The Bloody Meadow

Chapter Four

Korolev managed something approximating sleep for a good part of the journey, although he joined the other passengers to stretch their legs at Kursk, and by the time they landed in Odessa he was almost used to the strange experience that was flying.

He took his bag from the youth who was emptying the cargo hold and made his way over to the small wooden airport building, the word ODESSA attached to its roof in-between two obligatory red stars. Several small trucks and a couple of black cars were parked haphazardly in its vicinity and a small crowd of people stood around it, waiting for the passengers, he presumed. It wasn’t difficult to spot Major Mushkin.

He was a tall man, just over six feet, and if he wasn’t wearing a uniform as such, there wasn’t much doubt that he was a Chekist. Certainly every citizen within viewing distance had Mushkin marked, even though no one seemed to be looking in his direction. In fact, that was just it. Everyone was ignoring the burly man from State Security so pointedly that he stood out like a palm tree on an iceberg.

And of course it didn’t help that the major’s gaze was like a searchlight sweeping the crowd as he flicked the worker’s flat cap he carried against his thigh like a whip to the rhythm of a tune only he could hear. Korolev watched him reach for a cigarette case from the pocket of his double-breasted leather trench coat, then bring one the contents to his mouth. He was about to light it when he became aware of Korolev and, as their eyes met, Korolev felt a shiver run down his spine as every instinct told him that the fellow was bad news. Very bad news.

The strangest thing, he thought as he approached, was that the major was almost good looking. The nicotine-stained blond hair that he’d pushed back from his pale forehead was beginning to whiten around the ears, but was still thick, if a little tangled. His features were regular enough – a broad jaw, high cheekbones and a straight nose – and would have been pleasing on another man. But the major’s face had a weary, cynical cast to it that Korolev suspected must be permanent, and it robbed him of any attractiveness or warmth.

‘Major Mushkin?’ Korolev asked, holding out a hand in greeting.

‘Korolev,’ Mushkin said, ignoring the hand. ‘My car’s over here. We’ll talk on the way.’

‘Comrade Mushkin?’ It was Belakovsky’s voice. ‘Are you here to meet us?’

The major turned and looked at Belakovsky for a long moment. ‘No,’ he said eventually.

Belakovsky’s eyes swivelled towards Korolev, remembering him, before turning back to Mushkin with an apologetic smile.

‘Of course, I’m sorry – when I saw you standing here…’

‘Yes, you jumped to a conclusion.’ Mushkin spoke the words like a threat.

‘Excuse me, Comrade, my mistake. Please forgive me.’ Belakovsky turned away and, nodding to Lomatkin, walked quickly round the corner of the building in the journalist’s company. Mushkin looked at Korolev for a reaction, which Korolev was careful not to provide.

‘Well, now you’ve met Belakovsky. You’ll see more of him. Lomatkin his sidekick as well, no doubt.’

The car rattled along a road so straight it could have been laid out with a ruler, although after months of freezing temperatures the surface had nothing of the same regularity. Not that Mushkin allowed that to affect his speed, manoeuvring round only the bigger pot-holes and leaving the car’s suspension to deal with the rest – a task that Korolev’s bruised body told him was beyond it. It was a good fifteen years since he’d travelled through the Ukraine, but he remembered the steppe all too well and the flat landscape extended unremittingly to the horizon. Rodinov had told him it would be warmer than Moscow, which it was, but only by a couple of degrees and ice still clogged the streams and lakes and scatterings of snow marked each variation in the relentless flatness.

‘We found her hanging from a wall bracket in the dining room,’ Mushkin said, his voice rising to compete with the car’s engine.

‘So I understand. Anything suspicious?’

‘No,’ Mushkin replied flatly.

Korolev looked out of the window at the passing landscape but after a while of staring at the endless road ahead, the temptation to ask another question got the better of him.

‘Where is this dining room?’

