Vagabond

by Seymour, Gerald

  He not only kept the house clean, waited in the car, as a chauffeur should, and dried the dogs when they came in from running among the beeches on the hill: he had responsibility for day-to-day matters affecting Timofey Simonov, such as deciding when the Englishman would be permitted to visit them, when the ‘cargo’ might be examined and where . . . Also, other matters: in Yekaterinburg, a man had risen too fast and had forgotten to pay respect. Within the next hour he would be taken off the street, or his car rammed, or his apartment entered. A garage waited, with a cut-down oil drum, and dry cement, water, a chair and some rope. The brigadier had learned the ways of the gangs when they feuded. And, because of the arrangements he had made, a marksman – a Bosnian Serb – would that morning be taking delivery of a Rangemaster calibre .338 rifle with a killing range, in the hands of an expert, of up to 1500 metres. It had been tested in some fly-blown sheikhdom or emirate in the Gulf, and had disappeared. Then, from a land of corruption and camel shit, it had become available and had been taken into the United Kingdom. That morning, it would be in the marksman’s hands. The brigadier had made the arrangements and found the man who would fire the shot. The captain had negotiated the contract by siloviki figures in Moscow: a former official in the tax office now had the life expectancy of a tethered goat in a tiger reserve.

  The brigadier, Nikolai Denisov, could moan in his head about his life as a virtual servant. It was a reversal of roles on an epic scale. In public, his fall from high rank was not mentioned: he existed with it. That day he wore a floral apron. But he would organise killings and would kill himself to protect the man who fed him.

  He saw nothing that interested him. He was thirty-four, had a middle-ranking job and earned a middle-scale salary in public service. The life of Karol Pilar ticked over.

  He heard nothing that enlivened him. That morning the sun shone. He was already tired. Before dawn, his alarm had gone off in the studio apartment where he lived, courtesy of an uncle. It had been converted from the roof space of the once grand house in the middle-class Prague suburb of Vinohrady, said to have been designed in the style of Paris. He had dragged on the first fag of the day as he looked out of the window and saw the statue of Svatopluk Cˇech, a writer, who had died at least a hundred years ago. He had been on the road before half past six.

  The files put in front of him on the first floor of the principal police station in Karlovy Vary, on Krymska, had told him nothing. Karol Pilar was probably of average ability, was certainly of average height and average build. He stood out among his many colleagues for his commitment to his work. He was a dedicated detective, who took obfuscation and obstruction with dogged calm. He was not a uniformed policeman who battered down doors and carried a high-grade machine pistol. A detective, plain clothes, he struggled to make an impression on the organised-crime desk from an office in the centre of the capital. His speciality involved the gangs originating in Russia: they would likely still have connections to the Solntsevo people in Moscow and the Tambovskaya group from St Petersburg, but there were also links to government and to personalities with influence in the Kremlin, close to the seats of power. His department, UOOZ, mostly hunted down small-time criminals involved in drugs, prostitution, stolen cards and the trafficking of children from the east towards Germany. Occasionally it looked for Mafia leaders who had taken residence in his country – and there lay the difficulties. He had seen the files, spoken to local officers and learned nothing that justified his early start and the drive from Prague. He was walking up the hill on Jiriho, and round the next bend he would see Timofey Simonov’s home. He could devote one week in four to matters affecting the Russian community that had bought up the best properties in Karlovy Vary, and one day each month to maintaining a view on the affairs of the former GRU officer. There were difficulties. The town was said to be a fiefdom of Russian Mafia money, and Russian control of the country’s economy grew each day. Russian piped gas provided three-quarters of the energy needed to keep people from freezing in winter, at a carefully negotiated price. Russian bids were about to succeed for the construction of nuclear reactors worth twenty billion euros. The force of Russian espionage agents based at the embassy wasn’t there for cocktail-circuit gossip but to influence government policy and for a back-door access to the secrets of NATO and the European Union. That business was far above the level of Karol Pilar and his pay grade. Somewhere at that level Timofey Simonov lived quietly, apparently without criminal contacts, but he was worth one day each month of the young detective’s time. The chance of a major investigation, which might ruffle far-away feathers and cause inconvenience, was remote.

  The sun was warm on his face. The street was clean, swept of fallen leaves. There was no litter on the pavement. The villas on either side of the road were Russian owned or rented: a month’s rent might add up to Karol Pilar’s annual salary. They had bought judges, local officials, politicians, even senior policemen. To them the town was a ‘safe-house’.

  When he came to Karlovy Vary, he walked up that hill for a simple reason: the file reported Timofey Simonov as a former captain in Military Intelligence, with a small pension, yet he lived in a house that would have been priced at four or five million euros by any of the town estate agents negotiating with Russians. Where had the money come from? Organised crime – arms sales in Africa, drugs sales in Russia, sex sales in the old Europe of the West, and the sale of services to the regime currently holding power in Moscow. A considerable target.

