Dead Men Living Page 2

  Behind him Kurshin made a rough sketch against which to put his measurements. It was a vaguely round, banked hole, the still partially earth-covered bodies at its lowest point. Several times the measuring tape came free of the stones with which he tried to tether it, so he had to repeat the process. It would have been pointless asking any of the withdrawn group to come closer to hold it in place. Reminded, he said, “I suppose I’ll have to touch the bodies as well as you to get the Eye before your people will take them out?”

  “Of course,” said Novikov, surprised at the question.

  “I’m being stung to death. It’ll be worse in there.”

  “You shouldn’t have forgotten your hat and mask.”

  “It doesn’t help to be told.”

  There was a murmur from the watching Yakuts as Novikov stepped as delicately as possible into the grave, medical bag hanging from its strap over his shoulder. Flying things engulfed him, encroaching beneath his jacket and trouser cuffs. Bites began to burn their way up his arms and legs. Kurshin was right about it being worse inside the grave, even though it was far colder than he’d expected.

  Kurshin, also under attack, said, “Let’s hurry.”

  Novikov said, “We can’t afford to.”

  The bodies were still frozen too solidly to intrude a thermometer into any part of either body from which Novikov would have normally attempted a reading. He laid the thermometer against the outside of each grimaced face. Flies and bugs were crawling in and out of the stretched-apart mouths and their faces were swollen and bumped from stings inflicted at their moment of death, unknown years before. Novikov took close-up photographs of the obvious wounds. The backs of both heads were totally gone, exposing brain pulp. In the center of each was a trajectory hole he hoped still contained the fatal bullet. He wrote E for English and A for American in his notebook and against the E recorded the twist of the man’s foot. It would, he guessed, be a green-bone ankle fracture, from the fall into the pit. Strangely the American’s spectacles were still perfectly in place, although the left lens was shattered. Novikov himself had taken the chance and worn his contact lenses, in which he preferred to work, although he had glasses in his medical bag. Normally at this time of year it was so cold that contact lenses froze in the eye, making them impossible to wear. He was the only person in Yakutsk who bothered with what was considered a pointless ophthalmic invention. He said, “It won’t be easy getting the Englishman into the van, with his arm thrust out like that.”

  “How would that have happened?”

  “Muscle spasm when he was struck by the bullet,” guessed Novikov. He tried but couldn’t open the Englishman’s tunic pockets. “I would have expected the clothing to have thawed by now.”

  “You think they were prisoners of war?”

  Novikov shook his head, deciding against telling even his best friend what he thought he knew and what he was thinking. Kurshin would have laughed at him, as he’d laughed before about the things he’d tried to do for Marina and the boys. “They’re too smart. Look! You can see the creases in their trousers. You want to get in here and touch the bodies, so we can get my people to move them?”

  Waving his arms against a fresh insect upsurge, Kurshin stepped into the grave and tapped both corpses. Each was ice-cold and rock-hard. Looking back at the village headman, Kurshin said, “Moscow will have to be told.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Shouldn’t we leave the bodies here for Ryabov to see—be photographed looking at, perhaps?” Yuri Vyacheslav Ryabov was Yakutsk’s publicity-conscious, eager-to-pose militia commissioner.

  “Fuck him,” said Novikov.

  “You don’t have to rely on him like I do,” complained Kurshin.

  “I don’t want animals eating at the bodies, even though it’s still going to be some time before they thaw,” said Novikov. He shouted to the two mortuary attendants, who reluctantly approached with stretchers.

  Kurshin remained in the grave for the two Yakuts to see that he had touched the bodies and attracted the bad spirits, before climbing out. He was halfway toward the road, pacing out its distance from the grave, when the shout came. He turned in time to see the two attendants scrambling out; one actually fled toward the Kiriyestyakh group. Kurshin ran back himself, unable at first to hear what Novikov was yelling from the hole.

  “What?” Kurshin shouted, still some distance away.

  “There’s a third body,” said Novikov. “It was covered by the other two. It’s a woman.”

  Taking Sasha to the state circus, all part of Charlie learning fatherhood, had been wonderful, as it always was, but they’d had to stand in line for half an hour to get into McDonald’s, which was a long time for Charlie to stand comfortably. Neither Charlie nor Natalia had ordered food and now Charlie wished he’d chosen the cola instead of the coffee, which was awful. He pushed it aside. Trying to be philosophical, Charlie supposed a thirty-minute wait was practically moving at the speed of light for a Russian restaurant. And Sasha, her face greased by her cheeseburger, was enjoying it.

  “I checked again,” announced Natalia. “There’s nothing on you apart from your appointment details.” Long before Charlie’s Moscow posting, Natalia had used her colonel’s rank within the then-existing KGB to expunge all Charlie’s records from the organization’s files, as Charlie had double-checked the embassy’s security archives against those in London to establish there was no file on Natalia.

  Charlie looked sadly at her. “You already knew that.”

  “Just wanted to be sure.”

  “So now you are.” He’d badly misjudged how difficult it was going to be. Even Sasha seemed aware of her mother’s uncertainty.

