Kings of Many Castles

by Brian Freemantle

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What work did he do, after he came out of the army?”

  “He didn’t, not for a long time.”

  “How could he pay you to live at Hutorskaya Ulitza?” asked Anne.

  “He didn’t.”

  “He was still drinking?”

  “Worse than ever, after the army. Every day. All day.”

  “Did you give him the money to buy it?”

  The woman shook her head, positively. “There wasn’t any. Not for drink. After Peter died, all I got was a 3,420 ruble-a-month pension.”

  She could count it to the last kopek, thought Charlie, less than sixteen pounds a month. “How did he get money to drink?”

  “Stealing. He used to go out to Sheremet‘yevo and steal suitcases from tourists. And the same at the railway stations, at the Kiev and Kazan departure terminals and at the central passenger bureau at Komsomol’skaya. There was always a lot of Western things at the apartment. I asked him not to because if he got caught we’d be thrown out of the apartment … .” She briefly trapped her lower lip between her teeth again. “That’ll definitely happen now, won’t it? The detective colonel said it could.”

  “I don’t know,” admitted Charlie, who thought it probably would. Hurriedly he went on, “Did he stop?”

  She nodded. “Just under a years ago, when he started work at the television station.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I never knew how or why it happened, but George stopped stealing ever so suddenly. It was a long time before he told me he was seeing a doctor, a friend, who was helping him. I don’t remember his name but I know you’ll want to know it. I’ll try. I’ll really try.”

  “What about the job?”

  “He said he’d met someone who’d helped him. I thought it might be the doctor.”

  Charlie felt a flare of hope. Don’t rush, he cautioned himself. “Was he still drinking heavily?”

  “I don’t know about at work. Certainly at home. There were always bottles.”

  “What did he earn?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It should be easy enough to find out from the station. “But it was certainly enough to keep bottles at home?”

  “It seemed to be.”

  “Who was the person he’d met who helped him get the job?”

  “He never told me.”

  “Do you think it could have been the person he went out to meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays: perhaps stayed with on the times he didn’t come home?” asked Anne.

  “It could have been.”

  “Do you think this person worked at the TV stations, too?”

  “It would have made sense, wouldn’t it?”

  “Was it a man? Or a woman?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t have girlfriends. It would most likely have been a man, I think.”

  “What were the names of the people who came from the KGB to see Peter?”

  “They didn’t have names … not names that they were introduced by. Peter never told me.”

  “Not ever?” demanded Charlie, disbelievingly.

  “Not ever.”

  “What about Peter’s papers after he died?” said Charlie, asking the question as it came to him. “Did Peter keep a diary … a journal … letters … ?”

  “A diary. And other things. He was always writing.”

  Charlie was aware of Anne stirring beside him. He said, “What happened to it?”

  “Taken,” said Vera, shortly. “The day he died people came … they had security bureau identification. They collected up everything and said it would be returned when they’d finished with it.”

  “Was it?”

  “No.”

  “Did you have the name of anyone to call … to ask …?”

  “No.”

  “Have you asked for Peter’s things back?”

  “I didn’t want to upset anyone. I wouldn’t be able to get another apartment … I can’t survive without the pension …”

  “Did George keep a diary … have things written down?”

  “Maybe. He didn’t let me go into his room. The militia searched the apartment when they came … brought me here … I don’t know what they took … no one’s told me.”

  Natalia hadn’t mentioned anything about George Bendall’s personal property taken from the apartment. Olga Melnik certainly hadn’t, either. “I’ll find out,” promised Charlie.

  “Get me out of here. Please,” the old woman suddenly blurted. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m in a cell. There’s no toilet … nowhere to wash.”

  “I will,” promised the lawyer. “You shouldn’t be kept like this.”

  Charlie wished Anne hadn’t been so positive.

  “Now! Can I come with you now!”

  “It’ll have to be an official release. I have to arrange it,” said the lawyer.

  The older woman’s face crumpled. “I don’t know what else to tell you … what else I can do. I don’t know anything that will help.”

  “I will do everything I can, as quickly as I can,” said Anne.

  Vera Bendall’s lips quivered and her eyes flooded. “Don’t abandon me … please don’t do that.”

  “We won’t,” assured the lawyer.

  Anne Abbott held back until they stepped through the prison gates. As they did she breathed out, theatrically, and said, “Jesus Christ! I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a terrifying place in my life!”

  “That’s what it’s supposed to be,” said Charlie.

  “You really believe there was a tape recording being made of us?”

  “And a film.”

  “Jesus!” repeated the woman.

  “Welcome to Russia.”

  “There’s no justification for her being there.”

  “No,” agreed Charlie.

  “Do you think Sir Michael would agree to her being held somewhere within the embassy?”

  Charlie looked sideways in disbelief at the woman. “I wouldn’t think so for a minute.”

  “She’s British.”

  “The wife of a defecting spy—after whom she fled—and the mother of a murderer. Vera Bendall’s going to be kept at the end of a very long barge pole,” reminded Charlie. “The ambassador—and London—will want as little to do with her as possible.”

