The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  Novosadov chatted them up in hotels in the city centre; then you just needed a phone call and bingo! – the whole thing is sorted. The tariff – one hundred roubles, half to the girl and half to the madam. Ogurtseva sat in a corner of the office in her fur coat while looking at her varnished nails and defiantly observing the policemen. Novosadov, who was wearing a leather jacket that was worth a year’s salary for a guard, sat next to her and, to tell the truth, he looked rather depressed: just look how things turned out, and yet it had seemed such a good idea… The two customers, Dandamayev and Atabekov with their taqiyahs on their heads, were seated in the opposite corner and grasping their artificial leather briefcases full of documents that justified their trip to the capital. Every now and then they exchanged a few words in their own language. The women left the office very reassured, the two Uzbeks were informed that it was time to return to their companies, and that their superiors would be informed of the manner in which they used their expenses.

  Only Ogurtseva and her friend went to trial, and they both got two years of forced labour.

  Of course, Nazar didn’t tell Asya this story: how could you explain to her that those women were utterly normal – frightened of course – but in every aspect just like her colleagues with their plastic bags for shopping during the first free hour, with their children to pick up from the nursery school, and pelmeni to be cooked when their husbands return home. And so what if every now and then they went to bed with some stranger and put fifty roubles in their purses – a trifle… No, she would not have understood.

  No, mummy would have been horrified. In a sense, it was a cheerful little story. Certainly more cheerful than the Kosmos Hotel story, which happened while Asya was pregnant and spent her nights on a chair in the kitchen, because she couldn’t sleep or even lie down. Nazar told her it in one of those nights between three and five in the morning. And it is a story worth telling again, not just to squander a bit more paper, but because it helps us to get a clearer picture of our man’s profession. In short, a judge is not paid just to pass sentence and send criminals to labour camps, each in his own appropriate circle of Hell: he struck a man on the head – with a spade? That’s five years then!

  Oh, he wasn’t dead? Oh well then, make it a year and consider time off for good behaviour… No, that is not how it is – not now at least! Today a judge has to find out what actually happened; he cannot just believe the first thing they tell him. He interrogates people, but above all rummages endlessly amongst the papers! In this instance, he went to the Kosmos Hotel to check out a report from a policewoman, Natalya Averina. Lappa had met her in prison: she was a large, blonde woman and mortified by her prison uniform, but her eyes flashed with anger as she told her story. Face to face with Lappa, she confirmed every point of the declaration she had made before they imprisoned her: namely that her superiors, the chief of the police unit at the Kosmos Hotel, Vodopyanov, and his deputy, Pivovarov, allowed guests to stay in the hotel in contravention of the rules and thus pocketed quite a few of the readies. Who were these people? Well, mainly citizens from the republics of Asia and the Caucasus who came without travel permits and bookings, and above all who did not register. Moreover they did not come into contact with the staff who were serving the hotel’s ordinary customers… Nazar laughed: what exactly does “non-service contacts” mean? The woman did not get the joke: she delivered her report gravely, and it was all the stuff of Georgian wine and bedroom parties and a certain kind of women – of course. And the police were taking part in it all. The fact is that former Officer Averina had reported these activities two years before, and with a punctuality divine retribution appears to lack, persons unknown brought charges against her for administrative irregularities and the judge signed the arrest warrant with untypical promptitude. When she was acquitted at the trial, the prosecutor appealed, and now two years had elapsed before the investigation was assigned to Lappa with instructions to shed some light on whatever was going on at the Kosmos Hotel. Nazar Kallistratovich threw up his arms: administrative irregularities? It is clear there weren’t any.

  We’ll get Natalya Nikolayevna out of prison, but when it comes to show whether or not she invented it all – that is another question! He had had all the possible records brought to his office, but it wasn’t easy to make much sense of them. The list of customers appears to be in order: they must have entered incorrect information, but try and prove it! The staff timetables also seem quite acceptable, and besides two years have now passed … The accounts for the restaurant do have something a little odd about them. We all of us here in Russia practically force-feed ourselves when we go to a restaurant on expenses. But if that is the number of customers in a month, then it simply isn’t possible that they ate all that meat and drank all that wine. It simply isn’t possible! On this small point and only on this small point, Nazar Kallistratovich had understood that he could prove that the woman had told the truth. And so, without prior notification, he went to carry out an on-the-spot investigation at the hotel during its hours of business. It came out that at this police unit they now felt perfectly secure, and believed that people would stop queuing outside the Lenin Mausoleum long before anyone would think of coming to disturb them again: so the Komsomol manager for the police section got himself caught in a state of drunkenness at the hotel swimming-pool, which at that time of year was empty. He was snoring away in a corner crouched against the wall in full uniform with his beret pulled down over his head.

