People Who Walk In Darkness

Chapter Seventeen

The pause was long. In the not great distance cars and trucks rambled, and the familiar construction sounds of discarded wood and rusted metal rattled down a chute and clanged onto the bed of a truck.

A lone car, an old Lada, came obliviously down the narrow street and stopped as a clutch of men on the left and another on the right stepped off of the narrow curb. The car came to a sudden stop. The driver, a man with many chins, pushed his head out of the window, displayed his angry pink face, and opened his mouth to shout. Then he saw the guns and the faces and registered the fact that he was being completely ignored.

There was no room to turn around. He backed up, trying to look over his shoulder. The car veered to his right and scraped a rear fender against a lamppost before successfully fading back the way it had come.

No one in the two groups now facing each other looked in the direction of the retreating car and the scratch of metal on metal.

“This is not going to be easy, is it?” called out Kolokov, stepping ahead of his three men, James Harumbaki behind him.

He was looking for someone to bargain with. No one emerged from among the six black men in front of him.

“Come. Come. Come,” Kolokov said, pacing now. “The police will be coming and we will have to start shooting and you will not get our prisoner, who will be shot, and we will not get our diamonds and no one will be happy except Pau Montez, the bald man behind me, who likes shooting people and who has expressed a particular interest in shooting our hostage.”

“Laurence,” James Harumbaki called out hoarsely.

Kolokov spun around to look at his prisoner. The Russian smiled.

A small, plump young man stepped forward into the street. He stood no more than five paces from Kolokov who turned back to face him. The Russian noted that the young man did not appear to be in the least bit frightened.

“Die or trade?” asked Kolokov.

Laurence adjusted his glasses and said nothing. He held up a cardboard box the size and shape of a large book. Kolokov held out a hand and Laurence took four more steps to hand the box to him.

From inside the doorway in which they had been standing, Akardy Zelach said, “When the shooting starts, who do we shoot?”

“If shooting is to be done,” said Iosef Rostnikov, “there will be no need for our help in doing it. What is our assignment?”

“Diamonds,” said Zelach.

“Diamonds,” Iosef agreed.

Back in the street, Kolokov removed the lid from the box and reached in to pull out a small, almost round stone with a milky luster. He held it up as if he knew what he was looking at and motioned over his shoulder. Alek stepped forward. Kolokov handed him the stone. The man held it up and he too pretended that he knew what he was looking at. Then he nodded.

“We now carefully conclude our business,” said Kolokov, backing away and putting the lid back on the box. “And no one dies.”

The bald man pushed the stumbling James Harumbaki forward.

Kolokov handed the box to the bald man and held up his hands in a sign that this confrontation was over.

But it was not.

Before he even joined the line of black men, James Harumbaki, between swollen and torn lips, said, “Kill them.”

The Africans fired first, but the Russians were quick to respond. Weapons were whipped out from under coats. Others were simply lifted and fired. It was not the bang-bang sound of television and movies, but a steady bap-bap-bap. There were no screams.

Iosef and Zelach watched as men flung their arms out, casting clattering weapons in the street. There was a pause, and then more firing. Neither side had moved forward or sought cover. Then James Harambuki’s voice called out hoarsely as he pointed at Vladimir Kolokov,

“Do not kill him.”

Two of the Russians behind Kolokov lay dead in the street. The bald man was also dead, but he sat with his back against the wall of a building. His eyes were open and he seemed to be smiling. Kolokov knelt, his right arm torn, bloody, nearly severed. He was blinking furiously.

James Harumbaki took a gun from the hand of Laurence and stepped in front of Kolokov, who spit blood and with his remaining good arm fumbled for a cigarette in his shirt pocket. He could not manage it, gave up, and looked at James Harumbaki, who looked down at him.

“I came very close,” said Kolokov.

“No, you did not,” said James Harumbaki. “Those are not real diamonds. I have a question. Answer, and you live if help comes to you in time.”

“Ask,” said Kolokov.

“Who told you that we had diamonds? Who told you where to find us when you took me and the two others you tortured and killed? Lie and you die. Tell the truth and you live.”

Kolokov started an instinctive shrug but the pain was unbearable.

He was now surrounded by black faces looking down at him.

