Dead Men Living Read online

  Irena smiled, taking the large, enveloping chair beside the couch on which Charlie sat. “She said she wanted to have a secret, so I told her to make one up.”

  Charlie indicated the drink, pouring a second for himself. Irena added just one ice cube, properly sipping the water separately, and Charlie decided there was nothing wrong with a pretension if it was carried out confidently enough. Irena was doing fairly well.

  “How long have you and Natalia been together?”

  “A while,” said Charlie, evasively.

  The woman was looking around the apartment. “And isn’t she the lucky one. Sasha said princesses lived here once and I believe her. You must be either very important or very rich or both.”

  “There’s a lot of opportunities in Moscow now.” Charlie decided that apart from an obvious facial resemblance Irena was different in every way from Natalia. He preferred Natalia’s natural darkness to Irena’s blond-highlighted hair and if he was making a direct comparison—which he was—he thought Natalia’s figure was better, too. Irena verged upon the voluptuous and seemed to want to, from the tightness of the second-skin jeans as well as the sweater.

  “I know someone from the American embassy trade division,” Irena declared. “Saul Freeman. You know him?”

  “Of him,” said Charlie, cautiously. Saul Freeman headed the FBI’s station at the U.S. embassy. It had been the Bureau’s success in getting a man based in Moscow—and the dominance and Western crime links of the Russian mafia—that had been instrumental in Charlie’s appointment. Freeman was a balding New York bachelor who shared with the British embassy’s matchingly single MI6 resident, Richard Cartright, the apparent ambition to screw every woman in Moscow. Natalia wouldn’t be happy at Irena finding them together and most certainly not at Irena knowing someone with a Bureau function from another Western embassy. “How’d you meet Saul?”

  “He was on my flight, about six months ago.” She grinned. “Not by choice. It was the only plane available.” She looked around the apartment again. “But his place doesn’t come within a million miles of this.”

  Cautiously Charlie said, “You seeing each other?”

  Irena grimaced again, pulling down the corners of her mouth. “We went out to dinner once or twice.”

  “But?”

  “He didn’t make me laugh. And he counts.”

  “Counts?”

  “In a notebook. Writes down what he spends, when he spends it.”

  “You’re joking!”

  “I told you, there was nothing to laugh about. I think you’d make me laugh, though. What do you think?”

  “I think I know someone who’d think he was terrific making a note of his expenditure,” said Charlie, refusing the flagrant invitation.

  “She’d be disappointed. He makes love by number, too. Hup, one two three, hup, one two three … .”

  Charlie laughed, because he was expected to, curious just the same. Genuine free spirit? Or something else? He shouldn’t kid himself it was anything else.

  “It’s a man.”

  “Maybe that’s his real interest. He tried to explore.”

  Time to call a halt, Charlie decided. “I’ll check Sasha. Say good night.”

  “She’s okay.”

  “I’ll still check.” Sasha was asleep, the Donald Duck string around her wrist. Charlie gently disentangled it and put it on the bedside table. Sasha snuffled but didn’t wake up. When he returned to the smaller sitting room, Irena had moved from the chair to the couch upon which Charlie had earlier sat. He momentarily considered the chair but went back to his original seat, although wedging himself in the corner farthest from the woman and half turning toward her.

  Irena swiveled toward him, one leg crooked onto the seat, smiling over the separating gap. “I won’t bite. Not unless I’m asked.”

  “Good.” What the hell was this all about? Careful against misinterpretation, he warned himself.

  “What’s Natalia told you about me?” demanded Irena.

  “Very little.”

  “She hasn’t told me anything about you, either. So why don’t you?”

  “Ask Natalia.”

  “Why so shy?”

  “I don’t want to bore you, like Saul seems to have done.”

  “I don’t think you would.”

  He lifted the bottle. Irena nodded. Once, thought Charlie, this might even have been fun. “How do you know I don’t keep an account book?”

  “I’m usually good at judging men. Saul was a mistake.”

  So what was Irena? A prick teaser or a pubic scalp collector? One was potentially as dangerous as the other, quite apart from the embassy connection. That wasn’t a danger, now that it was over. And he wasn’t interested in—didn’t want to answer—either of the other questions. “Maybe this is a mistake.”

  “What?” The smile was quite open now.

  “I think you are a very exciting woman. Beautiful,” said Charlie, who believed, without conceit, that he’d perfected sincere-sounding dishonesty into an art form. “At any other time I would have liked to have played these word games—every other sort of game—for a very long time. But I’m with your sister, whom I love. As I love Sasha. We’re wrongly met: wrong time, wrong circumstances. Lost opportunities … .” Jesus! thought Charlie. There should have been violin music for that last bit. “So it’s got to be just friends. Okay?”

  Before Irena could answer, the telephone jarred into the room and Charlie thought, saved by the bell, and was right. He replaced the receiver and said, “Natalia’s on her way home.”

  “No,” said Irena.

  “No what?” frowned Charlie, momentarily lost.

  “No, it’s not okay.”

  Fuck you, thought Charlie. At once he corrected himself. No, I won’t, despite the obvious offer.

