When they reached the last corridor, its bricks painted blue, it was deathly quiet. This was the lifers’ spur, populated by men who would never leave prison again. Contrary to what one might have expected, it was also the most settled wing. Unlike the majority of prisoners, who were awaiting trial, most lifers didn’t want trouble, merely a chance to serve out their sentences in peace.
They entered the interview room, which had thick glass on all four sides, like a fish tank. The guard let them in, then turned to leave. “Wait here, if you please. It will only be a moment.”
Once they were alone, Dancy lowered his bulk carefully into a chair. “I’m looking forward to hearing what this is about. I assume you wouldn’t be here without a good reason. Or are you going to make me guess?”
Even as the solicitor spoke, the door was unlocked from the outside, and a guard led Vasylenko into the room. As the old man, his eyes on Powell, took a seat next to Dancy, the guard told them to knock if they needed anything, then left, locking the door on his way out.
Powell looked at Vasylenko. At seventy, the vor was smaller than he remembered, his hair and mustache a shade whiter. He was dressed in jeans and a gray pullover. While on remand, he had been allowed to keep his own clothes, but now only his trainers were his own. All the same, he retained an aura of power, as if these earthly garments were merely a shell, ready to be discarded at the right moment.
When Wolfe introduced herself, Vasylenko regarded her coolly, then turned his eyes to Powell. His voice was almost accentless. “We haven’t spoken in a long time. It makes me wonder why you are here.”
“We don’t intend to keep you from your other engagements,” Powell said, taking the case file from Wolfe. He found himself looking at the edge of a tattoo visible above the collar of the old man’s shirt, a hint of something pointed, like barbed wire. “But there’s something we thought might interest you.”
Opening the folder, he removed the surveillance photos and pushed them across the table. Vasylenko picked them up carefully, studied the shots for a moment, then set them down again. “So?”
Powell saw a challenge in the old man’s eyes, which were fixed disdainfully on his own. “Those pictures were taken this week in Stoke Newington. An armorer named Aldane Campbell was killed. Two days later, this man showed up at the scene. We’re hoping you can tell us why.”
Vasylenko did not drop his eyes. “And why would I know anything about this man?”
“I expect that you know a great deal about him,” Wolfe said. “Ilya Severin killed for you in the past.”
Vasylenko smiled, but kept his eyes on Powell. “You must be mistaken. He wasn’t a killer. He was a righteous man. Or so he thought. If he killed anyone, he must have been deeply confused.”
Powell felt the old man daring him to look away, and resolved not to give him the satisfaction. “So you know him. But you don’t know what his interest in this armorer would be?”
“No,” Vasylenko said. “If anything, I am more curious about you. It seems very fortunate that you obtained these photographs. I wasn’t aware that the police kept a crime scene under such close surveillance, long after the murder itself. Or did you have it under surveillance already?”
Powell saw that Vasylenko had lost none of his cunning. “Did you know Campbell?”
“I never met the man.” Vasylenko turned aside, as if bored. “As for Ilya, if you find him, you can ask him yourself. He is no longer any concern of mine. All I remember is a dreamer with his head in books. He did not understand how the world really worked. Or what he really was.”
“Which was what, exactly?” Powell asked. “A tool of Russian intelligence?”
Dancy interrupted. “If you’re only going to dredge up that old issue, I see no point in continuing with this interview. In any case, I don’t see why you’re asking my client about a man he hasn’t seen in years—”
Powell only smiled. If there had been any point in doing so, he might have told them the truth, which was that two years ago, when ballistics linked Ilya to the gun that killed Lermontov, he had seen it as a message meant for him. This was not a reasonable conclusion. It was doubtful that Ilya even remembered him at all. But the more time passed, the more convinced he became that the art dealer’s death had silenced the one voice capable of providing the answers he had spent most of his career trying to find. And all because of one man.