Mushkin sighed and, for a moment, Korolev thought his question wouldn’t be answered.

‘The dining room is in an old manor house where the cast and crew are staying – it was a nobleman’s country residence before the Revolution, now it’s part of an agricultural college. They call it the Orlov House locally. The College has plenty of room, is secure and it’s near the village where they’re filming. The students and teachers who would be there otherwise have been sent to nearby kolkhoz s to help them prepare for the new season’s planting, so it’s convenient for everyone.’

Korolev was surprised at such a thorough answer, so surprised that he decided to push his luck.

‘What time did she die?’

Mushkin’s lips tightened into a scowl, and when he answered his voice had acquired an undercurrent of irritation.

‘She was found at just past ten last night. The last time she was seen alive was after the evening meal at around seven-thirty. The caretaker passed through the room where the body was found at eight o’clock and saw nothing. So between eight and ten is what I would deduce.’

‘What about the other people staying in the house?’

‘A night shoot down at the village. It was a crowd scene, so everyone was involved except for the girl. It seems she was alone in the house after the caretaker left.’

‘Who found the body?’

‘The caretaker – at least he was the one who opened the door when they found her. But he was with Shymko, the chief production coordinator. They’d been down at the shoot – the caretaker was in the crowd for the scene they were filming.’

‘What’s a production coordinator?’

‘A fixer. He makes sure everything runs smoothly. He’s the adjutant to Savchenko’s colonel.’

‘And this caretaker?’

‘He’s nearly sixty – he’s taken it badly. To me it looks open and shut, no one else involved except for her, but I understand you have orders as to how to proceed.’ Again that note of irritability.

‘I’d like to see the body first.’

‘As you wish.’

‘Did you know the girl?’ Korolev ventured.

Mushkin nodded, and for the first time Korolev thought he detected a glimmer of sympathy.

‘Yes, I knew her – it was a surprise to me.’ He sighed, and his face took on a gentler, more thoughtful expression. ‘She didn’t strike me as the suicidal type. On the contrary – an able worker, a committed Party activist, well respected by her comrades. Popular. And I’m not aware of any reason why she’d have wanted to kill herself. As I said, I was surprised – but then these things happen.’

Mushkin shrugged his shoulders; death obviously didn’t impress him any more. And when it came to suicide he had a point. They didn’t publish figures, but everyone knew someone who’d ended their own life. It was the nature of the transition they were going through, Korolev supposed: the march from a feudal society to modern socialism exerted pressures on the individual – and not all individuals were made of steel. Sometimes he wished the Party would just give them a few months off. A holiday from change.

‘How about personal relationships? A lover perhaps? There’s nothing in the file, but young women…’ Korolev left the sentence hanging.

Mushkin shook his head.

‘I’m not in the locality in a professional capacity, Captain, as you’ve probably been informed. I’m here for a period of rest.’ The major glanced at him and Korolev felt his reaction to the statement was being assessed. It made him wonder whether the period of rest was voluntary.

‘I haven’t been monitoring things closely,’ Mushkin continued, ‘at least not up until now. It’s possible, however. Very possible. She was a popular girl.’

By now they’d left Odessa far behind. The villages they were passing through were further and further apart, and the landscape was made up almost entirely of enormous fields divided from each other by thin lines of bare-branched trees.

