Dead Men Living

8

All of Charlie’s forebodings were confirmed from the very outset. There was no trace of their confirmed reservations on Aeroflot’s ten A.M. Domodedovo airport departure for Yakutsk until Charlie offered his passport with a $50 note folded inside. That still, however, didn’t guarantee a seat. It was agony for him to have to run, like everyone else, but they got to the aircraft ahead of families with small children and the infirm, while there were still unoccupied seats. Vadim Leonidovich Lestov determinedly elbowed his way through to get beside Miriam Bell, and Olga Erzin and the Russian forensic scientist remained stubbornly and protectively together, which left Charlie to fight for himself, which suited him perfectly. He hoped it would be a permanently established division.

He managed a seat next to a Yakut who greeted him with a graveyard-toothed smile and a miasma of halitosis so bad Charlie wastempted to surrender his place to a loudly demanding, arm-waving woman with an apparent official boarding pass. There were, however, at least seven more identical arguments going on simultaneously throughout the aircraft, which meant it was overbooked, as Aeroflot planes always were, and that no other seat was available. Charlie was isolated as a dispensable foreigner by an androgynous stewardess, whose arrival he greeted with another $50 note, which secured his occupation and got the pass of the still-protesting woman torn up as she was escorted from the aircraft.

Immediately after takeoff the passenger directly in front abruptly and without warning fully reclined his seat, the back of which stopped just inches from Charlie’s face, even though he threw himself backward. The frame of the inset meal table jammed tightly just below Charlie’s knees, threatening the blood supply. The man ignored Charlie’s shoulder tap and whispered plea to ease forward and told him to fuck off when he tapped harder. The Yakut obligingly made room for Charlie’s legs.

Despite his advanced tooth decay Charlie’s companion chewed contentedly upon an appropriately turd-shaped black and sinewy piece of pemmican he took, unwrapped, from inside an enveloping jacket. Aware of Charlie’s interest, the man smiled again and generously offered Charlie a bite, wet end first. When the tepid mystery described as lunch was put before him, Charlie wasn’t sure he’d made the right decision refusing the chance of even previously chewed dried meat. He offered the tray, minus the vodka and wine, to the Yakut, who eagerly accepted. The manly stewardess was just as eager to serve him more vodka when she realized he’d pay in dollars.

The visa kiosk at Yakutsk airport was shuttered. Charlie stood back to let other passengers hammer and protest against the metal grill and Miriam stayed with him. So did the three Russians, and Charlie frowned at the prospect of being the group tour guide. It was only two in the afternoon, but already it seemed to be darkening from twilight into night.

It took them more than an hour to progress into the customs hall. Their luggage was already waiting. The pathologist and forensic scientists had tried to anticipate the equipment they might need, with no way of knowing what would be locally available. Olga said at once, “I’m missing a case. Some saws, spare scalpel blades.”

“You’d better report-” started Miriam, before stopping abruptly, embarrassed.

“We are the police,” Charlie reminded, grinning at her. There was no air-conditioning within the terminal building and Charlie felt his clothes melting around him in the humidity. Already there were a lot of flies and insects.

Resigned, Olga said, “There’ll be no point, will there?”

“None,” said Lestov, positively. “Can you manage without?”

“I’m going to have to, aren’t I?”

Yuri Ryabov, Aleksandr Kurshin and Vitali Novikov were waiting on the outside concourse. The silver-haired, urbanely mannered militia chief, who’d put on his neatly pressed and newest uniform for the occasion, looked curiously at the disheveled although obviously Western-dressed Charlie-particularly at the snowshoes-spread Hush Puppies-and said in Russians, “Who’s that?”

Charlie said, “I’m the British investigator. Everyone able to speak Russian will make it easier to work together.” Charlie wasn’t offended-he never was when somebody underestimated him-but he was surprised at the stupidity. He was sure he’d caught the slight smirk of satisfaction from Kurshin. Charlie was conscious of the intense examination from the third man in the group.

Also in Russian, Miriam said, “And I’m American. Hello.”

Ryabov looked more confused than embarrassed. Gesturing toward three waiting, undesignated cars, the local militia chief said, “You’ll want to settle in, after such a long flight. We’ve booked you into the Ontario.”