  There is an elite group of men who observe with what can best be described as tolerance the comings and goings of political parties in what are described as democratic elections in the countries of the West. Invariably the word secretary appears somewhere in their title, which conveys totally the wrong impression of their absolute power and unparalleled influence, a misconception they foster because these are men who, if it were possible, would choose physically to be as invisible as they metaphorically are. It is they who, irrespective of briefly passing governments and electorally promised policies, ensure the stable passage of their respective countries through life’s stormy seas. Each is known personally to and operates with the other in a structure without name or written rules or constitution. It is enough that they know, which they do instinctively, without the need to explain to one another. They discuss.

  Such a man was Kenton Peters, an urbane, cultured American aristocrat of such independent means that his salary always went automatically to charity, a man who joined the American State Department during the Nixon administration, which he felt never would have ended as it did had he been in control, and who was the first person an incoming secretary of state asked to see, upon arrival at Foggy Bottom, unaware that Peters had approved his appointment before it had been offered.

  Another was James Boyce, whose family was traceable to the restoration of the English monarchy, which one or other of its members had loyally served ever since. Boyce himself had entered the British Foreign Office, of which he was now permanent secretary, during the late premiership of Edward Heath. Of all this special elite, throughout Europe and North America, Kenton Peters was the one with whom James Boyce preferred to operate—work would have been quite the wrong word—when the occasion demanded. It was Boyce who decided the Yakutsk murders were such a demanding occasion and made contact with Peters within an hour of the Russian message arriving at the Foreign Office.

  “This is something we never expected,” opened Boyce. “Bit of a damned nuisance, all ’round.”

  “Nothing we can’t handle.”

  “Of course not.”

  “How do you intend handling it, from your end?” asked the American.
r />   “Involve every intelligence department we’ve got, to create the maximum confusion. And insist I have access to everything, so I know at all times what’s going on and how to misguide, if necessary.”

  “You think we might have to stage a diversion?”

  “Such as?” questioned Boyce.

  “If anyone were to get too close and have to die, it could be blamed on the Russians or people in Yakutsk, couldn’t it?”

  “I don’t think there’s the remotest chance of anyone getting close, but it’s certainly something we should consider.”

  “Your person in Moscow disposable?”

  “They’re all disposable.”

  “I could move someone in from here to do it—someone nobody knows, with no provable attachment to an agency or government,” offered Peters.

  “Let’s make contingency plans,” agreed Boyce.

  “And keep in touch?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How?” shouted Natalia, knowing she was taking out on Charlie all the fears and frustrations of the meeting she’d just left but unable to separate them from the shock of finding Irena calmly sipping whiskey with him when she’d gotten home. And then having to sit through an hour of frigid conversation before it had been possible to get rid of the woman.

  “You gave her the bloody number. And the address!” Charlie shouted back. “She rang and said she had something for Sasha and I told her to bring it around sometime. I didn’t expect her to come right away.”

  She had given Irena the number, Natalia remembered. “Did you tell her you were attached to the embassy?”

  “Not directly. I let her think it was something to do with joint venture trading.” He wouldn’t tell Natalia that Irena knew Saul Freeman.

  “I’m sorry,” apologized Natalia. “I’m …” She stopped. “I’m not being a very nice person at the moment, am I?”

  “No,” answered Charlie, honestly. “But you’re allowed. The adjustment is bigger for you than it is for me. And obviously you’ve got a lot of work pressure.” He waited hopefully but she didn’t respond.

  6

  Charlie Muffin was on his first paper airplane of the day—a new prototype, with a separate tail section—when the dust-covered telephone rang and Sir Rupert Dean announced, “You’ll get everything on paper, of course. But I need you to understand a lot of things that aren’t written. The most important is that the future of the department—and your posting to Moscow—depends on your getting everything right.”

  Charlie had never wasted time over personal disappointments—apart from the death of his first wife, Edith, which would always be a personal disaster for which he’d never forgive himself—but there was a lasting surge of regret as he listened to the director-general. Sadness came close behind. And then—surprising himself—sympathy. Natalia hadn’t been intentionally perverse, hadn’t tried, in some way, to trick or ridicule him. Maybe she’d even thought the assignment wouldn’t be given to him, although he couldn’t really accept that, convenient though it would have been.

  Natalia was making a mess of it. Of everything. Of their being together—living together—and by trying to keep separate their professional lives and by not being able to trust him (for which he couldn’t blame her) and by trying to do everything her way, wrongly, was endangering all that they hoped to exist between them.

  Which was not the immediate consideration: the immediate consideration was his need totally to concentrate and understand what he was being told.

  “Every other agency is involved?” he demanded, determined against the slightest misunderstanding.

  “Every other agency has been asked to search their archives: contribute whatever they can,” replied Dean, equally pedantic. “The investigation is ours.”

  “Which you see as a test?”

  “We’re vulnerable: everyone snapping at our heels. We’ve got to answer all the questions, find out who he was and what he was doing there. We do that—you do that—and I’ll be able to fight whatever survival battle we’re confronted with.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then that’s what it could become: a battle for survival. At best we could become a branch of some other agency.”

  “What about my remaining here in Moscow?”

