Last of the Breed

Chapter 35

Ostap stood on the street, a cigarette hanging from his lip. Men were hurrying to work; a few cars passed and a big, clumsy truck. It was early morning, gray and dismal. Across from him was the framework of a huge, rambling structure begun months ago and left standing. In the spring they might finish it and they might not. One never knew in Magadan.

He hunched his shoulders against the cold. Not likely anybody was following him. He was small fry and wanted to stay that way so far as anybody knew. He would get his when the time came, and this affair might be an opening. Ostap was one who lived by the edge.

He had an edge here, an edge there. A piece of this and that. He did not want all of anything. To try to get it all left one vulnerable. But pieces were something else. All he wanted was a percentage.

He had a sort of loyalty to his kind, and his kind did not like Shepilov. He would like to trip Shepilov, do him a dirty one. At the same time, Shepilov was KGB and dangerous. He waited until a big truck passed, and then he crossed the street, started down an alley, and then turned into the incompleted building. In one of the completed rooms on the lower floor, three men were standing around a fire.

It was built on the concrete floor, with broken bits of lumber for fuel. Lev was there and Kraslov. With them was another man, a stranger.

Noticing his hesitation, Lev said, “This is Botev. He is all right.” Lev hunched his shoulders. He was a very young man whose face looked old. His blue eyes were perpetually red-rimmed and he had a slack mouth. Ostap did not like him, but he had connections. He was related somehow to several officials and doted upon by his mother and his aunt. He always knew when there was going to be a shakedown or an investigation, and he always knew who wanted what. He came to Ostap because Ostap knew how to get it.

“Botev is a trapper,” he said. “Lives in the forest.”

“Shepilov is in Magadan,” Ostap advised, reaching his fingers toward the fire.

Lev looked at him from the corners of his eyes. “Now how did you know that? He just arrived.”

Ostap shrugged. “I have my ways.” Better to let them think he had connections, too. And he did have, a few minor ones.

“Kuzmich is recruiting trappers and hunters to search for the American,” Lev said. “Botev has been asked.”

Ostap looked at Botev. “Zamatev wants him, too. Zamatev will pay.”

Kraslov shrugged. “What do you know of Zamatev?” he sneered.

“He will pay. He wants the American.”

Botev spoke up. “He is right. It is Zamatev who needs him most. Shepilov would like to try to get him first. The man escaped from Zamatev.” He squatted on his heels, close to the fire. “You cross Zamatev and he will break your back.”

Ostap glanced at Botev. “Will you go into the woods after the American?”

Botev smiled. “I will look,” he said. Then he added, “He is a Red Indian.”

They were fascinated, as he had known they would be. “A Red Indian? Truly? Does he wear feathers in his hair?”

“That was long ago. Some of them are capitalists now. This one was a flyer.”

“Think of that! A Red Indian who is a flyer! How did he escape?”

“Who knows? Do they ever tell you?”

Ostap spread his fingers toward the fire. “Zamatev will pay,” he repeated. “Shepilov will clap you on the shoulder and tell you what a great thing you have done for the Soviet.”

He glanced over at Botev. “Can you find him? You and the others?”

“What others? I can find him.”

Ostap rubbed his fingers together. “I can reach Zamatev,” he said. “He will pay well. If you can catch him,” he said to Botev, “fine. But speak to the others. Pass the word along. It is Zamatev who will pay.” Ostap looked into the fire, then up at them. “I would not wish to be the man who crosses Zamatev.” He stood up. “Catch him for Russia, but deliver him to Zamatev.”

“You will have no chance,” Kraslov said to Botev, “Alekhin is hunting him.”

There was silence, and then Botev suggested, “We could get him first.”

“Better you do if you want anything from it. If Alekhin gets him, there will only be a body.”

They huddled about the fire, and Ostap was thinking of Botev. A tough man, a good man. How did Lev come to know him? Botev was a man he could work with, but dared he trust him? But, after all, who did one trust? Certainly not Lev, and Kraslov least of all.

Ostap was looking at Botev when Kraslov spoke next. “They just took a man up on the road to Semychan, a man named Yakov. They are bringing him in tonight.”

