Dead Men Living

6

Charlie Muffin was on his first paper airplane of the day-a new prototype, with a separate tail section-when the dust-covered telephone rang and Sir Rupert Dean announced, “You’ll get everything on paper, of course. But I need you to understand a lot of things that aren’t written. The most important is that the future of the department-and your posting to Moscow-depends on your getting everything right.”

Charlie had never wasted time over personal disappointments-apart from the death of his first wife, Edith, which would always be a personal disaster for which he’d never forgive himself-but there was a lasting surge of regret as he listened to the director-general. Sadness came close behind. And then-surprising himself-sympathy. Natalia hadn’t been intentionally perverse, hadn’t tried, in some way, to trick or ridicule him. Maybe she’d even thought the assignment wouldn’t be given to him, although he couldn’t really accept that, convenient though it would have been.

Natalia was making a mess of it. Of everything. Of their being together-living together-and by trying to keep separate their professional lives and by not being able to trust him (for which he couldn’t blame her) and by trying to do everything her way, wrongly, was endangering all that they hoped to exist between them.

Which was not the immediate consideration: the immediate consideration was his need totally to concentrate and understand what he was being told.

“Every other agency is involved?” he demanded, determined against the slightest misunderstanding.

“Every other agency has been asked to search their archives: contributewhatever they can,” replied Dean, equally pedantic. “The investigation is ours.”

“Which you see as a test?”

“We’re vulnerable: everyone snapping at our heels. We’ve got to answer all the questions, find out who he was and what he was doing there. We do that-you do that-and I’ll be able to fight whatever survival battle we’re confronted with.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then that’s what it could become: a battle for survival. At best we could become a branch of some other agency.”

“What about my remaining here in Moscow?”

There was a pause from the London end. “There are arguments being put up against the posting. They’d be hard to oppose.”

Gerald fucking Williams, guessed Charlie. Why did the parsimonious bugger take as a personal insult Charlie’s special interpretation of an expense account? It wasn’t as if it was Williams’s money. Perhaps, thought Charlie, he should have considered the early challenges, too long ago now to remember, as more than the game he chose them to make it, virtually challenging the man to catch him out. Bluntly he said, “I fail to solve it, I get withdrawn? My role-my reason for being in Moscow-won’t exist anymore?”

“It would certainly come up for very hard discussion.”

“From what you said, these killings happened fifty years ago!” Charlie pointed out.

“I know,” accepted Dean.

“And no one’s acknowledging our victims belonged to their department?”

“They’ve only been checking for a few hours, but so far, no.”

“Supposedly checking,” qualified Charlie. “No one’s going to want this coming out of the woodwork. SIS or military intelligence or Christ knows who find they’re involved, they’re going to bury it for another fifty years.”

There was a further silence from London. “The edict from Whitehall-and Downing Street-is that there mustn’t be any embarrassment, no matter how long ago it happened. Whatever it was.”

“Which means they don’t want it solved!” protested Charlie. “It’s impossible. Ridiculous. We’re being set up.”

“That’s why I’m calling you. I do believe we’ll stand or fall bythis. You’ve personally got every support it’s possible for me to offer. I wish there were more. Better. And I know what I’m asking.”

Charlie wished he did. Slipping back on to yesteryear wordage, Charlie said, “Who’s my control?”

“You deal with me, direct, at all times,” stipulated the director-general. “But let’s stay with that. Control. Don’t you even think of trying or doing anything without discussing it with me first. One mistake-one miscalculation-is all it’s going to take.”

This time it was Charlie who didn’t speak at once. Eventually he said, “Am I expected to work with SIS and the military attache here? Let them know everything I’m doing?”

“Not until you’ve talked whatever it is through with me first.”

“Which is what they’re being told, probably right now.”

“Probably,” accepted Dean again.

“You know it’s hopeless before I start?”

“Close to being hopeless,” allowed the older man.

“There’s not a lot left to say, is there?”

“Everything we’ve got from the Russian Foreign Ministry is being faxed back right away. And don’t forget my personal support.”

There wasn’t any point in further protests or arguments. “A British officer-and an American-dead for fifty years without anyone wondering what happened to them! And a woman, too! How the hell can you explain that?”

“I can’t,” conceded Sir Rupert Dean. “That’s what you’ve got to do.”

Natalia recognized she was the most exposed of them all: the one in the greatest danger. Although there was the outward, cosmetic appearance of personal and authoritative involvement, the presidential emissary and the deputy ministers all had their blame-ready intermediaries, after whom there was the final buffer of Natalia Nikandrova herself. It was she who provably had to select the Russian investigatory team and just as provably had to propose the precise moment to invite Washington and London to an international game of musical chairs and after that monitor from a distance of three thousand miles its progress in a time-lost republic where everyone would be trying to pull the safe seats away from everyone else at every discordant note. With one of its chair-snatching participants beingCharlie Muffin, whose feet were always too painful for any sort of musical dance.