  Yes, stories concerning the police are not very cheerful, and no one likes dealing with them. But this one is laughable compared with some others. Lappa once came across a business that was enough to make your hair stand on end. So much so that for some time afterwards, he never wandered about in the evening on his own. It all started on the night of 27 December 1980…

  VII

  The Astafyev affair

  Moscow, 1980-1981

  On the night of 27th December 1980 on the road to Bykovo Airport, a highway police patrol came across a naked and bloody corpse half buried in the snow and partly frozen; the deceased’s clothes were scattered around and nothing was found in the pockets except a small notebook full of telephone numbers. The police phoned the first of the numbers in the list and discovered that they were talking to the switchboard at the Lubyanka KGB. Poor bastards, they knew they were in shit and would have to pass a night of it.

  Someone suggested that they should do a runner and leave the cadaver to its destiny, but that wouldn’t do, as the idiot who made the call had given them his name… An hour later, while the policemen sat in their car and tried to keep themselves warm by keeping the engine’s revs high and emitting great clouds of vapour from the exhaust, three black Zils drew up beside them and a dozen men in plain clothes got out. The commander went and knocked on the police car and flashed his KGB colonel identity card at them through the misted-up window. The sergeant in the traffic police reluctantly got out of the relatively warm car and accompanied the newcomers to inspect the corpse. His men would have preferred to stay where they were, but the men from the KGB let it be known that they should get out too, and this is what occurred. The colonel turned the corpse over so that he could look at its face; he then flicked through the notebook, shook his head, gave an order in a quiet voice, and suddenly someone started taking photographs while someone else went to telephone for an ambulance.

  That night in the Lubyanka basement, a surgeon carried out an autopsy on the dead body and revealed that the poor fellow had been beaten to death no more than a few hours earlier. A regular job by professionals: you could see practically nothing from the outside, but inside the guy was reduced to a pulp. Then came the moment in which the body was identified as that of Vyacheslav Astafyev, a general in the KGB in charge of a branch fighting the drugs traffickers. Those people have lots of branches working on that front, but equally he was hardly a novice. What’s that? No, I don’t remember his patronymic… Anyway great things were expected of this Vyacheslav – hell,
could be anything, let’s say Ivanovich – but no one expected that he would be killed in the middle of the night. He was a little tipsy when he left his office to go home, and we will soon see why, but apart from that it was an evening like any other – absolutely normal. It goes without saying that the KGB sifted through every name associated with Astafyev at work and, for good measure, anyone implicated in any way with the investigations being carried out by his section: thousands upon thousands of records were re-examined, thousands of urgent reports were commissioned from police authorities from one end of the Union to the other, hundreds of possible suspects resident in Moscow or the surrounding region were interrogated and a few dozen were arrested for verifications.

  This is the fun part of the job; it’s like looking for mushrooms in the woods: you find a lot that are no good and you move past them without so much as a glance, or occasionally you just give them a kick for no particular reason; well lo and behold, here you have a boletus, right in front of your nose, and all you have to do is bend down and pick it up… But nothing useful to the prosecution emerged from this screening process.

  A meeting of all those in charge of the investigation was held at the Lubyanka on New Year’s Day. Some argued that it was an accident, after which the guilty party had lost his head and attempted to confuse the picture by simulating a murder. Others felt that it was indeed a murder. In other words, it was decided that the case should be handed over to the homicide department of the Chief Prosecutor’s Office of the USSR. At the time, Naydenov was still there and he had just become the Deputy Chief Prosecutor. As we know, he didn’t last long; he had made too many enemies, may his soul rest in peace. Nazar Kallistratovich was living alone, as Nina had left and he hadn’t yet met Asya. It was midnight and he had just got into his pyjamas when the phone rang and it was the voice of Naydenov summoning him to his office. He protested that he would not find a taxi at that time of night, and he was told that a car was coming. The judge re-dressed and then did not know what to do: he turned on the television and sat in a chair to watch the weather forecast – and thus he fell asleep. Half an hour later, the door bell, a brusque awakening and a drowsy journey to his workplace. In the empty building, he was greeted by a police officer who led the way to Naydenov’s office. Apart from its incumbent, there was a colonel in the KGB dressed in his uniform, and just the sight of those epaulettes was enough for Lappa to know that they were about to throw him a real hot potato. But what can you do? You wanted to be an investigating judge, well now the fun starts! He shook their hands and sat down expectantly. The colonel introduced himself: he was Zaporoshchenko, the personal assistant to Andropov, who, as we all know, was the head of the KGB; we should not forget that Brezhnev was still in the Kremlin.

