People Who Walk In Darkness ir-15

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Gerald St. James had carefully worked out the plan for the demise of his own network. It had outlived its usefulness and had become far too vulnerable. Devochka was only a small part of the St. James empire, a very vulnerable part. Devochka had become too elaborate. If and when it was re-established, he would see to it that it was far more simple. As it stood now, the diamonds were smuggled out of Devochka by the regularly scheduled plane to Moscow. In Moscow, the diamonds were turned over to the Botswanans, who verified their authenticity and made arrangements to safeguard their transfer to a courier who would take them to the contact in Kiev, who, in turn, would get them to Paris, where they would be transported to London. It had evolved thus. It was much too awkward. It had all been set up by a member of the Russian parliament for a steep price. It had been early in Gerald St. James’s expansion. He would never do something so full of unnecessary intrigue again. A simple transfer of diamonds to Ellen in Moscow and a quick flight on St. James’s jet, and that would be that. The present system had to end, and so too did the contacts in Devochka, Moscow, and Kiev.

  “No,” said St. James. “Have him killed, but first have him eliminate any trace of what we have done in the mine.”

  “Cut off our access to the pipe?” she said calmly.

  “The trickle is not worth the risk. We’ll use our source to find another way to the pipe, but we’ll wait a few years. Patience. Moscow?”

  “The situation is a bit messy I’m afraid,” Sten said. “Another of our Botswanans has been killed. This time by the police. That leaves two, plus the one the alcoholic Russian is holding.”

  St. James shook his head before throwing the dart in his hand.

  “Situations involving the kind of people we deal with will often get messy.”

  “The Botswanans who are left do not know how to reach us. The one who is a hostage of the Russian. .”

  “Kolokov,” she supplied.

  “The Botswanan he has is our contact, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this Kolokov is proving himself an idiot.”

  “Yes,” she said. “The two remaining Botswanans seem to be planning a rescue or an exchange. It seems the police know about the planned rescue. Shall we warn Kolokov?”

  He looked at her and sighed.

  “No,” he said. “Let us not lose sight of our goal, which is. .”

  “To end our operation in Devochka, Moscow, and Kiev and eliminate anyone with whom we have had direct business contact so that it looks as if we were not involved.”

  “So that it looks as if we have been hurt by the murder and violence,” he amended. “Messy. I wonder if they ever have problems like this at DeBeers?”

  “I’m confident they do,” she said.

  He had at least fifteen darts left before he had to get up from his chair.

  “Eliminate the enterprise,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How difficult will it be to replace the Botswanans?”

  “Not difficult. Expensive.”

  “You will have two years from the time the current enterprise is terminated till we have a new presence in Moscow. That leaves Kiev.”

  “Balta is behaving rather strangely,” she said.

  “Strangely? The man is mad,” said St. James, deftly letting a dart fly and missing the red circle by at least a foot. “You know what he is doing?”

  “I think so,” she said. “With a man like that. .”

  “A man like that,” St. James repeated, remembering a time when circumstances had briefly made him a man like Balta, with a knife as sharp.

  “He plans to find the diamonds and keep the money for himself,” she said. “He has no intention I’m sure of turning over anything to the Botswanans.”

  “Who will not exist in any case. Talk to Balta.”

  “I doubt if it will do any good.”

  “I don’t intend to reason with him. I intend to lull him into a sense of complacency.”

  “And then?”

  “You will arrange to get the diamonds and the money and kill Balta. That will be the last step in our temporary closure of the Russian chain. The checkmate of Yaklovev and his Office of Special Investigations.”

  He paused, dart in hand, and sighed so slightly that only Ellen, who knew his every move, would have detected it.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “What an asinine name. Balta.”

  Mounted on shiny dark stone and laid into notches along the path of gray blocks rested the thirteen honored rectangular polished coffins. The coffins contained not human remains but capsules of earth from the Hero Cities of World War II-Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Volgograd, Sevastopol, Odessa, Novorossiysk, Kerch, Tula, the Brest Fortress, Murmansk, and Smolensk. The name of each city stood out in large letters facing the path.

  The memorial, the Eternal Flame, and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior meant little to Biko and Laurence other than as possible places in which to hide while they waited for the coming of the Russians who had James Harumbaki.

  Yesterday Patrice, before he was killed by the police, had wondered what they might do if the Russians came without their hostage. He had come to no clear conclusion. Biko and Laurence were even less equipped to deal with the problem. So they had concluded that they would arrive in the Alexandrovsky Gardens early, hide, wait, and when the Russians appeared with James Harumbaki they would spring out and fire, trying very hard not to kill James Harumbaki. If the Russians arrived without their hostage, they would try to bargain with the worthless stones Biko had in his pocket. They agreed that Laurence would do the talking, though his command of Russian was no better than Biko’s.

  But this was not to be.

  First, there were uniformed soldiers in full dress and carrying rifles guarding the ground-level tomb, which was set back against a high wall behind the thirteen entombed capsules of earth.

