The effect was devastating. The colour which their embrace had brought to her pale cheeks now ebbed dramatically leaving them twice as pale as before. Her eyes rounded in fear and her voice when it came was shrill.
‘That’s him!’ she cried. ‘That’s the man who fell through the lift. Lev, who is this? What does it mean?’
‘God knows,’ said Chislenko. ‘I mean it literally. God alone knows.’
But the drama was not over. Natasha was still studying the photo.
‘And that’s the other one,’ she said. ‘Yes, definitely. That’s him.’
‘The other one?’
‘The one who came up behind and pushed. Look, him there.’
Now her finger stabbed at the solemn face of the man Chislenko knew was that dear old friend of the Bunin family, Yuri Serebrianikov.
‘But that’s impossible!’ he said. ‘It has to be impossible! Please God, let it be.’
Behind him the door opened. He knew who it was even before he turned, but when he glanced at Natasha he didn’t see any fear in her eyes to match his own.
‘Yes? Can I help you?’ she said impatiently.
Of course, he realized. There was no way that she could link the young man in the picture with the benevolent, white-haired old gent with his old-fashioned goatee beard standing quietly in the doorway.
He needed to explain this to Serebrianikov. He should have guessed the old bastard would still keep a close eye, and ear, on him. Such men did not survive what he had survived without a triple-barred caution at all levels at all times. But he had never suspected what might be at stake! How could he? How could anyone? Except perhaps Bunin. Had Bunin felt something, some vibration, which had made him persist in following up this matter despite all the good advice to the contrary?
Bunin had trusted him, and all he had got for his trust was a lie.
He suddenly realized that there was nothing he could say to Serebrianikov which was going to persuade the old KGB man to risk letting him survive to tell Bunin the truth.
But he had to try to do something for Natasha.
‘She doesn’t know,’ he said. ‘Even if she did, it doesn’t make sense, does it? Leave her alone.’
Serebrianikov smiled.
‘Give me the photograph, Comrade Lovchev,’ he said.
Natasha looked in bewilderment to Chislenko, who nodded at her and said, ‘Give it to him, Natasha.’
She handed it over and then demanded angrily, ‘Just who are you anyway?’
Serebrianikov smiled and said, ‘That’s me there, my dear.’
And held up the photo, underlining his young face with his thumbnail.
Chislenko closed his eyes in pain.
Serebrianikov said, ‘I have a couple of men downstairs. I’ll send them up for you. Wait here, would you? Unless you prefer to run for it. That would make things even easier.’
He turned and left. Chislenko went to the door and watched him walk along the corridor to the lift. As he entered the old man glanced back and gave a friendly wave. Chislenko turned away.
Natasha came into his arms.
‘What’s it all mean, Lev?’ she demanded. She was shivering as though a great coldness had gripped her.
‘It means that fifty years ago that man murdered his own friend, the brother of the man who has protected him and kept him alive for God knows how many years.’
‘But it can’t be! I saw both the young men in the photo. They were ghosts or something, I’ve got to accept that. But he’s alive! How can I have seen his ghost?’
She was beginning to sound hysterical.
‘I don’t know!’ said Chislenko talking rapidly in an effort to soothe her. ‘When I was young and clever I read Dante in translation and there’s a bit in the Inferno where he meets the spirit of a man who’s so evil that he’s already condemned into hell while his body’s still walking round alive on earth. Perhaps that’s it! But I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it. Why’s it happened? What’s it mean?’
He realized that far from being a calming influence, he was shouting too in his anger and despair.
And he was not the only one.
Distantly there was another voice raised up in a dreadful wail of horror and fear. Through the open door it drifted. Other doors opened along the corridor and someone said, ‘Sounds like old Muntjan’s been on the pop again,’ and there was some laughter.
Muntjan.
‘Wait here!’ commanded Chislenko.
