No Time for Heroes

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Danilov was aware of the two men following as he entered the room. He turned, stopping them before they were fully inside. Remaining in their path, Danilov said: ‘Thank you.’

‘There may be something that needs explaining,’ said Pavlenko.

‘If there is, I’ll ask,’ said Danilov.

‘I am the senior security officer,’ said Redin. ‘I will assist you.’

‘I don’t need help,’ refused Danilov. He couldn’t have staged such an open confrontation in the old omnipotent days of the KGB. He wasn’t sure he could do it now. But Redin flushed, as he had in the car, twitching a look towards the cultural attache, and Danilov knew he had won. ‘Thank you,’ he repeated, closing the door upon them as they retreated into the outer office.

Danilov turned, his back to the door, looking once more into what, under closer examination, scarcely qualified as an office at all. It was a cubicle created by hardboard screening from a corner of the huge, open room beyond, and so small it would have been almost absurdly overcrowded with three in it, particularly if one were carrying out any sort of search. So why had they tried to pack in behind him? Was it simply for a diplomat and a security officer to watch him, the intrusive outsider, at all times? Serov’s workplace had obviously been searched. Had they wanted to watch him do it again because they’d found nothing and were anxious to see if he would do better? Redin was a professional intelligence officer, whose training included the craft of room scrutiny.

At once Danilov questioned his own thought. The training and expertise of a trained intelligence officer was different in one very important respect from that of a trained and experienced investigator. He would instinctively look to detect and to connect: Redin’s search, he guessed, would have been more to locate the obvious.

Apart from the immaculate desk, there was a filing cabinet recessed between the windows and a half-glazed bookcase just inside the door. A padded office chair was neatly slotted into the leg space beneath the desk; a more basic visitor’s seat fronted it. A polystyrene cup stood beneath the air-conditioning unit to prevent the drips staining the thin, brown cordweave carpet. On the windowsill there was a vase of atrophied tulips, their petals scattered on the sill and the floor below. After all the trouble sanitising the room, Danilov was surprised: rather than make the room appear untouched, the flower debris accentuated the fact that it had been examined.

Danilov began with the bookcase. The visible, glass-fronted part contained a selection of textbooks on American culture, although the very bottom shelf held tomes on Russian history and art. All were large, with a lot of coloured illustration. Guessing Redin would have done the same, Danilov held each by their spine, to shake free anything concealed between the leaves, and additionally rifled through the pages to double-check. There was nothing. The enclosed lower half of the bookcase was serried with shelves upon which were arranged, as neatly as everything laid out on the desk, carefully indexed records of Washington cultural events from the beginning of Petr Serov’s posting. Danilov went through them as intently as he had the better bound books above, not wanting to dislodge any genuine but unattached document. He realised as he worked that the folders were further indexed with events Serov had attended, as opposed to those he had not, and in addition were marked to indicate those to which his wife had accompanied him. Each attendance, either separately or with Raisa, was also marked with names and sometimes telephone numbers or addresses of possible cultural contacts.

It took Danilov an hour to go superficially through the dossiers; he finished wishing he was accompanied by the painstaking Major Pavin, to whom he could have delegated the proper page-by-page task. There was nothing immediately to help the investigation but there was something to learn, nevertheless. Danilov didn’t doubt the faultless perfection of the desk was the work of Pavlenko or Redin or both. But the folders before which Danilov now squatted did confirm that Serov was an obsessively methodical keeper of detailed records. And that being so, it was a more than reasonable assumption he would somewhere have kept records of an association with a Swiss financier named Michel Paulac.

But where?

Danilov rose and went finally to the desk, sitting in the chair in which Serov had sat, looking from closed drawer to closed drawer, unsure where to begin. The moment he did, there was fresh evidence of Serov’s fastidiousness. The top right-hand drawer contained invitations accepted, the left those rejected, often because of a clash of dates. The right-hand drawer also contained an address book, which Danilov scoured avidly, trying every combination of letters to locate a listing for, or reference to, Michel Paulac. There was nothing apart from official diplomatic numbers. Danilov slumped back, accepting it had probably been too much to hope for but disappointed just the same.

The official appointments diary was desk size, too big to be carried except in a briefcase. Serov’s handwriting was precise and legible, every word easy to read. Danilov went at once to the day of the murder. The only notation was a lunchtime reception for an exhibition of Native American art at the Smithsonian, marked as having been attended. Hunched forward over the desk, Danilov worked his way through every entry from the beginning of the year, forcing himself on until he reached the murder date again even though it quickly became obvious that it was an appointments diary, recording nothing else.

He put the diary aside and went just as intently through everything else in the desk. It was entirely devoted to the man’s function and position at the embassy: there was nothing personal, not even a photograph of Raisa. There was a Xeroxed form of Russian embassy events, the diplomatic list of Russian embassy personnel, six official diplomatic year books of European legations each marked at their cultural sections, a bulldog-clipped collection of bills and dockets on top of empty expense claim forms, and two drawers devoted to embassy stationery.

