Rafferty breathed out noisily but didn’t protest. ‘It’ll need a squad again.’
‘The taxi checks haven’t been completed, but there’s nothing so far,’ reported Johannsen. Unexpectedly he added: ‘The papers say you speak fluent Russian. You get anything of what they were whispering to each other yesterday?’
Despite the assumed nonchalance they were both good, Cowley acknowledged. ‘When you pressed Pavlenko about social engagements, particularly on the night Serov died, the guy who wasn’t introduced told Pavlenko he couldn’t talk about it.’
‘That all?’ demanded Johannsen, disappointed.
‘What I did get was incomplete. Just two words: “You can’t.” They were taking a lot of trouble not to be overheard.’
‘The papers also say you’re head of the Bureau’s Russian division, monitoring all Russian personnel in this country,’ said Johannsen. ‘You make the second guy, who wasn’t introduced?’
Very good, thought Cowley. ‘Nikolai Fedorovich Redin. KGB when it was the KGB. Now it’s called an external security service.’
‘What about Serov planning to defect?’ suggested Rafferty. ‘It’s happened elsewhere, despite all the changes. Redin discovers it, knocks Serov off and throws in the mouth shot to blow smoke in our eyes …’ The man paused, apparently unaware of the appalling metaphor. ‘… It would even be appropriate, if Serov were going to tell us things we shouldn’t have heard. And the Russians do kill people who try to run: it’s happened a lot.’
‘In the past,’ disputed Cowley. ‘One, defectors invariably are intelligence officers, with something to offer: our files mark Serov as a genuine diplomat. Two, there’s usually some approach, before they try to run. It’s very rarely a walk-in: someone literally coming off the street. Three, I am head of the Russian division: if there’d been any prior contact, I’d know about it already. There wasn’t.’
Both detectives looked unconvinced.
‘Your files could be wrong,’ said Rafferty.
‘Maybe, rare though it is, he did intend to be a walk-in,’ said Johannsen. ‘You think the CIA would tell you if they had Serov about to jump into the bag?’
‘Not necessarily,’ conceded Cowley.
‘Shouldn’t you ask the Cousins at Langley?’ suggested Rafferty.
It had been an impressive double act, admired Cowley: probably carefully rehearsed, like using the tradecraft word Cousins, which was coming close to going over the top. Cowley didn’t think it would produce anything, but then neither had the house-to-house enquiries. ‘Yes, we should,’ he admitted. ‘I hadn’t thought of it, which I should have done. Thank you.’
Both detectives smiled, satisfied.
Harry Robertson was standing expectantly in his office, shifting from one foot to the other with the impatience of a dedicated specialist. He was a giant of a man who wanted to be bigger and was trying hard to achieve it. His hair was long, part secured by a coloured bandana in a pony tail and the rest matted into a beard that had never been trimmed and exploded in all directions to hang fully down to his chest, like a napkin. His stomach was enormous, encased in a lumberjack-check workshirt and bulging over corduroys held up by a death’s head buckled belt at least two inches wide. The ensemble, predictably, was finished off by high-laced work boots.
Cowley decided Robertson had to be damned good to be allowed to get away with such determined affectation: J. Edgar Hoover would be corkscrewing in his grave. But then, the homosexual Hoover would probably be wearing a dress.
‘Here’s the little feller!’ announced Robertson, with the pride of a conjuror producing the rabbit from an empty hat.
The shell casing was still enclosed in a see-through exhibit pouch. To Cowley it looked like an ordinary brass shell sleeve. ‘How can you be sure it’s Russian?’
‘Size!’ declared Robertson. He gestured towards a desk as dishevelled as he was. For the first time Cowley saw two handguns, side by side. They looked identical. There were bullets alongside each.
Robertson picked up the gun on the right of the desk, offering it for examination. ‘Observe the Walther PP!’ he invited. ‘One of the most successful hand weapons after the invention of the bow and arrow. Developed by the Germans in 1929 as a police pistol, not to be confused with its smaller brother, the PPK, of James Bond fame and all that crap …’ The man paused, to make his point. ‘It is also the most copied handgun in the world, both with and without permission.’
