by Alex Dryden
At Kyzyl, she’d taken another bus to Abakan. This was a bustling town and she could more easily lose herself now. At a marketplace in the centre near the bus station, she’d taken the gun and ammunition, then dumped the apples and hitched an overnight ride to Krasnoyarsk in a rasping truck that was taking cheap Chinese goods to the city.
When she’d arrived in the city she paid the driver of the truck on the outskirts and walked. Then she’d scouted the area where she’d needed to stay in order to be near the port and the hiring office. The plan was all worked out in a control room at Burt Miller’s Cougar ranch in New Mexico. She’d first marked out several old babas at the marketplace nearest to where she’d wanted to be. There’d be one who would rent her a room for a few nights. She’d finally taken a room from a 76-year-old woman named Zhenya with whom she’d fallen into conversation at the street market, a conversation that was instigated on Anna’s part for just that purpose. Zhenya’s apartment was in the slums of the slum city, in a filthy dilapidated block on Sverdlovsk Street, not far from the docks. It was ideal.
Now, Anna looked up at the greying skies of Krasnoyarsk. The sun had crept behind the clouds after its early dawn display, a broken promise. The city was mantled in dullness and unseasonal cold. She’d been at the apartment for two nights already, looking for work downriver towards the Arctic – and her destination. And this hiring today was her final chance of obtaining the job that would get her part of the way there, as far as Igarka. Her mission was at the starting blocks. But now she must make her way north, towards the ever colder destinations where she would find, or not, Professor Kryuchkov and the answer to Burt Miller’s question.
And so now she waited, for the second tired morning of the hiring process. And she tried to put her troubled thoughts from the incident at the border crossing behind her.
CHAPTER FOUR
FROM THE CRIME scene Lieutenant Petrov first went back to his apartment. It was just after seven-thirty in the morning. Normally he would have gone straight to the militsiya station, but he didn’t wish to have the papers he had taken from the sole of Bachman’s shoe on his person when he arrived at work. He’d left a telephone message for his superior, Major Sadko, about the foreigner’s body and would leave it to him to gain whatever thin glory there was in informing the MVD. Sadko enjoyed keeping possession of such access to himself.
And now Petrov sat at his kitchen table for the second time that morning and unfolded the papers he’d taken from the corpse from their waterproof wrapping. He flattened each sheet one by one and placed two books at the top and bottom to keep them flat. There were just three sheets in all, each about three inches high, torn from a cheap, lined Russian notebook.
He’d made a cup of coffee and now placed the cup on the kitchen top far away from the table. Like an experienced climber who fears an uncharacteristic loss of balance when perched on a precarious ledge, he suddenly imagined that he could lose control of his normally smooth physical functions and that, at any moment, his hand might involuntarily knock the cup over and destroy whatever was written on the papers. Then he turned his attention to what was written on them.
What he’d expected to find in their carefully concealed manifestation he wasn’t sure. Writing, obviously, but in truth he’d hoped for more prose than he could see, something plainly put that any man could understand, even a lowly militsiya lieutenant like himself. So when he saw a sea of figures, calculations and equations that covered the three pages on both sides and were interspersed by only the occasional explanatory paragraph of prose, which the figures put him off from reading, he was disheartened. And everything on the papers was also written in terribly small handwriting. He felt that his meticulous preparations for the event of reading them – the carefully placed chair, the cup of coffee, the objects to flatten the documents and his intensively calmed mind – had been misplaced. There was nothing for him to prepare for if the papers were incomprehensible to him. Only the prose, in Russian, made any sense to him and even that was written in some kind of scientific language that all but eluded his understanding. He didn’t bother even to try and take it in.
He got up from the chair and went to the tiny sitting room next to the kitchen. These apartments were like chicken coops, he thought. Just enough room for a man and a woman to lay the eggs the State required of them. Well, he and his deceased wife hadn’t fulfilled any State quota. They’d been childless when she’d died.
He rooted in the drawers of a desk that contained mostly his former wife’s belongings – knick-knacks she’d found in the market, a small religious icon painted on cheap wood, postcards which were never sent to people who existed anyway only in her imagination, a ball of string, a pair of gloves – until he found a smudged magnifying glass she used to examine postage stamps from around the world and which she’d collected from a man with a stall on Leninskaya, in exchange for apples and honey from Petrov’s small allotment out of the city near old Afasiev’s place.
Without closing the drawers, he returned to the kitchen, cleaned the glass on a fresh tea towel, sat down and squinted at the jumble of figures. But even magnified – particularly magnified, he decided – they were still just as incomprehensible as they had been before.
Petrov sat, magnifying glass in hand, and wondered if there were anyone he knew well enough to whom he could show at least a line or two.
His deceased wife had worked as a laboratory assistant at the military industrial complex outside the city, known as Krasnoyarsk B. In Soviet times the mountain from which it was hollowed appeared on no maps. She had made friends with a few of the scientists there – women – one of whom had even visited the apartment on an occasion when Petrov had cooked dinner for the three of them. Petrov supposed he could call her. He could look in his wife’s address book for the name which he’d forgotten.
