The Bearpit

36

Yuri routed himself through Spain and Germany, so it was a long flight, but up to the last hour before the Moscow touchdown he had not properly worked out how he could advance into the necessary destructive indictment the information he carried in the briefcase at his side. Or even into the unquestionably more necessary protective one. And then he remembered rust-coloured vodka and body odour and a contemptuous disregard for authority and coupled it to the militia investigator’s insistence upon the importance of back-street repair shops in discovering who had killed his father. And decided, in rare assurance these days, that he had nothing to lose.

Yuri walked slowly along the line of waiting taxis, peering in and ignoring the inviting gestures, finding the man he wanted five vehicles from the front. He got into the car, ignoring the hornblasts of protest from the others ahead, which the driver did as well. The lead taxi protested the loudest and as he passed Yuri’s driver thrust up a single middle finger and said: ‘Fuck you.’ As they negotiated the exit loops from Sheremet’yevo the man said: ‘Come far?’

Yuri was too impatient to endure a full repeat of the sales pitch of the previous journey so he leaned forward against the seat in front, the fifty-dollar note folded upward and almost directly in front of the man.

The driver said: ‘What’s that?’

‘What’s it look like?’

‘Fifty American dollars.’

‘That’s what it is.’

‘Piss off,’ dismissed the man. ‘Is that how you get promotion in Gorbachov’s anti-corruption militia? By entrapment! Amateur: fucking amateur.’

‘Last time you offered me girls and vodka and said I wouldn’t get a better rate anywhere for my dollars,’ reminded Yuri.

He was conscious of the man’s attention in the rear-view mirror and moved, to make himself more visible.

‘Who are you?’ demanded the driver.

Yuri didn’t reply to that question, either. He let the note drop and said: ‘It’s yours.’

‘You haven’t asked the rate.’

‘I don’t want to know the rate.’

‘You’re not making sense.’

‘I want help: the sort of help I think you can give me.’

‘You notice I’m not touching that money? Don’t know it’s there,’ said the man. ‘You’ve got to get up much earlier in the morning to trick me, asshole. You know what I think I’m going to do? I think I’m going to stop here and throw you out of the cab. That’s what I think I’m going to do.’

As close as he had to be, Yuri saw that the collar of the driver’s coat was even blacker than before from his greased hair and the miasma of tobacco appeared stronger, too. As the car began to slow and move to the side of the highway, Yuri took another fifty-dollar note from his pocket and held it up, like the previous one. ‘You know whose portrait that is?’ he said. ‘That’s Ulysses S. Grant.’

The man looked from Yuri to the money and back to Yuri again. He said: ‘I asked you who you were.’

‘And I said I wanted help.’

The driver’s eyes went back to the money, briefly, and he said: ‘What sort of help?’

‘Garages which repair cars that have been in accidents that can’t be reported. For unaccounted money.’

‘You…?’ began the man and then stopped, looking back at the airport and shaking his head. He said: ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Yuri let the fifty-dollar note drop beside the first and said: ‘I’m talking about money.’

‘Who told you?’

‘About what?’

‘Me.’

‘This isn’t a trap.’

‘Convince me.’

‘Look closely.’

The tobacco breath was disgusting as the man turned fully to him. ‘So?’

‘Recognize me?’

‘No.’

‘Try harder.’

‘Why should I?’

‘For the hundred dollars beside you.’

‘I don’t know anything about a hundred dollars beside me.’

‘You weren’t so careful last time. You wanted to deal in anything American that I wanted to sell or barter.’

‘I don’t remember any last time: there wasn’t one.’

‘You wanted to sell vodka and to buy dollars and anything American that I had,’ repeated Yuri.

‘I’ve never seen you before.’

‘You took me to the KGB building on the ring road.’

‘I did not.’

‘I could have reported you then to the anti-corruption militia,’ said Yuri, remembering how strong the temptation had been and glad he had not succumbed to it. ‘I didn’t. If I had done and you’d been intercepted how would you have explained the vodka? And all the cash you were carrying as a money black marketeer?’

‘There wasn’t another time,’ insisted the man.

