by James R Benn
“You sound like you’ve spoken those lines before,” I said. It was all I could say. I was almost ready to confess.
“Every actor has his choice. To speak the lines or have no lines to speak. Do you see how easy life is in the Soviet Union? A multitude of choices is dizzying to the average Russian. It is why I must shepherd my flock, like a priest, to keep them holy.”
“A priest also forgives and shows mercy.”
“Another time, perhaps, there will be mercy. For now, the Soviet Union must be merciless to our enemies, wherever we find them. Does that shock you, Billy? Do you show mercy to criminals in your city?”
“Back home, we enforce the law. The same law for all.”
“Ah, yes. The same law for all. With liberty and justice for all, is that not what you Americans pledge? Yet you keep your Negroes in ghettos, and hang them when they step out of line, do you not?”
“No, I don’t. It happens, but it’s against the law.”
“So the police in your southern states, they apprehend the murderers of Negroes, and bring them to justice?”
“Listen, I don’t make excuses for what’s wrong in my country. Maybe you should do the same.”
“Forgive me, Billy, I did not mean to offend. We are taught that your country is wild territory, with gangsters, capitalists, and racists oppressing the workers and peasants.”
“We don’t have peasants. We have poor folks. And we have our share of the rest, too. But right now I’m more concerned about who oppressed Gennady Egorov and why. What do you really think?”
“Between us? I would not repeat this in front of anyone else, but he was an arrogant idiot, and angered everyone he worked with. Half a dozen people would have gladly killed him, and more were glad to hear of his death. We must demand a public investigation, but no one but his father will care, and he is in Moscow.”
“Of those half a dozen, how many would have thought of pinning it on the Poles?”
“All, I’d say. The crisis over the rightful Polish government and the Katyn affair has preoccupied us. It would be an obvious ruse.”
“OK, since we’re talking off the record, how about telling me about that shipment?”
“What shipment? More food?”
“No, not food. The big shipment, coming any day now, the really valuable one,” I said, as if I knew more.
“Sorry, my friend, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What about Vatutin? Would he know anything about it?”
“Rak? Oh no, he’s a good one for taking orders, but that’s all. If I don’t know about it, I can assure you he doesn’t. Now excuse me, I need to meet him at the rugby club. Those lads can almost outdrink a Russian.” I watched Sidorov talk with the tableful of Russian and English officers before he left. He had a casual way about him that put westerners at ease. His style was suave, which made him likable, all laughs and handshakes. But his countrymen eyed him as he left, and they seemed to breathe a perceptible sigh of relief as the door closed on his back.
A few minutes later I was outside, too, buttoning the collar of my trench coat against the cold night air and the breeze off the channel. I would have seen Kaz if he’d come back to the inn, so I knew he was still out there. I thought he’d either walk along the water or head up above the cliffs to the castle. There weren’t many places open in Dover. Most of the population—many women and most children—had been evacuated during the worst of the Blitz, so there was a shortage of functioning pubs and no other entertainment. I walked along the deserted promenade, watching for Kaz and wondering if any Luftwaffe aircrew were lurking nearby. If so, they probably were thanking their lucky stars they’d landed in England and not at the Russian front.
I came to the end of the promenade and walked along a street where the houses nestled in under the white cliffs. There were no lights and little moonlight, and I turned around, deciding Kaz could pass me on the other side of the street and I wouldn’t be able to see him. I found a footpath leading up to the castle, and pretty soon I wasn’t feeling the cold at all. I trudged up, wishing I’d worn boots instead of my dress browns. Or maybe it was the three ales I’d had. Either way, by the time I got to the top, I was winded, cursing Kaz, certain he was climbing the steps at the inn to his warm bed right now.
