by William Ryan
“I’m sure of it.”
“Oh, you can’t be sure of it. The Party may decide otherwise.” He winked at Korolev and gave him a slanted smile. Then he frowned. “Pay no attention to Ginzburg—he’s at the end of his tether. Highly strung poets aren’t designed for Five Year Plans and purges.” He put the glass to his lips and closed his eyes as he drank.
“Anyway, what’s all this about? What assistance can a poor writer offer the combined forces of the NKVD and Petrovka Street?”
“I can’t tell you all I would like to,” Korolev began and Babel nodded.
“That doesn’t surprise me. I guessed as much when Gregorin called. Tell me as little as you can, if you don’t mind. I’ve a two-year-old daughter asleep down the corridor and a wife I plan to spend a lifetime with—but I’m happy to help if I can.”
It was Korolev’s turn to nod. “There have been two murders. One of the dead was a Thief. The other was a young American woman, although of Russian birth—it seems she was also an Orthodox nun. The two killings are almost certainly connected.”
Korolev looked into Babel’s eyes for a moment, then opened his briefcase and extracted the envelope of case papers. He took out the woman’s autopsy photographs.
Babel took his time with each picture, seemingly absorbing each pore of her skin, each crusty fleck of blood. He turned the images to see them more clearly and when he had reached the last photograph, the one Gueginov had taken of the girl’s profile, he sighed.
“She was quite beautiful. You would think he must have hated her to do this. But maybe not—he’s such a precise man. See the way the clothes are neatly folded, the body parts arranged in just such a way. I wonder. Perhaps he’s sending a message.”
Korolev leaned forward to look at the girl’s body, all shadows and light in the black and white photograph. “I thought as much myself. The way the ear, eye and tongue are arranged?”
“Yes, I’ve heard of something like this, but I’ve never seen it. It’s something the Thieves used to do. To an informer. Or a spy. It means that the dead person may have heard and seen but he will never tell.” Babel looked up at Korolev, his eyes blinking as though trying to remove the dead girl’s image from his retinas. “But the Thieves would be unlikely to desecrate a church. They might steal from it but they wouldn’t do something like this. Well, not while Kolya rules Moscow, that’s for sure.”
Korolev found himself blinking now, but with surprise. He’d heard of Count Kolya, but Babel’s offhand reference implied a personal knowledge of a man reputed to be the Chief Authority of all the Thieves in Moscow. It wasn’t an elected position, it was open to challenge, but Count Kolya was never challenged. At least, if he had been, the challenge had been dealt with so quickly and savagely that it had barely rippled the surface of his reign. The Militia had been trying to track him down for seven years, but a wall of silence surrounded him and any time the wall looked as if it might be penetrated, the informant who’d seemed to be a promising prospect had either disappeared or shown up dead. Now that Korolev thought of it, one of them had been mutilated in just such a way.
Babel tapped the side of his nose. “I was born in Odessa, Captain. Do you think I made up the stories I wrote about Benya Krik? I changed his name, but if you ask any of the old Militiamen from Odessa they’d tell you all about him. As brave and honest a Thief as ever broke a maiden’s heart. It was just that his version of honesty was quite different from yours and mine, and most certainly from the Party’s. They caught him in the end. A bullet in the neck, I’m told. But they probably needed more than one to finish him. And he was revenged by his fellows, you can be sure of it.”
“Do you know Count Kolya?” Korolev asked and Babel exhaled a long breath, then nodded.
“I talk to him sometimes when I go out to the Hippodrome. Horses are a weakness we share. You might not spot him straight away, except that if you were to look in his direction for a little longer than you should you’d find three or four handy-looking lads with blue fingers have surrounded you, and then you get the strong impression it’s time to go and look at the horses for the next race.”
“You know Count Kolya.” Korolev wasn’t asking the question again, just expressing a quite amazing fact.
“Why do you think Gregorin sent you to me? The NKVD use me as a line of communication from time to time, although I try not to know what they communicate about. I’ll tell you this, though. Kolya would never desecrate a church in this way. He’s not a Believer, at least not the way I suspect you may be, but there’s a code he must live by the same as any other Thief. If this was done on his instructions or with his consent—well, he wouldn’t be the Chief Authority for long.”
Babel seemed oblivious to the fact that Korolev’s blood had concentrated in his toes.
“A Believer, Isaac Emmanuilovich? Me?”
Babel looked up at him and smiled.
“Am I wrong?” He leaned across and put his hand on Korolev’s arm, smiling. “Comrade Korolev, I apologize if I’ve offended you. I must be mistaken.”
Korolev drank the rest of the wine in a single gulp and wondered, not for the first time that day, how the hell he’d got himself into this mess. He took a deep breath, put the glass down firmly on the table and thought for a moment.
“I think I agree with you. If it was a message, maybe it was a message sent to the Thieves. Maybe to Kolya himself. The dead Thief was tortured as well. See these electrical burns on the girl’s body—they both have them.”
Babel whistled. “Is that what they are? You hear things, of course . . .”
“What things?”
“Things. How people are interrogated these days. I’ve heard that electricity isn’t only used to brighten Lenin’s Lamp.”
