Dead Men Living

by Brian Freemantle

  Lestov followed dutifully, happy for Miriam to consider herself the leader. He leaned casually against the food bar dividing the kitchen in two, watching her and anticipating the prospect of that familiar body under the concealingly loose caftan. If only he fully understood that morning’s White House meeting, he’d be a very happy and contented man. “I’m not sure I shouldn’t tell Charlie. He seems to have been pretty open with us … you, at least, which amounts to the same thing.”

  “Only as much as it suits him,” objected Miriam.

  And you, thought Lestov, curious how much there was she hadn’t told him. “You think there are things he’s kept back?”

  “I’m sure of it.” She’d expected something from the OSS archives by now. She hoped the bastards in Washington weren’t working the well-known need-to-know shell game to sideline her. She still didn’t fully understand the business with Henry Packer. Charlie insisted he didn’t understand it, either, although there was the suggestion of a separate CIA operation, which the Agency people at the embassy denied, which of course they would if it had or if it hadn’t been.

  “He might offer something back.” Was she sleeping with Charlie Muffin, as well?

  “Let’s wait, see what you get from following up the Larisa Krotkov lead,” suggested Miriam. “Always best to negotiate from a position of strength.”

  Miriam lived outside the embassy compound and from the kitchen of the apartment there was, paradoxically, a superb nighttime view of Moscow’s Catherine Palace. Nodding through the window, Lestov said, “I had that checked, hoping someone there might have known Raisa Belous or Larisa Krotkov.” He shook his head. “No one did, although some of the stuff rescued from St. Petersburg was stored there until the end of the war.”

  “And there was definitely nothing in Fyodor Belous’s apartment when you went there?” pressed Miriam.

  “Not that we found. I think he would have been expecting us, hidden things away. I might wait awhile and jump him again.”

  Lestov topped up her glass, leaning immediately forward to kiss her, and Miriam kissed him back, enjoying it, like she enjoyed the man himself. As well as being sure Charlie was still keeping something to himself—despite chest-clutching denials—she was equally sure she was ahead of everyone, largely as a result of sharing her favorite hobby with this militia colonel. Who was better than a lot in the past with whom it had been necessary to sleep in the call of duty and Miriam Jane Bell’s personal advancement. Vadim Lestov hadn’t so far failed to make the chimes ring in bed and was more interesting than most on the embassy fuck circuit, including Richard Cartright, who hadn’t offered anything worthwhile outside the sheets, either. “What, objectively, are the chances of finding Larisa Krotkov’s trial records?”

  Lestov shrugged, with his back to her. “Doubtful.”

  “You honestly think there might be something in them to account for Raisa being in Yakutsk?” questioned Miriam, going back to a suggestion Lestov had offered when he’d told her of the Gulag 98 discovery.

  “Anything else would be too much of a coincidence, wouldn’t it?” He was disappointed that the totally logical speculation hadn’t encouraged a more forthcoming response from her: it was always questions, never answers.

  “So where do the two lieutenants come in?” Miriam hadn’t given Lestov the Englishman’s name. Or told him of the OSS possibility. She served the steak and handed Lestov the Napa Valley chardonnay to open.

  “If I knew that, it would be the end of the mystery,” exaggerated Lestov. He really had hoped to get more—or the hint of more—from her. He hesitated a little longer from making the commitment that had occurred to him on the way to Miriam’s apartment. He hadn’t wanted to disclose the German names, but he’d exhausted all possible Russian sources. But the FBI would have access to more. So the sacrifice was necessary. He said, “Fifteen Germans were sent to Gulag 98 in April 1945.”

  She looked fixedly at him across the table. “You got the names?”

  “For yours and my information only.”

  “Absolutely,” agreed Miriam, at once. All this and a good fuck, too.

  “Vitali Maksimovich Novikov,” identified Charlie. “He’s got a wife and two boys.” Natalia had relaxed during dinner, laughing more readily and genuinely than Charlie could remember for a long time. The last few weeks had been a greater strain upon her than he’d fully realized.

