by Craig Thomas
‘Sorry ‘
‘No problem. But it’s three already.’
‘Anything useful?’
‘On Rawls?’ Vorontsyev shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
‘Where do we go from here?’
Their footsteps hurried along the corridor, echoing ahead of them and behind, as if a platoon of soldiers were quick-marching through the Foundation Hospital.
‘Nowhere, I should think. What can we do? The guy was robbed. Everyone says so.’
‘Except you.’ Vorontsyev shrugged. He had, involuntarily and perhaps while he was unguarded, recalled an early visit to Dmitri’s house for a weekend barbecue in summer. Remembered the vivacity of both wife and daughter, their unexpected ease in front of him, the certitude of their family life. Midges had plagued the patch of garden behind Dmitri’s home on the outskirts all afternoon, but it had not seemed to matter. It had not diminished the laughter.
‘Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what Americans think they’re doing?’
They reached the bottom of the final flight of stairs, and the foyer where the Outpatients Department had created its encampment of people with limbs in plaster or patched eyes, loiterers, children who sniffled and roared and ran around shrieking — and, as if the Soviet ethic could never be entirely expunged, lounging porters in brown overalls. But he had been informed that hospital porters throughout the world were similarly ossified.
The day, declined into late afternoon, was bruised with cloud on the horizon. Vorontsyev pushed open the fingerprinted, smudged glass doors and the cold struck against them with a promise of winter violence. Their boots crunched on the freezing snow as they crossed the car park. Dmitri’s bulk slithered on glassy ice, and Vorontsyev grabbed his arm, righting him.
The cellular telephone nagged in Vorontsyev’s pocket. He opened the mouthpiece and said: ‘Yes?’
‘The flight’s on time, sir. The weather’s OK, they should get in more or less on time.’
‘Good.’ He folded the instrument away like the empty wrapping of a toy, and thrust it into his pocket.
‘Well?’ Dmitri had forgotten his wife.
‘It’s in the air — and coming our way.’ Dmitri’s face was as excited as that of a child. He sensed the same pleasure in himself.
He was warm in the car park’s freezing air. The lock of the Car door opened easily, without his having to heat the key. They bundled themselves into the car, as if setting out for a party, and Rawls and Dmitri’s wife, Anna, had never existed.
The aircraft bringing gas workers up from Pakistan would land in a little less than six hours. They’d be at the airport to meet It, would watch the unloading and the passengers filing, ghostly, in night-glasses across the tarmac. They’d follow the bus or taxi back into town, then wait for the Pakistani called Hussain to walk into the glare of their surveillance at the block of flats. How much heroin didn’t matter, it would be something; a satisfactory consignment. It would be real, unlike the cloudy speculations that surrounded the murder of Allan Rawls.
He started the car. Dmitri, beside him, was now tense with excitement, and guilt at the opportunity to forget his wife for a few hours. The engine coughed, then became an assertive roar.
He had wandered out of some abstract drama which refused to make its meaning clear into the last act of a play that offered a genuine climax. They were going to do something, have something to show The telephone drew him slowly up from a deep, dreamless sleep.
The room pounced familiarly as he switched on the bedside lamp. Four in the morning. He could hear rain against the window.
‘Yes?’
There was a moment’s hesitation, then: ‘Do I have Mr John Lock?’
‘Yes? Is this important?’
‘I’m Lieutenant Faulkner, Mr Lock. I’m calling from Mr William Grainger’s house—’
‘Wait a minute, there. Are you police?’
‘Yes … Mr Lock. Washington PD.’ The man’s reluctance worried him. He felt stunned by a detonation he had hardly begun to suspect.
‘What kind of policeman are you?’
‘A homicide detective, Mr Lock.’
He was silent, hearing the rain against the window, the tick of the alarm clock, the breathing of the man on the other end of the line. A solitary car in the street below.
‘Mr Lock?’
‘Yes,’ he said in a stony, gruff whisper.
‘I’d like you to come out here, sir — to help us identify the ‘
‘No!’ It was not his answer to Faulkner’s request. ‘What’s happened?’
