Dead Men Living Page 8

  Novikov said, “Very little changes here. Never for the better.”

  It was difficult to conceive that what little Charlie could see outside the car could have been worse. The countryside was unlike anything he had seen or experienced before, ever imagined. The stretched-to-the near-horizon twilight was only broken by the stick-drawn blackness of skeletal, leaf-naked trees, a child’s pencil drawing abruptly denied by the suddenly vivid, paint-box colors of rarely seen plants brought to life by the strange thaw. Most difficult of all was to believe that beneath such a barren, infertile moonscape, larger than the entire Indian subcontinent, lay the majority of the world’s reserves of oil, gas, coal, gold and diamonds. Or that for so many Stalin years—and after—men, women and child slaves had little more than their bare hands, and those stick-thin tree branches for pit props, to mine it.

  Charlie, with difficulty, remained silent, his foot-throbbing instinct telling him the other man had more to say. But abruptly Novikov had fallen silent, although his hands were still white-knuckled at the wheel and the perspiration still flecked his upper lip.

  They entered Yakutsk along the Ploshchad Druzhby. Charlie had read, along with everything else, of the melting effect of brick and concrete houses upon permanently frozen ground but hadn’t anticipated the added effect of the unprecedented thaw. One of Sasha’s English-learning nursery rhyme books had a doggerel about a little crooked man who lived in a little crooked house and Charlie thought it could have been written about this place. Only the wooden buildings lifted free of the ground on stilts had any proper, houselike shape. Everything of brick or concrete was lopsided, tilting this way and that, their walls fissured, cracked and lined like old men’s faces.

  Novikov turned on to Prospekt Lenina, pointed to a series of buildings, all close together and said, “My professional opposition.” Outside of each were docile lines of men and women, waiting for admission.

  Wrong to appear too ignorant, decided Charlie. “Shamans?”

  Novikov nodded. “Healers. And a lot more besides. The local people don’t understand what’s happening with the weather. It should be cold now: minus twenty celcius, at least. Possibly lower. Snow a meter, two meters deep. They think it’s a curse. That the spirits are offended.”

  “What will they do to placate them?” asked Charlie.

  Novikov humped his shoulders. “There are rituals … offerings …” He caught Charlie’s quick sideways look. “No,” he said, smiling for the first time. “No blood sacrifices. But they’re linking these killings with it. They know it would have been impossible for those bodies to have been where they were. They say spirits put them there, as a warning.”

  “Of what?” asked Charlie.

  “That’s what they’re asking the shamans to tell them.”

  Through the topsy-turvey buildings Charlie occasionally glimpsed the Lena River, which became more visible, muddy, debris-littered and unusually fast, as they began to clear the town. He’d kept a comparison between the number of motorized to horse-drawn vehicles and decided he was right about the choice of the Ontario Hotel.

  As they entered the parking lot Charlie said it wouldn’t take him long to unpack and Novikov said he wasn’t in any hurry.

  The hotel was properly built for the normal local climate and far better than a lot of hotels in which Charlie had stayed in the Eastern Bloc during his operational days of the Cold War. There was no bribe-prompting hindrance with their reservations, all of which were on the third floor, Charlie’s room directly opposite Miriam’s. The shower worked and despite the promise to the waiting man downstairs Charlie used it and changed, convinced the jacket he’d been wearing retained the odorous trace of his gap-toothed aircraft companion. He took particular care to avoid snagging the mosquito net he’d had shipped in with the special hat and doused the window area with insect spray. The bath had a plug still attached to its chain, so there had been no need for the spare he’d packed, from long experience. Everything he did, however, was automatic, his mind upon the journey from the airport. Yakutsk might as well be on another planet and its inhabitants aliens, but Charlie didn’t have any doubt there were messages and meanings in the curious conversation he’d had with the pathologist. They would still have to come from the man himself: someone clearly as nervous as Novikov could easily be frightened away.