He ran out into the corridor. The noise was drifting up the stairwell. He sprinted down on to the next floor, the seventh. And there, leaning back against the wall in the posture in which he had first encountered him, was Muntjan. His face too was the same colour and in his hand was the same hip-flask. Pills have their place, but in time of need a man flees to his oldest friends.
‘Josif!’ demanded Chislenko. ‘What happened? Come on, man! Speak!’
‘It was him, boss, it was him.’
‘Who?’
‘Him. That fellow again. We stopped at the seventh, just stopped, no signal or anything. The door opened and there he was, boss, same fellow, same clothes. I knew him soon as I laid eyes on him.’
He took another drink.
‘What happened? What did he do?’
‘He stepped into the lift, boss. Only this time he didn’t go through the floor. The doors started to close. That’s when I got out! I haven’t moved so fast in years, boss, believe me. Like lightning I went, boss, straight out. Even then the doors nipped me, but I kept going, boss. I kept going!’
‘And the other man. The old man in the lift?’
‘That poor old gent? He never moved, boss. Never moved. He’s gone down with that thing, whatever it is. They’ve both gone down together!’
Serebrianikov had felt no fear as the newcomer stepped into the lift on the seventh floor, only a great curiosity.
As the lift began to descend again, with the piercing wails of the hysterical Muntjan fading above them, he said calmly, ‘Hello, Fyodor.’
‘You’re not going to dispute me, then, Yuri?’
‘I don’t think so. Though on the other hand it’s always possible one of my more ingenious enemies is playing a curiously convoluted trick. Let’s see.’
Serebrianikov put his hand inside his jacket and produced a small automatic. Aiming it carefully, he kept his finger hard on the trigger till the nine shots it contained had all crashed into the woodwork behind his companion. The lift cubicle was filled with smoke and the smell of cordite, and the sound-waves of the shots bounced round the walls in deafening reverberations.
The old KGB man looked at the unmoved and unmoving figure before him and let the gun fall to the floor.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What do you want? Explanation?’
‘Explanation?’
‘Yes. It was expedient. Joe was always going to win. I had to make a choice. You’d have gone with Kirov a few months later anyway, Fyodor, you must know that.’
‘Yes, I must know that Yuri,’ murmured the other, faintly mocking.
‘So what is it you want?’
‘I want nothing, Yuri. I’m not in the wanting game any more.’
‘What then?’
‘I am, you’ll recognize the term, a sort of agent.’
‘Agent? What for?’
The figure did not reply. Its voice had been like a faint breath of wind through a dark cypress tree and now it was stilled. Somehow Serebrianikov knew it would not whisper forth any more.
Above the figure’s head the floor indicator had flickered down 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 … and now the indicator halted at B for basement.
But the lift did not halt. On and on it went, sinking further and further down.
And now at last, after all those years and all those deaths, Serebrianikov began to feel afraid.
When Chislenko got to the basement and forced open the lift doors which the impact of the bullets had jammed shut, he found the old man sitting in a corner with
his head slumped on his chest.
Gently, Chislenko raised it. The eyes were still open, but they were seeing nothing anyone living could see. He tried to close them but found it wasn’t as easy as it always looked in the cinema, and in the end he gave up.
‘Heart attack almost certainly,’ diagnosed the doctor who arrived with the ambulance. ‘He must have fired his gun to try to attract attention, but at his age there was never any hope, I’m afraid.’
‘No,’ agreed Chislenko. ‘No hope at his age.’
He returned to the eighth floor, running up the stairs. The photograph he had removed from Serebrianikov’s jacket was crumpled in his pocket.
Natasha was still in her office looking desperately and beautifully afraid.
‘Lev, what’s happening here? I don’t understand anything!’ she cried, jumping up as he entered.
He took a deep breath. It was good that she was afraid, except that probably she was afraid for the wrong reasons.
Her next words confirmed this.
‘Josif’s still saying he saw that ghost again and someone heard shots. Is it true that awful old man is dead? What’s it …’
He seized her shoulders and shook her gently.
‘There’s been an accident,’ he said.
