Red Star Rising

6

The media posse had grown by the time Charlie returned to pick up Paula-Jane Venables from her embassy compound apartment. Some uniformed Russian militia officers had arrived to supplement the British security cordon, keeping the pedestrian door clear. They weren’t doing anything, though, to prevent the television cameramen and photographers from taking pictures, and Charlie told his taxi driver to continue on to a telephone kiosk farther along the embankment and wait while he made a call.

“Ashamed to be seen with me?” Paula-Jane asked, flirtingly, when Charlie warned of the likely ambush.

“You don’t need to be identified with me by the FSB and I don’t want to be linked with you by them.”

“Don’t you think they already know who we’re from: you’ll be on file, for Christ’s sake!”

“Why advertise it?”

“There’s caution for you!” she mocked.

“Pity there hadn’t been a lot more of it in the last few weeks,” said Charlie, heavily.

“You had a bad day?”

“Not at all,” denied Charlie, hoping he wasn’t showing his disappointment at not finding a telephone message from Natalia when he’d gone back to the hotel to change. “I’ve got a cab. I’ll pick you up at the Kalininskaya Bridge, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, her lightness gone.

It took her twenty minutes, arriving uncomfortably on elevated high heels, the shoes coordinating with the clasp bag. The cleavage was so deep, the single rope of pearls looked like a suspension bridge between two peaks. Settling gratefully into the back of the cab, she said, “Television didn’t really show the extent of the scrum. I guess you were right.”

“Where are we going?” asked Charlie, as the cab moved off.

“Where else but the American Cafe, just off the ring road?” She gave the driver the address in Russian.

“You seen the papers?” asked Charlie.

“Heard it on television, when I was trying to estimate the crowd outside. Your friend Harry’s gone ape-shit, along with the entire inquiry team that came in this afternoon. I actually didn’t think I was going to be able to get away tonight after all: they’ve got Sotley in with them now, with Dawkins on standby.”

Charlie was intent upon the cab driver’s reflection in the rearview mirror, relieved from the disinterest on the man’s face that he really didn’t understand English. “Who’d you think couldn’t keep their mouth shut?”

“If we take you, me, and Halliday out of the frame you’ve got a fairly short list of suspects. My money’s on Reg Stout.”

Stout was certainly the most obvious, accepted Charlie. They were on the multilaned freeway now, swept along by the tide of vehicles all around them. Recognizing the landmark of Pushkin’s house, Charlie looked to the right where Natalia’s apartment was, little more than a hundred yards off the main highway.

“Familiar places from when you were here before?” asked Paula-Jane.

“No,” denied Charlie, honestly. The apartment he’d occupied with Natalia and Sasha, an entire floor of a minor, prerevolutionary palace, was on the far side of the city. Wanting to move on from the unwelcomed reminder, he said, “Tell me about the people we’re going to be with tonight.”

“Tex Probert is from the Company,” she said, using spook-speak to identify the CIA. “His wife, Sarah, is over on a visit. Bill Bundy’s his intended replacement, overlapping to settle himself in. Shirley Jenkins, who’s partnering Bundy, is in their legal department. Nice guys, although it takes a lot for Shirley to unbend. . ” She smiled, the remark prepared. “Although she does quite a lot of unbending in certain circumstances, according to the stories I’ve heard.”

Charlie ignored the innuendo. Instead, he said, “Sarah’s over on a visit?”

“From what’s officially described as relocation leave,” explained Paula-Jane. “Tex is due to go back permanently any time now. He’s been assigned a CIA headquarter’s posting at Langley so she’s house-hunting around Washington and finding colleges for the two kids, who’ve been at school there. Bill’s the eventual replacement, like I said: third-term assignment, the Company’s acknowledged Russian guru.”

“I know,” said Charlie.

“You know?”

“He was on station here the same time as me.”

“How about that!” exclaimed Paula-Jane.

How about that indeed? thought Charlie, easing his finger inside his left shoe to massage the discomfort.

Charlie had never understood why nostalgic, back-home theme restaurants and bars in foreign cities never properly replicated back home at all. The American Cafe, which hadn’t existed when he’d lived in Moscow, was designed to represent a 1940s diner that, as far as Charlie was aware, didn’t exist anywhere in the United States. This one was complete with blown-up photographs of Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth, and a cigarette advertising poster of a young, Chesterfield-smoking Ronald Reagan. There was even a bulbous, multilighted although silent jukebox. All the tables were covered in red checked cloths, each topped with a totem ketchup bottle.

