Bearpit

by Brian Freemantle

  Malik looked for and found the cross street for the shortcut to pick up Kutuzovsky Prospekt, stumping off with his mind filled again with the past and its part in the present. There was still no hate. Not for what happened before nor for what he believed Kazin had attempted, since Malik’s transfer to the First Chief Directorate. He was actually surprised, disappointed even, wanting the consuming emotion he had once known: shouldn’t he, of all people, have found that easy! He should, but he didn’t. All he wanted was to be rid of the man, to remove an irritation.

  He wished now he had not told Yuri: could not understand why he had. It had always been a promise to himself – and to Olga who had never known the baby was to be a boy – that the child should never know. It had been a mistake, a ridiculous weakness to blurt it out.

  At least, Malik tried to reassure himself, Yuri did not know it all. Nor would he ever know.

  The cross street by which Malik was limping to regain the broader thoroughfare to Kutuzovsky was dark and ill-lighted, hardly more than an alley, and enclosed in himself as he was Malik was abruptly disorientated. His first outward impression was of light going to darkness, which could not be right because it was already night and therefore dark. His continuing reaction was that he’d suffered some optical aberration, having come so recently from such a highly illuminated highway into a street sombre in comparison. And then he realized, further confused and not understanding, that it was not an optical aberration at all and that behind him a vehicle had entered the alley with its lights full on. But that now they were extinguished, plunging the car into an indistinguishable gloom, so indistinguishable that it was difficult to delineate it as a car at all: certainly it was not possible to see precisely where it was or guess the direction it was taking. And clumsy as his injury made him, it was quite impossible for him to attempt to get out of the way.

  The following seconds – those last, brief seconds – were a chaos of thoughts too quickly brought together to form any cohesive sense. There was the horror of an approaching black mass and the recollection of a conversation with Yuri, about killing, which he knew the boy had not believed, and an instant fear of pain, of agony, and then there was agony, a searing, tearing anguish which incredibly – miraculously – lasted only seconds, hardly sufficient for the scream blocked in his throat to burst out. He had the disembodied sensation of being thrown against something solid – a wall, his mind was clear enough to guess – but there was no fresh jab of hurt. Rather he was suffused with a feeling of heat, a warmth almost too hot to bear. Black was crowding in and he did not feel himself fall, although there was another sensation of hardness and the black became blacker and he thought it was the vehicle again, because there was an enormous, crushing pressure, which was the last conscious awareness that Vasili Dmitrevich Malik had before he died.

  There had been a shouted argument between Levin and the boy after Bowden’s warning of Petr’s refusal to cooperate with his tutor and another yelling dispute when Bowden reported no improvement after a fortnight, and Levin was worriedly aware that the hostility hardening between himself and his son was stretching to create a deeper division between himself and Galina. He was desperate for something with which to break down the barriers and so he was fervently grateful to Proctor for delivering at once the letter from Natalia. He bore it like a talisman before him into the kitchen in which it had become their custom to live, in some unacknowledged preference to the other, more comfortable rooms of the safe house.

  ‘From Natalia!’ he announced.

  For the first time since that outburst on the night of the defection Petr’s attitude faltered in his inability to control the excitement at contact from his sister. Father and son deferred to Galina to open it. Levin discerned almost at once Galina’s near-tearful collapse and Petr’s instant retreat behind the accustomed wall of antagonism when the boy became aware of the effect upon his mother.

  Galina tried her best at control, unspeakingly handing the letter to Levin, whose own eyes misted when he read it and who then gave it, again without speaking, to the boy.

  ‘Abandoned!’ accused Petr, the letter half read, at once picking up Natalia’s accusation.

  ‘I have not abandoned her!’ said Levin. He knew it was quite the wrong reaction but felt a boredom at the persistently repeated defence.

  ‘Convince her!’ sneered the boy.

  ‘We’ve written to do just that.’

  ‘I bet that’ll be a terrific comfort to her.’

