There was a stenographer at a side table and Lestov carefully took the man through what, at the first telling, was virtually a repetition of his newspaper account. Belous also produced the originals of his now-much-copied souvenir photographs, along with Raisa Belous’s award citation.
“That’s all I can tell you,” concluded the man.
“Let’s see,” said Lestov.
The homicide colonel’s questioning was thorough although unimaginative and Charlie decided the man would make an excellent support deputy for Natalia; the lateral thinking might come with time and encouragement. Belous was discomfited conceding that his mother’s personal belongings had been disposed of after her death—refusing to use the word sold when Lestov talked of jewelry and the hero medal itself—and insisted he didn’t know what his grandparents might have done with any letters or documents apart from the medal certificate. Certainly nothing had survived. Belous couldn’t remember any discussion, ever, about his maternal grandparents and had always assumed they’d died before he was born.
“Where did your father’s parents tell you she was buried?” demanded Lestov.
“They didn’t. I mean, they didn’t know. They said there’d just been a notification that she’d been killed.”
“Where?” persisted the Russian detective.
“I don’t know that, either. They never said.”
Charlie deferred to Miriam when Lestov invited them to join the questioning, as always wanting the benefit of everyone else’s input before making his own. And was disappointed, even wondering if Miriam was using the same ploy to hold back for his contribution before making hers.
Charlie took his time, actually repeating some of Lestov’s questions hopefully to lessen the slightest edge of resistance he detected in Belous’s response to the American.
“Your grandparents were extremely proud of your mother?” he asked, edging toward his own agenda.
“Rightfully so,” said Belous. He had wispy, receding hair and the pallor of a permanent indoor worker.
“Indeed,” agreed Charlie, wondering at the defensiveness. “But they were your father’s parents?”
Belous frowned. So did Lestov. Questioningly Belous said, “Yes?”
“Weren’t they proud of a son who died in one of the most heroic episodes of the Great Patriotic War?”
“Of course they were!” replied Belous, indignantly.
“None of your photographs show him with your mother.”
“The newspaper appeal was for information about her, not him.”
“So you do have photographs of them together?”
“Not now.”
“What happened to them?”
“I don’t know. My grandparents showed me some, when they were telling me about my parents. I don’t know what happened to them after my grandparents died.”
“What were they photographs of?” demanded Miriam.
“Their wedding.”
“When was that?”
“June 1941.”
“How many were there?” Charlie bustled in. He didn’t believe parents would dispose of photographs of their son but keep those of their daughter-in-law.
“Four, I think.”
“Doing what?”
The man shrugged. “They were wearing the same clothes in each, so I guess they were all taken at the same time. There was one I remember showing them relaxing; nothing in the background. It was dated June 1940. The other two showed the Catherine Palace behind them, so it had to be Tsarskoe Selo, where they worked.”
“They worked?” seized Charlie. “You hadn’t told us that. What did your father do?”
Belous flushed. “He was the senior restorer at the palace. That’s how they met, when my mother joined the curator’s staff.” The man shifted uncomfortably.
Charlie’s feet gave a psychosomatic twinge, a usual body and mind indicator that he was going in the right direction, even if he didn’t know what the destination might be. Lestov and Miriam sat unmoving, waiting, as if they expected to learn something, too. Cautiously Charlie said, “I think we might have gone too quickly over what you told the Moscow News. And us, earlier. I’d like to make sure I’ve got everything right. Your mother and father worked together at Tsarskoe Selo until the German invasion in 1941. Your mother escaped, rescuing a substantial amount of the Catherine Palace treasures, and your father stayed behind and died just before the siege lifted, in 1943 … ?”
“No,” said Belous, shifting again. “The paper got that wrong; made it a better story, I suppose. My father was drafted into the army long before the invasion. He left St. Petersburg—or Leningrad, as it then was—almost immediately after he and my mother married. According to my grandparents, they got married because he was being moved.”
“So where did your father die?” came in Miriam, again.
“They were never quite sure. My mother never showed them the official notice. They thought it was somewhere near the Polish border, Lvov in the Ukraine or on the other side, near Lublin.”
“You told us your grandparents virtually brought you up by themselves, after your mother came to Moscow?” probed Charlie, hoping Miriam wouldn’t interrupt again too quickly.
“I believe so. I can’t remember my mother.”
“Not ever having been with you?”
“No.”
“What age would you have been when they told you about her and your father?”
“I’m not sure. Seven, eight, nine—something around that age.”
“Is that when you saw the photographs of your mother and father together?”
“That would have been the first time, I suppose, yes.”
Charlie was intrigued at the man’s apparent selective memory. This was turning out to be a far different encounter than he’d imagined. “They were proud of her? Talked about her a lot?”
“Yes.” Belous relaxed slightly.
“When they told you about her for the first time, did they tell you she was away a lot?” Charlie was aware of the other man relaxing further. So what had made him tense?
“She had an important job, they said.”
“Doing what?” demanded Lestov.
“They never told me.”
“You don’t have any photographs of your mother in any sort of uniform?” Belous was lying, Charlie knew. To have told her bereaved son what his mother had done would have been the first thing proud grandparents would have done.
