No Time for Heroes (50 page)

Danilov guessed they were going into one of the apartments, but they didn't. Kosov led towards a far basement corner, where there was a brighter light for the stairs leading down, but no nameplate to mark what it was. He absorbed everything as he followed Kosov, appreciating the absolute security. It was not, he acknowledged, protection against any sudden raid by a law enforcement agency. This was security against rival gang incursions, and was perfect. He hadn't seen the surveillance, but the passage from the road would somehow be constantly monitored: any suspected entry would be identified halfway along and the occupants of whatever it was in this far corner warned before the intruder reached the courtyard. Danilov guessed there were enough exits from the rabbit warren he was entering for it to be cleared before an interloper began to cross the square.

Directly inside the basement entrance was a small, curtained-off vestibule with a reception counter to the left. An extremely attractive, heavily busted girl in a blouse too tight and too low smiled at him. The gold-adorned man from the Metropole blocked a further curtained entrance to whatever lay beyond: Danilov could hear the muttered noise of people. The man smiled, too, and advanced towards Danilov, hands familiarly outstretched for a pat-down search.

Danilov extended his own, halting hand. He'd have to concede, but it would be a mistake not to protest, now and later. This was the only chance he'd get: if he failed tonight, here, he failed in everything.

‘He's OK. I asked,' tried Kosov.

‘Orders,' said the man, simply.

Would it only be a weapon search? Or would the man be feeling for a wire, too? Whatever, Danilov was glad he hadn't gone along with Cowley's suggestion. ‘This once,' he accepted, tensing against the man's hands going over his body. He would have welcomed the Militia – certainly the Militia at Petrovka – being this cautious.

‘OK,' approved the man, stepping back.

‘Who was on guard when you were at the hotel?' asked Danilov.

The man smiled again but didn't answer.

A club, decided Danilov, as he pushed through the curtain. Hardly a public one, if every customer had to endure a body search. Another records check for Pavin tomorrow, to discover in whose name the property was registered. The room was very small, circular until the far end, where it flattened out into a roughcast, whitewashed wall, in which were set three doors, all closed. There was a small dance floor, surrounded by tables and chairs, and a tiny stage to the left. That, too, was curtained-off: to one side, from a glassed cubicle, another extremely attractive girl with displayed cleavage rivalling the receptionist's was at a turntable. The music was quiet, American jazz. No-one was dancing. Danilov guessed there were about thirty people in the room, far more men than women. They were smoking well-packed Western cigarettes; the emptying bottles on the tables bore the labels of Western gins and whiskies. Three or four girls were alone at tables: he wondered if Lena Zurov had come here often.

No-one paid them any noticeable attention as they skirted the dance floor towards the far wall. Danilov expected them to go through one of the doors, but Kosov stopped at a table almost hidden by the unused stage, where a dark-haired, sallow-faced man sat alone.

He smiled up at Danilov, indicated a chair and said: ‘It's good to meet you.' He extended his hand but didn't stand.

Danilov didn't sit or accept the offered hand. ‘I will speak with Arkadi Pavlovich Gusovsky.'

The man lowered his hand but remained smiling. ‘You're speaking to him.'

Danilov breathed out, heavily. He hadn't expected, after all the caution so far, immediately to meet the Mafia leader, but they should at least have surrounded whoever this substitute was with others, to make it look right. It was unthinkable Gusovsky would have greeted him without escorts. Unthinkable, too, that the real ganglord would have smiled at the handshake refusal. ‘I've been through enough theatrical shit tonight. I'm not going through any more. Go and tell Gusovsky I want to meet
him
. I don't care how many others he wants around him, but I'll only deal with him direct. He's got five minutes to make up his mind. If I'm not with him in that time – and satisfied that it
is
him I'm meeting – I'll leave, having wasted my time. Tell him in those words. You got all that?'

The smile faded, into blankness. ‘I'm not used to being spoken to like that,' tried the man.