  “So much for compassion.”

  “So much for hard assed political reality.”

  “We’ve got to find somewhere better than that place.”

  “Good luck.”

  “How do you think it went, overall?”

  She didn’t yet know all that he did and he couldn’t tell her, Charlie realized. “Overall we managed to raise more questions than we’ve got answers for.” And there were more he still had to ask.

  “That’s what I think. I also think we made a pretty good team.”

  She had asked all the right questions, Charlie acknowledged. “Could be even better with practice.”

  “In fact, I was going to suggest buying you a celebration drink but I’ve decided helping Vera Bendall has higher priority.”

  “Let’s take a rain check,” agreed Charlie. Stealing an hour drinking with Anne Abbott would have been very pleasant but he supposed he had higher priorities, too.

  “It is bad, isn’t it? Worse than you’ve told me?”

  Anandale looked down at his wife, one side of her body embalmed beneath her protective tunnel. They’d been married for twenty-two years—happily so despite his resisted temptations—and in their personal life he’d always levelled with her, as she had with him. “The nerves in your arm have been damaged.”

  “Is that why I can’t feel it?” Her hair had been lightly brushed and her face washed properly, not with an unguent, so that it didn’t shine anymore but her pallor was still drained a deathly white. There was a saline as well as a plasma drip into her uninjured arm.

  “Yes.”

  “Will I get the feeling back?”

  “There’s goi
ng to need to be treatment. We’ve already got the specialists lined up, for when we get back.”

  “What sort of treatment?”

  “Re-connecting the nerves.”

  “The bullet smashed them?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happens if they can’t be re-connected?”

  “We’re going to the best people in the world to ensure that they can be.”

  “What if they can’t,” demanded Ruth Anandale, with the persistence of the criminal lawyer she’d been before their marriage.

  Anandale hesitated, swallowing. “Then it will be permanent.”

  “No feeling at all?”

  “No.”

  “No use then?”

  “No.”

  Ruth Anandale didn’t cry. Her face creased, once, as if there had been a spurt of pain but then she lay expressionless although not looking at him. “I broke my leg skating when I was a kid. About twelve, I guess. Even then all I could think about in the hospital was that it would be stiff when it got fixed, so that I’d have to limp—drag it maybe—for the rest of my life.”

  “I promise it’ll be fixed.”

  “You’ll have to help me, Walt. Help me a lot. I don’t want a body that doesn’t work right … look right …”

  “We won’t give up, until we get it fixed.”

  “No,” agreed Ruth. “We won’t.”

  The Russian Foreign Ministry is within walking distance of the American embassy, which was how Wendall North and the U.S. secretary of state finally completed their journey because Smolenkaja Sennaja Ploscad was gridlocked. The two Russians were waiting in Boris Petrin’s office actually overlooking the traffic-clogged highway.

  When North began to apologize for their lateness the foreign minister said, “We saw you, from the window. It’s a perpetual problem.” The floor to ceiling windows were double glazed, smothering any outside noise, but Petrin still led them deeper into the cavernous room, to where easy chairs and couches were arranged around a dead fireplace. There was an oasis of bottled mineral water and glasses in the middle of a low, glass-topped table. The Americans took the seats toward which the minister gestured and sat, waiting.

  Trishin said, “We want formally to express our condolences about your dead security man.” Local television had been dominated by footage of the coffin being loaded aboard the plane at Sheremet’yevo.

  North nodded but didn’t speak. Neither did James Scamell.

  Petrin said, “I am glad you agreed there was no need for advisers or a secretariat.”

  The two Americans remained silent.

  “Politically we’ve got to move forward now,” said the Russian chief of staff. “I’m sure you agree with us on that, too?”

  “I’m not clear what positive movement there can be in the circumstances,” said Scamell, at last.

  “The treaty was ready to be finalized,” insisted Petrin.

  “It had reached the final discussion stage,” qualified the secretary of state.

  “Easily resolvable points,” argued Petrin.

  “That’s not our interpretation,” said North. “Your elected president is alive but incapacitated …”

  “ … And Aleksandr Mikhailevich Okulov is the legally acting president, empowered to make and take all presidential decisions under the conventions of the Russian constitution,” interrupted Trishin, formally.

  “Pending elections also required under your constitution in the event of that incapacity becoming permanent or the death of the legally incumbent president,” finished the equally well-rehearsed North, just as formally.

  “The pending elections are not specially convened,” fought Trishin. “They were already scheduled.”

  “A circumstance of convenience,” dismissed Scamall, briefed by the American embassy’s constitutional lawyer. “Our advice is that it would be legally unsafe—as well as unfittingly hasty on the part of both sides-to consider any formal signing in advance of that election.”

  There was a visible stiffening from the two Russians.

  “What do you consider appropriate?” demanded Trishin, tightly.

  “A joint statement regretting what’s happened, with the hope that those still surviving make a full recovery. And an assurance that the incident in no way endangers the treaty negotiations, which will continue,” recited Scamell.

