No Time for Heroes

by Brian Freemantle

  Danilov pointed out the abrupt stopping of the entries in the middle of 1991, and was annoyed not to have thought of it himself when Cowley remarked the first extension of Serov’s posting dated from that year.

  Cowley said the two DC detectives were checking the guest lists of events in Serov’s diary which coincided with the financier’s earlier visits to Washington. And then, saving the best until last, added: ‘Something intriguing’s come from Switzerland. Seems Paulac hasn’t long been the family name. It was legally taken by his grandparents, after they fled the Ukraine in 1918. Before that it was Panzhevsky …’ Cowley smiled at the look on Danilov’s face. ‘And according to his housekeeper, Michel Paulac was a fluent Russian and Ukrainian speaker: Russian books all over the flat. She also thinks he’s entertained Russians there in the past. But his partners again say they don’t know about it …’ He paused once more. ‘We checked the passport, obviously, for entry visas into Russia. There aren’t any.’

  Danilov seized the opportunity to recover from his oversight about the 1991 date. ‘Russian visas aren’t stamped into the passports of foreigners. It’s a separate arrival and departure document taken out when the holder leaves.’

  ‘So if he did visit, it could be traced in your Moscow immigration files?’

  Danilov looked wistfully at the list of unintelligible letters on Cowley’s desk. ‘Which may not be on computer.’ In the old days the KGB and Intourist, which they controlled, had maintained detailed and easily retrievable records of all foreign visitors. He’d never imagined mourning the former Communist control. But then, he’d never imagined working in America with an FBI agent as a partner.

  ‘Somebody will have a lot of paper to go through?’

  ‘Yuri Mikhailovich is working with me,’ said Danilov. Pavin had been their scene-of-crime officer last year.

  ‘It could be the opening,’ urged Cowley. ‘There’d have to be a link between anyone Paulac met in Moscow with his meeting Petr Serov, here.’

  ‘There’d be a sponsor’s name, on his visa,’ agreed Danilov.

  ‘Tell Pavin I’m sorry,’ commiserated the American.

  Danilov took over Serov’s former office to write the Moscow report on Paulac’s ancestry and set out the immigration chore for Pavin to attempt. He also asked the major to try to identify the unknown man pictured with Serov in two of the photographs he’d taken from Massachusetts Avenue and shipped back overnight. He said nothing in any message of the disparate letter collection which at the moment he couldn’t explain.

  Oleg Firsov produced the list of embassy personnel already interviewed. Redin’s report gave a detailed account of the mortuary meeting with the Americans and of the near confrontation that had followed, but openly admitted he had discovered nothing from his search of the office or the Serov apartment.

  Firsov’s dispatch to the Foreign Ministry was as empty as that of the security chief, and Danilov realised why when he repeated the interviews. The denials of any awareness of Serov’s involvement with the Swiss financier were practically recited, like the insistence Serov had been a wonderful diplomat with a wonderful wife doing a wonderful job whose murder was inexplicable.

  He was behind the desk in Serov’s office, everything completed and not able to think of anything else to do, when the telephone jarred into the rooms, startling him.

  ‘We’ve got it!’ declared Cowley triumphantly. ‘You got it!’

  ‘What?’

  Cowley avoided the direct answer. ‘I could manage a drink in the roof bar of the Washington Hotel. Fifteen minutes.’

  Danilov made it in twelve: the FBI man was already there. ‘Names,’ Cowley announced. ‘All Russian. Seven in total. Four are in our computers, for listed convictions or suspicion of involvement in serious crimes. One, Viktor Chebrakin, got a murder rap reduced to manslaughter in 1984: he was released two years ago. Another, Yuri Chestnoy, is suspected of two killings but the file is marked insufficient evidence. Each of the seven, according to State Department records, emigrated from the Soviet Union in the Eighties.’

  ‘Where do we go from here?’

  ‘The Russian ghetto,’ replied Cowley, answering literally. ‘I’ve already alerted the local force and our New York office. We’ll go up on the shuttle tomorrow morning.’

  ‘So Serov was a d’ehdooshkah,’ said Danilov.

