Quiller Meridian

Chapter 6: SHOT

They have asked for a new compartment.' Galina stood watching tic. 'I'm relocating them from Car No. 12 to Car No. 4. They say they're too near one of the lavatories.'

The dark was coming down on our second day out from Moscow; the Rossiya had ploughed through nearly two thousand kilometres of steppes and the Ural mountain range and now we were running through forests of birch and pine and cedar standing draped in snow under the endless leaden skies. We were due in Novosibirsk tomorrow.

Galina had shown herself in the doorway of our compartment a few minutes ago, glancing across Slavsky — who was reading as always — and giving me the slightest movement of her head. I had followed her to the provodnik's station.

'They object to the smell,' she said, simmering.'so what would they expect? Look what the passengers do in there all day, are they rose gardens? Would our friends perhaps prefer the smell of roses? So would I!'

'But you've agreed to move them?'

She lit a cigarette, its black tobacco glowing as the flame of the match went out. It smelled of forest fires. 'I have decided to accommodate them, yes,' she said.' there are three compartments in Car No. 4, nearer the locomotive, occupied by Chinese tourists.' Her small eyes kindled sparks of light. 'Certain favours were exchanged, as you will understand. Our friends are not ungenerous, and the Chinese are indigent, being Chinese. Thus there is no problem.'

She had started yesterday to talk of the generals as' our friends', without my prompting. She would train well, if she ever wanted to enter the shadowed nether-world of covert operations.

'You're moving their entourage,' I asked her, 'as well?'

'But of course.' she watched me steadily, squinting in the smoke from her cigarette.' I thought you should be informed.'

'Yes. Do you think their reason for wanting to move was genuine?'

A shrug. 'With men of their kind, who knows what is genuine, and what spurious? They had power, once. Now they have no power. But they think they have. Their ways are devious.'

I drank some tea with her as the train plunged into nightfall through the dizzying snow that drove past the windows, piling against the frames. She told me that she had chosen to supervise the switching of compartments personally, and would report to me of anything she observed or overheard.

In the evening I shared a table in the dining car with Boris Slavsky, and listened to his views on the future of the CIS, if — as he said — it could be considered to have one. He spoke well, marshalling his facts, but my attention was less with him than with General Velichko and his companion, Tanya Rusakova, smiling and attentive, at the table for two we'd been sitting at last night.

Galina searched me out an hour before I turned in; she had nothing to report except that during the changing around of the compartments she'd learned that the former General Velichko had been made a Hero of the Soviet Union for gallantry in Afghanistan, and then was stripped of his rank and honours following the coup.

I didn't see her again until soon after dawn the next morning, when she came to our compartment bringing tea for us, and the news that one of the passengers in Car No. 9, Nikolai Vladimir Zymyanin, had been found shot dead.

He was lying on his back with his face to the ceiling, and there were powder burns around the blood-filled entry wound in the right temple. Flecks of blackening flesh and splinters of bone were scattered across the floor from the exit wound: the bullet had gone straight through his skull. The gun was also on the floor, not far from the open drain, a short-barrelled heavy-calibre revolver, perhaps army surplus.

'He shouldn't be in here,' one of the security officers said to Galina. He was looking at me. We were in the lavatory for Car No. 9, and the security people had got the provodniks to rig up a makeshift curtain of sheets around the door to give them more room and keep people out; there was a piece torn from a cardboard box pinned onto one of the sheets with instructions chalked on it: Out of order. Use lavatory in Car No. 8 or 10.

'He is an important journalist,' Galina told the officer, 'from Moscow. He is known for his crime reports in all the papers.' They were young, the security officers, and her tone was perfectly pitched: she spoke not as someone in uniform with responsibilities on this train but as a stern and implacable mother, the ultimate authority.

I squatted down, and the reek of the disinfectant burned inside my nostrils. I was looking for signs of torture on the face and hands and wrists, burn marks, the red pinpoint of a needle puncture anywhere. It had been set up as a suicide, but that wasn't in character, and Zymyanin had been left-handed and the entry wound was in the right temple. What I needed to know was whether he'd been put underpressure, very great pressure to talk before they shot him, and whether to expect the same kind of thing if in fact they'd broken him and he'd blown my cover. But there weren't any marks, and the conjunctivae of the eyes that stared at the ceiling showed no damage.

