They entered Yakutsk along the Ploshchad Druzhby. Charlie had read, along with everything else, of the melting effect of brick and concrete houses upon permanently frozen ground but hadn’t anticipated the added effect of the unprecedented thaw. One of Sasha’s English-learning nursery rhyme books had a doggerel about a little crooked man who lived in a little crooked house and Charlie thought it could have been written about this place. Only the wooden buildings lifted free of the ground on stilts had any proper, houselike shape. Everything of brick or concrete was lopsided, tilting this way and that, their walls fissured, cracked and lined like old men’s faces.
Novikov turned on to Prospekt Lenina, pointed to a series of buildings, all close together and said, “My professional opposition.”Outside of each were docile lines of men and women, waiting for admission.
Wrong to appear too ignorant, decided Charlie. “Shamans?”
Novikov nodded. “Healers. And a lot more besides. The local people don’t understand what’s happening with the weather. It should be cold now: minus twenty celcius, at least. Possibly lower. Snow a meter, two meters deep. They think it’s a curse. That the spirits are offended.”
“What will they do to placate them?” asked Charlie.
Novikov humped his shoulders. “There are rituals … offerings …” He caught Charlie’s quick sideways look. “No,” he said, smiling for the first time. “No blood sacrifices. But they’re linking these killings with it. They know it would have been impossible for those bodies to have been where they were. They say spirits put them there, as a warning.”
“Of what?” asked Charlie.
“That’s what they’re asking the shamans to tell them.”
Through the topsy-turvey buildings Charlie occasionally glimpsed the Lena River, which became more visible, muddy, debris-littered and unusually fast, as they began to clear the town. He’d kept a comparison between the number of motorized to horse-drawn vehicles and decided he was right about the choice of the Ontario Hotel.
As they entered the parking lot Charlie said it wouldn’t take him long to unpack and Novikov said he wasn’t in any hurry.
The hotel was properly built for the normal local climate and far better than a lot of hotels in which Charlie had stayed in the Eastern Bloc during his operational days of the Cold War. There was no bribe-prompting hindrance with their reservations, all of which were on the third floor, Charlie’s room directly opposite Miriam’s. The shower worked and despite the promise to the waiting man downstairs Charlie used it and changed, convinced the jacket he’d been wearing retained the odorous trace of his gap-toothed aircraft companion. He took particular care to avoid snagging the mosquito net he’d had shipped in with the special hat and doused the window area with insect spray. The bath had a plug still attached to its chain, so there had been no need for the spare he’d packed, from long experience. Everything he did, however, was automatic, his mind upon the journey from the airport. Yakutsk might as well be on anotherplanet and its inhabitants aliens, but Charlie didn’t have any doubt there were messages and meanings in the curious conversation he’d had with the pathologist. They would still have to come from the man himself: someone clearly as nervous as Novikov could easily be frightened away.
It was an uneasy gathering in the bar below, an uneasiness which Charlie did not have to work too hard to maintain. Vadim Lestov remained Siamese-twin close to an accepting Miriam, while the two local police officers tried hard but seemingly unsuccessfully to ingratiate themselves with Olga Erzin and the forensic scientist. When Charlie joined them, Vitali Novikov was trying to talk to the Moscow pathologist, too. Her patronizing disinterest in the local medical examiner verged upon outright rudeness.
They ate reindeer steaks, which Charlie enjoyed, identifying from its texture the dried turd the man beside him had chewed upon during the incoming flight. The reserve was more noticeable during the meal from Olga and the forensic scientist than from Lestov, although the militia colonel kept himself to one glass of Canadian-imported wine. Miriam tried hard but failed with the other woman and Charlie concentrated determinedly upon Vitali Novikov, holding the man’s total attention with talk of London and Moscow, carefully interspersed with hints of the authority that seemed important to the doctor.
It was Charlie who afterward suggested returning to the bar and its Canadian whiskey, which he considered an unexpected bonus. Everyone except Charlie, who was confident of his capacity, and Olga, who appeared uncaring, continued to limit their alcohol intake, although as the evening progressed Lestov’s stammering became more pronounced.
Using Novikov’s insistence that his wife was expecting him, Charlie broke the evening up, walking with the local pathologist to the lobby where the elevators were.
Charlie said, “Thank you again for being at the airport. I enjoyed our conversation.”
“I did, too,” said Novikov.
“I’m looking forward to starting work tomorrow. I’m going to be relying upon you a great deal. I hope we can learn to work together.”
“That doesn’t seem to be anyone else’s idea.”
“I’m only interested in my own,” said Charlie. “In case you need to contact me at all, I’m in room thirty-seven.”
“I’ll remember that,” promised Novikov.
Charlie rode bemused, silently, to the third floor but made no effort to get into bed. Within fifteen minutes he heard Miriam’s quick footsteps, alone, along the outside corridor and her door open and shut. It was half an hour later when there was a second set of heavier footsteps and another quick opening and closing of the American’s door.
With the six-hour time difference it was still only six in the evening in Moscow, but Charlie failed to get a connection to the embassy when he tried to dial direct. Experimentally Charlie booked the call through the hotel switchboard, where it would be logged. The connection was made immediately. Charlie smiled, not surprised.
Raymond McDowell and Richard Cartright came anxiously on to a conference call together. For the benefit of the suspected eavesdropper, Charlie exaggerated the total cooperation and assured the two men he had made the official request for the return of the body, which had amounted to the only proper conversation that evening with the militia commander.
“Do you imagine any problem with that?” asked McDowell.
“No.”
“When are you meeting the council?”
“Nothing’s been arranged.” Which wasn’t, Charlie had already decided, an oversight. He made up his mind to give the head of chancellery a gift of his special hat if McDowell had personally to come from Moscow.
“What’s it like there?”
“Unusual.”
“London is concerned,” announced Cartright. “The finding of the bodies got leaked, it seems, through Canada, and from there, obviously, to America. There’s a lot of media interest building up.”
“I can imagine,” said Charlie.
“I’ve promised a cable from here tomorrow.”
“I’ll try to give you something.” Charlie hesitated. “If I haven’t come through to you by this time tomorrow, you ring me. Telephone calls out aren’t easy.”
Charlie had just replaced the telephone when the knock came hesitantly at his door.
“I hope you don’t mind,” said the rapidly blinking Novikov.
“Not at all,” said Charlie, opening the door more widely.
Richard Cartright was seeking, not providing, so it was right he crossed the river from the British embassy to the American legation on Ulitza Chaykovskovo, and when Saul Freeman said he liked Chinese food Cartright suggested they simply walk the few blocks to the Peking. It was Freeman who guided the way into the foreign currency section. Cartright deferred to the American’s superior knowledge of a Chinese menu written in Russian, too.
“We heard from Charlie in Yakutsk,” offered Cartright, at once. “Just arrived. Nothing’s started yet.”