A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  ‘Hand this over to someone else—’ She was already shaking her head in protest, but then acquiesced. ‘- I want you with me.’ None of the others in the room would give this victim of domestic violence the time of day, but it couldn’t be helped. It seemed almost his duty to wean Marfa forcibly away from her addiction to lost causes; at least for short, recuperative periods of time.

  Marfa patted the woman’s unceasing hands, whispering intently to her. Then she browbeat a junior detective into taking over the interview, before she followed Vorontsyev out into the chill of the corridor. It smelt strongly of disinfectant where the linoleum had been washed down.

  Marfa sniffed loudly, repeatedly, as they went down in the lift.

  ‘Cold?’ he asked, grinning despite himself. Marfa Tostyeva wasn’t a hypochondriac — merely someone always surprised and disappointed in herself at the onset of minor illness. Perhaps, at twenty-six, she still felt immortal.

  ‘Flu, probably. I expect you’ll get it from me.’

  Thanks, Marfa.’ He felt obliged to ask: ‘That woman. Her old man beat her up?’

  ‘Naturally! Rig worker — when he’s sober. Obviously thought he’s start his two-week vacation with a little exercise. Bastard.’

  It was said without malice and without cynicism. Marfa still believed that life possessed oughts and ought nots. Imperatives.

  Rules of behaviour. She was the angriest and most passionate member of the CID. Which was why he trusted her.

  She sniffed again, her pale blue eyes looking more watery than usual. She would battle the cold or flu or whatever it was as violently and unremittingly as she did domestic violence, theft, drugs, cruelty to animals. Joan of Arc. He masked his smile. He’d have trouble sending her home if it was flu.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, glancing back at the interior of the lift as they left it, as if she had somehow betrayed the young, drab, beaten woman.

  The foyer was a casual litter of humanity that lounged, slumped or moaned on benches and in tiled corners, observed by cynical militiamen or brifshed and mopped around by cleaners.

  ‘The dead body this morning. It was staying, when alive, at the Gogol. I thought we’d go and see in what style it was entertaining itself before going into the dark. OK?’

  Marfa glowered at him. Rich men’s crimes hardly interested her. The Gogol Hotel was another planet, and one whose atmosphere was malign.

  ‘OK,’ she replied.

  His car emerged from the last trees of the avenue that shrouded the climbing drive and his headlights splashed on the Georgian facade of the house. Though splendid, it was too far out along the George Washington Parkway, in Virginia. It overlooked the Potomac and the rushing waterscape of Great Falls. Its twenty-acre grounds nudged the Park. The immaculate mansion whispered of money; owned variously by eighteenth-century landgrabbers, a retired Civil War general, a steel baron — and now temporarily in the custody of Billy Grainger. Of which John Lock approved, since the house had been his sister’s sanity.

  Billy’s black Porsche, his company limousine and the cruiser stood marshalled to one side of the house. Floodlights let the manicured lawns creep to the edge of eyesight and greened them. A few last brown leaves — overlooked by the gardeners lay like liver spots on an old hand. There were two other black limousines from the Grainger fleet, parked regimentally alongside Billy’s cars. Billy must have flown in some business associates.

  He shut the door of the small Nissan and walked towards the portico, which was supported by four white columns — like the White House. He smiled. Billy’s mansion was slightly smaller. The flagpole thrust up into the starry evening, the flag itself furled. The huge lamp above the doors was gleaming.

  Windows glowed with light, welcoming and secure.

  And he no longer had to worry what he would find inside, as he had during the months when that facade had been a lie.

  He felt no instinctive hunching of his shoulders, so often in the past the reaction he had been unable to avoid on coming to the house, wondering and even dreading what he would see.

  Beth’s drugs, her drinking, her breakdown — caused by Billy’s infidelities. He understood it now; they had come through it, his sister had been put back together again, good as new. He smiled to himself in anticipation of her appearance. Now, he could even understand Billy’s behaviour, because it had caused no lasting damage to Beth. Billy had simply cracked under the pressure of marriage to someone cleverer, purer, brighter than himself. The women he chose as mistresses had always been glamorous, they were never intelligent.

