Dead Men Living

by Brian Freemantle

  Novikov was not permitted to concentrate entirely upon the postmortems, which he would have liked. During the delay in being able to start them, he—together with Kurshin—was summoned before the inner governing cabinet of Yakutskaya for a meeting that was pointless, because neither could offer any evidence or theory about bodies still too frigidly rock-hard even for clothes to be stripped and examined. Equally without any practical purpose, apart from their physical presence being recorded—which it was by two photographers and a secretary—the five-man group also personally visited the mortuary to examine the ice mummies.

  It was headed by Valentin Ivanovich Polyakov, the chief minister whose detestation of everything Russian stemmed from the exile and premature death of his father, banished not by Stalin but by his secret police chief Lavrenty Beria. Polyakov was the region’s fiercest advocate of distancing itself from Russian domination with the end of communism. Until now Polyakov regarded as his best independence gesture persuading in 1994 the Yakutskaya cabinet now uncomfortably grouped around him to impose a local visa requirement upon any foreigner—particularly Russians—arriving at the town’s airport. Although he still hadn’t worked out how, Polyakov considered the finding of the three bodies—two of them Westerners—an opportunity to make another dramatic gesture of independence.

  By comparison—although paradoxically by the same reasoning—there was hardly any of the outrage Kurshin had feared from Yuri Ryabov for not being alerted before the bodies had been removed from their grave. The local militia commander was well aware of their professional and technical inadequacies and saw protection in not having been involved from the very beginning. So for once local newspaper and radio headlines were secondary to an excuse—if excuse was needed—for any failure in the investigation. If there was praise, he could equally ensure he was the recipient, as the ultimate commander.

  He also didn’t like the way Kurshin looked from having been out there. Ryabov, a vain man constantly aware of his appearance, was as familiar with the warm-weather infestation as anyone else in the region but could rarely remember seeing anyone so badly bitten as Kurshin. The man’s head and neck remained so swollen, even after two days, that he was physically unable to button his collar and his pumpkin-sized face was purpled from the insect attack.

  The government visit was spoiled before it began by their entry—perhaps because of the door slamming—being the moment that the Englishman’s upright arm abruptly fell perfectly by his side, as if he’d suddenly become alive. All the cabinet, apart from Polyakov, were full Yakuts, but it was Polyakov who cried out in terror, pulling back toward the door to which the rest retreated, actually huddled together as if for protection.

  Recovering the quickest, Novikov said, “It’s nothing: what I’m waiting to happen.” He, too, was surprised by the state of Kurshin’s face and was glad, now that the bodies were softening, that he’d suctioned the persistent mosquitoes, midges and gnats from the victims’ mouths, noses, ears and eye-socket surrounds.

  Despite Novikov’s assurance, the cabinet remained tightly just inside the door. As if the medical judgment were his, Polyakov declared, “It will still be some time before we can discover anything about them. I want to know as much as possible, before contacting Moscow.”

  There were murmurs and shuffles of agreement from men anxious to get out of the room. Ryabov, eager to establish a working procedure, said, “It’ll be their case, though. Has to be.”

  “We don’t know what anything has to be, until we find out what happened, whenever it happened,” disputed Polyakov. Officiously, making it a government order, he said, “We wait. I’ll decide if and when Moscow is informed. And I’ll do it personally.”

  Asshole, thought Ryabov. He said, “I’ve checked with wartime photographs. They’re definitely English and American uniforms. Officers, too.”

  “What about the woman?” asked someone unseen, from the cabinet group.

  “Civilian clothes,” said Ryabov, unnecessarily, because the still fully clothed woman was lying on a trolley next to the momentarily unneeded freezer drawers. “But they look Russian to me. So does she. Slavic.”

  “This is an opportunity to bring world attention to what Stalin and the bastards who followed him did to their own people,” decided Polyakov, an idea hardening in his mind. “We’re going to use this for all it’s worth. Embarrass Moscow. They’re still pillaging our country, for what’s in the ground.”

