The Town By The Sea

A CALL FROM MOSCOW

I had always known that Nikita liked making a mystery of things.

You would ask him about something that interested you. All he had to do was to tell you the answer without keeping you on edge. But no! Nikita would keep you beating about the bush for goodness knows how long, and then, when you fairly were bursting with impatience, he would calmly start telling you about something quite different.

And that was more or less what he did now.

Not a thing would Nikita tell me all the way to the district OGPU office. His only answer to my questions was: "Wait a bit!"

Clutching our blue passes in our hands, we climbed the stairs. Anyone could see that Nikita had been here before by the bold way he climbed the stairs. I followed him.

We reached the top landing. Nikita walked confidently down a dark corridor and stopped at an oak door. He knocked loudly.

"Come in!" said a voice from inside.

Heavy curtains on the windows. Two glass-fronted bookcases. A big, fire-proof safe standing in the corner. In an alcove, a map dotted with flags, half covered by a cur-lain. Below the map, which must have been of the frontier, in the shadow cast by a table lamp sat Vukovich, the tall fair-haired frontier guard chief, who had spent so long scouring about round headquarters with Polevoi after that anxious night when Sasha let the bandit get away.

"Here's a lad who's just got back from Kharkov. He says he saw Pecheritsa in Zhmerinka," Nikita flashed out straightaway.

"Near Zhmerinka," I corrected him. "That's interesting!" said Vukovich and offered us a seat.

... When my story was nearly over, Vukovich asked: 'But just which station was it where you saw Pecheritsa last?"

"I was asleep when he got out."

"I understand that, but when did you see Pecheritsa last?"

"After Dunayevets... No, half a mo'... That was where the tickets were checked first time."

"Where was the second check-up? You know, when this chap in the wadded jacket read the warrant?"

"I don't know... The train was moving and they woke me up."

"Just a minute!" And Vukovich glanced at his notepad. "You said Pecheritsa asked whether the tickets had been checked."

"That's right."

"Where was that—when the train was moving or at a station?"

"The train had stopped... At a station, I think." "Now, what station was it? Didn't you see any notices?"

"I just can't remember.. . If I'd known.. . You see, it was the first time I'd been on a train... "

"Perhaps it was Derazhnya?"

"No... I don't think so..."

"Chorny Ostrov?"

"No.. ." "Kotuzhany?" "No."

"Was it light on the platform?"

"Uh-huh."

"What kind of light?"

"Same as usual. You know, not very bright."

Vukovich frowned. "No, wait a moment. That's not what I mean. Was it electricity or kerosene lamps? Or gas, perhaps?"

"A sort of greenish light from a lamp—a lamp with a round glass, and a burner inside. It was hanging from a post. You remember, we used to have lamps like that in Post Street, near Shipulinsky's cafe. . ."

"Gas lamps?"

"That's it—gas lamps!"

"The station wasn't on a hill by any chance? Stone steps, and the platform all rutted? If it had been raining there'd be a lot of puddles about? Is that anything like it?"

"Yes, I think so. The train comes in a long way from the station."

"And you are sure that Pecheritsa didn't get out there?" Vukovich continued with great interest, dropping the last trace of formality in his manner.

"Of course! It was later on that the conductor checked up again and read his warrant, after that station, and he was still asleep on the bunk."

"Sure he was asleep?"

"Yes, he must have been. Although ... he might have been faking, who knows. All I remember is that I saw him there."

"So then you went to sleep yourself, and when you woke up you were in Zhmerinka?"

"Uh-huh." .

"And Pecheritsa wasn't there?"

"Uh-huh."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Dead sure."

"You're a lucky fellow! You got off lightly. With a travelling companion like him, in an empty carriage, you might have gone to sleep and never woken up again," Vukovich said rather mysteriously, then with another glance at his pad where he had been making notes, he asked: "What struck you about Pecheritsa's appearance?"

"Well, his coat was sort of ragged... I'd never seen him in a coat like that before."

"And what else?"

"Oh, yes! He hadn't got a moustache."

"None at all?"

"Not a hair left. He'd shaved it right off."

"Aha, Comrade 'Kolomeyets," Vukovich said triumphantly, "so it was his moustache we found in a bit of paper outside the District Education Department. I said it was Pecheritsa’s moustache, but Dzhendzhuristy wouldn't have it. 'No,' he says, 'that blighter wouldn't give up his moustache. That's one of the nationalists' traditions—a big bushy Cossack moustache. He'd rather shave off his beard!' Just shows you how people come to expect the usual thing! Why, any enemy in Pecheritsa's shoes would throw away every tradition he ever heard of. You can't bother about traditions when your life's at stake!" And turning to me, Vukovich went on: "You're telling the truth, aren't you, Mandzhura?"

"Why should I tell lies?" I said indignantly. "Only people who're afraid and have guilty consciences tell lies. I want to help you catch that snake myself."

"That's the idea, Mandzhura," Vukovich praised me smilingly. "It's the duty of all young workers to help us. We are dangerous only to the enemies of the Revolution, and the better we work, the sooner we shall get rid of them altogether."