  Then she was on the steps, as if it were her twelfth or thirteenth birthday, not her forty-first, hovering excitedly beside Billy’s English butler in a silver sheath of a dress that bared one of her narrow, pale shoulders to the light.

  ‘Hi, Sis-‘ She was hugging him, childlike rather than in the desperation he had seen her through. He held the gift-wrapped present behind his back and felt her hands search for it. Her lips giggled warm little breaths against his cheek.

  ‘Johnny — I’ she exclaimed in mock disappointment and temper, pouting. He handed her the present and she held it against her girlish breasts for a moment, before taking his hand and half-dragging him into The mansion’s broad, high-ceilinged reception hall.

  ‘Excited?’ he asked.

  ‘I got through forty — I’m going to enjoy forty-one!’ A maid offered him a champagne flute. Stillman, the butler, regarded his mistress and her younger brother indulgently, judging them to be adolescents, but acceptably well-mannered. Beth drew him into her parlour.

  There was a log fire in the hearth. Subdued lighting glowed on the marble fireplace and the gilded clock on the mantel, and reflected in the pieces of furniture she had gathered to the room.

  American and English. Beth thought French too fussy, even vulgar, to the horror of a number of Washington matrons and climbers of her acquaintance. The drapes, and carpets, like the furniture, were her choice, not the diktat of a high-priced designer. Which was probably why he liked the room. Two Sisleys and a small Cezanne were the only paintings; there were books everywhere else., Books by their father, still regarded almost thirty years after his death as one of the best historians of the Civil War — books by Beth, from her doctoral thesis to her last and best-selling volume, the one she called her potboiler. Books on history, music, art, many of them Dad’s library recreated here … and one half-shelf left mockingly empty, or put there as a challenge.

  The one reserved for his own books, whenever she finally goaded him into writing them.

  Beth let him take the room in, as she always did, just as if she were a tour guide, or perhaps a mother who had kept his old room exactly the way he left it, year after year, waiting for him. She squeezed his arm in shared, silent memory. Then, breaking the reverie, she all but pushed him into a chair, her eyes bright. Not with drink or cocaine any longer, or even with a determined pretence of happiness. Just because — now — she was happy.

  ‘How was Russia, Johnny? Are things any better, for God’s sake?’ She asked as if she had near and endangered relatives there; the impression she always gave about any place or state or war zone she cared about — and she cared about most of them. Organised, donated, went sometimes … she wanted to accompany him to Russia next time he went. Strangely, she had never travelled with Billy. He would have seen nothing with her eyes, and she required someone to share her perceptions.

  ‘How were things? Come onV she added, as if his silence teased her.

  ‘It’s not good — though I met an honest cop.’ He grinned, ‘You were arrested?’

  ‘No. He interviewed me, over a fight in the hotel bar. Sort of a fight,’ he added quickly as her face clouded with concern.

  ‘Just an argument, really. Since I was State, I rated the chief of detectives himself. He seemed more amused by me than concerned.

  He was about as cynical as you could get, but I quite liked the guy. Other than that, Billy’s investment’s safe, thoug
h what the Russian government and people are getting out of it ‘

  ‘Pete Turgenev’s here, with Billy. They flew up from Phoenix just today.’

  ‘Has Vaughn come up with them?’

  ‘No — he’s a little tired’

  ‘Nothing wrong?’

  ‘No, he’s fine. I think he overreached, presenting Pete Turgenev and his executives to major stockholders. He’s not Billy’s father in name only.’ She smiled.

  ‘How was your trip to New York? I get back from Russia, and you’re not even in town!’ he mocked gently.

  ‘You know. Rich students listening to a debate on the Third World’s hunger— how much can it mean to them?’ She spread her long-fingered hands. Diamonds glittered in the firelight, sparkled at her ears and throat. He did not remark the irony.

  ‘Well, maybe one or two were impressed by the UN. The others either wanted us to send the Marines or get the hell out.’

  Images of her radicalism, her protesting and marching, flickered in his memory. He realised he was still staring at her in a doctor’s searching manner, and that it amused her. Recognising old contempts and angers in her expression was like seeing signs of returned health.