  ‘It’s Godfather, not Grandfather,’ the Russian-speaking American corrected.

  ‘Serov was dirty, wasn’t he?’ said Danilov, enjoying his new expression.

  ‘Dirtier than a pig in shit,’ agreed Cowley.

  The dacha was in the wooded Lenin Hills, off the Medvedkovo road, and had been the weekend retreat of a senior Party secretary before Gusovsky took it over. The KGB had installed the alarms and protective fencing, which Gusovsky had disdained as totally inadequate: now the country house was completely enclosed by a high, electrified wall, with sensors seeded in the grounds, which men constantly patrolled with Doberman dogs.

  It was an elaborate party, as Gusovsky’s gatherings always were. Marquee-covered tables were bowed under goose and snipe and partridge and hazel-grouse, and there were other displays of beef and pork and chicken. There was a separate bar tent stocked with every sort of liquor and wine and a range of cigarettes and cigars, and waiters were in constant circulation. Many of the specially supplied girls were swimming naked in the pool or playing softball. There were a lot of men but no wives: some of the men were also naked in the pool. Some couples had already paired off.

  Gusovsky and Yerin sat apart, side by side on the encircling verandah of the dacha, equal on identical chairs. Gusovsky counted aloud: ‘Four ministries, two at Deputy level. Three judges, and senior officers from every Militia district.’

  Yerin laughed. ‘Fairly average turn-out, for midweek.’

  Gusovsky waved at Kosov’s approach. Encouraged, the man climbed on to the verandah. ‘Great party. The girls are wonderful!’

  ‘Take your pick,’ invited Yerin.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘We need to have Danilov,’ declared Gusovsky.

  ‘I understand,’ said Kosov.

  ‘We want you to get him for us.’

  ‘I can do it,’ undertook Kosov, too eagerly. Danilov had been on a payroll before: he was sure, after the conversation with Olga, that all it needed was the right persuasion. He decided against telling the other two men why he was so confident.

  ‘You sure?’ pressed Yerin.

  ‘Positive.’

  Gusovsky nodded to the pool and the shrieking girls. ‘Try the one with hair almost to her waist: she’s very good.’

  ‘Do you really think he can get Danilov?’ asked Yerin, as Kosov hurried off towards the pool.

  ‘We’ll give him the chance: they know each other.’

  ‘I’m really not sure about Zimin being the one to go to Italy,’ said Yerin.

  ‘It’s always been the idea: he’s got the language,’ reminded Gusovsky. Excluding Zimin from the party, at Yerin’s urging, was the greatest concession Gusovsky had made so far to the blind man’s antipathy to the third man who ruled the Chechen.

  ‘He’s weak,’ insisted Yerin. ‘We can’t risk a weak man.’ Their intention was to make the Chechen the strongest and most powerful Family in Russia: they were confident the link they were about to forge in Italy would achieve it.

  ‘It would be difficult for you to go,’ said the thin man. ‘And for me.’ As if on cue, Gusovsky began to cough; he stubbed out his half-finished cigar.

  ‘I suppose there’s no alternative,’ Yerin capitulated. He was silent for several moments. ‘Zimin thinks we should give the Ostankino a definite message. He’s sure it was their people who intercepted our airport shipment. He knows the man who organised it, Ivan Ignatov.’

  ‘If he’s the man who did it, let’s kill him,’ decided Gusovsky, easily.

  Danilov returned immediately to the embassy after his meeting with Cowley, apprehensively aware that the names of at least four
recorded criminals, one a convicted killer, in Serov’s possession created precisely the sort of problem the Deputy Foreign Minister had specified at the departure briefing.

  He warned the Foreign Ministry the Americans knew Serov had the names and that the following day he would travel with the FBI to the last known address of one of the listed Russians. He attached to the Ministry cable his orders to Pavin, to go through all available Moscow records for the three names not in the American crime computer.

