The Case of the General's Thumb

by Andrei Kurkov

  Pogodinsky stood holding the money as if at a loss what to do with it.

  “May I suggest you don’t try cashing it in Monschau,” he said suddenly. “Go somewhere bigger. Düren or Aachen.”

  Though not clear why they should, Nik nodded.

  Sakhno finished what remained of the vodka, and they left.

  The hearse moved slowly away, restoring to view the well-loved beauty and tranquillity for so long part of Pogodinsky’s unpretentious but far from simple life.

  Pulling off the road, Sakhno leant his head against the door and closed his eyes. Nik got out and strolled amongst the pines until himself overcome with weariness. Climbing into the back of the hearse, he stretched out in the coffin space.

  The surrounding pines made early evening seem like night.

  36

  Viktor spent most of the next day in his office awaiting events and telephone calls. At least twice, and secretly laughing at himself for so doing, he went and checked the boot of his car. There were no new corpses. Nor did Georgiy phone.

  Zanozin looked in several times to report that Grishchenko had neither appeared for duty nor returned home. When, towards evening, Georgiy rang to say that the body in the boot was that of Senior Lieutenant Grishchenko, the news came as no surprise.

  “And tomorrow morning why not just pop back to where you dumped him? Look the house over. You never know what you might find.”

  “How about who lives there?”

  “Lying in the morgue. They opened fire instead of the door. Go early. You won’t be challenged.”

  Setting off next morning, after once again checking the boot, he was surprised how few people there were about, until he remembered it was Saturday, when normal folk would still be abed. He remembered, too, that he’d not told Ira he was going, but no matter, he would be straight back.

  The garage door was half open, as also the wicket beside the main gate of the house. He came first on an empty kennel, then a dead Alsatian, still attached to a running-leash cable.

  The solid oak door yielded at a push, and he entered. The silence was unnerving. Where, then, were Georgiy’s watchers? The short hall terminated in another open door. He glanced in, then mounted the creaking wooden stairs.

  The attic had been converted into a lounge with three settees, a large dining table and wide-screen Sony television and, in the far corner, a desk littered with invoices, letters and copies of the glossy weekly Itogi.

  The desk drawer, which he opened with his handkerchief, contained a notebook, a Dictaphone, a couple of cassettes, and a stainless steel box with handles, such as syringes for Granny’s injections had been kept and sterilised in, when he was a boy. This one, he saw, lifting the lid, contained a scalpel, three tiny, different-toothed saws, and surgical forceps.

  He returned the handkerchief to his pocket – others had been here disturbing prints before him. He would take what seemed of interest.

  His phone rang.

  “How’s it going?”

  “It’s odd. No security, but any amount of stuff.”

  “So?”

  “Thought I’d take the best of it back to the office.”

  “Four plus out of ten! Four for back to the office, but you get a plus for effort.”

  “Office not the right place?”

  “No, home, and ring when you get there. Security’s present, but you’re not seeing it.”

  A tiny video camera in a corner of the ceiling! Kilometres away someone was watching, or recording, as with SVI radio traffic!

  Sensing suddenly that it was time to leave, he swept everything off the desk into a large carton, throwing in the surgical box and contents of the drawers for good measure, and carried it out to his car.

  Taking another look round on the ground floor, he discovered an iron manhole in the kitchen leading to the cellar, but was unable to raise it.

  He pulled the wicket gate to behind him, shut the garage doors more securely, and left.

  Some five minutes after the red Mazda had returned to the smooth asphalt of the Zhitomir highway, the Miller Ltd minivan drew up outside the house. The driver opened the garage doors and reversed in.

  37

  Returning to Euskirchen, thoroughly chilled by their night in the hearse, Nik and Sakhno went straight to bed.

  Nik woke at noon. The sun was shining, German birds were singing. He made coffee, made sure that the cheque was still safe in the pocket of his jacket, discarded on the floor, then roused Sakhno.

  Sakhno was all for cashing the cheque in Cologne, but Nik insisted on Düren as closer and offering fewer temptations.