First stupid, now clever, thought Charlie, who’d spent the intervening days since first being alerted to the murders preparing himself far more thoroughly than by simply buying a beekeeper’s hat that would be necessary in the summerlike temperatures. In the short time outside the airport terminal he’d already noted the preeminence of horse-drawn transport in his search for nonexistent taxis. And knew the Ontario Hotel, a Canadian joint venture, was a thirty-minute car ride from the Yakutsk town center: effectively they would be as imprisoned as the original Russian exiles.

It was the thin, intense man who at once introduced himself and maintained the aircraft division, hurrying forward to usher Charlie into his car, which Charlie allowed unprotesting but curious, wonderingif Novikov was intended to be his personal jailer. Ryabov shepherded Miriam and Lestov into his vehicle, leaving the remaining Russians to go with the local homicide investigator. Always ready to kiss as well as look a gift horse in the mouth, Charlie said, “Is it always as dark at this?”

“In the proper summer it’s lighter. Maybe for two months of the year.”

The car’s body shell was a Lada but the inside was cannibalized from other vehicles. It smelled of longtime dampness. Charlie said, “You lived here all your life?”

There was a quick look across the car. “Regrettably I was born here.”

Charlie awarded himself ten out of ten again. Sometimes the gods, whoever and from wherever they were, truly smiled. He said, “Until a few days ago I’d never heard of Yakutsk. Or the region.”

“Few people ever have. Or want to.”

Charlie saw the pathologist was white-knuckled from the tightness with which he was holding the wheel. Why, wondered Charlie, had the arrival examination been so equally intense? The man was blinking rapidly and perspiration was bubbled on his upper lip. Charlie moved to speak, but before he could Novikov said, “You have come especially from London?”

The temptation to rush-to try at once to use the advantage of being alone, how he always preferred to be-was enormous, but Charlie held back. “I am permanently based in Moscow.” I hope, he added mentally.

“Officially?” queried the man. Then, just as quickly, he nervously answered his own question. “Yes, of course you must be. The end of the old system, I suppose?”

“It’s a very new arrangement,” agreed Charlie. There were times to push against the tide and times to go with the flow.

“You are the first, under that arrangement?”

“Yes.”

“You must have been special chosen? Have influence maybe?”

The man wanted him to be special. Why? “There were reasons,” he said, seeking another guiding question to fill the emptiness of his reply.

“Are you attached to the British embassy in Moscow?”

“Yes.” Where the hell was this going?

“You must know important people?”

Charlie exaggerated the shrug of apparent modesty, seeing the crack of light in the literal darkness. “I suppose I do. Things are very different in Moscow now: different in Russia.” He gestured to the two cars in front. “Once our being here like this would have been unimaginable.” As it was unimaginable that a British officer was here more than fifty years ago, he thought.

Novikov said, “Very little changes here. Never for the better.”

It was difficult to conceive that what little Charlie could see outside the car could have been worse. The countryside was unlike anything he had seen or experienced before, ever imagined. The stretched-to-the near-horizon twilight was only broken by the stick-drawn blackness of skeletal, leaf-naked trees, a child’s pencil drawing abruptly denied by the suddenly vivid, paint-box colors of rarely seen plants brought to life by the strange thaw. Most difficult of all was to believe that beneath such a barren, infertile moonscape, larger than the entire Indian subcontinent, lay the majority of the world’s reserves of oil, gas, coal, gold and diamonds. Or that for so many Stalin years-and after-men, women and child slaves had little more than their bare hands, and those stick-thin tree branches for pit props, to mine it.

Charlie, with difficulty, remained silent, his foot-throbbing instinct telling him the other man had more to say. But abruptly Novikov had fallen silent, although his hands were still white-knuckled at the wheel and the perspiration still flecked his upper lip.

They entered Yakutsk along the Ploshchad Druzhby. Charlie had read, along with everything else, of the melting effect of brick and concrete houses upon permanently frozen ground but hadn’t anticipated the added effect of the unprecedented thaw. One of Sasha’s English-learning nursery rhyme books had a doggerel about a little crooked man who lived in a little crooked house and Charlie thought it could have been written about this place. Only the wooden buildings lifted free of the ground on stilts had any proper, houselike shape. Everything of brick or concrete was lopsided, tilting this way and that, their walls fissured, cracked and lined like old men’s faces.