The denial was weak and Yuri knew the man had at last remembered him. He said: ‘I didn’t do it then. I am not going to do it now. Not unless I have to.’

‘What’s that mean, unless you have to?’

‘It means there’s two ways,’ said Yuri. ‘One way makes you money. The other way makes you unhappy: subject to stop and search and harassment, whenever, however.’

‘I’m supposed to be frightened?’

The bravado was weaker than the denial. Yuri said: ‘What would a search squad find right now, where you live?’

‘Two hundred dollars,’ capitulated the driver.

‘If it’s worth it.’

‘Now.’

‘Later, when we find the garage.’

‘There are a lot: the anti-corruption campaign is a joke.’

‘Keep the meter running, all the time.’ The man’s physical presence could be an advantage.

‘You looking for engine damage? Engineers?’

Yuri hesitated. ‘Bodywork,’ he said.

‘What happened?’

‘No need for you to know.’

There appeared to be a lot, as the man said. Because it was on the way into Moscow from the airport they stopped at Khimki and after there near the Dynamo sports stadium and crossed to the northern river terminal, where they unsuccessfully checked two places from which the driver, who by now had identified himself as Leonid (‘like Brezhnev: he enjoyed living well, too’) said stolen cars were sold as well as unrecorded repairs carried out. At every garage there was a wall of rejecting hostility towards him and Yuri quickly realized just how much he needed the man with him. The pattern developed of the questions being put through the driver rather than directly from him. Yuri became hopeful at a service station on the road to Krasnogorsk when a paint-sprayer remembered a 1984 Lada and was just as quickly disappointed when he said the colour had been green.

‘Sure you want to go on?’ asked Leonid as they turned off the ring road to appraoch the centre of Moscow.

‘Quite sure.’

‘You see what’s on the clock?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘This must be pretty important to you.’

‘It is.’

There were four more garages and two more wrongly coloured Ladas before the taxi pulled into Begovaya Street. It appeared to be a three-man business, one of the owners the sprayer himself, anonymous behind a protective mask, his overalls multi-coloured from previous jobs. From the attitude Yuri guessed he knew Leonid personally: instead of answering the first question the man nodded in Yuri’s direction and said: ‘He OK?’

‘Yes,’ said the driver.

‘How OK is OK?’

Yuri didn’t understand until the driver said: ‘Of course he’ll pay; he’s with me, isn’t he?’

‘A 1984 Lada?’ queried the garageman. He had lifted the visor of his mask but it was still not possible to see what he really looked like.

‘Around October fourteenth,’ prompted Yuri.

‘Fifteenth,’ said the man at once.

He’d got this far before, thought Yuri, curbing the optimism.

‘What was the damage?’ asked Leonid.

‘Scraped nearside wing,’ said the man. ‘And the light assembly was smashed.’

‘What colour?’

‘Fawn. Managed a good match.’

A feeling of satisfaction engulfed Yuri. Abandoning their established system and taking over from the driver, he said: ‘Remember anything about the man?’

‘He was a soldier,’ declared the sprayer at once.

‘A soldier!’ demanded Yuri. ‘You mean he wore uniform?’

The man shook his head. ‘The way he walked; held himself. Always tell a military man.’

The fit was there, decided Yuri. He said: ‘What else about him? Anything at all?’

Instead of replying, the sprayer said to Leonid: ‘You sure this is all right?’

‘Dollars,’ promised Leonid.

‘How much?’

‘Twenty,’ opened Yuri.

‘Fifty,’ bargained the man.

The ultimate satisfaction would be charging it to KGB expenses, Yuri decided as he handed the money over: ‘payment for essential information’ perhaps. He said: ‘So what else about him?’

‘Nothing about the man: just that he had a positive military bearing.’

Yuri felt a flare of irritation, imagining he had been tricked into parting with money upon the promise of something more, and then recognized the qualification in the reply. He said: ‘What else, if it wasn’t about the man?’

‘You sure this isn’t official?’

‘You often get paid in American dollars by the police?’

The man hesitated and then went into the cubby-hole office in one corner of the paint shop, re-emerging at once with a ledger-sized book. ‘Wouldn’t have mattered if it had been official,’ he said, offering it already opened at a page.