Ostap was looking at Botev and he saw the man’s expression. Suddenly, he knew. This was why Botev was here. He had been seeking information.

Why? What was Botev’s interest in Yakov? He spoke casually, “I never heard of him.”

“Who hears of anything?” Kraslov said, impatiently. “What do they tell you? Nothing!”

“They do not have to,” Lev said, amused. “Word gets around. Somebody tells his comrade, the comrade tells his girlfriend, and she tells her mother. Soon everybody knows.”

Ostap was thinking. Sure, everybody whispered a little, but there were listening posts, such as this one, where one might hear things others did not talk about. How had Botev come to know Lev? Through the black market? Botev was a trapper and Lev dealt in whatever meant money. But why was Botev interested in the prisoner Yakov? And he was. Ostap had seen his expression. He wanted a word with Botev.

Nobody stayed long at the fire but Ostap had seen deals for thousands of rubles consummated here. No prices talked, just casual meetings and a few words dropped as to what was needed and who would pay and occasionally a figure tossed in the air. If there was no reply, it had to be more. Ostap stood up, sure the movement would attract Botev’s eye. When their eyes met Ostap gestured with his head to indicate they would meet outside.

“Zamatev will pay,” Ostap said again. “He will pay well. If I knew where the American was, I could get us a bit of something very good.”

Ostap went outside, glancing up and down the street as he approached it. Bold as he might appear when talking to Katerina or Kyra, he was cautious in all his relationships and in moving about. He watched Kraslov go off up the street, but Lev lingered, seeming to want to speak. When he did he nodded after Kraslov. “I do not trust him.”

“Who can you trust?”

“I would trust you, Comrade Ostap.” Lev’s tone was sincere.

“And I, you.” Ostap hesitated, and then he said, “But there are some things best left unshared. Why should either get the other into trouble?”

After Lev disappeared, Botev returned. Where he had been in the meantime Ostap did not know.

Botev approached and then stopped, looking warily about. “You wished to speak to me?”

“Zamatev wants the American. Above all, he does not want Comrade Shepilov to reach him first. You will be out there among them, and I understand there is some feeling among some of them that might work for us.” He paused. “We must have the American. He is an enemy of the people.”

“Of course,” Botev replied, his tone slightly ironic.

“He cannot escape. Where he goes now, there are no hiding places. The country is too open.”

“You have been there?”

“No, no, of course not. But I have been told—”

“Do not believe all you are told.” He glanced around. “Nonetheless, I shall see what I can do.”

Ostap turned down the street, trying to think what else might be done. He was pleased that Kyra had come to him for help. She was bright, sharp, and hard, nobody to fool around with. Anybody who tried tricking her or playing games would get himself hurt. He had watched her operate from afar and knew what she had done. And now she was associated with Zamatev, of all people. There might come a day when he would need her influence.

He was on the outside of everything, living by his wits in a country that offered little room for it.

If they could just take that American, things would settle down again. He did not like Shepilov being here, nor the fact that because of him everybody was being very sharp and quick. There had been a dozen arrests made that would never have happened had the American not been hunted.

Back in the two rooms he shared with Katerina, he studied the situation in his mind. The American had no chance. No matter how skillfully he had evaded them until now, he was being neatly boxed in. The area in which he could move was narrowing down. There was more tundra, more open country, fewer trees. Further north, there were none until one reached the Anadyr Mountains.

Botev had no intention of helping either Shepilov or Zamatev. He had met the American but twice, but he liked him. He was a true man of the forest, and Botev could not believe whether he escaped or not would matter. Perhaps to Shepilov and Zamatev, but not to Russia. Of course, he knew little of what was at stake, yet what could one man do?

Ostap walked steadily, turned several corners, and then went to the edge of town. He took a lane between two yards filled with rusting machinery and went on into the woods.

Kyra was seated with Katerina when Ostap came in and threw his cap on the bed.

“I have told them,” he said. “I told them Zamatev would pay well to have him first.”

“I can promise that.”

“Good! I believe they will have him. After all, where can he go?”