"You've got a big job on," Nikita put in.

"Yes, to make the whole country free of parasites," Vukovich assented. "Just a minute." And he lifted the telephone receiver. "Shemetova? Vukovich speaking.., Is the chief there? We'll be round in a moment, tell him we're coming, please."

The office of the chief of the frontier guard detachment and the district OGPU department glowed in the soft light of bowl lamps hung close to the ceiling. How strange to find people here, at this late hour, when all the other offices in town had closed long ago!

The arm-chairs were soft and comfortable; a glass of strong tea steamed on the edge of the big walnut desk. The chief nodded to us to sit down and with a telephone pressed close to his ear went on listening attentively.

Soon he got an answer.

"Is that the commandant's office, Vitovtov Brod?" the chief shouted into the telephone. "What's become of you down there! ... Yes, what happened?... Yes... Yes... Steady, Bogdanov, not so fast, let me get it down." The chief picked up a sharp pencil and, pressing the receiver even harder to his ear with his left hand, jotted notes on a pad with his right. "Who led the group?. . . What? That bandit again? Yes, gone to the right place! Less work for the revolutionary tribunal... Who stopped him?... I see... Yes... Splendid! Thank him officially on my behalf... What?... Of course... To headquarters at once!...

What?.

Listening involuntarily to this one-sided conversation, I glanced round the big room and, I must admit, began to feel rather timid. It was the first time I had seen the security chief at such close quarters.

I had seen him before, from a distance, when he rode round the ranks of frontier guards and convoy troops on his white horse. His face reminded you of ;Kotovsky, who had been murdered only a short

time ago. Lean and erect, a born horseman, pistol belt strapped tight across his body, he would bring his hand up to the shiny peak of his green frontier guards cap and greet the troops in a cheerful ringing voice, and the troops of the garrison would answer with a shout that drowned the chiming of the clock on the old town hall.

And now he sat before us without his cap, dressed in a well-cut field tunic of good cloth. His fair hair was combed back from a high, slightly bulging forehead.

When he had finished speaking, the chief put down the receiver, surveyed Nikita and me with a quick glance and said cheerfully to Vukovich:

"Another attempt to cross the border, at Zhbinets. Nine smugglers. And not one of them got through. The commander of that post, Gusev, is a good man. Dealt with them with his own forces without calling up the emergency group. Got the ringleader with a grenade."

"What were they bringing over?" Vukovich asked. "Saccharine again?"

The chief looked at his pad and said slowly: "Not much saccharine. Only—thirty pounds. A lot of other trash— scarves, stockings, gloves, razors, ties, and even a whole bale of Hungarian furs."

"Who wants Hungarian fur when the winter's nearly over?" Vukovich said smiling.

"Oh, perhaps some profiteer's wife wanted it for her bottom drawer," the chief said. "But something else was found, more important. In a walking stick that the leader of the gang threw away as soon as the shooting started, Gusev discovered seventy hundred-dollar notes."

"Seven thousand dollars?" Vukovich replied, making a quick calculation. "Not a bad salary for someone... "

"We'll get to the bottom of it," said the chief and, abandoning the subject, looked inquiringly in our direction. "These comrades from the factory-training school," Vukovich reported, "have some important information about Pecheritsa... Go ahead, Mandzhura." The chief nodded.

I told my story quietly, without hurrying. The chief watched my face keenly with his light penetrating eyes. Suddenly he raised his hand and stopped me:

"And Pecheritsa spoke Russian to you all the time?" "All the time. That's the funny thing! After kicking our instructor Nazarov out of school just because he spoke Russian!"

"And he spoke it well, fluently, without an accent?" the chief asked.

"Yes, just like a Russian. If I hadn't known he was a Ukrainian, I'd never have guessed it from the way he talked."

"We shall have to bear that in mind," the chief said to Vukovich. "That means he may be anywhere in the Soviet Union by now. Go on, young man."

I related how I had discovered Pecheritsa's disappearance, and the chief said to Vukovich: "There, you see? Dzhendzhuristy's theory that he made a break for the border turns out to be wrong. He's not the kind of enemy that puts his head in the noose straightaway. Perhaps he has three or four other tasks to carry out. He thinks he'll lie doggo for a bit and let us forget about him..."

A bell rang sharply outside the door. Shemetova appeared.

"Moscow on the line, Comrade Chief!"

"Now then, look sharp with those latest reports on anti-contraband work!" the chief ordered and picked up the receiver.

A minute of silence.

"District chief of frontier security speaking," the chief said in a loud clear voice. "Hullo, Felix

Edmundovich..." And he signed to Vukovich for us to leave the room.

... Long ago the marchers had returned to their homes. Long ago their torches had cooled in the club store-rooms. Silence reigned over the steep white streets of our little town. Cocks were crowing far away across the river.