Korolev had heard rumours of what had happened in the Ukraine in ’thirty-two and ’thirty-three – dangerous words heard late at night from soldiers who’d had too much to drink in the Arbat Cellar. How the Red Army and the NKVD had forced the peasants to give up every scrap of food and how, faced with starvation, they had resisted, futilely, and the soldiers and the Chekists had shot them down. The car passed more than one smoke-blackened church, their domes charred black skeletons, and each village was dotted with roofless ruined buildings. Korolev couldn’t help but notice that the few hunched peasants he saw seemed older than their probable years, with barely the energy to lift their feet from the ground. They turned their heads to look at the passing car with no interest whatsoever and Korolev had seen that look before, during the war, on the faces of men who’d been fighting too long and had seen too much. On his own face caught in a mirror, not far from here, the day after cavalry had caught his company in the open and he’d hidden underneath his friend Pavel’s dead body as the horsemen had searched for the living amongst the dead, the pop of revolver shots marking each discovery. It had taken three days for his hands to stop shaking enough for him to shave. But by the time that had happened he’d been tired, so tired – seven years of fighting and so many dead friends and dead enemies filling his dreams. It wasn’t surprising he’d nearly broken. He didn’t know where he’d found the strength, perhaps the Lord had answered his prayers, but somehow he’d pulled himself together, shaved, washed his friend’s blood from his tunic and marched on with a different group of comrades, thanking the Virgin he still breathed.

Korolev looked across at Mushkin and realized that the Chekist’s expression wasn’t that dissimilar from the one on the faces of the peasants they’d just passed – a man who’d reached his limit and gone past it. The soldiers in that bar had said that in some places that winter the peasants had organized themselves and taken reprisals against Party officials – even ambushed detachments of Militia and the Red Army – and that the NKVD’s retaliation had been savage. Each rebellion had been crushed, no matter how small, and each act of resistance, real or imagined, met with brutal retribution. Mushkin must have been up to his neck in all of that, Korolev thought to himself. He noticed the way the major kept his eyes fixed on the road in front of them as they drove through the battered villages. Was it Korolev’s imagination or was the major trying to avoid looking out at the signs of the struggle that had taken place here?

‘You said this agricultural college was secure – does it need to be?’ Korolev found himself saying, and regretted it almost immediately. Mushkin glanced at him before turning his eyes back to the road ahead.

‘The struggle against wreckers and counter-revolutionaries is not yet over in these parts, Korolev.’

They passed through another village, not dissimilar to the others – thin, hungry faces and rotting empty houses, the wooden walls grey with age and the damp thatch sagging. The usual signs of Soviet Power were here too – the kolkhoz office, a small Militia post, a collective store. These buildings at least looked as though they were being maintained.

But Mushkin looked neither left nor right, driving through the village as though it didn’t exist until, on reaching a large concrete block which announced the Odessa Regional Agricultural College in foot-high letters, he turned off the main road onto a gravel drive. The drive continued into woodland, the first Korolev had seen since he’d landed, and after a minute or so it reached the remains of a small church, burnt out long before.

‘The family that owned the estate were buried here,’ Mushkin said, stopping the car and indicating a small graveyard that had suffered as much as the church. ‘When the Revolution arrived the peasants dug up their graves and scattered their bones over the steppe. Then they burnt the church down with the priest inside it.’

Korolev kept his face expressionless – he’d heard of worse things happening during the Civil War, and seen things as bad. But he was surprised by the priest. In fact he’d risk a fair amount of money that it wasn’t the villagers who’d burnt their priest alive. Korolev glanced at Mushkin and something in his expression, the way he looked at the church, made him wonder if Mushkin himself hadn’t had something to do with the atrocity. After a few moments of contemplation, Mushkin put the car back into gear and they drove for another hundred metres or so to where the woods opened up and a series of newly built concrete buildings appeared – dormitories, what looked like a gymnasium, classrooms, lecture halls and several large barns. Finally the drive led to a large house built from ochre-coloured stone, three storeys high and standing in the middle of winter-stripped gardens.

It wasn’t a palace as such, but a substantial residence all the same. It didn’t look Russian, with its small turrets at each corner and its arched windows, more like a building from North Africa. To the left of the house stood what must have been the stable block, the courtyard of which contained a number of trailers, a bus and a truck, as well as an odd assortment of equipment, some of which was covered with tarpaulins bearing the stencilled logo ‘Ukrainfilm’.

