Court records provided three different addresses in Moscow – one a brothel operated by three shalava, sleevesnatching street whores unable to get foreign clients because of age or feared disease, reduced to charging visiting peasants less than a hundred roubles a time. No-one, at any address, admitted any knowledge of the dead man. His occupation was variously given as a labourer and a porter, never with any workplace or employer. So far no friends or acquaintances had been found, nor any record of his having been married or permanently involved with any woman.
‘A man who didn’t properly exist,’ said Danilov. Holding up the last pages, listing the arrests and court appearances, he said to emphasise his point: ‘And stupid. Every arrest at the scene of a crime, convicted because he was taken straight from police detention to a court. What’s that tell us?’
‘Small time,’ agreed Cowley. Enjoying the new word, he said: ‘A lokhi.’
‘So what’s the connection between a street-level pimp and thug and a murdered Soviet diplomat? OK, we’ve accepted Serov was dirty. But surely Ignatov was too small time!’
Pavin answered the telephone when it rang, listening without interruption. At the end of the one-sided conversation he put his hand over the mouthpiece and said: ‘A uniformed Militia search party has found a gun, close to where Ignatov’s body was recovered. It’s a 9mm Makarov.’
‘Leave it where it is,’ ordered Danilov, as he got up from his desk. Exhausted or not, it had been a mistake not to have gone to the scene the previous night.
‘It don’t make sense!’ protested Bradley, probing for beef in the stroganoff before him. He chomped, open-mouth, and said: ‘This really isn’t bad. Great, in fact.’ He gulped at some red wine before he’d emptied his mouth. ‘You should have had it.’
Hank Slowen had already pushed his pork aside, deciding it was too rich roasted with plums: he was convinced he had an ulcer, although two examinations hadn’t discovered any medical evidence. ‘It’s early days yet.’
‘All the druggies in the fucking place should be pleading for mercy by now!’
‘They are,’ pointed out the FBI supervisor. ‘We’ve got hospital registers to prove it. They’re screaming.’ They’d chosen the Gastronom Moscow, right on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, making themselves very visible, like the rest of the Task Force throughout the area.
‘For methadone or whatever other shit substitute they can get!’ dismissed the detective. ‘They’re not screaming what we want to hear! Neither are the hookers or their pimps or any other bastard. It’s like a monastery under a vow of silence out there!’
‘Too early,’ repeated Slowen. He wondered if Bradley knew whether it was monks or nuns who lived in a monastery: probably not.
Bradley finished his stroganoff: he missed a grease blob on his chin with his napkin and the FBI man couldn’t bring himself to point it out. ‘Not too early,’ argued Bradley. ‘Too fucking scared. And if everyone in Brighton Beach is that scared, they’ve got something to be scared about. Like we’ve got something to worry about, because it means we’re wasting our fucking time.’
Sergei Ivanovich Stupar believed himself a lawyer whose time had finally come. He had a brilliant, analytical brain which he’d known was being wasted in the former Soviet Union, mourning his inability then to quit for the West, where he knew he could have made a fortune.
He had been forty-five years old when Communism died, which was too old for a man seeking long-delayed rewards to study for any postgraduate degree in a foreign law school. Which Stupar, who was also a conceited man, decided he didn’t have to do anyway. International law – particularly international financial law – was subject to interpretation from both sides of a no longer divisive barrier. Stupar, who had spent the beginning of his career manipulating the doubtful laws of Communist finance, blended perfectly into the milieu of adjusting and fashioning financial arrangements between East and West. Legitimate negotiations were, however, poorly paid.
The Chechen, on the other hand, promised to make him very rich, even paying him in dollars. He had initially been excited about the Swiss assignment, because it was precisely the financial environment in which he wanted to become involved. He decided he needed to exaggerate the problems he’d encountered in Geneva, to preserve his professional mystique and also because he was frightened of this man to whom he was reporting and wanted to impress.
‘I’ve found a lawyer who will act for us,’ he said, which was true. ‘But not as long as there are police enquiries into the American murder of Michel Paulac.’
‘The police have discovered the corporation?’ demanded Yerin.
‘They won’t,’ assured Stupar, also exaggerating his knowledge of international law and, more particularly, country-to-country treaty agreements. ‘Switzerland is a complete bank secrecy country. But the Swiss are cautious. The lawyer won’t move immediately.’
‘How quickly could there be a transfer?’ asked Gusovsky. He was unsure about excluding Zimin from this encounter.
‘All it needs is a replacement Founder’s Certificate and a nomination of new directors.’
‘So we can go ahead,’ said Gusovsky, to Yerin. ‘We don’t need formal control before the meeting. We know we can take over whenever we like.’
‘It’s important to keep to the schedule,’ agreed the blind man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The previous investigation had been in the winter, everything wrapped in a half-light of smothering greyness, sometimes fog, and Cowley had thought of it as a city with a blanket pulled over its head. In summer the greyness was still everywhere, unbroken by the faded green of the river-bordering trees. The streets were grey and the river was grey – except where the dredger was working, where it was black with churned mud – and the unsmiling people all around were grey. The uniforms of the street Militia were even officially grey.
And the murder scene was beyond professional belief.
Until that moment – based upon the police photographs – Cowley had imagined the alarm raised from above, from street level over an unbroken river wall. But the wall was broken, with steps leading to a concrete base beyond which floated a slat-board pontoon for passengers to board cruise boats and ferries: from where the dredger was working, he assumed the body had jammed on a mud-bank directly against one edge of the jetty, where it abutted the wall.
There was no taped-off cordon keeping the street clear for forensic examination, as there would have been in America. Onlookers were shoulder-to-shoulder along the wall on both sides of the entry to the river, littering fingerprints everywhere and foot-shuffling into oblivion any possible evidence. The pontoon steps were crowded with more milling, evidence-trampling sightseers and police and officials connected with the dredging operation.
‘For Christ’s sake let’s clear these people away!’ Cowley exclaimed. ‘This is a goddamned shambles!’
‘Too late,’ said Danilov, as angry as the American. He still had Pavin locate the uniformed Militia major to clear the pontoon and the immediate street above.
‘I can’t believe this!’ said Cowley, quiet-voiced in fury. ‘I simply can’t believe it! I’ll have to tell Washington! And not to save my ass. They should know.’
‘I think you should,’ agreed Danilov again. What about his ass? Safe, he decided. Pavin’s? There’d be efforts to side-step the responsibility. But a general, which Metkin was, or the senior investigating colonel, which Kabalin was, couldn’t dump it on someone of Pavin’s rank. Abruptly, a far more sinister realisation came to him. His safety had nothing at all to do with his being 5,000 miles away when Ivan Ignatov had been found. If Cowley had not returned to Moscow with him – which no-one had expected – all this staggering ineptitude and inefficiency would have been blamed upon him. Danilov hoped at least the Makarov had stayed in place and not been passed around between any interested hands before they’d got there.