  Düren was a drab little town. They left the car in a two-storey car park, and soon found a bank.

  “Slip me ten marks, and I’ll wait in that café,” said Sakhno, “while in you march, singing your head off, as they say in the army.”

  Nik handed the cashier the cheque and watched her fingers dart over her computer keyboard. Suddenly they stopped.

  “It’s dated the year after next,” she said, passing it back over the counter.

  “Give me two hundred,” said Sakhno, sitting before a tall glass of beer.

  “Haven’t got it.”

  Nik showed him the cheque.

  “Bloody man! We’ll have his guts for garters!”

  Finding Masha’s shut, they found their way to the back. Sakhno hammered hard on the solid door, then forced the catch and entered. Nik, who had been keeping watch by the dustbins, followed.

  Sakhno, when he caught up with him, was in the kitchen eating ham from an open fridge.

  “Can’t have gone for long, leaving all this food. Look upstairs.”

  Nik made his way up to a carpeted landing with a watercolour of St Basil’s on the wall. Of three doors, the first opened into a small bedroom: wooden double bed, dressing table, small television, two faded still lifes, metal-framed photograph of a middle-aged woman. Next, a tiny study: desk, two walls of bookshelves, revolving easy chair, single window giving onto the embankment. Then to the sitting room, where he found Pogodinsky, hanging by a strap from a hook which had supported the chandelier, now on the floor beside an overturned chair.

  “Come and eat,” said Sakhno, sitting over beer and ham at a corner table in the restaurant, “we can do ourselves well till Pogodinsky comes back.”

  “Pogodinsky’s still here. Upstairs. Hanged.”

  “Sod the bloody fool! Well, dig in all the same!”

  Nik ate, contemplating the black, fire-guarded void of the hearth and doing his best not to think.

  Bringing beer and a glass, Sakhno poured for them both.

  “Any cash about?”

  “Haven’t looked.”

  “I’ll have a go. Finish the beer first.”

  Sakhno rummaged noisily upstairs, and eventually came down with a bulging carrier bag and a tortoise.

  “Found it under his desk … Can’t leave it to starve … Seventy marks, that’s all the money … No sign of a safe … There’s a chequebook so the bank’s where the cash is. But let’s go. We’ve sat here long enough.”

  It was getting dark as they made their way back to the hearse, Sakhno cradling in his arms the carrier bag which now contained the tortoise.

  They left Monschau at about 10.00, and drove for a long while before realizing that they were lost.

  “Game for a second bivouac in the forest?” Sakhno asked, and as Nik said nothing, passed him a flat stainless steel flask from the carrier bag.

  Whatever it contained was pleasantly bitter to the tongue, aromatic and very strong – like Riga Balsam.

  “To hell with the wretched man!” Sakhno said, reaching for the flask. “But at least we shan’t freeze!”

  38

  The kitchen was becoming increasingly like a night office, but Viktor’s sleepless hours there were not especially fruitful. No sooner did the Bronitsky case seem on the point of getting somewhere, than it raised fresh questions and puzzles. And Georgiy the Invisible, while clearly
more in the picture than Viktor, appeared in no hurry to share what he knew.

  The notebook he’d brought from the house outside Kiev contained as many Moscow telephone numbers as Kiev ones. Its owner – of whom Viktor knew no more than that he was dead – had lived in both capitals and dealt with, amongst others, Ivin and Kozitsky of the Bronitsky circle.

  He rang Georgiy.

  “Since you ask,” Georgiy said, not, apparently, surprised to be rung at such an hour, “the notebook will have belonged to Vasily Prorokov, also known as ‘Mr Blessed’, and now reposing in the morgue. A real crook’s crook. Came to these parts from Tula a year ago. With him on the slab are the District Tax Police Chief, Voronezh, his younger brother, and A.N. Other, carrying no papers and so far unidentified. I’ll ring you on that one.”

  Viktor entered Crook’s Crook Prorokov on his diagram of Bronitsky connections, then lit the gas to boil a kettle.

