The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  Astafyev was searched at the police unit, and showed his identity card but refused to hand it over. Okay, and what then?

  Lappa would have got them to squeal in any case, because of the identity card, which never turned up, but the electrician – him again – saved him the bother, and then the policemen ended up confessing one by one, especially as the victim’s screams, the judge assured them, had been heard by several witnesses – a circumstance that did not entirely correspond to the truth; well, actually it was complete fabrication. Astafyev, it turns out, did not want to hand over the identity card, and they just dug their heels in: hand it over! No, I will not! Hand it over, I tell you, or it’ll be worse for you! No, I will not, I say! Then, of course, they beat him until he lost his senses. Lappa thought they would now have to confess to his murder, but they were not willing to swallow that last bitter mouthful – not at any cost. So now their roles were reversed, a delightful paradox: Confess! he shouted; and they retorted, no, I won’t confess! You have to know that only one of them, Samoylov, was sober, and this Samoylov, who claimed he had only landed one or two punches just to keep the others company, had phoned their chief after the beating to inform him of what had happened and ask what he should do about it. Whether he decided on his own to make this call or after consulting some of his cronies was always unclear, as the witness statements diverged dramatically on this point. What was established, however, was that on the telephone he was told either to free the detainee or proceed in accordance with the regulations, which meant calling a representative of the KGB. The policemen consulted each other and decided to let him go.

  They managed to wake Astafyev, handed him the bag and chucked him out. The man staggered off into the darkness.

  Up until then, Lappa had travelled between his home and Lefortovo Prison on the underground. That evening after having signed the arrest warrants for the six policemen and the electrician, he asked Colonel Zaporoshchenko to have him taken home in a KGB car. He had hesitated to ask, because he feared that he might appear ridiculous, and if the colonel had asked what he was frightened of, he would not have been able to explain it: such things don’t happen here in Russia. As it turned out, Zaporoshchenko was not surprised and raised no questions. Besides, it was becoming clear that some things really do happen here in Russia.

  When the car turned into Chkalova Street and drew up at the pavement, Nazar Kallistratovich realised that there were a couple of strangers standing in the doorway and they looked decidedly disreputable. He opened the car door and got out, and the two exchanged a glance of meaningful complicity, but then Zaporoshchenko’s men also got out of the car and flanked him. “I believe the comrade wants to get into his flat, isn’t that right?” asked one of them in a terse and caustic tone. After a pause, the two men shifted themselves out of the way while not relaxing their threatening demeanour, and Lappa went in. From then on, a KGB car was always at his disposal; Zaporoshchenko even offered him another car to take his kids to school and pick them up, but the judge had no children at the time. The colonel – he discovered on that occasion – had four of them.

  Who would have thought it? So Nazar Kallistratovich stopped going out on his own in the evening, and in any case, he would have little free time in the weeks to come.

  The interrogation of the suspects continued the following morning, and he asked them one by one what had really happened after Astafyev had fainted. He implied that it would be in their best interests to cooperate, given that they had already admitted to beating the victim. Every one of them replied that they had let him go.

  The six policemen refused to budge from this version. It’s true they had thrashed the arrested man, but then they released him, and they never saw him again. They all repeated it again and again, sometimes in a low and hesitant voice and sometimes with self-confidence or even anger, so in the end Lappa grew tired of seeing them appear before him day after day with their dull-witted or frightened faces, as they pleaded their innocence in whiny voices. But what else could he do but interrogate them? The ordeal only ended with the arrest of the officer in charge of the guard post, Pokrovsky; he was a very young sergeant who wore glasses, the same officer who had told Samoylov on the phone that he should follow the instructions in the rule book. No reason there to get hot under the collar? Here in Russia there are rules for every damn thing; follow them and you can’t go wrong! At Lefortovo Prison, Pokrovsky was now in a position to realise that the difference between beating up the man from the KGB and stiffing him good and proper, so vast in the eyes of the law, was reduced in his new surroundings to a trifling detail that was hardly worth discussing, so he began to see the terrible weakness of the line of defence he had clung to from the very start. At his second interview, Nazar Kallistratovich discovered that yes, he had heard the policemen arguing while he was on the phone, and some wanted to release the detainee and the others wanted to keep him in the cell, but before he put down the phone, Sergeant Samoylov had been assured that the prisoner would be released.

