around the doorway leading from the Customs Hall. Crocker gave him a quick glance and ignored him.
‘Taxi? Taxi?’ called another.
And another.
Crocker shook his head slowly, not wanting to dislodge his schapka while at the same time willing these uninvited pests to disappear. His eyes searched for Oleg Ilyich Nikiforov, the company driver employed to ferry him around when he was in Moscow. After a long flight, the last thing Crocker felt like doing was bargaining with one of the many evil-looking villains who, calling themselves taxi drivers converged like vultures around the terminal’s main exit.
It was difficult to see through the stale, copper-tinted haze in the poorly lit hall, and he was about to become even more downcast when a quiet voice greeted him from behind.
‘Ullo, Mr Lee.’ The familiar greeting was all he craved at that moment. The tension growing within him disappeared instantly.
Oleg was a singularly unattractive, spindly man in his late forties wearing a knitted orange ski-hat topped with a floppy orange pom-pom. With widely spaced bulbous eyes, fixed grin and poor complexion, the driver resembled an overgrown, badly painted, bandy-legged garden gnome. But now those eyes were crinkled in a friendly welcome. He was clearly pleased to see the American, almost as pleased as Crocker was to see him. They shook hands warmly.
‘It’s good to see you, Oleg. Are you well?’
Oleg cleared his airway with a thick smoker’s cough.
‘As usual, Mr Lee.’
Good old reliable Oleg.
Crocker followed the driver out towards his car, at peace with the world again, at least for the moment.
The sky outside was pitch-black, and the change from the kerosene-saturated warmth of the terminal building to the bitter winter air outside seized Crocker by the throat. Of all the cities he visited in his work, Moscow could feel colder in January than anywhere else. It was not for the first time he was grateful for his thermal underwear. He prayed the drive into the city would be the final hurdle without any more surprises before he could settle down to some edible food, and then a good sleep.
Sinking into the rear seat of Oleg’s orange Lada, Crocker was aware that nothing in the car had changed since his last trip. The atmosphere of cheap perfumed disinfectant blended with stale Russian cigarette smoke, filled his lungs. The lucky-charm temptress still swung from the rear view mirror, her exotic Spanish-style paintwork still chipped on her nose, breasts and buttocks. The four windows were permanently shut, the interior handles having been stolen some months earlier to feed a growing market for Lada spares.
‘Keeps the warm in,’ Oleg had proclaimed when first asked about the closed windows. Crocker had decided there was no point in trying to argue with such practical Russian logic.
‘We were all so sorry to hear about your brother, Mr Lee,’ said Oleg, his face turned up to the roof of the car.
All the mystery and sadness surrounding his brother’s death, flooded back into Crocker’s consciousness from wherever it had been consigned by the unexpected police interrogation.
‘Thanks, Oleg. The shock still hasn’t worn off.
‘You were good friends?’
‘If you mean close, no. Not really.’
‘Yes, close.’
’I’m going to miss him, although we saw each other mainly through business. We didn’t socialize a great deal.’
‘I understand.’
‘He was some years older. A little wild when we were kids. Probably thought I was dull. But, hey; that’s enough about Paul. How’s your wife and boy?’
‘They are very happy, Mr Lee. Yes, very happy, thank you.’
The American stretched his six-feet-two-inch frame as far as the rear of the Lada would allow, and he pondered on his unexpected encounter at the airport; the round face, the dead eyes and the prominent ears coming back to him. Kolyunov? Kolyunov? He searched his memory once again for some forgotten connection no matter how tenuous, but still the name meant nothing to him. He wrote it down on the back of his air ticket, promising himself to check it out the next day at the office.
With his mind overloading with many varied topics, from conversations with his erstwhile live-in partner, Angie Powers, to recent events in Moscow, he decided coming here was fast becoming anathema to him.
What the hell do I want this for? I don’t need it.
He tried telling himself he was being irrational, probably because the incident with the police had rattled his nerves, and he was hungry and tired. But deep down, he didn’t believe it. Knowing himself as he did, he anticipated this police matter would prey on his mind until he had all the answers. He hated loose ends.
While the Lada continued along the bumpy, poorly lit roads of Moscow’s suburbia, in the darkness of the car, Crocker rummaged through his shoulder bag among the presents bought at the Duty Free. He dug out one of the large packs of Marlboros and dropped it onto the empty front seat.
‘Thank you, Mr Lee,’ acknowledged Oleg over his shoulder, his wide grin held for several seconds. Being embarrassed for distributing largess was a thing of the past for Crocker. It was on his first visit that he understood recipients were not interested in his personal or emotional upheaval when they were beneficiaries of unattainable presents from the West.
Driving in complete silence, neither Oleg nor Crocker noticed the dipped lights of the large saloon car maintaining a constant distance behind.
3
It had taken the best part of an hour in softly falling snow for the Lada to reach Gorky Street where it pulled up gently in front of the Intourist Hotel. Crocker made his way through the miserable clutch of crudely made-up prostitutes, black market traders and unshaven taxi-drivers, clustered together in the snow around the hotel’s portico. He didn’t find it pleasant being propositioned by any of this gathering, especially the hookers, whose make-up reminded him of a second-rate waxworks he’d once visited as a youngster with his parents back home in Connecticut. He collected his resident’s identity card at the crowded reception desk and took the elevator to the fourth floor where dust and the day’s cigarette smoke were searching for nonexistent open windows. A tall brunette in a tight white coat exchanged his card for a room key.
Crocker had learnt a golden rule from his late brother: he routinely checked out the phone on entering a hotel room for the first time. If it were dead, he would change rooms, but today the apple green phone perched on the large television set by the window was in working order.
He let himself drop fully clothed onto the nearest of the two single beds and closed his eyes.
With the volume turned up fully on his small tape machine, he could hear his choice of music playing above the din of the shower. La Boheme instantly put him in a good mood. Music had been a passion ever since he’d learned to play the piano as a boy and often felt grateful to his mother for insisting he continue lessons, unlike brother Paul, who had found any excuse for skipping class to play ball. Crocker had led the college jazz group on harmonica, and as a late teenager, played piano at night in some of