  But a target that was presently ‘untouchable’. There was a little garden opposite. Later he would shop in the souvenir stores for Jana, his girlfriend – something pretty but cheap – and he would talk to the people he paid for information. There was one in the telephone exchange, another in the town’s main hospital, and a Customs man at the airport. He sat in the garden. Most of the colleagues of his own age, who had inklings of ambition, had resigned and either gone abroad to work in security or had joined private consultancies. He had stayed on, plodded forward. There was a new memorial in the garden, dedicated to Anna Politkovskaya, journalist and human-rights activist – she had been assassinated eight years ago. With her investigative writing, she had been a thorn in the arse of those inside the Kremlin. A grim irony had sited her memorial in this Russian enclave. He saw the man.

  Almost prematurely aged, but only fifty-four, a survivor of hard times and now basking in the success that had brought him millions, he would have accounts, Karol Pilar assumed, in Dubai, Gibraltar, St Kitts and Nevis, those atoll islands in the Pacific, Cyprus and probably in the City of London. The phone rang in his pocket. He lit a cigarette. ‘Untouchable’, protected by a ‘roof’. The detective could dream – the ram, the door swinging open, the charge of masked men, dawn coming up, flashes from press cameras, and the man being brought out in handcuffs. To dream was free. He answered his phone. He was told by his line manager where he should be, when, and his duties. He no longer argued. He had talked the last summer with a British officer, a contact that was made to seem by chance, had spoken of his special interests and must have made a fair impression. What was it about? He was told. He ground out the cigarette close to the monument for the murdered woman. He let the man pass him – the dogs lunged at him – and Timofey Simonov crossed the road, went into his garden and climbed the steps to the door. It was opened. A ‘servant’ stood with the towels to clean the dogs. He had been a brigadier. The door closed.

  To Karol Pilar, it was humiliating that there were ‘untouchables’ in his country, who strolled beyond his reach.

  She flew from Belfast to Stockholm. A second passport, not in Frankie McKinney’s name, and a change of appearance for the CCTV would take her out of Sweden to Berlin, then a connecting lift to Prague.

  She had dressed as if she were going for an interview at an investment bank or a firm of international lawyers. She would have seemed – as those who had tasked her had demanded – to be one of the scores of young women with professional jobs who flocked in and out of Europ
e’s airports. Her makeup was subdued and her jewellery discreet: they had said she would be seen but should not be noticed. She felt consuming pride that she had been chosen for the mission, and would work alongside one of the Organisation’s principal fighters.

  Malachy kept his hands clasped behind his back. It was because of the graves that he continued to fight. He would never give up on the struggle. There were graves in the Six Counties for volunteers of the Provisional wing of the IRA, the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Defence Regiment, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the Royal Irish Rangers and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. There were the graves of those killed by ‘mistake’ and more graves for those who had strayed into crossfire. They were spread across the length and breadth of Northern Ireland. Nothing was forgotten or forgiven. The dead kept alive the conflict.

  His grandfather’s grave was further down the hill in a churchyard nearer to the Townlands and Dungannon. He stood in front of the plot where his father, Padraig, lay. He was often there and was well known to the workers at the church and the Parochial House. A grave-digger had discarded his pickaxe and leaned on the handle of a shovel. He smoked quietly and wouldn’t disturb him. Another man had stopped spraying the gravel with weedkiller. Both men would have thought that soon the mourners would come along the path from the church to put him down beside his father. The lettering was in gold on the black marble headstone: Padraig Riordan 2nd Batt East Tyrone Brigade Irish Republican Army Killed on Active Service 28 April 1989 Aged 36. The marble was expensive, quarried in South Africa, China or India and imported by a stone mason in Armagh City. He had heard the gravedigger tell a man, who had been planning for the future, ‘Order the best, spare no expense, because you’re not around to pick up the bill.’ Also on the stone was Mary, Queen of the Gael, Pray for Him. He would not have considered the call for people to ‘move on’ with their lives.

  It seemed that every village, every parish, owned its own grave. It was not possible for any man of honour to step back from the graves, he thought. Many had. They had been in the hedgerows with the rifles and at the end of the command wires but now they sat in lonely bars and lived off handouts, benefits and pensions. Many times each week he drove his lorry through the village of Cappagh where the biggest monument stood, with words engraved on the ebony marble from Patrick Pearse, executed by the Crown ninety-eight years before: This is the Death I should have asked for if God had given me the choice of Deaths, to die a Soldier for Ireland and Freedom. He had not been there, but had been told of a plaque in St Anne’s, Church of Ireland, in the centre of Dungannon, for soldiers of the part-time Ulster Defence Regiment, shot dead or bombed by Malachy’s people: They died before their day but as soldiers and for their country. One day, perhaps, he might go and read it.

  He could remember being in bed and his father bending to kiss his forehead, then turning out the bedside light. The big roughened hand had rested a moment on his shoulder and he had heard footsteps on the stairs, then low voices, the kitchen door opening and shutting . . . and he could remember the priest coming with the dawn. Anything other than what he did would have been ‘sell-out’, the worst betrayal.

  His cheeks were dry. He walked past the gravedigger, who straightened and stood almost to attention, and went to his car.

  They couldn’t move. Danny Curnow felt irritation well in him. The dawn had come and the day had moved on. She was a powerful woman.