I made notes, for the look of things — Jane had put a shorthand pad into the briefing bag — but I didn't ask any questions. Now that I'd seen what I'd come here to see I wanted to slip back into low profile and disassociate myself from the dead man.

I thanked Galina and pushed the curtain aside and started back along the corridors. The snowstorm had moved south, and a wintry sun was hanging above the pines on the eastern horizon like a Chinese lantern.

He'd died scared, Zymyanin. The Bucharest thing had shaken him, and more than he'd shown, though he'd shown a little: there'd been a note of panic in his voice when we'd been talking about Hornby's fatal incompetence: And what guarantee have I got that lean trust you? How do I know how competent you are? How do I know you haven't brought half a dozen opposition hit men onto this fucking train because of your incompetence?

That hadn't happened. I'd been totally clean when I'd come aboard the Rossiya in Moscow; there'd been no one surveilling me on the night flight, no one tracking me from the airport when I'd got into Jane's car: I'd made absolutely certain of that, had needed to make absolutely certain, because if the shadow executive for Meridian had landed for briefing in Moscow with even the smell of the Longshot thing on his shoes we would have gone into the mission compromised and endangered at the outset.

I hadn't brought any opposition hit men onto the train, but Zymyanin had. He must have done. I hadn't contaminated him, but he could have contaminated me in his last hours. Not his fault: That is all I can tell you for the moment. When I have something more, I'll contact you. In the meantime, keep your distance. I would slip Galina another hundred when I saw her again, tell her to play down the fact that I'd wanted to view the body. It had been a risk I'd had to take, a calculated risk; there'd been no choice.

I sat down to some eggs in the dining car when the first calls for breakfast came; I wasn't hungry but wanted to take in protein. There was only one topic of conversation among the other passengers, and they spoke in low voices.

'You mean he'd been lying there all night long?'

'But surely someone would have heard the shot!'

'Poor man, and we were all sleeping peacefully. I don't think I can manage any more, Julia, do you mind if I leave you here?'

I went back to my compartment soon after eight o'clock and found Boris Slavsky with sheets of writing paper laid out on his bunk like cards in a game of patience. He looked up at me, his eyes wide behind the thick lenses.

'What have they found out?'

He meant the security people.

'Nothing, as far as I know.' I hadn't told him I'd been to look at the body.

'They still think it was suicide?'

'I don't know. I haven't asked them.'

He went back to his papers. He was a professor of biology, he'd told me, at the Academy of Sciences in Akademgorodok, south of Novosibirsk.

Just before ten an announcement was made over the public address system. This is the chief of security. We shall be stopping briefly in half an hour from now, at thirty minutes past ten o'clock. Nobody will be permitted to leave the train, and passengers are instructed to keep away from the doors. I will repeat: no passengers will be permitted to leave the train.

I was reminded again that if anything went wrong with the mission, if I needed continued freedom of movement to keep it on track and make progress, I might be forced to do it in the confines of these narrow corridors, and might find that when I'd boarded this train in Moscow I had walked into a trap. The only way out of it, even if I could reach an unattended door, was across the limitless wastes of Siberia.

'There'll be a full enquiry,' Slavsky said, 'I imagine.'

'Yes,' I said.

In twenty minutes the huge momentum of the Rossiya began dying, and the beaker of water on the small collapsible table was sliding gradually towards the edge. A distant scream came from the locomotive ahead of us, and the steel couplings began banging as the tension came off.

'Would this be a town?' I asked Slavsky. He'd said he did this trip three times a year.

'Yes — ' looking up from his papers — 'a small one. There are several between Tyumen and Novosibirsk.'

Small buildings swung past the windows, many of them with their blue or green paint faded and peeling away. We heard geese raising a clatter, and the faint shout of a farmer's boy. Inside the train, people were crowding along the corridors, staring through the snow-encrusted windows.

We will repeat our previous announcement. No one will be permitted to leave the train when it comes to a stop. Passengers must keep the doors clear.

Boris Slavsky was shuffling his papers into some sort of order and stuffing them into his big leather case.' I hope this enquiry won't hold us up,' he said.' they've got a little dinner party planned for tonight in Novosibirsk.' He trailed off with a modest mumble:

Celebrating my homecoming.'

