Dead Men Living
( Charlie Muffin - 12 )
Brian Freemantle
Brian Freemantle
Dead Men Living
Knowledge Itself is Power.
-“Of Heresies,” Meditationes Sacrae, Francis Bacon
1
The El Nino-Christ’s Child-gets its name from always beginning in December, usually in a seven-year cycle, and reverses the equatorial winds to blow west to east across the Pacific. But there was nothing benevolent about the worldwide climatic upheaval Christ’s Child caused that year.
The heavy storms that followed the wind-driven warm water washing up against the coasts of North and South America caused deserts to flood and rain-denied rain forests to wither.
Drought parched Southeast Asia and smoke from fires that engulfed Indonesia blocked out the sun and plunged the country into near-darkness for weeks. There was so little water in the lakes and rivers feeding the Panama Canal that ship size had to be restricted. Raging torrents destroyed roads and railways in Kenya and Tanzania and Uganda, and rainstorms caused more than $1 billion of damage in California. For weeks temperatures of more than one hundred degrees seared Texas. Scores of people died from heatstroke. Forest fires engulfed Florida. Canada was paralyzed by ice storms.
Siberia was also hugely affected. Tundra permanently frozen so hard that houses were built without foundations melted, in places reducing entire villages to collapsing matchwood. The thaw was particularly pronounced around Yakutsk.
It was returning home to the tiny township of Kiriyestyakh from a supply-buying trip to Yakutsk that a reindeer herder found the bodies. Had he not been on horseback-denied the more customary use of the sled the animal normally pulled-he might not have seen the upthrust, hand-clenched arm: as it was, his first impression was of a tree branch.
He was too young to have known the Great Patriotic War, although his grandfather had been killed on the eastern front and his father had lost an arm in the battle of Stalingrad. But the until now perfectly preserving ice tomb had collapsed sufficiently for him torecognize that both corpses were dressed in military uniform. Neither uniform looked like those he’d seen in any photographs of his grandfather or father. His initial impulse was to loot the bodies of whatever valuables there might be, but Siberia is the most superstitious of any Russian region and to grave-rob risked the Evil Eye. Instead he remounted his horse and hurried on to Kiriyestyakh, to report his find.
2
Although, after all he’d seen and endured and done, it would have been impossible for Charlie Muffin to believe in God, it had seemed divine intervention when he, of all operatives, got the first-time Moscow posting in the department’s anxiety to justify its continued existence by becoming a quasi-British FBI after the supposed end of the Cold War.
Maybe, despite being a disbeliever, he had believed it was something like that, so quickly had he again come into contact with Natalia-and seen their daughter for the first time-and imagined she’d so easily forget all the hurt and all the deceit. The fact that she’d resumed their affair at all was little short of a miracle; that she was here, with Sasha, in his apartment, even more miraculous. Second thoughts-and third thoughts and fourth thoughts-were inevitable. He had, every time, convincingly allayed them, as convincingly as he’d persuaded her to move into Lesnaya Ulitza. Although, Charlie accepted, Natalia had hardly moved in. The belated doubt had come even before she’d unpacked.
“This is ridiculous! A mistake!”
“You’re here now. Let’s just give it a chance.”
“We can’t afford chances. Not one.” She shook her head distractedly. “I can’t conceive that I’m here: that I agreed to it.”
Neither, in all but rare honesty, could Charlie. He’d even phrased the initial suggestion in a way that he could have dismissed it as a joke, although deep down it hadn’t been. “It’s not like the old days. We don’t even have a concierge to inform on us. And you’re keepingLeninskaya on: officially that’s still where you and Sasha live.”
“Which will be meaningless, if we’re discovered.” Why didn’t she tell him of the threat she thought herself to be under, despite so much of it personally involving him? Too much to think about; too much-too fast-of everything.
“I love you,” declared Charlie solemnly. “Sasha is my daughter. I’m in Moscow permanently now. Officially. It doesn’t make sense for us to go on living apart.”