In the end, of course, Powell said none of this. Instead, he glanced at Wolfe and said, “You know, that’s a good point. You haven’t seen him in a long time. So perhaps we can remind you of a few things.”
Seeing her cue, Wolfe spoke up, producing a sheaf of pages. “Two years ago, your dreamer put down his books long enough to take out a very powerful man in New York. After he was betrayed, he went after his former collaborators. One died. The other had his eye burned out. Later, he was disabled with a stun gun and left for the police. It seems that Ilya then went to London, where he took out a leading paymaster. Which makes me wonder what else he has in mind.”
Powell took up the thread. “You see, it would be one thing if he were killing upstanding citizens. At the moment, though, he seems much more interested in taking down everything your kind has worked to accomplish. So when you come right down to it, he isn’t dangerous to us. He’s dangerous to you.”
Vasylenko had listened to this speech in silence. “So what are you trying to say?”
“If you don’t want to cooperate, it’s your call,” Wolfe said. “But I suspect that you’d rather make life hard for Ilya. Before you refuse, then, you should ask yourself how safe you really feel with a man like this on the street.”
Vasylenko did not reply at once. Although nothing in his expression betrayed what he was thinking, Powell thought he could sense the wheels turning rapidly in the old man’s head.
At last, Vasylenko spoke again. “As I said before, I take no interest in this man. I do not know where he is or care what he does.” He paused. “But if I did care, I would look at Marbella.”
“Marbella?” Wolfe looked at Powell, then back at the vor. “What’s in Marbella?”
Vasylenko only turned to his solicitor. “If you don’t mind, I would prefer to end this now. These two have wasted enough of my time.”
The old man signaled for the guard. After a beat, when it became clear that the interview was truly over, Powell rose from the table, followed by Wolfe. As Dancy stayed behind with his client, Powell knocked on the other door, which was opened a moment later by the guard in the hallway.
Wolfe remained silent until they were back in the corridor. “So what do you think?”
“We got more than I expected,” Powell said, waiting as the guard unlocked the first set of gates. “You did good work back there.”
“Unless he was only playing with us.” As they went through the gates, moving away from the lifers’ wing, Wolfe seemed to grow thoughtful. “Vasylenko said that Ilya didn’t know what he was. What did he mean by that?”
Powell followed the guard outside, passing through the concrete courtyard. “Look at Ilya’s background. He was brought up to hate the civilian intelligence services, and he believed that by working with the mob, he was undermining the system that the Chekists had created. In fact, though, he was working for them all along. Everything he knew was a product of their training.”
Wolfe seemed satisfied with this. As they signed out, though, Powell found himself further considering this point as well. Ilya, he saw, wanted to destroy the forces that had turned him into a killer, but such a man could never really escape his past. Even as he exacted his revenge, he continued to think and act in a certain way, using the set of skills he had acquired. He was the enemy of the secret services, but also their greatest creation. And to anticipate his next move, it was necessary to consider how his training had taught him to think.
As they left t
he prison and walked silently to the car park, Powell realized that he already had access to much of this information. There was one man, he knew, who had spent his entire life contemplating these matters. Which meant that, as painful as it might be, he had to go back to Canterbury.
He was still coming to terms with this when his mobile phone rang. Unlocking the car door, he answered it. “Yes?”
It was Arnold Garber. He was excited. “Get back here now. We’ve got another body.”
9
At first, when the dead man’s face was revealed, Wolfe thought it was sheathed in a kind of translucent membrane, like a caul. A second later, as the sheet was pulled farther back, she saw that the pathologist had covered it in a plastic bag, as well as both of the hands. The arms were bent and slightly raised, in the pugilistic position, and nearly all of the flesh had been burned away.
Lester Lewis, the Home Office pathologist, removed the plastic sheet, then took it to the countertop to check for trace evidence. As he examined the sheet, he smiled at her. “I hope you aren’t easily sick.”