  “The Yakutsk doctor?” she remembered, at once.

  “He claims to have more. The exchange is to get him and his family out.”

  “You promised him?”

  “I said I’d do what I could. Without him I wouldn’t have known about Gulag 98, which we used to destroy Viskov and Travin. It was one of the camps Novikov’s father looked after. Was originally sentenced to. I’ve got to know what it is he’s got.”

  “We both have,” she agreed.

  Charlie’s telephone call to Vitali Novikov was the last of several he made from his embassy office the next morning before leaving for the airport. Miriam Bell was not among them.

  Novikov said, “I was beginning to think I wouldn’t hear from you again.”

  “Just make the application. It’s being supported through the embassy,” lied Charlie. “Don’t mention that, of course.”

  “How can I thank you?”

  “You know,” reminded Charlie.

  24

  Charlie gazed through the window as the plane banked for landing, feeling the usual surge of nostalgia for a city in which he’d worked so often that Berlin had once seemed more like home than London. He couldn’t pick out the odd memorial scraps of the Wall, but didn’t anyway need markers for where, like a bloated aorta along which so much real blood had run, it had gone through the heart of the city. He didn’t see the Commonwealth war cemetery, either. He didn’t bother trying to locate from the air the other building he was anxious to get to, knowing very well where it was.

  What embarrassment—what need—could there be after all these years for not one but two countries to be so determined to cover it up, as America and England appeared to be? Something both had combined upon, clearly. Big, then. Mammoth, even. All securely hidden for fifty-four years, never ever intended to be revealed, as the bodies had never been intended to be discovered. A shared secret of one agency? Or several, each in some way involved in some small part? Would the telephone calls he’d made and the ambiguous conversations he’d initiated in the last few days, spreading the inquiry too wide, he hoped, for anyone to see a direction, be sufficient? Or would whoever the puppet masters were have been too clever, getting there ahead of him—years ahead of him? He was pinning a lot of hope on bureaucracy getting in its own way, which in his experience it nearly always did. And on the fact that he’d worked in Berlin so often and knew so well just how many institutions had been created there in the immediate post and Cold War years. He hoped most of all that his memory and knowledge were better than any Whitehall or Washington chair-bound keeper of secrets. And Kenton Peters had another secret now, not one to keep but to discover. Charlie’s whereabouts. Persuading Sir Rupert Dean not to disclose his movements was as personally self-protective as it was to guard the department. More so. The American mistake—Peters’s arrogance—had been letting him know what Henry Packer looked like, not knowing how well tuned Charlie’s antenna was. It was going to be much harder to recognize Packer’s replacement if one was sent.

  Charlie had made his reservation at the Bristol Kempinski, the hotel in which he always stayed, without asking the current prices, not thinking until he was checking in of the distress it would cause Gerald Williams to authorize these expenses as well as maintaining the rent on the Lesnaya apartment. Letting the thought drift, Charlie acknowledged it had been several weeks since any expenditure inquisition from the zealously attentive financial controller. He’d almost been disappointed that the cost of his beekeeper’s hat hadn’t been queried. Perhaps, mulled Charlie, the man had given up. Then again, perhaps he hadn’t.

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nbsp; Natalia had insisted on packing for him, everything laid out in his case in meticulous comparison to his customary haphazard effort, and when he lifted out the spare jacket Charlie knew why. There were two notes, with another framed photograph of Natalia and Sasha. Natalia’s note said simply, Hurry Home. Sasha’s was much longer, the laboriously printed English attempt interspersed with cyrillic letters, each line dipping dramatically at its end, literally falling away. It said, I love you and miss you and I am sorry about that silly word. Charlie liked best that it was addressed to Daddy.

