A Darker Place Read Free Page A

she said, “What about you?”
    “Good heavens, no. The occasional relationship, but it never lasts. I’m a very difficult man, but then, I’ve had a difficult life. You know about me?”
    “A bit. Your aunt raised you, right?”
    “Svetlana was everything. I loved her dearly, but life in Moscow under Communism was difficult. When I was seventeen, she got a chance to travel with a theater group to London—she was an actress—and she met a professor named Patrick Kelly, a good man. For once she had found something for herself, so she refused to return to Moscow, stayed in London and married him.”
    “How was it you managed to join her?”
    “That was my father. As a KGB colonel, he had influence. He arranged for me to visit Svetlana, hoping she’d change her mind.”
    “And your sister?”
    “Tania was at high school and only fifteen. She’d never been close to Svetlana, and so she stayed with my father. There were servants, a couple living in my father’s house, to care for her.”
    “And where did the London School of Economics come in?”
    He grinned, looking different, like a boy. “I always had a love of books and literature, so I didn’t need to study it. I found a new world at the LSE. Svetlana and Kelly had a wonderful Victorian house in Belsize Park, and they felt I should fill my time for a few months, so I took courses. Sociology, psychology, philosophy. The months stretched out.”
    “Two years. What made you return to Moscow?”
    “News from home, bad news. Over fifty-five thousand dead in Afghanistan. Too many body bags. Brokenhearted mothers revolting in the streets. Student groups fighting with the police. Tania was only seventeen, but up to her neck in it. Pitched battles, riot police, many casualties.” He paused, his face bleak. “And Tania among them.”
    Her response was so instinctive as to be almost banal. She put a hand on his. “I’m so sorry.”
    “I returned at once. A waste of time, of course—it was all over. Just a headstone in Minsky Park Military Cemetery. My father used his influence to make things look respectable. She was already dead when he’d got in touch with me in London, so he’d trapped me into returning. I got my revenge on him when I went downtown and joined the paratroopers. He was stuck with that. To pull me out would have looked bad in Communist Party circles.”
    “Then what?”
    “If you’ve read the opening chapters of On the Death of Men, you already know. There was no time to learn how to jump out of a plane with a parachute. I got three months’ basic training, then I was off to Afghanistan. It was ’eighty-nine, the year everything fell apart, the year we scrambled to get out, and lucky to make it.”
    “It must have been hell.”
    “Something like that, only we didn’t appreciate that Chechnya was to come. Two years of that, and that was just the first war.”
    There was a long pause, and he poured another vodka with a steady hand. She said, “What now—what next?”
    “I’m not sure. Only a handful of writers can achieve great success, and any writer lucky enough to write the special book will tell you the most urgent question is whether you can do it again or it was just some gigantic fluke.”
    “But you answered that question for yourself with Moscow Nights .”
    “I suppose, but . . . I don’t know. I just feel so . . . claustrophobic now. Hemmed in by my minders.”
    She laughed. “You mean the bear-on-the-chain thing? Surely that’s up to you. When Svetlana cast off her chains and refused to return to Moscow, she had to defect. But things are different now. The Russian Federation is not dominated by Communism any longer.”
    “No, but it is dominated by Vladimir Putin. I am just as controlled as I would have been in the old days. I travel in a jet provided by the Ministry of Arts. I am in the hands of GRU minders wherever I go. I don’t even handle my own passport. They would never let me go willingly.”
    “A terrible