The Watchmen

by Brian Freemantle

  To the hovering janitor Danilov said, “Be more precise. One week or two since you last saw him?”

  “More like two,” said the subdued man.

  “Before I got here. Unannounced and unpublicized. And even longer before you began asking at his garages,” Danilov pointed out. “And I would have thought he would have taken more of his clothes and certainly all the money that was in the desk, wouldn’t you?”

  “There’s been enough publicity from America. An investigation here was obvious,” insisted Averin. “He was in too much of a hurry to get out. And there’s no passport. He’s obviously taken that.”

  “Doesn’t something about the desk surprise you?” asked Danilov.

  “What?” Averin frowned.

  “There’s nothing personal there whatsoever. No letters, no photographs, nothing. This doesn’t look to me like a hurried departure. To me this looks like an apartment that’s been thoroughly sanitized, cleaned of anything that might have helped this investigation. Or that might have told us where to find him.”

  “Either way he’s running,” insisted Reztsov.

  Seeing the direction in which the janitor was looking, Danilov said, “We’ll take the money for safekeeping. Log it in an evidence file.”

  On their way back to the hotel Danilov declined the invitation to dinner for the second night, insisting he had too many calls to make. As he passed through the lobby he identified one of his breakfast companions still engrossed in the newspaper the man had been frowning over that morning.

  The same voice as before answered Cowley’s extension and asked him to hold to be transferred. Another woman who identified herself as Pamela Darnley said she’d actually seen Cowley that day and that the injuries weren’t life-threatening, although it was still too early to say when—or even if—he’d be returning to the investigation.

  “I’m acting case officer,” continued the woman. “He told me to tell you to share everything with you—that everything’s two way.”

  “So what happened?”

  The speed with which she talked betrayed Pamela Darnley’s impatience to hear whatever Danilov had to share.

  “Do you know where the bombs came from?” Danilov asked when she finished.

  “Still under analysis. Anything from your end?”

  Danilov hesitated, at once accepting the stupidity of not wanting to work with anyone but Cowley whose integrity and ability he knew so well. “I haven’t been to the plant yet,” he lied easily. “I’ll keep in touch, either direct like this or through Moscow.”

  There was a matching hesitation from the other end before the woman said, her disappointed suspicion obvious, “OK. Look forward to hearing from you.”

  The connection to Yuri Pavin was just as quick. Danilov said, “Who or what does the Moscow telephone number on the warhead belong to?”

  “It doesn’t exist,” said Pavin. “At least not any longer. I’ve asked the telephone authorities to check their records, but they say they don’t keep any for discontinued numbers.”

  “Shit!” said Danilov. It fit, he supposed, with Ivanov’s assertion that the program had been abandoned twenty-five years earlier. “We can’t find Viktor Nikov.”

  “He’s dead,” replied the deputy in Moscow. “Found in the Moskva, jammed under one of the Smolenskaja Bridge supports. Shot mafia style, with a bullet through the mouth. Another one in the head.”

  “How long … ?” started Danilov, but the other man continued talking.

  “He wasn’t alone,” said Pavin. “He was handcuffed and roped to another man, Valeri Alexandrovich Karpov, who’d been killed the same way. Not listed in records. According to what we found on him, he lived at Pereulok Samokatnaja 54, here in Moscow. I’m just on my way.”

  “Wait until tomorrow,” ordered Danilov. “I’m coming back.”

  Neither Reztsov nor Averin looked like proper detectives even when they were doing what was supposed to be their proper jobs. It was the major who escorted Aleksai Zotin, whom they identified as Nikov’s brigade leader, into the interview room at Gorki militia headquarters, but he did so subserviently, standing back almost politely for the gang leader to enter ahead of him.

  Zotin was an immensely fat, damp man preceded by the odor of his own perspiration. He waddled to the desk that divided the room and had to splay his legs to sit down. He said to Danilov, “You’re new. This a shakedown?”

  “Haven’t you heard that Viktor Nikov’s been murdered in Moscow?”

  “Who?”

  Danilov sighed. “Viktor Nikov, one of your bulls.”

  “Don’t know what a bull is. Had a driver of that name a long time ago. Haven’t heard from him for a long time.”

  Danilov realized that it didn’t appear as if he could perform properly as a detective, either. “You think your memory might improve in a cell?”

  Zotin laughed at him openly, nodding toward Reztsov. “Even he does better than that, and he’s paid a lot of money to put me out of business.”

  “That’s not true, of course,” said the militia colonel. Like everything else about the man, it was a token gesture.

  It had been a stupid threat, acknowledged Danilov. There was absolutely no evidence upon which to hold Zotin, and to do so—and then be forced to free him—would make him look even more ridiculous than he already did.

  “The murder’s a major investigation in Moscow. If we can make a connection between Nikov and you, I’ll charge you with complicity to steal microbiological weaponry from Plant 35. That’s a life sentence, no remission.”

  Zotin yawned exaggeratedly. “I don’t know anything about Viktor Nikov or what he was doing in Moscow. I haven’t seen him for months. You’re wasting your time.”

  He was, admitted Danilov. He hoped the other things he was doing would not be so frustrating.