It was a maze from which she desperately needed guidance and Charlie was the obvious person to give it. But if she did seek his guidance, this early, she’d have to tell him why Viskov distrusted her and she didn’t want any reminders of Alexei Popov.

She’d grossly, stupidly overreacted the previous night to Irena being at the apartment, which had nothing at all to do with Charlie but everything to do with other fears-memories-she didn’t want to share with him, either. She was going to have to share a lot of other things, though. He’d hear today. Be told by London of the Yakutsk murders and realize she could have warned him. But hadn’t. Maybe, despite her aching loneliness and aching hope for her personal life at last to change, it would have been better if Charlie hadn’t come back to Moscow at all.

Natalia physically shook herself, as if sloughing off her personal reflections.

She had left Charlie in bed to get to the Interior Ministry before eight, determined to preempt Viskov or Travin-or both-from imposing a squad of their choosing and their loyalty upon the investigation. She worked, wearily resigned to the fact that she would be judged from whomever she assigned and that she couldn’t afford the slightest miscalculation. And to miscalculate the honesty and loyalty of the Moscow militia, in which neither existed, was the easiest possible mistake to make.

It was ironic-and she hoped to her advantage-that the investigation would be in Yakutsk and not here in Moscow, where virtually the entire militia would have been initially distracted by the automatic requirement for financial reward for doing-or not doing, depending upon the paymaster-a job they were paid supposedly to do anyway. The disadvantage was that, denied the usual bribery by both the obvious age of the crime and the inevitable hostility from the indigenous Yakutsk and the gulag descendants, finding anyone without an impossible-to-leave workload could be more difficult than solving three fifty-year-old murders themselves. For the militia homicide detective she went for comparative youth, seeking out the most recently promoted, someone, she hoped, only yet ankle-deep in thecorruption swamp and, she hoped, even more, still anxious to prove his ability.

It took Natalia five interviews to reach Colonel Vadim Leonidovich Lestov. She was immediately encouraged by the thirty-year-old man’s down-at-the-heel imitation leather shoes and lapel-curled dark gray suit, shiny at the seat and elbows, a clear indication that he had so far failed to establish a private tailoring allowance. He was blond, fresh-faced and when he became enthusiastic, as he did when Natalia outlined the assignment and mentioned Yakutskaya, stammered in his eagerness to get his words out.

“My grandfather is still alive: a Stalinist. He insists the Yakutskaya gulags never existed. That they were an invention of Stalin’s detractors.”

“There are several million people who’d argue against him if they were still alive,” remarked Natalia.

“I want to go!”

“Then you shall,” decided Natalia.

Olga Erzin was Natalia’s choice for the forensic pathologist. The woman had impeccable medical qualifications, five years’ experience of forensic medicine and a weight problem she appeared to be doing little to control. Natalia guessed the woman, whom she knew from personnel records to be the same age as Lestov and like the militia colonel unmarried, weighed close to two hundred pounds.

“It will be extremely uncomfortable,” warned Natalia.

“It’s the chance to become involved in an incredibly unique murder case.”

“Which will attract attention. To you, I mean. We can’t afford any errors.”

“I won’t make any if you don’t,” said the younger woman.

“I don’t understand.” Natalia frowned, surprised at the near impertinence.

“By choosing someone other than me,” said Olga.

After so long-and with so little information from which to judge-Natalia was unsure if any worthwhile forensic evidence would remain and decided initially only to send one scientist, to become team leader if his assessment was that a full scene-of-crime contingent was justified. Natalia was able to extend her age limitchoice, because scientific technicians did not have the access-nor therefore the opportunity-for contorted handshakes in dark alleys. Lev Fyodorovich Denebin was a lugubrious fifty-five years old whose pure white hair rose from his head as if in shock, which he’d never been, whatever the brutality of the crimes he’d investigated. Which, since the KGB control of Moscow had been virtually replaced by the mafia, had been a lot.

Denebin very obviously had that in mind when he said, after Natalia had outlined what she so far knew, “This could be fascinating. Very different.” His voice was blurred from a lifetime’s addiction to tobacco.

“And very difficult,” Natalia warned once more.

“The bastards want us to admit we haven’t got the facilities!” protested Valentin Polyakov.

“They’re going by the book,” suggested Yuri Ryabov, who’d been summoned immediately after the cabinet session that Polyakov had chaired. “Acknowledging the degree of independence we’ve so far achieved.”

“It’s important the British and Americans are coming,” decided Polyakov, his decision quite positive now.

“We can’t question Moscow’s ultimate authority, certainly as far as foreign policy,” said Ryabov.