“Only when I breathe,” Wolfe said, blushing slightly. In point of fact, she wasn’t feeling particularly well. She had never liked the morgue, with its waxy smell of death, like furniture polish, laid over a deeper odor of decay, which reminded her uncomfortably of some underlying truth about the body.
To distract herself, she tried to list the differences between forensic procedure here and what she remembered from New York. Back home, the bags around the corpse’s hands would have been paper, not plastic. And there was no central morgue in London. Instead, each body was brought to the nearest hospital mortuary, in this case a somewhat grimy room in Whittington Hospital in Archway, a few miles from where the dead man had been found.
She looked around at the others. For continuity of intelligence, officers who had observed the scene in Finsbury Park were encouraged to attend the postmortem, with the inspector assigned to the case standing at the head of the table. At his side was Powell, who had accompanied her to the dead man’s house earlier that day. Wolfe could still smell the smoke in her own hair.
Lewis finished examining the plastic sheet, then removed the bags from the body’s head and hands. As his assistant took pictures of the body, climbing onto a stepladder to get a better view, the pathologist began to dictate: “The body is that of a normally developed, well-nourished, extremely burned male of indeterminate age. Height is approximately seventy inches, weight eleven stone. Nearly eighty percent of the skin has been burned away. The hair is gone. So are the eyes.”
Setting the recorder down, he gently lifted the head from the block on which it rested, examining the wound on the back of the skull. “There is a large defect at the rear of the skull, consistent with a single gunshot wound to the head. No exit wound is visible.” He lowered the head again, then counted the dead man’s teeth with a steel probe. “All thirty-two teeth are present. And something else—”
He explored the interior of the mouth with a gloved index finger, then removed it and showed it to the others. On his fingertip, there were number of dark purple crystals.
Smiling subtly at Wolfe, Lewis said, “The substance in the mouth is consistent with potassium permanganate.” He deposited the crystals in a plastic vial, then spoke quietly to his assistant. “Gary, please bring me some glycerol when you have a chance. Not the silver bottle—the brown one.”
After examining the clothes for foreign objects, he began to undress the body. Looking over his shoulder, Wolfe saw that the dead man’s shirt was almost entirely burned away. As Lewis laid the blackened remains on a clean sheet of paper, he continued his dictation. “Fragments of brittle material, suspicious of charred clothing, adherent to the left lateral torso. On the thorax, a defect consistent with a gunshot wound at the level of the heart.”
The pathologist carefully pulled off what was left of the dead man’s jeans. He found that the seat of the jeans, where the body had rested against the floor, was almost intact. Taking it off the rest of the way, he laid it on the counter, then checked the back pockets, first the right, then the left. Looking into the left pocket, he paused. “There’s something here.”
With a pair of tweezers, he gingerly removed what turned out to be a charred piece of paper, the edges going from chocolate brown to black. He set it on a tray, then examined it through a magnifying glass. “A portion of the text is still visible. I can make out one of the words. Ainha.”
The detective inspector came for a look. “Ainha? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“An Arabic name, I believe.” Lewis lowered the lens. “Didn’t you say that he was Algerian?”
Powell nodded. “Rachid Akoun, a recent immigrant from Algiers. Unemployed, unmarried. Trained as an electrical engineer, but had been working more recently as a lorry driver. We’re still looking into his background.”
“I see. Well, perhaps you should also be looking for a woman named Ainha.” As the inspector wrote this down, Lewis set the burnt paper aside. “The rest of the note is unreadable, although I suspect that at least a portion can be reconstructed. Gary, please be sure to pack it up for the lab.”
The rest of the postmortem was fairly routine. From the dead man’s skull, a nine-millimeter slug was removed for comparison to the one recovered in Stoke Newington. Most memorable was a moment near the end, when Lewis tested the substance they had found in the corpse’s mouth. Placing some of the dark purple crystals in a glass dish, he carefully added a few drops of glycerol. At once, the crystals began to smoke, and were instantly consumed by a hot burst of flame.