"You know who that was on the telephone?" Nikita said impressively, stopping in the middle of the road. "Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky! Do you realize that, Vasil? Dzerzhinsky himself! The top security man of the Revolution! ... On a night like this you don't want to sleep at all... Are you very tired after your journey, Vasil? If you aren't, let's go for a walk round town."

... I shall never forget that calm spring night on the cliff near the Catholic church.

Tired after walking all over the town, we sat down to rest on the oak rails of the old stairway that led steeply down the cliffs to the river. Here and there the moon was reflected in the little puddles on its worn steps.

The dark silhouettes of the Catholic saints on the portals of the church rose up behind us. They seemed to be petrified for ever in some strange ecstasy that was incomprehensible to us. The sleepy crows cawed quietly on the bare branches already swelling with the sap of spring. A motor purred down at the power station. Far below, the river Smotrich glistened at the bottom of the cliff. A trembling bar of moonlight lay across it. Beyond the hamlet of Dolzhok a faint gleam on the horizon signified the approach of dawn.

"That's how it is, Vasil..." said Nikita, as if thinking aloud. "All over the world a terrible, desperate struggle is being waged between the oppressed and the oppressors. And you and I are in that struggle. Our country has been the first in the world to show the oppressed the right path to a better life. We ought always to be proud of that. We've got cunning and clever enemies to fight. But we shall win, the working people will win. I am sure of that."

The familiar chimes of the town hall clock came to us from behind the old houses of the town.

"Three," said Nikita. "Three in the morning... Yes, Vasil, we're living at a very interesting time. Believe me, none of our descendants will see as much in their youth as you and I, because it's not only our youth, it's the youth of the whole Soviet land... And one day we'll be telling them about it, perhaps even about tonight. 'Yes,' you'll be saying, 'I used to live in a little town on the border. The Civil War had only just finished. There were still a lot of bandits about—the last remnants of the old order who were up in arms against us. There were quite a few people who hated Soviet power in those days, because it had trod on their corns pretty hard. Soviet power had said: "Enough! You've done enough grabbing to last your lifetime, enough squeezing of blood out of honest working folk, now come on, and get down to work yourselves." But they wouldn't have it, the snakes! They were all for back-sliding, for squirming off the path of labour and equality, and every day they longed for Soviet power to be overthrown... And once, you will say, 'a friend of mine and I went on important business to the headquarters of OGPU (you'll have to explain to them what OGPU was, you can be sure of that) and just when we were in the chief’s office, the chief had a telephone call from Moscow, from Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky. That same Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky who was a terror to all enemies of the Revolution and saved tens of thousands of homeless children from typhus and starvation, from lice and scab, to make them into healthy, happy people... ' "

Taking advantage of Nikita's falling silent for a minute while he lit a cigarette, I asked him to tell me just why Pecheritsa had run away from our town. I had wanted to ask Vukovich, but I hadn't dared.

Nikita explained to me that any idle talk could only hinder the search for Pecheritsa. I promised faithfully not to tell anyone anything about it and said that if anyone should hear what he was about to tell me it would only be twenty years after this night.

"Not until twenty years have passed? Do you give me your word?" Nikita asked.

"I give you my word," I said in a trembling voice. "The word of a Komsomol member! You can be sure of that!"

"Well, be careful," said Nikita and began his story, every detail of which I strove to remember.

THE PRIEST'S SON FROM ROVNO

It turned out that when Pecheritsa's wife told Furman she had killed a chicken on her front door-step she had been deceiving him. But she did not deceive Vukovich.

When Polevoi said to Vukovich: "Why, think of that, we nearly mistook chicken's blood for human!" the security man had pretended to agree. And what was more, to cover his real opinion, he replied loudly, so that the tenants who had come out on to the porch should hear: "That bandit isn't fool enough to hang about here for long!"

When he got to the square, Vukovich gave the watchman a sound dressing-down for letting such a dangerous criminal slip through his fingers. The watchman swore by all that was holy that no bandit had been anywhere near him, but Vukovich refused to believe his protestations and returned to headquarters. There he learnt that a big Petlura gang trying to cross the border that night had been routed by frontiermen in the region of Vitovtov Brod. "So that Galician refugee, a labourer from Okopy village, was right when he warned the frontier guards that bandits were assembling near Zbruch!" Vukovich thought to himself.

While telephoning the frontier posts, Vukovich still did not forget about the woman who had chosen such an unsuitable place to kill her chicken. Who had ever heard of people killing chickens on their front door-step, and certainly not at the main entrance to a building where such cultured, educated people lived! Usually housewives killed their chickens, geese, turkies, and other livestock in woodsheds and out-of-the-way corners, where no one could see, but not in full view under their neighbours' windows.

By the evening of the same day Vukovich knew the woman who said she had killed a chicken on her front doorstep as well as if he had been acquainted with her since childhood. One thing he learnt about her was that she was the daughter of the owner of a sugar refinery who had been condemned to death in 1922 for working with the Angel gang.

