As the train pulled into Finland Station, Arkady jumped from it while it was still moving, waving the red KGB identification card taken from the man Kirwill had beaten to death. Anthems filled the loudspeakers. It was the day before May Day.
Chapter Seventeen
A hundred kilometers north of Leningrad, on a plain between the Russian town of Luzhaika and the Finnish city of Imatra, the train rails crossed the border. There was no fence. There were shunting yards and customs sheds and discreet radio bunkers on each side. Dirty snow lay on the Russian side because Russian trains on this spur burned low-grade coal, and cleaner snow on the Finnish side because the Finns used diesels.
Arkady stood with the commandant of the Soviet Border Patrol station and watched a Finnish major return to the Finnish Frontier Guard post fifty meters away.
‘Like the Swiss.’ The commandant spat. ‘They’d sweep all the soot on our side if they had the nerve.’ He made a halfhearted attempt to fasten the red tabs of his collar. The Border Patrol was an arm of the KGB but was staffed largely by veterans of the regular Army. The commandant’s neck was too thick, his nose aimed sideways, and his brows were an honest mismatch. ‘Every month he asks me what to do with that damned chest. How the devil should I know?’
He framed Arkady’s match with his hands so that they each could light their cigarettes. A Soviet guard watched from the track, an assault rifle that looked like a plumber’s tool hanging from his shoulder. Every time the guard shifted, the weapon rattled in the wind.
‘You’re aware that a chief investigator from Moscow has about as much authority here as a Chinaman,’ the commandant told Arkady.
‘You know Moscow around May Day,’ Arkady said. ‘By the time everybody stamps my papers I’d have another victim on my hands.’
Across the border the major led a pair of frontier guards to a customs shed. Beyond, foothills led to the Finnish lake country. Here the land was ironed flat and sprinkled with alders, ash, bilberry shrubs. Good country to patrol.
‘The smugglers here bring in coffee,’ the commandant said, ‘butter, sometimes nothing but money. For foreign-currency shops, you know. They never smuggle anything out. I guess that’s insulting. Pretty unusual, a case of yours bringing you all the way out here.’
‘Nice here,’ Arkady said.
‘Quiet here. You can get away from it all.’ The commandant pulled a steel flask from inside his jacket. ‘Do you like this stuff?’
‘Probably.’ Arkady took the offered draw on the flask and body-heated brandy rolled to his stomach.
‘Some men can’t take it guarding a border – guarding an imaginary line, you know. They actually go crazy. Or they allow themselves to be corrupted. Sometimes they actually try to cross the border themselves. I should have them shot, but I just send them back to have their heads examined. You know, Investigator, if I met a man who came out here from Moscow without any clearance to sweet-talk the Border Patrol, I’d have his head examined too.’
‘Frankly’ – Arkady met the commandant’s eyes – ‘so would I.’
‘Well’ – the commandant’s brows lifted and he slapped Arkady on the back – ‘let’s see what we can do with this Finn. He’s a Communist, but you can fry a Finn in butter, and he’s still a Finn.’
The customs shed across the border opened. The Finnish major returned carrying an envelope.
‘Was our investigator right?’ the commandant asked.
The major dropped the envelope with distaste into Arkady’s hands. ‘Turds. Small animal turds in six compartments inside the chest. How did you know?’
‘The chest was out of its case?’ Arkady asked.
‘We opened it,’ the commandant said. ‘All packing is opened on the Soviet side.’
‘Would the inside of the chest have been inspected?’ Arkady asked.
‘What would be the point in that,’ the Finn answered, ‘relations between Finland and the Soviet Union being what they are?’
‘And what is the procedure for claiming articles from the customs shed?’ Arkady asked the major.
‘Very simple. Very few goods are ever in the shed; they usually stay on the train until Helsinki. No one can remove any goods without papers of identity and of possession, and also import-duty receipts. We don’t have a man at the door, but we would have noticed if anyone had tried to carry out a chest. Understand, we maintain a very light force of men here by agreement with the Soviet Union in order to avoid provocations with a friendly neighbor. Now you must excuse me; I am off duty, and I have a long drive home for the holiday.’