“Cute, eh?” enthused Paula-Jane.

“Fascinating,” allowed an unimpressed Charlie.

The American party was already there, around a centrally placed circular table. Charlie instantly recognized Bill Bundy in the middle of the group, guessing from Paula-Jane’s rehearsal that the serious faced, dark-haired girl to the man’s right to be the lawyer Shirley Jenkins. Which made the man next to her Tex Probert, with blond wife Sarah completing the group. Both men stood to shake hands at their introduction and Bundy said, “Good to see you after all this time, Charlie.”

“And you,” said Charlie, who couldn’t isolate a single apparent difference in the man’s appearance from when they’d last met. The preppy, short haircut didn’t look out of place on a man who had to be at least fifty. Nor did the regulation Ivy League suit, complete with metal-pin collared shirt clamping the club tie in place.

“You two guys already know each other?” exclaimed the angular-featured Probert, whose accent explained the nickname: the formal introduction had been John.

“From way back,” confirmed Bundy. “We two can actually remember what the Cold War was like.”

“And dinosaurs,” said Charlie, to the laughing appreciation of the three women, giving him the necessary moment to think. Bundy’s posting quite clearly had nothing whatsoever to do with what he’d been sent from London to investigate but Charlie had never before heard of a third-time overseas assignment-certainly not one that involved moving such an acknowledged Russophile at a time of impending political change. His professional curiosity was piqued.

The arrival of the waiter stopped the conversation. The women agreed to share a bottle of white wine while they decided the menu. Probert chose beer and Charlie stuck with vodka in preference to doctored scotch, knowing the restaurant definitely wouldn’t have a bottle with the correct label, let alone genuine Islay malt, which reminded him to collect his commissary order the following day. Bundy, whom Charlie belatedly remembered never chanced losing control, stayed with mineral water, insisting on breaking the bottle-cap seal himself. The American food order was uniformly T-bone steaks upon Probert’s insistence that they were definitely flown in from Texas. Paula-Jane wanted trout, ordering from prior knowledge of the menu without needing to consult it, and when Charlie asked for borscht Bundy said, “Staying native, Charlie?”

“When in Rome,” Charlie answered, using the cliche. He started putting people in their pigeonholes. There was very definitely a frisson between Probert and Paula-Jane, which he guessed Probert’s wife was as conscious of as he was. Probert also appeared overly deferential to Bundy, even making allowances for the Bundy legend within the CIA. Deciding to use that reputation to goad the man in return, Charlie said, “How about you, Bill? What brings the head of the CIA’s Russian desk back to Moscow?”

“Interesting times, politically, don’t you think?” said the man.

“I always thought ambassadors and diplomats assessed things politically and that people like you and me were expected to make other sorts of contributions.”

“My philosophy has always been that you can’t do one without studying the other. You here simply because of your murder?”

“Who said I was here for that?” demanded Charlie, aware of the others shifting uncomfortably at the sudden seriousness between him and the American.

Bundy looked around the table, as if aware of it, too. “Now here’s a lesson for all of us, the danger of assuming too much. Charlie’s on a mission he obviously can’t tell us about.”

“Which is another dangerously accepted assumption,” said Charlie, raising his delivered vodka in a toast to the group to cover his irritation at losing the exchange.

“Can’t say I envy you guys,” came in Probert, attempting to lessen the atmosphere. “Must be a hornet’s nest down there at Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya?”

“It’s kind of busy,” agreed Paula-Jane.

“You just won the understatement of the year award, P-J,” said Probert, leading the laughter.

“From the outside, looking in, I’d say there’s going to be a wholesale massacre,” suggested Bundy.

“I’m keeping my office door locked,” said Paula-Jane, over-emboldened by her earlier reception, although only Probert laughed again this time.

“From what I’ve read in the American papers it seems too late for that,” said Sarah, adding to her wineglass for the third time. “I thought all this spy nonsense was over: actually I never believed most of it in the first place.” She was blue eyed as well as blond, with perfectly sculpted teeth and a milk-and-vitamin-fed complexion. She looked challengingly between her husband and the two other men and said, “Okay, let us in on the secret! How many James Bond coups have any of you had that you know saved the world?”

“Sarah, stop it!” protested Probert.