Everyone knew that Doctor Pecheritsa and his wife lived in a three-room flat in the red-brick building in Trinity Street. It was a good flat, light and warm, but with one shortcoming—it had no kitchen. The reason was that before the Revolution the whole second floor of this large house had belonged to the lawyer Velikoshapko. Together with the Pilsudski men the lawyer had run away to Poland in 1920, and soon afterwards the town housing department had divided his seven-room apartment into two separate flats. The larger of them had the kitchen. The housing department had not had time to fit up a kitchen in the three-room flat that Pecheritsa had been given on his arrival.

But Pecheritsa had not insisted that they should. "We're birds of passage," he had told the engineers who came to measure up his flat. "Here today and gone tomorrow. If they send me to Mogilyov, I shall go to Mogilyov, if they send me to Korsun, I shall go there. The People's Commissariat of Education plays about with you. I don't intend to build a home. What's the point of making kitchens when you're on the march, it's just wasting people's time! We'll manage as we are, without a kitchen!"

Twice a day—afternoon and evening—Pecheritsa's wife Ksenia Antonovna, a tall, dark-haired woman, would carry her shining aluminium dinner-pans to the Venice Restaurant by the fortress gates. Martsynkevich himself, the head cook, served Pecheritsa's wife with dinners and suppers.

She carried the food home in her little dinner-pans and warmed it up on a small spirit stove; and that was how she and her husband lived. They kept themselves to themselves and never had any guests. Even

Pecheritsa's colleagues at the Education Department had never visited his flat.

They had neither kerosene stove, nor primus—just a little spirit stove burning with a blue flame on which Ksenia Antonovna boiled her husband's black coffee in the mornings. Pecheritsa was very fond of that stimulating drink.

On learning all this, Vukovich became even more surprised that Pecheritsa's wife had killed a chicken. Where had she roasted it? On the little spirit stove? But why should people who took their meals from a restaurant go to all that unnecessary bother?

Vukovich also learnt that the day after the night alarm at headquarters, on Sunday, Pecheritsa's wife started taking three dinners and three suppers from the Venice Restaurant. She hadn't enough dinner-pans, so she brought earthenware pots in a string bag for the third, extra meal.

"You must have some guests?" the extremely polite head cook asked sympathetically.

"Oh, it's only my sister from Zhitomir..." Ksenia Antonovna replied, rather hastily.

It was rather strange, however, that none of the neighbours ever saw this sister. Moreover, having investigated Ksenia Antonovna's past, Vukovich knew quite well that she was the only daughter of the sugar manufacturer.

Vukovich also knew that Pecheritsa had no servants, but that every Monday the education department's messenger, Auntie Pasha, came to scrub the floors.

When he arrived at work on Monday morning, Pecheritsa said to Auntie Pasha: "You needn't come to us today, Auntie. My wife's not very well. Come next Monday."

After this instruction from her strict department chief, Auntie Pasha was very surprised when going home from work to meet the "sick" Ksenia Antonovna on New Bridge. Pecheritsa's wife was walking quickly across the bridge, on the other side, carrying her dinner-pans.

'Ksenia Antonovna was in such a hurry to get home that she did not notice Auntie Pasha and did not answer her when the messenger bowed and said: "Good evening, Ma'am!"

At exactly six thirty in the evening on the day when I left for Kharkov, Doctor Gutentag- burst agitatedly into the duty officer's room at district security headquarters.

Gutentag said he must see the chief at once. The duty officer sent Gutentag up to Vukovich and the surgeon told him the following story.

That morning, when Doctor Gutentag was still in bed, Pecheritsa's wife had rushed in to see him and said that her husband was seriously ill. Ksenia Antonovna said that Pecheritsa must have appendicitis and begged him to go with her to their flat.

Gutentag knew Pecheritsa. A short time previously he had cut a tumour out of his neck. Besides, Gutentag was very fond of music and singing and enjoyed listening to the concerts that Pecheritsa conducted. And so, in spite of the early hour, Gutentag promptly got ready and set off for Trinity Street.

What was his surprise when the sick man himself opened the door to him! Inviting the doctor into the empty dining-room, Pecheritsa said:

"Listen to me, friend! I could, of course, play blind man's buff with you, I could invent some story about my poor relative who was accidentally shot during a hunting trip, but I have no desire or intention of doing anything of the kind. You and I are grown-up people and we're too old for fairy-tales. Besides,

I know you are a man of the old school. You studied at the medical faculty in Warsaw, and I don't think you have any particular liking for Soviet power. To put it in a nutshell, behind that door lies a wounded man. He has a bullet in his leg. His condition is getting worse; the leg is swollen and he may have blood-poisoning already. That man is being searched for. No one must know that you have helped him.

If you do your duty as a doctor and save my friend, it will be good for you and it won't be bad either for your chemist brother who lives in Poland, in Pilsudski Street in the town of Rovno."

Even before Doctor Gutentag's story was over, Vukovich realized that he had done the right thing that day in issuing a warrant to search Pecheritsa's flat.

About five minutes after the doctor had finished his story, two groups of mounted security men rode out of headquarters.