  “Let’s hope it was Moscow who had them killed all those years ago,” said Kurshin, emboldened by the vodka he’d drunk before the visit.

  Novikov listened uncomfortably, unsure after all if the murders would be the chance for which he’d hoped. The more he’d thought about it, the more determined he’d become to make it so, but he couldn’t achieve it if the intention was positive obstruction and embarrassment. He wanted friends, not enemies.

  Novikov began the autopsies later that evening, starting with the Englishman because the body’s outstretched arm had made it more convenient to put upon the examination table when they’d first arrived. Again—as he did subsequently with the American and the woman—he exhausted an entire roll of film photographing the body from every conceivable angle, reloading in readiness to record the dissection before physically touching the body. From both his father’s tuition and the stolen guidance manuals, he knew it would have been professionally acceptable to cut the uniform away, but he had heard of incredible advances in forensic science—DNA, for instance, which he only vaguely understood—and used the empty threat of dismissal to force the two mortuary attendants, his only assistants, to help him lift and maneuver all three bodies to strip the clothes away intact.

  Having done that, he left the naked body on the slab to go through each item of clothing, stopping painstakingly to itemize by hand each article he found. From the Englishman, in total, there was twenty British sterling, in notes and ten coins; 100 German war-script marks and $43, both currencies all in notes; a gold watch with a worn leather strap, the hands stopped at 12:43; a gold cigarette case containing six American Camel cigarettes and engraved with an inscription in Roman lettering that Novikov could not understand; a cigarette lighter, uninscribed; four keys, one designated by a twist of red cotton around its shank; a British-made Parker fountain pen, the ink inside still frozen; and a tie pin in the shape of a bayonet. The pin was still in a plain, army-issue tie, but the tie itself was snapped, close to the neck.

  The clothes consisted of brown leather shoes, showing little sign of wear; army-issue cotton socks; cotton singlet vest with half-thigh-length underpants; starch-collared khaki shirt, the top four buttons undone, with two missing but already found lodged at the waist during the undressing; and a well-tailored khaki officer’s uniform, around the jacket of which there was what Novikov described in his notes as a leather harness, a belt encircling the waist of the jacket, which continued to midthigh, with another leather strap looped over the man’s right shoulder to be joined, front and back, to the waist belt at the left. There was brass shoulder insignia, which Novikov noted, although he was not able to identify the denoted rank. All the clothes were so perfectly preserved that Novikov thought that with cleaning—the brass buttons and leather polished—everything would have been wearable again.

  The body was that of a blond-haired, well-nourished male Caucasian, approximately thirty years old. From its condition the man could have died that day. Novikov concentrated upon the obvious cause of death. At least half the cranial casing had been lost, a considerable amount driven into the brain pulp. It was easier than Novikov expected to extract the single bullet, which had entered in a downward trajectory and lodged at the Atlas vertebra at the spinal tip. The pathologist had no forensic ballistic knowledge or experience, but the bullet looked quite large and appeared reasonably intact. There were minor facial abrasions, dark with after-death lividity, and there was a lividity burn around at the rear of the neck. Apart from that there was no body wound. The wrists and ankles were bruised,
predeath, indicating the man had been tightly bound.

  He sawed into the sternum, continuing the chest opening to the man’s pelvis, and braced the rib cage apart. Novikov extensively photographed the exposed organs before examining each intently. None looked enlarged or diseased. Finally, still working downward, he extracted and weighed the heart, aorta, both lungs, the thymus, stomach, liver, gallbladder, pancreas, spleen, both kidneys, both adrenaline glands, bladder, prostate and urethra. Having done that, he returned to the skull and removed, weighed and preserved what remained of the cerebrum and cerebellum, inserting a pencil to show the trajectory of the wound on the photographs.