Cowley shook his head against taking the gun. He supposed the theatrical presentation went with the man’s appearance.
‘Specifications,’ itemised the scientist. ‘It’s 6.38 inches long and has a six-grooved, right-hand-twist barrel 3.35 inches long and an eight round magazine. Most popular chambering is known as a Short …’ Robertson picked up one of the unspent bullets and held it forward for inspection.
Cowley looked, dutifully.
Robertson took up the second gun. ‘The Russian 9mm Makarov,’ he announced. ‘It’s 6.35 inches long and has a four-grooved, right-hand-twist barrel 3.85 inches long. And uses an eight round magazine …’ He turned back to his desk, hefting the Walther again, making balancing movements with a gun in either hand. ‘The Makarov is the unlicensed, unauthorised Russian copy of this …’
‘So how can you be sure it was a 9mm Russian copy and not a 9mm German original that killed Serov?’ demanded Cowley. ‘Or any other 9mm copy?’
‘Simple, dear sir!’ said Robertson, pleased with the question. ‘I’ve already told you. Size. It can only be a Makarov because this shell’ … he produced the spent casing in its glassine bag … ‘won’t fit anything but a Makarov. They modified the shell. It’s fractionally larger than any other 9mm slug. You can’t fire an ordinary 9mm round from a Makarov, and the Makarov will only fire a Russian-manufactured 9mm bullet.’ He tossed the pouch up and down. ‘And that’s what this is. Guaranteed one hundred percent Russian.’
Reluctant as Cowley was to accept it, the ballistic evidence took them closer to a tie-in with the Russian Mafia. ‘What about casing marks?’
‘Pretty as a picture,’ promised Robertson.
‘So if we get a suspect weapon, we could make a match?’
‘We’d testify right up to the Supreme Court,’ assured the co-ordinating expert.
‘The effects list mentioned a notepad being tested for impression from previous writing?’ Cowley reminded.
‘A blank,’ said Robertson. ‘We put it through every test, chemical as well as electronic. Not a register.’
‘It was a new pad?’
‘Half used.’
‘Why didn’t something show?’
‘Because careful Mr Serov did not use a single piece at a time. The only way to keep the unused pages as clean as they are would have been to remove three or four leaves every time from beneath whatever he wrote.’
Which could also have been the action of an intelligence officer, accepted Cowley. ‘Anything else?’
‘We’re taking the clothes apart, for alien fibres, dust, whatever we might find. And we scoured the ground cleaner than it’s ever been: it’ll take a while to go through that. We’re not looking for anything specific, after all. Just something that shouldn’t be there.’
‘You still want that area sealed?’
Robertson shook his head. ‘What we haven’t got now we ain’t never going to get.’
Cowley remembered the blood-gouted shape of Serov’s body: before the covering tent was dismantled he’d advise the DC highway authority to clean it up, to prevent a macabre photograph appearing somewhere. ‘Thanks for identifying the weapon.’
‘Hope it helps,’ said the huge man.
‘So do I,’ said Cowley, sincerely. For the moment, it compounded the problem.
Leonard Ross sat hunched forward over a yellow legal pad, making notes like the trial judge he had once been, not interrupting Cowley’s briefing. Only when it finished did he say: ‘You think we’ve finally got to face it’s Russian Mafia?’
‘What about defections and spying?’
‘I don’t buy it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Instinct. Which is fallible and why we’ll have to take it as far as we can.’
‘Isn’t there a significance in Redin being present at the meeting?’
‘It was his job to be there, since the security changes.’
Ross nodded, accepting the qualification. ‘I’ll personally ask the CIA Director,’ he decided. ‘He’ll still lie if he wants to – and he probably will if it’s a cross-over that went wrong.’
‘I’d hoped you would,’ said Cowley honestly. The Director had a better chance than he did of being told something like the truth, if there was anything to tell.
‘We’ll give it another twenty-four hours before we make the Mafia connection,’ decided Ross. ‘And then only to Hartz. I don’t want anything to go public, making it official, so don’t mention it to the DC people in case it leaks.’