“A woman,” Kolokov said. “I never met her. I think she was English. She called me, told me where you would be, that you would have diamonds, money.”

“Where do I find this English woman?” asked James.

Kolokov shook his head.

“I do not know. I do not know her name.”

The woman, whoever she was, had wanted to disrupt James Harumbaki’s link in the chain from Siberia to Kiev, had wanted to destroy his operation and have him and his men killed. English. Gerald St. James was English, but why would he want to destroy his own operation?

“I believe you,” said James Harumbaki, looking over his shoulder with his one, partially functioning eye.

Two Africans lay dead. A third was being tended to by Biko and another man.

James Harumbaki turned back to the kneeling Russian, who smiled through his pain and said, “We had some good chess matches.”

“No, we did not,” said James Harumbaki. “You may well be the worst chess player it has been my very bad fortune to face across a board.”

And with that he held the gun up and put it to the head of Kolokov.

“You said you would not kill me.”

“I am not,” said James Harumbaki. “You are being killed by the ghosts of two good men who you tortured to death three days ago.”

There were sirens now. Both directions. The police were coming.

“Three days? Was it only three days?” Kolokov asked as the bullet tore into his forehead.

Oxana Balakona could wait no longer. She was to meet Rochelle Tanquay at the airport in three hours. Jan had stalled but she was going to his apartment to demand the diamonds. It was time. If she were going to hide and transport and trade them in Paris, she would have to have them now.

She took a taxi to his apartment. She also took a very small, flat, well polished gun in her purse. She had bought the gun for too much money from a man named Oleg, from whom she had purchased cocaine in the past.

If Jan stalled, balked, or backed out, Oxana was prepared to kill him. If she did not kill him today, she would have to at some point soon. She felt reasonably sure that she could fire the gun. She had never fired one before, certainly never killed anyone, but the diamonds were in the apartment, and the apartment was not large. She would have two hours to search for the diamonds before she had to get to the airport, where she had checked her bags the previous night.

This would be a successful day. She would make it a successful day.

The elevator in Jan Pendowski’s apartment building was working. It did not always work. Oxana took this as a good sign. She went up to the fifth floor along with a very tiny, grunting woman clutching a large stuffed cloth shopping bag to her chest.

At the door to Jan’s apartment she paused. She could not identify with certainty the sounds from within. A groan of pleasure, pain? Sex? With whom?

Oxana unzipped her small purse, looked down at her gun, and knocked.

“The woman in the photograph you took at the cafe,” said Sasha. “I know who it is.”

Elena had been following Oxana who had just gotten out of the taxi in front of the apartment building of Jan Pendowski when Sasha called on her cell phone.

“Rochelle Tanquay,” said Elena, getting out of the taxi that she had taken to follow Oxana.

“Balta,” said Sasha.

“Balta? Who is Balta?”

“A female impersonator,” said Sasha. “A very good one.”

“You go to see female impersonators?”

“Once,” he said. “I went one time. Is that really relevant?”

“What is she. . he doing here?” And then she answered her own question. “Diamonds.”

“Diamonds,” said Sasha.

“I will call you back,” Elena said.

“Where are you?”

“The apartment building of Jan Pendowski. Oxana just went in.”

“Wait. I am coming. I am not far.”

Elena closed her phone and entered the building. She had no intention of waiting for a partner who cheated on his wife and went to see female impersonators.

“The tunnels have not been properly maintained,” said Boris. “Not for thirty, forty years.”

“I take no delight in hearing that,” said Rostnikov, following the old man through the steel mesh gate that guarded the mine opening.

Emil Karpo watched as Boris closed and locked the gate behind them.

It was dark now. All three men wore yellow hard hats with mounted lights.

“You can turn your lights on now,” Boris said.

Karpo and Porfiry Petrovich reached up and hit the switch on the hard hats that Boris had given them.

“The map in my head is better than Stepan Orlov’s or that crazy old fool with the guns who thinks the Japanese are coming.”

“This time we will use Orlov’s map,” said Rostnikov, walking carefully toward an open-topped golf cart that sat in the middle of the wide tunnel. “Next time we will use yours.”

“Next time,” said Boris with a shake of his head. “I do not trust next times. You drive.”