But what if even a few lines of the mathematical jungle on the pages in front of him contained something she recognised to be highly secret and sensitive – and surely they did, or they wouldn’t have been so carefully concealed? The woman would feel obliged to ask him how he had got hold of them, at the very least, and, more than likely, would also feel obliged to report their existence to her superiors. Then he’d be a suspect, possibly laying himself open to charges of treason, let alone tampering with evidence.
He sat back in the chair and stared at the pages, laid out side by side, as if watching them would provide some clue to their decipherment. Then he stood, gathered them together in a bundle, clipped them with a paperclip, and went to the bathroom holding them in his hand. He lifted an asbestos panel above the toilet and was about to slide them inside the ceiling when he thought of the mice. He stepped down, walked back into the living room and dug around again in the drawers of his wife’s desk. Finally he came up with a large tin in which his wife had kept her stamp collection. He buried the papers under the stamps, closed the tin and sealed it with tape. Then he returned to the bathroom where he placed the tin in the ceiling and slid the asbestos panel shut again. He would think about the documents at greater leisure later in the day.
On the way to the militsiya station Petrov listened to the new Krasnoyarsk ballet company on the car radio. They were performing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring that evening and the radio programme was by way of an advertisement. It was a ballet in which, as Stravinsky himself had noted, In a circle of sage elders a young girl dances herself to death.
Though not a patch on Moscow’s or Petersburg’s ballet companies, the city, nevertheless, was trying to nurture a Siberian company without the help of the State or of the billionaires who sucked the people and the place dry with their aluminium factories.
As Petrov listened to the violent magic of the music, he decided what he would do. Maybe it was the music that set his mind running, its discordant, tuneless cacophony supposedly echoing a ritualistic, pre-Russian folk practice – an Evenk practice, perhaps – at least in the Slav Stravinsky’s mind, Petrov thought. It was amazing how the Slavs fantasised
about his own people, and the Evenk were only one of dozens of ethnic Siberian tribes that seemed to set their imaginations racing. So, what was he to do?
It all came together for him in a flash. He would take a vacation from work, extended leave for a few weeks at least – that was the decision that came to him. His leave could be combined with his thoughts from earlier that morning. He decided to tell Major Sadko that his grandfather was ill and undoubtedly dying. That he wished to see him once more before he died.
The thought of seeing Gannyka before the old shaman left this world filled Petrov with a sudden happiness that he couldn’t explain. He hadn’t been north, up to where his family tribe lived, for more than five years. Somehow it had never crossed his mind. But he could take his leave any time and the urgent immediacy of his request of absence would only be granted because of family illness or death.
The music tumbled around in his head in its repetitive way that was supposed to imitate the ecstatic chants and out-of-body experiences of so-called primitive people. The shamans perhaps. Yet somehow it seemed to connect him with another way of life, theirs, his mother’s and his grandfather’s.
But then what? It was more than a thousand miles downriver to the village and they’d be gone from there by now with the reindeer herds. And what would he do with the papers? He decided he couldn’t risk leaving them behind. He would have to take them with him.
He parked the police car on some waste ground behind the station and walked around the front and into the reception. No expense spent, he thought, as he surveyed the decayed infrastructure of the building and recalled that the toilets hadn’t been working the day before. The girl behind the metal grille nodded sharply at him.
‘Major Sadko wants to see you right away.’
He nodded in return but didn’t reply. The door next to the grille was unlocked by the woman from the inside and he went straight to Sadko’s office, down a hall of peeling paint, if you could call the colourless daub put on to the walls, God knew how long ago, paint. He knocked and entered.
Sadko was sitting, or slumping, in a wheeled, swivel office chair. He was a large Slav with a drinker’s gut and russet cheeks beneath a wrinkled brow, bushy eyebrows, and grey, thinning hair that stuck to his sweating scalp. The picture of a true, corrupt police officer, in Petrov’s mind, and there was no love lost between them.
‘Sit down,’ Sadko said without a greeting.
Petrov took the chair on the far side of the desk.
‘You were the first to look at the body of the foreigner this morning,’ the major snapped before Petrov was even seated.
‘Yes, Major.’
‘Find anything interesting?’
Sadko sat back in his swivel chair and pressed his thumbs together as if he were conducting some kind of sign language.
‘Nothing. Apart from the fact that he’s a foreigner.’
‘Was a foreigner. After I informed them, the MVD have been back on the phone.’
Petrov saw no need to reply.
‘They want to talk to you, Petrov.’ There was a hint of triumph in his voice.
‘When?’ He didn’t give the major the satisfaction of asking him why.
‘Now. Right away. Get down to their headquarters. A major called Robolev.’
‘Good.’
Sadko raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s good about it, lieutenant?’
‘I mean it’s good that it’s now,’ Petrov replied. ‘I’ve had news that my grandfather is dying. I’d come to ask you if I could take time off.’
‘Well. If the MVD let you go,’ Sadko sneered, ‘you can take a few days off, if you must.’
