The Oktober Projekt Read Free

his
leather jacket.
    ‘If things should… you know… if…’
    ‘I’m compromised, rounded up,’ said Nick, finishing for Foula.
‘You don’t wait, you go for the fallback and the escape route.’ Nick hooked a
crumpled packet of Capitals from his pocket. Three cigarettes on a loose bed of
tobacco that would have to last him back over the border. He lit another as two
cars slowly passed them, driving slowly down a road built for taking tanks
abreast, their headlights playing along the shabby concrete, hard searchlights
seeking a living target. Nick watched them drive by the family, no slowing
down, no sign from the pavement. Then that would have been too unprofessional
he decided.
    ‘I’m sorry, I really am…’ Foula started, his voice wavering. ‘I
… I’ve been out of the field too long.’
    ‘Listen to me Alistair,’ Nick urged him, shaking Foula by the
shoulder. ‘I’ll get us home, but you have to help.’
    Beside him, Foula stared at Nick, his blank eyes barely able to
focus. ‘Don’t leave me, you promise, you won’t leave me behind,’ Foula pleaded,
his request drifting out of the window along with the smoke from Nick’s
cigarette. Nick tasted the sourness of the Latvian brand stick to his tongue.    
    ‘No, I won’t leave you,’ Nick assured him. ‘What’s the
approach?’
    ‘Approach?’
    ‘The entry to make the collection, what was agreed?’
    As though speaking on behalf of someone else, Foula uttered
numbly, ‘You tell her you have a taxi waiting.’
    Giving his hands one last nourishing boost of warmth from the
car’s lacklustre heater, Nick was out beside the Gaz tucking up his collar and
crossing the road. The evening air hit him hard after the car’s heat. Pellets
of snow whirled in his face, dribbling down his neck past the collar on his
jacket. Pulling on his fur hat, its brim twisted for effect, Nick continued his
long walk aware of the isolation and the distance.
    Taking smart strides he headed towards a block as indistinct as
the next, tall and glistening against a sky tinted pink. A colour for the
mental scrapbook he was compiling; oddments, facts, memories: the outline of a
hill, the touch of sea on his skin, what normal people called sanity. All of it
amassed for a day when he’d outgrow this dangerous trade and stick to his Devon
cottage, where he’d pull all his collected trivia together in paint or words.
As he neared the block, he waited for the hand on his shoulder the rifle butt
in his back, but they never came. He saw them before even opening the stiff
doors, a gang of seven, four male and three female no older than nineteen.
Members of Nashi decided Nick, a youth
movement loyal to the Kremlin, or another splinter group of young fanatical
patriots. Sitting on a banquette its red leather ripped and scarred by knives
and cigarettes, they smoked impassively, assessing him as soon as he stepped
in.
    In one corner someone had dumped one of the old large silver
framed prams, this one minus its wheels; next to it lay a washing machine and
fridge, looking as if as they’d been rolled all the way down the stairs from
the top floor. Across from the gang, posters were taped across split green
tiles; scuffed, frayed at the edges from the passing of bodies. Monthly
communal committee edicts were hung in rows running at eye level to the lifts.
One of them advertised the residents’ committee, with a much abused Lefortovo
Administrative District logo in its top right corner.
    Along the bottom a list of absentees from the last meeting, the
names printed large by a neat official hand, the red ink already fading. He
scanned the list halting at the thirteenth name, matching the one supplied by
RUS/OPS. Unchanged and bold it confirmed the address and bid him welcome. As
Nick started up the stairs some of the gang glared at him, but none of them
made a move.  
    Steep and wide, the stairs were stale and in poor repair with
not enough air and too little light from strip lights