  Danilov left a copy of everything for Oleg Firsov’s arrival in the morning, stretching back in the chair at Serov’s desk which he had commandeered as his own workplace. He wished it were possible to talk personally to Pavin, but given the time difference between Washington and Moscow, Danilov knew the major would not be at Petrovka. He looked at his watch, to calculate the exact difference, but it had stopped at seven o’clock. He supposed Olga would be at Kirovskaya: then again, she might not. She spent a lot of evenings at the cinema with work-friends; sometimes it seemed that was all she ever did. He decided not to bother telephoning: he could not think of anything for them to talk about. There hadn’t been anything for them to talk about for a long time.

  Olga was at the apartment, at that moment looking down at the photograph in Izvestia of her husband emerging from the Georgetown cafe. She thought he looked frightened and bewildered, like an animal caught in the glare of a hunter’s light. He’d been out enjoying himself. So she had no cause for unease at having gone out with Yevgennie Kosov. She hoped Yevgennie would call again, as he had promised. And that they’d go this time with Larissa, of course. She decided to pick out some clothes, just in case.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Cowley had delayed going to New York until the next morning so that he could brief the FBI Director. It also enabled Danilov to telephone Pavin at a Moscow time when he would be at Petrovka, and Cowley to get Rafferty and Johannsen’s report on the cultural events in Serov’s diary coinciding with Paulac’s visits to Washington.

  Neither Danilov nor Cowley was entirely happy with their respective results.

  Pavin said he’d gone again to Raisa Serova’s apartment on Leninskaya, and been turned away because he had not been accompanied by anyone from the Foreign Ministry. The major also warned that arrivals at Sheremet’yevo were not computerised; neither were they filed in any alphabetical, nationality or dated order. A slip-by-slip search for a visit by Michel Paulac could take months, even if the time frame were narrowed.

  Danilov had just replaced the telephone when Nikolai Redin thrust into the room, demanding to know how the seven names had been discovered. Scarcely speaking – only saying “there!” and “there!” and “there!” – Danilov led the security officer through the dossiers, pointing out the incongruous letters which the computer had formed into identifiable names.

  ‘The list should have been returned to Moscow! Computers there could have given us the same breakdown!’ insisted Redin.

  ‘The individual letters were there, for you to see, when you made your search,’ returned Danilov. ‘You missed them.’

  Redin went quiet at the clear implication. You’ve told Moscow?’

  ‘You’ve seen every message I’ve sent to Moscow.’

  ‘Are you going to tell them?’

  ‘I don’t see any practical purpose.’

  The vaguest suggestion of a smile hovered at the corners of Redin’s mouth. Abruptly the man turned and left the office, without saying anything more.

  Less than a mile away, on the fifth floor of the FBI building, Leonard Ross stared down at the Russian names and said: ‘Looks like we’ve got that great big can of worms nobody wanted. The Secretary of State is going to be one very unhappy man.’

  ‘Danilov says he’s not getting any vibes that it’s official.’

  ‘I hardly expected he would: or that he would tell us, if he did.’

  ‘He’d tell me,’ insisted Cowley. He hadn’t expected Rafferty and Johannsen’s inquiry to turn out as it had. He decided against discussing it with the Director: they were talking about positives, not negatives. Not that it was strictly negative. More inexplicable at the moment.

  ‘Right now I believe we’ve got unarguable evidence of the Russian Mafia operating out of the Russian embassy,’ said Ross. ‘And I don’t like that one little bit.’

  ‘How public are we going to go?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think Hartz would want to go public at all. There’s no advantage to us in doing so, is there?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Best left to the diplomats,’ judged the Director. ‘Any playback from New York?’

  Cowley shook his head. ‘It would be a miracle if there was.’

  ‘A miracle is exactly what I’d welcome at the moment. Call me the moment there’s anything.’

  ‘I’d like to think it would be that quick,’ said Cowley. He paused. ‘But I don’t.’

  He looped up to the embassy to collect Danilov, who was waiting. On their way back to the 14th Street bridge, Cowley announced that the organisers and staff of every event Serov had marked as having been to on the occasions Michel Paulac had been in Washington were adamant the Russian had not attended. There had been sign-yourself guests list for four of them; Petr Serov’s name did not appear on any.

  ‘Is it essential to sign such registers?’ asked Danilov, unfamiliar with the practice.