I stopped to catch my breath and turned around, facing the channel. A wooden bench was thoughtfully set by the path to afford a view out over the water. I took advantage of it. Even in the pitch black, the view was beautiful. Starlight reflected off low waves and sparkled on the breakers. I could make out one or two vehicles, light leaking from their blackout slits, making their way down the coast road. I heard footsteps ahead of me, and I turned from the view to follow, hoping it might be Kaz. I walked carefully by the cliff edge, toward a gate guarded by a couple of sentries silhouetted against the night sky. Beyond them, I could see the snout of an antiaircraft gun pointed toward France. I heard a noise close by, but it was too dark to make out anything except a low, dark shape on the side of the path.
“Who goes there?” It was one of the sentries, advancing with his bayoneted rifle.
“Help,” a voice croaked weakly from my right before I could answer. It was Kaz. I moved closer, putting my hand on his shoulder. He was kneeling over a body. It was facedown on the ground, lying in that graceless pose that only death can arrange.
“What’s this then?” the sentry demanded, shining his flashlight on us. I squinted against the sudden light, but not before I noticed four things, none of them good. The body wore the pale blue greatcoat of a Soviet Air Force officer. As I leaned closer, I saw it was Rak Vatutin. The back of his head was a dark red mess, and Kaz’s hand rested on a lichen-encrusted rock that had its share of the same. What’s this then, indeed?
“Kaz?” I said, shielding my eyes from the light, while trying to see into his.
“Billy, I found him like this, not one minute ago.”
“Then why do you have that rock in your hand?” I pointed to where his right hand rested on the ground, palm down on what looked like the murder weapon. Kaz pulled his hand away, his fingertips stained crimson, his eyes wide with disbelief and confusion. We stared at each other as the silence was broken by a whistle, a piercing, screeching sound as the sentry blew his whistle with all his might, sounding the alarm, too late to do any good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“NOW LET’S GET this straight,” Detective Sergeant Roy Flack said for the hundredth time. I took a drink of tea, wishing it was coffee. It had been hours since I found Kaz, and we’d spent every one of them in this room. Brick walls and arched ceiling, every brick painted a glossy pale yellow, the kind of paint job you get when you have plenty of free labor, officers with not much else to do, and an endless supply of government-issue paint.
“You became angry after reading the newspaper accounts of the Russian investigation of the Katyn affair,” Flack said, reading from his notebook.
“Yes. And then quite inebriated,” Kaz said. He looked pale, but that could have been the lighting. It was harsh, a row of light fixtures above the table where we sat, Kaz and I on one side, DS Flack on the other, and a constable at the door. There was a British soldier standing guard on the other side of that door. I hadn’t tried to leave, because I didn’t want to desert Kaz and because I wasn’t sure if they’d let me.
“Inebriated, as you say,” Flack noted. “You left your room as it was getting dark, about 5:00 p.m. Lieutenant Boyle observed this, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Inebriated is too strong a term. Tipsy, maybe.”
“Angry and tipsy,” Flack said, raising his eyebrows. “Sounds like a vaudeville act. Were you going to meet someone, Lieutenant Kazimierz? Or look for someone?” It had been the same question, over and over again, since Flack arrived. The sentries had summoned their commanding officer, who sent for Sidorov and the local constable. Sidorov was nowhere to be found. The commanding officer and the constable both sensed more trouble from more quarters t
han either wanted any part of, and made a call to Scotland Yard. Flack had been the closest inspector, still coordinating the hunt for downed Germans south of London. He’d been awakened in the middle of the night and forced to drive over country lanes in the blackout to get to Dover. By the time he arrived, rain clouds had moved in, and he’d gotten soaked dashing in from his car. He wasn’t much happier about being here than we were.
“No,” Kaz said, shaking his head, as if willing the cobwebs to be cleared from Flack’s single-track mind. “I left rather than make more of an ass of myself. I knew I’d had too much to drink, and that I was verging on self-pity. I thought the cold night air would do me good, and I’d heard that from a good height, you could see the muzzle flashes from the German railway guns, when they bring them out to shell Dover.”