The arrival of their food contributed to the interruption. Unasked, Charlie took the initiative and ordered his favorite Georgian red wine, intrigued by the total unexpectedness of the dinner party and the vague undertones he was detecting, most surprised-and curious-at facing an adversary he’d never imagined confronting ever again, socially or otherwise. His mind held by Sarah Probert’s outburst, Charlie tried to recall a start-to-finish operation of which he was proud, and couldn’t. He’d stuck a hell of a lot of wrenches into a hell of a lot of engines, though, and who could calculate their outcome if he hadn’t done it? Perversely wanting to keep the uneasy conversation on its present track to see where it might lead, Charlie said, “There’s no such thing as a one-man band in our business: it’s lots of different people offering lots of different tunes eventually to create a song to hum to. Wouldn’t you say that’s how it is, Tex?”

Before her husband could reply, Sarah said, “John says very little about anything, to me at least. That’s why I’m glad we’re moving back to Washington, D.C., where things will be much more normal and I can get my husband back.”

“That’s enough, Sarah!” said Probert.

“Moscow’s not the best foreign posting for a family,” offered Paula-Jane.

Sarah looked across the table at the English woman but deferred to her husband’s warning, pushing aside her scarcely touched meal and picking up the empty white wine bottle with her other hand to gesture for a replacement.

“Is Ann coming back this time?” Charlie asked Bundy, knowing the man’s wife hadn’t enjoyed Moscow and spent a lot of time back in America during their contemporary posting.

“Jury’s still out on that,” said Bundy. “How long are you expecting to be here?”

Charlie shrugged. “Open-ended.”

“Why don’t we make lunch sometime? Catch up on old times?”

“That would be good,” lied Charlie, who’d only ever socialized with the American at mutually attended embassy receptions and even then to the polite minimum.

It was Paula-Jane Venables who recovered the evening, using her enjoyment of Russia in general and Moscow in particular as the springboard-although not in critical comparison with Sarah Probert’s obvious disenchantment-to enthuse about the Bolshoi ballet and of a trip she intended repeating to St. Petersburg to again visit the Hermitage and the Tzars’ village of Tarskoye Selo and to see more opera at the Mariinsky Theatre, culminating with the announcement that when her tour of duty in Moscow ended she intended going east, not west, to take the trans-Siberian railway all the way to the Chinese border and complete her recall to England via Japan if she was refused a visa into China. She amusingly told stories against herself of misadventures and mistakes during her explorations, to the genuine, Tex Probert-led amusement of everyone with the initial exception of Sarah. Shirley Jenkins took up the travelogue with an account of a college-graduation rail journey the length of Latin America as far as Patagonia, and eventually Sarah-and even Bundy-relaxed sufficiently to keep the conversation away from embassy rumor and gossip, the only real subject all of them had in common.

On the way back to the embassy Paula-Jane said, “That wasn’t anything like the fun I’d hoped it would be. Bundy’s a stuffy old fart, frightening all of them with a reputation I didn’t see or hear much to justify. I think he’s stuck in a Cold War time warp, like the way he dresses and how that fucking cafe is designed.”

“He’s a very dedicated guy,” said Charlie, impressed at her analysis.

“You work a lot with him when you were both here?”

“Not at all. We both preferred to work alone.”

“Like you prefer to do now?”

“We’ve been through that.”

“You didn’t share anything with Bundy!” persisted the woman, disbelievingly.

“Nothing,” said Charlie. “Was it just your idea to invite me along tonight?”

Paula-Jane turned to him in the taxi. “How do you mean?”

“Was my name mentioned, when you were invited?”

Paula-Jane hesitated, thinking. “I don’t remember your name coming up. How could it have? No one at the American embassy could have known you were here, could they?”

“Bundy didn’t seem surprised to see me. And appeared to know what I was doing here.”

“Bundy tries to give the impression of knowing everything before it ever happens,” she dismissed. “I thought we came close to an embarrassment with Sarah.”

“You did well to save the evening,” congratulated Charlie. “You know her well?”

“Hardly at all. This isn’t her first extended trip back to the States. From what Tex has told me, she’s spent more of his Russian tour back home than here.”

As the embassy came into view Charlie leaned toward the windshield and said, “The media siege appears to have been lifted.”

“I thought you might have invited me back to the hotel for a nightcap,” said the woman.

I’d guessed you would, thought Charlie. “Maybe another time.”

