Dead Men Living

15

It was what Muscovites call a Napoleon Day, the dawn sun burning from a cloudless sky to set fire to Moscow’s near-deserted streets as they really had been torched to drive out the briefly occupying French emperor. Charlie hoped it wasn’t an omen. The Americans had transportation-a van large enough for both coffins-at Domodedovo airport and Charlie continued to impose, actually being driven first and direct to the river-bordering Morisa Toreza. He parted from Miriam Bell in the British embassy forecourt with promises to talk later in the day.

“Make sure you do,” insisted the woman. Saul Freeman barely waved.

The embassy watchman complained he hadn’t been warned about the arrival of a corpse and wasn’t sure about storage because he hadn’t had to deal with a dead body since his posting. The man couldn’t find a cart and he and Charlie needed several stops staggering with the coffin between them to the canteen’s walk-in refrigeratorin the basement. The watchman said the chef wouldn’t like it and Charlie agreed he probably wouldn’t and promised to take the blame.

“You’ve got a rotten job,” remarked the man.

Charlie said he knew. The night duty officer at the embassy switchboard was dozing when Charlie walked in, snuffling awake at Charlie’s greeting. It only took Charlie minutes to discover what he wanted in the London telephone directory and he smiled at something proving easy for a change.

Everything in his hutchlike officer was filmed with dust. The paper plane prototype he’d been working on lay forgotten under the desk: the cleaners had obviously forgotten the room altogether. There were three demands for immediate contact from Sir Rupert Dean on his voice mail, the last at ten the previous night. Charlie put messages on theirs for McDowell, the military attache and Cartright, telling them he was back.

So clear was everything in his mind that it only took Charlie an hour to write what he intended telling London at that stage, which wasn’t everything. There was, for example, no mention whatsoever of Vitali Maksimovich Novikov, only of Gulag 98. It was still only six-thirty when he made his way familiarly to the cipher room for his findings to be encoded, satisfied that because of the time difference it would reach London to coincide with Sir Rupert Dean’s arrival for his normal day.

Charlie guessed he had about half an hour. Natalia answered on the first ring. “Good to hear your voice.”

“My telephone was tapped.”

Natalia smiled bleakly to herself. “I guessed there was a reason.”

“How’s Sasha?”

“Missing you.”

“How about you?”

“Don’t ask a silly question.”

“Can I speak to her?”

“She’s still asleep. She wondered what you were doing on television.”

“A lot of people did. And still do. You all right?” He thought she sounded subdued.

“There’s another problem, to go with all the others.”

“Serious?”

“Could be. Depends how I handle it.”

“Connected with this?”

“People seeing an advantage in it.”

“Who’s ahead at the moment?”

“I think I am.”

“We’ll keep it that way.”

Natalia smiled again, warmed by the confidence. “I saw both television transmissions. It looked chaotic.”

“Something like that.”

“How’d it work out?”

“Pretty good, I think. We’ll talk about it.”

“We need to,” she said, pointedly.

The final good-bye to separating integrity, he guessed: it would be a giant leap forward. “I can keep you ahead, believe me.” I hope, he thought.

“What about Yakutsk itself?”

“Unbelievable.”

“How was the American girl?”

“Clever.”

“She looked a mess on TV.”

Charlie frowned at the obviousness. “That’s why I didn’t sleep with her.”

“You get the chance?”

“Natalia!”

“I was joking.”

Charlie wasn’t sure she had been, but either way that was an improvement, too. Past pressure or whatever had arisen now? “So was I.”

“When will you be home?”

“It’s going to be a busy day. Do you want to talk on the telephone?” It was a coded question.

“Maybe not.”

So she wasn’t sure if the Lesnaya telephone was clean. But it was his apartment: if their telephone was tapped, their being together had already been discovered. Natalia wasn’t thinking clearly. “We could lunch?”

“Maybe walk, like we used to a long time ago.”

She was worried, Charlie realized. During his phony defection, when their relationship would have meant automatic imprisonment or, for her, even worse, they’d risked trysts in the botanical gardens on Botanicheskiy Sad. “Noon,” he suggested.

“It is good to have you back.” Her relief was obvious.

“For me, too.” The second line on his console began flickering urgently. “I’ve got to go.”

“At last!” greeted the director-general, when Charlie pressed the button.

“No one’s going to like the idea of another English officer being a killer,” criticized Dean at once. The man had the calm, encouraging voice of the university professor he’d once been, inviting debate.

