Delicate Indecencies

by Sandy Mccutcheon

  ‘So, I was right, yes? Just an accident.’ The police chief didn’t think much of this smartarse foreign insurance investigator. He shoved Teschmaker’s papers across the desk and got to his feet, ready to show him the door.

  ‘You know what a rat flambé is?’

  ‘A what?’

  Teschmaker ignored him and took a seat. ‘A rat flambé. An old Mafia trick. The recipe is pretty simple. One live rat, one small tin of petrol, one box of matches and a pair of gloves to protect your hands. You soak the rear portion of the rat in petrol and light it with the matches. Then you release the rat into the targeted building, preferably into the most highly inflammable area, and remove yourself from the vicinity.’

  ‘Very funny, Mister Investigator, but I’m afraid we’ve concluded our investigation and found the fire to have been an accident. I don’t mind you wasting your own time, but not mine.’ He waved his hand towards the door, indicating that his visitor should leave.

  ‘That’s a pity. Because you overlooked something important.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t spare any further time —’

  ‘Then I’ll just have to take my little discovery to your superiors. I’m sure they’ll be interested in finding out why you’re unwilling to investigate Mafia activity on your patch.’ Teschmaker figured it was worth the bluff. He got to his feet. ‘I’ll show myself out.’

  ‘Wait a moment! What discovery are you talking about?’ The police chief’s voice was taut and he looked as though he was struggling to refrain from launching himself at Teschmaker. ‘I should remind you that it is a serious matter to withhold information gathered from a crime scene.’

  ‘Crime scene? I thought you said this was an accident?’

  ‘Let’s say I have developed an open mind on the matter.’

  Teschmaker casually dumped the bagged remains of a fairly well-barbecued rat on the man’s desk. ‘Unfortunately for your arsonist, the rat didn’t manage to leave the scene of the crime, and sadly for the rat, it died just outside the building.’

  ‘It doesn’t prove anything —’

  ‘So your superiors in Moscow will believe that out here all the rats stink of petrol and are prone to self-immolation?’

  For a moment the police chief looked at the rat as though wishing it were Teschmaker, then he returned to his seat. ‘I will need you to make yourself available over the next couple of days . . .’

  On the police chief’s recommendation Teschmaker booked himself into the nearby Sevastopol Hotel. It was not a good choice but at least it confirmed that the local Mafia didn’t have a monopoly on rats.

  The following morning the owner of the warehouse was dragged in for questioning. He denied having anything to do with petrol, rats or matches. He had been in Petersburg at the time, he pointed out indignantly. His alibi checked out and was enough to save him from being charged, but on the other side of the ledger the rat was enough to annul his insurance claim. He walked out of the police station free but destitute, an angry man. Stupidly he didn’t check behind him and so Teschmaker and the now grudgingly co-operative police chief were able to follow him straight to a local gypsy neighbourhood.

  Later, while he waited for his flight at the airport, Teschmaker phoned the police chief to ask him if there had been any further developments. To his surprise the man was remarkably upbeat.

  ‘I’ve just arrested the warehouse owner and charged him with arson and the murder of a local gypsy rat-catcher. I’ll post you the documents.’

  At the airport Teschmaker remembered another errand that he had promised himself he would attend to before returning home. From his jacket pocket he took a small piece of a jigsaw puzzle. It was what he referred to as a difficult piece — one of the hundreds of sky-blue pieces that could only be distinguished from any other by its shape. Wrapping it carefully in tissue paper, he sealed it inside an envelope on which he had previously written the New York address. Before boarding the aircraft he purchased some stamps, affixed them and dropped the envelope in a postbox. Then Teschmaker flew home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Russia, February 2001

  For many people the twenty-hour train journey from Moscow to Arkhangelsk would have been a journey to avoid. Not for Laverov. For him it was a chance to escape from the claustrophobic room and the boxes of files that he was increasingly thinking of as toxic. He desperately needed to devote some time to thinking. It was also a chance to put some space between himself and Boris Kozlovsky. At first the relationship had been reasonably relaxed, with Laverov handing over a sealed report at the end of each week and Kozlovsky seemingly uninterested, spending more time attempting to impress Laverov with his successes with the foreign women he picked up in the Arbat. But as the investigation dragged its way into the second month Kozlovsky had become increasingly antagonistic towards Laverov, openly suggesting that maybe he wasn’t up to the task and, at the same time, prodding him for more details. It occurred to Laverov that Kozlovsky knew very little about the substance of his task and he wondered why the man was now showing interest.

