Dead Men Living

4

Difficult though it was about anything involving the man, Gerald Williams did his best to remain totally objective about Charlie Muffin. And objectively he accepted he’d lost the last battle, like so many before it. But most certainly he hadn’t lost the war. Nor would he. Still objective, he conceded that Charlie Muffin had succeeded in hisexperimental posting to Moscow by shattering a Russian nuclear-smuggling operation to the Middle East and that, for the moment, Charlie Muffin could do no wrong in the opinion of Sir Rupert Dean, the director-general. Which wasn’t, by any stretch of any imagination, Williams’s opinion. Charlie Muffin could-and would-break rules. The man couldn’t help himself. It was Muffin’s way. The way that one day-the sooner, the better-he’d make the mistake he couldn’t wriggle away from, as he’d wriggled away from so many; the mistake with which he, Gerald Williams, would finally rid the service of a nuisance that should not have been allowed to exist in the first place and shouldn’t be allowed to continue in these uncertain times.

There had been too many changes made too quickly in expanding the department with the hope of justifying its continued existence after the end of the Cold War. There’d actually been some personnel moves as a direct result of what the damned man had already done in Moscow. Which meant that for the moment not enough people remained in power who knew Charlie Muffin for what he truly was. But Gerald Williams knew. He knew Charlie Muffin to be an insubordinate liar and cheat with an inverted snobbery about people with better accents whose boots he shouldn’t have been allowed to lick, let alone appear equal to-sometimes, even, superior.

Williams, a fat but fastidiously neat man, was sure of his strategy. Time. But with persistence. What he had to do was allow Charlie Muffin all the time-all the rope-with which to hang himself. But not let this ridiculous admiration cult grow, simply because of one initial new posting success. So there had to be constant, leveling reminders. And there was no one better qualified than he to introduce that constant balance. And he was going to be able to do that now that he was being included in these nervous discussions about the uncertainty of their organization.

Williams was happy with his reflections, quite content for the departmental conference, chaired by Sir Rupert Dean, to swirl around. For some of the time he’d only half listened, more interested in his own thoughts, gazing across the Thames to the headquarters of the MI6, or SIS, as Britain’s external intelligence service preferred to call itself.

Today’s meeting had been convened by the director-general toassess the effectiveness of the National Crime Squad as Britain’s FBI-the role they’d fought to establish for themselves in the post-Cold War adjustments-and Williams felt the least threatened of all. The first to suffer from any retraction or functional change would be operational heads. His record as financial director and chief accountant was unblemished, although as careful as he was, Williams recognized a danger-another reason to be wary of the man-in the drunken-sailor way Charlie Muffin was being allowed to throw money around in Moscow, as if he had the key to the safe. Worriedly it occurred to Williams that the bloody man was devious enough actually to have made an impression and done just that.

“I believe they’ve made inroads, damaged our claim,” insisted Jocelyn Hamilton. He was new to the control group, a replacement as Dean’s immediate deputy. The demise of Hamilton’s predecessor had come from the man’s own power struggle miscalculation, but the nuclear-smuggling Moscow episode had been the trigger and Williams hoped he’d find an ally in the bull-chested, sparse-haired new deputy whose office was festooned with photographs of him as a rugby prop forward and four-time English rugby international.

“We’ve more than held our own,” countered Dean, a disheveled man whose hair retreated from his forehead in an upright tidal wave. He’d been appointed director-general from the chair of Modern and Political History at Oxford’s Balliol College and was internationally acclaimed as the foremost sociopolitical authority in Europe. There was no longer talk of his tenure being temporary, as it had been described in the beginning. Williams didn’t believe the nuclear affair had anything to do with Dean’s knighthood, but it had come soon afterward and some people thought there was a connection.

“It’s just more duplication,” persisted Hamilton. “There’s already the National Criminal Intelligence Service. There’s regional crime squads. There’s us. What can a National Crime Squad do that we or any of the others couldn’t? Or aren’t already doing?”

