But it might help. Two years ago, some of the local pushers hadn’t had the expertise to cut the heroin for maximum profit while leaving their customers alive for more. Now, they did.
The drugs had followed hard on the heels of the Germans, the Yankees, the Japs and the market economy. The local gangsters had discovered distinctly Western ways of making money.
The bad old days might have been bad, but now…? Vorontsyev rubbed his face. The bad old days had been bad. Always remember that, and what you’re supposed to be doing about the new days … despite a corrupt police force, seniors on the take or in the pockets of the biznizmen or the remnants of the KGB and the GRU and the local powerbrokers and the gas companies. Just remember, you’re holding the line.
They had to strike lucky tonight. They’d waited so long for a break. They needed a success — the arrest of Hussain and whoever would be at the flat they had under surveillance, where some of Hussain’s relatives lived. A whole shipment of Pakistani heroin suddenly taken off the streets would dry up supplies temporarily.
By which time, they might have begun to make inroads on the smuggling and distribution organisation. Begun climbing the greasy pole towards whoever ran things.
‘You stay here and monitor the surveillance,’ he announced.
‘I’ll take Marfa over to the Gogol and search Rawls’ suite. We ought to appear to be doing our best when Bakunin takes over.’
He smiled. The answer might be sitting on the bedside table you never know.’
He tugged on his boots, then thrust his arms into the sleeves of his topcoat. Wound his scarf around his neck, donned his fur hat, and opened the door of his office. At once, it seemed, the barnlike space of the Criminal Investigation Department became a scene of noisy indolence; as if a schoolmaster with a Party card had arrived. The duty detectives glanced furtively at him as if he were likely to ask some of them for his cut of their black incomes.” Or simply ask for results; a greater coronary threat than their drinking and their fatty diets. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke, but the place didn’t even smell Russian any more, the dark, pungent tobacco having been abandoned in favour of American cigarettes. The only real Russians remaining in the room were a kid who needed a fix and couldn’t pay for one, a whining old peasant woman in black, her face like an eroded rock formation, and the drab, youngish woman being interviewed by Marfa. The younger woman had a black eye and split lip.
The other suspects and complainants in the echoing, smoky, littered room were mostly well-dressed and either relaxed or demanding. One padded neck wore a vivid silk tie, and Vorontsyev noticed an astrakhan collar on a dark coat. He smelt cigar smoke.
He looked momentarily at the beaten, drawn woman, her hands twisting like strangers suspiciously circling each other, then studied the intensity of comfort in Detective Second-Class Marfa Tostyeva’s face. She was leaning her narrow body forward across her desk; her hands seemed engaged in some constant series of military forays of sympathy towards the other woman’s hands. Her cheeks were pale, her eyes glittered. Vorontsyev tapped her on the shoulder. Her reaction was that of someone woken from a deep sleep.
‘Hand this over to someone else—’ She was already shaking her head in protest, but then acquiesced. ‘- I want you with me.’ None of the others in the room would give this victim of domestic violence the time of day, but it couldn’t be helped. It seemed almost his duty to wean Marfa forcibly away from her addiction to lost causes; at least for short, recuperative periods of time.
Marfa patted the woman’s unceasing hands, whispering intently to her. Then she browbeat a junior detective into taking over the interview, before she followed Vorontsyev out into the chill of the corridor. It smelt strongly of disinfectant where the linoleum had been washed down.
Marfa sniffed loudly, repeatedly, as they went down in the lift.
‘Cold?’ he asked, grinning despite himself. Marfa Tostyeva wasn’t a hypochondriac — merely someone always surprised and disappointed in herself at the onset of minor illness. Perhaps, at twenty-six, she still felt immortal.
‘Flu, probably. I expect you’ll get it from me.’
Thanks, Marfa.’ He felt obliged to ask: ‘That woman. Her old man beat her up?’
‘Naturally! Rig worker — when he’s sober. Obviously thought he’s start his two-week vacation with a little exercise. Bastard.’
It was said without malice and without cynicism. Marfa still believed that life possessed oughts and ought nots. Imperatives.
Rules of behaviour. She was the angriest and most passionate member of the CID. Which was why he trusted her.
She sniffed again, her pale blue eyes looking more watery than usual. She would battle the cold or flu or whatever it was as violently and unremittingly as she did domestic violence, theft, drugs, cruelty to animals. Joan of Arc. He masked his smile. He’d have trouble sending her home if it was flu.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, glancing back at the interior of the lift as they left it, as if she had somehow betrayed the young, drab, beaten woman.
The foyer was a casual litter of humanity that lounged, slumped or moaned on benches and in tiled corners, observed by cynical militiamen or brifshed and mopped around by cleaners.
‘The dead body this morning. It was staying, when alive, at the Gogol. I thought we’d go and see in what style it was entertaining itself before going into the dark. OK?’
Marfa glowered at him. Rich men’s crimes hardly interested her. The Gogol Hotel was another planet, and one whose atmosphere was malign.
‘OK,’ she replied.
His car emerged from the last trees of the avenue that shrouded the climbing drive and his headlights splashed on the Georgian facade of the house. Though splendid, it was too far out along the George Washington Parkway, in Virginia. It overlooked the Potomac and the rushing waterscape of Great Falls. Its twenty-acre grounds nudged the Park. The immaculate mansion whispered of money; owned variously by eighteenth-century landgrabbers, a retired Civil War general, a steel baron — and now temporarily in the custody of Billy Grainger. Of which John Lock approved, since the house had been his sister’s sanity.
Billy’s black Porsche, his company limousine and the cruiser stood marshalled to one side of the house. Floodlights let the manicured lawns creep to the edge of eyesight and greened them. A few last brown leaves — overlooked by the gardeners lay like liver spots on an old hand. There were two other black limousines from the Grainger fleet, parked regimentally alongside Billy’s cars. Billy must have flown in some business associates.
He shut the door of the small Nissan and walked towards the portico, which was supported by four white columns — like the White House. He smiled. Billy’s mansion was slightly smaller. The flagpole thrust up into the starry evening, the flag itself furled. The huge lamp above the doors was gleaming.
Windows glowed with light, welcoming and secure.
And he no longer had to worry what he would find inside, as he had during the months when that facade had been a lie.
He felt no instinctive hunching of his shoulders, so often in the past the reaction he had been unable to avoid on coming to the house, wondering and even dreading what he would see.