‘For May Day,’ Arkady said.
‘Walpurgis Night.’ The Finn enjoyed correcting him. ‘Witches’ sabbath.’
From Vyborg, close to the border, Arkady flew to Leningrad, and there caught the evening plane to Moscow. Most of the passengers on the flight were military on two days’ leave, and were drinking already.
Arkady wrote a report of the investigation. He put it into the evidence bag along with the border commandant’s statement, the envelope of droppings from the chest, fur samples from Kostia’s cage, personal effects from the footlockers of the three victims, the tape of Irina’s testimony in the cabin, and the February 2 tape of Osborne and Unmann. He had addressed the bag to the prosecutor general. A stewardess handed out hard candy.
Within hours Osborne and Kirwill would board their flight. More than ever, Arkady appreciated how finely Osborne timed his entrances and exits. ‘Even a delay . . .’ Unmann had worried the day before the chest concealing Kostia Borodin’s six Siberian sables was shipped from Moscow. How long could small animals be drugged with safety? Three hours? Four? Enough for the flight to Leningrad, certainly. Then Unmann could have given them another dose on the way from the airport to the train station. The chest couldn’t be flown out of the country because international air packages were X-rayed. Cars and their contents were virtually dismantled at checkpoints. The train was the answer, a local train to an undermanned border station, while Osborne drove back from Helsinki to the Finnish side of the border station before the chest even came off the train. The Soviet Border patrol did the job of opening the packing case. The Finns had done Osborne the favor of leaving the chest unguarded in a shed. Did anyone even notice him going in? Did he have a special coat made with pouches? Was there an accomplice among the Finnish guards? No matter, Osborne had never had to show papers and there was no link between him and the chest from the start of its journey to its conclusion.
Kostia Borodin, Valerya Davidova and James Kirwill had died in Gorky Park. John Osborne had six Barguzin sables somewhere outside the Soviet Union.
The plane descended from a sunset to Moscow at night.
In the airport, Arkady mailed the package. Taking the holiday into account, his report would reach its destination in four days no matter what happened to him.
The courtyard was watched. Arkady entered the basement from the alley and climbed the stairs to his apartment, where he changed in the dark into his chief investigator’s uniform. The uniform was navy blue with a captain’s four brass stars on the epaulets and a red star on the gold braid of his cap. As he shaved he heard the televisions in the apartments above and below. Both were tuned to the Bolshoi’s traditional May Day Eve performance of Swan Lake in the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses. During the overture he made out an announcer’s voice noting the most honored and most beloved of the evening’s six thousand guests, but he couldn’t pick out the names. He tucked his automatic inside his uniform jacket.
Out on Taganskaya Boulevard, it took him twenty minutes to wave down a taxi. The ride into the central city was accompanied by floodlights and banners. All year Moscow had been a dour chrysalis for red banners that sprang to life mothlike to the lights of this one night. Red wings draped every high building, and billowed over wide avenues. Letters marched: Lenin lived, Lives and Will Live Forever! The taxi overtook them. Heroic Workers . . . Noble and Historically Unprecedented . . . Applauds . . . In Glory ...
No public traffic was allowed in the blocks around Red Square. Arkady paid his last rubles to the taxi driver and walked to Sverdlov Square just as William Kirwill came out of the Metropole Hotel carrying a suitcase to an Intourist bus. Kirwill was dressed in a tan raincoat and a short-brimmed tweed hat, and he looked like any of the other dozen or so Americans lining up at the bus. When Arkady was still crossing the garden in the center of the square, Kirwill saw him and shook his head. Arkady stopped. Looking around, he saw militia detectives in a car behind the bus, in the hotel café, at the street corners. Kirwill set the suitcase down; it was still dented from Arkady’s kicks. Another bus pulled out; the passing glare of headlights made Kirwill’s presence all the more temporary. Kirwill made a point of looking in the direction of each detective in case Arkady had missed any. The Intourist driver sauntered out of the hotel, threw a cigarette on the street and allowed the tourists to board.
