Dead Centre

she wanted to sell the house, she could do what the fuck she wanted with the proceeds.

She wrote back. She was really happy to have an address for me at last, and told me thanks, but no thanks. Her mum had died six months earlier and she’d finally taken my advice and got a job as a nanny in the South of France. She’d met a man. A Ukrainian guy called Frank. It didn’t strike me as the commonest name for a Ukrainian, but that was beside the point. Tracy was in love. She’d sold the house and moved to be with him.

There was no return address, just thanks for all I had done. She told me life was wonderful, and how much she wished she’d taken my advice earlier.

I felt happy for her, but the last paragraph choked me up. She thanked me for all I’d done for Mong. I’d been a true friend to him, she said. I’d always watched his back. And she would always be my friend, too. Mong would have wanted it that way.

I was cleaning the barrel a bit too vigorously. I felt the same way I had the first time I’d read the letter. That she wouldn’t have had to go through all this shit if Mong was still alive. And he would have been, if I’d stood firm about him not going to help BB.

6

Two brits I’d seen there a couple of times before came into the coffee shop and ordered espressos. They reminded me of the comedians Mitchell and Webb. Their accents were almost posh, the sort estate agents might develop after a few years’ running around in designer Minis selling overpriced properties to Sloanes or the Notting Hill mob.

Their hair was well cut but over-gelled, and they were cleanshaven. They wore Armani jeans and shirts, with rugby-ball cufflinks. You saw a lot of guys like them around town, with money to burn and plenty of drop-dead beautiful Svetlanas and Nadias happy to help them — for a suitable fee. These were sex-pats. They’d be down here later tonight, no doubt, watching the women who danced in cages, and buying shots from the ones wearing bikinis and vodka bottles slung in hip-holsters.

The ex-pat women didn’t get left out. There were plenty of Russian men looking to provide the same service. This was an equal-opportunities town.

Companies that sent staff to dangerous places showered them with incentives. Forget bankers’ bonuses. On top of their monster salaries, these guys got free rent, foreign service premiums, and cost-of-living allowances. No wonder money lost its meaning for them. After a thousand-dollar dinner at the Cafe Pushkin, they went to clubs like Gunslingers and ordered vodka tonics at thirty dollars a time. Then they’d select their sofas and wait for the girls to come say hi. Behind each was a private room. The menu on the table — in Russian, Japanese and English — helped you budget for what happened in there: Intercourse 30 minutes: $500.

Then they all turned up at their banks and law firms the next morning after about half an hour’s sleep. By lunchtime they’d be having the first one of the day in the company bar or snorting a line of coke on their desk to steady their nerves.

Anna had a word for their disease: anomie. ‘It means a breakdown of social norms or values, Nicholas. Distance from home puts personal values out of mind.’

It was just the kind of thing her favourite Russian authors banged on about. My new best mate Fyodor Dostoevsky certainly went for it in Crime and Punishment. The main character was trying to justify murder by saying it was not people he was killing but a principle.

Good luck to them. Why not? It didn’t bother me. I just got on with my own life and let those jokers get on with theirs.

Mitchell, the well-fed one with the side parting, turned to me. ‘You’re a Brit, aren’t you?’

I looked up from reassembling the weapon. ‘Yep.’

‘We are too.’

He pointed at the Glock. ‘We like them. That your own?’

I nodded.

‘I’ve seen you shoot a couple of times. We’re thinking of joining, buying some Glocks, having some fun.’

Webb, taller, with dirty-blond hair, was concentrating on the TV. RT ran the intro to the ten o’clock news.

‘Yeah, that’d be good.’

‘What do you do with the gun? Do you have it locked up at home, or is it better to leave them here? Is it a drama carrying a pistol across town?’

The RT announcer was a very bland-looking guy with thinning hair and rimless glasses. The headlines kicked off with Libya. Anna would be on soon. Gaddafi had launched his first bombing raids on Benghazi. The West had called for a no-fly zone and Russia was sitting back and laughing at it all.

‘I just leave mine here, mate. I don’t need it at home. And I don’t want it burning a hole in my pocket.’

I glanced at the screen above his head. Anna was gobbing off into her mike, with crowds of chanting Libyans around her.

Mitchell got the hint and went back to his showbiz partner, who was now watching Mong get even more pissed off with the Germans. They were larging it in front of an increasingly long queue of tourists waiting their turn.

7

Anna looked as good as ever. The water in Benghazi must have been back on. The last email I’d got from her, the day before yesterday, told me the water had been cut off and she hadn’t washed her hair for a week. Her two-minute piece was done. I’d watch the full-length version when it came on later. The three o’clock news was more in-depth.

I zipped my Glock back into its case and handed it in to the armoury. I didn’t bother saying goodbye to my new showbiz mates. I got my coat and headed outside into –8 °C.

The Russian media took the piss out of the UK continuously for grinding to a halt at the first hint of a snowflake. Moscow hadn’t seen a winter like this one for well over forty years, but it was still functioning. The mayor had gripped the situation. He’d raised an army of six thousand street cleaners.

The city was covered with gloomy grey and black slush but nowhere was impassable. Ladas and Mercedes spun a bit and people slid, but it was business as normal. There was very little grumbling about it. Some people just forgot about their cars until spring. They took the Metro, the same as I did.

The only problem was ice falling from rooftops. Two kids had been seriously injured yesterday. In St Petersburg, the roofs of a hospital and a hypermarket had collapsed under the weight of snow. They’d probably been built in the 1980s when Putin was mayor and subbing jobs out to the Mafia.

Unless there was an icicle with my name on it, I was weatherproof. I wore a North Face parka with a huge hood well and truly done up. I looked out at the world through a little circle of fur a few inches in front of my face. The hood was so big it didn’t move when I turned my head. I looked like Kenny out of South Park. On my feet I had a pair of Dubarrys, the Gore-Tex and leather boots that were all the rage in this city. They looked like posh wellies. Anna had bought me a pair as a present for my first winter here.

According to the mayor, this was going to be the last time the city ever suffered from snow. The grey stuff reflected badly on its image, and he was going to do something about it. This boy had more money at his disposal than many a nation’s GDP. He probably spent more in a day than Boris did in a year.

He’d decided to ban snow from the city. He was going to invest in the same cloud-sealing programme the city rolled out on all the major holidays to ensure the citizens of Moscow didn’t get rained on. When had it ever rained on a May Day parade? Never. The city paid for jets to get up there and spray silver iodine into any clouds heading Moscow’s way so they’d dump their rain upwind well before it could spoil things in Red Square. I wouldn’t be needing the Dubarrys next May Day.

Alongside the biggest collection of billionaires on earth there was a massive migrant population, as well as