  Ira appeared in the half-open door, barefoot and in her nightdress.

  “Shouldn’t you get some sleep?” she whispered.

  “Just going to.”

  39

  Nik stood at the window with a glass of beer, gazing gloomily down at the empty, rainy, Euskirchen street, thinking of Tanya and Volodya.

  “Let me have twenty,” said Sakhno.

  Nik pulled two notes from his shirt pocket and passed them over.

  “It’s boring here. I’m going for a drive.”

  “Fine.”

  The door banged, and a little later there was a hoot as the hearse turned the corner.

  Nik was about to boil water for coffee when the phone rang.

  “How did you make out with Pogodinsky?”

  “He’s hanged himself.”

  “So you overdid it.”

  “No, all went smoothly.”

  “Were you seen when you found him hanged?”

  “No.”

  “Leave any evidence of your visit?”

  “No.”

  “Right. Stay put. Ring you shortly. No need to mention my call to your friend, when he gets back,” the voice added, leaving Nik to conclude that they were being observed.

  When the man next rang it was to ask if they had brought back any papers.

  “Sakhno did,” said Nik.

  “Have you seen what?”

  “No.”

  An accusing sigh greeted this admission.

  “Go now and see! You’ve got twenty minutes. Whatever it is – notebooks, chequebooks, credit cards – have it ready by the phone.”

  The carrier bag was by the radiator, so, too, a saucer of water and the tortoise.

  The carrier bag yielded two tins of black caviar, Produce of Astrakhan; a generous portion of salami; a bottle of Smirnoff and one of Absolut. The rest was indeed personal stuff: two notebooks, a chequebook, letters, a fat pocketbook and two sets of colour photographs. The notebooks were in German and Russian, the photographs of people whose faces meant nothing to him.

  Sakhno’s professionalism in making this collection came as something of a surprise. Nothing had been said about seizing documents, and it hadn’t occurred to Nik to do so.

  “Well, what have we got?” asked the telephone voice.

  Nik reported.

  “Got a pen? Write down these names: Slonimsky, Kurz, Weinberg. Any mention of them, make a note. I’ll call back.”

  The next twenty minutes Nik spent searching the diaries, and when the man rang, was able to give phone numbers for Kurz and Weinberg.

  “Got the tablets still? Good,” the man said, and rang off.

  40

  Viktor set off for an afternoon walk, giving his red Mazda a glance and the guard a friendly nod as he went, and made his way to the Shelkovichnaya Street gastronom where he and Zanozin had been for a beer. Zanozin was now on temporary loan to Ratko, assisting in a case involving arms sales.

  Viktor took his large coffee over to a stand-at table in the window and was watching the people pass in the sunlit street, when Georgiy rang.

  “What’s new?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’m going to. Listen. The day after tomorrow you fly to London for a conference on money-laundering. I’m having a passport delivered to you at the office by 6.00 this evening.”

  “I don’t speak English.”

  “There’ll be an interpreter.”

  “But what’s the point?”

  “It’s a three-day conference. You have a six-day visa. So the point is to have a full and frank talk with Bronitsky junior. I’ll ring and brief you further. This is work, not a jolly, so get yourself into the mood.”

  He was past being surprised by anything. Go to London, he was told, so to London he’d go. He was beginning to tire of the whole thing. And not least of being given a case, and from the word go denied a mass of detail known to others who were in on the case as well.

  He’d have to bring back something for Ira and Yana. How surprisingly practical he was all of a sudden!

  Returning to his office, Viktor found Zanozin seated at his desk.

  “Got a surprise,” he said smiling and patting a large brown envelope.

  It contained a photograph showing a badly burned corpse in a room destroyed by fire. “Veresayev, Nikolay Petrovich, Colonel, Border Troops HQ,” Zanozin explained.

  “Who took it?” Viktor asked, examining it closely.

  “Find me a flat, and I’ll tell you,” laughed Zanozin.

  “Tell me, and I’ll find you a couple.”

