A Patriot in Berlin

by Read, Piers Paul;

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Kessler had asked.

  ‘A young couple – Russians, clearly … they spoke very little German – came into the gallery about six months ago and offered me an icon – a beautiful St Nicholas, early sixteenth-century. It was wrapped in a cloth and carried in a briefcase. They had some kind of bill of sale from the Patriarchate in Moscow, almost certainly a forgery, but all the same I made them an offer. I cannot remember exactly what it was. Say ten thousand marks. Not a bad offer, but all the same I could see what was going through their minds. They were astonished that it was worth so much, but just because I had offered them more than they had imagined, they now thought that perhaps it was worth more, so they said they would think about it and went away. I heard nothing for a week, but then the girl came in alone and asked if the offer was still open. I said it was but she looked frightened. She said that the boy had gone to Maslyukov who had offered them only a thousand marks. She said she would come back with the icon that afternoon, but she never returned, and ten days later Maslyukov offered me the same icon … for thirty thousand marks.’

  ‘Did you buy it?’

  ‘No. It was overpriced.’

  ‘The young couple never returned?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps Maslyukov put up his price.’

  ‘No. He frightened them. That was his style. So many had no proper visas or bills of sale, and if threats did not work …’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I don’t know. There were stories.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Accidents. Maslyukov had some very unsavoury friends.’

  ‘A charming profession!’

  She frowned. ‘Are there no corrupt policemen?’

  Kessler laughed. ‘So I am told. But tell me: did you ever come across Maslyukov’s wife?’

  Katerina von Duse wrinkled her nose. ‘Once or twice. A dreadful woman.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Worse than her husband. Grasping. Also vulgar.’

  ‘Would she have known details of the business?’

  ‘Certainly. She was cleverer than he was. An Armenian, I think, or a Jew.’

  ‘Could they have been killed by a rival dealer?’

  ‘He had no rival,’ she said. ‘Not in Berlin, at any rate. Those that there were had disappeared.’

  Even before he heard this opinion from Katerina von Duse, Kessler had come to dislike Vera Maslyukov. The image of her fat, putrid corpse had lodged in his mind. The set of her features in death, the features twisted in that horrible caricature of sexual ecstasy, still disturbed him. She had been tied up, tortured and then killed. He should feel sympathy, pity, outrage: instead, he only remembered the hair from her moustache, some on the tape, some still on her upper lip. The pungent aroma that still lingered in his nostrils made Kessler imagine that she had somehow wallowed in her agony just as she had wallowed in pleasurable sensations; that she was primitive, indulgent, a grotesque blob of flesh around her own nerve endings. He loathed the victim but still had to find the man who had killed her. That was his job.

  Kessler’s obsession with Vera Maslyukov distracted him from a close scrutiny of her husband’s corpse. It was only when he seemed to have reached a dead end with the tape that had gagged her, and the shreds of tobacco on the floor, that Kessler returned to the report from the forensic experts on Grigori Maslyukov.

  His body had been found at the bottom of the stairs, five or six metres from the front door. His hand held the butt of a revolver on the inside pocket of his jacket. No bullet had been fired. Presumably they had shot him because he was reaching for his gun. His revolver was a Smith and Wesson; the bullet extracted from his body was from a Beretta. Both were common weapons. The specialists had been unable to make much of the markings from the bullet that had gone through Maslyukov’s heart. Only one comment in their report attracted Kessler’s attention. ‘The subject was killed by a single bullet entering the heart, a remarkably accurate shot from a short-barrelled weapon of this kind, if fired across the hallway from the front door.’

  Remarkably accurate. Anything remarkable was unusual and anything unusual was a clue. If the revolver itself was not significant, the use of it was; because it was far harder than people supposed from watching television to bring down a man with a single shot, unless it is from point-blank range. From the position of Maslyukov’s body, the trajectory of the bullet suggested that he had been shot from the direction of the door. Had the killer entered with his weapon drawn? Or had he beaten Maslyukov to the draw? Either way, he had had no time to take careful aim yet had fired a single shot that went straight to the heart.