Mushkin stopped the car in front of the ornate entrance to the house. ‘The local Militia will be arriving soon,’ he said, looking at his watch. ‘You’re not here in an official capacity, but as Babel’s friend. We’ll be asking your opinion, seeing as you’re here – by complete coincidence.’

‘So I was informed.’

‘I’m informing you again,’ Mushkin said as he pulled himself out of the car. He glanced round at Korolev once, then walked towards the stable yard, his hands deep in his pockets.

Korolev stayed where he was for a moment, looking around him. Apart from Mushkin’s departing figure there was no one to be seen. Perhaps Korolev was a little tired, and Mushkin’s story about the family graves and the burning priest too fresh in his mind, but he had a sudden image of the porch’s black-and-white tiled floor slicked with blood. For a moment the image was so vivid that he couldn’t breathe.

Shocked, Korolev sat there, not sure what else to do but open up the packet of cigarettes he had in his pocket, extract one with some difficulty, his fingers rattling a nervous tattoo on the cardboard box, and put it in his mouth. He lit it, wondering if he was cracking up, and feeling so worn that he almost didn’t care. Tiredness was all this was, he reassured himself for the second time in twenty-four hours – the previous day’s arrest, the Chekist knocking on the door, the Lubianka waiting room, the plane journey, Mushkin. Things like that took it out of a man. He sighed and coughed as he inhaled, savouring the spread of nicotine through his body.

When the bang on the driver’s door came, the surprise lifted Korolev out of his seat so high his head touched the roof.

‘What the hell?’ he shouted, adrenalin shuddering though his body like electricity and his hand instinctively going for his shoulder holster.

‘Sorry, Comrade.’ The smiling face of a small blond boy with a red Pioneer’s scarf round his neck was looking in at him through the window, nose flat against the glass. And the strangest thing was that he was the spitting image of Korolev’s son Yuri, so much so that Korolev wondered whether he were having another hallucination until he saw the small differences, the slightly darker blue of the eyes, the perfect teeth where Yuri’s were a little crooked. But the likeness was uncanny and it was with some difficulty that he pulled himself together.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, and the question came out a little more gruffly than he’d intended.

‘Pavel.’

‘And do you usually go around scaring the living daylights out of honest citizens, Pavel? And you a Pioneer as well.’ Which, again, wasn’t how he’d intended to speak to the boy and when the boy’s smile was replaced with a grave expression he felt a parent’s guilt.

‘I’m sorry, Comrade,’ the boy began, but Korolev shook his head.

‘Don’t be, Pavel. It’s me should be apologizing – you caught me by surprise, that’s all. Off with you now – we’ll meet again, I’m sure, and start from the beginning again.’

The boy’s smile reappeared and he saluted before disappearing round the corner at a gallop. Korolev hauled himself out of the car, suddenly determined to deal with this affair quickly so he could take what was left of the two weeks to go and see the real Yuri in Zagorsk. He could be there in two days with a bit of luck and Rodinov’s help with the journey. Yes, that’s what he’d do, he thought to himself, and prayed the girl had indeed killed herself.

He walked into the domed porch, glancing up for a moment at the curved sky-blue roof on which silver stars twinkled, then tried the front doors, which were locked. No one answered when he pulled at a metal chain that rang a distant bell, and there was no one to be seen in the entrance hall when he looked through one of the small windows.

A cobbled path circled the house and Korolev followed it, listening for any sign of human activity and hearing none, only the sound of the wind pushing its way through the garden’s trees, and on the opposite side of the building he found a long balustraded terrace that overlooked a frozen lake, ice embracing the withered reeds around its shore. The house was even more impressive from this angle and in front of the terrace there was a large fountain, ice cascading from the mouths of cherubs into a deep, shell-shaped basin, a good twenty feet in diameter. Korolev imagined the Orlovs eating on the terrace in the heat of an August evening, perhaps under an awning, dressed in their summer whites, the windows of the conservatory that ran the length of the house open to let in the slight summer breeze, the fountain’s water tinkling beneath them, unaware that their days were numbered

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps. A tall elderly woman with a straight back and almost military bearing appeared round the corner of the house in the company of Major Mushkin. They were talking quietly, the old woman stabbing the path with a walking stick for emphasis as she marched along. She had a thin, angular face and her grey hair had slipped out from under a worn fur hat, before curling round the upturned collar of her greatcoat. If the walking stick was needed, Korolev decided, it wasn’t for reasons of speed, as she was maintaining a brisk pace, albeit with a stiff, awkward gait.

