The Oktober Projekt Read Free Page A

spluttering with age. He
came out on a bare landing never quite finished. Somewhere above him he heard
footsteps clatter in the gloom, hollow and unwanted. Starting on the next
flight Nick came across two drunks blocking his way, sitting shoulder to
shoulder. In their thirties, both reeked of cheap vodka, both reluctantly
leaning apart to let him pass, the heavier set drunk spitting in disgust, his
comrade challenging Nick with a drunk’s mean stare. Nick moved on to the sound
of babies screaming, and the stunted music of mass entertainment echoing round
dull halls.
    The name was the same as he’d read down in the lobby, Evgeniya
Vrangelya. Written at speed in loose unsteady characters on a yellow sliver of
card, jammed carelessly into a slot beside the ninth door along. He pressed the
bell once, then twice in quick succession and followed this up by hammering on
the faded panel door.
    She opened the door in a single movement framed in its shadow,
a silk wrap creased with its newness hardly covering her. Evgeniya stood with
her hands punched onto her hips, her nose flaring and her lips parted in a
hiss. Nick, his Russian firm, announced that he had a taxi waiting. She nodded
and he followed her in, into a darkened passage with a hard polished floor, the
odour of cooking lapping against perfume worn for the day. He kicked the door
closed, grabbed her forearm and dragged her into the middle of the room.  
    ‘Where is he?’ He had to shout over the television and
radio.  
    She stood square to him, defiant, rubbing her arms, a gauche
face lifted up to him burning with hate. The silk wrap strayed open but she
made no attempt to cover her small rounded breasts. Her eyes signalled a determined
resoluteness, moist and swollen by tears she refused to release. Plain, without
make-up, Nick put her in her late-thirties and she mocked him with taught brown
eyes. Evgeniya Vrangelya lifted her hands and dropped them, too weighty to
support. She had a shoulder-length bob parted on the right, and from its wild
strands Nick guessed she hadn’t long been out of bed.   Her lips and nose
somehow looked a touch too big for her face, giving her a sense of severity.
Around her neck she wore a cross and a medallion on heavy gold chains.
Belatedly she clutched at the silk to cover her breasts.
    ‘I’m leaving…right now,’ shouted Nick.
    Vrangelya inspected him slowly, judging him critically as
neither handsome nor ugly. A clean scar over the right eye prompted her to think
of a fighter for some reason. Out of a childhood game grown to a habit, she
classed people according to the respect they deserved. She took two uncertain
steps back, crossing aimlessly to the window, terribly pale against the night.
    A door opened and a short, thin figure emerged.
    ‘I am Lubov,’ he announced, taking in the scene.
    Christ, thought Nick this is all I need, Foula over the edge
and an agent who gives me his surname. Vasily Lubov stepped forward to meet
them, his small face cluttered by wire-rimmed spectacles and an old-style
walrus moustache. He’s an accountant or a bookkeeper of some sort, Nick decided
as Lubov proudly squeezed between an upright piano and a walnut bureau loaded
down with sheet music. In a tight awkward walk, conscious of his clothes, Lubov
seemed as though he’d got himself a new skin that needed to be broken in.
    A loose lick of hair refused to stay in place and Lubov brushed
it back onto his forehead with practised ease. There was a frailness about him;
an inward acceptance that his life thus far had been marked by failures, of
which he had a considerable list. At Vrangelya’s side he stood a good seven
inches shorter than his mistress and he gripped her hand for support, but this
only emphasised the disparity and he stepped forward out of embarrassment or
chivalric honour.
    ‘I have decided to defect,’ he said in a bold declaration.
    A hundred things happened in Nick’s head at that moment and all
of them were mirrored by