‘But, Lev …’
‘There’s been an accident,’ he insisted. ‘Comrade Secretary Serebrianikov has had a heart attack. He came here to meet me to discuss if any action needed to be taken against Muntjan.’
‘But Josif saw …’
‘Josif is very sick. He has been mixing tranquillizers and vodka. I’ve asked the doctor to give him an injection. When he is discharged from hospital, I expect he’ll go and live with his niece. The Comrade Secretary had decided there were to be no charges against him. It was all a genuine confusion. He sent Josif to see me here, that’s why he travelled down in the lift by himself.’
‘But the man! The man Josif saw! The ghost …’
He drew her trembling body to him and crushed it tight.
‘You’re upset,’ he said. ‘The death of this great, patriotic and beloved old man has naturally upset you. You will feel the need to weep for him. If anyone asks you any questions you don’t know how to answer – especially anyone from the KGB – I dare say that your need to weep for the Comrade Secretary will overcome you very strongly at that moment. Won’t it, Natasha?’
She felt calmer in his arms now. It was remarkable what a calming effect a lover’s voice could have, especially when it was whispering the magic initials, KGB.
‘Yes, Lev,’ she murmured obediently.
‘Good. That’s very good. Just remember, darling, in all this there are only two things you must be absolutely certain of. Remember them and in the end you will come to no harm.’
‘What are they?’ she asked, eager for instruction.
‘One is, that I love you.’
‘You love me,’ she said as though getting a lesson off by heart. ‘And the other, Lev? What’s the other?’
Chislenko laughed and spoke softly but firmly.
‘The other is: there are no ghosts in the Soviet Union!’
bring back the cat!
It was a cold, clear morning, shortly after ten, when Joe Sixsmith arrived at the house on Brock Wood Lane. He checked the number, then set out on the long walk up the drive. It was an imposing double-fronted villa whose bay windows proclaimed middle-class wealth like an alderman’s belly.
An upstairs curtain twitched but it might have been a draught.
He rang the doorbell.
After a pause, the door was opened by a woman of about forty, good-looking, well dressed in a county kind of way, with an accent to match.
‘Y … e … s?’
It came out long as a sentence. A death sentence.
‘Sixsmith.’
‘Sorry?’
He handed her his card.
‘You rang my office,’ he said.
She studied the card till he retrieved it. He only had one card and he wanted it to last.
‘Ah, that Sixsmith. I was expecting …’
He knew what she was expecting. Paul Newman, or Humphrey Bogart at least. What she wasn’t expecting was a balding West Indian in a balding corduroy jacket.
‘Yes,’ she said again. It was another sentence, suspended this time. She was making up her mind. Suddenly she closed the door.
At least once she’d made up her mind she didn’t fuck around with conscience-cleansing excuses, he thought.
‘You see, it works.’
He looked around. He was alone.
‘You try it from your side.’
The voice came from between his feet. He looked down. A small flap in the door at ground level was being swung on its hinge.
He stooped and said, ‘Mrs Ellison?’
‘Push it, Mr Sixsmith,’ she said impatiently.
He studied her meaning for a moment, then pushed it.
‘Again.’
He pushed it again.
‘There, you see. It works both ways. Quite adequate for both ingress and egress, don’t you agree?’
He said, ‘Mrs Ellison, it certainly works. But I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it. Also I don’t know if …’
The door opened. Mrs Ellison looked down at him.
‘Come in, Mr Sixsmith,’ she said.
He went in. It was a long broad hallway smelling of lavender polish and hung with prints of The Cries of Old London. A girl of sixteen or seventeen was standing by a small table on which she was arranging a vase of flowers. She was rather plump and wore a tight sweater, short skirt and leg-warmers. She tore savagely at the flower-stems as if they had offended her.
A flight of stairs ran up from the hall to a landing, then turned back on itself. Sitting on the landing was a boy only slightly younger than the girl. His hair had blue highlights. He stared morosely at a spot between his feet.
‘This is my daughter, Tittie. That is my son, Auberon,’ said Mrs Ellison.