“Focus on the criminals identified at the very top,” said Jeremy Simpson, the legal adviser. Heavily he added, “And NCIS isn’t operational.”

Patrick Pacey, a small, dark-haired, and totally nondescript man, except for a face permanently reddened by blood pressure, said, “Itmakes the government’s commitment against organized crime look good.” He was the political officer.

“I don’t think there is any cause for us yet to overreact,” said Dean. He habitually spoke too quickly, his voice staccato, and seemed to make more use of his spectacles as worry beads than as an aid to reading.

“Nor to be complacent,” said Hamilton.

Time carefully to venture a toe into the water, decided Williams. He said, “Certainly it would be a bad time for us to make a mistake.”

Jeremy Simpson, who compensated for his alopecia baldness with a drooping bush of a mustache, sighed. “Do you know a good time to make a mistake?” He didn’t like Williams and regretted his inclusion in these meetings, although acknowledging finances and costs were important in their overall future.

Williams flushed, well aware he couldn’t expect any support from the odd-looking lawyer, who was buttressed against any upheaval within the department by an inherited personal fortune. “I meant that perhaps we should devote some time to anticipating potential problems.”

“Like what?” demanded the political officer.

“Personnel,” said Williams, shortly.

“Here we go again!” sighed Simpson, in weary anticipation. “Why do you have such animosity toward Charlie Muffin?”

Williams shifted uncomfortably, knowing it would be wrong for his objections to appear a personal vendetta, even though it had, for him, developed into one from how Charlie Muffin had maneuvered his attempt to impose some financial restraint into open ridicule throughout the department. Holding back from the specifics he’d intended, Williams said, “He totally disregards authority-doesn’t conform. Which are attitudes I don’t think we can afford in our current situation.”

“You think he should be withdrawn?” asked Hamilton.

“I would not oppose the suggestion,” snatched Williams, eagerly.

“Most of the cabinet Intelligence Committee would, after that most recent business,” deflated Pacey.

“There’s no justification any longer in his retaining the apartment he has,” blurted Williams, unable to stop himself and regretting it at once.

“Now we’re getting to it!” jeered the lawyer.

“It’s excessive expenditure,” said Williams. “My function is to control the finances of this department. I will be hard-pressed to explain the huge amount of money Moscow is costing.”

“There was every justification for the apartment to distance Muffin from the embassy over the nuclear business,” pointed out Dean, becoming as irritated as Simpson by the accountant’s obduracy. “And you won’t be called upon to explain. I will.”

Enough, Williams decided; he was on record as having fulfilled his official and expected role, which was important. He said, “I felt-and still feel-that the point should be made.”

“And you’ve made it,” dismissed Simpson.

And would again, determined Williams. It was extremely important to discover everything he could about Charlie Muffin’s extravagant lifestyle in Moscow. The problem was finding a way of doing it.

Vitali Novikov’s mortuary, examination room and what were supposed to be his scientific testing facilities epitomized the township at the center of which it stood: crumbling and inadequate. Like the provincial government offices and militia headquarters to which it was attached, it had been built of brick and concrete, to appear impressive, before architects learned brick and concrete thawed the permafrozen ground upon which they were placed. The whole complex was now lopsided and gradually subsiding, breaking up like a sinking ship. The freak thaw had caused fresh cracks in Novikov’s particular section, and down the outside wall brick dust leaked and smeared appropriately red, like blood. The space originally made for it had pulled away from the frame the only outside window in what passed as Novikov’s laboratory, widening an already existing gap that needed fresh canvas packing, cardboard and binding tape to block up. Fortunately the inner autopsy room didn’t have an outside wall. It had little else, either.