  ‘Don’t you realize what this correspondence means, you stupid little idiot!’ exploded Levin, exasperated.

  Petr smirked, happy to have angered his father. ‘Why don’t you tell me!’

  ‘It means she’s not being victimized …’ Levin snatched the letter back, gesturing to the address. ‘She’s being allowed to stay where she is, without any pressure being exerted upon her … she’s being allowed to write to us and we are being allowed to write to her, in return.

  Which is a concession which further indicates that no pressure is going to be imposed upon her …’

  ‘Big deal …!’

  Levin lashed out, stopping the renewed, Americanized sneer. It was an unthinking action, fury moving him, shuddering both at what he’d done and at the physical pain as the flat of his hand slapped against the side of Petr’s face, which whitened and then almost at once reddened, at the force of the blow. The boy’s eyes flooded at the pain and he clamped his lips between his teeth, literally biting against a breakdown. Just one tear escaped, meandering lonely down his cheek, and Petr ignored it, pretending it wasn’t there.

  It was Galina who was openly crying, the sobs groaning throughout the room and careless of the FBI-approved staff who remained quiet and apparently embarrassed near the stove area. Galina rocked back and forth, physically holding herself, saying ‘No, oh no!’ over and over again.

  ‘Don’t question me!’ hissed Levin to the boy, inwardly conscious of the danger of an anger he’d been trained always to subdue. ‘Don’t question me or treat me with contempt or doubt it when I say that a way will be found for Natalia to come here, to us!’

  For several moments Petr remained staring at his father, arms tight to his sides against the impulse to reach up to the sting in his flushed face.

  ‘Fuck you!’ he said at last. And he intended to, thought the boy: he intended to fuck his father completely for what he’d done to wreck the family as he had.

  21

  By the time Alexandr Bogaty arrived at the scene the street was sealed, with closed-sided trucks drawn across either end and the technicians of death, the forensic experts and photographers and a pathologist, busy around the body, scraping and measuring and picturing and examining. There were two uniformed militia men at either end of the street, reinforcing its closure, and four more by the body. Accustomed to unexpected and violent death, they were uninterested in the mechanics of its cause: two were smoking cardboard-tubed Prima cigarettes and the other two huddled close together, stamping their feet against the cold, breath puffing whitely from them as if they were smoking, too.

  The captain, one of the two who was not smoking, saw Bogaty’s approach and broke away from the group to meet him.

  ‘Thought you should see this from the beginning, Comrade investigator,’ he said.

  The man’s name was Aliev, Bogaty remembered: a good policeman but nervous of responsibility and so inclined to summon superior officers when something appeared difficult. Bogaty said: ‘If it’s important, I’m glad you did.’

  ‘It’s important,’ insisted Aliev.

  Bogaty moved past him, towards Vasili Malik’s body. Arc lamps flooded everything in harsh white light and Bogaty saw from the chalked outline how the man had lain when he had been found: the body was shifted on its side now for some pathological probe. There had been a lot of bleeding. Bogaty said: ‘What’s it look like?’

  ‘Struck from behind,’ recounted Aliev. He gestured to a bloodstain that Bogaty had missed. ‘Thrown against the w
all, hard, then fell where the outline is …’ As the man spoke the pathologist returned the body to its original position and Aliev said: ‘It was the tyre marks … see?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bogaty, ‘I see.’ Aliev had been right: it was important. Not that he would have been irritated if it hadn’t been: given the opportunity to work meant he did not have to go home to Lydia and a diatribe of complaints about the conditions of the apartment and what she could afford or not afford upon an MVD investigator’s salary and when was he going to be promoted to a senior investigator of the homicide division to get the salary increase they need just to exist, let alone live. Without the summons here he would have been drinking in some café and lied about a fictitious assignment when he got home.

  ‘It could have been a panicked reverse to get away, of course,’ suggested Aliev, guarding himself against a mistaken summons.