  They could be dealt with. They would have no idea what was going to happen, and both Biko and Laurence reasoned that in the bloody battle that was very likely to take place the death of a few soldiers caught in the crossfire would be marked as casualties of Moscow gang fighting.

  But this was also not to be.

  Biko and Laurence stood about forty yards from the memorial, off the path, behind a stand of bushes. They thought that this would be the direction from which the Russians would come with James Harumbaki.

  And then, quite suddenly, to their left, down the path a dozen or so people quietly appeared, men and women, mostly in their twenties or thirties. All of them were carrying flowers. The group went silently past Biko and Laurence to the tomb and placed the flowers among others that had been put there during the day. The soldiers stood at attention.

  Biko and Laurence waited behind a small brace of yellow-flowered bushes for the group to move away, but they stood silently, heads bowed.

  Then Biko and Laurence heard something coming from their right. At first there was a distant murmur of voices. Then it became a chanting. Then dozens of people appeared, crowding the path, bleeding over onto the grass.

  Biko and Laurence carefully moved farther back, where they were less likely to be seen.

  They could not understand who these new, angry people were. There were boys in black shirts, bearded Russian Orthodox priests carrying crosses and icons, old babushkas crying out.

  They descended on the small group that had laid out the flowers and began throwing stones, eggs, and condoms filled with water, shouting, “Moscow is not Sodom” and “Faggots Out.” One screaming young woman with a bullhorn, her face turning red, screeched a tinny-sounding, “Not Gay Pride. Queer Shame.”

  “What is happening?” asked Biko.

  “I do not know,” answered Laurence as about twenty policemen in full uniform and wearing helmets with Plexiglas face covers appeared as if from the air, swinging batons at the black shirts, priests, and old ladies.

  Surrounded, the twenty or so gays fought their way through the crowd with the help o
f the police and began to run, with the black shirts in pursuit. The police beat the attackers with clubs and pushed a dozen or so of them against the wall behind the tomb.

  “We must leave and come back in an hour,” said Laurence.

  Biko agreed. If this crowd was attacking a small group of quiet homosexuals peacefully placing flowers on a tomb, what might they do to two black men who were carrying weapons?

  As they eased away, above the shouting they could clearly hear the voice of the screaming woman on the bullhorn.

  “Mayor Yuri Luzhkov of our beloved Moscow has said that any attempt by these people to lay flowers here is a ‘desecration of a sacred place.’ They should expect to be beaten.”

  “Russians are very crazy people,” said Laurence. “I have known crazy people in Sudan, Ghana, but none as crazy as Russians.”

  Yes, thought Biko, Africa is much safer.

  Sasha Tkach had just been through an early morning ordeal. His phone had rung just before six while he lay in the darkness of his hotel room, awake but unwilling to rise, shower, and shave. He would move when the glowing red numbers on his tiny travel clock, a gift from his mother, hit six and two zeroes.

  “Sasha?”

  It was the very last person whose voice he wished to hear.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what your name means?” Lydia Tkach asked.

  “You woke me to ask. .?”

  “Aleksei, do you know?”

  She almost never called him Aleksei, and when she did so it was intended to indicate a very serious subject of conversation. The problem was that Lydia thought anything regarding her only son was monumentally important.

  “Defender of men,” he said.

  “Do you know what your name was supposed to be before your father, may he rest with the angels in a field of silver icons, insisted that you be called Aleksei?”

  “You are a Communist and an atheist,” he said, holding the phone a few inches from his ear to protect himself from his hard-of-hearing mother who, at the age of seventy, thought people could only be heard on telephones if they were shouted at. “You do not believe that my father is with any angels.”

  “I believe what the times dictate I should believe,” she shouted. “That is how we survive. Your name was to have been the same as my father’s, Kliment which means. .”

  “Merciful and gentle,” he concluded.

  “Merciful and gentle,” she said, not heeding her son’s words. “You were meant to be merciful and gentle.”

  “By God?”

  “No, by me. Did you see Maya?”

  “Yes.”

  “When is she coming home with the children?”

  “She is not.”

  “Try again.”

  “I’m going to go see her and the children as soon as you let me go.”

  “Who is keeping you? It is time for you to stop being a policeman. I will bet that even now as we are speaking some criminal is planning to beat you or seduce you or stab you or shoot you. .”

  “Or drop a rock on my head or beat me with a wooden cross or. .”

  “You are mocking me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are mocking your mother who is trying to save your marriage and your life,” she said.

  “I am sorry.”

  He was sitting up now, licking his dry lips with his dry tongue and wondering if perhaps his mother might not be right.

  “Think about it.”

  “I will,” he said.

  “Now go get my grandchildren and your wife.”

  Before he could ask her how she got his cell phone’s newly changed number, she hung up.

  He should plan what he was going to say, how he would say it. It was difficult to convince himself that he would be fine if she gave him another chance. If he could not convince himself, how could he convince Maya?

  What was it she had said? He was a lamb waiting to be shorn by any attractive woman. Some day the shears would slip and he would bleed and be standing shorn and suddenly naked.

  He staggered to the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked at himself in the mirror. He was not growing more handsome with each passing day.