One group led by Vukovich turned in the direction of the red-brick' building in Trinity Street.

Auntie Pasha, whom the security men from the second group found at the Education Department office, said that Pecheritsa had run into his office about five minutes ago. He had brought a small suit-case, put some papers in it out of the office safe, asked Auntie Pasha for a towel and told her that he had been summoned urgently to the border village of Chemirovtsy. Before leaving the building he had slipped into the wash-room where he had remained for two or three minutes.

Security Officer Dzhendzhuristy rang up at once from the education department and ordered a party of mounted security men to be sent after Pecheritsa to Chemirovtsy.

The hands of the station clock pointed to past seven when the security men arrived at the station. By that time the train taking me to Kharkov had already passed the first little station of Balin.

Meanwhile the group led by Vukovich surrounded the big house in Trinity Street.

Vukovich knew that Pecheritsa's flat had no back door but he also knew that a fire escape reaching from the ground to the roof passed near one of the bed-room windows. At the very moment when one of the security men walked up to the front door with a metal plate bearing the name "'Doctor Zenon Pecheritsa" and pulled the brass bell handle, Vukovich was cautiously climbing this narrow, slippery ladder.

As he had expected, no one opened the door. The security men knocked louder. Still no answer. There was a faint sound as someone tip-toed up to the door, moved the brass cover of the spy-hole and, having made sure who was knocking, went back into the flat. Then the security men decided to break the door down.

As he climbed the rickety ladder, Vukovich heard a man's angry voice coming from the open window:

"I tell you we must fight, Ksenia Antonovna!"

"Everything's finished!" the woman said.

"Ksenia Antonovna, you must believe me!" the man shouted.

"It's too late!" Pecheritsa's wife replied and a shot rang out in the room.

"Hysterical fool!" Pecheritsa's guest muttered, crawling to the window, but at that moment Vukovich leapt to him from the window-sill like a whirlwind.

Taken by surprise, the man crawling across the floor missed his aim and the bullet flew wide. Vukovich kicked the heavy Mauser pistol out of his hand and at that moment the door gave way under the blows of the security men.

At first the bandit denied that it was he who had intended to blow up Special Detachment Headquarters and its ammunition stores. But when Doctor Gutentag came to the prison hospital and removed the bullet from the bandit's leg, it turned out to be a bullet from a Webley Scott revolver.

It was with a revolver of this rather rare pattern that Polevoi had fired at the bandit on that memorable night when Bobir had made such an ass of himself.

At the second interrogation the bandit gradually began to confess, and soon it came out that he and Kozyr-Zirka, the notoriously ruthless ataman of a regiment of Petlura storm-troopers, were one and the same person.

In the year when the Pilsudski and Petlura men fled for ever from the Ukraine, it was on Kozyr-Zirka's orders that the cut-throats of the "Carefree Soul" regiment had slaughtered over half the innocent population of the hamlet of Ovruch, including the parents of one of our trainees, Monus Guzarchik. . . It was Kozyr-Zirka who was rumoured among the frightened inhabitants of the Ukrainian border villages to be either the Count of Belaya Tserkov or a runaway convict from Galicia... It was he, Kozyr-Zirka, who when surrounded by a partisan detachment in the village of Privorotye had murdered his orderly, a tall, dark fellow like himself, and, to hoodwink the partisans, thrust his own papers, signed by Petlura, into the pockets of the murdered man. The partisans had thought they had killed the real Kozyr-Zirka and he had managed to escape.

Vukovich conducted the investigation himself.

It turned out that Kozyr-Zirka was neither a count nor a runaway convict, but a very ordinary son of a priest from the town of Rovno.

Having run away from the Red Army to Poland after the unsuccessful alliance between Pilsudski and Petlura, Kozyr-Zirka spent a short time in a Polish concentration camp at Kalish. The camp was visited twice by a well-dressed man in civilian clothes, who wore a black Homburg hat and carried a heavy walking stick. He was lean and dark and spoke excellent Russian. Kozyr-Zirka, like many inhabitants of the part of Volyn that had once belonged to the Russian Empire, also spoke Russian. He and the visitor talked together for a long time, and Kozyr-Zirka became quite convinced that the visitor must be some important Russian whiteguard, one of those who had joined the notorious terrorist, and enemy of Soviet power, Boris Savinkov, in Poland.

Great was Kozyr-Zirka’s surprise when soon after these visits he was summoned before the camp commandant, the Pilsudski man Nalegcz-Bukojemski, who said to him: "Congratulations, ataman! You have found favour with Captain George Sidney Railey of the British Intelligence Service. Captain Railey is an old enemy of the Bolsheviks. He knows Russia as well as I know this camp and he was very pleased after his conversation with you. By permission of Marshal Pilsudski, Captain Railey is touring all the camps where Petlura troops have been interned. It is his mission to select the bravest and most experienced supporters of the independent Ukraine. At Captain Railey's personal request, I am granting you leave to go home to Rovno for a holiday. Have a rest and get your weight back. You will be found when you are needed. In the meantime you had better forget about our conversation."