Novikov had only ever had one corpse at a time and was unsure how effective the two additional but rarely used freezer cabinets were. It was not an immediate problem while the bodies were still melting, but on their journey back to Yakutsk from the grave, Novikov and Kurshin had agreed, anxious to convince themselves, that Moscowwould send in a team that required, ironically, that the bodies be refrozen after Novikov’s initial examination. And because of the climate change he couldn’t simply leave them in an outside storage shed, which he would otherwise have done in January.

There was only one examination table and there weren’t replacements anywhere in town for the three bulbs that had blown in the overhead cluster, reducing his working light by half.

Novikov had both watched and conducted full autopsies at his father’s side, but always the medical details of the killings had been as unarguable as the circumstances of their being inflicted. During the day and a half it still took for the bodies sufficiently to melt, he reviewed two basic guidance manuals on forensic pathology-both Communist-era unauthorized translations of American originals-and decided his best protection against professional criticism was to remove and preserve as many of the most obviously necessary body organs as possible for later Moscow analysis. Almost at once he realized that with three bodies he wouldn’t have enough proper preserving containers. He supposed he’d be able to improvise with ordinary pickle jars, but he wasn’t sure if he had sufficient formaldehyde. He’d have to be sparing from the start.

Novikov was not permitted to concentrate entirely upon the postmortems, which he would have liked. During the delay in being able to start them, he-together with Kurshin-was summoned before the inner governing cabinet of Yakutskaya for a meeting that was pointless, because neither could offer any evidence or theory about bodies still too frigidly rock-hard even for clothes to be stripped and examined. Equally without any practical purpose, apart from their physical presence being recorded-which it was by two photographers and a secretary-the five-man group also personally visited the mortuary to examine the ice mummies.

It was headed by Valentin Ivanovich Polyakov, the chief minister whose detestation of everything Russian stemmed from the exile and premature death of his father, banished not by Stalin but by his secret police chief Lavrenty Beria. Polyakov was the region’s fiercest advocate of distancing itself from Russian domination with the end of communism. Until now Polyakov regarded as his best independence gesture persuading in 1994 the Yakutskaya cabinet now uncomfortably grouped around him to impose a local visa requirement uponany foreigner-particularly Russians-arriving at the town’s airport. Although he still hadn’t worked out how, Polyakov considered the finding of the three bodies-two of them Westerners-an opportunity to make another dramatic gesture of independence.

By comparison-although paradoxically by the same reasoning-there was hardly any of the outrage Kurshin had feared from Yuri Ryabov for not being alerted before the bodies had been removed from their grave. The local militia commander was well aware of their professional and technical inadequacies and saw protection in not having been involved from the very beginning. So for once local newspaper and radio headlines were secondary to an excuse-if excuse was needed-for any failure in the investigation. If there was praise, he could equally ensure he was the recipient, as the ultimate commander.

He also didn’t like the way Kurshin looked from having been out there. Ryabov, a vain man constantly aware of his appearance, was as familiar with the warm-weather infestation as anyone else in the region but could rarely remember seeing anyone so badly bitten as Kurshin. The man’s head and neck remained so swollen, even after two days, that he was physically unable to button his collar and his pumpkin-sized face was purpled from the insect attack.

The government visit was spoiled before it began by their entry-perhaps because of the door slamming-being the moment that the Englishman’s upright arm abruptly fell perfectly by his side, as if he’d suddenly become alive. All the cabinet, apart from Polyakov, were full Yakuts, but it was Polyakov who cried out in terror, pulling back toward the door to which the rest retreated, actually huddled together as if for protection.

Recovering the quickest, Novikov said, “It’s nothing: what I’m waiting to happen.” He, too, was surprised by the state of Kurshin’s face and was glad, now that the bodies were softening, that he’d suctioned the persistent mosquitoes, midges and gnats from the victims’ mouths, noses, ears and eye-socket surrounds.

Despite Novikov’s assurance, the cabinet remained tightly just inside the door. As if the medical judgment were his, Polyakov declared, “It will still be some time before we can discover anything about them. I want to know as much as possible, before contacting Moscow.”