  So what? Kessler had the plan of the hallway spread out before him with the position of Maslyukov’s body marked in ink and the probable path of the bullet a black dotted line. Had Maslyukov recognized his assailant? Who had let him in? Had they had a key? Or had Vera opened the door? All in all, it suggested a more accomplished operation than one would expect from Russian mafiosi.

  Dorn came into Kessler’s office. ‘We’ve got nowhere,’ he said. ‘It’s a waste of time.’

  ‘Have you looked into people leaving for the Soviet Union the day after the crime?’

  ‘Yes. From Schönefeld, nothing. Or nothing convincing. There were direct flights from Frankfurt to Moscow and Kiev. But if they were taking the icons with them, they could hardly have packed them all into suitcases …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They are more likely to have left them in Munich or Frankfurt or even here in Berlin.’

  ‘Or Switzerland. Or Liechtenstein.’

  Dorn shook his head. ‘We’re wasting our time, chief. What’s the point of checking all these entries and exits? It won’t be Russians from Russia who topped them, and if it was, they would hardly fly in and out like a trade delegation …’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can we drop it, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dorn turned to go but Kessler held him back. ‘What about this?’ He tapped his pencil on the dotted line showing the trajectory of the bullet.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘One shot. Straight to the heart.’

  ‘Luck?’

  ‘Or skill.’

  ‘They don’t have skill, these gangsters. That’s why they use Uzis or sawn-off shotguns.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Dorn looked puzzled. ‘So what do we conclude from that?’

  ‘That he was a good shot, a very good shot.’

  ‘Experienced?’

  ‘Trained.’

  ‘Ex-army?’

  ‘Not with a Beretta.’

  ‘Then what? Intelligence?’

  ‘More likely.’

  ‘Ours or theirs?’

  ‘Could be either.’

  ‘Any noise from the BfV?’

  ‘No. But then we haven’t enquired.’

  ‘It’s a long shot.’

  ‘Yes.’ Kessler looked down at the plan. ‘Precisely. A long shot. Let’s see where it takes us.’

  There were channels for liaison between the West Berlin police and West Germany’s ‘Office for the Protection of the Constitution’, the BfV, but Kessler chose not to use them. They were slow. It would mean briefing his superiors on the progress of his investigation which in itself would be awkward since there was none. He had also found that the local BfV people were reluctant to put things on the record. Requests went to Cologne; authorization was arbitrary. Kessler always ended up with a fraction of what he wanted to know.

  He also knew that the BfV still had their hands full dealing with the disbanded East German secret police, the Stasi. His request would go into an in-tray and might not be considered for weeks. He therefore said nothing to his superiors but telephoned a contact called Grohmann and arranged to meet him that evening in a bar in Wilmersdorf.

  Grohmann was hardly a friend. Kessler felt no particular fondness for him or anyone else in the BfV. The paymasters of the BfV were the Christian Democrats in Bonn,
and reflex anti-Communism made it suspicious of the West Berlin police whose leftist sympathies dated from the days of the Weimar Republic. Kessler was hardly soft on Communism, and he appreciated that West Berlin had been sustained by the subventions from the Federal Republic; all the same, he felt no great affection for the government in Bonn.

  But just as Berlin had needed Bonn, so Bonn had needed Berlin, not just as a showcase for capitalism and democracy but also as a centre for its operations to the East. They might treat the city police as auxiliaries but they needed those auxiliaries all the same; and if Kessler now wanted some help from Grohmann, he was only calling in favours he had done for Grohmann outside official channels in the past.

  Grohmann was ordinary in appearance – medium height, glasses, brown trousers, a green blouson. He might have been a maths teacher on his day off, or perhaps the company secretary of a small firm. He looked at his watch when Kessler came in, even though Kessler was on time, and after a curt nod of greeting asked him what he wanted to drink.