He coughed and they looked up, coming to a halt, Mushkin’s eyes cold, while the woman seemed to study him as if he were a potential problem that needed brisk and efficient resolution. He raised his hand in greeting.

‘This is Korolev, Mother.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘If you want the film people, they’re off somewhere. Ask Andreychuk – he’ll be inside. Good morning to you, Comrade Korolev.’

She made to move on, but stopped as Korolev opened his mouth to speak.

‘Well?’ she asked, allowing her stern voice to become a little gentler, making Korolev feel as though he were a child. ‘What is it?’

‘The house seems to be locked, Comrade.’

‘Locked?’ she repeated. ‘I see.’

She pointed her walking stick up at a glass-paned door that offered access to the conservatory.

‘That door will be open, or the one at the other end – and Andreychuk is in there somewhere, I assure you. He’ll know where they are.’

‘Thank you, Comrade.’

She gave a sharp nod of acknowledgement and proceeded on her way, Mushkin falling into step beside her. Korolev looked after them for a moment, confused. Mushkin’s mother? Was that why the major was convalescing here? She certainly behaved as if she belonged here.

He turned back to the house and climbed the chipped steps to the terrace, crossing to the conservatory and knocking on the door Mushkin’s mother had indicated, but there was no answer. He looked around him, wondering whether the elderly woman had been mistaken, at the same time thinking the silence was strange. He found himself whistling under his breath, just to keep himself company. Almost reluctantly, he turned the handle and it opened.

The conservatory was a high room, dominated by two elderly vines that looked as if they’d seen better days. He stepped inside and shut the door quietly behind him. For some reason he felt as though he was trespassing, as though the family who’d once lived here might emerge at any moment and discover him tiptoeing through their home.

He paused for a moment, to reassure himself that this was nonsense, that he was here on official business, and, anyway, he was looking for Babel and everything was fine. But still it was undeniable that there was an atmosphere to the place – the girl had died here, of course, perhaps that was the reason for his uneasiness.

He walked through an open door, passing into a large dining room with a ceiling made entirely of glass through which the natural evening light illuminated the room. At any other time he would have paused to examine the roof more closely because it was extraordinary, but at the far end an old man with a bushy white beard stood, head bowed, in front of one of the four large cast-iron candelabras that protruded from the walls and which must have been installed to illuminate the room before the days of electricity. At the sound of Korolev’s step the old man turned, and Korolev was surprised to see that the milky blue eyes beneath his thick white brows were wet with tears.

‘Are you all right, Comrade?’ he asked, walking towards him.

‘I’m fine,’ the man said, turning away to compose himself.

Which was a lie if Korolev had ever heard one. But it wasn’t his business to pry – not yet at least.

‘Is this where she died?’ he asked, surprised to hear his own voice.

‘Yes,’ the old man said, having turned back towards him. ‘The Lord help me, I was the one who found her.’

Korolev nodded his sympathy, surprised that the old man spoke the Lord’s name so freely. ‘Comrade Andreychuk, is it? The caretaker?’

‘That’s me. Efim Pavlovich Andreychuk. The unlucky Andreychuk. The poor soul who found the dead girl.’

‘My name is Korolev. Alexei Dmitrieyvich. I’m a friend of Babel, the writer. I was sorry to hear the news.’