  ‘Why reverse?’ said Bogaty. He was a fat but tidy man who cared about his appearance. He’d been oversized since he was a child and long ago abandoned diets: Lydia complained about what he spent on clothes, as well. Once the complaint had been about how heavy he was when they made love. They didn’t any more, which was a small relief.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Aliev, relieved.

  ‘Who was he?’ said Bogaty.

  ‘Important: the reason for calling you,’ said Aliev, offering the investigator the identification documents which had been taken from Malik’s body.

  ‘Shit!’ said Bogaty. He supposed the KGB caused him more annoyance than Lydia did, if that were possible. There were frequent occasions when investigations in which he had been involved overlapped on to what they regarded their territory – which was everything – and Bogaty resented their arrogance and despised their supposed ability as competent investigators. He said: ‘Have you told them?’

  ‘I waited until you arrived,’ dodged Aliev.

  ‘Witnesses?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Who found the body?’

  ‘A motorist.’

  ‘What’s he say?’

  ‘He turned off Oktyabrya and his lights picked up someone lying on the pavement. He was going to drive by, thinking it was a drunk, but then he saw blood. So he stopped.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He halted with his lights on the body, checked that the man was dead and called emergency.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  Aliev jerked his head in the direction of one of the obstructing trucks. ‘Making a fuller statement.’

  ‘Could he have done it?’

  ‘No,’ said Aliev positively. ‘He’s not showing the sort of panic there would be, if he’d done it. His car is not marked …’ The man nodded towards the tyre tracks. ‘… And his tyres are different from those.’

  Bogaty sighed, slump shouldered, and said: ‘I suppose it’s time we alerted Dzerzhinsky Square: saw how the big boys operate.’

  As Aliev moved away, the pathologist straightened from the body, nodding to Bogaty. ‘Crushed,’ the man announced unnecessarily. ‘Dead almost at once. Back was broken, too. Looks like the poor sod had already suffered enough as it was, before this.’

  ‘Couldn’t have felt much, then?’ said Bogaty.

  ‘He felt a lot,’ insisted the pathologist.

  The doctor’s departure signalled the end of the technical examination. The photographer started packing up his equipment and the forensic expert tidied small, see-through envelopes into a special wide-bodied briefcase.

  ‘Anything?’ Bogaty asked the man.

  ‘Glass fragments,’ reported the forensic examiner. ‘Some paint, too …’ He gestured towards the bloodstained wall. ‘I think the car scraped it.’

  ‘What about those tyre marks?’ asked Bogaty.

  ‘Definitely a reverse,’ judged the man. ‘Bloodstained from the initial impact, which registered when it came back.’

  ‘Could the car had been jammed against the wall so that the driver needed to reverse?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said the man. ‘But if it had jammed I would have expected more evidence of damage … more glass, more paint. Maybe some broken-off metal.’

  ‘But there was some damage to the vehicle?’

  ‘Certainly a broken light and a scraped wing.’

  With Bogaty’s arrival, the uniformed men had stubbed out their cigarettes. To one Bogaty said: ‘Get the trucks moved to let the mortuary ambulance in.’

  He stood directly at Malik’s feet, plump chin against plump chest, staring down, moving his head left to right and right to left, tracing the passage of the hit and run vehicle. Not simply hit and run, he decided. Hit and hit again. Then run. The bloodied outline and tread of the tyres were very obvious in one direction, but there were no brake marks from what must have been the approach. Rigor mortis was already stiffening the body: the man’s arm was thrown out, hand extended in a pointing gesture, and the lips were strained back from the teeth in a seized grimace of agony. Poor bugger, Bogaty thought: like the pathologist said, he’d been through enough already. Bogaty wondered how he’d suffered the earlier, appalling injury.