  Nazar Kallistratovich told Samoylov of this affidavit and let him know that because of that phone call he had more chances of saving his skin, but only on condition that he revealed exactly what had happened after he had put down the receiver. Samoylov kept quiet for a further day and a night, but in the end he gave in and started to talk. That evening they did let Astafyev go, but Lobov had insisted that they had to go after him. Idiots, he had said, how can you just let him go like that? He’ll soon sort us out! They decided to pick him up again. All were drunk and they rushed out of the guard post and ran blindly along the corridors of the underground until they bumped into Astafyev, who was still staggering about in the dark in search of an exit. They took him back to the guard post and started to beat him again.

  Lobov insisted that he had to be killed, but no one had the courage to do it. In the meantime Masokhin had woken up and saw Astafyev for the first time. He too felt that he could not be released at any cost. While Lobov held him still, Panov had grabbed the general by the hair and bashed his head against the wall until he collapsed.

  The investigation was at this stage when the Deputy Chief Prosecutor Naydenov was summoned to the Kremlin and there he found the Minister of the Interior Shchelokov frothing with rage and telling the Politburo that the Prosecutor’s Office and the KGB had exaggerated the affair to discredit him and his ministry. Well, we all know how it ended up: no more than four years later, Shchelokov blasted his brains out, and for good reason, but no one at the time could have known that the wind would blow in that direction. Naydenov rushed off to Lefortovo Prison in a state of considerable anguish. Together with Lappa, he spent a week putting the affidavits from the interrogations in order.

  The only confession at that moment was Samoylov’s, and of course it was not enough on its own, if there were a grain of truth in Shchelokov’s ravings: no one, for the moment, had exaggerated the affair, but Andropov was after the Minister’s scalp and managed to convince the Politburo that it was imperative that the investigation should be allowed to finish.

  So in the end, the Prosecutor’s Office was given a free hand.

  When the order came to resume the investigations, Lappa decided to find out how the body had been transported to the Bykovo road, because that was the key: whoever took it down there was guilty of the murder, but to prove that the policemen were responsible, he had to get them out of their guard post and drag them one way or another to the outskirts. And who would believe it, they didn’t want to go out. They preferred to stay in the warmth and all of them swore that on that evening they had not left the underground station, no, absolutely not! And then how did they get down to that bloody road – with what means of transport? No police car was available to them, and none of them owned a car, clearly: you try and buy a car on a policeman’s salary in 1980! Well? Lappa summoned the ambulance crew at the district’s accident and emergency unit, which that evening had been called as many as three times to the Zhdanovskaya Station, as was shown in
their records. He interrogated them for a whole day, without making any headway. Yet he became convinced that they were the ones who transported the corpse in an ambulance: they were just the types, and he could easily imagine them doing it. There they were with their unshaven chins and cigarettes in their mouths; first they would have had a drink with the policemen to warm themselves up and then they would have loaded the dead body on the stretcher, before disappearing into the night in search of a suitable place to dump it. While the judge was stubbornly testing out this version, Naydenov had reread the report of the crime scene and had found references to tyre marks in the snow, which appeared to be those of a Volga belonging to the police. So they again convened the policemen who had discovered the body and the KGB men who arrived afterwards, and more than one spoke of having seen tyre marks indicating the presence of a Volga that had changed its direction of travel.

  The following day, by sheer coincidence, a new witness turned up: he was a highway policeman who, on the evening of 27 December, saw a Volga with at least six or seven people on board and on its way from Moscow. It took the road for Bykovo. He had blown his whistle, but the car did not stop, and he naturally had no desire to give it chase.