He was looking at Emil Karpo who obliged and got into the driver’s seat. Boris got in next to him and Porfiry Petrovich sat in the back.

“Straight ahead,” said Boris. “I will tell you when to stop. Lights on.”

Karpo found the switch and turned on the single headlight, which, along with the lights from their helmet lamps, sent dancing beams ahead of them into the darkness. They started forward. Small green lights lined the ceiling of the shaft about four feet over their heads.

It was almost one in the morning, and the slow dance of head lamps and glowing green overhead lights made Rostnikov slightly sleepy. His eyes were closed when, a bit over two minutes later, Boris announced, “Here.”

Karpo stopped the cart and they all stepped out. Rostnikov and his alien leg came last.

“Three tunnels,” said Boris, turning his head to each of the dark entrances.

“Which one did the Canadian go in?” asked Rostnikov.

Boris pointed to the one on the left.

“It does not go very far. There was a pipe there many, many years ago but it ran out.”

“Why is it not sealed?” asked Karpo.

“Why?” said Boris. “Why should it be? No one goes in there.”

“The Canadian went in there,” Karpo reminded him.

“I told him it was pointless. He insisted. Americans do not listen,” said Boris.

“He was not an American.”

“He was a North American,” Boris said. “The difference can be measured with the thinness of a single sheet of very fine paper.”

“The ghost girl,” Rostnikov prompted.

“Yes, that is the tunnel in which the girl died in 1936 or 1942 or 1957, depending on who tells the tale.”

“And the other day,” injected Rostnikov, “Anatoliy Lebedev, which tunnel did he go in?”

“I do not know. I found him out here. Right there, where you are standing.”

Rostnikov turned his head downward. The beam of his hard hat revealed nothing, not even a stain of blood.

“I am going in that tunnel,” Rostnikov said, nodding at the tunnel on the left into which the Canadian had walked. “You two go in the other tunnels, the middle one first. How far does that go?”

“Maybe a quarter of a mile,” said Boris. “Maybe. .”

“Forty feet short of a quarter of a mile,” said Karpo, looking at the Orlov map in his hands.

“Go in, to the end. Check the small caves marked on the map,” said Rostnikov.

Karpo nodded his understanding of the order and started into the middle tunnel with Boris shuffling behind him. Rostnikov stood watching the light from the bouncing lamps on the hats of the two men slowly grow more and more dim as they moved away.

Rostnikov moved to the tunnel on the left and stepped in. It was definitely too small for the golf cart and not as flat as the tunnel out of which he was stepping. There were no green overhead lights glowing here. Only his lamp illuminated the dark tunnel.

He walked, his bandit leg protesting.

“The cave is not far,” he told the leg softly. “Tonight I will clean you, oil you, dry you, and place you on a pillow on the bed.”

This failed to appease the leg dragging along the rocky ground.

The small cave was exactly where the Orlov map showed it. Rostnikov removed the boards that covered it and peered inside. It appeared to be an empty space big enough for someone to fit in by crouching. On the floor of the cave, in a far corner, Rostnikov could see something crumpled on the floor. Rostnikov went down and awkwardly crawled forward until he could reach what he had seen. There was barely enough room for him to turn around and sit.

He did not bother to examine the walls for traces of diamonds. He knew there was no real chance of his recognizing a pipe of diamonds or even a real diamond among the stones next to him. What did interest him were the two empty candy bags. He picked up the first and smelled the inside. This was no ancient relic. It could not have been more than a day old, if that.

Rostnikov turned to his side and folded the two empty bags into his pocket. There was nothing else to see in the tiny cave. He began to ease himself out, this time feet first. Then he stopped. A light glowed outside the cave. Rostnikov pulled himself back inside the cave as the music began. It was a child’s voice, high and plaintively sweet singing “Evening Bells.”

“ . . tam slyshal zvon. f pasledni ras. I heard this sound there for the last time.”

Rostnikov sang the next verse. His singing voice was not sweet, and he sounded not like a bell, but he could hold a tune.

“I skolkikh nyet uzhe v zhivyky, tagda vesyolykh maladykh. And how many no longer are among the living now, who were happy then, and young.”