Kozyr-Zirka had other things to think about besides getting his weight back on the free meals at his father's vicarage. Thanks to the dark Englishman, his days of imprisonment behind barbed wire were now over, and Kozyr-Zirka began to seek out the friends who had served with him under Petlura.

At that time, after the Red Army's defeat of Petlura, many ex-commanders of the Petlura forces found themselves in emigration. Some had run away to Czechoslovakia, others to Canada, others to Austria and Germany, but most of them were still skulking in Poland, particularly in the largest city of the Western Ukraine—Lvov. It was these men whom the former Austrian-paid Colonel of the Galician riflemen, Yevgen Konovalets, began to rope in and register in his secret lists. Konovalets was known in the Soviet Ukraine as the ruthless butcher of the workers of Kiev. He and his riflemen had suppressed the revolutionary uprising of the Arsenal workers, who had shown no desire to support what Petlura called "independence."

Finding it hard to seek out his old ataman friends by correspondence, Kozyr-Zirka decided to go himself to Lvov, which at that time was swarming with Petlura men and former "gunner-boys." At that time Konovalets was banding together those traitors of the Ukrainian people into his criminal UMO (Ukrainian Military Organization).

When the leaders of a secret counter-revolutionary organization admitted Kozyr-Zirka to their ranks, he did not tell them the real reason why he had got out of Kalish so quickly. Kozyr-Zirka had taken good heed of the camp commandant's advice to forget about their conversation and the dark Englishman's repeated visits to the camp. True, Kozyr-Zirka doubted whether he could be found and made to repay the favour he had received. Captain Railey, however, had taken good note of the bandit with the raven-black hair and dashing side-whiskers, and through his secret agents found Kozyr-Zirka even in Lvov.

In the summer of 1925, arriving one day in Lvov, Kozyr-Zirka stopped at the People's Hotel.

Scarcely had he taken his bath arid dried his stiff blue-black hair, when a porter knocked at the door and said that someone was asking for 'the gentleman from Rovno" on the telephone. A woman's voice asked him to come at once to the neighbouring Hotel Imperiale where an important and intimate matter awaited his attention. Very intrigued to think that anyone should have been able to find him so quickly in Lvov, 'Kozyr-Zirka got dressed, performed a hasty toilet and went, as the unknown woman had suggested, to the Hotel Imperiale, a favourite stopping-place for merchants from the out-of-the-way townships of Galicia.

He was very surprised when on knocking at the appointed door a loud man's voice told him to enter. As soon as Kozyr-Zirka crossed the threshold, an immaculately dressed Pilsudski officer rose to meet him.

This was Major Zygmunt Florek, a veteran officer of Polish military intelligence, who was working in Lvov simultaneously for Marshal Pilsudski and a foreign intelligence service.

"And so we have found you, my dear ataman!" said the major. "Forgive me for asking you to call on me. I am rather well known in this town and if I had paid you a visit rather a lot of people would have got to know about it. Your organization has been accused often enough already of being in league with the Polish authorities."

Taken aback by the major's first words, Kozyr-Zirka was even more surprised when Florek told him that Captain Railey sent him personal greetings and wished him success in his first and rather dangerous mission.

Major Florek told Kozyr-Zirka that governments all over the world were preparing for war with the Soviet Union,. Anxious to convince the priest's son from Rovno that this' was so, Florek produced from his bag a recent copy of an English newspaper and translated part of an article which declared that Bolshevism would be smashed that year, and that Russia would return to the old life and open her frontiers "to those who wish to work there."

"And she will open them to you too, my dear ataman!" Florek said. "Do you know who wrote that? Henry Detterding, the biggest oil manufacturer in the world. He has already sacrificed millions of rubles in gold to crush Bolshevism and he'll give as much again to see it accomplished. You can trust what he says."

Having offered Kozyr-Zirka a fine position in the Ukraine when Soviet power was crushed, Florek asked him to carry out an important task.

Major Florek instructed Kozyr-Zirka to cross over, to the Soviet side and blow up Special Detachment Headquarters in our town, and all its stores. Major Florek was speaking the truth when he told Kozyr-Zirka that war with the Soviet Union was imminent. Egged on by foreign imperialists, Pilsudski's generals were preparing to make war on the Soviet Union that year. Their hired agents assassinated the Communist Pyotr Voykov, Soviet plenipotentiary in Poland, on the platform of a Warsaw station. The Polish general staff began massing troops on the Soviet frontier. Bombs were thrown into the Party club in Leningrad.

Major Zygmunt Florek offered Kozyr-Zirka a handsome reward in cash from himself and from

Captain Railey if the headquarters in Kishinev Street was blown up. "The whole world will hear the roar of that explosion and your name will go down in the annals of history, my dear ataman!" said Florek in farewell, giving him a list of addresses and contacts for use on Soviet territory.

Kozyr-Zirka crossed the border at a place he knew well. Lieutenant Lipinsky himself, commander of the Rovno "frontier-defence corps," saw him off as far as Zbruch and wished him luck when they parted...

