Shadow Pass ip-2

by Sam Eastland

  “Was he always like that?” asked Pekkala.

  Zalka shook his head. “Nagorski was a good man before the Konstantin Project took over his life. He was generous. He loved his family. He didn’t wrap himself in secrets. But once the project had begun, he turned into something else. I barely recognized him anymore, and neither did his wife and son.”

  “So what happened between you was an argument over the engine?” Pekkala was trying to understand.

  “No,” replied Zalka. “What happened was that Nagorski’s design virtually guaranteed that the tank crew would be burnt alive if any kind of fire broke out in the main compartment or the engine.”

  “I heard,” said Pekkala.

  “I wanted to change that, even if it did weaken the hull by a small margin. But Nagorski would not even discuss it.” In frustration, Zalka raised his hands, then let them fall again. “How perfectly Russian—that the machine we build to defend ourselves becomes as dangerous to us as it is for our enemies!”

  “Is this why Nagorski fired you from the project?”

  “I wasn’t fired. I quit. And there were other reasons, too.”

  “Such as?”

  “I discovered that Nagorski was intending to steal the plans for the T-34 suspension system.”

  “Steal them?”

  “Yes.” Zalka nodded. “From the Americans. The design for the suspension is known as a Christie mechanism. The wheels are fitted onto trailing suspension arms with concentric double coil springs for the leading bogies—”

  Pekkala held up his hand. “I will take your word for it, Professor Zalka.”

  “We had been working on a design of our own,” continued Zalka, “but Nagorski’s meddling had put us so far behind schedule that we weren’t going to meet our deadline for going into production. Nagorski panicked. He decided we would go with the Christie mechanism. He also decided we would say nothing about this to Stalin. He figured that by the time the design was approved, nobody would care, as long as it worked.”

  “What did you do?” asked Pekkala.

  “I confronted him. I said how dangerous it was to keep information from Stalin. He told me to keep my mouth shut. That was when I decided to quit, and in return he saw to it that I couldn’t find another place to do my work. No one would employ me. No one would even come close! Except them.” He jerked his chin towards the leeches in the pool.

  “But you said you still do research,” said Pekkala.

  “That’s right.”

  “And what happens to your work?”

  “It piles up on my desk,” retorted Zalka bitterly. “Page after page, because there is nothing else I can do with it.”

  “That reminds me.” Pekkala removed the equation from his coat pocket. “We were wondering if you could tell us what this is. It may have something to do with Nagorski’s death.”

  Carefully, Zalka took the brittle paper from Pekkala’s hand. He stared at it intently as the meaning unraveled in his head. At one point he laughed sharply. “Nagorski,” he muttered and kept reading. A moment later, he raised his head. “It is a recipe,” he told them.

  “A recipe for what?”

  “Oil.”

  “That’s it?” said Kirov. “Just oil?”

  “Oh, no,” replied Zalka, “not just oil. Motor oil. And not just any motor oil, either. This is a special low-viscosity motor oil for use in the V2 engine.”

  “And are you sure this is Nagorski’s writing?”

  Zalka nodded. “Even if it wasn’t, I could still tell this belonged to Nagorski.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of what’s not there. See?” He pointed to a batch of figures. The numbers seemed to gather around his fingertip like iron filings around a magnet. “The polymer sequence is interrupted at this point. He left it out on purpose. If you tried to recreate this formula in a lab, all you’d get would be sludge.”

  “Where is the rest of the formula?”

  Zalka tapped a finger against his temple. “He kept it in his head. I told you he didn’t trust anyone.”

  “Could you complete these equations?”

  “Of course,” replied Zalka, “if you gave me a pencil and ten minutes to work out what’s missing.”

  “What’s the point of low-viscosity motor oil?”

  Zalka smiled. “At thirty degrees below zero, normal motor oil will begin to thicken. At fifty degrees below zero, it becomes useless. What that means, Inspectors, is that in the middle of a Russian winter, you can have an entire army of machines which suddenly come to a stop.” He held up the piece of paper. “But that wouldn’t happen with this oil. I’ll give Nagorski this much. He was certainly planning for the worst.”