The singing of the child had stopped and was replaced by a deep male voice singing, “I krepok ikh magilny son. Deep in their sleep, in their tombs.”

“You have a fine voice, Viktor Panin,” said Rostnikov, “as does your son.”

“How did you know?”

“That you were the killer, or that the ghost girl was a boy?”

“Both.”

Panin was on one knee now looking into the small cave.

“The report of the naked ghost girl,” said Rostnikov.

It was quite uncomfortable in the small cave. He shifted, but it did not help very much.

“Why would someone write a false report about a fifty-year-old sighting of a naked ghost girl? Answer: Because the person writing the report wanted me to look for a girl and not consider a boy. I met some very nice girls, but concluded that none of them was the girl.”

“And me?” asked Panin.

“You,” said Rostnikov. “When you killed Lebedev you left a very tiny piece of your knife blade inside him. On the blade was a faint trace of something my scientist friend Paulinin discovered. There were also faint traces of the same substance on the clothes and neck of poor Lebedev.”

“What was this substance?” asked Panin.

“Chalk. Not the blue chalk next to the pool tables in the recreation room, but the white chalk of the workout room. I am sure I still have traces of it on my sweat suit. I know it takes a very long time to be absorbed by the skin or washed away. I made inquiries and found that you have a boy who is on the Devochka Children’s Choir, a boy who, I am sorry to say, has great musical talent but is more than a bit backwards.”

“I must kill you, Porfiry Petrovich,” Panin said. “For my family.”

“Well, I must stay alive for mine. How do you propose killing me? There is not enough room for you to get in here with me, and even if your son is very small I doubt if he could overcome me.”

“I would not ask him to do that.”

“Then. .”

“I could shoot you.”

“Too much noise. Karpo and Boris would hear.”

“We would be gone by the time they got here,” said Panin.

“Perhaps, but Emil Karpo is fast, and he will quickly be on your trail through the tunnel. One question,” said Rostnikov. “You hid your son down here during the day before the gate was locked for the night.”

“It was not difficult.”

“And then he came out and opened the gate from inside.”

“Yes.”

“And the other ghost girls, over the many years before you were old enough to do this, before you had a son to do this? All the children of people, like you, who stole diamonds and smuggled them to Africans in Moscow?”

“Yes.”

“Only you had no daughters, only sons.”

“Now you know.”

“Thank you. If you would help me out. .”

“I am going to have to kill you, Porfiry Petrovich. Do you not understand?”

“It would be pointless. Emil Karpo is a very good shot and I believe he is somewhere behind you, watching, at this very moment.”

Just outside the small cave the darkness of the tunnel was illuminated by two sudden beams, one fixed on the kneeling Panin, the other on his son of no more than nine or ten, who stood in dress and wig, a thumb to his mouth.

“You tricked me,” said Panin, with a deep sigh of resignation.

Rostnikov slid out of the cave on his back. Stones and pebbles tore at his jacket.

“We trapped you,” said Boris triumphantly. “Do I get a medal? I would rather have that free trip to St. Petersburg and a job there.”

“I will arrange it,” Rostnikov said, accepting a helping hand from Panin who pulled him to his feet easily.

The child looked at his father and the three other men and began to sing again, but Panin stopped him by gently placing two fingers on the boy’s mouth.

“There is one more thing you could tell us,” said Rostnikov.

“No.”

“I thought not,” said Rostnikov, knowing that his jacket was torn and, if he were lucky, his back only minimally scratched.

“It is over?” asked Boris.

“Yes,” Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov lied.

Oxana had a key to Jan’s apartment.

Jan did not know this. It made no difference to Jan at the moment because the final few beats of his bleeding heart and faint pulse were marking the end of his life.

Oxana listened at the door. Nothing. She knocked. No answer.

She used her key. If luck were with her, she could search for the diamonds, find them, and deal with Jan later.

She stood in the open doorway trying to make sense out of what she was seeing.

Jan lay on the floor on his back. His shirt was covered with blood. Blood pulsed weakly from a black-red gash in his neck. Standing next to him, a pouch in one hand, a bloody knife in the other, stood Rochelle. She looked, as composed as ever, as she said,

“Oxana, he called me, told me to get right over. He said you were in trouble.”

Rochelle took a step toward Oxana.