Korolev suspected Babel was coming to conclusions about what kind of a person might be behind the killings.
“Look, Comrade,” Korolev said, emphasizing the word “Comrade” and putting into it all the loyalty and hope that old soldiers like Babel and himself remembered from the bitter years after the German War. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but there’s someone going round killing people and I want to stop them, if I can. Whoever they are.”
Babel rolled the red wine round his glass, let it settle and then drank. He pursed his lips in appreciation and then shifted his gaze to Korolev.
“There’s racing tomorrow. Trotters and flat. A horse I follow is in with a chance so I’d have been going anyway. If I see him, I’ll approach him. I presume you’d like to know his side of it, if he’ll tell me. I’ll have to let him know who’s asking, of course.”
“It might be better if he were to agree to a face-to-face meeting. That way you wouldn’t hear things you might not wish to.”
Babel shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Why not?”
“It might be possible and, of course, even a man like me would rather not hear some things. Although I am curious—my God, I’m curious.”
He paused and smiled a cat’s smile, full of speculation and mischief.
“It will have to be quietly done, of course,” he continued. “The first rule in the Thieves’ world is non-cooperation with the Soviet state in any form, you know that. What Ginzburg said—it’s not quite right. Even in the prison system the Thieves bark at the sheep for their own purposes, not because they’re told to. Is there something in it for Kolya?”
“The Thief’s body, perhaps? His tattoos say he was known as Tesak.” It might be done. General Popov would consent if it bought them some information—the body would only be incinerated otherwise. “What do the Thieves do with their dead?”
“Same as the rest of us, I think. Put them in the ground and remember them fondly, or not, as the case may be. But for Kolya to recover Tesak’s body from the police it would have to be handled so as not to make him look like an informer.”
“He can steal it, for all I care.”
“I’ll ask him. Anything else you can offer him?”
Korolev considered for
a moment and then decided that if he was going to run the risk of being shot, he might as well be shot for a reason.
“It can be a two-way conversation. He may be as interested in my information as I am in his, particularly if the mutilation was a message with his address on it.”
Babel took another drink of the wine and sighed. “Do you know, when they reopened the Hippodrome after the Civil War I practically lived out there. It’s a place I feel very happy. It’s all about the horses, which is not a bad thing at all.”
A little later, the rest of the wine finished, Korolev said his farewells to Babel and stumbled down the stairs, a paper bag of Shura’s cheese dumplings clutched to his chest. He shut the door to the apartment behind him, taking all the more care when he heard the child Natasha’s voice and then Valentina Nikolaevna’s, quiet and reassuring, in response. He paused for a moment in the shared room and listened to the sound of a distant train’s whistle, then walked over to the window. It was snowing outside and a set of tire tracks in the center of the lane were already losing their shape. The lantern across the street cast its yellow glow and Korolev thought it seemed as peaceful as a scene from an old postcard.
He wouldn’t have seen the watcher in the carriage entrance if the man hadn’t moved. It was just a shift in the darkness, but when he looked more carefully, shielding his eyes from the streetlamp’s glare by placing a hand down the side of his face and looking a little off center—the way he’d learned to do in the trenches—he was sure he detected the outline of a man there in the shadows. Then he noticed the disjointed footprints under the round arch. If there was a watcher, then the cold was making him stamp his boots from time to time. It would be difficult, Korolev thought, for whoever it was to see inside the darkened apartment, but perhaps they’d seen the light from the hallway when he’d entered. The watcher’s eyes would be more attuned to the dark than Korolev’s, and he wouldn’t have made the mistake of looking at the single street lamp that served that part of the lane. Possibly he was looking back at Korolev at this very moment, seeing Korolev’s face in the same street lamp’s glow, which added a slight sheen of silver to the surfaces of the shared room. Another flicker of movement decided the matter. He considered going down and confronting the watcher, then thought better of it. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know who was keeping tabs on him—at least they were only watching at this stage, and not carting him off to Butyrka.
But Korolev didn’t turn the light on as he undressed. And when he lay down to sleep it was with the chair against the door handle and his Walther underneath his pillow.
It tired you out, this kind of work, and it didn’t help that he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in nearly a week. Of course, it was always difficult when you came home after a job, and busy periods exacerbated the problem. You couldn’t just lie down straight away when you’d finished—humans weren’t light bulbs, after all. They couldn’t just turn themselves off with the flick of a switch. They needed time to adjust to different situations. Like tonight, for example; the contrast between the sleeping domesticity of the apartment and what had happened out in the empty house was too extreme. As a result, he knew he’d have to let sleep come to him. He would have to be patient.
Over the years he’d become more accustomed to the late jobs. Of course, he’d had to; it wasn’t unusual to work past midnight, in fact it was probably the norm. After all, it was ideal for his kind of work—being the time when people were at their lowest, mentally and physically. But he was human also, and it required enormous effort to remain alert and hard and show nothing but strength to a prisoner, particularly if he also was exhausted and at the end of his tether. When it was over, no matter how tired he might feel, turning off that effort was difficult. He’d be driven home—they knew how to conserve his energy—and sometimes he’d drift off in the car, but it was rare. Mostly he just stared out at the empty streets and thought about the human being he’d just broken.
