A Wild Justice

PRELUDE

‘Nice overcoat — I wonder why his killer left it behind?’ Alcxei Vorontsyev muttered, his cheek turned into the hood of his parka against the chilling slap of the wind.

Behind Vorontsyev, Bakunin, the GRU colonel who had also received an anonymous telephone call summoning him to the scene of a murder, stamped clumsily back and forth on the rutted snow. Smoke from his cigarette whipped past Vorontsyev.

‘I like the suit he’s still wearing,’ he continued, calling out to Bakunin over his shoulder. The GRU officer appeared profoundly indifferent, as ff all he desired was to return to whichever warm room he had come from. ‘By rights, this corpse ought to be stripped naked.’

He tugged the body away from its bed of stiff grass, his hand behind it as if he were about to commence some ventriloquial act with the corpse. The body had been reported as having been accidentally discovered. There was nothing in the pockets, he’d already checked. Cleaned out by whoever had found it, or the killer.

He turned on his haunches and glowered at Bakunin — who paused in his patrol to attend to him, lighting another cigarette as he did so.

‘American tailor — Washington.’ He let the head of the corpse loll. ‘One wound — ‘ His words were repeated into a small Japanese recorder by his inspector, Dmitri Gorov. ‘- straight into the base of the skull and thrust upwards, from behind.’ The pathologist would, in all probability, be able to tell them little more, just the approximate time of death. There were two explosions of a camera’s flashgun. ‘Do you have to do that at this time of the morning?’ he growled, letting the corpse fall back much as the murderer must have done, hours before. ‘What’s this?’

It looked very much like a professional killing. They’d had a few of them recently, one gang of drug-dealers or black marketeers sorting out another gang; a territorial or profit-based dispute — newly imported capitalist crimes. Here, one stranger had approached another, unsuspecting, stranger for no more than a moment, ending a life. The wind numbed him through the parka. Nothing in the pockets, except … He held it up.

‘Recognize that, Colonel?’ he asked, then added with sour humour: ‘Yours the same colour?’

Bakunin snatched away the slip of stiff plastic. The labels had been left in the suit, and perhaps the card had, too, as a statement.

If it belonged to the dead man.

‘Is this him?’ the military intelligence officer snapped, his voice husky with a lifetime’s cigarettes.

‘If it is, then he must be from one of the American companies — oil or gas, or one of their suppliers.’ Vorontsyev looked at the rimed soles and uppers of the dead man’s shoes. Small, fringed leather tags, once-soft leather. Expensive, and hardly broken in.

No thief had found this body, or he or she would have been away with everything here, including the underwear. So, the killer must have been the one who called the station — and who had called Bakunin, too. The murder was some kind of statement that required publicity.

Bakunin handed back the single, unwalleted credit card with gloved fingers. It had appeared to be trapped in a back trouser pocket, as if overlooked. Allan Rawls, it claimed. An Amex Gold Card. A lot of Russians carried them these days — waved them like badges. Especially in front of babushkas and the other endlessly queuing poor. Gold Cards had all the power and credence the red KGB cards had once had.

The body had a youngish face, early thirties — maybe as much as ten years younger than himself. Snuffed out.

Vorontsyev climbed to his feet and stamped them to rid them of the icy cold, grunting at the numb ache in his legs. Bakunin, arms folded, confronted him like an implacable machine, or an assertion that nothing had changed. Military intelligence was as it had always been, dim and certain and eternal; all’s right with the world, Lenin’s still in his heaven. Behind Bakunin, Dmitri Gorov hovered, his round features pale with cold. Uniformed men waited as awkwardly as if it was the funeral, not merely the discovery of the body. Their cars and the morgue wagon were parked like abandoned toys.

There were rutted wheel tracks everywhere, leading from the road that ran past this shrivelled little copse of stunted firs. He rubbed pine-mould from his gloves. The red dawn was coming up behind the group of men and vehicles like a wound. Frost sparkled in the headlights of the parked cars, the frozen snow blued and reddened alternately by their slowly flashing lights.

Late autumn, Novyy Urengoy, Siberia.

The first of the MiL helicopters droned along the flat horizon of the snowbound marshes, making itself a black spot on the sun’s curled lip as it ferried the first of the day shift out to one of the gas rigs that were skeletally all around them in the day’s earliest light. Rigs topped with needles of flame and thin, desperate smoke signals lay across the landscape like preliminary sketches for sites of human habitation. Vorontsyev shivered.

‘Well, Major?’ Bakunin asked peremptorily. Vorontsyev wondered why whoever had murdered Rawls had wanted the GRU here. Security wasn’t involved, this was no more than a crime; his jurisdiction as chief of detectives.

‘Ask a doctor if you want a diagnosis.’

‘I’m asking you. Why are we both here to inspect a corpse?

He’s been murdered by one of your economic criminals … hasn’t he?’

‘It’s likely, Colonel.’ But possibly not the case.

Bakunin was just another military intelligence officer whose superiority over him resided entirely in their distance from Moscow.

His own authority as chief of detectives for the gasfield town of Novyy Urengoy was civilian and insignificant. Not that the military ran things — that was done by the entrepreneurs and the gangsters and the foreign investors — there were merely more of them. In reality, people like Bakunin no longer even irritated him. He was just one of many of the hundreds he vaguely disliked and without whom he attempted to get by; creatures called other people.