  The only time the antagonism flared into outright hostility was when Laverov requested permission to make the journey to Arkhangelsk. He hadn’t mentioned the trip in his report, preferring that it contained only what he knew, not what he surmised or hoped to discover.

  ‘Arkhangelsk?’ There was a look of incredulity on Kozlovsky’s face as though Laverov had requested a trip to the moon. ‘There is no provision in my budget for you to travel anywhere.’

  ‘Then please request it from your superiors.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that without providing a detailed explanation of why it is necessary.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that without compromising security,’ Laverov replied testily.

  ‘Then I can’t get you authorisation.’

  For a moment Laverov looked at the younger man, wondering just how far to push, but decided that it would be better to short-circuit the discussion. He shrugged and got to his feet. He would request the travel authorisation in his next report, thus taking the entire problem out of Kozlovsky’s hands.

  ‘At your age you are lucky to have a job at all, Laverov,’ Kozlovsky said quietly as Laverov went to the door.

  Laverov felt a surge of anger but again kept himself in check, deciding to include a comment about Kozlovsky’s attitude with his next report.

  When he returned to Kozlovsky’s office the following week he made no mention of the travel request and endured Kozlovsky’s smug remark about everybody being happier now that Laverov was concentrating on the job at hand. For his part Laverov made no comment, content to hand over the report and leave.

  It was the following week that the shit hit the fan. Kozlovsky was livid.

  ‘You went above my head.’ The voice was dangerously pitched, the tone accusatory.

  ‘You refused to do your job.’ Laverov kept his cool, aware by Kozlovsky’s reaction that he had won if not the battle then at least this skirmish.

  ‘You didn’t turn up to work on two days this week. I hope you can explain?’ Kozlovsky waved a file at him. ‘I have all the details.’

  ‘Good, then you’ll know that I was following other lines of enquiry.’ It irked Laverov that the young man had been checking on him, but he was certain that Kozlovsky had no idea what he had been up to.

  ‘You are being paid to sort some old files, not make enquiries.’

  Laverov smiled and, knowing that it would rile the young man, pulled up a chair and sat. ‘I take it from all your foaming at the mouth that my request for travel has been approved?’

  There was nothing for Kozlovsky to do but capitulate, but he did so with bad grace and, as he handed an envelope over, added a sting in the tail. ‘Yes, you can go. I’ve booked your tickets. I couldn’t get you on a plane so it’s going to have to be the train, I’m afraid.’ There was a slight smirk on his face as he added, ‘I hope you aren’t too put out, but I have you on the train that leaves at one in the morni
ng.’

  Laverov didn’t give a damn what time the train departed. A victory was a victory. In fact the time suited Laverov. The trip was thinking time and it no longer mattered to him when he did his thinking.

  He arrived at the station in plenty of time and found that Kozlovsky had gone out of his way to make the long trip as unpleasant as possible by booking him an aisle seat in the rear smoking carriage. Laverov ignored the seat and installed himself in a comfortable chair next to the window in the dining car and ordered a strong coffee. He knew from long experience that after three in the morning the staff would be playing cards in the kitchen and wouldn’t bother him until breakfast time. And, in the unlikely event that he was hassled, he had a letter of authorisation that would have intimidated a Lefortovo prison guard let alone a state rail employee. It had intimidated Laverov. When he first opened the envelope he had given it a cursory glance to check that it was in order. The signature at the bottom had pulled him up cold and not for the first time he wondered what the hell he had gotten himself involved in. Instinctively he patted his jacket pocket to check that he hadn’t left it behind. Reassured, he settled in and turned his mind back to the boxes.