‘There have been some homicides. If you could make it now, it would help us,’
‘Bodies?’
‘Yes. There were servants, I understand?’
The ridiculous spring of hope, broken-winged, was down in an instant.
‘A butler. A housekeeper. How many bodies are there?’
‘You’ve accounted for the other two, Mr Lock.’ immediately, he felt the nausea choking his throat as his stomach churned.
‘Hold on — ‘ he blurted, then staggered across the bedroom to the bathroom.
After he had vomited, retching until his throat ached, he stared into the bathroom mirror at a stranger’s face — white, drawn, dislocated. His mind reeled as if he had been awoken from a drunken stupor. His thoughts raced with images of Beth and Billy and of the house, the gardens falling to the Great Falls, the long drive up which his headlights had climbed, Beth and Billy, Stillman the butler, and Beth and Beth …
There was no escape. He was locked in a padded room where the scream, the only activity left to the stranger’s face in the mirror, wouldn’t be heard by anyone.
Beth had been murdered Twenty minutes late, the Tupolev dropped out of the clouds and rushed towards them, Aeroflot emblazoned on its flanks like the desperate cry of a lost cause. Vorontsyev watched it inspect the runway, wobble, hurry and then settle as quickly as a migrating duck onto the strip of darkness between the lights.
He swept the glasses after it as it rushed away again, not appearing to slow until it turned like a wounded animal, slowly and clumsily. A hundred passengers crammed into it, standing room only as was still the habit of Aeroflot, especially with Iranians and Pakistanis and whoever else had been gathered up in Islamabad to fly into winter. The plane nosed back towards them, once more looking like a shark, sleek and purposeful, nosing the darkness for its appointed parking slot. Dmitri twitched and shuffled beside him. On that plane would be handheld heroin, furtively concealed, nestling in clothing or in toothpaste tubes or talc containers. Just enough to keep the streets of Novyy Urengoy supplied until the next flight, a fortnight later.
The plane came to a halt. He continued to watch it through his night-glasses, staring at him like a ghost-shark.
Iran, Pakistan, Kashmir, the Moslem Triangle, as the press and agencies of a dozen countries called it, had come to Siberia.
Just a small sideline. The Foundation Hospital addiction unit, courtesy of the American conglomerate whose name it bore, was stuffed to the ceiling with the victims of that sideline. The passenger door had opened in the flank of the Tupolev. A collective sigh was audible from the surveillance team. And — and, it was being delivered into his hands, here and now. He sensed shared — the excitement like the freshness of a cold wind.
The passengers began to descend. Whispers identified or rejected them. They were waiting for Hussain, even though they understood that there could be two-three, even six carriers. The plight on the streets had been evident to them for days. A new supply was urgently required. The drugs community was rippling like dead flesh responding to the expansion and contraction of the gases of decay. It hurt — they needed.
The Iranians and Pakistanis and others trooped towards the terminal, while the luggage tractor nosed like a piglet against the sow and the bags began appearing. He glanced at Dmitri beside him, leaning against the other side of the car, his breath smoking in excited little signals of anticipation and desire. The stars were h
ard in the sky, there were a few grey blobs of cloud, and the airport lights showed a straggle of passengers.
He fitted the night-glasses once more against his eye sockets.
Those bags, they could contain more drugs. There were no searches of returning workers. Everything was done like some parody of Western commercials for holidays — Siberia welcomes you. The operation could, of course, be far bigger than Dmitri’s sole contact — an Uzbek he had charged with sodomising the son of a local government official related to a deputy prime minister — had ever revealed or known.
He admitted to himself that he had almost indulged Dmitri in his pursuit of the drug-pushers who had fed his daughter the heroin on which she had overdosed. It had seemed more con genial than having to watch his best subordinate disintegrate at his desk.
The troop of passengers had entered the terminal.
The town’s addiction problem was increasing like algae under sunlight, covering the surface of the place. The politicians made noises, then forgot, returning to their habitual fawning on the foreign companies who possessed the xeal power. Nobody wanted to know — not really know ~ about heroin.