The boy didn’t move but the girl said, ‘Is he the new au pair?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Mrs Ellison. ‘This way.’ Sixsmith followed her into a large, airy lounge. An upholstered bench ran round the window-bay. A coffee table stood in the bay. Opposite the window was a mock Adam fireplace. In the grate before it stood a large well-cushioned cat-basket. A chintz-covered suite of three armchairs and a huge sofa rested on the pale blue fitted carpet. At one end of the sofa with his legs up sat a man in his forties, shirt-sleeved, unshaven, and reading a Daily Mail. He looked up, caught Sixsmith’s eye, winked and said, ‘Hello, Sherlock.’
The woman ignored him and led Sixsmith to the window-seat. He sat in the bay and she perched herself at the angle of window and wall.
‘Mr Sixsmith,’ she said, ‘I would like you to investigate a disappearance. The disappearance of my cat.’
This was what Sixsmith had begun to fear. He rubbed his fingers across the worn ribs of his corduroy jacket and wondered how to react. He didn’t have the kind of mind which made decisions or even deductions very quickly and he recognized this as a disadvantage in his chosen profession. But he liked to think that in the end he got it right.
‘Well?’ urged the woman.
He sighed and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Ellison. We’ve all got to draw lines. I draw mine at chasing stray cats.’
He began to rise. There was a snort of what sounded like suppressed laughter from the sofa. This hurt him. He thought he’d sounded rather dignified, even if what he’d meant was he saw no way of tracking down a stray cat, so didn’t reckon there was much chance of squeezing his fee out of Mrs Ellison.
‘Sit down, Mr Sixsmith,’ she ordered peremptorily.
He paused in a semi-squat, neither rising nor sitting. It wasn’t the woman’s tone that froze him. He’d long since developed tone-deafness to the accents of the bourgeoisie. The petrification derived from what he could see waiting for him through the open doorway into the hall. The gir
l, Tittie, stood there. She was regarding him sullenly and at the same time rolling up her tight sweater till it circled like a life-belt beneath her armpits. She wore no bra and lived up to her name.
Sixsmith sat down. The girl put out her tongue and turned away. Her brother appeared behind her and closed the door.
‘What is hard to understand,’ resumed the woman, certain it was her simple command that had done the trick, ‘is why he should stray. Everything he wants or needs is here. He never goes further than the herbaceous border at the back or the shrubbery at the front. His little door stays open day and night. And as you saw for yourself, there’s no chance of it sticking.’
From the hallway came the sound of a hand cracking hard across flesh and a female voice saying furiously, ‘Piss off!’
‘So what’s your conclusion, Mr Sixsmith?’ said Mrs Ellison, ignoring the interruption.
‘Pardon?’
‘You’re a private detective. What conclusion do you draw from the facts I’ve just given you?’
He said, ‘Oh yes. Look, Mrs Ellison, I don’t have much experience of cats, I admit, but what seems likely to me is that either your cat strayed out on the road and got knocked down. Or maybe someone stole it. For one of those research places. I’m sorry.’
‘Research places?’
‘That’s right. You know, medical research. Vivisection. There’s a lot of pet-thieving goes on, I believe. Sorry.’
The woman rose now, her face twisted in grief.
‘Vivisection? You mean … cut up? Oh no! I’d know … I’d feel it … how disgusting!’
There were tears in her eyes. She went to the far end of the room, where a couple of decanters and some crystal glasses stood on an authentic reproduction Jacobean cocktail cabinet, poured herself a drink and went out of the room.
The man on the sofa said, ‘She weren’t so bothered when she took him to be doctored.’
‘Doctored?’ said Sixsmith.
‘Castrated. They smell like cats, else. That’s two of us she’s had done now.’
‘You’re Mr Ellison, are you, sir?’
Sixsmith spoke hesitantly. The man’s appearance, manner, and broad northern accent jarred with this Hertfordshire stockbroker belt setting.
There are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union Page 8
