The Anonymous Novel

by Alessandro Barbero

  “Okay, good luck! The warrant is in order, and if you find anybody in there, you can go ahead and arrest them. I’m off back to Lenin Square, so if you need anything, you know where to find me. Right, off you go!”

  Nazar would, of course, have preferred Salayev to come along, rather than going back to the headquarters. But what could he do? He had to let him go. When they finally got to Barrikadnaya Street, the judge and Sidorov ran up the stairs followed by two policemen. There were many flats and rooms in the apartment block and the lift, needless to say, was undergoing repairs. Fortunately number twelve was only on the second floor. There was a card on the door with “Pankratov” scribbled on it. They rang the bell.

  “There’s nobody in.”

  They rang again.

  “Okay, we’ll break down the door.”

  XVIII

  The Accountant’s bolt-hole

  Baku, June 1988

  Here in Russia, for reasons not altogether clear, criminals continue to call themselves by rather colourful names, such as Blockhead, Slim and even Squirrel. And again Boot, Drum, Pope and God knows what else. I say that the reasons are not clear, and it’s true that this kind of nickname belongs to the criminal world of another era, when there were rules to follow and a code of honour. But these people have no idea of what honour could possibly mean. They’re butchers who kill on a whim, travel in fourby-fours, snort cocaine and communicate by computer. But then again, the villains of yesteryear may not have been such angels after all; perhaps they would have knifed you for a cigarette, and they couldn’t care a damn about honour either, and those sobriquets were exchanged between them for obscure reasons of their own that had nothing colourful about them. But the fact is that the Accountant’s nickname had him down to a tee. Not a shadow of a doubt. The devil alone knows what school he went to and whatever diploma they decided to throw his way, but you would almost believe that he really was an accountant. Now you have to picture the scene: flat number twelve is small and both rooms stink of fried meatballs. In fact there’s half a portion on the table in the kitchen, and the leftovers are not yet cold. The frying pan on the gas cooker is lukewarm. Our friend has clearly done a runner, and Nazar can only grind his teeth: of course, with one phone call after another and every excuse for losing a bit more time, someone found a way to warn him.

  The quarry may have flown the nest, but he hadn’t been able to take his eggs with him. The first room when you go in is the kitchen, and the smell of fried food is strongest there. There’s a carton containing five bottles of Georgian wine on the floor behind the sofa bed. Three of the bottles are empty, two are full and a sixth bottle is on the table and has just been opened. But the second room, little more than a box room, is furnished a bit like a study. Instead of a door there is a curtain hanging in the open doorway. At the end wall, a window opens onto the blank wall of an apartment block across the way. There’s a desk in the middle of the room and behind it, metal bookshelves that cover the entire wall. There are four units a metre and a half wide, and ledgers and cardboard ring-binders are neatly lined up on each shelf – some are numbered, others are labelled and still others have yet to be touched: this is the water in which our sewer rat, the Accountant, likes to swim. Nazar exchanges a glance with Sidorov, one goes to the window and the other has a quick look in the bathroom. The policemen open the cupboards and check under the bed, but it’s clear that there’s nothing to be done. They will have to be happy with what they’ve got, and it might well be that they lose very little in the exchange. The judge looks at a bookshelf and contemplates the cardboard spines of the ring-binders with his hands on his hips, and chooses one. He takes it out purposefully and “Racecourse” is written on the label.

  “Is there a racecourse here in Baku?” he mutters as he unties the ribbon and opens the ring-bind on the surface of the desk.

  “Of course,” Sidorov replies. Besides, is there a city in the Soviet Union that doesn’t have a racecourse? People like to bet, throw away a few roubles and kid themselves that they’re earning millions, and the state earns quite a bit on the back of it, so what’s wrong with that? It’s true that some unsavoury characters are wandering around and it would be best to give them a wide berth. Nor should one have too many illusions about how the jockeys make their money, and every now and then you come across a horse poisoned with an injection or with its hocks cut just before a race.

