Red Star Rising (10 page)

“That’s enough, Sarah!” said Probert.

“Moscow’s not the best foreign posting for a family,” offered Paula-Jane.

Sarah looked across the table at the English woman but deferred to her husband’s warning, pushing aside her scarcely
touched meal and picking up the empty white wine bottle with her other hand to gesture for a replacement.

“Is Ann coming back this time?” Charlie asked Bundy, knowing the man’s wife hadn’t enjoyed Moscow and spent a lot of time back in America during their contemporary posting.

“Jury’s still out on that,” said Bundy. “How long are you expecting to be here?”

Charlie shrugged. “Open-ended.”

“Why don’t we make lunch sometime? Catch up on old times?”

“That would be good,” lied Charlie, who’d only ever socialized with the American at mutually attended embassy receptions and even then to the polite minimum.

It was Paula-Jane Venables who recovered the evening, using her enjoyment of Russia in general and Moscow in particular as the springboard—although not in critical comparison with Sarah Probert’s obvious disenchantment—to enthuse about the Bolshoi ballet and of a trip she intended repeating to St. Petersburg to again visit the Hermitage and the Tzars’ village of Tarskoye Selo and to see more opera at the Mariinsky Theatre, culminating with the announcement that when her tour of duty in Moscow ended she intended going east, not west, to take the trans-Siberian railway all the way to the Chinese border and complete her recall to England via Japan if she was refused a visa into China. She amusingly told stories against herself of misadventures and mistakes during her explorations, to the genuine, Tex Probert–led amusement of everyone with the initial exception of Sarah. Shirley Jenkins took up the travelogue with an account of a college-graduation rail journey the length of Latin America as far as Patagonia, and eventually Sarah—and even Bundy—relaxed sufficiently to keep the conversation away from embassy rumor and gossip, the only real subject all of them had in common.

On the way back to the embassy Paula-Jane said, “That wasn’t anything like the fun I’d hoped it would be. Bundy’s a stuffy old fart, frightening all of them with a reputation I didn’t see or hear much to justify. I think he’s stuck in a Cold War time warp, like the way he dresses and how that fucking café is designed.”

“He’s a very dedicated guy,” said Charlie, impressed at her analysis.

“You work a lot with him when you were both here?”

“Not at all. We both preferred to work alone.”

“Like you prefer to do now?”

“We’ve been through that.”

“You didn’t share anything with Bundy!” persisted the woman, disbelievingly.

“Nothing,” said Charlie. “Was it just your idea to invite me along tonight?”

Paula-Jane turned to him in the taxi. “How do you mean?”

“Was my name mentioned, when you were invited?”

Paula-Jane hesitated, thinking. “I don’t remember your name coming up. How could it have? No one at the American embassy could have known you were here, could they?”

“Bundy didn’t seem surprised to see me. And appeared to know what I was doing here.”

“Bundy tries to give the impression of knowing everything before it ever happens,” she dismissed. “I thought we came close to an embarrassment with Sarah.”

“You did well to save the evening,” congratulated Charlie. “You know her well?”

“Hardly at all. This isn’t her first extended trip back to the States. From what Tex has told me, she’s spent more of his Russian tour back home than here.”

As the embassy came into view Charlie leaned toward the windshield and said, “The media siege appears to have been lifted.”

“I thought you might have invited me back to the hotel for a nightcap,” said the woman.

I’d guessed you would, thought Charlie. “Maybe another time.”

“Let’s hope there is one.”

Charlie eagerly took the offered message slip from the Savoy receptionist, his expectation of it being from Natalia collapsing immediately. The only thing written on the slip was the telephone number of Colonel Sergei Pavel.

Charlie’s second arrival at Petrovka was very different from his first. On this occasion there was an instant acknowledgement from a different, attentive desk clerk, and at whose bell-pressed demand another escort officer appeared despite Charlie’s assurance that he knew how to get to Pavel’s office. The bigger surprise, coming close to astonishment, continued when he reached Pavel’s top-floor aerie. Already there, waiting with the organized crime colonel, were the weak-stomached Foreign Ministry official of the mortuary visit, together with the suspected FSB’s Mikhail Guzov, and two other men whose identities Charlie guessed from their nervous, foot-shuffling deference to be the discovering gardeners, which was a bonus Charlie hadn’t expected, but which he decided could more than justify his responding to Pavel’s previous night summons. There were thermoses of black tea waiting on a side table that hadn’t been in Pavel’s office the first time. The voice recorders and film equipment would still be, Charlie knew.

“The situation would appear to have become very complicated,” opened the Foreign Ministry’s Nikita Kashev.

“In what way?” queried Charlie, intentionally awkward to give himself time to compartment the assembled group in their necessary order of priority. Kashev had to be there, according to the diplomatically agreed protocol, for the questioning of the body-discovering gardening team. And the murder investigation was officially the responsibility of Sergei Pavel. Which left Mikhail Guzov as the only one who didn’t have a place. Which put the FSB man in charge. By intruding into the meeting Guzov was positively, although unnecessarily, confirming his own official role and purpose. Why? Could it be a test in reverse, Guzov
wanting
there to be no misunderstanding of who and what he was: confronting, even, any possible accusation of the FSB bugging the embassy? As always, Charlie accepted, he had to dance on ballet points, an agonizing concept with feet like his.

“A lot of media speculation about continuing difficulties at your embassy,” offered Kashev.

“I am not concerned or interested in any media speculation, apart from how it could interfere with what I am here to do,” Charlie continued with intentional awkwardness. “As I’d hoped to have made clear at our initial meeting, I am here for one specific purpose . . .” He smiled between the gardeners and Pavel. “And I appreciate what I’m anticipating to be our continuing cooperation.”