‘From what’s being published so far, the media don’t need any official confirmation of it being Mafia.’
‘Give me an opinion about the meeting with Pavlenko,’ insisted Ross. ‘Strict diplomatic formality? Or obstruction?’
Cowley hesitated, wanting to get the answer right. ‘Bordering on obstruction.’
‘You want me to bring pressure through the State Department for access to the embassy and Massachusetts Avenue?’
‘That was my initial intention: why I wanted to speak to you before I got back to Pavlenko and tried for access at my level,’ said Cowley. ‘But I’m not sure it would achieve any practical purpose. They’ll lie and conceal anything they don’t want to come out and I won’t have any authority to challenge them. And pressure from State wouldn’t cut much ice, either.’
The FBI Director looked surprised. ‘But you’re telling me the investigation will collapse unless there’s co-operation. So what’s your point?’
‘We need an official Russian investigator,’ insisted Cowley. ‘A professional who’ll know what we want and doesn’t buckle under officialdom.’
The Director shook his head, although not in refusal, looking quizzically across his desk. There was the vaguest of smiles. ‘And you know just the guy?’
‘If we’re right, we’re going to need him.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
The strongest surviving legacy of Russia’s failed but struggling-to-resurge communism is the doctrine that nothing works – or will be allowed to work – unless there is a personal benefit between those who seek and those who provide: the what’s-in-it-for-me philosophy.
Ironically for someone whose total honesty now made him an outcast, Dimitri Ivanovich Danilov was an expert at the system. He had begun his education as a personal-fine-on-the-spot beat officer with ambition, and had manipulated favour-for-favour and reward-for-reward on his way through the ranks to uniformed colonel in charge of a Militia district, where he had established the tribute-accepting reign he had abdicated to Yevgennie Kosov. Danilov had, however, operated by a strict code of personally acceptable morality. He’d never become involved in the protection of vice rings or drug dealing or gun running, or with the violent, sometimes murderous enforcement of some black marketeers. Indeed, he actually investigated and prosecuted as many as he could.
With a strictly Russian logic, Danilov had never considered himself truly corrupt; he’d believed instead he was being practical and pragmatic in an environment beyond improvement or change. He had never been a member of the Communist Party – which protected the most corrupt of all – nor did he ever accept its political ideology. Most of all he despised its obvious inefficiency: if the party couldn’t provide, a man had to provide for himself, according to his own integrity. With the help, of course, of the always available entrepreneurs. The essential factor, Danilov’s justification for the compromises he’d made, was that no-one got hurt or suffered in the arrangements he reached with the people who could obtain things other people wanted. If those providers made a profit and others – like Danilov – benefited along the way from ensuring there was no official interruption, everyone benefited. It was simply a slight variation on the free market economy political leaders were today advancing as the salvation of the country.
Anatoli Nikolaevich Metkin’s disadvantage was not knowing of Danilov’s previous expertise and more particularly how Danilov could use the stultifying bureaucracy under which Metkin was trying to bury him.
The responsibilities Metkin had set out would have buried Danilov if he’d attempted to fulfil them absolutely. But they weren’t if he combined another Communist inheritance with the first, building his own bureaucratic mountain and threatening an avalanche to engulf others.
Metkin’s vagueness about Danilov’s new accommodation had been part of the theatre. The man personally showed Danilov to a long, L-shaped room on the same floor as his own secretariat to convey the gloating impression Danilov would always be under his supervision. The room was internal again, with no natural light, and completely bare of furniture. There were no bulbs in any socket, but there were jack points in the walls, for telephones. But there were no telephones.
Danilov began his fight back within minutes of Metkin leaving him, giving the man just enough time to re-enter his own suite before descending to the basement garage. There were six unused cars in their bays. The office in one corner, with I. A. Borodin lettered on the door, was a hutch of a room, misted in cigarette smoke and with used stubs smouldering in an ashtray. Borodin, who was bent over a magazine displaying melon-breasted, splay-legged women, didn’t look up.