  “It was taken by On the Spot TV. They’re well in with the fire brigade – they’ve got a direct line. One of the On the Spot crew had his own camera.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Spoke to the firemen.”

  “Brilliant! Carry on like like this, keep your nose clean, and you’ll have your flat!” Viktor grinned. “But I’m not sure where this photograph gets us.”

  “Look at his hands.”

  Viktor took the print over to the window. The body lay arched, right arm flung back, left arm reaching forward. The tips of all fingers had been burnt away, but while the left thumb was more or less intact, the whole of the right thumb was missing!

  “Have you seen the TV footage?”

  “Hasn’t been kept. This photo’s all there is.”

  “Well, thanks.”

  When Zanozin had gone, Viktor looked at his watch. 3.55. Pending the arrival of his passport, he would give his mind to thumbs.

  41

  As it grew dark, and Sakhno had still not returned, Nik marvelled at his managing to make twenty marks last so long.

  He looked around for the tortoise and was relieved to see it still motionless before its empty bowl. Then the phone rang.

  “Why try to fool me?” asked the man.

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’ve left a hell of a lot of evidence at Masha’s … You’re going to have to ditch your pal. Then we’ll help. We can’t get both of you out of this. Slip him two of the tablets, and when you’ve done that, ring 48-04, and I’ll tell you what next.”

  The dialling tone followed, and for a while Nik stood, still foolishly holding the receiver to his ear.

  The tortoise had withdrawn its head into its shell. He hoped it wasn’t dead.

  What evidence had they left? The man was talking gibberish! Ditch Sakhno, indeed!

  He opened the window. The night air was amazingly warm. Hearing a vehicle, he leant out, hoping to see the hearse, but was disappointed. The drizzle was like a tepid shower.

  The phone rang, but he let it, and went and made coffee.

  After a while the phone rang again, and this time Nik answered. If the flat was being watched, they would know he was there.

  “How are we?”

  Nik said nothing.

  “Sorry if you’re put out. No need for any tablets. Just pulling your leg. You left nothing too incriminating.”

  Nik swore.

  “That’s the way – let off steam! And now you need paper
and pen … Tomorrow’s route and the new target address.

  “The house,” he continued, after Nik had read it all back, “has got cameras and security and is not to be approached. What you’re to do is buy en route four kilos or so of frozen fish. This you chuck over the wall when you get there, then come straight back.”

  “A four-hour drive just for that?”

  “And one that you’ll be doing more than once – so think long-distance! But here’s your pal coming back. Good luck!”

  Sakhno was in a cheerful mood. He put down lettuce for the tortoise, which the tortoise showed no interest in, keeping its head retracted, and offered Nik a smoke, which he refused. Told what was proposed for the next day, he showed no surprise and simply nodded.

  42

  The plane took off from Borispol for London at the early hour of 7.30 a.m. Viktor left his packing to Ira, and arranged for Zanozin to spend the night at their flat, then drive the car back to District from the airport.

  Sitting in the kitchen, Viktor checked the three hundred dollars travelling expenses in one pocket, and in another Ratko’s fifty dollars for a pair of red braces, any change from which, Ratko had said, he was to keep.

  “You must buy some new socks – yours are mostly holes,” came Ira’s voice. “And where’s the bag you took to Moscow?”

  “Top of the corridor cupboard.”

  Minutes later Ira came in, handed him the curious automatic and asked, “Is this the bag you’re taking?”

  Weighing the gun in his hand, he looked around for somewhere to put it. The dusty space between kitchen cabinet and ceiling looked promising, and wrapping it in a tea-cloth, he put it there.

  Georgiy rang.

  “All set?”

  “Almost.”

  “Mind on the job?”

  “Practically.”

  “You’ll have three hours on the plane to collect your thoughts. Good luck! Ring when you get back.”

  Zanozin turned up shortly before midnight, produced a bottle of Odessa cognac from his briefcase, and sat in the kitchen, where Viktor joined him, having checked his bag and looked in on Ira and Yana.