“No.”
“What about your father? Any photographs of him in his army uniform?”
Belous hesitated. “It looked like a uniform in the pictures in Tsarskoe Selo. I’m not sure.”
He was, Charlie decided. “Weren’t you ever told what army group or unit he was in?”
Belous shrugged. “He was killed at a battlefront. He must have been a soldier, mustn’t he?”
No, thought Charlie, who from his previous days’ study and the emerging attitude of Fyodor Belous believed he had a good idea of the wartime employment of both the man’s parents. The outside bits of the jigsaw were beginning to fit, but the center of the picture remained blank. He was curious if Miriam and Lestov thought the same. “You were seventeen when your grandparents died, within a month of each other?” said Charlie, picking up on what had been established in Lestov’s earlier questioning.
“Yes,” said the man.
“And you lived all that time in an apartment at Ulitza Kirova?”
“Yes.”
“They’re impressive apartments. Big,” said Charlie, who’d specifically gone there on his way to the ministry. “Your grandfather must have been an influential man: a Party worker like yourself, perhaps?”
Belous stared back warily, unspeaking for several moments. “It was allocated to my mother as a reward for what she did in Leningrad. They were allowed to keep it, after she died and was honored. Why is this important?”
“We’re trying to discover how and why your mother was murdered,” reminded Charlie. “Everything’s i
mportant. Tell us about things you remember in the apartment. Were there pictures, prints, on the walls. Ornaments around the place?”
“I don’t understand that question!” protested the man.
“Your mother worked in the palace of Catherine the Great: enjoyed things of rare beauty,” said Charlie, whose reading had extended to studying the illustrated masterpiece catalogue. “I would have expected her to try to decorate such a special apartment with things of special beauty.”
“You are suggesting my mother stole things!”
“Not at all,” lied Charlie. “Anything from the Catherine Palace would have been too well known, too well documented, for anyone to have kept them in Russia. Your mother would not have been honored as she was if there had been the slightest doubt about her honesty.”
Belous regarded him doubtfully. “There were some pictures, I suppose. A few ornaments. Nothing I remember particularly.”
Back to the selective memory, Charlie recognized. “Do you still have any of them?”
“No,” said the man, too quickly.
“They were sold?” demanded Charlie, directly.
“I don’t know.”
“If they weren’t sold, you’d still have them, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t remember. They just weren’t there, after my grandfather died.”
“Not even the medal, about which they were particularly proud?”
“No.”
Charlie leaned forward, picking up the citation, caught by a sudden thought, hoping but not expecting to find what he did. “Your mother got to Moscow with everything she saved from the palace in late 1941?”
“Yes,” said the son, swallowing.
“And was made a hero of the Soviet Union for doing it.”
“That’s what the citation says.”
“No, it doesn’t,” corrected Charlie. “It’s for ‘Special Services to the Soviet Union.’ And is dated December 1944. That would have been almost four years after she saved what she did from the palace, wouldn’t it?”
“If those are the dates,” conceded the man. “Things take a long time to get done in a bureaucracy. Particularly in wartime.”
There would have been treasures, Charlie knew. Maybe from the Catherine Palace or from what—and where—Raisa did for the remainder of the war, after 1941: maybe even small works of other people’s and other countries’ art. How much and how many would have been hoarded by Raisa Belous and gradually disposed of by this man over the years, for a few rubles—kopeks, maybe? Even a prized medal, which Charlie now doubted she’d gotten for what she’d done at Leningrad but for a far greater contribution afterward.
Belous was looking fixedly at him, apprehensively. The man hadn’t gone to an English-language newspaper to honor his mother. He would have demanded to be paid. Probably had been. And by some of the foreign correspondents he’d spoken to, as well. There wasn’t anything to be gained, challenging the man. Charlie recognized he’d gotten all he wanted. It had, in fact, been a far more productive afternoon than he’d expected. He hoped Lestov had, as well. It was as much for the Russian’s benefit—and ultimately Natalia’s —as it was for him. His curiosity about Miriam could wait. Charlie said, “Thank you. It’s been very helpful.”
Belous blinked, surprised. “You think you can find who killed my mother from what I’ve told you?”
Belous would have been prompted by the Moscow News. Charlie guessed; maybe by some of the Western correspondents, too. “Not by itself. But it’s added a lot to what we already know.”
“What was she doing at Yakutsk, with the officers?”
“That’s one of the things we don’t yet know,” said Charlie. But I’m getting closer by the day, he thought.
Natalia was for once already at Lesnaya when Charlie got home. Sasha was bathed and settled in bed and his Islay and glass were set out in readiness.
Natalia said, “We’ve got Gulag 98. As well as a lot of other obvious possibilities.”
Charlie sipped his whiskey, knowing she hadn’t finished, enjoying her excitement.
“Guess who was sent there, as well as the fifteen Germans?” she demanded.
“Who?” asked Charlie, dutifully.