‘The film people are out in the fields, if you’re looking for them. But they should be back soon.’ Andreychuk turned back towards the bracket. ‘She should have stayed in Moscow, you see. This place never brought her anything but sadness.’

‘What do you mean?’ Korolev asked, thinking the words curious. The girl hadn’t spent that long on the film – surely not long enough to pack in so much sadness. Andreychuk looked round at him as though he’d forgotten Korolev was there.

‘She’s dead, that’s what I mean,’ the caretaker said, frowning. ‘Nothing more than that.’

‘But you spoke as though she came from round here. I thought she came from Moscow.’

Andreychuk’s frown deepened, and his voice, when he spoke, was gruff. ‘She was from these parts a long time ago, or so she told me. She should have stayed in Moscow.’

Interesting that she’d been from the area – that information wasn’t in the file.

‘Was there something underneath?’ he asked, looking back at the wall bracket and wondering how she’d done it. ‘For her to stand on?’

Andreychuk glanced round at him, suspicious but also thinking.

‘A chair,’ he said after a few moments. ‘Someone must have moved it.’

Korolev looked at the wall fixture and tried to imagine the girl preparing the noose, tying the rope round one of the metal arms – they looked solid enough – and then kicking the chair away.

‘A hard way to go,’ he said, stating the obvious – a skill he’d learnt early in his career as a policeman. ‘There are easier ways to kill yourself.’

‘I don’t know why she did it. All I know is I wish I hadn’t been the one to find her. Excuse me, Comrade, I’ve work to attend to.’

The caretaker turned and walked out of the room and Korolev tried to imagine how it must have been for him when he found her – the weight of the corpse swinging, her feet inches from the ground. No wonder the poor fellow was a little taciturn.

He took a deep breath and opened his notebook and by holding his hand above his head estimated the height of the bracket, knowing, as he did, the distance from the ground of his up-stretched index finger. Seven foot two inches, give or take an inch or two. He’d measure it properly later on. He looked around – there was no shortage of chairs, but as to which of them had been underneath the dead girl, it was impossible to tell. He folded his notebook shut and turned to leave the room. If necessary he’d get a forensic team to have a look around, but it was a shame that there’d been no effort to preserve the scene. Perhaps Rodinov had thought it might be indiscreet to do so.

With nothing else to do, Korolev gave himself a tour of the house. At some stage much of the original furniture must have been replaced with more functional pieces, better suited to the house’s new role as an educational establishment for Soviet youth, but there was still plenty of the finest marble and gilding in evidence and the walls and ceilings still carried beautiful murals and frescoes.

Eventually Korolev found himself in the large entrance hall, the walls of which were hung with Ottoman weaponry, presumably from when this part of the world had been taken from the Turks. The front door was now mysteriously open and so he walked out through the splendid porch towards the stables, where the Ukrainfilm vehicles stood on the cobblestoned yard.

It had been one of the ironies of the tsarist times that the oppressing classes had looked after their horses better than they had their workers, but now the horses had been kicked out and the stables turned into classrooms. Light yellowed the panes of a window in the far corner of the three-sided yard and he walked towards it and opened the corresponding door marked Production Office without knocking. A bank of three female typists paused, their hands held above the keys like pianists, while behind them a young man with close-cropped brown hair and a pleasant face looked up from whatever it was he was reading.

‘Excuse me, Comrades,’ Korolev said. ‘I’m looking for Isaac Emmanuilovich. You know, the writer? Babel?’

‘Babel,’ the young man said, rising from his desk. ‘Of course, but I’m afraid he’s out with the crew. They’ll be back soon though, the light’s gone now. Pyotr Mikhailovich Shymko,’ he said, advancing with his hand outstretched. ‘Production coordinator.’

‘Korolev, Alexei Dmitriyevich. I’m a friend of his.’

‘Welcome.’ Shymko looked at the girls as though considering whether to introduce them.