She got to her feet. It was time she talked to Arkady. She had been too long away and, she reflected, too long in this place. She fastened her coat. “If you hear anything—?”

“Do not worry. You shall hear.”

She closed the door behind her and walked swiftly down the hall. She was about to turn into the street hallway when she saw the car parked in front. Quickly, she turned and ran down the hall to the rear door. There was a man standing there, a bulky man in a gray coat.

Swiftly she turned; nobody was in sight. She went to the end of the hall and opened the small door. It was not for nothing that she had been here before. The small door led to a storage room, where they kept coal to be burned. There was the small door through which the coal was brought in. It opened upon an alley.

She opened it slightly. Nobody was there. Across the alley was an old courtyard that wandered into another and then into a ramshackle building, long abandoned. Magadan was just such a place of empty spaces, structures hurriedly thrown up on somebody’s order or some bureaucratic whim.

Stegman was waiting at the helicopter when the taxi let her down. “Now!” she said. “At once!”

He asked no questions until they were in the air. “What is it?”

“Comrade Shepilov is making arrests,” she said, “but our work is done.”

Would they take Vanya? She hoped not. After all, what had been done? Yet she knew it was not necessary to have done something. It was enough to be suspected.

“Suvarov is with the soldiers,” Stegman said. “Somewhere in the north. I have a map if—”

“No. We will go back to Khabarovsk. Is there news of that woman? The Baronas woman?”

“None. When our men reached the cabin they were gone, gone for some time. The fires were out, the ashes cold. They have gone into the forest again, I believe.”

He picked up a distant peak and changed course a little. “Comrade Lebedev? There has been trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Yes, it seems Comrade Bocharev has taken an interest in the Baronas question. He has been making inquiries. It was necessary to report this to Colonel Zamatev.”

She frowned. Bocharev? What did he have to do with this?

“Our informant, the man Peshkov, has disappeared. Nobody has seen him. The others have scattered. A few arrests have been made, but the man Zhikarev has vanished also.” Suddenly his tone was angry. “I do not know what is happening! There has been much slipshod work! These people should have been arrested at once! At once! And that Zhikarev—!”

If Baronas and his daughter had left Plastun Bay, they had gone down to the sea, or they would try to cross the border into China. The sea was out of the question. Nothing could get past that buffer zone and the strict watch kept over the waters of the Sea of Japan. Hence it had to be the border.

From her briefcase she took a map. A crossing on the Ussuri River would be closest. When they reached Khabarovsk, she would see what could be done. In fact, if it was all right with Arkady she would go herself. She would fly to Iman.

For the first time she began to have doubts. What if Arkady failed?

The thing with Pennington had not gone well. He had protested that his only expertise was in insecticides and assured them he would be glad to help in that area. In fact, he knew a good deal about the infestation of mosquitoes and black flies and would cooperate. He assured them they had taken the wrong man, that he would have enjoyed meeting the Admiral but that they had not come to his section at all. She knew none of the details of the questioning or the methods used, only that they had come up with nothing except that he did know a great deal about insecticides and was willing to help with their problems. As he was valuable in that respect, there might have been hesitation to go further with the questions, but she doubted that, knowing the Colonel.

To have that effort fail, and atop it the escape of a man whom they could not seem to recapture—

It looked bad for Arkady, for Colonel Zamatev.

They would say he was inept. That he was careless. That he had failed.

If he failed, she failed also. He was her ticket to Moscow, her door to the future.

Yet suppose they could recapture the American? Suppose there really had been something between the American and that Baronas woman? If they had her, she might be bait for a trap. She shook her head. No, it would not work. Of course not. The man would not—

But she had heard the Americans were romantic. Was this Red Indian so? Would he come back to try to save his girlfriend? If she could be taken, it was worth an attempt.

Of course, he would not. She told herself that, but she wondered.

Catch her first, and then think about it. Under questioning, she would tell all they needed to know. But how to get word to the American? Ostap would know how; he always knew such things.

But Ostap was a prisoner. Undoubtedly, he had been taken.

Only he had not. Like she herself, Ostap had escaped. He was free, and he had gone into the forest.