‘I'm sure you are,' said Danilov. ‘And you're wasting time. Tell Gusovsky I want to talk about murders. And drug deals in Italy. And about fund-holding corporations in Switzerland. And about all the mistakes you've made and are going to go on making – make worse, in fact – unless we speak.' He looked at the watch that wasn't working. ‘You've already lost one of your five minutes.'

For a moment or two longer the Mafioso remained where he was. Then he pushed the chair back, noisily, and disappeared through the left-hand door.

‘What are you doing!' hissed Kosov, beside him.

Briefly Danilov had forgotten the other policeman. Kosov's face was twisted in frightened bewilderment.

‘Establishing ground rules,' said Danilov. It seemed a long time since he and Cowley had done the same.

‘I told you …'

‘… I'm here now, Yevgennie Grigorevich! From here on I'll decide how to behave: what to say and how to say it. You don't have to be involved, associated with it.'

‘This is madness …! Terrible …!'

‘You know what Gusovsky looks like? I want a sign that it's him.'

‘No … no …' muttered Kosov, looking nervously around the room. ‘This isn't right … not how it should have been …'

Danilov wasn't sure whether that was a denial or a refusal: either way it didn't matter. Kosov was clenching and unclenching his hands, eyes rolling in a fruitless search for nothing in particular: probably, Danilov thought, it was escape. An ancient record on the turntable – Louis Armstrong singing ‘Mac the Knife' – had reached the phrase about oozing blood, which Danilov hoped didn't turn out to be appropriate. He guessed it was an in-joke against them, for the benefit of the others in the room. They were being stared at now, standing obviously by the stage. ‘I'll make my arrangements my way. If they don't like it, it's my …' He paused at the cliché shared between East and West. ‘… It's my funeral.'

Kosov was too disoriented to make any coherent response: he positively moved back, as if retreating, when the man who had greeted them emerged from the nearby door, trying to compensate for his own rebuff by simply jerking his head, for Danilov to enter. Kosov shifted, from one foot to the other, but was spared a problem he didn't want by a further head movement, forbidding him to follow into the inner sanctum.

Beyond the door was a small, private dining room. There were only three tables. At one sat two men, the older with unnatural milky eyes. His companion was totally nondescript apart from the physical thinness of a man suffering a prolonged illness. His face had a chalk-white pallor and his skin, particularly on the hands he now held in front of him, resting his chin to examine Danilov, looked paper thin, as if it might tear. The appearance was worsened by a crumpled grey suit that was too large, sagged off the shoulders, the jacket sleeves partially covering the hands, despite the way he was sitting with his arms up. There was a finger-wide gap between his shirt collar and his neck.

Only one of the other tables was occupied. One man, wearing a turtlenecked sweater under a chamois bomber jacket, was a stranger; the other two had completed the watching group at the Metropole, with the gold lover outside. Definitely street people, Danilov decided. And he knew who the blind man was: so the chances were it
was
Gusovsky he was meeting. There were bottles and glasses on each table, but no food.

Danilov went to the table with the two men and sat, uninvited. To the thin man he said: ‘I still don't know who you really are …' He half turned, to address directly the man unable to see him. ‘… But I know you, Aleksandr Yerin …'

The most obvious stir at his awareness of a name came from the escort table: there was one very noisy grating of a chair. Yerin leaned forward, so adjusted to his disability that if the eyes had not been opaque it would have seemed he could see. Danilov's impression was that he was sniffing, like an animal sniffs the scent of another, to gauge danger. Only the thin man remained totally expressionless. Still with his chin on his hands, he said: ‘I am Gusovsky.' The voice was surprisingly deep, a rasping timbre.

‘I hope you are,' said Danilov.

‘My man outside said you were insolent,' said Gusovky, as if he were confirming something. He pointedly poured red wine into his own and Yerin's glasses. There was a third glass on the table: the man put the bottle down without offering it to Danilov.

Danilov thought it was an artificial gesture, like so much else. ‘I'm guessing it was Georgi Visco. He should have carried off the deception better than he did, with his KGB training. And you should have put people around him, like you have here. That was bad attention to detail. And the three you sent to watch my meeting with Kosov, to make sure I was alone, were a bad choice, too. They couldn't have been more obvious with signs around their necks.' Danilov was surprised how easy he found it to force the arrogance.