  He was at the room bureau, writing an immediate reply on a hotel postcard, when the telephone jarred, startling him by its nearness. With a befitting, machine-gun delivery, the voice said, “Jackson here. Thought we should meet, as you suggested. Downstairs when you’re ready.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Jackson’s age—at least half that of Gallaway, Charlie guessed—marked him at once as the complete antithesis of the ineffectual Moscow attaché, a fast-track career professional for whom the promotional escalator would never rise fast enough. He came up from the barstool like a spring, the flick of fair hair that would give him problems on parade days falling over his left eye. He managed to push it back and shake hands at the same time. The handshake was firm but not arm wrestling. Orange juice, Charlie noted, automatically ordering Islay malt, knowing the hotel stocked it, which was another reason for staying there.

  “A table’s probably better,” Charlie suggested, moving away from the bar at which there were only two other people anyway, and they at its far end.

  “Of course, sir.”

  “You want me to call you lieutenant colonel?”

  The man frowned, confused. “No.”

  “Then it’s Charlie.”

  The frown became a grin. “Not sure what the form is with you chaps … .” He looked down at himself. “Thought mufti was best.” The trouser crease of Jackson’s muted checked suit would have been dangerous to the touch and the man risked severing an artery moving his head too quickly against the stiff collar. The burnished brogues reflected sufficient light to send SOS signals.

  “Fine,” said Charlie, aware for the first time that Natalia must have pressed his trousers, too. It still amounted to a before-and-after comparison. “Sorry to barge in like this at the last moment.”

  “Glad to have you aboard. Saw the television from Siberia. Can’t have been much fun.”

  There’d been a reference from the attaché to seeing him on television when they’d spoken from Moscow. Charlie hoped that had been sufficient official identification, without the man feeling it necessary to check with the Defense Ministry in London. If he had—and there’d been objections—Jackson would hardly have kept the suggested meeting or been so amenable. Charlie said, “It was pretty rough.”

  “Any idea yet what happened to the poor bastards?”

  Open sesame! thought Charlie. “Not a complete picture. What guidance have you got from London?”

  “None,” said the other man, apologetically. “Just told to attend, as official military observer.”

  Bugger it, thought Charlie. “What’s the setup?”

  “Haven’t arranged anything. Waited for you. Got a car outside. Thought you might like to look around.”

  “What about the exhumation?”

  “There’s a security blackout on it, of course. Ministry insistence. Fortunately the Commonwealth cemetery at Charlottenburg is under military jurisdiction. Makes it easy. The section we want has already been sealed off. The grave itself has been screened. The workmen haven’t been told whose grave it is they’re opening. Apart from them, there’ll just be us, the embassy padre, a medical examiner and someone from the Berlin coroner’s office. There might be someone from the War Graves Commission; they’re not sure yet what to do about the grave marker, now they know it’s not Simon Norrington … .” He paused. “You know what you’re looking for?”

  “Not yet,” said Charlie. Hopefully he added, “Anything else London had you do? Don’t want any confusion between the briefings.”

  “Little risk of that,” assured Jackson, still apologetic. He’d been told the Gieves and Hawkes customer archive had provided the address of the family seat in Hampshire and Sir Matthew Norrington had produced the War Office’s 1945 notification of his brother’s death and burial in Berlin; having visited it, Sir Matthew had even known the plot number. He had, it seemed, considered it fitting his brother remain in a soldier’s grave rather than be reinterred in the family vault in England.

  “Located the grave myself from the plot number,” said Jackson. “Usual inscription: rank, name, unit, date of death.”

  “Everything based on what the family supplied?” queried Charlie, disappointed. “What about from the ministry itself?”

  “Family told the ministry, the ministry told me,” said the attaché.

  “Nothing more than that?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Was the Provost Company properly established here when Norrington was supposed to have died?” asked Charlie.

  “I doubt it, that early. From what I gather no one knew where anybody was in Berlin in April 1945: whole regiments split up, platoons and squadrons fighting on their own. And the Russians were here first, of course.”

  “What about wartime archives here?”

