‘Wait here,’ he whispered.

He disappeared and a moment later a match flared. His face leapt out of the night. He was lighting a gas lamp that hung from the ceiling, adjusting the slender chains that regulated the flow. She heard it hiss into life and an amber glow nudged into the room. She released her breath. The place was small with a bed, an armchair and a bedside table. Surprisingly a crucifix hung on the wall. But this space was all they needed.

He came to her, stood in front of her, his eyes dark and alive. Yet she knew him too well. In the uneasy set of his jaw and in the soft line of his mouth she could see the reflection of her own uncertainty. She took a breath and moved forward till her arms were entwined around his neck and his hands were on her back, holding her, caressing her, finding the reality of her under all the layers.

‘My own love,’ she murmured and lifted her mouth to his.

As his lips found hers, hard and possessive, she felt the fragile barriers between them shift. Heard the crack as they broke into a thousand pieces and she knew there would be no politeness.

38

The blindfold was removed from Alexei’s eyes. He blinked fiercely as his vision adjusted to the sudden light and he examined his surroundings. It was an underground wine store. The stone walls were lined with racks of bottles in all shapes and sizes, the air so dusty it caught in his throat.

‘Who is this?’

‘Why have you brought him to us, Igor?’

The questions came from the group of about twenty young men gathered in the room, each with his shirt open to the waist. Tattoos covered their naked chests, distinctive blue messages to the outside world, and above them were lean faces and sharp suspicious eyes. None of them smiled a welcome. Shit, this looked like a bad mistake.

‘Good evening, comrades,’ he said amiably. He nodded a greeting and tried to steer his gaze away from the tattoos, which wasn’t easy. ‘My name is Alexei Serov.’

He placed the sack he was carrying on the floor in front of them, where dust and cobwebs coated the black tiles. One of the men with a whispery voice and his hair oiled either side of a neat parting, stepped forward and untwisted the neck of the sack. He lifted out its contents. Immediately the tension in the air eased.

It had been an easy steal. Yet it had disgusted Alexei. Revolted him. But it was what Maksim Voshchinsky demanded, a show of his fidelity, a demonstration of his courage. A gift for the vory. He’d said yes immediately and gave himself no time to change his mind. That same evening he went out on the streets of Moscow to prove he was worthy of their trust, that he was as much a thief as they were and had no fear of State authority. He’d spent two hours roaming the back roads, searching out an opportunity with the same precision he had used to reconnoitre military manoeuvres. When the chance came, he took it without hesitation.

He’d moved out of the darkness of a narrow lane into a rectangle of light thrown from an open door, slipping silently into a stranger’s hallway. That’s all it took to turn him into a thief, to make that jump that crossed the boundaries of decent conduct and plunged him into the wrong side of the world. His hands had reached out as though they had been performing such acts for years and removed the carved clock from the wall, as well as a small pewter vase from a table. In and out of the house in less than a minute. Less time than it took to slit your own throat.

The man who lived in the house saw nothing. He was outside in the dark street roping pieces of furniture to a cart, a horse dozing between the shafts, and he had no idea he’d just been robbed. Why someone would be shifting furniture at this hour of the night Alexei chose not to enquire, but it served his purpose well. The eagerness with which he wrapped his spoils under his coat appalled him.

He wasn’t seen. Except by the short, dogged figure of Igor, who hovered somewhere hidden by the darkness. He had seen. He knew.


‘It’s a good clock,’ the man with the oiled hair announced, holding it up for the gathering to inspect.

It was a beautiful timepiece, old and beloved, judging by the patina of polish on its case, and Alexei felt guilt, raw and spiteful, take a great bite out of him.

‘It’s for the vory v zakone, the brotherhood of the thieves-in-law, ’ Alexei stated. ‘I offer it to this kodla for your obshchak, your communal fund.’

They nodded, pleased.

‘Was there a witness?’ one asked.

‘I bear witness,’ Igor said. He stood up in front of everybody, his eyes challenging any dissenters. ‘He stole like a professional.’

‘Good.’

‘But has he been in prison?’

‘Or in one of the labour camps? Has he been in Kolyma?’

‘Or worked the Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Canal?’

‘Who else speaks for him?’

Alexei spoke for himself. ‘Brotherhood of vory v zakone, I am a vor, a thief, like you, and I am here because Maksim Voshchinsky ordered me to be brought to this place tonight. He is sick and in bed but it is his word that speaks for me.’

‘There must be two who speak.’

‘I, Igor, speak for him. My word stands side by side with that of Maksim, our pakhan.’

So this was it. Dear God, he had become a vor. He still had much to prove before they fully accepted him as one of their own, but with Maksim behind him, he’d pushed open the door. He’d learned from his talk with Maksim that cells of vory criminals exactly like this one ranged throughout the length and breadth of Russia, especially in the prisons, all with the same strict code of allegiance and system of punishments. Some called them the Russian mafia, but in reality they were very different from that Italian organisation: they were not supposed to have a boss, the status of each member was meant to be equal and family connections were rejected. The brotherhood was the only family that mattered. Decisions were made and disputes settled by the skhodka, the vory court that was as all-powerful as it was ruthless. But the pakhan was nevertheless in a senior position and his word counted. Maksim was the pakhan.

Alexei prayed to God that Maksim’s name, even on his sickbed, was enough. Oddly, he felt no fear. He knew he should. He’d lied to them about having been in prison and their punishments were harsh. But these men reminded him too much of the young recruits he’d commanded in the army training camps in Japan, except that here they had banded into a criminal fraternity rather than a military one. They drew courage from each other as eagerly as the owner of this storeroom drew wine from the bottles. It flowed red and intoxicating. But as he studied their faces and their disfigured chests, he had a sense that these were damaged men. Both inside and out.