  But the biggest business is the betting. The binder contains just two notebooks used for book-keeping, one full and the other newly started on. On the first page there are names, figures and dates: for example, on 20 May, Panchenko, 1500 roubles; Myasoyedov, 2450; Gamzatov, 1800. Nazar frowns as he looks at the elegant, clear handwriting. If the register is recording the business from the racecourse, there is not much to discuss: these are clearly the people who laid the bets. I can’t imagine Pashayev having anything to do with this. What else was our Accountant recording? The judge goes back to the bookshelves and examines the line of ledgers; eventually he puts out a hand and takes out one with a very modest appearance – without number or label, its grey spine stippled with flyspecks. On the title page, the same confident hand has written: Voluntary Contributions. The bastard is taking the piss… It is immediately clear that the thin ledger is a list of bribes and protection money, because apart from the date and amount, the author of each payment is identified by the name of the shop, business or cooperative that he manages. Who knows if Gagarin, manager of grocery shop no. 16 at street number 133 Boulevard of the Partisans, could have imagined when he produced the envelope containing a thousand roubles that these good people were going to write it all down; you can bet your sweet life that the accounts in his shop were not kept so carefully as these. Of course, the accounts he keeps at the shop for the inspectors to check are not the real ones; those will be in his dacha, hidden under a mattress: the only possible explanation for his shelling out a thousand roubles a week. And for what reason? His payment is the penultimate, on 28 May; the last one was on the 29th, and was made by Anna Petrovna Timofeyeva, the canteen manager for Technical College No. 12, for the trifling sum of three thousand roubles. And next to this figure in the column reserved for comments, the Accountant has made a note of managerial precision: frozen meat. Well, dear Anna Petrovna will have to explain how you manage to get three thousand roubles out of frozen meat, other than, of course, the money she pocketed herself, another three thousand at least.

  Clearly, the band – because there must be a band behind the Accountant – is blackmailing speculators, and receives a percentage of the profits. In this world, there is no simpler and safer way of making money, and when it comes to identifying the speculators, all you need is a list of the commercial directors and a couple of sharp lads who know what to look out for. Nazar is rubbing his hands, unaware of Sidorov who is standing stiffly in the doorway and observing him with evident, youthful curiosity. Here there’s enough to turn this city inside out and upside down, and heads will fall when we take these papers to the court. But what about Pashayev? The judge had almost forgotten about him: he had given chase to the Accountant in the hope that he would lead him to the ayatollah’s murderers or at least those who hired them, but now the whole affair had taken on many more ramifications. Nazar eyeballs the bookshelves: there must be fifty-odd items between the ledgers and the binders, and to sift through this lot would take a couple of months of work. But in that moment as the sun is setting and outside Baku’s traffic is at its noisiest and most fetid, the judge cannot resist taking down one, two, three volumes quite randomly, and seeing what they contain.

  Perhaps there is some vague hope that amongst those nondescript covers he will come across a note, a draft or even an entry for the sum paid to the killer – or in other words, an explanation of how and why Pashayev was killed.

  But who knows which ledger or binder?

  His eyes run over the shelves and then fix upon the largest cardboard spine of them all, with a label that appears to have been jus
t glued on: Veterans’ Union. What could that be about? If you wanted to bump someone off, who better to do it than an Afghanistan veteran, a guy who knows how to use weapons and isn’t frightened by the sight of blood? Even before taking a look at the papers, Nazar is convinced that it has to do with Afghanistan and is not yet another association of veterans of the Great Patriotic War, possibly just because the label has not yet yellowed with age. But he realises that he is mistaken when he takes down the heavy box and the contents fall out on the desk. Why indeed would you need veterans? They cut Pashayev’s throat and you wouldn’t need parachutists to do that; around here, any goatherd would be just as good. But still he is curious: what could be the connection between the Accountant and veterans? The folder is full of paper, but this mainly consists of blank sheets and envelopes with the heading of the Veterans’ Union. The letterhead says exactly that, and just underneath in smaller type: import-export cooperative; Registered office: Jubileyny Prospekt 622, Baku. So that’s what the game is! Nazar has come across this on several occasions, and knows that there is nothing illegal about it, not even a legal technicality that you could make use of. The law on cooperatives is quite clear: associations set up for social and cultural purposes can finance themselves by constituting a cooperative and engaging in commercial activities, and because of this they enjoy some tax and customs concessions. Nazar is fascinated and becomes absorbed in reading through the papers to find out what the veterans of the Afghan War resident in Azerbaijan are trading in – presumably to cover the cost of artificial limbs or psychological treatments. There’s everything, all the cooperative’s accounts with double entry, and at the bottom of the page, the signature of the auditor, Artur Yakovlevich Dyakonov. For all that Nazar knew very little about graphology in spite of having attended a course on it at the Central Police Academy, that hand looks suspiciously like the one that compiled the betting ledgers for the racecourse and also the notebook on Voluntary Contributions.