  Searching for a new topic, he said, “I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  “We’re not close.” The letter from Irena had been among the mail she had collected from the apartment she still maintained in Leninskaya.

  “What does she want?”

  “Says she hasn’t been able to contact me. She flies for Aeroflot and brings things from abroad for Sasha.”

  “What have you told her about Sasha?”

  “That there was an affair that ended.” She looked directly at Charlie. “I thought it had.”

  And maybe would have liked it to, Charlie thought. “Am I going to meet her?”

  “Maybe,” said Natalia, noncommittally. “I suppose I should call her or write. There’s something else about us.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t expect you to ask me anything—to use my position—and I don’t expect you to share anything with me.”

  “Neither’s crossed my mind,” Charlie said with a smile, trying to lighten the atmosphere. McDonald’s hardly seemed the place for such a conversation, but then what—or where—was?

  “That’s bollocks and you know it,” accused Natalia, using the word that Charlie had taught her.

  “It doesn’t sound the same when you say it.”

  “It means the same.”

  Charlie accepted that he’d abused Natalia’s professional position badly enough in the very beginning, after he’d staged his phony defection to Moscow and deceived her when she’d been assigned to debrief him. So her distrust was justified, like everything else. Natalia had sufficient professional integrity to make up for any that he might lack. Still seemed a pity, if the facility was there. But then … Charlie abruptly stopped the reflection. He wouldn’t cheat or treat Natalia badly, ever again. In fact, he had to do even better than that. He had to make her love him again.

  4

  Difficult though it was about anything involving the man, Gerald Williams did his best to remain totally objective about Charlie Muffin. And objectively he accepted he’d lost the last battle, like so many before it. But most certainly he hadn’t lost the war. Nor would he. Still objective, he conceded that Charlie Muffin had succeeded in his experimental posting to Moscow by shattering a Russian nuclear-smuggling operation to the Middle East and that, for the moment, Charlie Muff
in could do no wrong in the opinion of Sir Rupert Dean, the director-general. Which wasn’t, by any stretch of any imagination, Williams’s opinion. Charlie Muffin could—and would—break rules. The man couldn’t help himself. It was Muffin’s way. The way that one day—the sooner, the better—he’d make the mistake he couldn’t wriggle away from, as he’d wriggled away from so many; the mistake with which he, Gerald Williams, would finally rid the service of a nuisance that should not have been allowed to exist in the first place and shouldn’t be allowed to continue in these uncertain times.

  There had been too many changes made too quickly in expanding the department with the hope of justifying its continued existence after the end of the Cold War. There’d actually been some personnel moves as a direct result of what the damned man had already done in Moscow. Which meant that for the moment not enough people remained in power who knew Charlie Muffin for what he truly was. But Gerald Williams knew. He knew Charlie Muffin to be an insubordinate liar and cheat with an inverted snobbery about people with better accents whose boots he shouldn’t have been allowed to lick, let alone appear equal to—sometimes, even, superior.

  Williams, a fat but fastidiously neat man, was sure of his strategy. Time. But with persistence. What he had to do was allow Charlie Muffin all the time—all the rope—with which to hang himself. But not let this ridiculous admiration cult grow, simply because of one initial new posting success. So there had to be constant, leveling reminders. And there was no one better qualified than he to introduce that constant balance. And he was going to be able to do that now that he was being included in these nervous discussions about the uncertainty of their organization.

  Williams was happy with his reflections, quite content for the departmental conference, chaired by Sir Rupert Dean, to swirl around. For some of the time he’d only half listened, more interested in his own thoughts, gazing across the Thames to the headquarters of the MI6, or SIS, as Britain’s external intelligence service preferred to call itself.

  Today’s meeting had been convened by the director-general to assess the effectiveness of the National Crime Squad as Britain’s FBI—the role they’d fought to establish for themselves in the post–Cold War adjustments—and Williams felt the least threatened of all. The first to suffer from any retraction or functional change would be operational heads. His record as financial director and chief accountant was unblemished, although as careful as he was, Williams recognized a danger—another reason to be wary of the man—in the drunken-sailor way Charlie Muffin was being allowed to throw money around in Moscow, as if he had the key to the safe. Worriedly it occurred to Williams that the bloody man was devious enough actually to have made an impression and done just that.

  “I believe they’ve made inroads, damaged our claim,” insisted Jocelyn Hamilton. He was new to the control group, a replacement as Dean’s immediate deputy. The demise of Hamilton’s predecessor had come from the man’s own power struggle miscalculation, but the nuclear-smuggling Moscow episode had been the trigger and Williams hoped he’d find an ally in the bull-chested, sparse-haired new deputy whose office was festooned with photographs of him as a rugby prop forward and four-time English rugby international.

  “We’ve more than held our own,” countered Dean, a disheveled man whose hair retreated from his forehead in an upright tidal wave. He’d been appointed director-general from the chair of Modern and Political History at Oxford’s Balliol College and was internationally acclaimed as the foremost sociopolitical authority in Europe. There was no longer talk of his tenure being temporary, as it had been described in the beginning. Williams didn’t believe the nuclear affair had anything to do with Dean’s knighthood, but it had come soon afterward and some people thought there was a connection.