'How nice for you,' I said.

There wouldn't be any celebrating in London tonight if I could send a signal through from Novosibirsk when the Rossiya made its stop. The board for Meridian would be looking bleak under the floodlights. Russian contact deceased. Opposition hit suspected. Executive assumed in hazard.

That would depend — the hazard thing — on whether any serious notice had been taken of the fact that I'd talked to Zymyanin not long before he was killed. It would also depend on whether the opposition had in fact struck some kind of spurious deal with Zymyanin — perhaps for his life — and got him to talk before they killed him. And finally it would depend on how well or otherwise my cover would stand up to a homicide investigation.

'I have two grandchildren, 'Slavsky said. He was perched on the edge of his bunk and looking up at me with his eyes magnified by their glasses.

'You don't look old enough,' I said.

'Thank you.' He looked down, modestly.

I'd begun to find Boris Slavsky rather charming, and it would have been nice to talk to him some more between here and Novosibirsk.

I didn't think that was going to be possible.

The couplings out there raised a whole peal of bells as the carriages started shunting, and I braced myself against the bulkhead as the train came to a halt. I got a towel and cleared a hole in the fogged glass of the window and saw two police cars standing in the snow beyond the rustic platform, their coloured lights revolving. Dark figures moved about; I couldn't tell whether they were in uniform.

A generator began running and hydraulic pipes hissed. The people lining the windows of the corridors were talking, their tone quietly excited, reminding me of a murmuration of starlings along a telephone wire. Then there was the tramp of boots on the platform and voices sounded, some of them from inside the train; then finally a door was slammed shut.

'Are they the police?' Slavsky asked.

'Yes,' I said.

It was 2:14 when a provodnik put his head into our compartment, a man, not Galina.

'Shokin, Viktor?'

'Yes.' I got up. I'd been looking at one of Slavsky's books, at a coloured illustration of the nervous system of the Drosophila melanogaster, while I was mentally going through the details of my cover.

I followed the provodnik along to the dining car. The corridors were almost empty: there'd been repeated announcements asking passengers to keep to their compartments unless it was essential to leave them. The Rossiya had taken on a different atmosphere since we'd stopped at the small town, something like that of a ship running into trouble in mid-ocean.

We were now halfway from the town to Novosibirsk, and moving into the half-light of darkening skies. It was said there was another snowstorm, a big one, hanging over central Siberia.

The tables had all been cleared in the dining car except for their white linen cloths, some of them still stained. The smell of sour cooking seeped in from the galley.

'You are Shokin, Viktor Sergei?'

'Yes.'

There were something like twenty uniformed policemen dispersed among the tables, sitting in their booths opposite the passengers with big yellow notepads between them. Some of the train's security guards were protecting the exits.

'Sit down, please. I am Chief Investigator Gromov.'

A man in his fifties, thick-bodied and square-faced, a black mole near the side of his nose, his eyes bland and patient as he studied me. He'd left his greatcoat on, despite the steamy heat in here. I sat down.

A chief investigator. This table was at the end of the dining car, the one where the major interest was centred, perhaps. They'd been sifting through probably two or three hundred passengers since they'd come aboard, and hadn't even reached Car No. 9, two along from my own.

I'd been specially selected.

'Do you know what has happened on the train?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Tell us what has happened, please.'

Two other investigators were at the table, one sitting beside me and the other opposite. The one opposite was quite different from his chief: lean and pale-faced with colourless eyes, a thin line for a mouth, a sharp nose-bone. He was also much younger, would have come up fast through the ranks, to be sitting here with the chief of homicide investigation.

'A dead man was found,' I said, 'early this morning.'

'Was it an accident?'

His eyes were a nutty brown, the chief's, with gold lights in them; they could be the eyes of your favourite uncle, the one who always brought you things when you were a whipper-snapper and he came to pay a visit. But sometimes as he watched me the eyes of Gromov deadened, and the light in them went out, and that was when I felt worried, because he was slipping a mask over them.

'There are a lot of rumours,' I told him. 'Some say he committed suicide, others say he was murdered.'

'And which do you think is the truth?'

'You're asking me to choose between rumours?'