The R/T, as if to emphasise the insistence of his thoughts, clamoured with reports. Hussain was in the terminal, they were making for the luggage carousel, then customs. Usually, they passed through customs with not even a perfunctory search.
Tonight would be the same.
‘Where’s Hussain?’ Dmitri’s excitement was palpable on the air, like the scent of petrol; something inflammable.
‘Baggage carousel. He doesn’t seem worried.’
‘He wouldn’t. He must have done this trip dozens of times.’
The Uzbek had been a small-time pusher, but he’d pointed them towards an apartment block, rundown and colonised by the families and relatives and hangers-on of gasfield workers.
He picked up his cut heroin there. There was a courier named Hussain, a Pakistani. The heroin originated in the Moslem Triangle. That was it. In exchange for the information, the sodomy charge had been kept from the father of the boy. The boy, an addict himself, fervently desired anonymity.
Vorontsyev glanced at his subordinate, all but envying him the sense of purpose that strained his features like those of a hunting dog close to its quarry.
He shook himself; the nervous tension was infectious, the voices from the R/T a discordant chorus of anticipation. Hussain had collected his luggage — two bags — and was on his way through the customs green channel. No one stopped him, but his exit from customs was reported.
‘Anyone else?’ Vorontsyev asked quickly. Dmitri was puzzled.
‘Get hold of the cabin crew, the hostess or the purser. Find out who he sat with — one of you, get on with it. You’re not needed in customs any more.’
‘Yes, sir.’ ffl There had — now that he really thought about it with stretched nerves — to be more than one courier. Diminish the risk, increase the supply. The addicts had begun queuing at the Grainger Foundation Hospital’s unit for the heroin substitutes, giving their names, addresses … the supply was so overdue.
‘Get me the passenger list — and I want every one of them checked out with GraingerTurgenev and RossiyaGas and SibGas and all the other companies. Wherever they work, I want links between them, if they’re there, uncovered. Got that, all of you?
Tomorrow’s schedule.’
Dmitri, for an instant, laid his gloved hand on Vorontsyev’s arm, a gesture of gratitude. Vorontsyev felt a small, sneaking shame but Dmitri didn’t even resent his elbowing his way in, taking control. Nor did Dmitri’s look remind him that he had shown no more than an occasional — even if fervent — interest in Dmitri’s lead via the Uzbek sodomite. Both of them loathed drugs, badly wanted results. But, Vorontsyev admitted, he had always believed Dmitri more of a crusader than a policeman.
‘He’s getting into a taxi.’
‘Tail-car?’ Dmitri snapped.
‘We’ve got him — don’t worry. Inspector.’
‘Let’s go,’ Vorontsyev said to the driver, and they heaped themselves into the rear of the ZiL.
The car skirted the terminal building and hurried towards the airport gates and the highway, the suspension thudding on rutted, frozen snow. In the distance of the night, the narrow flares from the rigs pricked out like campfires. Ahead of them, the town glowed, the outlying apartment blocks seemed skeletal, pocked with lighted windows. Block after block, retreating towards the centre of the town. Some larger houses, cottages, fenced gardens now under snow, churches, a cemetery, old fronted shops and narrow streets; Urengoy had been the administrative centre of the province, and Novyy Urengoy its suburb.
Now, it housed a hundred thousand people, and maybe fifteen or twenty thousand more lived in trailers, shacks, lean-tos and sheds. Workers from the Urals, the Ukraine, Iran, Pakistan, Soviet Central Asia, imprisoned for two weeks at a stretch for twelve-hour shifts on one of the fourteen hundred gas wells.