“You were determined to get yourself killed?” Flack suggested.
“Not at all. It may not have been my most splendid idea, but it was something I thought interesting. Better than drinking more vodka. So I climbed the path up the cliff and sat on a bench at the top. I watched the bombers fly over. It was really magnificent, if one could separate spectacle from reality. When the antiaircraft gun behind me opened up, I almost fell into the sea. I watched the two planes go down, and sat for a while longer.”
“How long?” Flack said.
“I have no idea. I was lost in my own thoughts after the firing died down.”
“What were you thinking about, Lieutenant?”
“My homeland. The likelihood that I will never see it again. What to do with my life. To whom I owe my loyalty. The woman I loved and lost. How beautiful the water looked under the starlight. The things one thinks about late at night, in wartime, under the stars, after death has flown overhead.”
“And you say you saw no one until Lieutenant Boyle came along?”
“No, I did not say that, DS Flack. I said I saw the sentries at the gate, when the guns fired. They were far away, though, and I’m sure they didn’t see me. And I saw the body, before I saw Billy.”
“Ah, yes,” Flack said, making a show of consulting his notebook. “You had no idea that the murdered body of Rak Vatutin lay just a few yards from where you sat? You didn’t see it when you looked toward the sentries?”
“No, it was pitch black, except for when the antiaircraft gun fired, and there was a bright explosive light, which lit the area around the gun. The sentries were only shadows.”
“With all that shooting, and everyone looking up, it would have been a simple matter to bash a man’s brains in,” Flack said, his voice mild but his eyes unblinking, riveted on Kaz. “It must have been tempting to come upon a Russian in the dark.”
“If Joseph Stalin had walked by, I would have given it some thought. But he was nowhere to be seen.” The constable at the door laughed, but lost the smile as Flack turned to stare him down.
“Explain the blood on your hands then,” Flack said.
“When I saw the body, I knelt down to get a closer look, to see if he was alive. I rested one hand on the ground and felt for a pulse with the other. I didn’t even notice I’d put my hand on a stone, until Billy pointed it out. Inspector, if I wished to kill anyone, Russian or otherwise, I wouldn’t do it within plain sight of sentries and a gun crew.”
“But you said yourself, they didn’t see you, that it was too dark.”
“I mean, I wouldn’t have taken that chance.”
“Very well,” DS Flack said. “Now, Lieutenant Boyle. We know what time you left the inn, based on witnesses there. Approximately fifteen minutes elapsed between then and when you found Lieutenant Kazimierz leaning over the body.”
“Yes,” I said. Never give an interrogator more words than you need to. Words are his weapon against you.
“You saw no other people in the area?”
“Not in the immediate area. I saw Archie and Topper Chapman at the inn. They were looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“Vatutin. They’d asked me to deliver a message to him.”
“Why would they do that?” Flack said, underlining something in his notebook.
“They’d lost contact with him after the Soviet group moved down here.”
“What was the message?”
“They wanted to know the time and place. Of what, I don’t know. Maybe it had to do with the hijackings. Maybe they killed him.”
“It would be unlike the Chapmans to eliminate a useful conduit for information. And I doubt Vatutin would have been a threat. One word from Archie and his own people would have sent him to Siberia. Still, it may put an end to the hijacking investigation. One less thing to worry about.”
“You don’t think Archie capable of murdering Vatutin?”
“Capable?” Flack said. “Certainly. But I know how he works. He wouldn’t show up outside of his own turf and commit murder. Too obvious, too visible. He’d hire it out. Easy enough to pay someone to watch for Vatutin and do away with him. But not while Archie is within spitting distance.”
“That makes sense,” I had to admit.
“Yes. Now tell me, did you ever witness an argument between Lieutenant Kazimierz and Captain Vatutin?”
“No.”
“Nothing unpleasant at all?”
“No. We met him at the embassy. He gave us food and drink and was a cordial host.”