“The inside of a uniform jacket would have been the obvious place to look for names, the tailor’s or the owner’s,” set out Charlie, patiently. “The inside of a trouser band wouldn’t be, to anyone but another Englishman who would know British military tailors duplicate like that. Only officers get their uniforms tailored. Only another officer would have known.”

“Tenuous,” challenged the other man.

“The Russian military Makarov fires bullets slightly larger than those of the nine-millimeter German Walther from which it’s copied,” said Charlie. “They weigh ten grams, the weight and size of the two recovered from the male bodies. The bullet that killed the woman was.38 caliber. The British army Mark IV Webley fires.38.”

“By 1944-the marker date on the coin in our man’s pocket-every army was fighting with every other nation’s weapons!”

“I think a British caliber bullet is significant and I think it’s worth checking, against the tailoring” persisted Charlie. “And we can check. We’ve got sufficient label material for a positive identification. And it shouldn’t be particularly difficult.”

“Take me through it,” demanded the director-general.

“There are only five military tailors in London: I checked the London directory as soon as I got back here this morning. And only one of those five has a name with an initial letter to match a scrap of the label left inside the trouser waistband. It’s so small it looks like a C, but it’s not. I think it’s G-Gieves and Hawkes, at 1 Savile Row, London. From the inscription in the cigarette case we’ve gotthe initials of the customer’s name, S. N. And his specific measurements, to help the trace ….”

“It all sounds remarkably simple,” agreed Dean.

“The cigarette case inscription helps a lot, apart from the initials,” suggested Charlie. “You’ll know far better than me, but I don’t believe there were more than a handful of universities in England in 1932, when we know he graduated. We know, too, that he got a First, which should narrow the search down. And we also know-for whatever reason-there was only a father. No mother.”

Charlie heard the rustle of turning pages from the other end. Dean said, “The marks of a missing signet ring? No wallet? No military identification? Why take away the obvious identification but still leave enough from which we can possibly get a name anyway?”

“I don’t have an answer to that,” admitted Charlie. “Maybe they thought they had it all: did the obvious, as you say, but didn’t look for other things. They were killed in what passes for summer there: the medical examiner found insects in all three bodies. Yet they had to use grenades to get them buried as deeply as they did. Perhaps they never thought there’d be a thaw this severe. There hasn’t been, for more than fifty years.”

“You’re sure there would have had to be official Russian knowledge of their being in Yakutsk?”

“Totally,” said Charlie, at once. “That was a closed penal colony-not even known about in the West during the war.”

“So how did a British and American officer come officially to be there? And then get murdered?”

“Another question on a long list I don’t have the answer to,” said Charlie, in further admission. “Something else I think we should bear in mind is our man’s uniform. Buttons on officers’ uniforms usually carry their regiment’s insignia, don’t they …?”

“I believe so,” agreed the director-general.

“The buttons on this lieutenant’s uniform don’t,” reminded Charlie.

“You suggesting a secret intelligence unit?”

“I’m not ruling it out.”

“A British officer, possibly intelligence-linked, in a part of the Soviet Union where he had no right to be-and therefore no permission to be-killed for being there,” mused Sir Rupert Dean, reflectively.“Working, somehow, in some way, with an American of matching rank. Somewhere there has to be a record.”

“Of the operation, perhaps,” accepted Charlie. “What would it say about their disappearance?”

“Stalin was too paranoid ever to have allowed British and American intelligence into a place like Yakustkaya,” insisted the sociopolitical professor. “Whoever got them to Yakutsk did it without Kremlin knowledge or agreement.”

“So they just had to disappear, without explanation?”

“It was wartime,” said Dean, reminding in return. “Hundreds-thousands-disappeared without explanation. Stalin was our ally. Neither Britain nor America could have admitted spying on him, although of course we did.”

“That’s all a long time ago,” said Charlie.

“But not to be dismissed until we know what they were doing there,” persisted the director-general. “It is a long time ago. All the history has been written: tidied up, as history always is. Two possible intelligence officers, together as they were, where they were, is phenomenal. If the secrets of what Stalin had created in Yakutskaya had leaked out-after the war had turned in our favor??it could have been enough to break the West’s alliance with Russia. And had the West split with Stalin, there wouldn’t have been the division of Europe at Yalta and Potsdam. Imagine that. No Soviet Union, no forty years of communist stranglehold on Eastern Europe, no Cold War, no God knows what else ….” He snorted a laugh, unamused. “You could have been inches from the truth, not fantasizing, when you talked of wartime mysteries!”