Novikov turned on to Prospekt Lenina, pointed to a series of buildings, all close together and said, “My professional opposition.”Outside of each were docile lines of men and women, waiting for admission.

Wrong to appear too ignorant, decided Charlie. “Shamans?”

Novikov nodded. “Healers. And a lot more besides. The local people don’t understand what’s happening with the weather. It should be cold now: minus twenty celcius, at least. Possibly lower. Snow a meter, two meters deep. They think it’s a curse. That the spirits are offended.”

“What will they do to placate them?” asked Charlie.

Novikov humped his shoulders. “There are rituals … offerings …” He caught Charlie’s quick sideways look. “No,” he said, smiling for the first time. “No blood sacrifices. But they’re linking these killings with it. They know it would have been impossible for those bodies to have been where they were. They say spirits put them there, as a warning.”

“Of what?” asked Charlie.

“That’s what they’re asking the shamans to tell them.”

Through the topsy-turvey buildings Charlie occasionally glimpsed the Lena River, which became more visible, muddy, debris-littered and unusually fast, as they began to clear the town. He’d kept a comparison between the number of motorized to horse-drawn vehicles and decided he was right about the choice of the Ontario Hotel.

As they entered the parking lot Charlie said it wouldn’t take him long to unpack and Novikov said he wasn’t in any hurry.

The hotel was properly built for the normal local climate and far better than a lot of hotels in which Charlie had stayed in the Eastern Bloc during his operational days of the Cold War. There was no bribe-prompting hindrance with their reservations, all of which were on the third floor, Charlie’s room directly opposite Miriam’s. The shower worked and despite the promise to the waiting man downstairs Charlie used it and changed, convinced the jacket he’d been wearing retained the odorous trace of his gap-toothed aircraft companion. He took particular care to avoid snagging the mosquito net he’d had shipped in with the special hat and doused the window area with insect spray. The bath had a plug still attached to its chain, so there had been no need for the spare he’d packed, from long experience. Everything he did, however, was automatic, his mind upon the journey from the airport. Yakutsk might as well be on anotherplanet and its inhabitants aliens, but Charlie didn’t have any doubt there were messages and meanings in the curious conversation he’d had with the pathologist. They would still have to come from the man himself: someone clearly as nervous as Novikov could easily be frightened away.

It was an uneasy gathering in the bar below, an uneasiness which Charlie did not have to work too hard to maintain. Vadim Lestov remained Siamese-twin close to an accepting Miriam, while the two local police officers tried hard but seemingly unsuccessfully to ingratiate themselves with Olga Erzin and the forensic scientist. When Charlie joined them, Vitali Novikov was trying to talk to the Moscow pathologist, too. Her patronizing disinterest in the local medical examiner verged upon outright rudeness.

They ate reindeer steaks, which Charlie enjoyed, identifying from its texture the dried turd the man beside him had chewed upon during the incoming flight. The reserve was more noticeable during the meal from Olga and the forensic scientist than from Lestov, although the militia colonel kept himself to one glass of Canadian-imported wine. Miriam tried hard but failed with the other woman and Charlie concentrated determinedly upon Vitali Novikov, holding the man’s total attention with talk of London and Moscow, carefully interspersed with hints of the authority that seemed important to the doctor.

It was Charlie who afterward suggested returning to the bar and its Canadian whiskey, which he considered an unexpected bonus. Everyone except Charlie, who was confident of his capacity, and Olga, who appeared uncaring, continued to limit their alcohol intake, although as the evening progressed Lestov’s stammering became more pronounced.

Using Novikov’s insistence that his wife was expecting him, Charlie broke the evening up, walking with the local pathologist to the lobby where the elevators were.

Charlie said, “Thank you again for being at the airport. I enjoyed our conversation.”

“I did, too,” said Novikov.

“I’m looking forward to starting work tomorrow. I’m going to be relying upon you a great deal. I hope we can learn to work together.”

“That doesn’t seem to be anyone else’s idea.”

“I’m only interested in my own,” said Charlie. “In case you need to contact me at all, I’m in room thirty-seven.”

“I’ll remember that,” promised Novikov.