  “We do not know each other at all,” the colonel started off, “and we do not have the time to get to know each other. I therefore ask you to listen very carefully to the story I am about to tell you and to express your own opinions with the utmost candour.” The victim’s movements on the evening of 27 December had, he explained, been ascertained down to the last detail. That day was Astafyev’s birthday and he had celebrated it with his friends at work. They had brought several bottles. He had then left to return home and, as always, he had taken the underground at Nogina Square Station. He fell asleep on … which line was it? The purple one, the same one that Nazar Kallistratovich took. It appears that Astafyev lived in Kuzminki, further on. He had a box containing a pair of new shoes on his knees, and at his feet he had an attaché case containing some shopping he had done at the office store. These shoes evoked extreme distaste in Colonel Zaporoshchenko, who grimaced at the mention of them, and for this reason the judge asked for more information: were they a gift? And so they turned out to be: then from whom? Of course this was all nonsense, and the colonel was entirely in the dark, but he answered politely and went ahead with his briefing. In short, Astafyev fell asleep on the underground; he had drunk alcohol and not just vodka, but genuine French cognac, and there had even been hors d’oeuvres – everything organised in accordance with good taste. He fell asleep, and so he went right past his own station and ended up at the end of the line – at Zhdanovskaya Station. Here the supervisors had woken him and asked him to leave the train. Declarations by these two women were available to the investigators. Astafyev, still half asleep, stood up with his box and went off on his way, leaving his briefcase behind. “Is this bag yours?” one of the supervisors had asked. “No,” he replied. It’s a mystery why he gave this reply, but of course he was still sleepy. Then waking up fully, he returned for it. The woman, who was now suspicious, went ahead of him and asked him to declare the contents of the bag. “Salmon, vodka, salami …”

  But while he was sleeping, someone had clearly lightened his attaché case, and only a bottle of cognac remained. On seeing her suspicions confirmed, the supervisor called the police before Astafyev could provide an explanation. The policemen on duty at the station arrived and took him away; he protested loudly and tried to extract his KGB identification card, but they took no notice of him, put him in an armlock and dragged him to their guard post.

  “And all these things were declared by the supervisors?”

  Lappa interrupted. “Word for word,” the colonel confirmed through gritted teeth; you could tell from his tone that the two women weren’t exactly having a pleasant time. More fool them, next time they’ll have learnt not to be so thorough!

  “The policemen on duty that evening at Zhdanovskaya station have been identified and interrogated,” the colonel continued. “There were six of them: Lobov, Panov, Sidorenko, Loza, Samoylov and the chief inspector, Masokhin. There was another person, but he was not down on the police roster: he was the duty electrician for the underground, Muzychenko. Everyone, of course, denies that they detained Astafyev. They say they just took him to the escalator: get out of here and get your story straight!”

  Nazar Kallistratovich shifted his glasses on his nose and stared at the colonel. There was only one thought going through his head: these people want to set me up! But he was already set up; they’d caught him on a fish hook, they’d landed him in a frying pan and were now ready to fry him very nicely, thank you. Get out of this one, if you know how… Well, he thought, let’s at least show how smart we are. He lifted his hand to stop the colonel, who was starting to talk once more, and asked him what they had found out from the police records. He discovered, however, that even the KGB weren’t complete idiots: they had checked the records and Astafyev’s name did not appear amongst those held by the police. No? That’s right, no! Lappa still had a card and he played it, but once again Colonel Zaporoshchenko proved to be equal to the occasion. This was the nub of the problem: the Ministry of the Interior was refusing the investigators access to the central records in order to see if the information had been tampered with. And more generally, the ministry did not show any interest in cooperating with the investigation. The six policemen and the electrician had been interrogated, charged and released on bail. Without an arrest warrant from an investigating judge, it was impossible to get the handcuffs on them.

  That night, while the car was taking him home, Nazar Kallistratovich struggled in his mind to puzzle out the whole affair, without, of course, achieving a great deal. In fact he too fell asleep before he got home. The following day, however, he got down to business, and in conditions that they can usually only dream about at the Prosecutor’s Office: the KGB had provided him with about a dozen investigators and an office at Lefortovo Prison. On his instructions, these men confiscated the records at the police units close to the underground and at the accident and emergency units that served Zhdanovskaya Station, and summoned everyone who had been in the area that evening to Lefortovo Prison. One affidavit after another gradually began to clarify the events at the station’s police unit. The police shift in question came on duty at four in the afternoon. They had got something to eat by confiscating it from a drunken pensioner who had been brought there by an indign
ant woman passenger. They had then taken money off three more drunks, and so they had been able to send for more booze on several occasions. Masokhin, now drunk, had fallen asleep in the back office, a circumstance confirmed in all the men’s affidavits, and he himself, you should know, did not deny it: whatever happened that evening, he was there but was sleeping. At eight o’clock, they got the call from the supervisors, and two policemen, Lobov and Sidorenko, went out and came back shortly with the arrested man. “He’s on the committee,” he muttered to the electrician as he passed, and he meant, he’s in the KGB.