  It was an uneasy gathering in the bar below, an uneasiness which Charlie did not have to work too hard to maintain. Vadim Lestov remained Siamese-twin close to an accepting Miriam, while the two local police officers tried hard but seemingly unsuccessfully to ingratiate themselves with Olga Erzin and the forensic scientist. When Charlie joined them, Vitali Novikov was trying to talk to the Moscow pathologist, too. Her patronizing disinterest in the local medical examiner verged upon outright rudeness.

  They ate reindeer steaks, which Charlie enjoyed, identifying from its texture the dried turd the man beside him had chewed upon during the incoming flight. The reserve was more noticeable during the meal from Olga and the forensic scientist than from Lestov, although the militia colonel kept himself to one glass of Canadian-imported wine. Miriam tried hard but failed with the other woman and Charlie concentrated determinedly upon Vitali Novikov, holding the man’s total attention with talk of London and Moscow, carefully interspersed with hints of the authority that seemed important to the doctor.

  It was Charlie who afterward suggested returning to the bar and its Canadian whiskey, which he considered an unexpected bonus. Everyone except Charlie, who was confident of his capacity, and Olga, who appeared uncaring, continued to limit their alcohol intake, although as the evening progressed Lestov’s stammering became more pronounced.

  Using Novikov’s insistence that his wife was expecting him, Charlie broke the evening up, walking with the local pathologist to the lobby where the elevators were.

  Charlie said, “Thank you again for being at the airport. I enjoyed our conversation.”

  “I did, too,” said Novikov.

  “I’m looking forward to starting work tomorrow. I’m going to be relying upon you a great deal. I hope we can learn to work together.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be anyone else’s idea.”

  “I’m only interested in my own,” said Charlie. “In case you need to contact me at all, I’m in room thirty-seven.”

  “I’ll remember that,” promised Novikov.

  Charlie rode bemused, silently, to the third floor but made no effort to get into bed. Within fifteen minutes he heard Miriam’s quick footsteps, alone, along the outside corridor and her door open and shut. It was half an hour later when there was a second set of heavier footsteps and another quick opening and closing of the American’s door.

  With the six-hour time difference it was still only six in the evening in Moscow, but Charlie failed to get a connection to the embassy when he tried to dial direct. Experimentally Charlie booked the call through the hotel switchboard, where it would be logged. The connection was made immediately. Charlie smiled, not surprised.

  Raymond McDowell and Richard Cartright came anxiously on to a conference call together. For the benefit of the suspected eavesdropper, Charlie exaggerated the total cooperation and assured the two men he had made the official request for the return of the body, which had amounted to the only proper conversation that evening with the militia commander.

  “Do you imagine any problem with that?” asked McDowell.

  “No.”

  “When are you meeting the council?”

  “Nothing’s been arranged.” Which wasn’t, Charlie had already decided, an oversight. He made up his mind to give the head of chancellery a gift of his special hat if McDowell had personally to come from Moscow.

  “What’s it like there?”

  “Unusual.”

  “London is concerned,” announced Cartright. “The finding of the bodies got leaked, it seems, through Canada, and from there, obviously, to America. There’s a lot of media interest building up.”

  “I can
imagine,” said Charlie.

  “I’ve promised a cable from here tomorrow.”

  “I’ll try to give you something.” Charlie hesitated. “If I haven’t come through to you by this time tomorrow, you ring me. Telephone calls out aren’t easy.”

  Charlie had just replaced the telephone when the knock came hesitantly at his door.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” said the rapidly blinking Novikov.

  “Not at all,” said Charlie, opening the door more widely.

  Richard Cartright was seeking, not providing, so it was right he crossed the river from the British embassy to the American legation on Ulitza Chaykovskovo, and when Saul Freeman said he liked Chinese food Cartright suggested they simply walk the few blocks to the Peking. It was Freeman who guided the way into the foreign currency section. Cartright deferred to the American’s superior knowledge of a Chinese menu written in Russian, too.