  There were far too many dead people in the boxes. It had taken two months so far and he was still under halfway through them. The first part of Laverov’s task — checking the files off against a microfiche index — had been relatively simple and he was quickly able to confirm that several were missing. But the second task — finding any of the people mentioned in the files — was proving more difficult. The majority of the people appeared to be called ‘name deleted’. There were other common threads: they had all worked on or been associated with the same project; they had, for the most part, lived in one of the closed cities; and, even though some of them had been relatively young at the time the files were compiled, they had all suffered the same fate — death. It was as though an illness had reached out and claimed them all and Laverov had enough knowledge of the old days to know where that illness came from. To complicate matters, every reference to what the actual project was had been carefully removed. There were also a number of people who were referred to by code names. It was obvious from the context that they were all agent-boyevik or combat agents. He suspected by the code names that some of them were not Russian nationals. In several of the heavily censored files he had found a cross-reference to a file which supposedly contained the real names of the agents. That file was one of those that was missing.

  Eventually, in frustration, Laverov had asked for a meeting with Kozlovsky and requested a list of everyone who had been given access to the files over the previous five years. Kozlovsky had curtly declared it impossible but to Laverov’s surprise the list was waiting for him in the locked room the following day. It was very short: General Lebed, Boris Yeltsin, General Igor Rodionov, Yevgeni Primakov, Oleg Rusak, Vladimir Putin. Presidents, prime ministers, members of the Duma and ex-defence ministers. Laverov had stared at the list for a long time, trying to make sense of it. Was it possible that the missing files had been removed by one of these people? If so, why was he being asked to investigate them? Or was he? Anyone with a reasonably developed sense of survival would quietly slip their investigation into reverse after seeing those names. His instructions had been unusually vague: check for missing files and attempt to verify the existence and nature of the project. They appeared to imply that the original creators of the files were no longer amongst the living; something it seemed that they had in common with the subjects of their files.

  Hopefully, in the next few hours without distraction, he could fathom out answers to the seemingly endless list of questions that his investigation had thrown up. What had the project been? Was he right in assuming it was past tense? Given that some of the code names suggested foreigners, wasn’t it logical to assume that the project had involved another country or countries? What was it that the authorities wanted to discover from his analysis of the files? Simply that some were missing? No. If that was the case then there would have been no reason for them to authorise this trip. And the deaths? Had it been a medical research project? Germ warfare? A virus escaped from a lab? His mind tossed up objections to the various scenarios that presented themselves. He knew that beneath the surface of chaos there had to be a reason — a line of logic. Despite his best efforts his mind kept coming back to the central question. What had the project been? Without that information he was blundering around in the dark. He went back to the list of people who had requested access and checked the dates of each request, but again there was nothing significant. Dead end.

  Yet there were chinks of light. A few weeks earlier he had come across a real name. Mikhail Lvovich Tarasov was mentioned as a supply officer who was to be investigated because he had known name deleted in the closed city of Krasnoyarsk-45 and had also come in contact with name deleted again in Chelyabinsk-70. Laverov had gone to the state archives and, to his surprise, managed to locate Tarasov’s service record. According to the documents he was alive, being paid a pension and living in the village of Kimzha in the province of Arkhangelsk. He was seventy-six years of age.

  Laverov ordered another cup of coffee and watched as the train moved through a snow-covered countryside illuminated by icy moonlight. They had stopped at several stations as they made their way out of Moscow but now the towns were increasingly infrequent. It was, he thought as they sped through a sleeping village, as though he were journeying back in time. The further from Moscow they travelled the more the stations looked as though they belonged in another century — wooden buildings lit yellow by flickering lamps. Further out the pure white expanses were broken only by the deep shadows of forests and timber plantations. This was not a world Laverov knew, but he found himself fascinated by the idea that inside the distant farmhouses entirely different lives were being lived out. Different dreams and fears. Yet somehow they were connected. No, he corrected himself bitterly, they might as well inhabit another universe for all they would care about his concerns.

  He took off his glasses, tucked them into his jacket pocket and settled back in his seat. Eventually the constant rocking of the train and the white world unfolding outside the window lulled him into a troubled sleep.