‘Larisa.’ He addressed a pretty blonde after a moment’s pause. ‘Would you take Comrade Korolev over to the house? Make him comfortable while he waits?’

Larisa frowned as she stood to her feet, but Korolev waved her down.

‘Please, Comrades, I can see you’re busy. What with the tragedy, you must have your hands full.’

‘The tragedy?’ Shymko echoed, and Korolev noticed that Larisa’s eyes had filled with tears.

‘The poor girl who killed herself.’

Larisa sobbed and ran from the room.

‘I apologize,’ Korolev said, surprised to discover an unlit cigarette had appeared in his mouth. One of these days he’d give up – aside from anything else he wouldn’t be able to afford it if he’d reached the stage where his hands were feeding the things into his mouth without conscious thought.

‘Excuse me,’ Shymko said as a telephone began to ring, but Korolev had spotted a black car approaching the house and, deciding it must be the Odessa contingent, made his own excuses and left. When the car stopped, however, it was Belakovsky who climbed out rather than Militiamen and his welcoming committee consisted only of a distraught typist.

‘Larisa, is it true?’

‘It’s true, Comrade Belakovsky, it’s true,’ Larisa wailed, and Korolev, following behind the girl, saw her bury herself in Belakovsky’s overcoat.

‘Hello again, Comrade Belakovsky,’ Korolev said and Belakovsky nodded a greeting, before turning his attention back to Larisa.

‘Mikhail told me. I didn’t believe him.’ Then he paused, looking back to Korolev, recognizing him yet again, with a look of surprise.

‘Comrade Korolev?’

‘Yes, a coincidence. I’m a friend of Babel’s. I’d no idea we were visiting the same place.’

‘You have to understand – a colleague has died unexpectedly. She was one in a thousand. A vital part of this production, of course, but more than that. Much more than that.’

Behind him stood a sorry-looking man whom Korolev deduced was Mikhail, the bearer of bad news. The other occupant of the car – Lomatkin, the journalist – was leaning against the car door for support, as pale as the dead girl’s ghost. It seemed as though Masha Lenskaya had made quite an impression during her short life.

‘Korolev,’ Belakovsky said, as though thinking aloud. ‘Didn’t you say you were a detective – from Petrovka Street?’

‘I didn’t. You did and I’m on holiday,’ Korolev replied, perhaps a little too quickly.

Belakovsky glanced at the house, and if it wasn’t to see where Mushkin was, Korolev would have been most surprised. The NKVD definitely had a thing or two to learn about secrecy, even if they were always asking it of other people.

‘On holiday?’ Belakovsky repeated slowly, probably remembering how that fellow Bagraev had been booted off the plane. ‘What a coincidence. And perhaps fortunate for us. What did you say your specialization was?’

‘Petrovka Street normally handles the more serious crimes. And I’m an experienced detective.’

‘I see – bank robbery, that sort of thing. Murder perhaps?’ The fellow was putting two and two together and making four, so Korolev nodded politely, and felt in his overcoat pocket for his cigarettes, pleased that at least this time it was a deliberate rather than instinctive action.

‘Yes, I’ve handled the odd murder or two,’ he said, lighting the cigarette off the one in his mouth.

Another black car hove into view as they stood there weighing each other up, and when it pulled to a halt disgorged a stocky Militia colonel, who looked at them anxiously. He was followed by a tough-looking young woman in a leather jacket and a bald man carrying a doctor’s case. No sooner had the first car been emptied of its occupants than another arrived and three uniforms under a sergeant’s command scrambled out. It was turning out to be quite a party, and right on cue the guest of honour arrived.

‘Did you hear, Comrade Mushkin?’ Belakovsky said. ‘Korolev here is a Militia detective from Petrovka Street, visiting Babel.’

‘Indeed,’ Mushkin said, with a sliver of a smile, and Korolev deduced that the Major wasn’t too burnt-out to appreciate the humour inherent in the play they were all acting out. But for whose benefit, God alone knew.