  Only when he finished did Novikov remember the manual guidance about stomach contents and remove enough to discover it contained a largely undigested meal: even without using his microscope, the mirror of which was tarnished, Novikov identified meat and what looked like cheese. He had actually to consult the manual to learn that stomach evidence should not be preserved in formaldehyde. He immersed everything else, carefully labeling each jar as he did so. Without a name, he used the believed nationality. Again following the manual, he took fingernail scrapings, which just looked like dirt but which he fixed onto a microscope slide.

  It was at that moment he remembered he hadn’t weighed the body intact, which he should have done. He weighed it anyway, adding the minimal additions of the now-removed organs. After doing that, he took height and body measurements, something else he should have done at the outset. An inevitable second, more accurate autopsy, with better equipment, would probably pick up his error.

  He didn’t make it on either of the other two bodies. He chose that of the believed American next. The uniform was similar to the first, without the leather harness. Again it was all army-issue, cotton socks, boxer shorts underwear and singlet. The tie was completely missing and the three top buttons of the shirt unfastened. The tunic jacket again had shoulder ranking designation, which Novikov noted.

  There was a silver-cased, khaki-strapped wristwatch which Novikov took to be army-issue, stopped at 1:20, and a silver ring surmounted by a large red stone on the small finger of his left hand. The pocket of the uniform contained $75 in notes and twenty-five cents in coin and 100 war-script D-marks; five keys in a flat leather case, none with any identification; a small, ivory-handled penknife; a pocket magnifying glass with what appeared to be a matching set of tweezers; a Zippo lighter but no cigarettes or cigarette case; a silver propelling pencil; and a packet of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, with two sticks missing.

  The body was again that of a well-nourished male Caucasian, age about thirty-five. The fatal wound was once more to the back of the head but more to its right than that of the first victim. Less cranial bone had been shattered. It was again comparatively easy to recover the bullet, the trajectory of which had taken it from the right to the left of the man’s skull and been slightly more damaged by impact against the rear teeth to the left of the jaw. There was a lividity burn almost completely around the neck. Novikov made the same gullet-to-crotch opening, broke open the rib cage and this time used the man’s own magnifying glass to examine each of the organs, none of which showed any indication of damage or disease. He patiently went through the same weighing and preserving process, once more leaving the brain until last. Again, for the photographs, he marked the trajectory with a pencil. There was undigested vegetable matter as well as meat among the stomach contents. There didn’t seem to be debris beneath the man’s fingernails, but Novikov made scrape slides. He continued using the supposed nationality to identify his specimen jars.

  The dead woman’s clothing—a dark blue three-quarter-length jacket and skirt—resembled a uniform, although there was no indication of any service or rank. There were no pockets in the jacket but two in the skirt. In that on the left side there was a single key. In the right a cellophaned pack of Camels, from which two were missing. The remainder were crushed and broken. Her watch, which had stopped at 12:05, was tin-cased, the strap imitation leather.

  The woman’s shoes were down at heel, the mock leather uppers scuffed. There were no stockings. Her underpants were string-tied, with half–thigh legs. She wore only a bra beneath a long-sleeved white shirt, which was marked with several days’ wear at the cuffs and collar. As with the two men, some of the front shirt buttons were open—three, in her case. Around her neck, which was unmarked, a thin chain held a bare silver cross.

  Although heavily blood-matted now, her hair had been black and would have been long, practically to her shoulders. Her mouth had frozen into a grimace of agony, and although that had relaxed, the features were still distorted, destroying what once would have been an attractive, even beautiful, high-cheekboned face. Her heavy-breasted body would have been exciting, too. The pelvis was marked with the striae gravidarum of childbirth as well as an appendectomy scar. The shattering wound was more to the left side of the skull and only when Novikov inserted a probe to trace the entry line and locate the bullet did he properly realize that what he’d thought to be leaked blood from the head entry was in fact congealed around an exit wound in her throat, just above the larynx. And that the bullet had not lodged in her body. As he was examining the exit wound—again with the American’s magnifying glass—he isolated small black specks he couldn’t immediately identify, until separately placing them under the closer and more direct arc light on his desk. They were long-dead mosquitoes and gnats. He at once returned to the two men whose postmortems he had completed, making a scalpel incision in each throat. Both windpipes contained insect debris.