  Patrick Hollis hadn’t anticipated his mother demanding to ride with him when he’d announced he was going out in the new car. He hated upsetting her, and the dispute had delayed him. Now he was having to drive faster than he should have to keep strictly to the time schedule. He wasn’t sure what he would do if the booth was occupied. If it was, then it would be an omen, a sign that he wasn’t intended to take the call, so he’d drive away—keep to his original intention and sever the link.

  But the booth wasn’t occupied, although the telephone was ringing when he pulled up outside.

  “Where were you?” demanded the voice when Hollis picked up the receiver.

  “Traffic,” said Hollis. He was short of breath from hurrying and apprehension.

  “Build in time for delays.”

  “You did it, didn’t you? The missile in New York?”

  “You knew we were going to. You’re part of it.”

  Hollis hesitated, trying to calm his breathing. “A lot of people got killed.”

  “We’re fighting a war, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t want any part of it.”

  “You are part of it.”

  “Not anymore.” It had been right to take the call. Proved himself to be a man, confronting a situation and refusing to go on.

  “Listen to me! The war’s ongoing and we need more money. You’ve got to help us get it. Give us more account numbers—a lot more than you have already.”

  The man was frightened he was going to pull out. It was a strange feeling—a feeling he’d never had before—knowing another man was frightened of him. “No.”

  The sensation he’d never known before—power? authority?—stayed with Hollis as he drove away. It was going to be easy asking Carole Parker out, too. He’d have to make up a story for his mother. He didn’t want another scene like the one tonight.

  The duty complaint detective didn’t hide the sigh, knowing everyone else in the squad room was laughing and finding it difficult not to laugh himself. He said, “Sir, you’re telling me that in six months you’ve been shortchanged a total of seven bucks!”

  “Seven dollars and sixty cents,” corrected Clarence Snellin
g.

  “What does the bank say?”

  “That they’re sorry.”

  “They make it up to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So there’s no actual loss?”

  “No. But it’s the principle.”

  “What exactly would you have me do?”

  “Investigate it, what else?”

  “Sure,” said the man. “You’d better let me have the details.” He’d be able to turn it into that day’s funny story in the bar later.

  8

  There were a lot of officers and detectives who became distressed, vomited even, when confronted with the victim of violent death. Dimitri Danilov never had been, apart from Larissa, whom he’d had to identify from her belongings and which hadn’t been an uninvolved professional duty.

  A dead body mattered to him only for the clues it might scientifically provide to catch its killer. Beyond that it was a lifeless thing, of no interest or emotion. He felt absolutely none as he stood beside Pavin in the police mortuary, staring down at the naked gray flesh, following the pathologist through the external medical findings. The testes of both victims were ballooned from torture before they died. There were also whip marks across their backs and the round marks of cigarette burns on both faces, which no longer had eyes. There was severe restraint bruising to the ankles and wrists, which the pathologist guessed to have been caused by metal handcuffs, not softer rope, and the doctor also thought from the testicle damage that they had been tortured over a period of several hours—as much, even, as an entire day. The head shots had been what killed them, the teeth-shattering mouth wounds following, for symbolism. Medically Nikov had been suffering gonorrhea and Karpov ulcers, for which antacid medication was among the man’s effects.

  Pavin had met Danilov in at the airport that morning and brought with him the recovered pocket contents of each victim, but they’d spent the journey to the mortuary discussing Gorki.

  Pavin identified ownership by placing the appropriate plastic evidence sacks at the foot of each body on its adjacent gurney. As Danilov picked up the bag marked with Nikov’s name, his deputy said, “The other one’s more intriguing.”

  Danilov said, “I want to keep my head in sequence. All I’ve heard about for the past three days is this man.”

  Viktor Nikolaevich Nikov had come to Moscow to be murdered carrying $1,470 in American currency, a gold cigarette case containing ten now-soaked Marlboro cigarettes, and a gold Zippo lighter. The watch was gold, too, a Cartier, and the gold signet ring had an onyx setting. The only other jewelry was a gold, unengraved identity bracelet. There was a passport, showing two American visa entries and two driver’s licenses, one in his own name, the other in that of Eduard Babkendovich Kulik. They reminded Danilov that he’d forgotten the previous day to check for a vehicle or a garage that might have belonged to the man’s apartment. Carelessness was obviously contagious in Gorki.

  Danilov said, “Like they always say, crime pays.”

  “Until you get shot in the head and mouth,” said Pavin. “Now try the other one.”

  Valeri Alexandrovich Karpov had been carrying $420, again in American currency. There was a gold, Swiss-made watch, which had stopped at 12:40, and a wedding ring. All the contents had been removed to dry from a new leather wallet. There were curling photographs of a blond woman, from the background standing on the bank of the river into which Karpov had been thrown untold years later, one of a much younger Karpov with the same woman, and two more of the man with smiling children, both girls. There was only one driver’s license. As Danilov put it aside for the next item Pavin, beside him, said, “And finally the interesting part.”

  It was an official pass, on yellow cardboard kept dry by its laminated plastic case, and contained a photograph of the dead man, whose job description was given as stores supervisor. Reading the cover page imprint, Danilov said, “Do I need to ask what’s manufactured at Plant 43, Moscow provincial area?”