After the postmortem was over, Powell went off with the detective inspector for a cleansing scotch and cigar, while Wolfe returned to the office alone. On the train back, she went over her notes from the crime scene. Akoun had been killed in the bedroom, then dragged to the bathroom to be burned, destroying any trace evidence. So far, aside from the manner of death, there was no sign of any connection between him and the armorer in Stoke Newington.
At the office, it was lunchtime, and the smell of curry drifting across the floor made Wolfe faintly sick. As she approached her workstation, she saw Asthana quickly close a wedding website on her computer, then take a file from her desk. “I’ve been talking to Marbella,” Asthana said, handing her the folder. “They’ve got a pair of killings that look like Ilya’s work.”
Wolfe opened the folder, which contained a police report. “Who were the victims?”
“Manuel Fuentes, a local enforcer linked to the drug trade, and a second victim, as yet unidentified. Looks like a hit gone wrong. The intended target took out Fuentes first, then shot the other outside a hotel and boardinghouse. One of the tenants was a foreigner who worked at a local translation firm. He’s vanished. Police suspect that he’s the one who killed the other two.”
Wolfe studied the attached statement. “And we think that this translator was Ilya?”
“The descriptions seem to match. He was living there under the name Daniel Kaverin. A strange place to hide, though. Marbella is a center for organized crime. I’d think he’d want to stay well away—”
“Vasylenko’s crew doesn’t operate in Spain,” Wolfe said, scanning the file. “They’ve been pushed out by a younger breed of criminal. Maybe he thought he’d be safe there.” She noticed that the police had searched the missing man’s flat, which, judging from the attached photos, had contained mostly books. “There must have been prints in his apartment. Did they run them?”
“They did,” Asthana said. “No hits from the Interpol database. The prints are on file now, though, so if he turns up again, we’ll know.”
“Good.” Wolfe spent the next few minutes going over the report. On an attached witness statement, there was a phone number and email address for a young woman, a waitress at a local restaurant, who had reportedly known the suspect. After thinking it over for a moment, Wolf
e picked up her telephone and dialed.
The phone rang twice before it was answered by a woman’s voice. “¿Bueno?”
Wolfe switched easily into Spanish, which she had learned on her mission to Bolivia. “Hello, am I speaking to Malena Vargas?”
“Yes,” the woman said, something cautious in her tone. “How can I help you?”
Wolfe opened her notebook. “My name is Rachel Wolfe. I’m a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, operating as a liaison officer with the Serious Organised Crime Agency. I’d like to ask you some questions about the man you knew as Daniel Kaverin.”
“I only have a few minutes,” Malena said warily. “I’m leaving for work soon—”
“This won’t take long. I just wanted to clarify a few things. He was tutoring you in English?”
“Yes, as a favor to me. I’m hoping to go back to school, so I need to take the entrance exams. He was a regular at the restaurant, and I knew that he was a translator, so I asked if he’d give me some lessons.”
Wolfe noted this down. “You must have talked a lot, then. I was wondering if he ever mentioned anyone he knew in London. Do the names Aldane Campbell or Rachid Akoun sound familiar?”
“No,” Malena said. “He never told me about his past. Only about books—”
Something about this caught Wolfe’s attention. “What books do you mean?”
“He always had a book with him at the restaurant. Mostly English, but also Hebrew. A lot of titles about Judaism. Anyway, I’m not sure. He was very private. And I do need to go.”
“That’s fine,” Wolfe said. “I’m sending you my contact information. If anything else occurs to you, you can call me day or night.”
“All right,” Malena said, then hung up without saying goodbye. Replacing the phone, Wolfe looked again at the photos of books in Ilya’s flat. Hebrew text was visible on some of the spines, which reminded her of what Vasylenko had said. Ilya was a dreamer. And his head had always been in books.
City of Exiles (9781101607596) Page 6