  There was a pause from the London end. “There are arguments being put up against the posting. They’d be hard to oppose.”

  Gerald fucking Williams, guessed Charlie. Why did the parsimonious bugger take as a personal insult Charlie’s special interpretation of an expense account? It wasn’t as if it was Williams’s money. Perhaps, thought Charlie, he should have considered the early challenges, too long ago now to remember, as more than the game he chose them to make it, virtually challenging the man to catch him out. Bluntly he said, “I fail to solve it, I get withdrawn? My role—my reason for being in Moscow—won’t exist anymore?”

  “It would certainly come up for very hard discussion.”

  “From what you said, these killings happened fifty years ago!” Charlie pointed out.

  “I know,” accepted Dean.

  “And no one’s acknowledging our victims belonged to their department?”

  “They’ve only been checking for a few hours, but so far, no.”

  “Supposedly checking,” qualified Charlie. “No one’s going to want this coming out of the woodwork. SIS or military intelligence or Christ knows who find they’re involved, they’re going to bury it for another fifty years.”

  There was a further silence from London. “The edict from Whitehall—and Downing Street—is that there mustn’t be any embarrassment, no matter how long ago it happened. Whatever it was.”

  “Which means they don’t want it solved!” protested Charlie. “It’s impossible. Ridiculous. We’re being set up.”

  “That’s why I’m calling you. I do believe we’ll stand or fall by this. You’ve personally got every support it’s possible for me to offer. I wish there were more. Better. And I know what I’m asking.”

  Charlie wished he did. Slipping back on to yesteryear wordage, Charlie said, “Who’s my control?”

  “You deal with me, direct, at all times,” stipulated the director-general. “But let’s stay with that. Control. Don’t you even think of trying or doing anything without discussing it with me first. One mistake—one miscalculation—is all it’s going to take.”

  This time it was Charlie who didn’t speak at once. Eventually he said, “Am I expected to work with SIS and the military attache here? Let them know everything I’m doing?”

  “Not until you’ve talked whatever it is through with me first.”

  “Which is what they’re being told, probably right now.”

  “Probably,” accepted Dean again.

  “You know it’s hopeless before I start?”

  “Close to being hopeless,” allowed the older man.

  “There’s not a lot left to say, is there?”

  “Everything we’ve got from the Russian Foreign Ministry is being faxed back right away. And don’t forget my personal support.”

  There wasn’t any point in further protests or arguments. “A British officer—and an American—dead for fifty years without anyone wondering what happened to them! And a woman, too! How the hell can you explain that?”

  “I can’t,” conceded Sir Rupert Dean. “That’s what you’ve got to do.”

  Natalia recognized she was the most exposed of them all: the one in the greatest danger. Although there was the outward, cosmetic appearance of personal and authoritative involvement, the presidential emissary and the deputy ministers all had their blame-ready intermediaries, after whom there was the final buffer of Natalia Nikandrova herself. It was she who provably had to select the Russian investigatory team and just as provably had to propose the precise moment to invite Washington and London to an international game of musical chairs and after that monitor from a distance of three thousand miles its progress in a time-lost republic where everyone would be tryi
ng to pull the safe seats away from everyone else at every discordant note. With one of its chair-snatching participants being Charlie Muffin, whose feet were always too painful for any sort of musical dance.

  It was a maze from which she desperately needed guidance and Charlie was the obvious person to give it. But if she did seek his guidance, this early, she’d have to tell him why Viskov distrusted her and she didn’t want any reminders of Alexei Popov.

  She’d grossly, stupidly overreacted the previous night to Irena being at the apartment, which had nothing at all to do with Charlie but everything to do with other fears—memories—she didn’t want to share with him, either. She was going to have to share a lot of other things, though. He’d hear today. Be told by London of the Yakutsk murders and realize she could have warned him. But hadn’t. Maybe, despite her aching loneliness and aching hope for her personal life at last to change, it would have been better if Charlie hadn’t come back to Moscow at all.

  Natalia physically shook herself, as if sloughing off her personal reflections.

  She had left Charlie in bed to get to the Interior Ministry before eight, determined to preempt Viskov or Travin—or both—from imposing a squad of their choosing and their loyalty upon the investigation. She worked, wearily resigned to the fact that she would be judged from whomever she assigned and that she couldn’t afford the slightest miscalculation. And to miscalculate the honesty and loyalty of the Moscow militia, in which neither existed, was the easiest possible mistake to make.

  It was ironic—and she hoped to her advantage—that the investigation would be in Yakutsk and not here in Moscow, where virtually the entire militia would have been initially distracted by the automatic requirement for financial reward for doing—or not doing, depending upon the paymaster—a job they were paid supposedly to do anyway. The disadvantage was that, denied the usual bribery by both the obvious age of the crime and the inevitable hostility from the indigenous Yakutsk and the gulag descendants, finding anyone without an impossible-to-leave workload could be more difficult than solving three fifty-year-old murders themselves. For the militia homicide detective she went for comparative youth, seeking out the most recently promoted, someone, she hoped, only yet ankle-deep in the corruption swamp and, she hoped, even more, still anxious to prove his ability.