  “We heard from Charlie in Yakutsk,” offered Cartright, at once. “Just arrived. Nothing’s started yet.”

  “That’s what Miriam told me. Bizarre place, apparently.”

  “Thought you might have gone yourself.”

  “What about you?” hedged Freeman.

  “Would have done in the old days,” agreed Cartright, as if he were volunteering something, seeing a way to follow. “MI5 in England is increasingly taking an FBI, crime-fighting role, so it had to be Charlie.”

  The wine—Georgian—was poured without their being asked to taste it. The surprise was that it was drinkable.

  “Interesting guy,” said Freeman, which was precisely the reaction Cartright wanted.

  “No one at the embassy quite knows how to take him. Lot of experience, apparently. Bit unconventional.” Like the second phone call from Gerald Williams was unconventional, although it was a combined operation and Cartright had checked that the two financial directors were talking to each other in London. Cartright’s unease was not so much keeping an eye on a colleague as personal apprehension at that colleague being as odd and as unpredictable as he was finding Charlie Muffin to be.

  “One of our guys died in that nuclear business,” reminded Freeman, although without hostility.

  “There were some casualties, although not physical, at our embassy, too,” recalled Cartright, nervously. “You ever go out socially with him, find out what sort of guy he was?”

  Freeman shook his head. “Gather he and a gal from our technical department in Washington got close on the nuclear thing, but he doesn’t seem particularly social, apart from the odd drink. Got a hell of an apartment, I understand. Never been there, though.”

  “Neither have I.” Cartright decided he was wasting his time. “Got any interesting numbers to swap?”

  Freeman smiled. “Got to know a fantastic Aeroflot stewardess.”

  “Worth a hello call?”

  “Wouldn’t be telling you if she wasn’t. Her name’s Irena.”

  “It must be widely known that there was a camp nearby?” pressed Charlie.

  “There were so many.”

  “How did you remember Gulag 98?”

  “My father.”

  “You haven’t told anyone else? Not Ryabov or Kurshin?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I want something they can’t give me.”

  “What makes you think I can?”

  “I’m taking the biggest chance I’ve ever taken in my life, in praying that you might be able to. And until you do, you don’t get everything. Which is how I am protecting myself.”

  9

  In a long and often uncertain life, Charlie Muffin had met a lot of desperate men and recognized that Vitali Maksimovich Novikov was a very desperate man indeed. Without any compunction Charlie further decided it was an attitude to be taken every advantage of, certainly until the doctor stopped playing games and spelled out the deal he wanted. Everyone had to live, and to live it was first necessary to survive. It was a very good beginning.

  The transport division was the same as the previous day. As they assembled in the hotel parking lot, Charlie thought it was practical for Olga Erzin to have worn trousers, but as big as she was it created an unfair comparison between the Russian pathologist and the American, whose jeans were actually tailored.

  As the vehicles moved off, Novikov said, “It’s getting hotter.”

  He’d follow the other man’s pace at all times after the previous night’s approach, Charlie decided, settling in Novikov’s car. Which did not, of course, preclude a little prodding.

  The sun was actually visible today and it was airless. The roads were permanently wet with the seepage from the deeper thawing of the road-edge tundra, and the insect swarms were much thicker and persistent. Charlie lowered the window, hoping the rush of passing air would blow them away. It didn’t seem to help. Seizing the obvious opening, Charlie said, “When the weather is normal, when you have your usual spring and summer here, does it get as hot as this?”

  “This would be a very hot day. Unusually so.”

  “At the end of your summer, after a period of warmth, how deep into the ground does the thaw reach?”

  Novikov gave one of his nervous sideways glances, aware it was not a casual conversation about the weather. “About a meter, I suppose. Maybe less. Why?”

  “How deep was the grave?”