  Pankratov, not only! Here we have the Accountant with his own official identity: Dyakonov Artur Yakovlevich – God love him – the auditor of the accounts of the Veterans’ Union.

  And if he had been happy with that, he could have lived quite nicely, because it appears that the Afghans have got their fingers in every pie. You could not imagine half the stuff that has been recorded in those papers. Export permits issued by all the ministries, and not just the republican ones, but the pan-Soviet ones too. In a yellow envelope closed with a paper clip and under the heading Import, there is correspondence with Philips over the purchase of a consignment of transistors… Clearly the Accountant was not just happy just with that, no sir, he was not. And quite rightly: why be happy with a salary, when you can become a millionaire?

  Be careful, however: it would be a little difficult for the veterans to use their import-export business to trade in arms and drugs, at least as far as their official accounts are concerned. With some regret, Nazar calls Sidorov across and has him help with putting all the papers back in the box, which he closes and puts back in its place on the shelf.

  Then he takes a careful look at the four rows of binders. He wonders if he will find what he’s looking for. Of course, this is all incriminating evidence – the juicy stuff of the detective novels – and there is nothing, or at least very little, that could come out without being condemned in the eyes of others: perhaps only the cooperative’s headed stationery – the unused envelopes and sheets of paper. But is it possible that drug trafficking and gunrunning are recorded here in these volumes, one might say, in the light of day, alongside the more trivial matters of extortion rackets and bets at the racecourse? No, if for no other reason than the psychological one. Following this intuition, Nazar sits down at the desk and tries the drawers. One after the other they open and contain rubbers, pencils, fountain-pen cartridges, paper, envelopes, stamps – every stationery item you could possibly want. In one, there is even a half-eaten sandwich wrapped up in foil and neglected for some time. And at last, one that doesn’t open. It has been locked.

  “Sergeant! Give me a hand to break open this drawer,”

  Nazar orders. Sidorov comes over and tries to pull it open with both hands. Then he takes out a penknife, opens the blade and starts to tinker around with the lock mechanism.

  Crack! It’s snapped, and the drawer is open. Inside there is a thin notebook with a purple cover, and Nazar knows he has what he wanted, before he even opens it. No one has entered the subject in the relevant box on the first page, but you only have to flick through a few pages to understand this is yet more accounts, and recent ones: the consignment and dispatch of goods from December 1987. The Accountant had recorded everything in his fussy and laboured handwriting: 6 December, twenty kilos; 13 December, twenty-five kilos, “quality stuff” annotated in the margin.

  Outgoing on the right-hand page: 10,000, 12,500. Roubles?

  Dollars? No, in any event the figures don’t add up; they’re too small. And next to each figure there is a name or rather a pseudonym: Abbot, Diamond, Rock, just like the confidential police or KGB reports, only here, in all probability, the pseudonym hides not an informer but an accomplice who has received the goods or the other one who has taken the money… Well, he’ll have quite a few beans to spill, this Dyakonov, when we finally get our hands on him!