There were murmurs and shuffles of agreement from men anxious to get out of the room. Ryabov, eager to establish a working procedure, said, “It’ll be their case, though. Has to be.”

“We don’t know what anything has to be, until we find out what happened, whenever it happened,” disputed Polyakov. Officiously, making it a government order, he said, “We wait. I’ll decide if and when Moscow is informed. And I’ll do it personally.”

Asshole, thought Ryabov. He said, “I’ve checked with wartime photographs. They’re definitely English and American uniforms. Officers, too.”

“What about the woman?” asked someone unseen, from the cabinet group.

“Civilian clothes,” said Ryabov, unnecessarily, because the still fully clothed woman was lying on a trolley next to the momentarily unneeded freezer drawers. “But they look Russian to me. So does she. Slavic.”

“This is an opportunity to bring world attention to what Stalin and the bastards who followed him did to their own people,” decided Polyakov, an idea hardening in his mind. “We’re going to use this for all it’s worth. Embarrass Moscow. They’re still pillaging our country, for what’s in the ground.”

“Let’s hope it was Moscow who had them killed all those years ago,” said Kurshin, emboldened by the vodka he’d drunk before the visit.

Novikov listened uncomfortably, unsure after all if the murders would be the chance for which he’d hoped. The more he’d thought about it, the more determined he’d become to make it so, but he couldn’t achieve it if the intention was positive obstruction and embarrassment. He wanted friends, not enemies.

Novikov began the autopsies later that evening, starting with the Englishman because the body’s outstretched arm had made it more convenient to put upon the examination table when they’d first arrived. Again-as he did subsequently with the American and the woman-he exhausted an entire roll of film photographing the body from every conceivable angle, reloading in readiness to record the dissection before physically touching the body. From both his father’s tuition and the stolen guidance manuals, he knew it wouldhave been professionally acceptable to cut the uniform away, but he had heard of incredible advances in forensic science-DNA, for instance, which he only vaguely understood-and used the empty threat of dismissal to force the two mortuary attendants, his only assistants, to help him lift and maneuver all three bodies to strip the clothes away intact.

Having done that, he left the naked body on the slab to go through each item of clothing, stopping painstakingly to itemize by hand each article he found. From the Englishman, in total, there was twenty British sterling, in notes and ten coins; 100 German war-script marks and $43, both currencies all in notes; a gold watch with a worn leather strap, the hands stopped at 12:43; a gold cigarette case containing six American Camel cigarettes and engraved with an inscription in Roman lettering that Novikov could not understand; a cigarette lighter, uninscribed; four keys, one designated by a twist of red cotton around its shank; a British-made Parker fountain pen, the ink inside still frozen; and a tie pin in the shape of a bayonet. The pin was still in a plain, army-issue tie, but the tie itself was snapped, close to the neck.

The clothes consisted of brown leather shoes, showing little sign of wear; army-issue cotton socks; cotton singlet vest with half-thigh-length underpants; starch-collared khaki shirt, the top four buttons undone, with two missing but already found lodged at the waist during the undressing; and a well-tailored khaki officer’s uniform, around the jacket of which there was what Novikov described in his notes as a leather harness, a belt encircling the waist of the jacket, which continued to midthigh, with another leather strap looped over the man’s right shoulder to be joined, front and back, to the waist belt at the left. There was brass shoulder insignia, which Novikov noted, although he was not able to identify the denoted rank. All the clothes were so perfectly preserved that Novikov thought that with cleaning-the brass buttons and leather polished-everything would have been wearable again.

The body was that of a blond-haired, well-nourished male Caucasian, approximately thirty years old. From its condition the man could have died that day. Novikov concentrated upon the obvious cause of death. At least half the cranial casing had been lost, a considerable amount driven into the brain pulp. It was easier than Novikovexpected to extract the single bullet, which had entered in a downward trajectory and lodged at the Atlas vertebra at the spinal tip. The pathologist had no forensic ballistic knowledge or experience, but the bullet looked quite large and appeared reasonably intact. There were minor facial abrasions, dark with after-death lividity, and there was a lividity burn around at the rear of the neck. Apart from that there was no body wound. The wrists and ankles were bruised, predeath, indicating the man had been tightly bound.