“Let’s hope there is one.”

Charlie eagerly took the offered message slip from the Savoy receptionist, his expectation of it being from Natalia collapsing immediately. The only thing written on the slip was the telephone number of Colonel Sergei Pavel.

Charlie’s second arrival at Petrovka was very different from his first. On this occasion there was an instant acknowledgement from a different, attentive desk clerk, and at whose bell-pressed demand another escort officer appeared despite Charlie’s assurance that he knew how to get to Pavel’s office. The bigger surprise, coming close to astonishment, continued when he reached Pavel’s top-floor aerie. Already there, waiting with the organized crime colonel, were the weak-stomached Foreign Ministry official of the mortuary visit, together with the suspected FSB’s Mikhail Guzov, and two other men whose identities Charlie guessed from their nervous, foot-shuffling deference to be the discovering gardeners, which was a bonus Charlie hadn’t expected, but which he decided could more than justify his responding to Pavel’s previous night summons. There were thermoses of black tea waiting on a side table that hadn’t been in Pavel’s office the first time. The voice recorders and film equipment would still be, Charlie knew.

“The situation would appear to have become very complicated,” opened the Foreign Ministry’s Nikita Kashev.

“In what way?” queried Charlie, intentionally awkward to give himself time to compartment the assembled group in their necessary order of priority. Kashev had to be there, according to the diplomatically agreed protocol, for the questioning of the body-discovering gardening team. And the murder investigation was officially the responsibility of Sergei Pavel. Which left Mikhail Guzov as the only one who didn’t have a place. Which put the FSB man in charge. By intruding into the meeting Guzov was positively, although unnecessarily, confirming his own official role and purpose. Why? Could it be a test in reverse, Guzov wanting there to be no misunderstanding of who and what he was: confronting, even, any possible accusation of the FSB bugging the embassy? As always, Charlie accepted, he had to dance on ballet points, an agonizing concept with feet like his.

“A lot of media speculation about continuing difficulties at your embassy,” offered Kashev.

“I am not concerned or interested in any media speculation, apart from how it could interfere with what I am here to do,” Charlie continued with intentional awkwardness. “As I’d hoped to have made clear at our initial meeting, I am here for one specific purpose. .” He smiled between the gardeners and Pavel. “And I appreciate what I’m anticipating to be our continuing cooperation.”

Reluctantly drawn into the discussion, Pavel introduced the two FSB informant gardeners, Boris Nikolaevich Maksimov and Petr Petrovich Denin, formally including their patronymics. Pavel made the identification at the same time as offering Charlie two separate dossiers, concluding, “And here are their sworn statements.”

Bulldozing time, Charlie at once recognized, his conviction growing that everything was being orchestrated as well as recorded by Guzov. Disregarding the increasingly impatient fidgeting of his audience, Charlie took his time reading the supposed recollections of each gardener, both of which stopped short of two full pages and roughly-very roughly-accorded with Reg Stout’s totally inadequate account of his conversation with Maksimov.

“There are some questions, of course, in light of what was discovered after your crime scene investigation.” Charlie briskly set out, docking Guzov two points on the professional score sheet for the man’s obvious frown. Talking directly to Maksimov, Charlie said: “How close did you go to the body?”

The thin-faced man hesitated, his look to Guzov for guidance too obvious. Haltingly, weak-voiced, he said: “I’m not sure. Not close enough to touch it.”

“You thought at first it might be someone sleeping, didn’t you?”

“What!” asked the man, now including Pavel in his anxious look for help.

“You told the head of security at the embassy that at first you thought the man was sleeping. It’s not in your statement,” said Charlie, waving the folder.

“I don’t remember saying that.”

“Why should you have thought someone was sleeping in the embassy grounds?”

Maksimov scrubbed his hand across his sweating face. “You see people lying drunk at night.”

“What made you changed your mind?”

Maksimov shuddered. “When I got closer. . saw what had happened to his face. . that there wasn’t a face.”

“Were the clothes wet?”

“No. . I don’t know. .”

“You did touch the body, then?”

“No! I told you I didn’t.”

“You said the clothes weren’t wet. How did you know the clothes weren’t wet if you didn’t touch the body?”

“He said he didn’t know,” came in Guzov, speaking for the first time.

“After saying the clothes weren’t wet,” insisted Charlie.

“I meant I didn’t know, not that I touched the body. I didn’t touch the body.”