There were lights from the town and, scattered and pitiful, from its surrounding villages and dachas, lodges and peasant smallholdings. Novyy Urengoy was on the southern edge of the tundra, where the forest petered out into marsh before the northern barrenness and the Kara Sea. His responsibility except that the police were the district’s three fabled monkeys who had no ears, eyes or voice for any serious wrongdoing.

More like traffic wardens. The local bigwigs and his own chief saw to the effective castration of the force. No one should interfere with the holy mission of getting gas and oil out from beneath the permafrost.

‘It’s saying to us that it’s professional,’ he murmured, as if to Dmitri rather than Bakunin. Gorov was nodding in agreement.

‘It’s screaming the fact out loud.’

‘Yes?’ Bakunin snapped, as if the temperature was still the only matter to which he could give his attention.

‘But then there’s a credit card so clean it must have been kept in a wallet or billfold — which tells us exactly who he is. It’s there as if it’s been overlooked.’

‘But why was / telephoned?’ Bakunin asked angrily.

It might have been drink, more than lack of sleep, that rendered Bakunin’s chilly, broad features as coarse and brutal as they appeared; it was neither. The man was brutal, the reddened eyes like those of some malevolent boar glaring at a hostile world.

‘I don’t know. Colonel,’ Vorontsyev replied. ‘Someone evidently requested your presence. You’d be involved eventually though, wouldn’t you, with the murder of an American? Perhaps our mysterious caller was just saving time.’

Another big helicopter transporting workers out to the wellheads and rigs passed low over them. He waited until the rotor noise began to fade, watching the ugly, tenement-like blocks of apartments and offices that were Novyy Urengoy, as if puzzled by his location. The streetlighting was fading as the day lightened. The near-tundra of the frozen marshland stretched shadowy and empty to the horizon in every direction. The town was sitting in the landscape like a spilt box of building-blocks, isolated and bleak, ringed by the watchtowers of the gas rigs.

‘Someone wanted both of us to know about this death. I don’t know why. Does the name mean anything to you. Colonel? You move in more exalted circles than myself, after all.’ Dmitri’s mouth cracked like a cold sore for an instant, behind Bakunin’s shoulder.

‘Not immediately. I’ll have it checked.’

‘Are you assuming control of the investigation?’

Bakunin shook his brutal head. ‘You’re the detective. It’s just a murder — for the moment. The motive was probably robbery ‘

‘He didn’t walk all the way from town in those shoes. If he was brought, then he knew his murderer … at least, knew who he was coming to meet or who drove him here.’ Bakunin nodded like a pedagogue, lighting another cigarette, cupping his hands around a gold lighter.

‘How long has he been dead?’

‘Who knows? I doubt the pathologist could be accurate. I’d say three hours, roughly.’

‘My call came two hours ago — yours, too?’ Vorontsyev nodded. ‘Whoever wanted us to find him was keen we should get on with it. He wouldn’t wait, just in case someone found the body and …’ He paused, then added softly:

‘In case someone walked off with the clothes and the Amex card.’ He glanced again at the makeshift town hunched in aggressive defence on the frozen land. Lights on in the tower blocks, unlit streetlights straggling out towards larger homes and to scattered copses sheltering new hotels. Rawls would have been booked into one of them, probably the best, the Gogol. Hyatt part-owned it, had part-paid for its construction. It had the biggest lobby and the best whores. The Japanese, the Germans, the Americans, all had bought into Novyy Urengoy … flats, hotels, company offices. The town had trebled in size in four years. There were dozens of companies involved in leasing, owning, exploring and exploiting the gasfield, some with Russian partners, some not.

Rawls had belonged to one of them.

‘I don’t understand,’ he announced.

‘What?’ Bakunin returned.

‘People like him are normally sacrosanct. Remember — no, you wouldn’t, it was a small matter. An oil company executive got mugged in the summer, outside his hotel. The culprit was knee-capped by one of the local mafiosi, just to enforce the holiness of golden geese like Rawls. So why has he been murdered?

It’s usually the gangsters and racketeers and the drug dealers who execute each other.’

‘You’re suggesting he was a gangster? All the best ones were American, weren’t they?’ Even the smile was sadistic, leering with command.

‘I don’t know.’ Addressing the corpse, he added: ‘Who are you, Mr Rawls? Why are we supposed to take special notice of you, dead as you are?’

Bakunin stamped his feet, as if bringing a royal audience to an end. He turned away, waving one gloved hand and calling:

‘I leave it up to you, Vorontsyev. You’re the policeman.’

Dmitri Gorov grinned as Bakunin all but lost his footing on the rutted snow as he walked towards his limousine. The driver flung away a cigarette and snapped open the rear passenger door.

Vorontsyev turned back to the body as Bakunin’s ZiL lurched out of the slight depression where it had been parked and onto th^ main highway. A car tooted its intrusion into the fast lane, but the horn was muted, as if the military insignia had suddenly been recognized.

Rawls’ hands, even with the nails blued, were soft and manicured.

The man, when alive, would have reeked of power and money. The wind rattled the leafless birches and swayed the firs of the copse. Novyy Urengoy seemed more alien than a minute before, and the landscape that tolerated it more vast than ever.

Someone had ordered this corpse, and demanded it be made to look like a professional hit. Was it intelligence work? He glanced towards the highway but Bakunin’s car was already out of sight. Gangsterism, or something else …?

We were meant to notice — but who is being warned?