Tonight he’d climbed the stairs carefully, avoiding the steps that creaked, and slipped a soundless key into the apartment door. Once inside, he looked in on his son and touched the curls of his head as he lay there. His fingers looked rough against the boy’s porcelain cheeks, and he tried not to think of the blood he’d shed that night. He stepped back when his son stirred, his lips puffing outward for a moment and a frown forming, but the boy didn’t wake, and he was grateful—who knew what the boy might see in his eyes? He wished then that the boy could stay forever just like this—innocent and safe. Who was to say that the boy might not find himself in just such an empty house as the one he’d just left? And what if he were there too? They might ask that of him some day—to kill his own son. They had asked everything else of him. He sighed and pulled the blankets closer round the sleeping child.
He was never hungry when he came home. He liked to have a drink, it was true, but he didn’t have an appetite for food. Some did, but not him. Instead he’d sit in the kitchen, like tonight, pour himself a glass of vodka and read for a bit. Anything would do. For a while he’d read Shakespeare’s plays but then they’d become difficult. There was too much right and wrong in them, and he lived in a world where such bourgeois considerations were unhelpful. What did so-called virtues like honor, compassion and justice mean in the context of a Revolution? Let their enemies get bogged down with such nonsense—they were meaningless in the prism of predestined historical change. And yet they left awkward questions, the kind of questions his wife had asked before the end. He poured another measure. She’d seen him late at night too many times to have any illusions as to what kind of person he might be. And now nor did he. It was the reason why there was no mirror in the kitchen.
Two more ruffians dealt with tonight—easier with two, as well. The driver had taken them out well past Lefertovo, then down a winding road, and then a track. The two Thieves were trussed like chickens in the boot, and had looked around in confusion when they’d been hauled out. He wondered if it had been the first time they’d seen the moon cut through a forest’s bare branches—they certainly looked as though they’d never left the city before. It was the last time they’d seen the moon, anyway, if they’d bothered to take the chance.
Inside, the house had the penetrating cold of a long-empty dwelling, but it had three rooms, and doors to separate them, and once he started to work he’d warmed up soon enough. He’d played them off each other, used one’s pain to persuade both, passed information from room to room. Having the driver there had been a help—and, for once, he hadn’t had to worry about the noise. That had been useful too.
Afterward he’d shot them in the cellar, and the driver had helped drag them back to the car. This time they wanted no traces—the Militia were investigating the first two, and there was no point in getting them all worked up with another couple of stiffs. That worried him, if the truth were told. When he’d done this kind of work before, investigations had been no more than paint jobs. The idea that this one might be more substantial—well, it made him wonder.
He reassured himself that he’d followed the orders that he’d been given, and that they were close now; that much was evident. It shouldn’t be long—the two Thieves had given them useful information. Still—messy. It wasn’t the first time he’d been involved in an irregular action, but normally, of course, there was a team, preparation and coordination, a clear aim. This time the support was almost nonexistent—they didn’t know who they could trust within the organization, so they said, and therefore the operation had been stripped down to its essential parts—the driver was the only active assistance he’d seen. They’d told him there were others acting independently, but he’d seen no signs. And there was no plan as such—they had an objective, it was true—to recover the icon, and trace it back to the leak—but everything was improvised, each step forward leading to the next, whatever it might be. That was not something he was used to either.
There was always a degree of trust and support among Comrades from the organization, a fellowship th
at accepted frailty and occasional excess. The organization understood all too well the pressure they placed on operatives like him and they made allowances. They looked after you, kept an eye on you, sent you for a break when it was needed, organized extra rations of vodka when you were busy, that kind of thing. Mostly he worked in the Moscow area—the Butyrka, the Lubianka, Lefertovo. He was well known in all of them. His colleagues didn’t look down on him for what he did, far from it; they understood that specialists like him were essential to their work. You could only get so far with ordinary forms of interrogation, they all knew that. For tougher cases you needed a man like him. He could take a prisoner to pieces and then put him back together again, but always as just one more step in a process. He was merely another cog in the machine and each cog relied on the others for forward momentum. It was Soviet power in action, no detail overlooked, no goal unattainable.
But it was strange that they wanted things done quietly now—it seemed a change of tactics since he’d been instructed to leave the mutilated body of the girl on that damned altar. If that hadn’t been sending someone a public message, he wasn’t sure what else it could have been. And the girl troubled him as well. Her last look was always there, lurking at the periphery of his consciousness, and only effort kept her from his thoughts.
The girl came to him now, despite his resistance, with that gentle look she’d given him just before she died, and it occurred to him, and there was a sweet dizziness to the thought, that this might not be an authorized action. That he might be out on a limb with no back-up, no protection. That if it blew up he’d be the hunted, not the hunter. It didn’t bear thinking about. He’d followed orders, trusted his superiors, that was all he’d ever needed to do. He thought of his son asleep in the next room, his blond hair curling on the pillow and hoped this was tiredness playing tricks on him—this feeling that the girl had cursed him with those soft eyes of hers.