‘Osborne,’ Arkady mouthed from the center of the square.
William Kirwill took a last look at the investigator. Clearly, he’d missed the name. He wanted it desperately, but he knew that to get it he would have to kill all the plainclothesmen watching him in the square, and all the plainclothesmen that followed, and beat down the buildings of the square and all the buildings of the city, and not even his great strength was equal to that.
Swan Lake wafted from the bus radio. Kirwill was the last to board. By then Arkady was gone.
Hammers and spaceships fashioned from flowers waited in Dzerzhinsky Square for the morning’s parade. Arkady jumped onto a personnel carrier of soldiers, and they rode past the empty grandstands in Red Square. Floodlights made the Kremlin walls hover, the swallowtail battlements shiver.
Along Manezhnaya Street on the other side of the Kremlin, limousines were drawn into black, glossy, diagonal ranks. Not just ordinary Chaika limousines but the Presidium’s Zils, armor-plated and spiked with antennae. Militiamen on foot were spaced along the middle of the street, and others on motorcycles traveled back and forth from the more open space of Manezhnaya Square to the Kremlin’s Kutafia Tower, where Arkady jumped from the personnel carrier. His uniform his identification, he explained to the KGB officer who approached that he had a message for the prosecutor general. He controlled his hands as he lit a cigarette, and moved away from the floodlights welling out of the sunken gardens up over the short whitewashed bridge that connected the Kutafia Tower to the Kremlin’s Trinity Gate. He moved casually across the street into the high shadow of the Manezh, the czar’s riding school. From there he could see the white marble roof line of the Palace of Congresses over the Kremlin wall. As a car of KGB officers went by, he heard the ballet’s last movement, a valse, on the car radio. Along the Manezh, other shadows stirred – an eye here, a foot there.
Above the Trinity Gate, swarms of moths, real ones bright as crystal, climbed to the ruby star of Trinity Tower. Two soldiers emerging from the gate were backlit into their own shadows until they crossed the little bridge, where they seemed consumed like match heads by light. Another car of KGB went by trailing radio applause. The ballet was over.
To get to the airport on time, Osborne would have to pass up the official reception after the performance. Even so, there were curtain calls, bouquets for the ballerinas and the Presidium, and the inevitable struggle at the cloakroom. Chauffeurs ambled to their limousines.
Guests started to appear. Arkady watched a long line of Chinese, then Navy men in dress whites, some Westerners laughing loudly, Africans laughing even louder, musicians, women in ushers’ uniforms holding flowers, a well-known satirist alone. Limousines with diplomatic flags rolled off with passengers. The rush of early goers thinned and the bridge to the sidewalk emptied. There was no apparent reason for Arkady to start for the street.
A figure walking briskly, elegant as a knife, approached the Trinity Gate. It passed through to the lights of the bridge and became Osborne pulling on gloves, eyes straight ahead to the alert faces of plainclothesmen and the open doors of limousines. He wore a sober black coat and the same sable hat he had offered to Arkady. The dark fur contrasted with his silver hair. The attention of the plainclothesmen shifted to guests following Osborne. He vanished into the Kutafia Tower, emerged on its steps and was off the sidewalk heading for a limousine that had pulled out for him before he saw Arkady coming.
Arkady felt the shock of recognition in the American, a tremor so quickly controlled that it was no more than an extra beat of the heart. They met at the limousine, facing each other over the car roof.
Osborne showed a bright, powerful smile. ‘You never came for your hat, Investigator.’
‘No.’
‘Your investigation—’
‘It’s over,’ Arkady said.
Osborne nodded. Arkady had time to admire the touches of gold and silk around the body, the look like wood of tanned skin, features so un-Russian. He saw Osborne’s eyes travel up and down the street to see whether Arkady had come alone. Satisfied, the gaze returned to Arkady.
‘I have a plane to catch, Investigator. Unmann will bring you ten thousand dollars American in a week. You can have it in another currency if you wish – Hans will handle the details. The main thing is that everyone is content. If Iamskoy does go under and you keep me clear, I would consider that another service worth even more. I congratulate you; you’ve not only survived but you’ve made the most of your opportunity.’