  What would the KGB response be? Not his concern; he guessed there was very little that would be his concern. Still, excuse enough to avoid the nightly tirade from Lydia. Bogaty, who knew himself to be a very positive policeman, recognized that in his private life he was contrastingly ineffectual. One day, he reflected, he would divorce her. One day. Recalling the name of the corpse before him, Bogaty wondered if Vasili Dmitrevich Malik had been married. It would be the KGB’s job to advise any widow. He would have liked to have known what the man’s position had been in the Committee of State Security. Something further not to be his concern. He supposed most investigators would be grateful for such an apparently difficult case shortly to be taken from their hands, but Bogaty wasn’t. He enjoyed detective work, discovering what people did not want to be discovered, and would have liked to find out why a crippled giant of a KGB man had been intentionally run over and killed. Maybe not so difficult to discover: Bogaty’s guess was someone with a grievance. And there were certainly enough people in the Soviet Union with grievances against the KGB: the majority of the population, he guessed.

  Bogaty looked sideways, conscious of someone approaching and expecting to see Aliev but instead recognized the uniform of a KGB colonel. Instinctively he straightened and at once, irritated at the gesture of respect, relaxed again. In self introduction, he said: ‘Investigator Bogaty. MVD homicide.’

  The man nodded without bothering to reply, gazing down at the body.

  ‘And you?’ pressed Bogaty.

  The colonel turned and for a moment Bogaty imagined the man was not going to identify himself. Then he said: ‘Panchenko. Security. KGB First Chief Directorate.’

  ‘He must have been important for a colonel to be involved?’

  ‘It is none of your business,’ rejected Panchenko curtly.

  Supercilious shit, thought Bogaty: they were all the same. He said: ‘He was deliberately run down. You can see where the car reversed over him.’ He saw the uniformed man shiver from the cold: the feeling had practically gone from Bogaty’s own hands and feet.

  Panchenko said: ‘It will be a KGB investigation.’

  ‘I anticipated it would be.’

  ‘What examination has there been?’

  ‘Pathological, forensic and photographic,’ listed Bogaty.

  ‘It’s all to be handed over.’

  Why was politeness always so difficult for KGB personnel? Bogaty said: ‘It will be.’

  ‘Immediately.’

  ‘When it’s available,’ qualified Bogaty. It was hardly independence but it was something, at least.

  ‘And all your notes.’

  ‘I haven’t made any,’ said Bogaty.

  ‘Anything your officers might have.’

  ‘The motorist who found the body is being interviewed.’

  ‘I definitely want that.’

  ‘That’s all there is.’

&n
bsp; ‘Sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure!’ Bogaty wasn’t impressed or frightened, even if the man were a KGB colonel.

  ‘I want everything.’

  ‘You already said that.’

  ‘Just so you understand.’

  ‘He was killed,’ insisted Bogaty.

  ‘It is no longer your investigation.’

  ‘You said that, too.’

  There was the sound of engines from the end of the street and the blocking vehicle moved to admit an ambulance. Panchenko said to the attendants approaching with their wheeled stretcher: ‘To the First Chief Directorate mortuary, not the civilian militia.’

  The rigor-hardened body was easy for the men to manoeuvre on to the stretcher: briefly, for no more than a second, the one rigidly outstretched arm pointed directly at Panchenko, who looked abruptly away, back to Bogaty.

  ‘Don’t forget the official reports,’ he said.

  ‘Is it likely I would?’

  ‘What was your name again?’

  To show he was not intimidated, Bogaty spelled it out instead of saying it.

  ‘I’ll remember it,’ bullied Panchenko.

  It wasn’t difficult to imagine why people wanted to run KGB officers down. Trying to end the encounter on his terms and not be dismissed by the man, Bogaty said: ‘If I were you I’d start checking garages before whoever did it has a chance to get his car repaired,’ but it didn’t work because Panchenko had already turned away and was walking back to the entrance to the street, without any farewell. Bugger the man, thought Bogaty: he wouldn’t get the expert reports until he asked for them. And asked for them politely. Still too early to go home to Lydia. Just one drink, in the café on Sverdlova. Maybe two.

  As always Kazin insisted on caution on unsecured telephones so when Panchenko called the man said, simply: ‘Safe?’