Dead Men Living

30

The instruction had been for Charlie not to be late and he’d set out from London before the early morning rush hour, although not to comply with Sir Peter Mason’s autocratic demand. After his even earlier telephone conversation with Natalia, in a three-hour-time-difference Moscow, Charlie’s impression was of events closing in upon him in ever-constricting circles without his being able to orchestrate the process, and it was always necessary for Charlie to be the one with the baton in his hand. Which was why, driving unhurriedly and still constantly checking his mirror through the low Norfolk countryside, he wasn’t happy. And why he needed the time properly to analyze what he and Natalia had discussed to rearrange the score to his own tune, not that of the other players.

Unquestionably to Charlie’s benefit was the virtually speed-of-light granting of Moscow residency for Vitali Novikov and his family, which would bring them into the city and the already-provided apartment in the next two or three days. Even more unquestionable was that he had to be ready and waiting when the Yakutsk doctor arrived, finally to learn what the man knew about the murders.

If anything.

That nagging, persistent uncertainty was Charlie’s primary concern, as it had been from the first, initially unexplained approach from the thin, intense man. Charlie accepted with Novikov that he was in an all-or-nothing situation: all if the doctor had enough to unravel the riddles, nothing if he’d fallen for the desperate bluff of an innocent exile who’d greatly exaggerated his knowledge of a long-ago-eradicated camp and its special prisoners. The only thing hecould do-had ever been able to do-was call that bluff, if that’s what it was.

Which meant delaying his going on to Washington to try to find out if an American named Harry Dunne was still alive and had a nugget or two to contribute. In addition to trying equally hard to discover, either there or in London, the obvious although unknown importance of fifteen Germans imprisoned in the very last month of the war in a barely living hell on earth.

Was a shortcut possible with the Germans? Charlie knew-although she wasn’t aware of his knowing-that Miriam Bell had the fifteen names when she’d gone back to Washington; was prepared, even, to believe her return might well have been connected with that identification. She could, after all, easily have gotten the FBI in Washington to make the inquiry on her behalf. But Charlie, who’d objectively seen similarities between himself and the American, gauged Miriam Bell’s ambition to be such that, like him, it was always necessary for her to do things herself rather than rely upon others.

Could he trick her into disclosing whatever she’d found out, if indeed she’d discovered anything? He could certainly try. She’d even been anxious for him to get back to Moscow. And given a warning he hadn’t really needed, about watching his back. He had Timpson’s name as well as that of Hank Dunne: more than sufficient to bargain with. It was certainly something to consider, at least until all the greater uncertainties about Vitali Novikov were resolved.

Letting the reflection run, Charlie acknowledged the very practical argument, beyond anything the Yakutsk doctor might or might not have, for his going back to Moscow immediately. According to Natalia that morning, Nikulin’s threat to go public about a second British officer had been prompted by Charlie’s unspecified London recall and continued absence. Which made it possible to delay any public announcement by going back. Charlie reckoned he certainly knew enough from Natalia to invent a plausibly fictitious reason for the London return; he could even infuse something in the negotiations with Miriam for her to pillow talk about to Vadim Lestov to keep all the balls juggling in the air. Perhaps not as difficult to orchestrate to his own personally composed tune as he’d initially thought.

What about, even, an entirely different concert? Convinced as hewas that he and his fighting-to-survive department were being buggered about by their own gods on high, Charlie abruptly wondered what or who might fall out of the woodwork if Russia did disclose the presence of a second British officer. His not being in Moscow at the time of any announcement would avoid any personal or departmental blame. All he had to do was not warn the director-general of his prior knowledge. At once the counterargument presented itself. If he didn’t give the easily explained warning, he could stand accused-almost inevitably by Gerald Williams, another unresolved problem-of not being properly on top of the Moscow end of the investigation, whether he was physically there or not. Not an alternative, then.

He definitely had to go back, Charlie accepted, as he began picking up the signs to East Dereham. But without the intended American detour on the way, quickly to get upon the rostrum, baton in hand. And now with the score set out more clearly in front of him than it had been at this journey’s beginning.

The estate of Sir Peter Mason, a former government mandarin of Her Britannic Majesty, was minuscule by comparison to that of Sir Matthew Norrington but still impressive to someone born in a terraced council house, which Charlie had been. The period of its construction, which favored a confusing mix of towers and castellated battlements, was indeterminate, but Charlie had the impression that it was far more recent than the Hampshire mansion, and the grounds didn’t have their grazing herds, but even to Charlie’s Philistine eye the paintings and artwork appeared comparable.