‘Why do you say all this?’ Arkady asked.
‘You haven’t come to arrest me. You haven’t the evidence. Besides, I know the way you people operate. If this were an arrest, I’d be in the back of a KGB car and headed for the Lubyanka right now. It’s just you, Investigator – you alone. Look around – I see friends of mine, but none of yours.’
So far the plainclothesmen had taken no special notice of Osborne’s delay. At close distance they were characteristically beefy men vigorously hurrying ordinary guests away from the cars of the elite.
‘You would try to arrest a Westerner, here of all places, tonight of all nights, without a signed order from the KGB, without even the knowledge of your prosecutor, without anyone else at all, all by yourself? You, a man wanted for murder? They’d put you in an asylum. I wouldn’t even miss my plane; they’d hold it for me. So all you could have come for was money. Why not? You’ve already made the prosecutor a rich man.’
Arkady brought out his automatic and rested it in the crook of his left elbow, where only Osborne could see the dull muzzle. ‘No,’ he said.
Osborne glanced around. Plainclothesmen were all about, but distracted by the growing stream of guests emerging through the floodlights.
‘Iamskoy warned me that you were like this. You don’t want money, do you?’ Osborne asked.
‘No.’
‘You’re going to try to arrest me?’
‘Stop you,’ Arkady said. ‘Keep you off your plane, to begin with. Then, not arrest you here and not tonight. We’ll take your car. We’ll take a drive tonight, and tomorrow we’ll show up at the KGB office in some small town. They won’t know what to do, so they’ll call the Lubyanka direct. People in small towns are afraid of state crimes, the theft of valuable state property, sabotage of a national industry, smuggling, the concealment of state crimes – by which I mean murder. I will be treated very skeptically and you will be treated very politely, but you know how we operate. There will have to be more phone calls made, cages thoroughly inspected, a certain chest transported. After all, once you miss tonight’s plane you’re already late. It’s worth a chance, anyway.’
‘Where did you go yesterday?’ Osborne asked after a moment’s thought. ‘No one could find you.’
Arkady said nothing.
‘I think you made a trip to the border yesterday,’ Osborne said. ‘I think you believe you know everything.’ He checked his watch. ‘I’m going to have to run for that plane. I’m not staying.’
‘Then I will shoot you,’ Arkady said.
‘You’d be shot a second later
by every man here.’
‘True.’
Osborne reached for the door handle. Arkady began squeezing the Makarov’s spitcurl trigger, pulling forward the releasing lever, which slid along the magazine against and then away from the leaf spring, which would slap the cleared hammer toward the 9-mm. round in the breech.
Osborne released the handle. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘You can’t be willing to die simply to make an arrest to please Soviet justice. Everyone is bought, from the top to the bottom. The whole country’s bought – bought cheap, cheapest in the world. You don’t care about breaking laws, you’re not that stupid anymore. So what is there to die for? Someone else? Irina Asanova?’
Osborne pointed to a coat pocket, then slowly put his hand into the pocket and drew out a red-white-and-green scarf decorated with Easter eggs, the scarf that Arkady had bought for Irina. ‘Life is always more complicated and simpler than we give it credit for,’ he said. ‘It is – I see it in your face.’
‘How did you get this?’
‘A simple exchange, Investigator. Me for her. I’ll tell you where she is, and you really don’t have time to worry whether I’m lying or not because she won’t be there long. Yes or no?’
Osborne placed the scarf on the car roof. Arkady gathered it in his left hand and raised it to his nose. It smelled of Irina.
‘Understand,’ Osborne said, ‘we each have one basic demand for which we will destroy everything else. You will throw away your life, career and reason for that woman. I will betray my accomplices rather than miss my plane. We are both running out of time.’
The limousines were backing up. The nearer plainclothesmen shouted and waved for Osborne to get into his car.
‘Yes or no?’ Osborne asked.
There was no decision to make. Arkady stuffed the scarf inside his uniform. ‘You tell me where she is,’ he said. ‘If I believe you, you’re free. If I don’t, I kill you.’