“Larisa Yaklovich Krotkov. Who was on the curators’ staff at Tsarskoe Selo. The complete staff list still exists. I ran a comparison with the names at Gulag 98. And there she was!”
Charlie stopped drinking. “What was she jailed for?”
“Assisting the enemy.”
“Any details?” Coincidence, or another piece of the jigsaw?
“Not so far.”
“We can use it,” insisted Charlie. “You can use it.”
“How?”
“You’ve sent the Gulag 98 file on to Travin?”
She nodded. “In this afternoon’s consignment. But how can Lestov be shown to discover it when he’s not examining the camp material?”
Until this moment it had been a problem Charlie hadn’t known how to overcome, but now he did. “Did Lestov pick up on the interview with Fyodor Belous?”
“You made it clear enough. He’s having Belous’s place raided tonight, to see if there’s anything the man hasn’t already sold. And Raisa was Trophy Brigade. So was her husband, from the very beginning.”
“One thing at a time,” said Charlie. “Have Lestov do what you’ve already done, run a check on all the curator staff at Tsarskoe Selo, which he could logically do after today’s interview. It’ll throw up Larisa Krotkov’s imprisonment. And where she served it.”
“Yes,” agreed Natalia, distantly. “That’ll do it, won’t it?”
“It’s them or you,” urged Charlie, knowing her difficulty. “Them or us.”
“I know.”
“Arrange a personal meeting with Nikulin, include Lestov, for him to get the credit,” advised Charlie. “But you make the direct accusation, against Viskov and Travin.”
“I know that, too,” said Natalia. “And I’m as frightened as hell.”
There wasn’t the hiss-voiced fury of Kenton Peters’s first telephone calls, a loss of control Boyce had never before known. Now the anger was in the frustrated determination to find out how Henry Packer had been exposed.
“Only you and I knew he was still in Moscow. And neither of us made the calls,” said Boyce. It was Cartright who’d discovered the anonymous contacts. “And there wasn’t any way Charlie Muffin could avoid recognizing him, after the amount of television coverage.”
“Still damned impudent of Dean to put what he did in the exchanges.”
“It would have been wrong for me to intervene.”
“I quite understand,” said Peters. “I don’t know or understand how, but the information must have come from a Russian source.”
“From which it follows that Moscow has more than we suspected or guessed about Raisa Belous and Yakutsk,” suggested Boyce.
“I’ll not give up,” insisted Peters. “I’ll go on until I do find out.”
“We both will. But shouldn’t we move on a little?”
“I don’t like Norrington being identified,” said Kenton Peters, taking the suggestion.
“I’m not letting it be made public,” assured Boyce.
“I’m surprised the Russians allowed the photograph to be published, to let Raisa Belous be identified,” continued Peters. “I’ve always said they’re the uncertainty, didn’t I? This and Packer confirm it.”
“You didn’t know your president was going to make his hero announcement until it was too late,” gently reminded Boyce.
“What the president did will never occur again,” said Peters. “He knows just how annoyed I am about that. I’ve told him enough to understand what the effect could be. He’s terrified.”
“I was merely pointing out that oversights can happen. And we can hardly remind Moscow, can we? We’re not supposed to know.”
Unable to move his mind for long from what came close to being the first embarrassment of his career, Kenton Peters said, “The
Agency lost a good man in Packer. He’s useless now that he’s been so publicly identified.”
Boyce said, “We’ll have to put on hold any move against Muffin for the time being. Nothing too close.”
“I’ve asked for someone else to be selected,” disclosed Peters. “Muffin’s an uncertainty and you know I don’t like uncertainties.”
22
Again it was the absence of anything positive or worthwhile that confirmed for Charlie a suspicion he didn’t need proved any further. It wasn’t even the fault—or obstruction—of the other three with whom he’d yet again gathered in the military attaché’s office. They were as much puppets as he was intended—chosen—to be. The difference was they didn’t know how their strings were being pulled. Charlie did and was thoroughly pissed off at the realization. With his feet, dancing was a dirty word anyway; it was equally forbidden when he was the puppet.
“My people can’t trace anything on a Lieutenant Simon Norrington, either by name or by the army serial number his family gave,” apologized Gallaway. “Nor any cross-reference to a Raisa Belous. Whatever existed must have been destroyed.”
“What about an art squad?” persisted Charlie, as a test, already knowing that one existed.
“I only filed that request yesterday,” said the attaché. “I’m still waiting.”
“So am I,” said Cartright. “So far I haven’t even had an acknowledgment. As far as I know, SIS didn’t have an interest.”
From that morning’s conversation with London, Charlie knew Sir Rupert Dean was also still waiting for a reply to his inquiry, made even earlier. The director-general hadn’t argued with Charlie’s open accusation that they were being played with by every other interested government ministry and department. Instead he’d told Charlie he wanted him back in London by the end of the week.
“It’s put a lot of extra pressure on me,” complained Raymond McDowell. “The biggest continuing diplomatic dispute between Germany and Russia is stolen or disputed wartime art, even after all these years. I’ve averaged four cables a day from London since Raisa Belous was identified. So’s the ambassador.”
Dead Men Living Page 23