“How close did you go to it?”

“Not close. . no closer than a yard.”

“Close enough to see that there wasn’t a face?”

“That was obvious.”

Maksimov was starting to relax, Charlie recognized. “Not at first, when you thought it was someone sleeping.”

“I don’t remember saying that,” repeated the man.

“What about the chip out of the brickwork? You saw that, didn’t you?”

“No. . I don’t understand that question.”

“You sure you didn’t?”

“No. . I mean I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“What did you mean by telling the embassy security officer that you didn’t do it? Did you mean that you hadn’t killed him?”

“I didn’t mean to say that. It just came out like that.”

“When you got about a yard away you could see the body very clearly?”

The man hesitated, nervously. “Yes.”

Time to sow more seeds, Charlie decided. “I know there wasn’t a face but on which side was the head laying, to its right or to its left?”

There was another pause. Maksimov looked at his supervisor, who shrugged. Maksimov said, “To its right.”

“You’re sure it was to its right?”

“Yes,” said the Russian, sounding anything but sure.

“That’s consistent,” said Charlie, as if to himself, looking down again at Maksimov’s written statement, to provide the delay.

“Consistent with what?” demanded Pavel.

Looking down as he’d had to, Charlie hadn’t been able to see any indication from Guzov for the organized crime detective to ask the question. Charlie said, “The gouge mark in the wall our forensic people believe was caused by the bullet ricochet. .” He looked from Pavel to the others in the office. “You have passed on what we talked about earlier?”

It was Kashev who answered. “The colonel has, in some detail, which is why we are here and why I think we need to talk very specifically beyond this immediate subject. I want to stress, most forcibly, that my government denies absolutely any knowledge or responsibility for what is being reported in the media as an espionage intrusion into the British embassy. My colleagues also wish-”

“Sir!” Charlie broke in. “And before I continue any further, I apologize for interrupting you. I have no permanent attachment to the British embassy here. I cannot, therefore, discuss anything other than what I have been sent here to investigate. My investigation is, however, overshadowed by the situation to which you refer. And obviously, potentially hampered by it, particularly by the disparities in these”-Charlie fluttered the two inadequate statements-“and what British forensic scientists collected from other parts of the murder scene. And I intentionally use those words, murder scene, because every conclusion British scientists have so far reached is that the crime was very definitely committed on British territory, not somewhere else. I have taken the advice of our embassy lawyer on that. . the embassy is legally and technically British territory, not Russian.”

“None of those conclusions-or the proof that led to their being reached-has been exchanged, according to the cooperation understanding between our two governments,” intruded Mikhail Guzov, to Charlie’s satisfaction.

It would be wrong to challenge the other man’s official reason for being there, too easily dismissed as Guzov being attached to the Foreign Ministry, which technically he probably was. “Another overshadowing but inevitably connected problem.”

“So what’s the resolve?” demanded Guzov.

“A separation, if it’s possible, between the diplomatic and the criminal,” suggested Charlie.

“Answer your own question,” insisted Guzov. “Is that possible?”

“I, for my part, believe that I can work in total cooperation with Colonel Pavel, quite separately from whatever else is affecting the embassy. I will further undertake to do my utmost to persuade London to make available the results of all scientific tests. And as a gesture of my commitment, I will tell you now that there are definitely images upon the CCTV loops that were intended to be rendered useless by being tampered with. The ricocheting score mark on the wall is still evident and has been extensively photographed, although its immediate brick surface has obvious been scraped away for fragment traces of the bullet that made the mark after exiting the man’s head. Also extensively photographed is the second border area from which earth was dug by our forensic experts’ team to retrieve blood residue and, hopefully, the bullet.”

“I must ask that our forensic officers be allowed back into the embassy for a second examination,” said Kashev.

“In the circumstances in which we now find ourselves and which I have made clear to you, that is not my permission to give,” sidestepped Charlie. “That has to be an official request from your ministry to the ambassador. The most I can offer is the expectation of sharing with Colonel Pavel the photographs and the forensic results to which I have referred.”

He’d been cut off by Guzov before getting all that he’d wanted from the easily manipulated gardeners. But he’d done far better than he could possibly have hoped before entering the room. So why wasn’t he feeling far more satisfied?

The doubt vanished an hour later when he entered the Savoy to find waiting for him, on a message slip, another telephone number he recognized at once to be Natalia’s.