Double book-keeping, as a protection against any police raid! Yuri realized. He took the book eagerly but before he could study the work record, the man said: ‘Everything is properly detailed. Everything. Even the registration.’

‘Registration!’

‘On the first line.’

Yuri didn’t ask, unwilling to risk a refusal. He walked to the cubby-hole and copied MOS 56-37-42 on to a scrap of blank paper on the desk top, put it in his pocket and left the account book there. He could actually feel the throb of his own heartbeat and wondered if he were flushed with the excitement. He’d got the most positive evidence yet. And already knew how he could use it further! He was close, he decided: close enough to reach out and touch!

‘Thank you,’ he said, with more sincerity than either of them knew.

‘You ever need a car resprayed, you know where to come.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

‘Where now?’ asked Leonid, back in the car.

‘The ring road building,’ said Yuri.

When they got there Yuri handed over the additional hundred dollars and settled the meter fare, which registered a hundred and seventy-five roubles. Yuri guessed it had been tampered with, to run quicker.

‘By the time any search squad gets to where I live, there won’t be anything there,’ said Leonid.

‘You’re safe,’ said Yuri.

‘You really KGB?’

‘What do you think?’ said Yuri.

‘What I’ve always thought,’ said the man, turning the remark. ‘You can’t trust the KGB: they’re assholes. Money’s good, though.’

Yuri did not report at once to the reception area. Instead he took the elevator to the basement garage, where he’d once regarded the people who’d cleaned and looked after his father’s car – the car in which he’d lost his virginity – as allies if not friends. His luck held. The duty clerk was a man he recognized: Andrei, he thought. The smile of recognition was returned but faded at once, embarrassment at a misplaced expression. ‘Sorry about your father,’ Andrei said.

‘It’s being investigated,’ said Yuri.

‘Let’s hope they get the fucker.’

‘Let’s hope,’ said Yuri. He produced his official accreditation and said: ‘I want to know from records if a Lada numbered MOS 56-37-42 is one of our cars. And if it was booked out on fourteenth October.’

With a positive date to work from it took the clerk only minutes. ‘Colonel Panchenko,’ he said. ‘He kept it a week.’

‘Is it here now?’

The clerk consulted a chart on the wall and said: ‘Bay 38.’

The paintsprayer had not been exaggerating, acknowledged Yuri: the colour was an excellent match. Like another positive match, the provable tread of the tyres compared against those outlined in his father’s blood, at the scene of the killing: outlined in the photograph he possessed.

He had it all, thought Yuri, taking the elevator back up to the reception area. Now what was he going to do with it? He imagined the question answered when he identified himself and was told he had to report to Vladislav Belov.

The despair lumped in John Willick’s throat and he swallowed against breaking down, although there was no one in the Karacharovo apartment to witness his crying. No one anywhere. The drivers taking him to and from the debriefings appeared unable to speak English and his interrogators rotated and every one treated him with an attitude bordering on contempt anyway, so he was resigned against any possibility of acquaintanceship, let alone friendship. The system had been established for him to be paid but he had been granted no concessionary facilities. He had not yet been able to buy anything without lining up for hours and having to use sign language when he’d bought the purchase ticket and then moved into the second queue to reclaim what he wanted, against the price already paid. He found the language sessions impossible. The instructor was impatient with him and Willick knew it would take him months – years – to get even a limited mastery of Russian. He was so miserable, he thought; more miserable than he’d ever been in his entire life. He didn’t know what to do; there was nothing he could do. He choked, unable to hold on any longer, sitting at the stained table, the sobs shuddering through him.

The revelation of the CIA headquarters personnel was as devastating as Vladislav Belov had predicted during the last interview with Kazin. The identities were disclosed over a period, for maximum and sustained impact, were published throughout Europe, and from the outlets there picked up and carried on television and in newspapers across America.

Harry Myers was named as the Agency’s security chief and Edward Norris as the deputy controller of the Soviet Division in the second batch released.

‘Holy Mother of Christ!’ exploded Myers.

‘I know,’ anticipated Crookshank, uncertain if the disclosures were over and fearing his name could still come. ‘If you could, you’d kill him. I would, too.’