Charlie rode bemused, silently, to the third floor but made no effort to get into bed. Within fifteen minutes he heard Miriam’s quick footsteps, alone, along the outside corridor and her door open and shut. It was half an hour later when there was a second set of heavier footsteps and another quick opening and closing of the American’s door.

With the six-hour time difference it was still only six in the evening in Moscow, but Charlie failed to get a connection to the embassy when he tried to dial direct. Experimentally Charlie booked the call through the hotel switchboard, where it would be logged. The connection was made immediately. Charlie smiled, not surprised.

Raymond McDowell and Richard Cartright came anxiously on to a conference call together. For the benefit of the suspected eavesdropper, Charlie exaggerated the total cooperation and assured the two men he had made the official request for the return of the body, which had amounted to the only proper conversation that evening with the militia commander.

“Do you imagine any problem with that?” asked McDowell.

“No.”

“When are you meeting the council?”

“Nothing’s been arranged.” Which wasn’t, Charlie had already decided, an oversight. He made up his mind to give the head of chancellery a gift of his special hat if McDowell had personally to come from Moscow.

“What’s it like there?”

“Unusual.”

“London is concerned,” announced Cartright. “The finding of the bodies got leaked, it seems, through Canada, and from there, obviously, to America. There’s a lot of media interest building up.”

“I can imagine,” said Charlie.

“I’ve promised a cable from here tomorrow.”

“I’ll try to give you something.” Charlie hesitated. “If I haven’t come through to you by this time tomorrow, you ring me. Telephone calls out aren’t easy.”

Charlie had just replaced the telephone when the knock came hesitantly at his door.

“I hope you don’t mind,” said the rapidly blinking Novikov.

“Not at all,” said Charlie, opening the door more widely.

Richard Cartright was seeking, not providing, so it was right he crossed the river from the British embassy to the American legation on Ulitza Chaykovskovo, and when Saul Freeman said he liked Chinese food Cartright suggested they simply walk the few blocks to the Peking. It was Freeman who guided the way into the foreign currency section. Cartright deferred to the American’s superior knowledge of a Chinese menu written in Russian, too.

“We heard from Charlie in Yakutsk,” offered Cartright, at once. “Just arrived. Nothing’s started yet.”

“That’s what Miriam told me. Bizarre place, apparently.”

“Thought you might have gone yourself.”

“What about you?” hedged Freeman.

“Would have done in the old days,” agreed Cartright, as if he were volunteering something, seeing a way to follow. “MI5 in England is increasingly taking an FBI, crime-fighting role, so it had to be Charlie.”

The wine-Georgian-was poured without their being asked to taste it. The surprise was that it was drinkable.

“Interesting guy,” said Freeman, which was precisely the reaction Cartright wanted.

“No one at the embassy quite knows how to take him. Lot of experience, apparently. Bit unconventional.” Like the second phone call from Gerald Williams was unconventional, although it was a combined operation and Cartright had checked that the two financial directors were talking to each other in London. Cartright’s unease was not so much keeping an eye on a colleague as personal apprehension at that colleague being as odd and as unpredictable as he was finding Charlie Muffin to be.

“One of our guys died in that nuclear business,” reminded Freeman, although without hostility.

“There were some casualties, although not physical, at our embassy, too,” recalled Cartright, nervously. “You ever go out socially with him, find out what sort of guy he was?”

Freeman shook his head. “Gather he and a gal from our technical department in Washington got close on the nuclear thing, but he doesn’t seem particularly social, apart from the odd drink. Got a hell of an apartment, I understand. Never been there, though.”

“Neither have I.” Cartright decided he was wasting his time. “Got any interesting numbers to swap?”

Freeman smiled. “Got to know a fantastic Aeroflot stewardess.”

“Worth a hello call?”

“Wouldn’t be telling you if she wasn’t. Her name’s Irena.”

“It must be widely known that there was a camp nearby?” pressed Charlie.

“There were so many.”

“How did you remember Gulag 98?”

“My father.”

“You haven’t told anyone else? Not Ryabov or Kurshin?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I want something they can’t give me.”

“What makes you think I can?”

“I’m taking the biggest chance I’ve ever taken in my life, in praying that you might be able to. And until you do, you don’t get everything. Which is how I am protecting myself.”