  “Pathetic image that was meant to be Kliment, you must offer something meaningful. You must make a sacrifice that she cannot refuse.”

  His image looked back at him, letting him know exactly what that sacrifice must be. He hurried to shower, shave, wash, and dress so that he could see his children and present his gift to Maya.

  Elena lined up the 5 × 7 photographs next to the fax machine in the Russian embassy.

  They had two more days before the meeting that would determine the fate of the Office of Special Investigations.

  It was a little before seven in the morning and she had a buttered roll and a cup of coffee perched on the table next to the machine. The roll and coffee had been provided by a junior diplomat who had worked through the previous night on a report dealing with the potential tour of a Chinese cellist who now resided in Kiev.

  The junior diplomat, whose name was Machov, had told her that the fax machine would be in constant demand in less than twenty minutes when the rest of the staff started to come in.

  The first photograph was of Jan Pendowski. The second was of the French woman named Rochelle Tanquay, and the third was of a thin, vacant-eyed man with a scarf around his neck who appeared to be following the Kiev policeman.

  She faxed all three photos to Moscow. Later she would try to find a fax number for Porfiry Petrovich in Siberia. When she was finished, she put the photographs back in a folder in her briefcase and stood drinking her coffee and eating her roll.

  She yearned for a sausage, even a small one. She had been watching her weight for months and she was sure, though he denied it, Iosef was also watching her weight.

  He said that he loved her just the way she was, but when she pressed him about her size, he had admitted that she might be able to fit in clothing more svelte were she to shed a few pounds. Shed a few pounds. He had said it as if it were as easy as taking off one’s shoes. “Svelte” was not a descriptive term for Elena. Full-bodied was much more accurate. Her bones would not allow for svelte as they had not allowed her mother, aunt, or grandmothers a leaner frame.

  There was no way Elena Timofeyeva would or could ever look like Oxana Balakona or Rochelle Tanquay.

  In half an hour she was due in Jan Pendowski’s office for what she was certain would be a wild goose chase across Kiev in search of Oxana Balakona. She had agreed to let Sasha see Maya and the children instead of coming with her.

  The primary problem with being alone to spend the better part of a day with Pendowski was that he was certain to make sexual overtures unless she did something forceful. She was not flattered by the possibility of his advances. He seemed to be in very good condition. He made that clear by wearing his sleeves rolled up to display his muscles and his shirt unbuttoned one button to show just a bit of chest. He was not an oaf, and she could see how some women might find him interesting. Elena found him wearisome, however. The man was a walking unsatisfied penis.

  The one thing she had decided was that if he placed a hand on her once, she would remove it. If he placed a hand on her twice, he would hit the floor with a sudden and painful thud. She hoped, if that happened, there were many people around to watch, and that of the many people around to watch, police officers would be preferable.

  She checked her watch and went looking for the junior diplomat to ask him if there was a place nearby, perhaps a cart or stand, where she could buy a sausage sandwich.

  Iosef and Zelach were jostled forward by the crowd, wedged in between two bearded priests wielding crosses like bludgeons and crying out against specified and unspecified blasphemy. Iosef wondered where these men had been for the almost seventy godless years of Communism.

  It was difficult in the mélange of bodies to remain upright, to keep from getting herded by the police against the wall behind the tomb, and also to watch the two
Africans, who were running from the scene.

  The screaming woman with the bullhorn was at Zelach’s side now, as the two policemen tried to make their way through the crowd to the grass beyond the path. Zelach reached up and turned a knob on the bullhorn, sending out a screech that brought winces to the faces of police, gay mourners, and the angry mob. Then the bullhorn went silent. The screaming woman had not noticed Zelach’s move, but a babushka had and shouted, “That one. He turned it off.” She was pointing at Zelach.

  Iosef also shouted and pointed at a nearby tall black shirt.

  “Him,” he said. “I saw him too.”

  A few in the crowd reached for the protesting black shirt. Zelach and Iosef made a lunge through a small opening in the crowd and arrived in the open, just missing a baton swung by a particularly large policeman.

  “Police,” Iosef said, pulling out his identification and showing it to the large slashing policeman who was in no mood or condition to examine identification.

  Iosef and Zelach ran. The large policeman turned back on the crowd.

  “We are the police,” Zelach said, panting.

  “Policemen have been known to be injured by mobs and each other,” said Iosef. “Which way did they go?”

  “The mob? They are right. .”

  “The Africans.”

  “There,” said Zelach, pointing.

  “You see them?”

  “They were heading for Red Square.”

  Iosef nodded and started in pursuit with Zelach right behind.

  “They will get lost in the crowd,” said Zelach.

  “Two black men? One tall and thin, the other short and round?”

  “It is possible.”

  “It is possible,” said Iosef, who began laughing as they ran.

  “Is this funny?” asked Zelach, barely able to keep up.

  “Forgive me, Zelach. The Rostnikovs have a peculiar sense of humor.”

  Which, thought Zelach, is better than having no sense of humor, which is the legacy of both sides of my family.

  “There,” gasped Zelach, trying to catch his breath.