“It does if you really intend us to make some sort of life. If our being together comes out, you’ll be withdrawn and I’ll probably be dismissed, and then what’s left?”
“London.”
Natalia shook her head. “I was prepared to make that sacrifice once, remember? Risked imprisonment-worse, maybe, because I was officially in the KGB then-to get myself to London, expecting you to meet your side of the bargain. All you had to do was meet me, arrange my defection. But you backed off-abandoned me because you weren’t sure. Which, in one very important way, I’m glad about now. I was so much in love with you then that I forgot I was Russian. How much being Russian means, which no one who isn’t can ever understand. Leaving Russia-coming to London and bringing Sasha to London-is the very last thing I want to do. Which I’d ever consider doing, which has nothing whatsoever to do with how I feel about you and about us. I’ll do everything I can to avoid it.”
Charlie felt abruptly hollowed out and it was several moments before he replied. As he did so, he gestured around the huge room in which they were and the apartment beyond. “If you’re telling me that you’re not sure any longer, then I agree. This doesn’t make sense. Nothing does.”
“I’m telling you I’ve got to make up my mind whether I am or not. I thought moving in might be a way of my finding out; thought too much about what seemed my biggest problem and not enough about what others could be caused by my being here. Which was stupid.”
They were talking English. Sasha, who was five, said impatiently, “What are you talking about?”
In Russian, Charlie said, “I was telling Mummy how much I love you and how pleased I am that you’re here.”
“Did princesses really live here once?” asked the child, craning her neck in awe.
“All the time. And now another one is going to. You.”
“I want to see!” demanded the child.
Charlie got up almost too quickly to take the child’s hand, glad of the escape from a conversation he didn’t want to have. The Lesnaya apartment extended over a quarter of an entire floor of what had been, in 1915, the fifth story of one of the grandest Moscow palace-mansions of a cousin prince of the last tsar. Legends had it, as legends often do, that Tsar Nicholas had not once but several times slept there, although not in the guest rooms on Charlie’s level. Rasputin, at the time caring for Nicholas’s hemophiliac son, Tsarevich Alexei, had been on Charlie’s floor, according to the same fable, but again not in any of the rooms in which Charlie lived.
Everything was echoingly enormous, following the principle that the specially chosen and therefore exalted rulers of others had to reside in surroundings built for giants. Charlie liked the leader-of-men imagery. The ceiling of the main room was high enough to have formed scaffolding for a tired moon. There was a huge Venetian mirror over an ornately carved mantelpiece, its cavorting cherubs climbing a bas relief to the faraway corniced and molded ceiling. In the main room, more a reception salon, there were three verandaed and velvet-draped windows, stretching the entire height from that ceiling to the deeply carpeted floor, and although a hodgepodge of style and period, all the furniture was of the highest and most comfortable quality, apart from some of the pieces-particularly two couches-that appeared from their pattern fade and some wear to date from the house’s original o
ccupant.
There was a separate, smaller and more convenient family room in which Charlie had installed the large-screen, transformer-operated and satellite-linked television-imported from England-and three bedrooms, two with four-poster beds around which, despite complete central heating, curtains could be drawn against a Moscow winter the El Nino appeared to have defeated. The kitchen was a burnished, chromium-gleaming contrast to the bygone age, a laboratory of microwave, ice machines, walk-in refrigerators and rotisseries. The entire edifice had been maintained and created for a relative of Leonid Brezhnev, when the most corrupt of recent Soviet leaders had ruled,taken over by subsequent Party tsars until the demise of communism, after which it had come upon the list of diplomatically offered properties through endemic bureaucratic incompetence.
Charlie had gotten it totally by chance, to support his arrival assignment cover as an entrepreneurial intermediary to infiltrate the nuclear-smuggling Russian mafia, and was reasonably confident-although not absolutely sure-that he could manipulate a matching dinosaur of Whitehall bureaucracy to go on living there by right of existing possession, even though the reason for his original occupancy had been successfully concluded.