  ‘So, you’re entrenched as official caring professor at Georgetown, sister of mine?’

  ‘I’m not politically correct’

  ‘- so you’re not popular.’ He grinned. Belh held onto her academic tenure because she was dazzlingly bright, Billy had established a professorship in geopolitical studies, and she had written an academic treatise on Eastern Europe’s economies that had fluked its way into the non-fiction best-seller lists. Criticism was silenced by the power of the successful word.

  He wondered whether she woukl nag him, even tonight, about his own book — the project that had accompanied him for years like a faithful but ignored hound. At State, they said every good boy needed a hobby, so the brightest and the best turned out monographs, papers, journalism when allowed — arts reviewing was favourite and he’d done a lot of it himself — but books, as he always protested to Beth, were real hard work, at which plea she would wrinkle her small nose with the mild, dismissive superiority of someone to whom the mind was a familiar room.

  ‘No, I’m not popular, but that doesn’t matter — not any more.’ She sighed, stretching like a small animal in the warmth and firelight. Once, it had mattered. His had been the only approbation she had been able to recognize. Billy’s fooling around had been a rejection. ‘Who did you meet?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a deputy prime minister — who’s in favour now but might not be by the weekend. Yeltsin’s shuffling them like cards, trying to keep the hardliners fed but not bloated.’

  ‘Is it all going to hell in a handbaskel?’

  ‘Maybe — maybe not.’

  ‘Billy says their economy is coming around.’

  ‘Billy would — he’s a great guy, but he still believes trickle down economics is enough to keep the peasants happy.’ He raised his palms in a gesture of peace. She would defend Billy like a bear its cub, now that she felt loved again, felt that her stability and happiness were not under threat or siege.

  She smiled. ‘GraingerTurgenev must be doing some good.’

  ‘Some. There are Russians driving Porsches in Novyy Urengoy now. That’s got to mean something — I guess. But you and Billy?’

  ‘Fine.’ There was no hesitation, no uncertainty. ‘I lost sight of what Billy and I had together — so did he. Everything’s fine now.’

  ‘Good.’

  He sipped his forgotten, tepid champagne. Relaxed in the firelight that threw their shadows together on the wall.

  ‘Open your present.’ She snatched it up from the arm of her chair and tore at the wrapping. Her eyes widened. The small, gold-framed ikon, a flat, cartoon-like image of the Virgin haloed with stars and heavily painted — like a whore, he thought irreverently — gleamed like the furniture.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’ She kissed him, and edged herself onto the arm of his chair. They admired the ikon together.

  ‘Black market, in Moscow. An old woman. She must have kept it under her mattress for decades.’ She seemed to disapprove.

  ‘I gave her a decent price, Sis, I really did. She’s suddenly rich, and in dollars.’ There was a knock at the door and the imperturbable figure of Stillman, the butler, appeared; an adult come to summon children.

  ‘Your guests have begun arriving, Madam,’ he announced sepulchrally. Lock, sipping at his champagne, controlled a giggle.

  ‘Thank you, Stillman — I’ll be right out.’ The door closed behind the butler. Beth sighed, but it was a noise of pleasure, then stood up, smoothing the sheath of her dress. ‘Come to lunch tomorrow. I want time to talk to you …’ Then she smiled, touching his hand with her fingertips. ‘No, just talk. I am going to enjoy my party!’

  She glided to the door and he followed her. There were gowned women, black-tied men in the reception hall, where the lights seemed suddenly stage-bright. The grand staircase climbed to the gallery, the chandelier glittered, hired-in maids took topcoats and wraps. A few politically incorrect furs, swathes of silk scarves and bright shawls. Jewellery gleamed as if the bare-shouldered women posed deliberately beneath the flattery of the chandelier. Beth squeezed his hand, then floated forward confidently to greet her guests.

  Lock took a cold glass of champagne from a passing tray, relieved and glad. Almost at once, a powerful lobbyist bore down on him and he, too, was drawn into the eddies and whirlpools of power and money and pleasure, the elements of the occasion.