‘I’m looking for the manager,’ announced Danilov. ‘I want a car. That Volga outside looks good.’
Borodin, a dumpy man with grease-encrusted fingernails, snorted a laugh, bringing his head up from the pornography. ‘I allocate cars. Where’s your authorisation docket?’
‘You’ve had a memorandum from the Director …’ Danilov stretched his copy across the desk, in front of the other man.
Borodin blinked down at it, then smiled up. ‘So you’re the new Deputy Director! Your having a car depends upon availability, I’m afraid. Everything out there is committed. Sorry.’
The instructions how he should be treated had permeated throughout every floor, literally from the top to the bottom, realised Danilov. ‘You’ve also seen this?’ asked Danilov, extending Metkin’s order making him responsible for the supplies and facilities throughout the building.
Borodin nodded, not bothering to reply.
How well had he remembered the what’s-in-it-for-me approach, wondered Danilov. ‘The car pool, this garage, is a listed facility. All vehicle spares, petrol, the purchasing of new cars and the disposal of old vehicles is categorised under supplies. You are no longer allowed to order in your own name and under your own authority any parts, for any car. Nor will you be permitted to order a new car or dispose of an old one without reference and approval from me. All petrol purchasing will in future be by me. I will also want, weekly, details of all mechanics’ work sheets and all overtime claims. I have also been appointed overall controller of finance: no money will be paid on any overtime claim unless I have countersigned it. I want all authorisation dockets, at the end of every week, detailing use on official police business.’
Borodin’s mouth hung open almost as wide as the legs of the naked women he had been studying. ‘I don’t … I mean …’ stumbled the man who had just heard the threat of every bribe-accepting, price-inflating racket being taken from him.
At a conservative estimate, Danilov reckoned Borodin stood to lose about twenty times his official salary: probably more. He waved the handful of instructions from Anatoli Metkin, because it was important the cause of the catastrophe be identified from the outset. ‘The new Director is determined upon great change.’
‘I don’t want to get our relationship off on a bad footing,’ said Borodin anxiously.
‘Neither do I,’ assu
red Danilov.
‘You know anything about running garages? Cars?’
‘Nothing,’ admitted Danilov. ‘I’ll learn, in time.’
‘It would be easier if we worked together.’
A motto that should be enshrined in stone over every official Russian door.
‘I wouldn’t want it any other way.’ Danilov waved an arm towards the garage. ‘Perhaps you’d let me have the order sheets, so I can see who those are going out to?’
Borodin made a half gesture of looking through the rat’s nest of a drawer in his desk. ‘I don’t seem to have made one up yet. But I’m not sure, upon reflection, the Volga is committed. I think I could rearrange things to make it available.’
‘I’d regard that as a favour,’ said Danilov. ‘Why don’t you get it cleaned and valeted for me to pick up tonight?’
‘It’ll be waiting,’ promised Borodin eagerly.
He hadn’t forgotten a thing about how the system worked, decided Danilov happily. His meeting with the initially dismissive manager of stores and maintenance was a repeat performance; it took less than fifteen minutes to make clear to the man the benefits he had to lose, and be instantly promised next-day delivery of everything he needed for his empty office.
The Volga ran well and the valeting had been meticulous. Olga insisted on a first-time ride, demanding they go almost halfway around the outer Moscow ring road.
‘This is better!’ she said, head back against the seat. ‘Like it was in the old days! About bloody time.’ They had not had a car of their own for four years, since their old Lada had crumbled beyond repair. It had been one of the most expensive gifts Danilov had ever received, from a black marketeer whose convoys he had guaranteed through his Militia district for eight years. The watch that rarely worked had come from the same source.
Danilov glanced across at her. He couldn’t detect the greyness through the tint, in the half light, but he didn’t think he liked her hair quite as long. Apparently thinking a good appearance was necessary in a prestige car, Olga had put on her new coat, a brown tweed with a deeper brown felt collar. There was a button missing from the front. Olga was the sort of woman from whose clothes buttons always seemed to be missing, even when they were new. She never appeared to notice.
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