“He had a knife,” said Rochelle. “This knife. He told me to undress. He put the knife down and. .”

“What is in the bag?” asked Oxana, taking the gun out of her purse and pointing it at the French woman.

“I do not know,” Rochelle said, looking at the pouch as if she had no idea what it was doing in her hand. “He had it, and. .”

“Put the bag on the floor. Put the knife on the floor and step back,” said Oxana.

“What?”

“On the floor. Step back.”

“Is there blood on my dress?” asked Rochelle.

It was Oxana’s turn to say, “What?”

“I cannot go out covered in blood.”

“Put the ba-”

Rochelle dropped the bag. Oxana watched it hit the floor and open enough to reveal three small glittering stones. When Oxana’s eyes were fixed on the stones, Rochelle leapt forward and threw her elbow into the face of the startled model.

Oxana went down on her back, her jaw searing, throbbing with pain.

The door to the apartment was still open. It could not be helped now. Oxana would have to be killed quickly and the door kicked closed.

“Rochelle,” Oxana gasped. “We can. .”

“No, we cannot.”

And then there was another voice, this time from the doorway, saying, “The knife, on the floor. Now.”

Oxana turned her head, and Rochelle looked at the doorway, where Elena stood, weapon in hand.

Rochelle did not drop the knife. Elena fired across the room, through the window.

“Drop the knife, Balta,” Elena said.

Balta smiled and dropped the knife. The woman in the doorway had her knees slightly bent, and she held her weapon in two hands. She was solidly built and rather pretty, not a beauty like Rochelle, certainly not a beauty like Oxana, who was certain that her jaw was broken.

Balta might have been able to dash the five steps across the room and plunge the knife into Elena, but it was a risk he did not have to take. He had a great deal with which to bargain.

Balta dropped the knife. Rochelle’s voice was replaced by a somewhat deeper voice as he raised his hands and said, “You have me.”

“Turn around,” Elena ordered.

Oxana sat blinking her eyes, trying to understand her pain, Jan, and what was happening. Her gun lay on the floor next to the pouch leaking diamonds. Before she could consider what her possibilities might be, Elena kicked the little gun across the room.

“You too, get up,” Elena said to Oxana. “Now.”

Oxana managed to rise in agony.

“Together. Backs to me,” said Elena.

Oxana looked down at the body of Jan Pendowski. Her knees were weak, not because of what she saw, but for the pain in her jaw.

Something clicked around her right wrist behind her. Oxana looked back to watch herself being handcuffed to Rochelle.

“Ya ne pani’mayu. I do not understand,” Oxana managed.

“To begin, you stupid department store dummy,” Balta said, opening his eyes wide, “I am a man.”

Sergeants Moseyovich and Sworskov had gone to work doing what they did best. They closed off the street and called in the cleaning trucks and ambulances. Within half an hour the street was clean and empty, and traffic was moving again.

Three miles away, in the back room of a church that had been converted to a small museum of icons, sat Iosef Rostnikov, Akardy Zelach, a young portly man who insisted that his full name was Laurence, and a very badly beaten James Harumbaki.

They sat and said nothing while Iosef listened to the call that had come on his phone. He had said,

“I understand.”

And then he hung up.

“Christiana Verovona,” said Iosef.

There was no reaction.

“She was murdered on a train coming from Kiev. She was carrying money just received from a model named Oxana Balakona for your diamonds.”

Neither black man said anything.

“I know this because the man who killed Christiana Verovona just told a police officer in Kiev,” said Iosef. “The officer has the money and the diamonds. I have been instructed by my Chief Inspector to let you get your passports, providing you have them, and escort you to the next airplane to Botswana. You will go as you are. Nothing but the clothes you are wearing. No money. You are never to return to Russia. If you do, you will be killed while attempting to rob an undercover police officer.”

James Harumbaki considered asking “Why?” but he did not.

“You agree to these terms?” asked Iosef.

“We agree,” said James Harumbaki.

Iosef had been informed by Porfiry Petrovich, who had been informed by the Yak, that it would be more convenient simply to get the Africans out of the country than to deal with the ramifications of their being in Russia.

“Good,” said Iosef rising. “Then your stay in Russia is over.”