  Why would anyone want to go to all that bother? The Volga was the ace, and Lappa played it. He summoned the six policemen, none of whom had confessed to anything with the exception of Samoylov, and he presented them with this new evidence. He was hoping that Samoylov would once again want to talk, as after all it was in his interests to get the others into trouble; but for some reason he had become taciturn. It was Masokhin who gave in – the one who had slept through most of the evening, and had therefore hoped right to the end that he would get away with it. He must have cursed the moment he woke up! They say it is destiny: if only he had had a few more glasses, perhaps they wouldn’t have managed to wake him and they would have had to work it out on their own… Masokhin, as I was saying, blabbered: there had been a Volga, no question of it, and it was no less than the chief of the detachment, Georgy Romanovich Barinov, who drove it.

  This Barinov was an officer and still young – clever and one of those who know how to get things done. On 27 December, he was officially off sick, but in reality he had gone to meet his lover, and before returning home he too had rung the duty officer from his lover’s home. Pokrovsky had told his chief that there was this problem down at Zhdanovskaya Station, and Barinov immediately understood that it was no laughing matter: he called for a police car and rushed to the station. You can imagine the scene when he got there: the police office had been double locked and, once inside, there was Astafyev’s battered and lifeless body; they had put a newspaper under his head so that the whole place wasn’t covered with blood, and the six policemen were exchanging looks. It took Barinov one glance at the situation for him to understand everything, and it was also clear that Lobov and Panov were responsible for having smashed the man’s head open. He sent everyone out except for those two and Masokhin, of course. Well, lads, asks Barinov, what were you planning to do next? Masokhin suggested taking him to the hospital. This is what Masokhin claimed in his statement, but Barinov confirmed this point, so he is to be believed.

  “Idiot!” Barinov screamed. “Tomorrow this place will be full of those bastards from the Cheka and all of you are drunk! Within an hour you would be like lambs to the slaughter!”

  “We could take him out of the city and dump him there, as though he had been mugged and beaten up,” suggested Panov. Masokhin thought of the Bykovo road, as he knew that at that time there was no danger of too much traffic; besides one spot is as good as another… So they loaded Astafyev in the car, they all climbed in and they drove out of the city. When they got to the place where they would dump him, they undressed him, threw away his clothes and then discovered that the poor man was still alive! Well, it goes without saying, he would have died of cold within five minutes, but clearly they didn’t think of this, or perhaps they did think of it… but knowing our luck, someone’s bound to come round in the next five minutes! Barinov decided that they had to finish him off. Take it in turns, he told them. Masokhin took a jack from the boot; he was in charge of the unit and had to go first. He bent over the victim and delivered a blow to the face. He was terrified, he said; he knew that he was killing a man… He passed the jack to Panov, who struck Astafyev again and again. Then he kicked him in the head.

  On 5 February, when they first took Barinov to the Lefortovo Prison, he had already smelled a rat; he was by no means stupid, this Barinov. He had another female friend who was the manager of a shop, a clothes shop – you know, the one in the Proletarsky District. Well, on 27 December they were doing a stock-take and had just received a delivery of sheepskin jackets. In such cases, they would work all night – not with all the staff, of course: the manageress, her deputy and perhaps two or three shop assistants, the most trusted ones. Occasionally one of these jackets is made really well with all the stitching in the right place and a fur collar; it would be a real shame to hang it up in the shop along with all the others, where the customers would walk by, thumb it all over and ruin it. In short, Barinov went along to take a look at it, and stayed there for the whole evening until after midnight. And had he found anything that he liked? No, he hadn’t found a thing, a great pity. His friend, when summoned to Lefortovo Prison, came in a heavy, ten-year-old anorak with a rabbit-skin shapka on her head, having left the silver-fox one at home; she too was not stupid. And yes, she confirmed that Barinov had spent that evening with them and giving them a hand. Until late? Until after midnight. But look here, you do know that the deputy manager, Gevorkiyan, and the shop assistants knew nothing about this. Indeed, they were quite certain that there was no stranger in the shop that evening. To tell the truth, one of the girls was ready to swear that she didn’t even go to the shop and that, generally speaking, she didn’t even work there, but Nazar Kallistratovich persuaded her that this was not the time for exaggerations. He summoned the manageress again; on the first occasion she had not revealed her motive for taking such an interest in her friend, and you should have seen how her colour changed as the judge spoke. Well, to be absolutely blunt, it was her dear Georgy Romanovich who asked her to tell those porkies – Barinov, I mean – and who could have imagined that there was all this behind it. If she had known, she would have told the truth immediately.