  “To defeat the Kommunisticheskaja Partiya Rossiiskoi Federalsii there has to be a signed treaty,” insisted Petrin. “That’s been our understanding—our agreement—from the beginning.”

  “I can continue coming here during the lead up to the elections,” offered Scamell. “There will only be one obvious inference.”

  “That the treaty will be agreed with us but not with the communists?” completed Trishin.

  The scenario was North’s and as he sat listening to it being spelled out he congratulated himself upon how well it suited both sides, although to a greater advantage to America than to Russia.

  “We are disappointed,” understated Petrin.

  “Nothing is being withdrawn,” insisted North. “Things are merely being postponed, which they should be.”

  “What about the joint statement?” queried Trishin.

  “Which must be a joint statement,” North said heavily and at once. “Strictly agreed between us, with no premature, unexpected announcements. I am giving you the American undertaking here and now that there will not be anything independent from us.”

  Petrin and the Russian chief of staff looked pointedly between each other. Trishin said, “I believe we see the point.”

  “If it is to be a joint statement, carrying the authority of both leaders, it should be made personally, not issued through spokesmen,” demanded Petrin. “We’d consider that essential.”

  “There’s the question of security …” North tried but Petrin overrode him.

  “There is no question of security!” The man looked around the huge office, empty but for them, as a reminder that it was an unattributable meeting. Completing the unspoken threat he said, “A personal statement, by your president and Aleksandr Mikhailevich, would totally guarantee no premature, ill-judged comments, don’t you agree?”

  John Kayley was already waiting in the small conference room adjoining Olga Melnik’s suite when Charlie arrived at Militia headquarters. For once the American wasn’t fumigating the place with his cigar smoke, which was a welcomed relief.

  As he passed over the transcripts of that morning’s meeting with Vera Bendall Charlie said, “I’ve included copy tapes, as well.”

  There was a stone-faced, head-nod of acceptance from the American, which Charlie interpreted to be continued annoyance at his refusal to let the man in on the interview and thought, fuck you too.

  “How did it go?” asked Olga, who’d already listened to her own eavesdropped recording and seen on film Charlie’s warning head shake to the woman who’d gone with him to Lefortovo.

  “One or two interesting points,” suggested Charlie.

  “Time to start work then!” she said, briskly.

  “Exactly,” seized Kayley. “And this isn’t the place or the way.”

  Charlie looked at the other man in open surprise. Surely yesterday’s rancor couldn’t have remained as strong as this? Olga just as quickly discerned the American’s irritation, hoping she’d succeeded in making the Englishman its focus.

  Charlie said, “You’ve obviously got a point to make?”

  “An obvious one,” declared the American. “Maybe the three of us can get on well enough together … maybe not. None of us know yet. But passing around packages like this is ridiculous. We need a centralized operation: an incident room, with trained officers indexing and correlating everything. Computers. Telephones. Access to forensic facilities. Somewhere from which we can all work together, be together. Yesterday all those facilities were flown in from America. And have already been set up in a basement at the U.S. embassy. It’s from there that I am going to head up the American side of the investigat
ion, an American side which will be fully exchanged with both of you. But what I’m suggesting—inviting—is for both of you to join me there, have all your stuff filed there. It’ll happen anyway, under the sharing agreement. But it’ll be in three different locations, with no necessary centralization. This shooting is almost forty-eight hours old and we haven’t got a damned thing properly off the ground yet …” He looked at Olga, smiling at last. “That’s not a criticism, of anything you’ve done. But look …” He swept his hand towards the pile of dossiers in front of Charlie. “He hasn’t had the opportunity to look at any of that yet …” He had to bulldoze them, be even more insistent if necessary. Paul Smith had made it a clear ultimatum when he’d spoken to the FBI director that morning. He had twenty-four hours to get everything on American terms under American control or he caught the direct Washington flight home the following night.

  Charlie had recognized Kayley’s point long before the American had got to it, his mind way beyond what the man was saying. The arrangement would suit him perfectly. Through Natalia he had virtually open access to the Russian investigation. And if he had entrée to the American facility he was confident he could discover whatever he wanted or needed, even if they didn’t want him to.

  Now it was Olga who was stone-faced. “You established all that without telling me—us—what you intended in advance!”

  “It’s the way I’m working the American part of the investigation!” repeated Kayley. “I’m inviting you both in, to be part of it. Like we’re supposed to be, all part of the same thing. What do you say, Charlie?”

  Yet again Charlie’s mind was way ahead. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Olga had been trying to drive a wedge between him and the American: how quickly what goes around comes around. “I think it’s a good idea. It is, after all, what we’re supposed to be doing.”

  “All those facilities exist here,” insisted Olga.

  Charlie was with him, which put her in the inferior bargaining position, calculated Kayley. “You don’t want to come aboard, that’s your decision. Charlie and I will operate out of Novinskii Bul’var, liaise and share everything with you from there. Not perfect but better than what we’re doing at the moment.”