Moskva (45 page)

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Authors: Jack Grimwood

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‘Do I want to know who was behind it?’

‘Probably not. Most of those implicated are dead.’

‘Ever meet someone called Kyukov?’

‘I killed him.’

Tom felt rather than saw Sir Edward glance at his daughter.

‘I owe you,’ the ambassador said.

Alex finally stepped back from her mother, and as Tom and Sir Edward watched, Lady Anna reached up to caress Alex’s face. Sir Edward sighed. ‘I’m going to have to let her go to that bloody school, aren’t I?’

He grimaced.

‘Well, aren’t I?’

Sveta smiled as Tom climbed back into the Zil.

He had said his goodbyes to Alex’s parents and received a firm shake from her father, a silently mouthed
Thank you
from her mother. Now it was done, he’d cross the city for his flight to London. There were things he needed to say to Caro.

The kind of things a man needs to say to a woman face to face. He wanted Caro to be able to see his eyes when he asked her for another go. His Aeroflot flight left from Sheremetyevo in an hour but he imagined they’d hold it for him if he hit traffic. Except that he wouldn’t hit traffic. This was Moscow, and the Zil had its own bit of road.

Right down the middle.

Acknowledgements

Moskva
is fiction and it goes without saying that no one in this book existed, except for the ones who did.

Thanks go to Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown for fixing the deal. To my editor at Penguin, Rowland White, for his sharp editorial eye and remorseless insistence that
if we just did …
(and endless cups of coffee). To Emad Akhtar, also at Penguin, for making a few but highly pertinent suggestions. My copy-editor, Emma Horton, who tweaked and trimmed and added
that
s, and stamped ruthlessly on repetition.

I owe a research debt to Antony Beevor’s
Stalingrad
and
Berlin
, and Keith Lowe’s
Savage Continent
, and an even bigger debt to Vasily Grossman’s
Life and Fate
, which
Le Monde
called ‘the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century’. (They probably forgot Bulgakov’s
Master and Margarita
.)

I’d like to tip my hat to Grigori Chukhrai’s 1959
Ballad of a Soldier
,
made during the Khrushchev thaw. It won the Special Jury prize at Cannes in 1960, the same year that
La Dolce Vita
took the Palme d’Or: a perfect counterpoint of East and West. A tip of the hat also to those who shared their memories of living or working in 1980s Moscow. Tom Fox is an amalgam of two or three people.

You know who you are.

Finally, love and thanks to Sam Baker, my partner, who was writing her own novel and wrestling with setting up a company while I was off, holed up in garrets and hammering away at a laptop. Here’s to still hanging round ley lines littered with sites of slaughter and canonization. I’m glad.
Kisses for Mayakovsky
is included for you.