Sir Peter Mason was an intimidatingly large man, immaculate in the sort of waistcoated dark pinstripe, complete with fresh rose buttonhole, that Charlie imagined the man would have worn every day of his working life in Whitehall and couldn’t bear to abandon in retirement. The virgin white shirt was hard-collared, the tie Charlie guessed to be the Carlton Club, although he wasn’t sure. There was scarcely any gray in the long, polished black hair, the advantage of either remarkable genes or an equally remarkable, dye-adept barber. The face was so pink and smooth it could have been genes. The man only just managed to stop himself from checking Charlie’s arrival timekeeping. He remained seated behind the sort of desk Charliecould believe permanent secretaries had made from the plans of aircraft carrier flight decks. There was no offer of a handshake. As well as several oils, the study was festooned with photographs of Sir Peter Mason with every world political leader Charlie could remember and some he couldn’t. There didn’t appear to be any of Mason in military uniform, though. The man said, “I talked to Sir Matthew, after your call. This is a dreadful business.”

“You’ll understand, then, why I need your help,” said Charlie.

“Of course, although I’m not sure I did at first last night. Or what I’ll be able to give you today.” Mason was leaning intently forward on his desk, one hand cupped protectively over the other. “Looked out what might help, but I’d like to hear as much as there is from you first.”

A man accustomed always to power and obedience, Charlie recognized: velvet-covered condescension. Charlie said, “You remember Simon Norrington?”

“Of course. Wonderful man as well as being superb at his job. First-rate mind.” The voice was measured, carefully modulated. There was a nod in the direction of the oil paintings. “Would have appreciated his opinion of some of these.”

“And George Timpson?”

The former civil service supremo frowned, creasing an uncreased forehead. “Not so well. American, wasn’t he?”

“An art expert, like Norrington. Colonel Parnell described them as friends?”

“They were,” said the large man. He lounged back at his desk, hands deep in his pockets. “Timpson had very bad eyesight, as I remember, although it didn’t seem to affect his work. Had no idea they were the two referred to in the newspapers. With the Russian woman all the fuss has been about, weren’t they?”

Instead of answering, Charlie offered Novikov’s grainy, insect-blurred photographs of the bodies in the grave and then the better, more professionally taken ones after the recovery from Yakutsk. Mason physically shuddered and said, “Horrible! How much else have you been able to discover so far?”

Mason listened to Charlie’s now almost automatic recitation, gazing down at the photographs, occasionally shaking his head in apparentdisbelief. He looked up inquiringly at the end of Charlie’s account, ensuring it was over before saying, “Now tell me how I can help. Which I will, of course, in any way I can.”

“The month of May 1945,” identified Charlie. “Norrington went into the eastern sector of Berlin, with a squad, to check intelligence that Goering had an art cache somewhere in the Air Ministry?”

Mason frowned. “It was a very long time ago for a recollection as definite as that. I certainly remember the Goering information: it was thought to be very reliable. And exciting.”

“But not Simon being sent to check it?”

“He would have been the most obvious choice, with the expertise and the languages, but I don’t specifically recollect it, no. There was so much happening. Or not happening. You’ve no idea what Berlin-Germany-was like: no administration, no utilities. Total devastation.”

“So I keep being told,” said Charlie, covering the sigh. “Colonel Parnell was in Munich virtually all of May. And Norrington doesn’t seem to have come back from the Russian sector. He can’t remember about the squad, either. But he is sure there was a message: maybe a reason why Norrington stayed there. Perhaps, even, why he went on to Yakutsk.”

Mason slowly shook his head. “That doesn’t mean anything to me-nothing that I can recall. Except that it wouldn’t have been anything to do with Yakutsk. We were assigned to Germany. It would have needed Supreme Allied Command authorization to have gone into Russia ….” The man hesitated, shaking his head. “Not even sure that would have been sufficient.”

“Don’t tell me it was impossible for Norrington and Timpson to be where they were found!” pleaded Charlie.

“None of this makes sense!”

“I keep being told that, too. You said you’d looked something out, to help.”

Mason groped into an unseen drawer at his side of the desk, taking out a faded brown leather-covered pocketbook. “Kept my wartime diaries: a log, really. This is ’45.” He finished the sentence looking down as he fingered left-handedly through the pages, exclaimed, “Ah!” and went back to turn the pages more slowly. “May, you say?”

“Yes,” confirmed Charlie, hopefully.

“Went to Hamburg on May sixth. Got back into Berlin on the twenty-eighth.” He looked up, smiling with what looked to be natural teeth. “And here it is!” He looked down again, to quote verbatim “‘May 2. Simon. Goering. Strong Louvre possibility.’”

“That’s all?” pressed Charlie, disappointed.

“No!” said the man, triumphantly, “‘May 5. Goering unsubstantiated. Squad back.’”

“Squad back?” echoed Charlie. “What about Simon Norrington?”

Mason offered the sepia-brown pages. “I didn’t make a note. Doesn’t look to have been my decision. I usually put in a lot more detail, for my fuller reports later.”

