‘We needed the car,’ Korolev replied firmly, ‘and I’d no way of telling you about him.’
Kolya nodded, then gestured to the hard-looking men who stood out by virtue of their stillness and intensity amongst the neighbourhood’s evening crowd.
‘Let’s go inside. Your car will be there when you need it. And Firtov too.’
They followed the Thief into the half-empty bar, and at a nod from Kolya a bottle of vodka and some dark rye bread arrived at the small table he led them to, followed swiftly by glasses. Korolev, after a moment’s consideration, unbuckled the strap of his machine gun and placed it on the floor, Slivka following suit with her own weapon.
The presence of two machine guns in the bar aroused little comment from the other drinkers, which wasn’t surprising given that everything from a bayonet to a cut-down shotgun was sitting on the tables around them.
Korolev was pretty certain that the half-dozen men in the room, including the bartender, had almost, but not quite, smiled with approval.
‘Nice artillery,’ Kolya said, placing a Luger on the table, followed by a saw-toothed knife.
‘We came prepared. So what’s the situation? It looks like there’s enough weaponry in here for a small war.’
‘A small war is what we might have on our hands.’ Kolya squinted at his watch, then smiled. ‘But in an hour or two we’ll bring the war to an end, I think.’
‘You know where the guns are?’
‘Yes. They have a place in the catacombs they think no one knows about, but they’re wrong.’
‘Catacombs?’ Korolev asked.
‘This city is built from limestone. Where do you think it all came from? Underneath the city is where – they’ve been cutting it out for a hundred years now, and once you start making holes like that beside the sea, pretty soon gentlemen like me link them up and make tunnels, and then you have a nice way of getting something from the port up to the town if you want to do it quietly. You can travel from one end of Odessa to the other without seeing daylight, they say. And even if they’re prone to exaggeration around here, it’s possible they’re talking the truth on this.’
‘So how do you know about this place of theirs?’
‘We have one of their men out the back, and he has a wife and children. He’ll show us where his friends have their stash.’
‘What’s in this stash of his?’ Korolev asked.
‘At least forty crates, he says – I don’t know more than that and there’s still more coming in, but we should catch most of it.’ Kolya looked at him keenly for a very brief moment, then resumed his impassive expression.
‘It’s understood that any weapons are for us, Kolya,’ Korolev said.
‘You can have anything that shoots or blows, that’s agreed. For guns and suchlike, we’ll only take away what we bring. We want a quiet life – and these guns are noisy. They’re of no use to businessmen like us. Shall we drink on it?’
They emptied the small vodka glasses, drank in unison, and Korolev felt the alcohol warming his throat and stomach.
‘So how many guards?’
‘A few.’
‘Well?’
‘More than one, fewer than twenty. All we know is that they want to take the guns out of the city tonight and if there are forty crates – well, they’ll need some bodies to shift them.’
Once again Korolev had the feeling there was something he wasn’t being told.
‘Come, Kolya, all I have to do is call Marchuk or Mushkin and this city can be shut down so that not even a bicycle can move three feet.’
Kolya rubbed his chin, as if doing this would help him come to whatever kind of decision he was attempting to make.
‘I’ll be honest with you, Korolev, we want to deal with these people ourselves – we owe them a thing or two for the last week. On top of which, we don’t need the Chekists and your boys tightening the screws on the city at the moment – it would be bad for business. And we don’t want them poking around the catacombs either. We’ve things of our own hidden there, not that there’d be much chance of them finding our belongings, or their guns for that matter, but still… Nadezhda, explain to him.’
‘Chief, the tunnels are everywhere under the city. Every building you see above the ground came from within it, so you can imagine how many there are. Some of the catacombs are linked, but many are independent of each other, or the connections are well hidden. People get lost down there and are never seen again. If the guns are properly concealed, we might never find them.’
‘You see, Korolev? But with you and these little guns of yours, we should do it easily enough. Anyway, we know where they are right now. By tomorrow they could be somewhere else. There’s no time to waste.’
‘The guns stay with us?’
‘On my word. We want what we want, nothing more.’
‘You’re telling me you’re going to risk life and limb to foil a terrorist plot for nothing?’
‘Not for nothing, Korolev. We’re calling in a debt – a blood debt.’
Korolev grunted his disbelief – there was something else to this, he was sure of it. He considered standing up and walking away. If he slipped a clip into the machine gun there wasn’t much anyone could do about it, but his duty was to see that the traitors were stopped. An armed uprising, at this time and moment, might lead to a Civil War for all he knew, and he’d seen enough of the last one not to want to see another.
‘All right, Kolya, we’ll play it your way,’ he said, and felt for a moment as though he’d signed away his soul to the Devil.
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was dark and damp and the tunnel they were making their way along had been cut for smaller men than Korolev, and he cursed as a drop of water went down his collar. After twenty minutes of walking bent over and regretting every spare round he was carrying, Korolev was not in the best of moods.
He was also becoming increasingly worried – after all, he’d no idea how to get out of this damned place if the matter in hand didn’t go according to Kolya’s sketchy plan. If he could see something, Korolev thought to himself, then perhaps he could get his bearings. He’d felt the draughts from passages they’d passed to the right and left, and once had even been surprised to look up and see the yellow glow of what might have been a street lamp, far above him in what must have been an air vent. But otherwise the only illumination was from an electric torch carried by the guide at the front of the column, and even that had been covered with a piece of grey cotton. All in all, it was the kind of situation that could eat into a man’s confidence.
But still they pressed on, inch by inch, step by careful step. And the further they went, the more Korolev was beginning to wonder if he’d ever be able to stretch himself up to his full height again.
He was almost at the point of despair when the man ahead of him stopped and turned to place a hand on his shoulder.
‘The Count wants you up in front.’ He spoke in a low mumble that Korolev presumed was meant to be a whisper. Korolev squeezed past him and three others before the shaded torch showed him a man lying crumpled on the floor and the faintest outline of Kolya’s face as he leant over a piece of paper that a grey-bearded old man was marking up with lines and crosses.
‘Greetings, Korolev. The place is up ahead. Not far, but we split here.’
‘What happened to him?’ Korolev asked, nodding down at the guide.
‘He served his purpose. Mole here knows where we are and how to go about the thing. This fellow wasn’t telling us the entire truth, so we sent him up to God to ask forgiveness for his sin.’
In the faint light Korolev saw that what he’d taken for a shadow was a puddle of blood spreading out from the dead man. Korolev nodded again, keeping his lips firmly pressed together – now wasn’t the time to be splitting hairs about how and why the man had died. Anyway, if the Chekists had got their hands on him his fate would have been the same.