, then groping for the light switch.
The room we entered definitely wasn't the source of the boiled cabbage stench. I could smell the heavy odor of wooden crates and gun oil; I would have known that smell anywhere. Proust's friend's childhood might have rushed back to him when he caught a whiff of madeleine cakes; this one took me straight back to the age of sixteen and the very first day I joined the army as a boy soldier in '76. Cakes would have been better.
The inevitable single bulb lit up a very small hall, no more than a couple of feet square. There were two doors leading off; Eight went through the one on the left and I followed, closing the front door behind me and throwing all the locks. Only one of the four bulbs worked in the ceiling cluster that any 1960s family would have been proud of. The small room was stacked with wooden crates, waxed cardboard boxes, and loose explosive ordnance, all stenciled with Cyrillic script. The whole lot looked very Chad-Chad that was dangerously past its use-by date.
Nearest to me was a stack of brown wooden crates with rope handles.
Lifting the lid off the top one, I recognized the dull green bedpan shapes at once. Eight, grinning from ear to ear, made the noise of an explosion, his hands flying everywhere. He seemed to know they were land mines too. 'See, my man, I get what you want. Guarantee of satisfaction, yes?'
I just nodded as I looked around some more. Piles of other kit lay wrapped in brown military wax paper. Elsewhere, damp cardboard boxes stacked on top of each other had collapsed, spilling their contents onto the floorboards. Lying in a corner were half a dozen electric detonators, aluminum tubes about the size of a quarter- smoked cigarette with two eighteen-inch silver wire leads coming out of one end. The silver leads were loose, not twisted together, which was frightening stuff: it meant they were ready to act as antennae for any stray extraneous electricity-a radio wave, say, or energy from a mobile phone-to set them off and probably all the rest of the shit in there, too. This place was a nightmare. It seemed the Russians hadn't been too fussed about where this kind of stuff ended up in the early nineties.
Picking up the detonators one by one, I twisted the leads together to close the circuit, then checked out the rest of the kit, ripping open cardboard boxes. Eight did the same, either to make me think he knew what he was doing or just out of curiosity. I gripped his arm and shook my head, not wanting him to play with anything. It would be nice to get out of here with all my bits and without him losing any more fingers.
He looked hurt, so once I'd finished sorting the dets out and had stored them in an empty ammo box, I pulled out the policy to give him something to do. 'What does this say, Vorsim?' I presumed he could read his own language.
As he moved under the light, I spotted some dark-green det cord. It wasn't in its handy 200-yard reel as I would have liked; there seemed to be two yards here, another ten yards there, but then I saw a partly used reel with maybe eighty or ninety yards left, which would certainly do the trick.
I put the reel of det cord to one side and went to check the other rooms. That was easy enough because each was about the size of a broom closet; there was a tiny kitchen-cum-bathroom cum-toilet arrangement and a bedroom that was even smaller. What I was looking for was plastic explosive, but there wasn't any. The only PE around here was in the antitank mines, and there were certainly enough of those to give me P for Plenty.
I returned to the main room and lifted one of them from the open box.
These were either TM 40s or 46s, I could never remember which was which; all I knew was that one was made of metal and the other of plastic. These ones were metal, about a foot in diameter and weighed around twenty pounds, of which over twelve pounds was PE. They were shaped like old-fashioned brass bed warmers, the sort that hang on stone fireplaces, alongside the horse brasses, in country inns. Instead of the long broomstick, these things had a swiveling carry handle, like on the side of a mess tin.
It was going to be a pain in the ass to get the PE out of these things, but what was I expecting?
Placing the mine on the bare floorboards, I tried to unscrew the cap, which was in the center of the top. Before laying it, all you had to do was replace the cap with a detonation device-normally a fuse and detonator combination-then stand well back and wait for a tank.
When it eventually started to move, shifting the years of grime that had formed a seal, I knew at once that it was really old ordnance. The smell of marzipan hit my nostrils. The greenish explosive had become obsolete in recent years. It still worked, it did the job, but the nitroglycerine fucked up not only armor, but also the head and skin of anyone preparing it. You were guaranteed a fearsome headache if you worked with it in a confined space and extreme pain if you got it on a cut. I was taking enough aspirin already without having to deal with that.
Eight sparked up. 'Hey, Nikolai, this paper is really cool.'
'What does it say?'
'First of all, his name is Ignaty. Then it says, you are his man.
Whatever you need must be yours. He protects you, my man.' He looked at me. 'It gets heavy. It says, 'If you do not help my friend, I will kill your wife; and then, after you have been crying for two weeks, I will kill your children. Two weeks after that, I will kill you.'
That's heavy shit, my man.'
'Who is Ignaty?'
He gave a shrug. 'He's your guy, am I right?'
No he wasn't, he was Val's. The card players had certainly recognized the name, that was for sure. I took the policy from Eight's hands and put it back in my jacket pocket. Now I knew what Liv meant about Tom receiving the kind of threat that made the Brits look a bit weak by comparison. No wonder he'd kept his mouth shut and just done his time.
Between us we carried several boxes down to the car, passing the kid still lying where I'd left him. On the last trip down, Eight locked up the apartment and we stood by the Lada with the hum and groan of the factory in the background. He was going to walk from there as he wanted to go and see a friend.
I said goodbye, feeling more than a bit sorry for him. Like everything else in this place, he, too, was just fucked over.
'Thanks a lot, mate, and I'll bring the car back in about two days.'