‘It’ll take a few days just to get there. He’s in the wilderness above the Arctic Circle. I’ll need a couple of weeks at least. I can take my summer vacation now, if that’s all right.’
‘Any more than that and it’s unpaid,’ Sadko replied. ‘But let’s see what the MVD have to say first, shall we?’
When Petrov left the building, no one asked him about his grandfather. Nothing interested anyone except their own day’s fulfilment. Why should they ask about his grandfather? He was just a nomad who was on nobody’s mental screen.
The MVD building was a grim façade of stone with small windows, barred on the inside, that seemed to exert some sort of malevolent presence on the street. Petrov imagined that pedestrians would cross to the other side to avoid it. He waited in a huge chamber of a lobby, two storeys high, until a woman in a tight skirt and clacking high heels, like a secretary in a fifties American movie, came to summon him upstairs. In the elevator she clutched a clipboard to her chest as if she’d forgotten to put on her blouse. An elevator! Petrov thought. The State still spent its money on monitoring its population and looking for spies or subversives, yet it didn’t give a damn about ordinary criminality or the daily death count.
He was shown into a large bare room with an outsize desk of the kind favoured by the bureaucrats and intelligence people. Robolev, in uniform, was sitting behind it making a credible pass at being interested in a pile of paperwork. When he looked up, like an enemy interrogator, he fixed Petrov through the lenses of round, Gestapo-like spectacles.
‘Take a seat.’ His tone was more jovial than his expression. ‘You’re… Petrov.’
‘Lieutenant Alexei Petrov, that’s right.’
‘What we want to know is how far you searched the foreigner’s body this morning.’
‘Just to the point where I found his passport. Then I knew it was a job for someone else. For the MVD.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He was shot in the back of the neck at close range,’ Petrov replied, knowing the MVD would also know the information.
‘A hit?’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Why?’ Robolev asked, and leaned back in the chair, resting his elbows on the arms and swinging gently from side to side.
‘They – or he – left his passport. A proper hit man would know how to get money for that.’
Robolev leaned forward, elbows now placed on the desk. ‘And why were his clothes sliced open, all the linings?’
‘I didn’t see that,’ Petrov lied. ‘Maybe they were looking for something.’
‘Something they expected to be well concealed.’
‘Presumably, major, yes, that would be my guess.’
‘A foreigner with something concealed in the lining of his clothes.’
Petrov didn’t see the need to reply.
‘And then there’s his right shoe, isn’t there?’
‘It seemed to have come away from the sole, as far as I could see,’ Petrov said.
‘Did you examine it?’
‘No, major. Maybe he caught it on something when he was running away from whoever killed him. But, as I say, as soon as I saw the passport I knew it was something for the MVD.’
‘Your lack of curiosity is…’ Robolev seemed to struggle for the right word, ‘unusual,’ he finally decided on.
‘I do my job. I have enough to do in my quarter. I judged the shoe must have come off when the body was moved,’ Petrov said, retreating into police observation. ‘Maybe the sole was partially removed, broken in the probable chase, or maybe it was slit, like the clothes.’
‘How do you know the body was moved?’ Robolev asked suddenly and leaned in triumphantly.
Petrov shrugged. This was common police work. ‘In the area around it there was no sign of a struggle, only signs of the legs being dragged. You could see that in the dust and dirt in the alley. And that’s what they do.’
‘Who do?’
‘Killers. Assassins. They move their victims in case there’s evidence of the ordnance used or if the killing took place too close to people and they didn’t want a victim to be discovered too quickly.’
‘So why did the victim’s body show signs of being so comprehensively searched?’ Robolev said, and focused the flashing lenses of his spectacles more closely into Petrov’s eyes. ‘There were slits in his coat,
his hat, he’d been all but strip-searched elsewhere…’
‘As I say, I didn’t see them, major. But they were looking for something, I suppose.’
‘Did they find what they were looking for? In your opinion?’
‘I’ve no idea, major.’
Robolev looked hard at him. ‘But you found nothing,’ he said eventually.
‘After the passport, I handed the case straight over to my boss for referral to your department.’
Then Robolev leaned further forward over the desk and placed his elbows flat on the surface, his knuckles supporting his chin. Once more his spectacles, like gun sights, zeroed in on Petrov. ‘It would be a terrible mistake if a militsiya officer took anything from the scene of a crime,’ he said.
‘I quite agree,’ Petrov replied and stared right back.
On the way out, he realised that Robolev hadn’t asked him to keep himself available, either from oversight or because he was dismissed from his mind as well as his office. But at least it meant he could now say to Sadko that he wasn’t prevented from leaving work.
CHAPTER FIVE
ANNA’S MAIN EFFORTS as she stood in the line of unemployed were devoted to being inconspicuous, transparent. Transparency was the dearest ally of the agent on foreign soil. Nothing was more important than that. Transparency was the best camouflage.
The most successful agents were the ones nobody ever noticed, the kinds of people you passed by in the street but didn’t really see, or met at a party and whose faces you couldn’t remember later; the people whose names somehow never stuck. The thought crossed her mind that, in an ideal world, she would simply have been invisible.