They passed a huge hoarding that informed him that Novyy Urengoy produced two-thirds of all Russian gas, fourteen trillion cubic feet every year. The word Soviet had been painted out, and Russian substituted. The place was — as it enlarged before and around them — phantasmagorical, almost nightmarish. Beside the highway was trailer park after parking lot after windswept collection of shacks. Lights glowed fitfully and feebly in the vast darkness, remote as stars from each other and from him. The place was a company town, his enforcement of law tolerated and often ignored. It was like a huge, Tsarist factory complex, except that no one was actually poor here any longer; desperate, futile, greedy, envious, crooked, but not destitute. They chose to live like derelicts and peasants because of the money. Six or seven hundred roubles for a week’s work. A thousand, two thousand a week for anyone with the slightest degree of skill or responsibility.
Stunted larch and birch, and sheds littering the ground beneath their inadequate shelter. Then the sodium lamps flared beside the road, masking the detritus of greed.
‘Hussain’s taxi still in sight?’ Dmitri asked over the car radio.
The canyons of apartment blocks enclosed the car, and Vorontsyev could hear the wind noise above the sound of the engine and the crunch of the snow tyres on the rutted street.
Hunched figures hurried through the icy weather.
‘We’re right behind him’
‘Don’t alarm him!’
‘It’s OK, Inspector, everything’s under control.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Junction of K Street and 14th. We’re both at the lights.’
‘Keep me informed.’ He turned to Vorontsyev, his eyes gleaming.
‘Just on the edge of the red-light district. He’s heading straight there.’
He kept the radio microphone cradled in his hand, like a weapon or a lifeline. The car halted at a set of lights strung above the junction of 9th Street and K. They were five blocks behind the tail-car and Hussain’s taxi. The old town slunk away into semi-darkness to their left, wrapping itself in the night and the twisting, narrow streets and patches of blankness. Ahead, the main street was swallowed in the glare of lights from bars, hotels, clubs, stripjoints, whorehouses, cinemas. K Street was a tunnel of neon.
The car skidded. No one bothered to clear the snow this early in winter. The heaviest traffic was workers’ buses taking men out to the wellheads and rigs, and large trucks moving pipes and heavy equipment. When they wanted to move, the streets were snowploughed. Otherwise ‘What’s that?’ he asked, tapping the driver on the shoulder.
A blue light was struggling to announce itself amid the neon glare and the small, gathered crowd.
He felt Dmitri about to protest.
‘We have time,’ he said. Just make sure the tail-car doesn’t lose him.’ Then to the driver: ‘Pull over. If they’ve picked the wrong situation, they could start a riot.’
It didn’t happen often, but it did happen — drunks who kicked back, or whose friends didn’t want them taken in. A brawl like t
hat had lost them two officers through serious injury and one they’d had to bury.
Ambulance and police car, the former drawn up at the black entrance to a side alley. The patrolmen were watching from beside their car, not quite indifferent but hardly concerned.
Vorontsyev got out of the car and they stood to attention and pretended attentiveness. He nodded.
‘What is it?’
One of the patrolmen pointed to the alleyway.
‘Dead druggie in there — OD’cd, by the look of it, sir. This one-‘ He jabbed his gloved index finger against the rear window of the patrol car. ‘- was trying to get the clothes off the body before it was cold. Says he’s a friend of the deceased and he wouldn’t have minded!’
‘Is the one you’ve arrested an addict?’
‘Looks like it, sir. He’s in a bad way. Really needs a shot in the arm.’ He grinned indifferently.
Vorontsyev nodded and crunched his way over to the two ambulancemen, who had placed the body on a stretcher. The small crowd was already beginning to drift away towards the warmth and expense of clubs and bars. He heard laughter; it wasn’t cruel, merely indifferent and at something else entirely.
The addict had already been forgotten. The wind howled out of the blackness of the alley. He sensed others in there, derelicts.
Huddled in cardboard boxes and drinking anything that offered oblivion. The cold stars were visible above the alley, undrowned by neon.
He turned to look at the body as the ambulancemen hoisted the stretcher. A thin, stubbled face, red-eyed and staring. Probably eighteen or nineteen; he looked Russian. His clothes smelt vilely even in the icy temperature. He watched the stretcher put carelessly into the rear of the ambulance, then saw the other addict, the grave-robber in need of a fix, so badly in need, staring at him with a dead, white, expressionless face.