  Out of the past came a chimera, shape-shifting: his long departed wife. Behind her a bust of Lenin, suddenly animated, smiling knowingly. His mother, for a moment, washing him in a hip bath, her skin smelling of the rough soap an aunt supplied to them. His wife, drinking with Lenin. Primakov’s face, close up, demanding that he hand back the key. What key? The one his wife has handed to Lenin who has changed into a marshal’s uniform? He has no key, he shouts, and waiters turn on him, fingers to lips, eyes darting messages of silence. You never had a key, his wife sneers, no longer in a restaurant with Lenin but in a limousine whose driver turns and smiles. It is Kozlovsky, his face marked by a long scar down one cheek, the blood dripping. Laverov shouts that they are all mad, jerks in his sleep, his head hitting the cold glass window, and wakes to the sound of an argument at the other end of the dining car.

  Laverov fumbled for his glasses then peered blearily at his watch but was unable to focus. The large clock on the wall was easier to see but the hands, stuck on 12.45, looked as though they hadn’t moved since Brezhnev was a boy. He turned stiffly in his seat and watched as a guard and one of the bar staff struggled to move a drunk soldier out the door.

  ‘They’re bleeding us dry,’ the young man shouted. ‘You can’t deny that.’

  ‘Move or we’ll put you off at the next station.’ The guard attempted to twist the drunk’s arm behind his back, but the man slipped from his jacket and dived back behind a table where another soldier was asleep, one hand clutching an empty vodka bottle.

  ‘Fucking traitor!’ the soldier swore quietly. ‘If you like the fucking Yanks so much why don’t you piss off out of the country?’

  The guard exchanged glances with the waiter and then, deciding that neither of them were fit enough to manhandle the young
man, took a wallet from the soldier’s jacket, extracted a couple of notes and handed them to the waiter. ‘Give him another bottle.’ He tossed the wallet and jacket on the table and turned away.

  As he moved up the carriage he noticed Laverov was awake and paused by his seat. ‘Sorry about that, Comrade, he’ll be less trouble asleep.’

  It had been a while since anyone had addressed Laverov like that. He smiled at the man. ‘What was his problem?’

  ‘Same old story. Nobody loves the military any more. Girlfriend went off with some foreigner and all this new democracy and free market stuff is a plot by the Americans to weaken and humiliate us.’

  ‘He could be right.’ Laverov yawned. ‘Hasn’t done much for me, I can tell you.’

  ‘Me neither.’ The guard stepped aside as the waiter returned with a small bottle, then lowered his voice. ‘I feel sorry for the young slob. Not much for his generation to look forward to now. The sooner we get someone like Zhirinovsky in charge, the sooner we’ll get the country back on track.’

  Laverov shrugged, unwilling to get involved in a political argument, especially over a right-wing maniac like Zhirinovsky. But, along with the majority of Russians, he agreed with the diagnosis of the country’s ills. Democracy and free markets, which a decade earlier had been touted as the way forward, had given birth to ugly perversions of these institutions and opinion polls now showed that profound doubt and even despair about Russia’s future was widespread. They also revealed that anti-Americanism had permeated the whole society and was probably more deeply entrenched than at any time in Russian history.

  Laverov watched the guard move away then turned to the window. Outside the moon had set, leaving the countryside enveloped in a cold darkness.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was a long flight, across continents, time zones and date lines. He arrived jetlagged, groggy and ill-prepared for what awaited him. As usual his wife, Gwenda, failed to meet him at the airport and so Teschmaker took a taxi. He always resented the taxi ride from the airport. Though there had been years of talk and shilly-shallying, the city bypass road was still just lines on some city planner’s sketch pad. Having to drive north through Claymont then east onto the Mitchell Freeway and finally back south to Gower seemed a waste of both time and money. It was possible to wend your way through the secondary roads but when he had tried it once, some years before, he had encountered over twenty sets of traffic lights before he stopped counting. Mind you, it was hardly the cab driver’s fault there was no direct route. He tipped and thanked the driver, who nevertheless still didn’t offer to get his case from the boot. Screw you, he thought and headed inside.