‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Didn’t you? Oh — well, “implied” may be a better word than “suggested”. At all events I thought there was an atmosphere between us. Not what I wanted, Pyotr Andreevitch, believe me.’
‘I believe you.’
‘It’s just that this co-operation thing is a bit tricky at the best of times,’ Bakradze said, and as if it had just occurred to him he proposed that they should have a drink some time and talk matters over.
‘Maybe,’ Kirov agreed.
There was a viewing window in the door. Kirov glanced through it into the room beyond. Gusev was laid out invisible under an operating gown and a team of doctors was working on him. The equipment looked second rate, relegated from one of the civilian hospitals. Watching the surgeons, he heard Antipov wheezing his way along the corridor on flat feet.
‘How did you get onto Gusev?’
Antipov looked to Bakradze and back. ‘You talking to me? It was a stroke of luck really. We arrested one of our friend’s distributors, a pharmacist called Zelenev — you should have a note of the arrest.’
‘No.’
‘No? Must be lost in the post, you know how it is. Anyway, this Zelenev kept a diary with a note of his meetings with Gusev. He couldn’t explain what the connection was. I mean, why should he be meeting all the time with a Moscow city apparatchik? We figured that Gusev had to be his supplier.’
‘Or customer,’ Kirov answered distractedly. Looking at Gusev he had an idea that the man’s vanity would be wounded by the scars left behind by the operation.
‘No customer would want antibiotics in that quantity, not so that they needed to go once a fortnight, not unless the customer was a hospital, which Gusev wasn’t. He had to be a supplier.’
‘Has Zelenev confessed?’
‘No.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Dead,’ interrupted Bakradze with more than a hint of sorrow.
Antipov waited, silently plucking a fragment of ash from between the hairs on the back of his left hand.
‘Well?’
‘He’s dead,’ Antipov confirmed. ‘We had him in custody for two days when he was killed by another prisoner. What can I say? It happens.’
‘You had him alive for two days,’ Kirov said neutrally. ‘And he didn’t confess?’
Bogdanov intervened sharply: ‘What the hell were you doing with him?’
It was Bakradze who answered, still striving for civility. ‘We live in changing times. We don’t beat up suspects any more. It’s called Socialist Legality.’
‘Since when?’ asked Bogdanov.
‘Go on,’ Kirov prompted.
‘There was a practical reason as well.’ Antipov stumbled over the reply. ‘Zelenev was no gangster: he was just a man making money on the side the way everybody does. I guessed that once we raided Gusev’s place and got some more evidence, Zelenev would realise he was finished and co-operate voluntarily. That way we would get more out of him than if we’d knocked him around. In any case,’ he added as if this were new to everybody, ‘the rough stuff is old-fashioned. Maybe it’ll come back or maybe it won’t, but look around you. Ever since Mr Clean took up home in the Kremlin we’ve all got a dose of morality. Take this antibiotics business. Under Brezhnev and Chernenko, who would have cared?’
While this was going on the KGB surgeon arrived. He came striding down the corridor, a tall erect man in a smart suit with his lecture notes stuck in one pocket and a table napkin in the other. ‘Are you Kirov?’ he asked, and glancing aside into the theatre added, ‘Christ, what a dump!’
‘I’m Kirov.’
Fomin eyed the other man and put away the casually assumed arrogance. ‘I gather our patient is vomiting blood.’
Kirov nodded.
‘Hmm. Ulcers.’ Fomin studied the corridor uncomfortably. Grey-painted walls and small trays of rat-bait where they met the floor. A pervasive smell of cabbage and disinfectant. He lit a cigarette and invited the others to join him. ‘I really don’t know why I do this. part of the job,’ he said easily. ‘I hate these places. By the way I pulled Gusev’s medical records, which is why it has taken me so long to get here. They confirm that he has a stomach ulcer. Now, if Gusev were living in America — but it doesn’t matter whether the Americans have drugs for controlling these things, does it?’
‘Do you think the ulcer explains his symptoms?’
‘It would explain the puking. What do they feed them on in here?’
‘I think that Gusev has been eating something special.’
Kirov left the newcomer washing up to go into the theatre and the police team hanging about the corridor. He ignored Bakradze’s curiosity.
Bogdanov followed him into the ward. ‘What are we searching for, boss?’
Beds lined each wall, lockers stood by the beds and the windows were barred. An orderly in a dirty white coat slouched in the space between the beds and a dozen or so patients in prison-issue pyjamas lay in the beds or sat on them waiting for something to happen. The room was pervaded by a sullen silence.
Kirov asked where Gusev had been.
‘Over there.’ Bogdanov pointed. ‘You still haven’t told me what we’re looking for.
‘Gusev’s last meal.’ Kirov reached into his pocket for the black velvet bag but remembered it was still being analysed. What had been in it? He approached Gusev’s bed and sensed a dull curiosity in the other patients.
‘Come to clean up?’ said a voice. ‘About bloody time!’
Bogdanov went over to the speaker and cracked him a sharp blow in the face. He ignored any risk of reaction and ambled back to Kirov murmuring, ‘Socialist Legality, my arse!’
A screen had been placed around Gusev’s bed when the vomiting fit started, before he had been moved to the theatre. The orderly came over and removed it without being asked. The bed was a mess of bloody sheets. The smell was foul. Kirov paced a slow circuit of the bed and noted the details. The iron frame showed signs of rust, the bedclothes were grey and patched, the door on the locker had lost one hinge and hung at a crazy angle. In his imagination Kirov could see Gusev feeling the burning in his guts and the onset of nausea. He had turned onto his side to lean out of the right-hand side of the bed and vomit on the floor. Then there had been the main rush of blood and Gusev had collapsed back onto his pillow and the blood had poured off him and onto the sheets.
Kirov turned to the orderly. ‘I want this bed stripped down one sheet at a time so that I can inspect them.’
The man was dimly astonished. ‘What, me? There’s blood on them.’
‘Do it!’ Kirov commanded. The orderly yanked one of the convalescent patients out of his bed and the two men set about the business.
‘Do you seriously expect to find something?’ Bogdanov asked.
‘Gusev didn’t swallow drugs or they would have showed up in the blood test. Whatever he swallowed must have been solid enough to irritate his ulcer.’
The orderly and the patient held the first blanket top and bottom and shook it but nothing fell out. They stretched it so that Kirov could inspect it. The blood showed as large stained patches reminding Kirov of the blot tests used by psychologists. They held the same ambiguity. You could read into them what you wished.
‘Try another one.’ He moved to the window. It overlooked an inner yard, floodlit and bare. Sleet was falling gently and was caught in the beams of light. In the stillness of the ward the lights went out except for that by Gusev’s bed, which burned like an altar lamp. In the yard someone was rolling a trash can from one place to another.