“Colonel Parnell issued the order. Just before he went to Munich,” confirmed Charlie. “So both of you were away?”

“There was still a support staff running the office,” stressed Mason. “Organized it myself. Anything that came in while we were away would have been automatically and immediately passed on to headquarters. Parnell was a stickler for records; insisted that we were trying to restore the art heritage of Europe. Which we were, of course. Had every damned telephone call logged.” He waved the leather-covered diary again. “That’s why I kept this. Parnell had to know where everyone was, what they were doing, every minute of the day.” He smiled again, confidently. “So you don’t have a problem! You go to War Office records and you’ll get every scrap of paperwork that ever passed through our unit. Including any message from Norrington, even if it was telephoned. You’ll know exactly what happened-or was supposed to be happening-to the man.”

“We’ve already done that, sir,” disclosed Charlie. “There are no records covering Norrington during May. Not until his body was returned.”

For a very long time Sir Peter Mason regarded Charlie over the huge desk. Then he said, “Do you know what I did, after the war?”

“I understand you were a permanent secretary at the Foreign Office,” ventured Charlie.

“The permanent secretary, to the foreign secretary, for fifteen years. I know about government files.”

“Then you’ll know that these have been destroyed,” said Charlie, bluntly.

“That is impossible. It cannot be done.”

“It has been done. So it is possible.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I don’t know enough to suggest anything,” admitted Charlie, honestly. “All I can tell you is that files that should still be in existence-as you believe they should still exist-have disappeared.”

“Government files go automatically into the Public Records Office at Kew after a prescribed period of time,” insisted the expert. “Even if the release time is extended beyond the normal fifty-year period, it is noted at Kew. Has there been the proper check?”

“I understand so,” said Charlie, who truly didn’t.

“An illegal act has been committed, if they’ve been tampered with. Or unless a special exclusion or extension-of-release order has been imposed.”

“They no longer exist,” insisted Charlie. He really was wasting his time. There wasn’t any reason to delay his Moscow return.

Sir Peter Mason lapsed into renewed silence. “Do you imagine you’ll ever fully get to the bottom of it all?”

“At this precise moment I doubt it,” admitted Charlie, honest again and hating the admission. “Everything has been dispersed between too many separate departments here in England and is compounded by supposedly shared but in fact quite separate and conflicting investigations by America and Russia.”

“In May 1945, we received a body with Simon Norrington’s identification from the Russian authorities in Berlin,” stated Mason, more to himself than to Charlie. “The three in Yakutsk-and whoever it was in Berlin-were killed by Russians. Who else could it have been?”

“The Russians have evidence of another British officer having been present,” declared Charlie, flatly.

“The present British government knows this?”

“Yes.”

“What evidence?”

“A bullet from a British gun. A button forensically proven to be from a British battle-dress uniform.”

“That, potentially, is appalling! Unthinkable! You should have told me about this last night …. I still have friends in government: people I could have spoken to … got a better understanding …”

Careless of his desperation showing, Charlie said, “Don’t you rememberanything about Norrington around that month?”

“His death, that’s all. Suddenly being told by the Russians that they had his body and were returning it.”

“Wasn’t any inquiry made about the circumstances? Colonel Parnell says your unit only ever lost two people during its entire existence.”

“Of course,” said the older man. “I do recall discussing that very fully with Parnell, obviously. It went higher, to headquarters, for them to use their authority to demand an explanation. All we got back was that his body had been found, by a Russian patrol, with no evidence of how he’d been killed.”

What, Charlie wondered, had been the explanation given to the Americans for the death of the man they’d believed to be George Timpson? “Is it conceivable Norrington would have gone to Russia without telling anyone?”

“Totally inconceivable!” insisted the other man. “Okay, we were an irregular unit and maybe did things in an irregular way. But as I said, Parnell was a stickler and everyone followed his rules if they didn’t necessarily strictly follow army regulations to the letter. For Norrington to have decided, off his own bat, to go to Yakutsk would have amounted to desertion! And how could he have gone, of his own accord? There were only military flights, in and out of both Berlin airports. And those flights were checked, by nationals of whichever country the plane belonged to. The one fact I am positive about is that the only way Norrington and Timpson would have got to Yakutsk would have been as prisoners of the Russians. Who were then prepared to murder to cover up what they had done ….” The man paused at a new awareness. “Is there a phony grave in Berlin for Timpson?”

“An American war cemetery in the Netherlands.”

“Why on earth isn’t the government-America, too-demanding an explanation?”

“The possible embarrassment of a second involved Briton.”