  “Is this formula valuable enough for someone to have killed him over it?” asked Pekkala.

  Zalka narrowed his eyes. “I don’t think so,” he said. “This simply represents a design decision. The recipe itself is not unknown.”

  “Then why keep it a secret?”

  “It’s not the formula he was trying to keep secret. It’s the decision to put it to use. Look”—Zalka sighed again—“I don’t know why Nagorski was murdered, or who did it, but I can tell you that he must have known the person who killed him.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he never went anywhere without a gun in his pocket and that means he didn’t just know the person who killed him. He must have trusted them to let the killer get that close.”

  “Who did Nagorski trust?”

  “As far as I know, there is only one person who fits that description, and that’s his driver, Maximov. Nobody got to Nagorski without getting past Maximov, and believe me, nobody got past Maximov.”

  “We have spoken with Maximov,” said Pekkala.

  “Then you’ll know Nagorski didn’t hire him for his witty conversation. He hired Maximov because the man used to be an assassin.”

  “A what?”

  “He was an agent for the Tsar,” explained Zalka. “Nagorski told me so himself.”

  “That would explain why he didn’t answer any of my questions,” said Pekkala, and suddenly he remembered something Rasputin had once told him, on that winter’s night when he came knocking on the door.

  “There are many others like us,” Rasputin had said, “each one entrusted to a different task—investigators, lovers, assassins, each one a stranger to the other. Only the Tsar knows us all.” At the time, Pekkala had thought it was just the ramblings of a drunk, but now he realized that Rasputin had been telling the truth.

  “It also explains why there was nothing on him in the old police records,” mused Kirov.

  The door opened. The nurse came in with a tray, on which sat a plate covered by a metal dome.

  “Ah, good!” Zalka held out his arms.

  The nurse handed him the tray. “Just the way you like it,” she said.

  Zalka set the tray carefully on his lap and removed the metal dome. A puff of steam wafted up into his face and he breathed it in as if it were perfume. On the plate was a slab of roasted meat, around which a few slices of boiled potato and carrot had been strewn like an afterthought. Zalka picked up a knife and fork from the tray and sawed off a slice of the meat. Beneath the surface, it was almost raw. “They feed me here,” he told them. “Red meat every day. I have to get the blood back in me somehow.”

  The investigators turned to leave.

  “The T-34 will not save us, you know,” said Zalka.

  Both men turned around.

  “That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” asked Zalka, talking as he chewed. “Nagorski has you all convinced that the T-34 is a miracle weapon. That it will practically win a war on its own. But it won’t, gentlemen. The T-34 will kill hundreds. Thousands. Tens of thousands. What Nagorski or any of those insane scientists he’s got working for him won’t admit is that it’s just a machine. Its vulnerabilities will be found out. Better machines will be built. And the men who used it to kill will themselves, eventually, be killed. B
ut you mustn’t worry, detectives.” He busied himself sawing off another piece of meat.

  “With a forecast like that,” muttered Kirov, “why wouldn’t we be worried?”

  “Because the only people who can destroy the Russian people”—Zalka paused to pack another slab of meat into his mouth—“are the Russian people.”

  “You may be right,” said Pekkala. “Unfortunately, we are experts at that.”

  PEKKALA BREATHED IN DEEPLY AS THEY STEPPED OUTSIDE THE BUILDING, trying to clear the sour reek of the bathhouse from his lungs.

  “I thought we had him,” remarked Kirov.

  Pekkala nodded. “So did I, until I saw that leg brace.”

  “Trailing suspension arms,” groused Kirov. “Concentric double coil springs. Leading bogies. It all sounds like nonsense to me.”

  “It’s poetry to Zalka,” replied Pekkala, “just as caviar blinis are poetry to you.”

  Kirov stopped abruptly. “You just reminded me of something.”

  “Food?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. The day I went into that restaurant to fetch Nagorski for questioning, he was eating caviar blinis.”

