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“I’m well aware that the Soviet Union no longer exists. Its dissolution was rather hard to miss,” said Nightingale, tapping the iPad screen impatiently. It caused the map to zoom in and out wildly before splatting us in the middle of Tashkent. “Good heavens.”
“Did you ever… help out? During the Cold War, I mean,” said Abigail, passing the bag of crisps to Nightingale. Their friendship was so strange and improbable to me—snarky mixed-race council estate kid and billion-year-old landed-gentry wizard who seemed to regularly level up in whiteness—but there it was.
“How might I have ‘helped out,’ exactly?” It came out in Nightingale’s teaching voice, the same one he used to say things like what precisely did you hope to achieve by splattering the laboratory with hummus? and I fail to see how translating 'Sexy Back' into Latin and performing it at great volume is a valuable use of your time. It’s hard to look commanding while holding a jumbo bag of Walkers cheese-and-onion crisps, though.
“Oh, I dunno… couldn’t you use magic to wriggle past the Iron Curtain? Hop the Berlin Wall? Jam the nuclear warheads? Steal state secrets?” pressed Abigail.
“I did a bit of that, domestically. There was the business with the nuclear power plant, of course, and I was once consulted on the exfiltration of a highly-placed spy from Moscow. That was rather the extent of it, though. It was certainly a frightening and complicated time for all of us.” Nightingale leaned down to give Toby a scratch behind the ears.
I looked sideways at Abigail. She and I had talked about this at great length, once—stakeouts are boring, foxes have a very flexible concept of punctuality, and we’d run out of snacks. We’d both been reading too many spy novels and it wouldn’t leave us alone, the idea of Nightingale in a trenchcoat darting through the grim shadows of the Soviet bloc, throwing spells and driving fast with the KGB on his heels. One would think that the threat of global nuclear annihilation would be sufficient to drag a traumatised wizard out of semi-retirement. It didn’t seem probable that MI6 would let him sit it out in his Regency mausoleum.
However, pushing Nightingale into whatever mental territories he’d labelled ‘here there be dragons’ tended to get me assigned extra Latin homework, so I tended to tread carefully. But it was definitely on my mind—a seducere here, an impello there, and he could’ve stepped across a border and changed absolutely everything. I certainly didn’t harbour any delusions about the inherent goodness of the West and the righteousness of its mission, but Nightingale could’ve done…well, something.
Why didn’t he?
Decades of undiagnosed PTSD and clinical depression, Dr Walid would probably say.
Old soldiers choose their battles.The Night Witch of Wimbledon also sat out the Cold War, you know, Oberon would probably say.
Being a wizard doesn’t make him owe the rest of us anything, you pillock, Bev would probably say.
He’s not as good or as smart as you seem to think he is, Lesley would probably say, which stung even as a hypothetical I’d entirely made up in my head.
Nightingale, tongue sticking just slightly out in concentration, zoomed in on the former Yugoslavia. “This, however…”
I opened up Google and found him some infographic gifs of the breakup of Yugoslavia. He watched the borders flash in and out of existence, colours flickering and the 1990s rolling by. The whitish light of the screen caught in his eyelashes and glinted in the grey of his irises. Molly, coming into the coach house with a tray of samosas, peered over his shoulder; he tilted the screen obligingly so she could see.
“It rather fits the mould, I suppose. The twentieth century was something of a kaleidoscope of shifting borders,” said Nightingale without looking up. “Europe spent it losing empires and waging wars both hot and cold, with decades of disruptive fallout.”
“Loss of life on a massive scale,” Abigail put in helpfully.
“Quite,” Nightingale said, scrolling gracefully through Slobodan Milošević’s Wikipedia page. “Europeans have a nasty tendency to rip others to shreds in the name of empire and honour. We like to accuse other parts of the world of being illogical and brutish as if we ourselves weren’t horrifically guilty of those things. Even more so, in fact, since our expansionist meddling in those parts of the world set off many of those conflicts.”
That was a surprisingly hot take for someone whose vocabulary regarding people of colour occasionally had to be gently but firmly corrected.
“And the reason for this geopolitical refresher course is…?” Nightingale asked, pointing at the telly, which was currently showing an advert for toothpaste.
“What we’re about to see is the glue holding it all together,” I said. “This is the thing keeping us all from ripping each other to shreds again, the stalwart line between peace and war. Its power cannot be underestimated.” Molly sat down next to me on the sofa and I only jumped a little. Toby took the opportunity to swipe my half-eaten biscuit from my hand.
Nightingale looked intrigued. “Some sort of political alliance? A conference? Is there a treaty being signed? It’s rather late at night for that sort of thing.”
Abigail shushed us and pointed at the telly. “It’s starting!”
“Good lord,” said Nightingale at the first flash of sequins, bare chests, and explosions.
“Eurovision, baby!” crowed Abigail, turning up the volume.