  The chest, stomach and pelvic opening had virtually become routine. He went almost automatically through the process of examining, extracting, weighing and preserving the organs, all of which appeared perfectly normal. Additionally, with the woman, he extracted the ovaries. They, as well as the spleen, pancreas and remains of the brain, had to go into vegetable pickle jars. Only when he was transferring the scant debris from beneath her very short and in places bitten nails did Novikov remember he had not estimated an age. It was difficult, because of the distortion he now knew to have been caused by the exiting bullet, but he guessed between thirty and thirty-five.

  So intently had Novikov worked that only when he looked, virtually for the first time, toward his supposed laboratory and saw daylight through the skewed window did he become aware he had worked completely through the night. His watch showed six-thirty. Abruptly he was engulfed in a physically aching tiredness he doubted would bring any sleep, so much was there to try to understand.

  He stored all three bodies, squinting at the temperature gauges outside each cabinet to ensure the refrigeration was working, shuffled across to his office and slumped into a chair that had lost most of its seat stuffing. He couldn’t immediately decide whether it was good or bad. Mixed, maybe. For him, personally, more good than bad. Certainly enough to make what he hoped would be a sufficiently impressive presentation.

  It took a long time for Aleksandr Kurshin to answer his telephone, and when he did his voice was still thick from vodka and it took several more minutes for the homicide detective to recognize to whom and about what he was talking.

  “Who are they?” Kurshin demanded finally, his voice still slurred.

  “That’s the point,” said Novikov. “Everything and anything that might have identified them has been taken. We don’t know who they are. And there’s no way we’re ever going to find out.”

  Yakutsk is six hours ahead of Moscow time, so it was still only midday when the telephone exchanges from the far side of Siberia percolated down through the Foreign Ministry to the interior minister’s secretariat and eventually to Natalia. She made only brief interjections and afterward sat without moving, even though the demand for her to attend was immediate. This could be the problem—the potential disaster—she’d prayed would never arise.

  “I’m going to be late,” she told Charlie, who answered the telephone on the first ring.

  “What time?” He’d thought it might have
been London, although telephones were normally reserved for emergencies. The sum total of his activity that day and too many before it had been to create a delta-winged paper plane that flew completely across his office, through the open door and almost reached the far wall of the outside corridor. There’d been four improvements from that morning’s prototype: it all had to do with the tilt of the wings.

  “I don’t know. Can you pick Sasha up from the creche?”

  “Sure. Something big?”

  “I’ll call when I have some idea of a time,” refused Natalia, ignoring the question.

  “I love you,” he said, but Natalia had already replaced the telephone.

  When it rang again, within minutes, he snatched it up, smiling, expecting it to be Natalia again. But it wasn’t.

  5

  Natalia was not late, but everyone else was already there. Viktor Romanovich Viskov even had his jacket off and collar unbuttoned, and she felt a fresh twitch of anxiety at the thought that the deputy interior minister trying to depose her might have already started an undermining attack in her absence. The room had gone ominously, expectantly quiet at her entry.

  Only Dmitri Nikulin gave any formal greeting. Viskov, a squat, stone-faced and professional long-term survivor in the oxygen-starved near-summit of Russian government, remained expressionless. Which Natalia expected. She supposed she should also have expected only the curt, grave-faced nod from Mikhail Suslov, confronted as the man appeared to be, after only four months as deputy foreign minister, with an international situation of potentially enormous proportion.

  For herself Natalia accepted that the international perception of Russia was of an out-of-legal-control country dominated by organized crime, which too much of it was, and that of anyone in the room she could be made to appear the person most closely connected to that failure and to that embarrassment.