  He was trapped, and there was nothing that he or Sebastian could do about it. They were in the hedge, squashed together. The target, Malachy Riordan, had kissed her, then heaved the kid under his arm, and they’d all laughed. Time to move, but she had blocked them. She had gone through the house, then appeared at the back door, stepped into her boots and picked up a bucket, then a sack. First she’d fed her fowls, then moved up the lower field. The cattle had stampeded towards her as she’d shaken the cake sack. She had the dogs with her.

  They quartered the field, followed scents – foxes or rabbits, perhaps a hare, and there would have been badgers. Danny Curnow had no more to stay for: he had seen his target, locked onto the body language and thought he had learned more than pretty much any file could tell him. He had squirrelled away the relevant points and—

  ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were here? Right where we are now, in this hole, the night the father was killed?’

  ‘And if I was?’ The cold was in his bones, made worse by tiredness and hunger. He hadn’t slept or eaten.

  ‘It’s intelligence work, FRU work, and there was an ambush waiting for the father?’

  ‘Try a back number of the Tyrone Courier.’

  The woman, Riordan’s wife, was some hundred yards from them and what wind there was blew up her skirt and punched at the sack. Most important, it was behind her so the dogs were not alerted. They would be if Danny and the young man rose from the hedgerow and headed off.

  ‘Did the father and the others who were killed have a chance to surrender?’

  ‘There was a war.’

  ‘So they were fair game?’

  ‘It was what we did, the way we fought.’

  ‘Worthy of pride?’

  He flared. ‘Hindsight’s great, but not if you didn’t experience it. It’s how we were and it’s what we did. A tout fingered them and I ran the tout. Did he get much? No. Lucky if I paid him a hundred quid a month.’

  ‘Your agent was . . . ?’

  ‘You’ve read the file.’ The woman shook the last of the cake from the sack and moved confidently among the beasts. Some nuzzled her but most searched for the last crumbs of food beside their hoofs. She was a good-looking woman – Danny would have called her handsome. Padraig Riordan’s widow had been attractive. He had not seen her that morning, when the priest had come up the lane and broken the news to her, but knew her from previous surveillance. He thought that both women would have strength and dignity. They would not cave, would likely take a sack of cake, go up the field with the dogs and weep there – but not where they could be seen. She moved sideways. He wondered if she considered whether danger – beyond its usual scope – was closer because her husband was about to travel. The young man had spoken of the risk of a mistake. It would be difficult if she kept on wandering about, came to their hide and the dogs found them. She lingered, but her back stayed towards them and the dogs hadn’t caught their scent.

  ‘Your agent was X-ray 47, Damian. He had learning difficulties but could manage simple carpentry. He had a small funeral but the day was noticeable for the address of the father, who took it from another priest’s remarks at a Belfast informer’s service. He spoke of ‘‘secret agents of the state with a veneer of respectability on their dark deeds that disguises the work of corruption. They work secretly, unseen, making little victims whom they can manipulate’’. It was pointed out to me when I took over the Riordan file. Today we don’t send informers to unpleasant deaths.’

  ‘And you’re not winning.’

  ‘Five years later the family blamed a different agent – a bakery driver, Aidan.’

  ‘Another was better protected, more useful.’

  ‘You would have swung out of bed in the morning, had a mug of tea and gone to Operations for the day’s schedule. As I see it, you’d have been flicking the pieces round the board, deciding which one stood and which was sacrificed, pawns slotted, knights and bishops preserved.’

  If she found them, how would she react? Would she go for their eyes? No chance. She’d look down at them with contempt and say nothing.

  ‘The more valuable the asset, the better he was looked after.’

  ‘One man would be denounced so that another stayed in place.’

  ‘Obvious.’

  ‘The piece that fell over on the board – you knew what would happen to him.’

  ‘It was a war, and we were winning. I did what I was asked to do.’

  ‘The teenage boy killed
the wrong man.’

  ‘An unpleasant man had his career cut short. Used to shift stuff with the loaves. He was trusted, and we dropped a couple of hints, in a roundabout way, so that suspicion fell on him. It’s good when they feel threatened and betrayed – it makes them panic.’

  Abruptly, she went briskly down the hill. They were strong women on the mountain. They didn’t whine and were loyal to their men.

  ‘Totally forbidden now. For that I’d be before a court.’

  ‘We were winning, and you aren’t.’

  ‘A last question.’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘Your call-sign was Vagabond.’

  ‘A long time ago.’

  She was past the barns and smoke veered from the chimney. The dogs tracked her. The young man had started to gather together the kit and Danny passed the binoculars back to him. They were later than he’d expected, but had not yet missed the flight.

  ‘I was with some old Branch men, chewing over the Riordan family. Did the work, went to a bar. They spoke of a call-sign, Vagabond, and a guy who was a bit of a legend, a handler who ran agents.’

  ‘You shouldn’t gossip, Sebastian, not in taxis, on the phone, in clubs and bars, at football matches, at home with friends, anywhere. “Whatever you say – say nothing.” The Provos made posters with that printed on them.’