  Kessler ordered a beer. Grohmann paid – not from generosity, Kessler suspected, but to be able to leave without waiting for the barman to return.

  ‘Maslyukov,’ said Kessler.

  Grohmann sipped his beer. ‘Grigori Maslyukov?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The art dealer. I remember reading about it.’

  ‘In the papers or in a memo?’

  ‘In the papers.’

  ‘He was murdered. So was his wife.’

  ‘So I read.’

  ‘They tortured her first.’

  ‘I didn’t read that.’ Grohmann peered into his glass as if looking for a fly in his beer.

  ‘We didn’t put it out.’

  ‘Why was she tortured?’

  ‘We don’t know. In fact, we know very little. We need help.’

  ‘As it happens,’ said Grohmann, ‘when I read about Maslyukov, I checked to see if we had him on our files.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  Grohmann put down his glass. ‘Nothing much. He came West in 1982, was given asylum, imported icons, made a fortune …’

  ‘An entrepreneur?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not an agent?’

  Grohmann shrugged. ‘If he was, he wasn’t active. They may have been saving him for something.’

  ‘Any reason to think that?’

  ‘No. I think he was probably what he seemed to be.’

  ‘So no reason for anyone here to kill him?’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Any of you people, or the Americans.’

  ‘Certainly not us …’

  ‘The Americans?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  Kessler glanced at Grohmann, trying to assess whether or not he meant what he said. ‘Whoever killed him was a good shot.’

  ‘What weapon?’

  ‘A Beretta.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Much favoured by the KGB.’

  ‘Could it have been them?’

  ‘Possibly …’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the icons. They may have come to reclaim them and have met with … resistance.’

  ‘If they were stolen, why not go through Interpol?’

  ‘Official channels? No. Too corrupt in Russia. Too slow in Brussels. And anyway, it would be difficult to prove that they were stolen.’

  ‘So they send a team to recover the icons, are recognized or ambushed, and shoot Maslyukov before he shoots them?’

  ‘That’s possible.’

  ‘Why torture the wife?’

  He shrugged. ‘To find where other icons were hidden, perhaps. Or the numbers of bank accounts.’

  ‘Have you any idea who might have led such a team?’

  Grohmann scratched his chin. ‘In the past, the KGB did some of the smuggling of icons. It was a perk that went with foreign travel. So if they mounted an operation to get them back, it would have to be insulated or else Maslyukov’s former customers would tip him off.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘That it wouldn’t have been done through the usual KGB personnel. It would have been a special operation, mounted directly from Moscow.’

  ‘So the chances of identifying the killer would be small?’

  ‘I can make enquiries but …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Even if we identify the killer, it’s unlikely that he could be extradited.’

  ‘Unless Yeltsin wanted to establish his law-abiding credentials.’

  ‘In which case it might make sense to play the game strictly according to the rules and ask Interpol for help from the Russian police.’

  ‘Would they give it?’

  Grohmann shrugged. ‘They’ll send someone, certainly, because Interpol pays. Whether he helps or hinders is another matter.’ Grohmann drank down the rest of his beer. ‘But you’re going to a lot of trouble. Does it matter that much who killed the Maslyukovs after all this time?’

  ‘It matters,’ said Kessler, ‘not because of the Maslyukovs, but to get the message across that Berlin is not going to become like the Chicago of Al Capone.’

  ELEVEN

  On the day General Savchenko was due back in Moscow, Nikolai Gerasimov drove out to Zhukovska to visit the celebrated painter, Anatoly Sergeyevich Orlov. He used a Volga from the Lubyanka car pool; his Samara was once again in the hands of Georgi Nazayan. Ease of access to Georgi’s mechanic was one of the reasons why Nikolai had returned to live with his wife in the flat on the Ulitsa Akademika Koroleva. He had neither forgiven nor forgotten, but had grown tired of sleeping on sofas, wearing dirty shirts and travelling by bus.