He picked up a pen, a cheap red ballpoint with a tuft of frayed string on it; perhaps he'd pulled it away from something. He began making notes on the big yellow pad, not all the time, just now and then as I went on giving him the answers to his questions as best I could. He talked to me as if this were the first I'd heard of any incident on the train, and I understood why: he wanted to see if I knew something that none of the other passengers did, and hoped I'd let it out unintentionally.

'Did you see this man Zymyanin when he was alive?'

I'd already told him I'd asked Galina to let me see the body and make some notes, and he'd thought it not unreasonable for a diligent journalist to do that.

'I saw him a couple of times,' I said, 'along the corridors. His carriage was two away from mine — or that's what I assume, since he was found in Car No. 9.'

'Did you ever speak to him?'

'Once.'

Gromov looked up from his pad.

'Oh?'

'I think he was — '

'Where was this?'

'In Car No. 7. I think he was waiting to go into the lavatory there, because someone came out while we were talking.'

'What were you talking about?'

I told him Zymyanin had asked me what I thought of the new economic bills they'd just signed in parliament, whether I thought they'd do any good, get any food on the shelves. He kept on circling this incident, Gromov, wanting to know the time when I'd talked to the deceased, what I'd thought of his demeanour — did he seem depressed, anxious about anything?

The other man never took his eyes off me, never made notes. Chief Investigator Gromov made quite a lot, covering half the first sheet of his notepad. Then he switched to a different subject, and I didn't know how well or how badly I'd done so far. It hadn't actually been a hurdle, the question of whether I'd ever talked to Zymyanin: several of the cleaning women had seen us together and so had the man who'd come out of the lavatory, one of the generals' bodyguards. I'd had no chance of lying.

'Do you know,' Gromov asked me suddenly, 'how the body of die deceased was discovered?'

I said no.

'But you saw the body.'

He left his patient brown eyes on me.

'That didn't tell me how it had been found.'

He looked down again at his notes. I didn't like these little traps he was setting for me, giving me a chance to say yes, the deceased had looked very depressed, possibly suicidal; asking me to choose the truth between rumours. It was quite probable that he'd spent his whole career as an investigator setting little traps, did it in his sleep, because he'd found they sometimes paid off; but he wouldn't have done this with the other passengers — unless they were already suspect.

I was right: this was the table where the action was, where they brought people straight through the queue as a matter of doubtful privilege, to be put under intense examination, however patient his eyes, Gromov's, however they reminded you of your favourite uncle's.

I was suspect.

He was saying nothing, waiting for me to volunteer some kind of information, waiting for my nerves to set little traps for myself on their own.

Wasting his time.

The younger man, the thin one, didn't take his cool pale eyes off me: they were fixed at the edge of my vision field, and if they moved I'd see it happen. I turned my head a little and looked through the misted windows. The world had become black and white out there, with the sky towards the east brooding in darkness and the snow-covered flatlands beneath it catching the last of the daylight. By the rocking of the train I would have said we were running flat out again at something like 150 kph, according to Slavsky's figures.

'You have nothing more to say?'

I looked back at Chief Investigator Gromov.

'I'm here,' I said, 'to answer questions.'

'Of course. Let me tell you, then, Comrade Sho — excuse me — Mr Shokin, how the body of the deceased was discovered. It might prompt your memory. The — '

'My memory's very good, Chief lnvestigator. My work demands it'

He inclined his large square head.' I was forgetting,' he said. He wasn't. "The deceased was found in a lavatory, as you know. The door was not bolted from the inside, though it was closed. One of' the passengers tried to go in there, since the sign was set at «Vacant» — the bolt being in the withdrawn position — but they found what they described as some kind of obstruction, and assumed that someone was inside and had forgotten to bolt the door and was simply pushing against it to disallow entry and ensure their continued privacy. This happened with three of the passengers, and after a time one of them told a provodnik that they thought someone might have passed out in the lavatory. The provodnik then used his weight against the door and managed to get it halfway open, and saw the deceased lying on the floor. He raised the alarm.'

I waited. I was here to answer questions.

The two security guards at the far end of the dining car stood aside to let one of the passengers out — a short man, almost round, in a dark coat that hung from him as if someone had thrown a black cloth over a ball. Another passenger was brought in — Tanya Rusakova, no coat, a white heavy-knit polo sweater and black leather skirt, fur-lined boots, a gold chain swinging from her neck as she slipped into the booth and looked at the investigator there, her eyes guarded.