‘So where are the older men of the vory brotherhood?’ he’d asked Maksim.

‘In prison, of course. In the labour camps. That’s what the obshchak fund is for.’

‘Do you use it to get them out?’

‘Sometimes. But more often to supply our brothers with food or clothes and with roubles for bribes. You see, Alexei, a prison is a vor’s natural home, it’s where he rules. Most of our brotherhood lie behind bars because each prison sentence is a badge of pride and is marked by a new tattoo.’

‘That’s incomprehensible.’

Maksim had smiled, his eyes secretive. ‘To you maybe. Not to me.’

Alexei wondered what the hell was going on here. What was this man’s history and what crimes had he committed? As if Maksim could read his younger friend’s doubts, he rolled on to his side in the wide bed and carefully undid the buttons of his pyjama jacket. He peeled it back to reveal his chest. It was broad and powerful, ribs like a bull’s, with hairless tired skin.

Alexei had drawn in a breath. ‘Impressive.’

In the centre of Maksim’s chest was a lavish blue tattoo of a large and elaborate crucifix.

‘You see this?’ The older man had prodded a stern finger at the decoration that curved above it, hanging between his collar bones. ‘You see this crown? That’s to indicate I am the pakhan. The boss of our vory cell. Without me, they’d be nothing. What I say goes.’

He yanked up his other sleeve and Alexei leaned closer, fascinated. From shoulder to wrist, tattoos crowded over every scrap of skin. An onion-domed cathedral and gentle-faced Madonna were caught disturbingly in a tangle of barbed wire and a row of prison bars. On his biceps a death skull grinned and on his elbow a spider’s web had ensnared an eagle by its wings.

Maksim watched Alexei, saw the fire rising within him. ‘Each one has a meaning,’ he said in a soft seductive whisper. ‘Look at my tattoos and you look at my life. God placed a mark on the world’s first murderer before sending him into exile. The mark of Cain.’ He pulled down his sleeve and covered up his chest. ‘It branded its bearer as a criminal and a social outcast. Tell me, is that what you are, Alexei Serov? An outcast?’


The pain was not bad. But bad enough. The tattooist turned out to be a bald man with a smooth hairless face and a teardrop tattooed at the outer corner of one eye. He was an artist who enjoyed his job, smiling to himself as he prepared to work on Alexei’s chest, humming the same snatch of Beethoven’s Fifth over and over again.

Alexei lit a cigarette and hoped to God he wouldn’t get blood poisoning.

‘It happens sometimes,’ the tattooist grinned. ‘Some even die.’

Alexei blew smoke at him. ‘Not this time,’ he said as he unbuttoned his shirt.

‘No smoking, please.’

‘I’ll smoke if I choose.’

‘Nyet. Your chest must remain still as stone.’

‘Fuck!’ Alexei said and stubbed it out.

The men in the wine store laughed as they watched, enjoying his discomfort. One thief, a wiry twenty-year-old with a rash of pock craters on his cheeks, walked over to one of the wine racks and extracted a bottle. He wiped the dust off with his shirt sleeve and used the corkscrew on a chain by the door to remove the cork. He pushed the bottle at Alexei.

‘Here, malyutka, drink.’

‘Spasibo, it might make you lot look a bit prettier.’

The young man laughed. ‘What could be prettier than this, friend?’ He unlaced his boot, kicked it off and removed his sock. ‘Look, tovarishch. Is that pretty enough for you?’

It was a cat, covering the surface of his foot. A laughing cat’s face with striped fur and a large blue bow under its chin, a wide-brimmed hat on its head.

Alexei laughed. ‘And what does that one mean? That your feet smell like cats’ piss?’

The vor nudged the tattooist’s elbow and the needle cut deeper. Alexei didn’t wince but accepted the wine.

‘It means I’m sly.’ The vor narrowed his eyes. ‘Sly as a cat. I smell out rats.’

‘Hah, comrade, smell like a rat is what you-’

‘No talking!’ The needle was buzzing and stinging, busy as a wasp. ‘Keep still.’

The tattooist had designs on his knuckles, a mix of letters and numbers that meant nothing unless you knew the code. His breath smelled of beer, strong enough to make Alexei turn his face away. He let his eyes close and unexpected images came to him. It was the sharp burning point of the needle that summoned them, its stinging pain on his chest. He remembered another day with a similar pain, his final day in Leningrad when he was twelve. His mother, the Countess Serova, was whisking him away to China, away from the Bolshevik troubles, and Jens had come to say goodbye. He had shaken Alexei’s hand as if he were a grown man and asked him to take care of his mother. ‘I’m proud of you,’ Jens had said, and Alexei recalled now the sorrow in his green eyes, the sun burnishing his hair as he rode away on his horse and the crippling pain in his own chest. Not on the skin like this, but deep inside.

Lydia had once said to him, ‘The trouble with you, Alexei, is that you’re too damn arrogant.’

Look at me now, Lydia. No arrogance left, is there? Here I am in rags, at the mercy of a gang of thieves, my skin massacred in the midst of filth and unclean needles. Humble enough for you now? And if they find I’m lying about having been a prisoner at Trovitsk camp they will remove this brand of membership with acid. Or worse, with a knife.

‘Look at him.’ It was the whispery voice of the one with the hair oil. ‘He’s fallen asleep.’

‘Trying to show how tough he is.’

‘Too bored to stay awake.’

‘He’s an arrogant bastard. What the fuck does Maksim want with him?’

Alexei opened his eyes, stared directly at the faces and lifted the bottle to his lips. He took a long, drowning drink.