He sawed into the sternum, continuing the chest opening to the man’s pelvis, and braced the rib cage apart. Novikov extensively photographed the exposed organs before examining each intently. None looked enlarged or diseased. Finally, still working downward, he extracted and weighed the heart, aorta, both lungs, the thymus, stomach, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, spleen, both kidneys, both adrenaline glands, bladder, prostate and urethra. Having done that, he returned to the skull and removed, weighed and preserved what remained of the cerebrum and cerebellum, inserting a pencil to show the trajectory of the wound on the photographs.

Only when he finished did Novikov remember the manual guidance about stomach contents and remove enough to discover it contained a largely undigested meal: even without using his microscope, the mirror of which was tarnished, Novikov identified meat and what looked like cheese. He had actually to consult the manual to learn that stomach evidence should not be preserved in formaldehyde. He immersed everything else, carefully labeling each jar as he did so. Without a name, he used the believed nationality. Again following the manual, he took fingernail scrapings, which just looked like dirt but which he fixed onto a microscope slide.

It was at that moment he remembered he hadn’t weighed the body intact, which he should have done. He weighed it anyway, adding the minimal additions of the now-removed organs. After doing that, he took height and body measurements, something else he should have done at the outset. An inevitable second, more accurate autopsy, with better equipment, would probably pick up his error.

He didn’t make it on either of the other two bodies. He chose that of the believed American next. The uniform was similar to the first, without the leather harness. Again it was all army-issue, cotton socks, boxer shorts underwear and singlet. The tie was completely missingand the three top buttons of the shirt unfastened. The tunic jacket again had shoulder ranking designation, which Novikov noted.

There was a silver-cased, khaki-strapped wristwatch which Novikov took to be army-issue, stopped at 1:20, and a silver ring surmounted by a large red stone on the small finger of his left hand. The pocket of the uniform contained $75 in notes and twenty-five cents in coin and 100 war-script D-marks; five keys in a flat leather case, none with any identification; a small, ivory-handled penknife; a pocket magnifying glass with what appeared to be a matching set of tweezers; a Zippo lighter but no cigarettes or cigarette case; a silver propelling pencil; and a packet of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, with two sticks missing.

The body was again that of a well-nourished male Caucasian, age about thirty-five. The fatal wound was once more to the back of the head but more to its right than that of the first victim. Less cranial bone had been shattered. It was again comparatively easy to recover the bullet, the trajectory of which had taken it from the right to the left of the man’s skull and been slightly more damaged by impact against the rear teeth to the left of the jaw. There was a lividity burn almost completely around the neck. Novikov made the same gullet-to-crotch opening, broke open the rib cage and this time used the man’s own magnifying glass to examine each of the organs, none of which showed any indication of damage or disease. He patiently went through the same weighing and preserving process, once more leaving the brain until last. Again, for the photographs, he marked the trajectory with a pencil. There was undigested vegetable matter as well as meat among the stomach contents. There didn’t seem to be debris beneath the man’s fingernails, but Novikov made scrape slides. He continued using the supposed nationality to identify his specimen jars.

The dead woman’s clothing-a dark blue three-quarter-length jacket and skirt-resembled a uniform, although there was no indication of any service or rank. There were no pockets in the jacket but two in the skirt. In that on the left side there was a single key. In the right a cellophaned pack of Camels, from which two were missing. The remainder were crushed and broken. Her watch, which had stopped at 12:05, was tin-cased, the strap imitation leather.