'Does this suggest anything to you?' Gromov asked me.' the fact that the door had not been bolted from the inside?'

I leaned back, resting one arm on the table, at my ease. 'It's still a question of taking your pick, isn't it, Chief Investigator? It could suggest homicide, since nobody could have shot the victim and then bolted the door from the inside when he left. But a suicide wouldn't necessarily have bolted the door either before he shot himself. The kind of evidence you're looking for is quite outside my knowledge, even though I viewed the body.'

'And what kind of evidence is that?'

'Circumstantial. The basics. You'll have got it by now, of course: were there fingerprints on the gun that weren't the victim's or was it wiped clean or did it look as if his fingerprints had been impressed on it by someone else? Was the deceased left-handed, according to the measurements you've had taken of the musculature on both arms, since the shot went into the right side of the head? Things like that. Of course I can't give you the answers.'

His eyes deadened, the tiny gold lights going out. 'And you are not trying to teach me my job, I assume.'

He wasn't being stupid; he was trying to get my goat, that was all, start an argument in the hope that I'd trap myself in the heat of the moment.

'You had me brought here to answer questions, Chief lnvestigator. You asked me what kind of evidence it was that I considered was quite outside my knowledge. That was my answer.'

I waited again. It still worried me that he was setting traps, because it looked as if he'd been given some kind of evidence against me and had got me here to pick at my brains until I broke and confessed, and I'd have to watch it, watch every word, every move. I hadn't shot Zymyanin but I'd been seen talking to him and I'd asked to view the body and I couldn't afford — I could not afford — to let this man put me in handcuffs and under guard on a charge of suspicion. Meridian was running and Hornby had been killed and the Soviet contact had been killed and the only lead I had would be taken away from me if Gromov took away my freedom.

'Your answers are appreciated,' he said in a moment, and looked at his assistant, the thin man, and back to me. 'You speak well, Viktor Shokin. You answer questions… adroitly.'

I let that one go.

The thin man got up and left the table, his thigh catching the corner and sending Chief Investigator Gromov's red ballpoint rolling across his notepad. He picked it up and wrote three more lines, his large head tilted as he watched the thin spidery script forming along the lines on the pad. Then he looked up at me again.

'There are two witnesses,' he said slowly, 'who have given evidence concerning you, Viktor Shokin, that I find significant. They — ' then he broke off as his assistant came back, bringing two people with him: the generals' bodyguard who'd come out of the lavatory when I'd been talking to Zymyanin, and Galina Ludmila Makovetskaya, the red-headed provodnik.' this man,1 the chief investigator said, 'claims that when he came out of the lavatory in Car No. 7 yesterday he saw you talking to the deceased, as you have admitted. But he says that your voices were raised, and that you seemed to be threatening him. What have you to say to that?'

I looked up into the face of the witness, saw no expression, a nondescript face, the eyes giving nothing away, as I would have expected of a former Red Army general's bodyguard, possibly a former member of the GRU, trained to keep his thoughts out of his eyes.

'He's lying,' I told Gromov.

The large head tilted a degree. 'He also claims that shortly before midnight last night he heard what he thought was a shot coming from somewhere in Car No. 9, and that he saw you in the corridor there, hurrying away from the lavatory. What have you to say?'

I looked down at Gromov. 'He's lying. You should check his story, Chief Investigator. You should check it very carefully.'

Gromov dropped the red ballpoint onto his notepad and swung his heavy head up to look at Galina.' this provodnik has also stated that she saw you in Car No. 9 — which is not where your compartment is — immediately after she heard what sounded like a shot.' He looked down at me. 'What have you to say?'

I felt a vibration on the air, created by the nerves I suppose, as I heard in my mind the bang of the trap shutting.

'She's lying,' I told Gromov. 'they're both lying.'

'Perhaps,' he said. 'Perhaps. But until I have satisfied myself of that, I am placing you under arrest, Viktor Sergei Shokin, on a charge of suspected homicide.'

The officer beside me nudged my arm and I made a token of protest as would be expected of me and then let him put the handcuffs on and snap them shut.