  “Chemical as well as biological,” confirmed Pavin. “It’s some way out of Moscow, to the northwest. Actually on the Skhodaya River, in the Tushino region.”

  “Which connects with the canal and the Khimkinskoy Reservoir,” recognized Danilov. “I wonder if anyone ever worries what would happen to Moscow if there were to be a leak, like there was at Chernobyl?”

  “Of course they don’t,” said Pavin, responding seriously to Danilov’s cynicism. “Our appointment there is for three this afternoon.”

  “Did you tell them why?”

  “I didn’t need to. Did you see the television coverage of what happened in America?”

  “Some. What did the factory say?”

  “That we needed authority from the Ministry of Science as well as the Ministry of Defense. So I called Chelyag’s secretariat at the White House. We got permission an hour before you landed.”

  “Thank you,” said Danilov. It hadn’t been a mistake at all to leave Pavin in Moscow.

  “We’ve got time to check out Pereulok Samokatnaja,” Pavin pointed out.

  “The wife been informed yet?”

  “You told me to wait,” reminded Pavin.

  Which might have been a mistake, thought Danilov—not putting any family there under protection at least. “I think we should.”

  Karpov’s apartment block was comparatively new and therefore, by that definition, prematurely old and decaying. It had been one of the last developments under the Brezhnev diktat promising a home of their own for every Russian family. The limited success of the program had been secondary to the million-plus kickbacks Brezhnev and his immediate family received from prefabricated material suppliers, incompetent architects, and cowboy builders. Some of the average-size rooms were smaller than the alloted space, and chicken coops at the rear of each apartment allowed the occupants some self-sufficiency in meat and vegetables they’d never been able to buy because Brezhnev and his ministers had run the country’s food supply and distribution as a private enterprise, too.

  Karpov’s apartment was a surprising exception when Naina Karpov admitted them. In the living room there was a matching suite of two chairs and a sofa and a glass-fronted cabinet displaying a set of matching goblets. As they passed the open-doored kitchen, Danilov had seen an impressively large refrigerator/freezer, and the television looked new and had a very good picture: It was a cartoon program for the girl of about ten who whined in protest at being told to turn it off and go and read in another room. It was only when Danilov turned to see the child open a linking door that he realized that it was not, in fact, one apartment but two, connected by what must have been a later, additional door.

  “What’s happened?” she demanded at once as the door closed behind the girl.

  “It’s serious,” said Danilov. Naina Karpov, the woman in the photographs the man had been carrying, was neatly dressed in uncreased skirt and sweater. She wore no makeup or jewelry, and she had about her an uncaring resignation that reminded him of Olga, which was scarcely fitting because if she had been made up and dressed differently Naina Karpov still might have been an attractive woman. The incongruous reflection reminded Danilov that he hadn’t bothered to call Olga from Gorki the previous night or telephoned today to tell her he was back. He didn’t imagine she’d be interested. There was still plenty of time.

  “What?” said the woman.

  “I’m afraid your husband has been killed,” said Pavin.

  “He didn’t come home last night,” declared the wife, as if it was a contributory fact.

  “It happened yesterday,” said Pavin.

  “How?”

  Pavin looked at Danilov, who nodded, watching the woman curiously. Pavin said, “He was shot. With another man.”

  Naina Karpov nodded without any obvious emotion. “I told him.”

  “Told him what!” demanded Danilov.

  “That it had to be wrong, what he was doing.”

  Danilov suppressed the sigh. “What, exactly, was he doing?

  “Selling st
uff from the factory,” she declared bluntly.

  “What sort of stuff?” coaxed the more patient Pavin.

  She frowned. “Metal, of course. That was his job, ordering a lot of the metal they use there: making sure there was always a supply. Keeping a proper account of it. Which made it easy. He ordered more than they needed and sold the surplus. Said it was easy. That he’d never be caught.” She made a vague gesture around the connected apartments. “That’s how …”

  “Who’d he sell metal to?” queried Danilov.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. He said other factories who didn’t have their supplies organized like he did. And garages. Places like that who always needed metal.”

  “He told you all about it then?” said Pavin.

  The shrug came again. “Not really. Not like I’m telling you. It just came out, in bits and pieces.”

  “So he’s been doing it for a long time?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “How long would you say?”

  “Two or three years.”

  “Which?”

  “Three, I suppose.”

  “And you warned him to stop?”

  “I told him I was frightened.”

  “Why—and of what—were you frightened?”

  “I didn’t like the friends he was making.”

  “So you met them?” seized Danilov.

  “No. That was the problem. I never met any of them. He said it was business—his business—but there wasn’t any socializing. He said the men he dealt with only liked dealing with other men.”

  “You weren’t surprised when he didn’t come home last night?” challenged Danilov.

  “He said he might be late.”

  “Late?” qualified Pavin. “Not that he wouldn’t be coming home at all?”

  “No.”

  Danilov said, “Were there many nights he didn’t come home at all, Mrs. Karpov?”

  The woman didn’t answer for several moments. “A few times.”

  “Once or twice a week?”

  “About that.”