The woman’s shoes were down at heel, the mock leather uppersscuffed. There were no stockings. Her underpants were string-tied, with half-thigh legs. She wore only a bra beneath a long-sleeved white shirt, which was marked with several days’ wear at the cuffs and collar. As with the two men, some of the front shirt buttons were open-three, in her case. Around her neck, which was unmarked, a thin chain held a bare silver cross.

Although heavily blood-matted now, her hair had been black and would have been long, practically to her shoulders. Her mouth had frozen into a grimace of agony, and although that had relaxed, the features were still distorted, destroying what once would have been an attractive, even beautiful, high-cheekboned face. Her heavy-breasted body would have been exciting, too. The pelvis was marked with the striae gravidarum of childbirth as well as an appendectomy scar. The shattering wound was more to the left side of the skull and only when Novikov inserted a probe to trace the entry line and locate the bullet did he properly realize that what he’d thought to be leaked blood from the head entry was in fact congealed around an exit wound in her throat, just above the larynx. And that the bullet had not lodged in her body. As he was examining the exit wound-again with the American’s magnifying glass-he isolated small black specks he couldn’t immediately identify, until separately placing them under the closer and more direct arc light on his desk. They were long-dead mosquitoes and gnats. He at once returned to the two men whose postmortems he had completed, making a scalpel incision in each throat. Both windpipes contained insect debris.

The chest, stomach and pelvic opening had virtually become routine. He went almost automatically through the process of examining, extracting, weighing and preserving the organs, all of which appeared perfectly normal. Additionally, with the woman, he extracted the ovaries. They, as well as the spleen, pancreas and remains of the brain, had to go into vegetable pickle jars. Only when he was transferring the scant debris from beneath her very short and in places bitten nails did Novikov remember he had not estimated an age. It was difficult, because of the distortion he now knew to have been caused by the exiting bullet, but he guessed between thirty and thirty-five.

So intently had Novikov worked that only when he looked, virtually for the first time, toward his supposed laboratory and sawdaylight through the skewed window did he become aware he had worked completely through the night. His watch showed six-thirty. Abruptly he was engulfed in a physically aching tiredness he doubted would bring any sleep, so much was there to try to understand.

He stored all three bodies, squinting at the temperature gauges outside each cabinet to ensure the refrigeration was working, shuffled across to his office and slumped into a chair that had lost most of its seat stuffing. He couldn’t immediately decide whether it was good or bad. Mixed, maybe. For him, personally, more good than bad. Certainly enough to make what he hoped would be a sufficiently impressive presentation.

It took a long time for Aleksandr Kurshin to answer his telephone, and when he did his voice was still thick from vodka and it took several more minutes for the homicide detective to recognize to whom and about what he was talking.

“Who are they?” Kurshin demanded finally, his voice still slurred.

“That’s the point,” said Novikov. “Everything and anything that might have identified them has been taken. We don’t know who they are. And there’s no way we’re ever going to find out.”

Yakutsk is six hours ahead of Moscow time, so it was still only midday when the telephone exchanges from the far side of Siberia percolated down through the Foreign Ministry to the interior minister’s secretariat and eventually to Natalia. She made only brief interjections and afterward sat without moving, even though the demand for her to attend was immediate. This could be the problem-the potential disaster-she’d prayed would never arise.

“I’m going to be late,” she told Charlie, who answered the telephone on the first ring.

“What time?” He’d thought it might have been London, although telephones were normally reserved for emergencies. The sum total of his activity that day and too many before it had been to create a delta-winged paper plane that flew completely across his office, through the open door and almost reached the far wall of the outside corridor. There’d been four improvements from that morning’s prototype: it all had to do with the tilt of the wings.

“I don’t know. Can you pick Sasha up from the creche?”

“Sure. Something big?”

“I’ll call when I have some idea of a time,” refused Natalia, ignoring the question.

“I love you,” he said, but Natalia had already replaced the telephone.

When it rang again, within minutes, he snatched it up, smiling, expecting it to be Natalia again. But it wasn’t.