Russian Roulette (5 page)

Pudovkin nodded his long head dismally and trudged silently to the other door leading into the corridor. He had learned that it was useless to argue when she got on to the inevitable subject of her family.

He let himself out and shut the door with relief. Even a trip down to the shop was welcome – part of the reason that he spent so much extra time in the Petrovka Street Headquarters was that he far preferred it to his own apartment.

Alexei ambled towards the lift, wondering if he was too old at fifty-three to apply for another secondment.
Hungary is too near
, he thought – Vladivostok was probably the nearest place out of earshot of Darya's tongue!

The lift clattered to a stop four floors below and all his urgings on the button failed to bring it any higher. With a sigh, he began to walk down the stairs – the faulty lift reminded him of yet another of his wife's grouses: ‘… and why can't we live in a
new
apartment block like the other senior officers? Making me live in this half-derelict old section house just because you've been here for years, yak, yak …!'

As his feet echoed down the bare concrete stairs, he noticed, as if for the first time, the peeling paint on the walls and the rude words pencilled by the children. It
was
a dump, he had to admit, but it had been home to him ever since he came back from the war. Their actual apartment was as comfortable as he could wish – there was plenty of money to buy everything except space. He sometimes thought that Darya was secretly annoyed that his pay was so good; it deprived her of the chance to nag him about being mean. With no children and her own job as a cashier in a Gorky Street store, they could afford almost anything. Already this year they'd had a new television and an elaborate radiogram. She'd even been hinting about a car these past few months … he could
just
afford a little Moskvich but, thank God, there was no garage space.

These ramblings brought him down to the ground floor. He pushed through a crowd of chattering children and parked bicycles in the entrance hall and came blinking into the afternoon sun of a bright spring day.

Looking up at the great yellow block that housed hundreds of policemen and their families, he grumbled, ‘What the devil does she want to move for?', then trudged along the pavement towards the store. The major part of the ground floor was given over to a branch of Number Fifty-five Store, which supplied almost all the shopping needs of the surrounding flats. Alexei Pudovkin pushed his way through the crowded food store and bought the cream, the wine, and some beer for himself. Stuffing them into the string bag, the badge of the true Moscow suburbanite, he made his way out, going as slowly as he could.

‘Hi, Alexei Alexandrovich, going on the booze again?' a cheerful voice hailed him from behind.

‘Vasily! I thought you were on extra duties – that assault job.'

‘All finished! He gave himself up at two o'clock – walked into Petrovka crying like a baby. He won't bother any more women for the next twenty years, at least.'

Vasily Moiseyenko, a detective lieutenant and one of Pudovkin's assistants, hoisted himself perkily on to a nearby window sill and sat swinging his legs while he rolled a cigarette. A round-faced, curly-haired young man, he looked utterly unlike a militia officer. