Dead Men Living cm-12

by Brian Freemantle

  Charlie stretched back in his chair, unconsciously fashioning another delta-winged paper plane. From what-or where-would come the proof, an indication that his supposition was at least worth considering? The most obvious would be finding bodies buried in Berlinin the names of the still-unknown American and Russian. A cul-de-sac, Charlie recognized. If either identity was uncovered-and shared after that-it would be from Washington or Moscow, not from any source available to him. Or was there a source? Norrington most definitely should not have been in Yakutsk. But for the man supposed to have been Norrington to be buried in Berlin surely proved the man should, officially, have been in the German capital. So in early 1945 there would have been a proper, filed in triplicate (or however many copies army bureaucracy required) order stating why he was there but hopefully-and at the moment more importantly-who he might have been with. If Norrington had been able covertly to go at least three thousand miles, possibly more, from where he was supposed to be, someone in Berlin had approved and known about it. The American was German-based, too, Charlie accepted, remembering the war-script D-marks among the dead man’s belongings.

  Awareness piling upon awareness, Charlie recognized where he had to look not just for the American identity-maybe even the Russian woman’s, too-but for the second British officer who’d been at the Yakutsk murder. But would anything still be in Berlin? He hoped he had an advantage in the amount of time he’d spent and worked in the city over the Cold War years when, sometimes, he’d started out with less than he had now.

  Charlie stirred, positively, with things to do, becoming fully aware of the absentmindedly constructed airplane. He launched it as he stood. It spun immediately into an arc and fell flat on its back. Charlie hoped it wasn’t an augury.

  The archives of the British embassy in Moscow are part of its basement, which have been tanked with two insulation-separated brick walls to prevent the incipient dampness of the Moskva river from mildewing the documents stored there ahead of their eventual transfer to London. In addition, humidifiers are kept constantly running. The artificial light, the only source, is harsh. Despite the brightness, the curator, a diminutive, quickly moving man with spectacles pushed up into disordered hair, blinked a lot, like a furtive animal accustomed to living permanently underground.

  The man, whom Charlie had not met before, pedantically insisted upon telephoning personnel to check Charlie’s authorization, appearingdisappointed when it was confirmed. He recovered the moment Charlie asked for any records of a Lieutenant Simon Norrington having been at the embassy in early 1945.

  “Don’t have to look,” said the man, cheerfully. “Already have, for Colonel Gallaway. We don’t have anything.”

  “When?” asked Charlie.

  “Yesterday,” said the archivist. “Told Mr. McDowell and Mr. Cartright this morning, when they inquired. This man Norrington must have done something pretty unusual?”

  “He did,” said Charlie. “He died where he shouldn’t have and ended up in the wrong grave.”

  Cartright was standing in the corridor outside Charlie’s office when Charlie returned because there wasn’t enough room with McDowell and Gallaway already inside. Both men were staring down at the paper plane.

  Charlie said, “Pilot error.”

  That day they used McDowell’s office, which was larger than the military attache’s. The head of chancellery accorded Charlie the padded leather chair, ordered coffee and dolefully said, “Seems like we’re all getting involved in this affair.”

  “I thought we already were,” said Charlie, studying each of them in turn over the rim of his coffee cup. McDowell was an apprehensive, first-tour diplomat frightened of any mistake, up to and including breaking wind at the ambassador’s cocktail party. Foreign Office instructions would be holy writ, never to be queried and certainly never modified by any personal initiative. Charlie had already judged Gallaway a military dinosaur mistakenly laid to rest in Moscow, which the Defense Ministry was now probably regretting but which could very definitely be to his advantage. The only uncertainty was Cartright, about whom he knew practically nothing but about whom he was most personally curious because of whatever was happening with Irena. Professionally Charlie was sure he could suck up the younger man and blow him out in bubbles and wondered if he’d have to. As he was sure he could the other two. To begin with, the use of each would be to relay back to their individual departments whatever he wanted circulated to mislead and confuse. And to make them responsible for everything and anything he considered personallyor professionally dangerous. The day was beginning to pick up very well indeed. With luck it could even get better.

  “I don’t want to repeat myself,” encouraged Charlie, easily. “So it’ll help if I know what, between you, you’ve already got from London.”

  The other three men looked among themselves. McDowell said, “I was simply asked what the embassy here had on an army officer named Simon Norrington.”

  The other two nodded in agreement.

  “Without any reason?” questioned Charlie.

  “Just that he was the man in the grave,” said Cartright.

  “But that he’s supposed to be buried in Berlin,” added Gallaway.

  Wrong! decided Charlie, in belated realization. Cartright was MI6, which was responsible to the Foreign Office. So why the duplication to the head of chancellery? McDowell was a professional diplomat. And professional diplomats were always separated from each and every sort of intelligence field activity to avoid embarrassment. The molehill was taking shape. Returning to an earlier, possibly more immediately relevant thought, Charlie said to the military attache, “Now we’ve got a name, your people should be able to find Norrington’s service record easily enough?

  “I’m not sure that they can,” said Gallaway. “It was a long time ago.”

  How far could he take this? wondered Charlie. As far as possible, he decided. “They going to let you have it, if it’s found? It could be useful.” For me more than any of you, he thought.

  “Why?” demanded Gallaway, a soldier checking the barricades.

  “The Russians are more convinced than me that there was another British officer there when Norrington was killed.” Within twenty-four hours that would become established as a positive fact within every necessary Whitehall department, its source lost in the retelling.

  “Oh, my God!” said Gallaway.

  “That’s appalling,” said McDowell.

  Still not sufficient reason for McDowell and Cartright to double up, Charlie decided. Concentrating upon the attache he said, “You’re in the hot seat, John. I’ll do all I can to help, obviously. But I do need everything you might get from your end. And let me warn you, John. Whitehall never makes a mistake: it’s always down to us poorbastards on the ground. We’ve got to look after ourselves, every time ….” He looked to Cartright. “Wouldn’t you say that?”

  “Absolutely,” said the intelligence officer, at once.

  Extending his hands, palms up, to include all three men, Charlie said, “For each of us to look after the other, you’ll have to pass on all the guidance you get from London so I’m not caught out with the Russians. Everyone prepared to go along with that?”

  “I certainly am,” said Gallaway, eagerly.

  “Me, too,” accepted McDowell.

  Cartwright said, “It’s strictly between us and these four walls, right?”

  What had he done to please God so much this day? thought Charlie. “That’s most important. None of you must show me to be your source. I won’t tell you anything that I’m not a hundred percent sure about.”

  “Thank you,” said Cartright.

  You won’t if I decide you’re trying to find out things about Natalia and I that don’t concern you, thought Charlie.

  Charlie went as far as to suggest a records check on the wartime prison camps at Yakutsk, which Vadim Lestov agreed was worth considering instead of disclosing it was already under way, and Charlie openly wondered how a Western-caliber bullet had
come to be in the Yakutsk grave, to Lestov’s shrugged insistence he had no idea. Charlie spent most of the time urging Lestov to release the photograph of the dead Russian woman, which he’d discussed at length with Natalia as a possible way of confirming Lestov’s appointment as her deputy: even if it achieved nothing, the publicity was guaranteed to convey the impression that the Russian was making a positive contribution.

  Charlie also provided his written impression of the Yakutsk inquiry with only the waistband label omitted. Miriam only left out her discovery of the photograph and the fact that the dead American’s eyesight would have normally failed him for military service. In apparent exchange, the Russian handed over copies of the second autopsy report, virtually identical to that of the first, and announced that a photograph of the so-long-dead woman was being issued to Moscow television and newspapers in the hope of an identification.

  They hadn’t before met in the deputy director’s suite, on the same floor as Natalia’s, whose closed door Charlie had seen on arrival. Only slightly smaller than Viskov’s, the room was ornately baroque and at least five times the size of Charlie’s. The homicide colonel hadn’t yet adjusted to such surroundings, actually on more than one occasion gazing around as if surprised to find himself there, which Charlie supposed he was. When Charlie asked directly about Petr Pavlovich Travin, the Russian detective said the man was otherwise engaged, which Charlie acknowledged to be an absolutely honest reply.

  Miriam again suggested a drink as they left the ministry building and this time Charlie insisted upon the Savoy. He still hadn’t resolved the uncertainty of how much to tell the American of what had nagged him throughout the meeting. Simon Norrington’s identity would be known by at least three different officials from three separate Whitehall departments at the Foreign Office meeting with Kenton Peters, he reminded himself. And Miriam was his only possible Moscow source for the dead American’s name. Those who gave received, he told himself.

  Miriam said, “You think Travin’s working on something good?”

  “Could be,” said Charlie.

  “Jesus!”

  “Maybe you’ll have to try your very personal way to find out from Lestov?”

  “Already in hand,” said the woman, quite seriously and unembarrassed. “You were far more open with him than I expected you to be.”

  “Not really,” said Charlie, finally deciding.

  Miriam was gesturing for the second round. She turned sharply back to Charlie. “What?”

  “Heard from Washington on the picture?”

  Miriam shook her head, but didn’t speak.

  “It’ll have been taken outside an art gallery or museum,” he said.

  “Go on.”

  Charlie did, telling her about Simon Norrington, leaving out only the reference to Berlin.

  Miriam finished her second drink before speaking and by then any astonishment had gone. Solemnly, slowly, she said, “You think we’re ever going to understand it all?”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Charlie.

  “I’ll tell you what I do know,” said Miriam, positively. “Something as complicated as this, there’ll be a lot of people very anxious that we don’t.”

  Which is why I’ve thrown the stone into your pool, to see how far the ripples spread, thought Charlie. Had Natalia’s visa check not shown that Kenton Peters’s companion, whose name was given as Henry Packer, was still in Moscow, staying at the National Hotel, Charlie conceded he might just have missed the man’s too-hurried, attention-attracting move from the table of the hotel’s pavement cafe, although he preferred to think he’d have still gotten it. As it was, he didn’t hurry helping Miriam into her car and then strolling along Ohotnyj Rjad to the metro.

  Over almost too long experience Charlie knew just how much of a surveillance nightmare the lofty, pillared and marbled halls of the Moscow underground could be, but today they were to his advantage. Within seconds of pulling himself behind one of the pillars, Charlie saw the open-eyed Packer fluster down the steps, looking wildly around, and chance getting on the train already at the platform, which would, in fact, take him in the opposite direction in which Charlie would normally have gone. Charlie went back up the stairs and into the Savoy bar again, with things to think about.

  “He told you that he speculated in currency?” demanded Cartright, in the darkness.

  “Boasted about it,” said Irena. He’d been very good, the best for a long time. The apartment was a disappointment, though, compared to Lesnaya.

  “What about Natalia?”

  “Something to do with pensions,” dismissed the woman. She hesitated. “You’re not going to tell anyone about Charlie, are you? Not to get him into trouble, I mean.”

  “Not something I want to get involved in,” avoided Cartright, which was an honest answer. He’d taken a big enough risk, agreeing in the first place to help Gerald Williams without fully understanding a reason. Now he was dependent upon Charlie’s guidance and wasn’t sure he could risk that, either. It was a mess.

  Irena was sure Cartright would. Which would teach the blabbermouthedCharlie-and Natalia, with her warning telephone calls-not to treat her like shit. The most appropriate word, she decided, smiling at the memory of the episode with Sasha.

  Charlie and Natalia were still up in their apartment on the far side of Moscow. Natalia said, “You will have to go everywhere else, won’t you? Leave us?”