“Rubbish. Preposterous rubbish,” rejected the man. “By 1945 there were millions of British handguns all over the place. And tens of millions of uniform bits and pieces. And it doesn’t matter whether there were one or two British officers. The unalterable, unchallengeable fact has to be they were prisoners of the Russians, withoutwhom they wouldn’t have been there in the first place ….” He paused, close to being breathless. “Instead of inventing conspiracies and spying missions and possible international embarrassments, has anyone thought that even if there was a second British officer his body might be somewhere else in another unmarked, unknown grave?”

“I don’t believe they have,” conceded Charlie. He certainly hadn’t, until now. Which he should have. A second body in a second grave would make nonsense of a lot of his theories and arguments so far. It could even, he further conceded, refute a Russian accusation.

“Suggest it!” insisted Mason. “At the same time as suggesting an explanation is demanded from the Russians for what’s clearly cold-blooded murder!”

Charlie said, “I appreciate the time you’ve given me. It’s been very useful: put forward different perspectives.”

“I don’t at all like the sound of how this is being handled,” said the other man. “You’ve got my number. Anything else comes up you think I might be able to help you with, you let me know. You’ve no idea what the Russians were like in Berlin.”

“Colonel Parnell tried to give me some idea.”

Mason shook his head dismissively. “You had to be there, truly to believe it.” There was a further, more vehement head shake. “And I can’t believe how this is being treated now.”

When Charlie phoned from a public kiosk in the center of East Dereham, Sir Rupert Dean insisted it should be a full meeting, not confined just to the two of them.

In Moscow Dmitri Nikulin announced the same decision and Natalia traveled to the White House in the same car as Colonel Vadim Lestov. She was curious at the strange harshness there had been in the presidential chief of staffs voice when he’d summoned them, apprehensive of what it might mean.

“You’re sure you seized everything Belous had hidden?” demanded the tall, austere man.

“After finding what we did, we virtually stripped the apartment,” assured the militia colonel. “There’s absolutely nothing more.”

“Where is it now?” Nikulin appeared distracted, looking around his huge office as if he expected to see it laid out for inspection.

“All in my personal office safe.”

“Fyodor Belous?”

“In custody, in Lefortovo. Held on suspicion of theft,” said Natalia.

Nikulin said, “The NKVD accreditation is the most important.”

“It’s with everything else,” guaranteed Lestov.

“I want you, personally, to bring it to me today,” ordered Nikulin. He hesitated, looking away from them, his mouth moving in apparent rehearsal for what he was about to say. Then, coming back to them, he said, “As of today, this moment, the investigation into the Yakutsk murders and the apparent disappearance of Larisa Krotkov is ended. Neither of you will take any further active part and certainly make no contribution.” He looked directly at Lestov. “You will appear to continue working with the American and the Englishman, to monitor everything they do or might discover, until such time as they announce the case unsolvable. At that time we’ll devise a public announcement, which at this stage isn’t something that has to be considered.”

Natalia broke the stunned silence that followed, stumbling to arrange her own words. “But we surely need-”

“There will be no professional reflection upon either of you,” interrupted the presidential aide, misunderstanding. “In fact, both your records will be personally endorsed, by me, that your investigation has been exemplary and the confirmation of your promotion, Vadim Leonidovich, will also be endorsed with presidential approval.”

“We have already issued a statement of a potential breakthrough, hinting at Tsarskoe Selo,” reminded Lestov, uncomfortable that it had been his idea.

“Which we can easily make it to be,” said Nikulin, another decision already made. “We can produce everything else you found in Belous’s apartment and disclose it as art she saved from being plundered by the Nazis: continue building Raisa Belous into a heroine, which she was. And we’ll keep the man silent by using his fear of security organizations. Tell him if he as much as speaks to the press again he’ll spend the rest of his life in a Yakutskaya labor camp.”

“Are we to be told why and how Raisa Belous became a heroine? Larisa Krotkov, too, presumably?” demanded Natalia, her thoughts in order now.

Once more Nikulin hesitated. “They were both instrumental in one of the greatest-ever services to the Motherland, which continued to benefit for decades. But which will never, ever be revealed.”

“When?” demanded Aleksandr Andreevich Kurshin.

“Immediately,” said Vitali Novikov. “Everything’s fixed.”

“Full citizenship … residency permission …?” groped Kurshin.

“Everything.”

“But you never said … talked about it,” complained the local homicide detective. “I would have expected …?”

“You know how many times I applied before. I thought I’d be refused again,” said the doctor, close to the truth.

It was midafternoon in the mortuary laboratory and Kurshin had already consumed one flask of vodka, squinting to focus and to understand. Befuddled, he said, “You’ll be gone! Forever!”

“I shall miss you, too, old friend.”

Kurshin came awkwardly forward, arms outstretched, and the two men bear-hugged. Novikov felt his boyhood friend shaking.

Kurshin said, “A farewell drink?”

“Of course,” accepted Novikov. “Several.” He had a lot to celebrate. Everything, in fact.