"Write it all down," Kozyr-Zirka said to Vukovich at the interrogation. "The game's up. I've nothing to lose now." Kozyr-Zirka made no bones about telling Vukovich his whole life-story, joking cynically about the many blunders he had made and recalling his crimes with a sneering grin. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, tapping them with his long swarthy fingers and drawing deep, as if he felt every cigarette might be his last. The cardboard holders, scarred with the marks of his sharp teeth, he tossed carelessly into an enamel spitting-bowl.

"What's the point of my hiding anything from you, gentlemen?" Kozyr-Zirka repeated at the interrogations.

"You've got my heart on a plate in front of you. Why should I keep back one rotten little murder or raid I've done. It's all the same to me. You know yourselves I won't be getting any more dollars or pounds. If your frontier guards have shot my chief, that Englishman Sidney Railey, somewhere up near the Finnish frontier, what's the use of my trying to diddle you! The world can come to an end when I'm gone, for all I care. Believe me, I'm confessing to you here, as before God himself on judgement day!"

But Vukovich realized that, although Kozyr-Zirka was confessing to crimes that the OGPU knew nothing about, he was really making a last bid to get his revenge on the Soviets by leaving his friends at liberty.

Vukovich was certain that when Major Florek sent Kozyr-Zirka across the frontier he must have given the bandit at least a few addresses. Without them the bandit would have been quite helpless.

At the interrogation the bandit flatly denied that it was Pecheritsa who had helped him to find his way on to the roof of the shed at headquarters.

"I did it all myself," Kozyr-Zirka insisted. "I took a few bricks out of the wall and nosed around a bit to see how things stood in the yard. We're lone wolves of the top class, you know, and we always work alone. That's why our skin is worth more. If everything had come off as I had planned it, I'd be having a good time in Paris by now, and even my dear old Dad wouldn't know where I got all the money from."

The only offence Pecheritsa had committed against Soviet power, according to Kozyr-Zirka, was that he, had taken pity on a man who was bleeding to death, given him shelter, and called a doctor.

"I had never set eyes on Pecheritsa before," Kozyr-Zirka insisted. "If you ask me, he's a completely loyal Soviet citizen. The only thing is he's a bit soft-hearted, I grant you that. I'm very sorry I got him into such a mess."

According to Nikita Kolomeyets, who told me the whole story, Kozyr-Zirka was very put out when Vukovich called in Polevoi and told the bandit it was our director who had winged him in the attic.

"Well, I'd never have thought it!" the bandit confessed. "I thought it was a trap you, security men, had laid for me. Shot by a civilian! Why, it's ridiculous! I'll be ashamed till the end of my days!"

"You haven't many more days left!" Polevoi remarked, stung by the bandit's words. "You're going to answer for your sins!"

Kozyr-Zirka looked savage for a moment, then recovered himself and, smiling, continued to testify in his former cynical manner, as if neither Polevoi nor Kolomeyets were present.

The day after Kozyr-Zirka's arrest someone made an attempt on Doctor Gutentag's life.

Coming home from an evening at the theatre with his daughter, the doctor switched on the light and went to the window to close the shutters. A shot rang out from the bushes in the garden and a bullet, piercing the window-pane about an inch from Gutentag's head, crashed into an antique Chinese vase standing on the shelf behind him.

The assassin got away, but this shot told Vukovich that there must be someone else in town connected with the people who had sent Kozyr-Zirka.

A little later Vukovich learnt from a peasant refugee who had fled from the Western Ukraine that at about that time the chemist Tomash Gutentag had been murdered by unknown bandits in the town of Rovno. The murderers had shot him in his shop and stolen much of the medicine.

On the night of the unsuccessful attempt on Doctor Gutentag's life, frontier guards at a remote post in the village of Medvezhye Ushko, twenty versts from our town, detained a half-witted old beggar, who had tried to slip away to Poland. In the collar of his lice-ridden shirt the guards found a rolled slip of paper containing the following code message,

"Dear Mum,

"The doctor sold the bull to strangers, I'm taking back the deposit. Gogus has moved to another flat, God damn him. Find him yourself and have a business talk with chemist G.

"Your son, " Yurko."

Lying in the prison hospital until his wound healed, Kozyr-Zirka knew nothing of the capture of this beggar, who was in reality a messenger for a spy group working on Soviet territory. Kozyr-Zirka was also firmly convinced that Pecheritsa's wife, before putting a bullet through her head, had burnt all secret documents that might incriminate her husband.

Indeed, when the security men seized Kozyr-Zirka, Vukovich, who at once opened the brass door of the stove in Pecheritsa's study, discovered a heap of charred papers smoking in the grate. But before his sudden flight from the town Pecheritsa had apparently forgotten to warn his wife about something that was hidden in the left-hand drawer of their wardrobe. Or perhaps Ksenia Antonovna in her panic had forgotten about the drawer?