“On the night of the opera, when Lieutenant Kazimierz threatened Captain Sidorov? Called him a butcher, and said he’d pay for what he’d done?”
“Is that what Inspector Scutt told you?” I knew I should have kept my answer to one word.
“He told me he’d be happy to never see another Russian opera. Now please answer my question.”
“It was a deliberate provocation. Scutt must’ve told you about the opera.”
“So it did happen, as I said?”
“Exactly as you said,” Kaz said, seeing I was reluctant to admit the truth.
“And were you drunk—sorry, tipsy—that night as well?”
“No. Quite sober,” Kaz said. “I did my drinking later.”
“After the film, a Soviet diplomat was beaten within an inch of his life as he walked in the park. Can you tell me anything about that?”
“No. I went back to the Dorchester and stayed there.”
“I can vouch for that,” I said.
“You can say with certainty that he never left? Would you have heard him leave? I understand the rooms you occupy are quite spacious.” Flack sat with his pencil poised over a blank page.
“I didn’t stay up all night watching him,” I said. “What, do you think he went out in the middle of the night on the chance he’d find a Russian taking a midnight stroll?”
“What I think, Lieutenant Boyle, is that all this started with one murdered Russian. Murdered in such a way as to suggest Polish involvement. Then threats against Captain Sidorov, followed by the savage beating of another Russian, and a second murder right here. Eddie Miller, found stabbed outside the Rubens, after you, Lieutenant Boyle, discover he is working for the Russians and tell Lieutenant Kazimierz. To top it all off, Captain Sidorov has now completely disappeared; he’s not in his quarters or any of the pubs. Three, maybe four people come to harm, and Lieutenant Kazimierz has been involved, to one degree or another, with each one. Inspector Scutt tells me the Soviet ambassador is throwing a fit, and so are the Foreign Office, and the home secretary. All that turmoil rolls right downhill to me, courtesy of Inspector Scutt. So rather than take a chance on this continuing any further, I hereby place you under arrest, Lieutenant Kazimierz, on suspicion of murder.”
“You can’t do that,” I said, standing up.
“Sit down,” Flack said, and I did, knowing he had to win this one. “I can and could do much more, being here at the invitation of the War Office. For now, it’s suspicion. Be thankful for that much.”
“Thankful?” Kaz said. “I’m under arrest for a crime I did not commit, and I should be thankful?”
“Yes. Since this crim
e took place in a secure military area, the Official Secrets Act applies. I could put you away for two years without trial if I didn’t like an answer you gave me. So yes, be thankful.”
“Billy,” Kaz said. “You must find Sidorov. If they think I killed him too …” He put his head in his hands and was quiet. Flack nodded to the constable, who led Kaz out of the room.
“I had to do it,” Flack said, after the door closed.
“Do you think he did it? Any of it?”
“He could have. Any one of them. The desire for revenge can be powerful.”
“In the heat of the moment, yes. But four, or even three?”
“Not for me to say. All I know is that those in exalted positions are demanding the case be solved. An arrest is progress, and he’s our only suspect.”
“Yeah, the Poles make great sacrificial lambs. Can I go now?”
Flack sighed. “Of course,” he said, nodding to the constable, who opened the door. His face held the weariness of cops everywhere who have heard it all. The protestations of innocence, the certainty that a friend, brother, lover could not possibly have done it. I felt the impossibility of communicating that to another human being who had not shared the terror, heartbreak, and friendship Kaz and I had. Flack had his job to do, and to him, Kaz was a legitimate suspect, and I could appreciate the logic in putting him on ice for a while. Still, I didn’t feel like cutting him any slack.
“You done with the crime scene?” I asked.
“Yes. I’m waiting for the preliminary medical report now. Take a look, not that there is much to see. That path is well trodden, and between the rains, the sentry, the two of you, the constable, and the victim, there’s not much in the way of discernible footprints.”