Ratcatcher - By Tim Stevens Page 0,10

exquisitely preserved uniform, the heft of the medals when he lifted them out of their box.

He sat in his study, tea at his elbow – he didn’t drink, was opposed to all intoxicants – and awaited Dobrynin’s phone call, the final confirmation that tomorrow was to go ahead. Gazing at the photographs arrayed on his desk and on the walls, he allowed his thoughts to wander.

His grandfather, his dedushka, Vasily Petrovich, had fallen in the Narva Offensive in the late winter of 1944, fighting with the Soviet Second Shock Army to liberate Estonia from the fascists and from its own collaborationist government. As the widow of a war hero his grandmother had been permitted to settle in Estonia after the war with her young son, Venedikt’s father. She had embraced it as her homeland, as had her son and his.

From Vasily Petrovich, a hero whom he had never met, Venedikt had learned respect. Respect for one’s people, and one’s country, that was so unbending one would lay down one’s life to keep it alive. It was because of an understanding of the value of respect that Venedikt had, after his national service, decided to join the Estonian defence forces. He had served the Ground Force, the Maavägi, with distinction, rising to the rank of ensign. In August 1991 Estonia declared its independence from the Soviet Union, and announced that neither people who had settled in the country after 1940 nor their descendants had any automatic right to citizenship.

He was twenty-seven years old, young enough for the betrayal to be his first. It burned him.

Venedikt had been brought up speaking Russian, as had his parents. He could get by in Estonian but was not fluent enough to have a hope of passing the strict new naturalisation exam. Languages were not his strong point and the chances of his mastering the second tongue did not seem high. As such, he could remain a resident of the country, could continue his career in the armed forces, but was not permitted to vote in national elections. He was effectively stateless.

His career hit a glass ceiling or, as a fellow ethnic Russian junior officer put it, he “got drowned in the river of piss from above”. He failed to progress to junior lieutenant level while younger, less experienced men – native Estonians, of course – soared past him. Bright young professionals began the gentrification of Tallinn, pushing up property prices and forcing Venedikt and his parents into increasingly ghetto-like quarters on the outskirts.

In August 1994 the last Russian troops left the country. Venedikt stood in his uniform by the side of the road out of Paldiski, the barracks town west of Tallinn, and watched the military vehicles roll past. The crowds were sparse. Slow applause broke out, and went on for several minutes before Venedikt understood it was mocking in nature. Then the jeering began, a counterpoint to the clapping.

A young man next to Venedikt, a student of some sort, boozy-eyed and stinking, yelled, ‘Vene sead.’ Russian pigs. Venedikt was not aware of his elbow jabbing into the boy’s face, or the blows after that, but it didn’t matter because the whole process was laid out in detail, injury by injury, in the courtroom. Venedikt received eighteen months in prison, of which he served eight. His career in the military was over.

The phone startled him out of his brooding. It wasn’t Dobrynin. He listened, asked a few questions, then, when the other person had rung off, made a call of his own. Afterwards he sat back in his chair, the phone still in his hand. This was a possible complication.

Again the phone rang. This time it was Dobrynin.

‘Contact made, and the rendezvous is confirmed. Two p.m.’

He allowed himself to breathe out, slowly. In his head he had divided the operation into steps, major and minor, though nothing had been written down. The rendezvous tomorrow would be step two. Step three, the climax, would follow the next day.

He would not sleep well that night, he knew, so there was no point in going to bed early. But there was a risk his thoughts would wander back down the bitter avenues of injustice from which he’d once thought he would never escape. Instead he closed his eyes and called up the memories of an earlier triumph: step one in the operation.

*

The heat from the five bodies in the van fogged the windows almost to their tops. The engine couldn’t be turned on to clear the condensation because