Charlie Muffin, who prided himself as an Olympic-class mental sprinter against his physical difficulty to reach a shuffling trot, recognized that his academic controller was practically out of sight ahead of him. Struggling to keep up-an unpleasant experience-Charlie said, “Can we speculate that much, this early?”

“We can imagine a possible scenario,” insisted the other man. “Gulag 98 is the obvious key.”

“I understand no records exist in Yakutsk.”

“Mosow’s the most likely,” suggested Dean. “Trial and deportation documents, even.”

“I would think so.”

“How much of what you’ve told me-written in your report-do the American and the Russians have or know?” demanded the director-general.

“The local autopsy reports, detailing all the body marks, were shared,” recounted Charlie. “So were the lists of belongings found on each body, but there was a mistake I didn’t correct. The inscription in the cigarette case is copperplate, all swirls and curlicues. The initials were copied down wrongly: the sweeping old English F-representing an S-was taken really to be F so it’s inaccurate. The Russian forensic scientist has full and undistorted photographs of all three faces, which we should get copies of. We can get our own from our own body. The two nine-millimeter bullets are common knowledge. And the.38 and the shrapnel from the grenades that made the grave. I’m sure neither have the waistband label ….” He hesitated. “That’s all, I think. They would have seen the marks where the ring was missing on our lieutenant, as I saw that things had been snatched or ripped from the other two bodies.”

“You haven’t mentioned Gulag 98.”

“I’m going to need the Russians to trace records,” said Charlie. “I don’t think the Americans have it.”

“We’re supposed to be in tandem with Washington,” reminded Dean.

“Tell Washington that.”

“You think they’re holding back?”

“I think for a situation involving so many people, agencies and government departments there’s an echoing lack of reciprocal information.”

“The same has occurred to me,” said Dean.

“Until we start getting a little back, it might be an idea to keep our hand covered.”

“You didn’t offer anything: interpret the fact they weren’t armed, anything like that?”

“No,” assured Charlie.

“You got a lot, Charlie-concluded a lot,” praised Dean. “And you’re right. We should be able to find a name, this end. But until we do-and get an idea of what our dead man was doing-I agree we should keep a tight lid on things.”

How difficult might it be following that instruction and resolvingNatalia’s new, as yet unknown problem? Everything had to be adjustable, as long as it was in his favor. He said, “The people at the embassy here will want an explanation.”

Sir Rupert Dean was silent for several moments. “And we’ve got to maintain a working relationship there,” he agreed. There was another silence. “Keep it all general, without positively lying. Particularly test out Gallaway. When this first broke, I expected it to be a military investigation, but the Defense Ministry ran a mile, not wanting to dirty their hands. Maybe they know something they’re not telling us.”

“Will they tell us, ever?” questioned Charlie, more to gauge the other man’s thinking than for the answer. He was pleased at the director-general’s acceptance of what had, until now, only been a suspicion.

“Not if they don’t want to. Or can’t,” said Dean, simply. “It’s not just identifiable responsibility everyone’s running from. The publicity is hysterical. Questions are being asked in the House. Daily demands for a statement from the prime minister. It’s all getting out of hand.”

“I’ll have whoever’s job it is get the body and belongings back today,” promised Charlie.

There was another silence. Then Dean said, “I might bring you back: continue here what you’ve started there. Be ready, if I do.”

That would leave Natalia-and Sasha-alone. Which he couldn’t do, not immediately-not until he’d sorted out whatever it was that was worrying her. Quickly Charlie said, “Shouldn’t I first see what the Americans and Russians are prepared to share? There seems to be some anxiety in the American embassy about people flying in from Washington.”

“This has waited more than fifty years. I’m not counting in days,” said Dean.

He was, thought Charlie, if there was any danger to his Moscow appointment. Or to Natalia. And apart from the voice mail impatience and the director-general’s initial greeting, there hadn’t been any rebuke. Praise, even. Probingly he said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to say more from Yakutsk. If it caused any problems.”

“Nothing serious,” dismissed the director-general. “Certainly nothing that needs to be discussed after this conversation.”

“I got the impression of a lot of angst in London.”

“Your only concern is my support. And you have it.”

Charlie celebrated the moment of satisfaction by picking up the airplane with the separate tail section and on impulse tried a test flight at the moment Colonel John Gallaway flustered into the room. The plane crashed at the military attache’s feet. The immaculate, cologne-smelling man frowned at the bristle-chinned, crumpled Charlie and said, “What in God’s name is going on?”