Danilov replaced the contents of each drawer as he had found it before extending the search in the way he guessed Redin would have done. He extracted each drawer completely from its slot, running his hands inside the cavity for anything secured or taped to the desk frame. He repeated the examination around every edge and the bottom of each drawer before replacing it. He got down on his hands and knees, probing the knee space for any concealed item, and at the end had found absolutely nothing.

The filing cabinet was as unproductive as everything else. There were brochures of events, both past and for the immediate future, all inserted according to date. Two drawers contained material and documents for the not-yet-assembled records that would have joined the rest of Serov’s career history on the shelves of the bookcase opposite. Two more contained correspondence stretching back over two years, annotated alphabetically. Recognising his own naivety, particularly after the failed attempt with the address book, he looked up P for Paulac and M for Michel before going on to F for finance and S for Switzerland. He even switched the combinations, in case Serov had filed European names under the designation of the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

It had been naive to expect to find anything in an office that had clearly been cleansed as antiseptically as this. As naive as looking up initial letters in address books and filing cabinets, or imagining himself better trained in his art than Redin was in his. He’d given way to pride, Danilov accepted: he’d enjoyed the publicity too much, and too easily believed the media descriptions of his supposed ability. So he’d wanted to find within hours of his arrival in Washington the key that would unlock the entire mystery, like the English fictional detective who played a violin and wore a strange hat and solved crime in minutes, about whom a series was currently being shown on Moscow television. But he wasn’t operating in a fictional setting. He was operating in real life, in hard reality, and his entire future depended upon his behaving like a proper detective.

Wherever that elusive somewhere was in which Petr Aleksandrovich might have left the secret of his association with Michel Paulac, it definitely wasn’t here, indexed under letter heading.

Danilov slumped head forward against his chest, the momentarily unfocused appointments diary open before him, embarrassed with himself for expecting it to be so easy, pushing the personal discomfort aside by concentrating yet again upon the murder date. He saw the grouping of the words but he wasn’t consciously trying to read them: seeing more the pattern than the construction of the spelling. Which was probably why the oddness abruptly and sharply registered: that and the fact that he had juggled with the script of two languages with different alphabets while looking at the address book and through the cabinet.

Danilov had read English at Moscow University, and learned it so well that his first intention, before joining the Militia, had been to become a translator and interpreter. He didn’t need his expertise or fluency to be curious at what he was staring down at now.

Everything about what he had seen and read in this office told him Petr Aleksandrovich was a man of consummate attention to infinite accuracy. Yet the entry at which he was looking was inaccurate. The entry for the murder day read: Exhibition of Native American Art. Smithsonian. Noon. Attend. And Serov had written it in English. But the two ‘R’s in the phrase were written with the Cyrillic ‘p’ and the ‘n’ of ‘exhibition’ was printed with the Cyrillic ‘h’.

Serov would not have made that sort of mistake. Danilov’s conviction grew as he read the diary entries once more from the beginning, coming again and again upon the correct use of both letters. But there were exceptions: he found four dates, one in each of the preceding four months, when Cyrillic again intruded.

Carefully Danilov noted each date, stretching back into the chair as the fatigue finally washed over him. He was sure it was significant. Hopefully there was a way to find out what that significance was. It would also create a test, to see if Cowley really intended full co-operation. Danilov was uncomfortable at doubting the American, but supposed there would have to be such a test. He wondered if Cowley would attempt one with him.

‘You’ve been in there a very long time,’ said Redin, close to complaint, when Danilov emerged.

‘I wasn’t aware of a time limit,’ said Danilov.

‘Anything?’ demanded Pavlenko, who was also waiting.

‘After only four hours?’ mocked Danilov, extending his rejection of the security man’s remark.

‘You haven’t finished?’ frowned Redin.

‘Of course not,’ said Danilov. Could there be a way for Pavin to dissect Serov’s work files with his usual thoroughness? It would be something to consider tomorrow.

Danilov remained as vague when he telephoned William Cowley from the surprisingly spacious apartment allocated to him in the Russian compound on Massachusetts Avenue.

‘When can we meet?’ demanded the American.

‘Tomorrow afternoon, after I’ve looked at Serov’s home,’ promised Danilov. ‘I’ll telephone.’

‘How’s it looking?’

‘Too soon to say.’ Unlike the telephone system in Moscow, calls here were routed through a central switch-board and he guessed the conversation, like any he had over the following days, would be monitored. It would be unsafe to initiate any discussion he did not want overheard from any Russian facility.

He collapsed gratefully into bed, curious whether he would find any more oddly spelled words in Serov’s apartment the following day. And then discover what they meant, in the way he thought he could.