Reluctantly drawn into the discussion, Pavel introduced the two FSB informant gardeners, Boris Nikolaevich Maksimov and Petr Petrovich Denin, formally including their patronymics. Pavel made the identification at the same time as offering Charlie two separate dossiers, concluding, “And here are their sworn statements.”

Bulldozing time, Charlie at once recognized, his conviction growing that everything was being orchestrated as well as recorded by Guzov. Disregarding the increasingly impatient fidgeting of his audience, Charlie took his time reading the supposed recollections of each gardener, both of which stopped short of two full pages and roughly—very roughly—accorded with Reg Stout’s totally inadequate account of his conversation with Maksimov.

“There are some questions, of course, in light of what was discovered after your crime scene investigation.” Charlie briskly set out, docking Guzov two points on the professional score sheet for the man’s obvious frown. Talking directly to Maksimov, Charlie said: “How close did you go to the body?”

The thin-faced man hesitated, his look to Guzov for guidance too obvious. Haltingly, weak-voiced, he said: “I’m not sure. Not close enough to touch it.”

“You thought at first it might be someone sleeping, didn’t you?”

“What!” asked the man, now including Pavel in his anxious look for help.

“You told the head of security at the embassy that at first you thought the man was sleeping. It’s not in your statement,” said Charlie, waving the folder.

“I don’t remember saying that.”

“Why should you have thought someone was sleeping in the embassy grounds?”

Maksimov scrubbed his hand across his sweating face. “You see people lying drunk at night.”

“What made you changed your mind?”

Maksimov shuddered. “When I got closer . . . saw what had happened to his face . . . that there wasn’t a face.”

“Were the clothes wet?”

“No . . . I don’t know . . .”

“You did touch the body, then?”

“No! I told you I didn’t.”

“You said the clothes weren’t wet. How did you know the clothes weren’t wet if you didn’t touch the body?”

“He said he didn’t know,” came in Guzov, speaking for the first time.

“
After
saying the clothes weren’t wet,” insisted Charlie.

“I meant I didn’t know, not that I touched the body. I didn’t touch the body.”

“How close did you go to it?”

“Not close . . . no closer than a yard.”

“Close enough to see that there wasn’t a face?”

“That was obvious.”

Maksimov was starting to relax, Charlie recognized. “Not at first, when you thought it was someone sleeping.”

“I don’t remember saying that,” repeated the man.

“What about the chip out of the brickwork? You saw that, didn’t you?”

“No . . . I don’t understand that question.”

“You sure you didn’t?”

“No . . . I mean I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“What did you mean by telling the embassy security officer that you didn’t do it? Did you mean that you hadn’t killed him?”

“I didn’t mean to say that. It just came out like that.”

“When you got about a yard away you could see the body very clearly?”

The man hesitated, nervously. “Yes.”

Time to sow more seeds, Charlie decided. “I know there wasn’t a face but on which side was the head laying, to its right or to its left?”

There was another pause. Maksimov looked at his supervisor, who shrugged. Maksimov said, “To its right.”

“You’re sure it was to its right?”

“Yes,” said the Russian, sounding anything but sure.

“That’s consistent,” said Charlie, as if to himself, looking down again at Maksimov’s written statement, to provide the delay.

“Consistent with what?” demanded Pavel.

Looking down as he’d had to, Charlie hadn’t been able to see any indication from Guzov for the organized crime detective to ask the question. Charlie said, “The gouge mark in the wall our forensic people believe was caused by the bullet ricochet . . .” He looked from Pavel to the others in the office. “You have passed on what we talked about earlier?”

It was Kashev who answered. “The colonel has, in some detail, which is why we are here and why I think we need to talk very specifically beyond this immediate subject. I want to stress, most forcibly, that my government denies absolutely any knowledge or responsibility for what is being reported in the media as an espionage intrusion into the British embassy. My colleagues also wish—”

“Sir!” Charlie broke in. “And before I continue any further, I apologize for interrupting you. I have no permanent attachment to the British embassy here. I cannot, therefore, discuss anything other than what I have been sent here to investigate. My investigation is, however, overshadowed by the situation to which you refer. And obviously, potentially hampered by it, particularly by the disparities in these”—Charlie fluttered the two inadequate statements—“and what British forensic scientists collected from other parts of the murder scene. And I intentionally use those words, murder scene, because every conclusion British scientists have so far reached is that the crime was very definitely committed on British territory, not somewhere else. I have taken the advice of our embassy lawyer on that . . . the embassy is legally and technically British territory, not Russian.”

“None of those conclusions—or the proof that led to their being reached—has been exchanged, according to the cooperation understanding between our two governments,” intruded Mikhail Guzov, to Charlie’s satisfaction.

It would be wrong to challenge the other man’s official reason for being there, too easily dismissed as Guzov being attached to the Foreign Ministry, which technically he probably was. “Another overshadowing but inevitably connected problem.”

“So what’s the resolve?” demanded Guzov.

“A separation, if it’s possible, between the diplomatic and the criminal,” suggested Charlie.

“Answer your own question,” insisted Guzov. “Is that possible?”

“I, for my part, believe that I can work in total cooperation with Colonel Pavel, quite separately from whatever else is affecting the embassy. I will further undertake to do my utmost to persuade London to make available the results of all scientific tests. And as a gesture of my commitment, I will tell you now that there are definitely images upon the CCTV loops that were intended to be rendered useless by being tampered with. The ricocheting score mark on the wall is still evident and has been extensively photographed, although its immediate brick surface has obvious been scraped away for fragment traces of the bullet that made the mark after exiting the man’s head. Also extensively photographed is the second border area from which earth was dug by our forensic experts’ team to retrieve blood residue and, hopefully, the bullet.”