At the bottom of the drawer, which was full of clean linen marked with the initials K- P. and Z. P., Vukovich discovered a neatly-folded handkerchief.

It was very well ironed and embroidered at the edges with light-blue thread. Beside it, at the bottom of the drawer lay several other handkerchiefs of the same kind. To Vukovich, however, it seemed that this particular handkerchief was slightly different from the others. The material was the same and the embroidery was the same, but the handkerchief itself seemed a little thicker.

When Vukovich unfolded the handkerchief, he found that it contained a document printed on a fine piece of cambric.

"The bearer of this document, Cossack Lieutenant Zenon Pecheritsa has remained behind during the withdrawal of our troops to Galicia to perform work which is to the advantage of the sovereign and independent Ukraine. We request all military and civil institutions, when our army returns to the greater Ukraine, under no circumstances to accuse Zenon Pecheritsa of Bolshevism.

"Colonel Yevgen Konovalets, "Commander of the Galician Rifle Corps."

That was all. No further trace of Pecheritsa remained.

True, thanks to the message taken from the sham beggar, Vukovich was able to guess that Pecheritsa

and the "Gogus" who had changed his flat were one and the same person. '

My encounter with Pecheritsa in the train might help Vukovich to solve the other riddles.

The records concerning Pecheritsa that remained in the files of the District Education Department showed that he had been born in Kolomya, had served first in the legion of Galician riflemen, then in a detachment of the so-called "Ukrainian Galician Army." When a group of officers and men from this army had refused to return to Galicia, which was then under Pilsudski rule, Pecheritsa had remained with them in Proskurov, and then moved to Zhitomir.

The questionnaires, the testimony of his fellow-officers, the good references of organizations in which Pecheritsa had worked before coming to our town all tended to confirm this. But the forgotten fragment of cambric with its printed message and, above all, the personal signature of Yevgen Konovalets in indelible ink made Vukovich think otherwise.

Vukovich was well aware that Colonel Yevgen Konova-lets had been working ever since the First World War for German military intelligence and had been supplied with German marks. When he withdrew his men from the Ukraine, Konovalets had left behind quite a number of secret agents with instructions to conceal their true function by pretending to be revolutionaries and supporters of Soviet power. A few of them had even succeeded in attaining very high positions in the People's Commissariat of Education. Later on, in the thirties, these spies were unmasked:

Yevgen Konovalets did not give every agent such protective authorizations. One had to have served under this pro-Polish commander in more than one of his bloodthirsty campaigns through the Ukraine to win his trust and be given one of those strips of cambric.

People who had stored away these cambric strips for years in hope of using them one day had friends and helpers. There could be -no doubt that the fleeing Pecheritsa also had such friends. Otherwise he could never have discovered that Doctor Gutentag, having performed several urgent operations at the hospital, had gone straight to security headquarters. It was these friends and assistants of Pecheritsa’s who had sent the old mad-looking beggar to Major Florek in Poland. When he was questioned, this beggar simply muttered a lot of nonsense. Left alone in his cell, he suddenly started singing Cossack ballads and dancing the gopak in the middle of the night. He did everything he could to make people think he was mad.

Vukovich, however, waited patiently for the beggar to give up his pretence. Vukovich guessed that besides this beggar Pecheritsa's friends had sent yet another messenger , to Poland who had been the cause of the mysterious death of the chemist Tomash Gutentag in the town of Rovno.

It was obvious that some of Pecheritsa's associates had remained in our town. The most convenient way of tracing them, of course, would have been to enlist the aid of Pecheritsa himself. But Pecheritsa had "moved to another flat..."

All this was told to me by Nikita Kolomeyets that night, after we had been to district OGPU headquarters. Not everything, of course, that Nikita told me then had the same shape that I give it in-retelling his confused story today. There was much that Nikita could- still only guess at, and many of the details were supplied by his own suppositions, and I too, it must be confessed, have been helping him all these twenty years, investigating quite a number of black spots in the biographies of the priest's son from Rovno and of Doctor Zenon Pecheritsa, making inquiries in what is now Soviet Lvov to discover for sure whether everything really happened as we thought in those far-off days of our youth.

There is one thing I will confess. This world of secret war into which Nikita Kolomeyets had plunged me on that long-to-be-remembered night when we sat until dawn; on the rails of the cliff stairway seemed

to me very terrible and dangerous.

Until then I had been very simple-minded. I had never thought that among us there could be scoundrels who, like Pecheritsa, lived the crooked double life of spies. I just could not imagine that among those who rubbed shoulders with us every day there were slinking creatures who while pretending to be sincerely in favour of Soviet power were only awaiting its downfall and looking out all the time for a chance to stab us in the back. How great, how noble, and how dangerous is the work of the frontiermen, who, like Vukovich, at the risk of their lives, penetrate that dark terrible world where these crimes are plotted, and manage to thwart the enemy just when he is least expecting it!

And Nikita's story also made it clear to me how much the world capitalists and their agents hated us, Soviet people, and I realized that we must be on our guard against them.