It wasn’t until the end of the tour, tightly holding her mother’s hand, that Sasha said, “Where’s my room?” and scuttled into the smaller one containing the curtained four-poster to which Charlie pointed. The child stood, legs apart, surveying it and gravely said, “I like it. I want to stay.”
“I’m glad,” said Charlie. Turning to Natalia-knowing in advance he shouldn’t use the child’s remark-he added, “How about Mummy?”
Natalia’s answer wasn’t a direct one. “I’ll tell you if I decide I’m not sure anymore, about you and I.”
“All right,” said Charlie, unable to think of anything better.
“Does that make you think any less of me?”
“No,” said Charlie, honestly. “It took me long enough, but now I’m sure.”
“I want it to work, Charlie. I really do.”
“So you’re going to stay?”
“I might change my mind. Think I should change my mind.”
They’d reverted to English. Feeling neglected again, Sasha said, “Are you going to live here, too, with Mummy and me?”
“Yes,” said Charlie.
“Does that make you a daddy?”
Charlie and Natalia looked at each other. Charlie said, “Yes. Would you like that?”
“I don’t know,” said Sasha with childlike truthfulness.
“Let’s hope everyone makes all their decisions soon,” said Charlie.
The entire town council of Kiriyestyakh, led by the mayor, stood around the softening grave. The bodies were still deeply frozen, theclawed hand stiffly upright, but more earth had crumbled so that they could see the backs of both heads had been shot away.
The mayor, who had fought with the reindeer herder’s father, said, “Definitely foreign. English, I think. And American. I saw uniforms like these in Berlin.”
“What are we going to do with them?” asked his deputy.
The mayor had survived the long years of communism by never once making a decision. “This is in Yakutsk jurisdiction. They’ve got facilities there.”
“They’ve been preserved exactly as they were the moment they were shot,” the awed deputy pointed out.
“English and American,” repeated the other man. “There will be a big investigation. We can get to Yakutsk in an hour.”
“Do we take the bodies with us?” asked a third man.
“We don’t touch them,” warned the mayor. “Let others risk the Eye.”
3
Yakutsk is the capital of the partially autonomous Russian republic of Yakutskaya, one of the most remote and inhospitable places on earth and provably the coldest, where temperatures plunge to minus eighty degrees centigrade. As well as being certain of the Evil Eye and the magic power of shaman witch doctor priests, the Yakut people who exist there believe unheard conversations freeze in the winter to be heard in the brief summer thaw.
In that region the summer is plagued by mosquitoes that sting so viciously that grazing reindeer and cows and horses that are not driven mad by the pain often suffocate from the attacking clog in their nostrils and mouths. Men and women have been driven insane by a concerted swarm, although the more frequent dementia is caused by the vodka intended to numb every feeling.
The freak weather of the El Nino had awakened the insects early and the melting grave was blackly thick by the time the mayor gotback to it with the two official investigators. The mayor and his council were all Yakuts, less troubled by the mosquitoes than Colonel Aleksandr Kurshin and Vitali Novikov, both of whose ancestry was Russian. Kurshin, the homicide chief, at once lit supposedly repelling smoke candles that made everyone’s eyes sting but did little to drive away the bugs. Novikov, the pathologist, put on a personally adapted and mesh-visored hat and gauze mask and protected his hands with rubber medical gloves. He didn’t have a spare mask, but he gave his extra gloves to Kurshin, who snatched at them.
“Where’s your hat and mask?” demanded Novikov, who’d made the same face protection for the other man, a boyhood friend as well as a professional colleague.
“Forgot,” said Kurshin.