  “Military police headquarters are at Rheindahlen. You might try there.”

  “What about records of stolen art?”

  “There’s an art recovery center at the university here. Others at the universities of Bremen and Dresden, too.” He stopped, thinking. “The grave of the American wouldn’t be here in Berlin. There aren’t any military cemeteries here.”

  Charlie felt a sink of further disappointment. “Where are the American dead buried?”

  “There are a lot of cemeteries throughout Europe. I wouldn’t even like to guess. Do you have a name?”

  “No.”

  “A unit?”

  “No,” lied Charlie, not wanting any destroying or concealing visits ahead of his own.

  “But you do have a photograph of the American body found in Yakutsk? Know what he looks like?”

  “Yes,” said Charlie.

  “That’s something, perhaps.”

  “But not enough,” said Charlie, deciding upon the need for another lie. “Anyway, it’s Norrington I’m interested in, not the American.”

  Charlie was surprised, momentarily bewildered, at his feeling of déjà vu upon entering the military cemetery, until the comparison came to him between the regimented pattern of so many headstones and crosses and the stunted, number-only wooden markers by the Yakutsk gold mine.

  The control office was in the middle of the cemetery, the grave areas radiating out like spokes in a wheel. There were manicured trees bordering the paths. Initially he and Jackson ignored the building, going instead to the grave, Jackson confidently leading the way. Some of the trees would anyway have partially concealed it, but screens more than two meters high completely encircled it. The cross naming Simon Norrington was still in place, but there had been some digging at its base to lift it. About a third of a meter of topsoil had already been dug out. At least, thought Charlie, there weren’t any man-eating mosquitoes.

  Jackson said, “What was the Yakutsk grave like?”

  “A bomb crater. They used grenades.”

  “Whoever this was had a proper burial.”

  “But was probably killed to order.”

  Jackson regarded him quizzically. “You sure about that?”

  “No,” admitted Charlie. “I’m still not sure about anything.”

  The duty registration clerk in the control office was a rigidly coiffed, rigid-faced woman who just as tightly demanded the military attaché’s identification, despite their having met earlier when she had been informed of the exhumation, and who regarded Charlie with disdain and his Moscow embassy accreditation with suspicion. She insisted on telephoning some unidentified official in another cemetery offic
e before accepting Charlie’s right to examine records, and stood at each man’s shoulder to ensure they fully completed the perforated, hole-punched entry slips with their names and details of their official identity documents.

  Considering the outside appearance of hundreds of graves, the archive vaults were surprisingly small, two linked rooms about fifty meters long and half as wide, totally bare except for central tables and row upon row of filing cabinets against every available wall space. On both tables, In Memoriam books were set out in symmetry matching that of the grave markers, in alphabetical order to replace the current page-a-day book displayed in its glass case in the entrance to the British lodge house.

  Charlie supposed there was an index system linking name and burial place, but they didn’t need to consult it, already knowing the plot number, which enabled the clerk to lead them at once to a cabinet halfway along the first room. She insisted upon retrieving and finding the Norrington entry herself, not trusting them to handle the paper-aged ledger, and laid it open on the central table, clearly unhappy at disturbing the neat arrangement of the waiting commemorative books.

  She said, “The paper’s fragile. I’d appreciate your not touching it.”

  The entries were listed in numerical order, by plot allocation. Norrington’s —Plot 442—was a third of the way down a right-hand page, the details occupying just one line, each fact fit into a designated box. There was his army officer’s six-digit serial number—987491—rank, full name—Simon St. John Norrington—unit and finally a date, 294-45. Under the box headed CAUSE was KIA. The number three was written in a final, far-right-hand column. There were various numbers against other names above and below in that column.

  Charlie said, “KIA? Killed in action?”

  “Yes,” sighed the clerk, confirming the obvious.

  “What’s the three refer to?”

  “Visitors asking to examine the register. The man’s entry has been read three times since his interment.”