  “Well, that’s very helpful, Kirov. Perhaps he was shot by a blini.”

  “What I remembered,” persisted Kirov, “was a gun.”

  Now Pekkala stopped. “A gun?”

  “Nagorski was carrying a pistol. He gave it to Maximov for safekeeping before he left the restaurant.” Kirov shrugged. “It might mean nothing.”

  “Unless Nagorski was shot with his own weapon. In which case it could mean everything.” He slapped Kirov on the arm. “Time we paid Maximov a visit.”

  MAXIMOV’S HOME WAS IN THE VILLAGE OF MYTISHCHI, NORTHEAST of the city. They found him at a garage across the street from the boardinghouse where he lived by himself in a room on the top floor. The caretaker at the building, a skeletally thin, angry-looking man in a blue boiler suit, aimed one stiletto finger at the garage. Then he held out his hand and said, “Na tchay.” For tea.

  Pekkala dropped a coin into his palm.

  The caretaker folded the coin into his fist and smiled. Men like these had a reputation for being the most enthusiastic informants in the city. It was a running joke that more people had been sent to Siberia for failing to tip caretakers on their birthdays than ever went away for crimes against the state.

  “Maximov is here,” said the manager at the garage, a broad-faced man with thick black hair and a mustache gone yellowy-gray. “At least half of him is.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Kirov.

  “All we ever see of him is his legs. The rest of him is always under the hood of his car. Whenever he’s not on the job, you’ll find him working on that machine.”

  The two investigators walked through the garage, whose floor was dingy black from years of spilled motor oil soaked into the concrete, and emerged into a graveyard of old motor parts, the husks of stripped-down cars, cracked tires driven bald, and the cobra-like hoods of transmissions ripped from their engine compartments.

  At the far end, just as the manager had said, stood half of Maximov. He was naked to the waist and stooped over the engine of Nagorski’s car. The hood angled above him like the jaws of a huge animal, and Pekkala was reminded of stories he’d heard about crocodiles which opened their mouths to let little birds clean their teeth.

  “Maximov,” said Pekkala.

  At the mention of his name, Maximov spun around. He squinted into the bright light, but it was a moment before he recognized Pekkala. “Inspector,” he said. “What brings you here?”

  “I have been thinking about something you said to me the other day.”

  “It seems to me that I said many things,” replied Maximov, wiping an oily rag along the fuel relay hoses which curved like the arcs of seagull wings from the gray steel of the cylinder head.

  “One thing in particular sticks in my mind. You said that you had not been able to defend Nagorski on the day he was killed, but I’m wondering if he might have been able to defend himself. Isn’t it true that Nagorski never went anywhere without a gun?”

  “And where did you hear that, Pekkala?” Maximov worked the cloth in under his nails, digging out the dirt.

  “From Professor Zalka.”

  “Zalka! That troublemaker? Where did you dig that bastard up?”

  “Did Nagorski carry a gun or not?” asked Pekkala. A coldness had entered his voice.

  “Yes, he had a gun,” admitted Maximov. “Some German thing called a PPK.”

  “What caliber weapon is that?” asked Pekkala.

  “It’s a 7.62,” replied Maximov.

  Kirov leaned over to Pekkala and whispered, “The cartridge we found in the pit was a 7.62.”

  “What’s this all about?” asked Maximov.

  “On the day I brought Nagorski in for questioning,” said Kirov, “he handed you a gun before he left the restaurant. Was that the PPK you just mentioned?”

  “That’s right. He gave it to me for safekeeping. He was afraid it would be confiscated if you put him under arrest.”

  “Where is that gun now?”

  Maximov laughed and turned to face his interrogator. “Let me ask you this. That day in the restaurant, did you see what he was eating?”

  “Yes,” replied Kirov. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “And did you see what I was eating?”

  “A salad, I think. A small salad.”