There was a fresh shuffle of movement from the adjoining table, at the introduction of the KGB colonel's name and the personal sneer at two of the men sitting there. Gusovsky's mouth tightened just very slightly, at the unprecedented lack of respect. ‘So they did talk, in Rome?'

‘You can't be sure of that, can you?' He had to be extremely careful not to connect source to fact: everything had to confuse them, worry them as much as they had to be worried, to allow him this close, this quickly. He breathed in, readying himself. A lot had been known before – and then afterwards – by the KGB who were now spread among all the Families in the city, hadn't it? he said. Neither replied, listening like statues. They shouldn't forget, he suggested, that it was virtually instinctive for the KGB, even disbanded, to infiltrate organisations to gain control. Had they thought about that, being overthrown not by rival gangs but by recruits they thought loyal? And then there was America. A lot had come out there. And Switzerland.

Opposite him Gusovsky and Yerin remained impassive, not drinking, not interrupting, not doing anything.

One by one, Danilov enumerated the Chechen names he
had
obtained in Rome, but which could have come from many other leaks. He threw in, quite superfluously, a lot of Genovese and Italian Mafia identities, to thicken the smokescreen. How much did Gusovsky think the Genovese consiglierie and the Liccio clan had to pass on? How certain would Gusovksy be there wasn't an informant here in Moscow, deep in their own organisation? Sure he'd created sufficient obscurity, Danilov concluded: ‘You couldn't plug all the leaks even if you knew where they were.' He didn't want, this early, to introduce the Geneva
anstalt
and the attempted Chechen take-over.

‘So we know what you've got,' accepted Yerin. The man spoke softly but with precise pronunciation, for every word to be heard.

‘I don't think you do,' further lured Danilov.

‘What do you want?' demanded Gusovsky. It was a contemptuous question from a man accustomed to dispensing favours to the frightened or the bribable.

Danilov allowed some silence. ‘I'm not the supplicant. You are.'

‘Don't treat us like fools.'

Danilov thought the blind man had difficulty controlling his voice that time: they really weren't accustomed to anything but abject respect. ‘Let's not treat each other like fools.'

Gusovsky's mouth tightened further, and his pallor accentuated an angry redness. ‘We were told you wanted to discuss things of mutual interest.'

‘More your interest than mine.' Very soon now, he'd find out if Kosov really had kept the past to himself. Or whether he had offered it to ingratiate himself with these men, to arm them with the sort of pressure they always sought.

‘Why don't you tell us what you think our interests are?' demanded Gusovsky. He indicated the bottle at last. ‘Take some wine.' It was an order, not an invitation.

Danilov was tempted to accept but wait for the other man to pour, but he didn't. He had no intention of obeying the expected rules by acting cowed or subservient, even on their own territory, but there was no benefit in unnecessary antagonism. He filled the available glass and drank, but without any meaningless toast. ‘I think one major interest is in forming an association with other Mafia groups, in Italy and in America and in Latin America. I think you believe you have funds available, to finance that association. I think you're concerned how endangered that intention is, by the arrests in Italy: you'd be stupid if you weren't. There's the confrontation with the Ostankino …' He let the recital trail, waiting intently. Would they pick up on the half-intentional clue about imagined funds? He hoped not, this soon. He did not want to play every card without an indication of what they were holding, in their attempt to outplay him.

Neither responded at once. The sightless Yerin bent slightly sideways to the other man, deferring to him the right to speak first, which Gusovsky eventually did. ‘Quite a catalogue!'

‘Your shopping list, not mine.' They were going to trap him, if he didn't soon get what he expected thrown back at him. Make me bargain, thought Danilov desperately.

‘The Italian arrests didn't come from here? It was American information?' said Yerin.

Kosov the faithful conduit! thought Danilov. ‘That's how it happened. From America.'

‘You work closely with the American?' asked Gusovsky.

‘Yes,' embarked Danilov, cautiously. This was the way he'd wanted it to go: the opening hand, card for card.