  ‘No,’ admitted Cowley. ‘But there are always photographers. Our photographic experts have examined the contact sheets of everything that was taken, at every function. And not just for the obvious people in the foreground: every background, too. Serov doesn’t show.’

  ‘What about Paulac?’

  Cowley shook his head. ‘That’s the intriguing thing. Two separate sets of people at two separate affairs recognise his photograph, although we’ve got to allow for the fact the man’s picture has been splashed across every newspaper and television screen in Washington for the past week. But one of our photographic guys thinks he can see him in the background of one of the contact prints, although it wouldn’t be strong enough to go to court with.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense!’ protested Danilov. ‘Why should Paulac be at these things if Serov wasn’t!’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Cowley, ‘I just work here.’

  As they approached National Airport, Cowley pointed out the lot where the financier’s body had been found. Danilov allowed himself to be swept along by the walk-on, walk-off, write-your-own-ticket convenience of the shuttle, thinking of the shoulder barging, cancellation-without-notice chaos of Russian air travel. Aboard the aircraft he read several times the instructions for the apparatus on the seat back facing him to make sure he had not misunderstood before saying to Cowley: ‘This is a telephone to make calls while we’re in mid-air?’

  Cowley missed the Russian’s astonishment. ‘You’ll probably need an American-billed credit card …’ He began to grope into his inside pocket. ‘You can use mine if you want to make a call.’

  ‘No,’ refused Danilov, glad the other man hadn’t detected his naivety. ‘It can wait.’

  From his window seat, he gazed down through the puddled clouds, wondering what were the names of the occasional neatly arranged townships and even more occasional smoke-belching industrial sprawl. A lot of the houses had the azure-blue postage stamp of a swimming pool in their gardens, and every built-up area displayed its white-painted church with a needle-point spire thrusting upwards to where God was supposed to be. Danilov supposed there were dachas with swimming pools in Russia – probably in the hills above Moscow, where the former Communist élite had played at being Tsars – but he’d never seen them from the air on the rare times he’d flown out of the city. And few Russian churches were white, and all had squat, fat-breasted towers not really indicating any upward direction at all. Perhaps in Russia even the clerics weren’t sure where God was supposed to live. Or maybe the churches of Mother Russia were supposed to have breasts.

  The announcement th
at they were approaching New York came over the public address system before Danilov could see it, because he was sitting on the wrong side of the aircraft on its approach. Then the plane banked and the city that most people – certainly most Russians – thought to be America all by itself lay set out below, a packed-together jumble of snag-toothed skyscrapers and tower buildings, everything overlaid by a thumb-print smudge of purple-brown smog. As the plane descended it was just possible to see the tight, joined-up lines of toy cars and lorries, so there had to be roads, but Danilov’s impression of Manhattan was of a solid mass, a sharply carved or weathered cliff in the caves and gullies of which people presumably lived.

  The FBI’s New York supervisor, Hank Slowen, was a neat, compact, slightly built man. He wore rimless spectacles, his fair hair combed precisely from an arrow-straight parting. Cowley had only ever known the man wear blue, as he was today, the jacket unrumpled, the trouser creases sabre-sharp. Slowen’s neatness was accentuated by the appearance of the man beside him: the Brooklyn detective, a lieutenant introduced as Wes Bradley, was a burly, bulging man whom nothing seemed to fit. The waistband of his trousers was lost beneath the roll of his stomach and the check sports jacket perched on his shoulders, with no chance of being fastened across the ample midriff even if there had been a button on the front, which there wasn’t. The shirt was fresh but already surrendering, the open collar tips turned up by the knot of a tugged-down tie.

  Bradley directed them towards a dented, paint-dull Ford, badly parked in a prohibited area, the attachable but unlit police emergency light prominent on the dashboard. Danilov knew men like Bradley all over Moscow, detectives who used police authority as a passport to where no-one else could go. The interior of the vehicle was as neglected as its owner, overflowing ashtrays spilled on the floor, among the take-away food wrappers; the upholstery on the driver’s seat had parted in protest along two seams. The engine was slowly choking to death.