  Novikov drove on in silence for several moments. “Much deeper than that. At least a meter and a half. Kurshin took measurements.”

  “Had anything been done to disinter the bodies, before you arrived ?”

  “No.”

  “But an arm was protruding?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much of an arm? To the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder?” asked Charlie.

  “From the wrist. Not much of that.”

  They were among the higgledy-piggledy nursery-rhyme buildings of the town again. The lines seemed longer outside the shaman temples on Prospekt Lenina. A lot of the people there—and on the other streets—were wearing their heavy winter clothes, unbuttoned and undone, expecting the phenomena to disappear at a finger snap or a shaman’s incantation.

  Although it was only ten in the morning, there were already several men slumped drunkenly or sleeping against walls. One lay in the gutter. Novikov said, “Miners. They come into town once a month, to drink and fuck. There have to be houses, because normally it’s too cold, but they’re hardly brothels. Just shelters. There’s three in the next street back, by the vodka factory. I suppose there’s something significant that the factory is the biggest building in town.”

  Charlie thought the red, brick-dust smear down an ocher wall looked like blood several moments before Novikov identified it as their mortuary destination. Charlie made a mental note to pick up later on the mine conversation.

  The transformation of Olga Erzin in the surroundings of a mortuary was almost visible. She virtually expanded into an autocratic bully, clipping her words and responses, instinctively assuming superiority. It was Olga, not Novikov, whose mortuary and laboratory it was, who led the way up the rickety stairs into the building. She stopped just inside the autopsy room, exaggerating her disdain, making no effort to help Novikov or his two tentative assistants get the three naked corpses from the storage cupboards onto examination trolleys. Already on separate tables alongside each, like produce displays at a village fete, were the proper specimen containers augmented by village fete vegetable jars holding what Charlie guessed to be every removable organ of each body. Behind each, again on separate identifying tables, were the uniforms and their contents. At once Charlie saw, dismayed, that nothing had been done to keep the uniforms or the woman’s clothes in the subzero temperature at which they had survived for so long. Already mold had begun to fur the fabric, endangering possible stains or marks from the moment of death.

  Charlie said to Novikov, “I’d appreciate it if you could keep it as simple—as nonmedically technical—as possible.” He smiled. “I’m going to need all the help I can get and
you’re the only person who might be able to provide it.”

  “That’s a hopeful expectation,” sniffed the Moscow pathologist.

  “Which I’m sure will be met,” said Charlie, still smiling. “I’d appreciate your nontechnical input, too. That’s the understanding, isn’t it? Total and mutual cooperation?”

  The woman looked sharply at Charlie, aware of the rebuke. She said, “I’ll look forward to your input, as well.”

  “The sooner we start, the better, then,” said Charlie, easily.

  The woman made as if to respond, but then apparently changed her mind. Instead she turned back to Novikov and peremptorily said, “Talk me through your examination.”

  To Olga Erzin’s obvious irritation, Novikov translated every medical technicality into layman’s terms, identifying each organ in each container. Charlie listened patiently to the recital, waiting for the details of the actual injuries. At the same time, he tried his best to study the clothing, conscious for the first time that a space at the bottom of the individual tables was allocated to scene-of-crime photographs. They were either badly taken or badly printed—or perhaps both—but even from a distance of almost two meters Charlie thought he isolated something curious.

  He concentrated totally upon Novikov when the man began to talk about the head wounds, looking around anxiously for the recovered bullets, relieved when he saw two in separate kidney bowls among the organ exhibits. Again before everyone else, he said, “All three were shot in the back of the head?”

  “Yes,” confirmed the local medical examiner.

  “I can only see two bullets.”

  “The one that killed the woman exited, through the throat.”

  “Didn’t you find it in the grave?” demanded Denebin, at once.

  “No,” admitted Kurshin, to the forensic scientist’s sigh.

  “Were there any powder burns to the skulls, to indicate the gun was held tightly against the head?” asked Miriam.