He quickly finished his drink, ordered another for Kauffman, and announced:
‘It’s my sister’s birthday, Bob. I’m running late. I still haven’t wrapped her present. Great to see you ‘
He was shrugging himself into his topcoat as he spoke, already a few yards from the bar. Kauffman watched him with a gored bull’s distrustful, enraged eyes. Lock waved his hand and Kauffman returned the gesture, his glance softening.
Lock shook off the man’s infectious world-weariness. He’d never known Kauffman well, he had never been a friend. They’d come into contact in Afghanistan in the ‘80s and hardly ever since. Kauffman was a ‘Nam veteran of the Company, an intelligence field officer who still moved through an imaginary world of inferior races and ideologies.
He was blithely recovered by the time the doors slid back and the street’s cold air struck him. He moved into the lamplit cold, turning up the collar of his topcoat. Leaves rattled like tin along the sidewalk. Gas was sharp on the air. He began to hurry, grinning with childlike anticipation.
Alexei Vorontsycv put down the telephone and announced:
‘They’re sending someone over to the hospital to identify the body. The shock-horror sounded genuine enough. From the description, it sounds like it is Rawls.’
Dmitri, licking his fingers and putting down a second receiver, nodded then said: ‘You’re going to love this.’ He shook his head in the direction of the telephone.
‘What?’
‘By the time Forensic — your pal Lensky — got to the morgue, someone had had the shoes off the corpse. The body must have unfrozen just enough to’
‘Deliberately?’ Vorontsyev snapped.
‘What?’ Dmitri was chewing on another huge bit of something that approximated to pizza. As a breakfast, its prospect made
Vorontsyev queasy. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. No, it looks like opportunism. Probably one of our uniformed buggers taking advantage.’ The office smelt powerfully of pungent, burned herbs, anchovies, tomato. And of their wet boots standing forlornly near the single radiator. The snow flew past the large window. The
‘It’s my sister’s birthday. Bob. I’m running late. I still haven’t wrapped her present. Great to see you ‘
He was shrugging himself into his topcoat as he spoke, already a few yards from the bar. Kauffman watched him with a gored bull’s distrustful, enraged eyes. Lock waved his hand and Kauffman returned the gesture, his glance softening.
Lock shook off the man’s infectious world-weariness. He’d never known Kauffman well, he had never been a friend. They’d come into contact in Afghanistan in the ‘80s and hardly ever since. Kauffman was a ‘Nam veteran of the Company, an intelligence field officer who still moved through an imaginary world of inferior races and ideologies.
He was blithely recovered by the time the doors slid back and the street’s cold air struck him. He moved into the lamplit cold, turning up the collar of his topcoat. Leaves rattled like tin along the sidewalk. Gas was sharp on the air. He began to hurry, grinning with childlike anticipation.
Alexei Vorontsycv put down the telephone and announced:
‘They’re sending someone over to the hospital to identify the body. The shock-horror sounded genuine enough. From the description, it sounds like it is Rawls.’
Dmitri, licking his fingers and putting down a second receiver, nodded then said: ‘You’re going to love this.’ He shook his head in the direction of the telephone.
‘What?’
‘By the time Forensic — your pal Lensky — got to the morgue, someone had had the shoes off the corpse. The body must have unfrozen just enough to’
Deliberately?’ Vorontsyev snapped.
‘What?’ Dmitri was chewing on another huge bit of something that approximated to pizza. As a breakfast, its prospect made Vorontsyev queasy. ‘Oh, 1 see what you mean. No, it looks like opportunism. Probably one of our uniformed buggers taking advantage.’
The office smelt powerfully of pungent, burned herbs, anchovies, tomato. And of their wet boots standing forlornly near the single radiator. The snow flew past the large window. The morning was all but obscured. The frontier town had, for a thankful moment, vanished behind the onset of winter. As had its drugs and gangster epidemic. He heard a truck skid, then collide with something four floors below.
‘OK, let’s assume it was Rawls. Why did someone have him turned off?’
Dmitri hunched his shoulders, wiping his mouth with a large, grey handkerchief. He did his own washing now — not very successfully. Vorontsyev’s laundry was much neater; fastidiously so. Arctic white and aseptic as the flat he occupied. Dmitri’s home was untidy and grimy with grief and neglect. He couldn’t take his washing along to the Foundation Hospital and ask his mad wife to do it for him. He went there just to sit beside her.
Not with her; she wasn’t with anyone any more.
‘Do you think he might have been involved with the local crap — the biznizmen and the mafia?’ There was a tone of fervent, reawakened hope in Dmitri Gorov’s voice, it was a sign of obsession rather than anticipation; everything, for him, had to be to do with drugs and the local mafia.
Vorontsyev shook his head and rubbed his unshaven cheeks with both hands, as if they still retained the chill of the copse beside the highway.
‘There’s never been any hint of an American connection.
Rawls was a senior executive of Grainger Technologies, not even part of the GraingerTurgenev set-up. I can’t see him dabbling in cocaine or heroin as a bit of private enterprise. Seriously, Dmitri — can you?’ Reluctantly, Dmitri shook his head, an intense disappointment on his features. He rubbed one big hand through his thinning, lank dark hair, then around his big-jowled face.
‘I suppose you’re right. Look, Alexei, this murder isn’t going to get in the way of our drugs bust, is it?’ He was all but pleading.
Vorontsyev shook his head.
‘I don’t know why Bakunin didn’t grab it straight away. He will do, though. There’s kudos in dealing with the Yankees, with Turgenev. Security is bound to take it over. After Bakunin’s had his breakfast — and maybe masturbated himself into a better mood.’ Dmitri laughed explosively. ‘No, we’ll concentrate on the drugs — as always.’
Dmitri seemed pleased. He picked up a report sheet from his side of the desk and passed it to Vorontsyev.
‘The Aeroflot flight up from Islamabad arrives at eight tonight.
Nothing’s changed. Hussain is booked onto it.’ Dmitri fidgeted with excitement.
‘The apartment block stakeout’s all set?’
‘All in place. There’s nothing much happening at the moment
— but that’s not unusual.’
‘OK. Tonight, then. The stuff will be on the flight?’
‘That’s what I’ve been told. It’s the usual method of transport, and Hussain’s the carrier — for the Pakistani connection, that is.’
‘The Pakistanis are all we have. We know it comes in from Tehran and from Kashmir, but we don’t have any leads. Hussain from Rawalpindi is all we’ve got.’ Vorontsyev realised he had begun to sound hectoring, a distributor of blame. He added:
‘Yours is the best lead we’ve had so far. We have a flight number and a name — at last. We know it’s coming from down there, the Moslem Triangle, and we guessed it was coming in by air, brought by casual workers on the gas rigs. But we never had a name and a precise flight. Now we have both.’ Suddenly, he banged his fist down on the desk. ‘Christ, the number of shipments that have been brought in under our noses! We’re not going to lose this one, Dmitri.’ He saw Dmitri’s features darken with what might have been some obscene hunger. ‘I promise. This time we’ll gut the bastards, sweat it out of this Hussain, follow the trail we persuade him to give us, pick up the distributors …’ He knew, to his own embarrassment, that he was feeding a sickness in Dmitri. Revenge. But, Christ, the man deserved his revenge if anyone ever did! ‘Planeloads of workers coming back off holiday, and every time a new consignment of heroin. Simple — when you know how.’ He studied Dmitri’s face. He had successfully lightened the atmosphere. Two years ago, Dmitri’s only beloved daughter had overdosed on heroin that hadn’t been sufficiently cut. Revenge might never compensate him for her death, nor make up for the post-breakdown, vegetable state of his wife in the hospital.