  At this stage, Lappa received a call from the Chief Prosecutor’s Office telling him to come urgently. You’ll be thinking that it was to congratulate him? No, it was Naydenov who had suddenly got frightened and wanted to know if there really was sufficient proof to arrest Barinov; if there weren’t, someone would have come after his head, but not before he had time to see Nazar Kallistratovich’s rolling about the floor! The latter told him exactly how it was: there was Masokhin’s affidavit, Pokrovsky’s, the manageress’s and even another friend’s – that of the woman who had really spent the evening of the 27th with Georgy Romanovich; they had even got to her. All Barinov’s colleagues knew her: Sofia Vasilyevna Capp, deputy manageress of the canteen, and he had been going to bed with her for, well, at least two years, according to some, and perhaps somewhat less, according to others. There was no doubt that they were going to bed together. She was divorced and lived with her daughter, but the daughter, it emerged, stayed with her father during the end-of-year holidays, and when she was called to the Prosecutor’s Office, Capp took fright: she had no idea that it had to do with Barinov, and I swear she too had something to hide. She explained her movements hour by hour of five or six days, but when it came to the evening of the 27th when she had received her friend, she wanted to know if it really was necessary to provide his name. On hearing that it wasn’t necessary, she loosened up, and in any case the friend left very early. He had phoned the office and they were having some difficulties down there and he had to leave.

  What do you mean by early? Oh well, say about nine o’clock.

  Naydenov had been listening up to that moment, and when Lappa
went silent, he stared at him, and then turned to a third person in the office: Skrynnikov, who was in charge of the investigative section of the Chief Prosecutor’s Office. Fortunately he saved Nazar Kallistratovich’s head; Well, he said, I think we need to arrest this Barinov of yours.

  But it was not over yet! Because at the Ministry of the Interior they were of an entirely different opinion. Naydenov had to visit Shchelokov, and explain everything to him, but do you think that the Minister was really interested in hearing whether or not the arrest was justified in terms of the law? You have to see him as he was then: he was already over seventy, an army general and marshal, a Hero of the Soviet Union and God knows what else; his days were full and interesting; in the morning he woke in a twelveroom dacha and a maid brought him his breakfast; in the next room his personal barber was preparing his lotions, outside the gardeners were tending to his roses, in the kitchen his cook was plucking some game birds for his lunch and in the garage his drivers were polishing his many Mercedes; and all these people were on the payroll of the Ministry of the Interior – the house owner did not have to pay a single kopeck. What more could you want from life?

  Every day, even in winter, fresh flowers arrived for his wife – the one who would some time later also shoot herself with her husband’s pistol – and these flowers were also paid for by the ministry from the funds allocated for ceremonial events. Every autumn, as it emerged at the trial, he would go to the bank in person carrying a suitcase of money or even two, containing a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand roubles in used three and five-rouble notes, and he changed them for one-hundred-rouble notes straight from the mint… And now – who would credit it – a nobody like Naydenov, no, not even him but some unknown prosecutor, arrests six policemen and then a seventh and then an eighth, a chief of detachment no less. Quite frankly, there’s the danger that our dear, good-hearted Leonid Ilyich, I mean Brezhnev, asks for some explanations perhaps after we’ve downed a bottle together: How are things going, dear comrade, in that ministry of yours?