  “It’s just more duplication,” persisted Hamilton. “There’s already the National Criminal Intelligence Service. There’s regional crime squads. There’s us. What can a National Crime Squad do that we or any of the others couldn’t? Or aren’t already doing?”

  “Focus on the criminals identified at the very top,” said Jeremy Simpson, the legal adviser. Heavily he added, “And NCIS isn’t operational.”

  Patrick Pacey, a small, dark-haired, and totally nondescript man, except for a face permanently reddened by blood pressure, said, “It makes the government’s commitment against organized crime look good.” He was the political officer.

  “I don’t think there is any cause for us yet to overreact,” said Dean. He habitually spoke too quickly, his voice staccato, and seemed to make more use of his spectacles as worry beads than as an aid to reading.

  “Nor to be complacent,” said Hamilton.

  Time carefully to venture a toe into the water, decided Williams. He said, “Certainly it would be a bad time for us to make a mistake.”

  Jeremy Simpson, who compensated for his alopecia baldness with a drooping bush of a mustache, sighed. “Do you know a good time to make a mistake?” He didn’t like Williams and regretted his inclusion in these meetings, although acknowledging finances and costs were important in their overall future.

  Williams flushed, well aware he couldn’t expect any support from the odd–looking lawyer, who was buttressed against any upheaval within the department by an inherited personal fortune. “I meant that perhaps we should devote some time to anticipating potential problems.”

  “Like what?” demanded the political officer.

  “Personnel,” said Williams, shortly.

  “Here we go again!” sighed Simpson, in weary anticipation. “Why do you have such animosity toward Charlie Muffin?”

  Williams shifted uncomfortably, knowing it would be wrong for his objections to appear a personal vendetta, even though it had, for him, developed into one from how Charlie Muffin had maneuvered his attempt to impose some financial restraint into open ridicule throughout the department. Holding back from the specifics he’d intended, Williams said, “He totally disregards authority—doesn’t conform. Which are attitudes I don’t think we can afford in our current situation.”

  “You think he should be withdrawn?” asked Hamilton.

  “I would not oppose the suggestion,” snatched Williams, eagerly.

  “Most of the cabinet Intelligence Committee would, after that most recent business,” deflated Pacey.

  “There’s no justification any longer in his retaining the apartment he has,” blurted Williams, unable to stop himself and regretting it at once.

  “Now we’re getting to it!” jeered the lawyer.

  “It’s excessive expenditure,” said Williams. “My function is to control the finances of this department. I will be hard-pressed to explain the huge amount of money Moscow is costing.”

  “There was every justification for the apartment to distance Muffin from the embassy over the nuclear business,” pointed out Dean, becoming as irritated as Simpson by the accountant’s obduracy. “And you won’t be called upon to explain. I will.”

  Enough, Williams decided; he was on record as having fulfilled his official and expected role, which was important. He said, “I felt—and still feel—that the point should be made.”

  “And you’ve made it,” dismissed Simpson.

  And would again, determined Williams. It was extremely important to discover everything he could about Charlie Muffin’s extravagant lifestyle in Moscow. The problem was finding a way of doing it.

  Vitali Novikov’s mortuary, examination room and what were supposed to be his scientific testing facilities epitomized the township at the center of which it stood: crumbling and inadequate. Like the provincial government offices and militia headquarters to which it was attached, it had been built of brick and concrete, to appear impressive, before architects learned brick and concrete thawed the permafrozen ground upon which they were placed. The whole complex was now lopsided and gradually subsiding, breaking up like a sinking ship. The freak thaw had caused fresh cracks in Novikov’s particular section, and down the outside wall brick dust leaked and smeared
appropriately red, like blood. The space originally made for it had pulled away from the frame the only outside window in what passed as Novikov’s laboratory, widening an already existing gap that needed fresh canvas packing, cardboard and binding tape to block up. Fortunately the inner autopsy room didn’t have an outside wall. It had little else, either.

  Novikov had only ever had one corpse at a time and was unsure how effective the two additional but rarely used freezer cabinets were. It was not an immediate problem while the bodies were still melting, but on their journey back to Yakutsk from the grave, Novikov and Kurshin had agreed, anxious to convince themselves, that Moscow would send in a team that required, ironically, that the bodies be refrozen after Novikov’s initial examination. And because of the climate change he couldn’t simply leave them in an outside storage shed, which he would otherwise have done in January.

  There was only one examination table and there weren’t replacements anywhere in town for the three bulbs that had blown in the overhead cluster, reducing his working light by half.

  Novikov had both watched and conducted full autopsies at his father’s side, but always the medical details of the killings had been as unarguable as the circumstances of their being inflicted. During the day and a half it still took for the bodies sufficiently to melt, he reviewed two basic guidance manuals on forensic pathology—both Communist-era unauthorized translations of American originals—and decided his best protection against professional criticism was to remove and preserve as many of the most obviously necessary body organs as possible for later Moscow analysis. Almost at once he realized that with three bodies he wouldn’t have enough proper preserving containers. He supposed he’d be able to improvise with ordinary pickle jars, but he wasn’t sure if he had sufficient formaldehyde. He’d have to be sparing from the start.