“Just seeing if it would fly as well as my ideas,” said Charlie.

“It didn’t,” said Gallaway.

They gathered in Gallaway’s office because that was where the six surviving wartime photographs had been assembled. Charlie carried with him the lieutenant’s uniform, which he decided smelled only slightly worse than he did, and everything it had contained. While McDowell, Gallaway, and Cartright prodded and poked among it all, Charlie took the pictures to the window, where the sun’s early promise had been fulfilled with a brilliantly bright day. The glare made him feel gravel-eyed, from tiredness.

The photographs were grainy and sepia-faded from age. Among the recommendations he’d already sent to London-carefully retrieved from the cipher room, with everything else, on his way to Gallaway’s suite-was that a Foreign Office and Defense Ministry archive search be made there for wartime pictures and Charlie decided to ship Gallaway’s trove back with the body of the dead man, despite there being no one in the prints even vaguely resembling the long-dead man in the basement refrigerator.

He didn’t hurry providing a greatly edited account of Yakutsk to the other three men. He omitted completely his belief of there being a second British officer involved.

“So!” he finished, looking at the military attache. “That’s my story. What’s yours, from the Ministry of Defense files about an intelligence operation?”

“Absolutely nothing!” declared Gallaway, glibly. “There wasn’t one.”

Charlie let the silence settle, until the others began to stir uncomfortably, not understanding. “Okay,” sighed Charlie. “The body of an English officer, wearing an English officer’s uniform, is in agrenade-created grave in a part of Siberia no one fifty years ago could get to. The Defense Ministry, which inherited the War Office, has no record of any lieutenant being there. Or here ….” Charlie paused, feeling another snatch of tiredness. “You tell me, John … you don’t mind me calling you John, do you? I’d like you to call me Charlie.”

Unable to anticipate what was coming, Gallaway shook his head.

“Thank you, John,” Charlie resumed. “So you tell me, John, what our man was doing there unless he was on a covert operation? And then you try to convince me-with the amount of publicity that this is getting-that your ministry hasn’t gone through every bus ticket and postage stamp receipt of its archives of fifty years ago to find out why a British army lieutenant was where he was. But before you do all that-John-you tell me what your brief is from London right now.’Cause if you don’t, I’m not going to share with you any more than I’m going to share with anyone else. And the loser-John-will be you. You think about it ….” Charlie looked sideways to Cartright. “And I’d like you to take that on board, too, Richard. Strikes me I’m doing all the work, being stung to buggery possibly in more ways than were obvious in Yakutsk, and getting very little back in return.”

“I shall most definitely report everything about this conversation to London!” said Gallaway. His face was puce but not totally: there were isolated white blotches, making him lizard-skinned.

“I obviously will, too,” said Cartright. “I’ve done everything I could think of to help. You can read my cable traffic if you like.”

“I want all of you to do that,” encouraged Charlie but ignoring the offer. “Just as I want you all to know I’m not making any accusations against you personally. It’s not the way those bastards on the top floor operate. When you complain to London about me, you also tell them that I’ve got a lot more they’d like to know but I’ve got to get a lot more in exchange.”

Gallaway was gulping for words when his telephone rang. He answered without greeting and just as wordlessly handed it to the head of chancellery. Raymond McDowell’s face contorted into disbelief. “The body’s in the canteen refrigerator! None of the staff will go in to get the food for breakfast!”

“I’m sorry,” apologized Charlie. “I haven’t got ’round to telling you.”

Gerald Williams was right, thought Cartright. This man was practically beyond belief.

Natalia listened intently as Colonel Vadim Lestov recited back to her the statement she’d just dictated to him, knowing even the intonation was important, correcting the detective twice.

“We’re going to issue something similar from here,” she said, finally. She’d spent an hour that morning suggesting the phrasing with the deputy foreign minister, Mikhail Suslov, and a further hour waiting for any correction from their presidential adviser at the White House. Dmitri Nikulin hadn’t called. There was only forty-five minutes before her meeting with Charlie.

“I’m very sorry,” apologized Lestov. “Nothing has gone as it should have, as it was intended.”

“You’re not being held responsible.”

“Why, then, is it you I’m being briefed by, not Colonel Travin?”

“This is political as well as being operational,” said Natalia, cautiously. Politically survivable for whom? she wondered.