  Gerasimov took some time to find the dacha. The straight roads cut through the pine forest all looked alike. Each house was set back behind a fence in its own hectare of land. Some had no numbers. They were all large by Soviet standards, most built in the 1950s with three or four bedrooms, given by the Party to those considered to have made an outstanding contribution to their country in science or the arts. Rostropovich had lived there. So had the physicist Sakharov until he had been turned into a dissident by his second wife, Ylena Bonner. Gerasimov’s lip curled at the thought of Sakharov. Times had changed but not Gerasimov’s instinctual distaste for those who had betrayed the Soviet cause.

  He finally found Orlov’s villa, and parked the Volga outside the gate. A drive led from the gate to a garage and the back door of the house. There was a lawn in front of the house – a small clearing in the forest. The grass was uncut and was half covered by damp, dead leaves. The doors to the garage had moss growing between the planks of wood. They did not appear to have been opened for years. Gerasimov looked up and saw a large north-facing window that he took to be that of old Orlov’s studio. Some slates were missing from the gable. Ferns grew out of the gutter. More moss had grown where there was damp on the walls.

  Gerasimov knocked on the door. There was silence. He had telephoned; he was expected; but so strong was the impression that the house was empty that, had it not been for the window of the studio, he might have decided that he had come to the wrong place. He knocked again and, after waiting and listening for a further few minutes, he heard a shuffling of slippered feet.

  The door opened. A tall woman, between sixty and seventy years old, invited him in. Like Tatiana Orlova, she did not ask who he was or why he was there.

  Gerasimov stepped into a pantry. Muddy boots stood on the floor. Empty vases stood in a low sink.

  ‘Natasha Petrovna?’

  ‘Yes. Come this way.’

  She led him through from the pantry into a dark hallway, and from there into a living room that was scarcely lighter: it looked out onto the garden but the garden itself was enclosed by pine trees, their shade welcome in summer, no doubt, but on a cloudy day in April shrouding the house in gloom.

  ‘If you will wait,’ she said, ‘I will tell my husband that you are here.’
/>   Gerasimov remained standing. From the look of the furniture it seemed that little had been changed since the house was built in the late 1950s. The chairs were made of varnished wood, with upholstered backs and seats. The same veneer had been used for the dining table and for the glass-fronted bookcases that ran along the wall. There was a grand piano at one end of the room and, displayed on a sideboard like birthday cards, stood leather folders containing certificates from different Soviet institutions – the Academy of Sciences, the Central Committee – commending Anatoly Orlov for his services to the arts. On one, Gerasimov saw the signature of Stalin; on another, Khrushchev’s; on a third, that of Leonid Brezhnev. There was an Order of the Red Banner, an Order of Lenin, all the honours that could be bestowed on a favoured artist; and when he looked up at the pictures hanging on the walls, Gerasimov could see that several had been painted by Orlov, some of them portraits, early works before he had evolved the distinctive style so familiar to every Soviet child – faces of workers set in the heroic, proletarian mould with square jaw, grim look, clenched fist, unyielding eye.

  Over the mantel there was a portrait of Lenin, again one of the kind that had hung in galleries in every major city of the former Soviet Union. It was on a smaller scale, of course, which made it unsuitable for a public collection. There was even a twinkle in the Soviet leader’s eye.

  ‘That is an early work.’

  Gerasimov turned. Behind him stood an old man wearing a dressing gown. Beneath the dressing gown he wore loose trousers, a shirt and a badly knotted tie. On his head was a tasselled fez.

  ‘It is entitled Lenin Amused, and was thought unsuitable for public exhibition. Prophets are not supposed to have a sense of humour.’

  Gerasimov, for all his professional training, could not suppress a look of astonishment at the old man’s costume.

  ‘Ah. I see that you’re amused, too. Well, it’s cold in my studio, damned cold, so I have to wear a hat and a fur hat’s too heavy and a peaked cap cuts out the light.’