Page 75 of The Half Life of Valery K

The train was so crowded that people were standing up, but Shenkov had a KGB coat, so the seat beside him was empty. He found himself wishing someone would sit there.

When they did, he was surprised to see it was someone he knew. He hadn’t seen the man for years, but they’d been in the Komsomol together, working on the construction of the White Canal. Sergei was, a decade later, just the same; his red hair had faded to a fox colour, and there were more lines round his eyes than there should have been on a man of forty, but far from changing him, it just made him look as though someone had put a softer filter over him. Behind him, some of the other passengers were looking disgruntled. He’d actually had to nudge his way through. Shenkov had a surge of gratitude.

‘Konstantin,’ Sergei said. ‘How are you?’

Shenkov took a breath and tried to think of something, anything he could truthfully say in a packed train. I work for the KGB now; no, that was obvious; I miss the White Canal; no, because that would imply, to anyone listening – and there would be someone listening to him lately, given that he was up for promotion – that he wasn’t ecstatic in the KGB. Good; no, because that would be a lie. I’m married now; who the hell opened with that to a man? No, but people did – didn’t they? It seemed just as weird not to mention your own wife.

‘Yes,’ he said. He couldn’t find anything else, feeling stupid. ‘Yes.’

‘Yes,’ Sergei agreed, looking just as anxious as Shenkov felt. He unlooped his scarf and twisted it between his hands.

Shenkov swallowed. He wanted desperately to have a real conversation. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one. In his bones, desperate. Like he’d been feeling the symptoms for a long, long time, but they’d only just managed to put themselves together at the thinking level of his mind, he realised that something in him was going to break if he didn’t talk to someone soon. Talk, not just speak, especially after the shift just past, and the little girl, and the dog.

‘Mine’s the next stop,’ he lied.

‘Mine too,’ Sergei lied back.

The night at the police station had been typical. It had rained, and when Shenkov got inside, he had to peel off the uniform leather jacket to keep from dripping all over the carpet, which the ferocious cleaners took a lot of pride in. As he walked down the corridor, the Commissioner leaned out of the big office and gave him a sheet of paper.

‘Names, lots of names; normal drill, bugs in the phones and all that. And I want you to go in person to the raid on this house. Fellow’s quite senior in the Party, he’ll frighten the boys if we send them alone. We want his wife too. Both of their communication privileges are to be revoked.’

Shenkov looked up to check. It was what you said to relatives at the prison gates when you wanted them to go away: nope, sorry, your husband’s communication privileges have been revoked. That was to say, he had been shot in the courtyard. ‘He’s got kids, hasn’t he?’

‘Three. Usual drill, there.’

He arranged his face carefully. He hated it when they had to take children. If they had nice relatives, someone would usually find out which orphanage had them and take them in, but if not; he’d started, anonymously, a set of files that he sent out at weekends to charitable institutions frequented by Party ladies, about adopting children. Some of them, babies especially, were all right now, but mainly it didn’t work. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘How’s your wife, Shenkov?’ the Commissioner said brightly. ‘I was thinking of organising another big dinner so she could swear at us all some more.’

Shenkov had a familiar electric shock of fear. ‘She’s very well, sir, she’s started as a teacher for the Komsomol. Part-time while she finishes her doctorate.’

‘Oh, fabulous, fabulous. Difficult work, that, very difficult.’

Shenkov nodded. It was difficult. If you got it wrong and one of the kids reported something you’d said that wasn’t quite bang on key with current Marxist–Leninist theory, someone came along to revoke your communication privileges. But Anna was clever. The kids liked her, that was the important thing; people rarely informed on someone they liked. She would be fine. ‘Quite an honour, though, sir.’

‘Quite, quite,’ the Commissioner said. He always said everything twice. He thought about it and pressed one hand to his hair, which was oiled flat so solidly that all of it moved at once, stuck together, with a crackling sound. ‘Quite. Well, on you go.’

The raid was standard, and the Party man came to the door fully dressed at one in the morning with a bag packed, and so did his wife. It was unexpected passivity and Shenkov was relieved. Sometimes he was very much in the mood to take a baton to a senior Party member, but it was his fifth night shift in a row, and he was starting to get a sunlight-deprived headache. Once the man and his wife had been taken away in the van, Shenkov herded the three children together as gently as he could. The eldest didn’t want to leave the dog. It was a sweet little spaniel, biscuit-coloured.

‘But I don’t think we know anyone who could look after her,’ the girl said seriously. She hadn’t complained about being told to put some clothes in a bag, and get on her coat and shoes. Her parents must have told her what would happen.

‘You can’t take the dog to an orphanage,’ Shenkov said, as softly as he could in the hearing of the other officers. He glanced that way. They were doing a search of the study for anti-revolutionary material. If they heard him call her sweetheart, one of them would report him for sympathising with Enemies of the People. All the younger officers were desperate to get off grunt duty and into a warm office of the next job rung up, especially with winter on the way.

‘Could you look after her, then?’ she asked, reasonable as an adult. She was about eight.

He would have loved to. They already had a dog at home, a collie who loved everyone and whose favourite hobby was swishing her tail over the boots of any visiting colleagues of Shenkov’s. She could get up a brilliant shine.

‘No, I couldn’t,’ he said.

‘But she’ll starve!’

One of the younger officers had come to the study door, and now he was watching in the predatory way of someone cold who had smelled good coffee and a nice corner office, his for the taking if he could only elbow Shenkov out of it and into the Lubyanka. ‘Got some Tsarist material, comrade,’ he said, and waved a framed copy of a proclamation of serf emancipation signed by Tsar Alexander in 1872. There was a stupid piggy gleam in his eyes that gave away how he was hoping Shenkov would snort and tell him where to shove it, a marvellous excuse for arrest if ever there was one. Shenkov kept his expression still and only nodded. Dmitry, aged two and a quarter, had laid more sophisticated traps.

Shenkov shot the dog.

Everything was quiet after that. He drove the children to an orphanage – the same one, not separate ones like he was meant to – and then went back to the office in spitting snow. He went straight to the bathroom to scrub his hands, because after a raid he always felt like there was a film of something foul all over him. He had to stand there with his wrists under the hot water for a long time. He did this job because otherwise a psychopath would do it. If he didn’t, kids would go to separate orphanages, and there would be no files sent to charitable institutions, and the teenager who’d been arrested last week for yelling that Comrade Stalin was a pig would be dead, not given a cup of tea and sent home with a note in her pocket for her mum about making sure her teachers knew she’d got that awful medical condition where you couldn’t stop swearing.

Throwing your hands up at an organisation like the KGB was no way to solve anything. You had to join, and then you did as many good things as you could, until the evil was a little bit less. He believed that. Or, he had used to. The fact was that to a little girl whose parents had been taken away and whose dog had been shot, it didn’t matter if the person with the gun was a psychopath or someone who wanted to do good. Your dog was still dead.