  A loose piece of squared paper has been detached from another notebook and slipped between the pages – yet more accounts or rather an inventory: “3 February 1987, available: 7 kilos and 340 grams of Afghan, 3 kilos and 750 grams cocaine, 3 kilos and 100 grams brown sugar, part in good condition, part old and rubbery”. On the back another more recent note: “accounts ending 28 November 1987, 54 kilos and 665 grams” – which in roubles, or rather in dollars at market prices comes to… No, a figure that high can’t be right. The judge replaces the sheet of paper, and thumbs through the book, starting from January. Now there’s something different, fifteen kilos, “Just mine”, the Accountant qualifies in the margin, so clearly he is also keeping accounts for someone else. Well indeed, why would you waste such a talent? But then on the right-hand page, instead of the usual figures in thousands, a completely different note: 10 AK 74. What is this, a code? A vehicle number plate? Of course, AK 74 is the most recent model of Kalashnikov, the kind they found on Saidov’s sovkhoz, and every time these initials appear, the corresponding sobriquet is always the same, “Philosopher”. Throughout January and February, the annotations alternate; one kind of consignment corresponds to figures of five, six or even ten thousand of whatever it is, and the other kind of consignment to ten, fifteen or, in one particular case, twenty-five AK 74. Could that be the price of the drug? It makes no sense; it is too little whatever it is. What if it were, shall we say, the import permit? Because if you want to bring in all these dainty morsels into the Soviet Union, you have to grease a few palms, and not just two impecunious border guards who pass their entire day in stultifying boredom as they watch the Aras River glide by – no, many more people and much higher up. That’s right: grease those palms with a fat percentage: twenty kilos, ten thousand roubles – that’s not even a lot. He has got himself a good price, our Accountant, because nowadays the price is usually around five per cent. And then there comes a moment – from January – at which payment in roubles is switched to payment in arms. Along with the stuff, the lorries transport a crate of Kalashnikovs, perhaps hidden under forty or fifty cases of tomatoes, and they leave them in the care of some trusted friend, and naturally that is the moment when here in Baku there start to be rumours that someone is secretly amassing arms and that in Karabakh they’ve started to shoot people. Yes, the sums add up, and Pashayev, who was passing on the names of suspects to the Drugs Squad, had certainly been putting himself in the firing line, while obviously believing that no one would touch a hair on an ayatollah’s head.

  “Well, look who is here! My compliments to the esteemed Nazar Kallistratovich!”

  Nazar turns round with a start: General Zia Yusuf-zade dressed in c
ivvies has appeared at the entrance to the flat.

  How did he get here? Who notified him? Salayev? When was it ever the case that the police passed on information to the KGB – its own glory handed on a plate to the competition?

  No, this has never happened and never will; there must be something going on. You could go crazy in this place!

  Sidorov, standing by the window, looks the intruder up and down with a hostile expression, but says nothing; fortunately it is the judge who has to decide how to react. That’s his business, how he extricates himself from this one.

  But in the meantime, given that he is standing by the window, he looks out and yes there is a car parked in a noparking area and one of his men has already gone to take a look. But there’s no one in the car; the new arrival clearly drove here on his own. And this on its own, thinks Sidorov, is strange because guys like this usually go around the place with their drivers.

  “You, it appears, have got here before us, Nazar Kallistratovich,” continues the general as he comes up to the desk. And when he’s there, as though there was nothing unusual, he looks sharply at the notebook, but Nazar has already closed it and is holding it tightly in his hands. You can only see the purple cover.

  “What do you mean we got here before you?” Nazar replies cautiously.

  “We’ve been keeping an eye on this flat for some time; here they were hiding some, shall we say, rather unedifying dealings. And now they come and tell me that the police have broken the door down. Well, I say, the devil take them; they’ll have let the whole lot get away – the rooks will have flown the rookery. Or did you by any chance arrest someone?”

  “No, they have flown,” Nazar admits. “But they have left all this,” and he waves his arm towards the shelves laden with binders and ledgers.

  “Quite. Very interesting. And you, my esteemed Nazar Kallistratovich, signed your own search warrant, I imagine?”