  “Not until I can’t any longer avoid it,” promised Charlie. “Dean said today’s meeting ended as confused as it began, no one telling anyone else what their part of the story was.”

  “What are you going to do, Charlie?”

  “What I’ve always done. Look after myself.”

  “Look after yourself?” challenged Natalia.

  “Us,” corrected Charlie. A man with staring blue eyes came immediately to mind. The most worrying thing about Henry Packer was the ineptness of the surveillance. To someone of Charlie’s professionalism it was further proof that it was not the man’s real job. Charlie no longer had any doubt what that was.

  “If it all does go wrong-and you’re dumped because of it-it’ll all be over for us here, won’t it?”

  “But it wouldn’t be the end of the World,” qualified Charlie.

  “No,” agreed Natalia. “It would just seem like it.”

  “It’s only been days!” protested Charlie, urgently. The telephone had been ringing as he’d entered his office that morning. Afternoon in Yakutsk, he calculated.

  “I have something about Gulag 98,” said Novikov.

  “I could arrange for you to come to Moscow by yourself.” Even that would be a risk, Charlie accepted.

  “Only with Marina and the boys. And with the residency permits.”

  “I’m doing everything I can,” said Charlie.

  “Make it soon.”

  “As soon as I can.”

  21

  The release of the Russian victim’s photograph caused a continuing series of sensations far greater than Charlie had anticipated, although it made perfect something else he had in mind. He hadn’t really expected an identification, either, which was the ultimate phenomenon.

  The predictable excitement, from the existing press hysteria, was the publication itself. Despite the written and verbal insistences that all three bodies had been preserved in their ice grave, the first visual proof of just how perfect that preservation had been caused shock not just in Moscow but throughout the West. The New York Times’ caption-“as if she died just hours, not half a century, ago”-was echoed in hundreds of newspapers and on television throughout the world.

  It also brought about an unremitting media clamor for photographs of the British and American lieutenants as well as for Charlie and Miriam Bell publicly to be again made available for interviews. The FBI’s inept reason for refusing-that photographic publication or a press conference could possibly interfere with ongoing inquiries-brought an even greater clamor to know what those inquiries were and within twenty-f
our hours newspapers in America and Europe were speculating with ironic accuracy at a cover-up.

  Encouraged by the American president’s already declared insistence that the American was a hero to be given a hero’s burial, the free-reined theorizing spiraled into total fantasy, up to and including-disregarding both the history of the time and the fact that Yakutsk is three thousand miles from Moscow-that it had been a mission to assassinate Stalin to end communism, prevent the division of Europe and stop the Cold War before it began. Germany and France-and Charlie-preferred the suggestion that it had been a joint operation to rescue Princess Anastasia from imprisonment in one of the Yakutskaya gulags after escaping the Ekaterinburg slaughter of the Imperial Russianfamily in April 1918. Claimed former gulag inmates recounted stories of a beautiful woman with black hair to her waist, living in moonscaped isolation in her own crenellated, barbed-wire-enclosed dacha guarded by watch towers and an elite Cossack troop.

  Brighton Beach, on New Jersey’s Atlantic coast, is a ghetto of Russian emigres, although demographically the majority are Ukrainian by birth or ancestry. They also represent the broad spectrum of Russian mafia in the United States. It was from the Beach-the waterfront avenue itself-that the first claim came from a man insisting the victim was his mother’s sister, with whom they’d lost contact after leaving her the custodian of priceless heirlooms, including a selection of icons for which he now sought reward or compensation from the Russian government. The virtually immediate FBI location of a three-page rap sheet for fraud, criminal deception and larceny didn’t prevent a day of headlines in the nearby New York newspapers.

  There were three similar deception attempts in Moscow, two of which drew heavily upon the Anastasia invention, the third stretching it with the assertion that the victim was the secret daughter of Rasputin. Each demanded money, always in dollars, for their stories and family photographs, all of which were faded and blurred and none anything like the dead woman even before scientific examination.