“That’s stupid,” said Novikov. Everyone drank too much in Yakutsk but Kurshin was increasingly drinking more than most and it worried Novikov. Kurshin had stunk out the mortuary vehicle on the way there. The weather and its effect worried Novikov, too. Malaria had never been a problem in such a frigid climate, but if this unnatural weather lasted, the disease could become an insect-borne epidemic. If it remained so warm for too much longer he’d warn the Health Ministry in Moscow, despite Yakutskaya’s independence pretensions. He couldn’t be accused of negligence if he sounded an alarm before a problem arose. It was ingrained in people whose forefathers had been exiled to permanent imprisonment, albeit without jail walls, to arrange defense before accusation.
Novikov was not, however, thinking of malaria at that precise moment. As he stared down into the grave, other thoughts-desperate, half-formed fantasies-were swirling through his mind, so distracting that he had consciously to try to push them back. He looked beyond the grave, squinting through the permanent half darkness of the Yakutskaya day over the flat, empty wasteland. He was sure he was right, but there was nothing to see, not the slightest trace. As if, in fact, a shaman had cast a spell to make everything disappear. How, he wondered, could he make it come back again?
Neither Aleksandr Andreevich Kurshin nor Vitali Maksimovich Novikov were frightened of the supernatural, although they were familiar with all the superstitions. Neither sneered at the folklore beliefs, either. Novikov, who also practiced as a general physician,knew of at least seven shamans in Yakutsk. He knew, too, that the townspeople consulted them as much as they came to him and that sometimes people whose maladies he had failed to diagnose recovered from whatever the shamans prescribed. Novikov considered himself a man of science, but didn’t know of a better medicine than the power of absolute, mind-over-matter conviction. Unable to resist another fantasy, he was curious if he possessed it sufficiently himself.
Kurshin, a fat, rumpled man who had little conviction about anything apart from the anaesthesia of vodka, said, “They look like wartime uniforms.” He couldn’t possibly be expected to solve something that had happened such a long time ago.
“This whole area was closed then, like Yakutsk,” reminded Novikov. His father, like Kurshin’s, had been exiled there during the Stalin era on trumped-up charges of political conspiracy. It had left both with an inferiority complex-an apprehension of authority-that both tried hard to conceal. Too often when he was drunk Kurshin wept for no apparent reason.
“It doesn’t make sense,” agreed the policeman, uncomfortably.
“This is too important for us,” judged Novikov, as anxious as his friend to avoid any accountability. He was a thin, nervous man whose blinking increased in pro
portion to his apprehension. It was very rapid at that moment. This would, he knew, attract the attention-maybe even the involvement-of faraway Moscow. Could there in some way be the salvation he almost maniacally dreamed of? Or the disaster that had overwhelmed his father?
“I know that, too. We’ve got to get everything right,” agreed Kurshin. He’d solved each of his eight previous murders because they had all been barroom brawls or mining camp disputes where the killers had either been standing over their victims or pointed out to him when he’d gotten to the scene. He’d had to shoot dead one man crazed from vodka, not mosquito bites. The first two shots had missed. The third had only hit because the man had lunged toward him.
“I intend to,” said Novikov. He checked to ensure his camera was loaded, even though he had put in the new film himself before leaving the mortuary. There weren’t any proper forensic facilities in Yakutsk. The two men were expected to provide their own.
The Kiriyestyakh group, as well as the two Yakut mortuary attendantswho’d come with Novikov, backed away from the grave roughly by the same distance that the medical examiner advanced toward it: a disturbed dense mass rose up toward him and before every exposure he had to shake the camera to dislodge the persistent cloud. Every print would be speckled. It couldn’t be avoided. He worked his way around the entire grave, taking a picture at each sideways step.
Behind him Kurshin made a rough sketch against which to put his measurements. It was a vaguely round, banked hole, the still partially earth-covered bodies at its lowest point. Several times the measuring tape came free of the stones with which he tried to tether it, so he had to repeat the process. It would have been pointless asking any of the withdrawn group to come closer to hold it in place. Reminded, he said, “I suppose I’ll have to touch the bodies as well as you to get the Eye before your people will take them out?”
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