  The suitcase lay open on the bed; forlorn in appearance only because Vorontsyev knew what had happened to its owner, lying in his underclothes in the mortuary of the Grainger Foundation Hospital. He had sat on one of the large room’s upright chairs for ten minutes, staring at the suitcase, aware of Marfa’s sniffles and the flatulence of the central heating pipes. Then he knew that the suitcase, packed before Rawls was summoned or taken to his appointment with a professional hit man, had been searched. Expertly, delicately — but searched nonetheless.

  There was no briefcase, no Filofax. There was a suit still in the wardrobe, together with a pair of shoes and some underwear, and little else except the toilet bag and its contents in the bathroom. Anonymous. It was too anonymous. There should have been a briefcase, papers, a passport, other things.

  He picked up the telephone. Unlit, the room was shadowy with the snowblown day outside the window. He pressed for the cashier.

  ‘I want to know whether Mr Allan Rawls left anything in your safe — yes, the dead man. Yes, the police.’ His identity had little effect. It was a measure of the passing of an aristocracy. A revolution had occurred and people were no longer cowed by KGB or police. They genuflected before other, imported, gods Amex Gold Cards, money, well-cut suits, fast cars. He was only the police and no longer counted here, in the best hotel in Novyy Urengoy where, uncorrupt, he could not afford a room.

  ‘Mr Rawls put nothing in the hotel safe,” came the reply.

  He put down the telephone. Marfa came out of the bathroom.

  ‘Found any pills your family can use?’

  She frowned, then nodded.

  ‘He must have had trouble sleeping over here. He got some tablets from the hospital, apparently.’ She rattled them, then put them in her pocket. Marfa’s sister-in-law had trouble sleeping.

  The gas company injury insurance and the disability pension paid to Marfa’s brother were inadequate to meet the demands of the town’s new Westernised economy. He’d lost an arm in a rig accident. Soon, they’d have to move somewhere where it was cheaper to live.

  ‘I have trouble sleeping over here,’ he murmured.

  ‘Nothing else, sir?’ She slumped into a chair, and then at once was aware that her posture made her appear exhausted and sat bolt upright, leaning eagerly forward. Her black woollen scarf reached almost to the pale carpet, and swathed her throat like the folds of a python. Her small, narrow, pretty face was already clouding
with the onset of her cold.

  ‘No, nothing. Listen, take the next couple of days off-‘ She made as if to protest but he held up his hand warningly. ‘You’ve got a cold coming. I don’t care how much you want to put our drug-smuggling friends out of circulation. One sneeze at the wrong moment and you’d blow the whole thing! So, don’t plead with me.’ She was angry, her frustration that of a child — or someone deeply just. Innocent, anyway. ‘OK? You’ll just have to leave us incompetent males to tie the parcel.’ He smiled.

  Eventually, after her face seemed to have wrestled itself into acquiescence, she said: ‘Agreed. Just don’t cock it up, sir.’ It appeared she was about to add a homily of some kind; probably concerning the dead or damaged victims of the heroin operation, their bereaved families. He really needed her on the drugs raid.

  How many of his people could he really trust not to fire off a warning shot that would took like an accident or the result of over-stretched nerves — or sound a car horn to warn the pushers and the suppliers? ‘What about this business, sir?’ she added, gesturing at the room. To her, it was a matter of indifference; a crime among the rich with only well-heeled victims.

  Vorontsyev rubbed his hand through his greying hair. ‘Who knows? He was searched and stripped of everything by his killer.

  The same man must have searched this room and removed his briefcase and any papers. Agreed?’

  ‘Just a minute, sir-‘ She sneezed, to her own anger. She pulled the telephone off the bedside table and returned to her chair. Consulting her notebook, she dialled a number. Her impatient breathing was loud in the room.

  ‘Antipov?’ she asked. ‘Police — yes, it’s me. You’re the night commissionaire at the Gogol. I don’t care if I woke you up, I’ve got some questions for you.’ She paused, listening. ‘Good. An American guest at the hotel, Mr Rawls — medium height, dark hair, small build, dark topcoat … he left the hotel around two or two-thirty this morning. Did he ask you to get him a cab?’