“I don’t intend to,” assured Polyakov, feeling very satisfied. He was a huge, towering man, his size seemingly made greater by a never-trimmed spade beard, which, ironically for a man who despised everything Russian, was allowed to grow fully down to his chest in the Russian style of a man of deep religious orthodoxy, which he wasn’t. Polyakov looked intently at his police commissioner. “But they don’t have the power of life or death, like they had in the past; like they had over my father and your father and everyone else’s forefathers. Here, now, I’m in charge. And here’s what we’re going to do. We show every consideration and help to whoever London and Washington send in. I want everyone they come into contact with to understand that. I’ll actually receive them ….” He stopped, one idea following the other. “But we won’t include the Russians. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so,” said the militia commissioner, uncertainly.

“But don’t make it too obvious, for your part,” continued the chief minister. “I want you as part of whatever investigation team Moscow sends. At all times. It’s essential publicly to appear a joint investigation, not a Moscow take over. And that’s how I want our response to read: that we’re inviting their assistance.”

Ryabov shifted, his uncertainty growing. “Why, exactly?”

“Because I’m going to ensure we’re the focus of world attention,” announced Polyakov, who was given to cliche in his attempt to appear statesmanlike.

“Moscow has asked for details of what was recovered from the bodies. And photographs,” reminded Ryabov.

Polyakov smiled, pleased with the way he’d worked everything out. “Moscow comes to us, on our terms. They wait until they get here to see what there is.”

“All right,” accepted the police chief, uncomfortably.

“You realize how fortunate we are, having the media contacts we have in Canada?”

“Not really,” Ryabov frowned.

“You will,” promised Polyakov.

Alexei Popov’s replacement as Natalia’s deputy was a taciturn, sleek-mannered, sleek-featured Georgian. The deputy interior minister had outmaneuvered an unsuspecting Natalia to get Petr Pavlovich Travin appointed, making it obvious that after the Popov debacle the Interior Ministry felt it necessary to have their own watchdog as close to the top of her department as possible, which was in no way a guarantee of Travin’s honesty or integrity: an enshrined legacy of communism, maybe even inherited by them from the tsars, was that poachers made the best gamekeepers.

Travin listened, wordless and expressionless, while Natalia talked and still didn’t immediately speak when she’d finished and Natalia, who’d first met Charlie as his KGB debriefer when Charlie had staged a false defection, identified the familiar trick of extended silence to lure more from someone being interrogated. With that awareness came curiosity that Travin might already consider himself entitled to interrogate her. Finally the man said, “I expected to be involved from the very beginning: selecting the Russian team with you. I might have had some suggestions.”

The burly, mustached man did consider himself her equal-if not more-Natalia recognized. Stressing the demand in her voice, Natalia said, “You will be in charge, from here, of overall liaison, between us and the British and Americans. We expect-in fact it’s been politically decided we want-them to go to Yakutsk.”

“What is the chain of command?” demanded Travin, virtually in open challenge.

“Mine is to Dmitri Borisovich Nikulin, the president’s chief of staff. Yours is to me. It’s imperative from the outset that there are no misunderstandings between us. I hope there won’t be.”

“So do I,” said Travin, insolently.

How many times had she already said and thought those words? wondered Natalia. And how many times was she going to repeat them in the immediate future? She said, “The most important thing for you to understand is that whatever the outcome, no blame or error should attach to our people.”

“I’ve understood that already,” assured Travin.

“That’s good.”

It was only when Natalia was redrafting for the third time her bureaucratically necessary memorandum to Dmitri Nikulin-with copies to everyone else in the planning group-that she accepted the first version had been quite adequate and that she was stupidly delaying her return to Lesnaya and Charlie.

“I’m on my way,” she said into the telephone.

“There’s a lot to talk about,” said Charlie.

“I know.”

“It’s an opportunity!” insisted Vitali Novikov.

“How? Why?” asked his wife.

“There’ll be foreigners: American and English.”

“What good will they be?” demanded Marina.

“I don’t know, not yet. But I’ll find a way.”

“Vitali Maksimovich! You’ve tried so hard for so long. Nothing works!”

“You want Georgi and Arseni to live like we’ve had to live?”

“You know I don’t. But there is no other way. No way out.”

“My father was a clever man. A meticulous man.”

“And you’re clever, too, my darling. But I can’t see how Americans or British can help us.”

“I’ll find a way,” repeated the medical examiner, stubbornly. “Even if I have to cheat and lie.”

Gerald Williams examined his idea from as many aspects as he could think of before telephoning his fellow finance director across the river at Vauxhall Cross. His second call was to Richard Cartright in Moscow.

“I thought I should introduce myself, now that our two departments are going to be working together,” said Williams.