  “Exactly!” Maximov’s voice had risen to a shout. “Twice a week, Nagorski went to Chicherin’s place for lunch and I had to sit there with him, because no one else would, not even his wife, and he didn’t like to eat alone. But he wouldn’t think to buy me lunch. I had to pay for it myself, and of course I can’t afford Chicherin’s prices. The cost of that one salad is more than I spend on all my food on an average day. And half the time Nagorski didn’t even pay for what he ate. Now do you think a man like that would hand over something as expensive as an imported German gun and not ask for it back the first chance that he got?”

  “Answer the question,” said Pekkala. “Did you return Nagorski’s gun to him or not?”

  “After you had finished questioning Nagorski, he called and ordered me to meet him outside the Lubyanka. And the first words he spoke when he got inside the car were, ‘Give me back my gun.’ And that’s exactly what I did.” Angrily, Maximov threw the dirty rag onto the engine. “I know what you’re asking me, Inspector. I know where your questions are going. It may be my fault Nagorski is dead, because I wasn’t there to help him when he needed me. If you want to arrest me for that, go ahead. But there’s something you two don’t seem to understand, which is that my responsibility was not just to Colonel Nagorski. It was to his wife and Konstantin as well. I tried to be a father to that boy when his own father was nowhere to be found, and no matter how poorly the colonel treated me, I would never have done anything to hurt him, because of what it would have done to the rest of his family.”

  “All right, Maximov,” said Pekkala. “Let’s assume you gave him back the gun. Was Zalka correct when he said Nagorski never went anywhere without it?”

  “As far as I know, that’s the truth,” answered Maximov. “Why are you asking me this?”

  “The gun wasn’t on Nagorski’s body when we found him.”

  “It might have fallen out of his pocket. It’s probably still lying in the mud.”

  “The pit was searched,” said Kirov. “No gun was found.”

  “Don’t you see?” Maximov reached up, hooked his fingers over the end of the car hood, and brought it down with a crash. “This is all Zalka’s doing! He’s just trying to stir things up. Even though the colonel is dead, Zalka’s still jealous of the man.”

  “There was one other thing he told us, Maximov. He said you were once an assassin for the Tsar.”

  “Zalka can go to hell,” growled Maximov.

  “Is it true?”

  “What if it is?” he snapped. “We’ve all done th
ings we wouldn’t mind forgetting.”

  “And Nagorski knew about this when he hired you to be his bodyguard?”

  “Of course he did,” said Maximov. “That’s the reason he hired me. If you want to stop a man from killing you, the best thing to do is find a killer of your own.”

  “And you have no idea where Nagorski’s gun could be now?” asked Pekkala.

  Maximov grabbed his shirt, which was lying on top of an empty fuel drum. He pulled it over his head. His big hands struggled with the little mother-of-pearl buttons. “I have no idea, Inspector. Unless it’s in the pocket of the man who murdered Nagorski, you’ll probably find it at his house.”

  “All right,” said Pekkala. “I’ll search the Nagorski residence later today. Until that gun turns up, Maximov, you are the last one known to have had it in his possession. You understand what that means?”

  “I do,” replied the bodyguard. “It means that unless you find that gun, I’m probably going to end up taking the blame for a murder I did not commit.” He turned to Kirov. “That ought to make you happy, Major. You’ve been looking for an excuse to arrest me ever since the day Nagorski was killed. So why don’t you just go ahead?” He thrust out his arms, hands placed side by side, palms up, ready for the handcuffs. “Whatever happened, or didn’t happen, you’ll bend the truth to fit your version of events.”

  Kirov stepped towards him, red in the face with anger. “You realize I could arrest you for what you just said?”

  “Which proves my point!” shouted Maximov.

  “Enough!” barked Pekkala. “Both of you! Just stay where we can find you, Maximov.”

  PEKKALA WENT BY HIMSELF TO THE NAGORSKI HOUSE. THE SAME guard let him in at the entrance gate of the facility.

  Before turning down the road which led to Nagorski’s dacha, Pekkala stopped his car outside the main facility building. Inside, he found Gorenko sitting on a bullet-riddled oil drum, thumbing through a magazine. The scientist’s shoes were off and his bare feet rested in the sand which had poured out of the barrel.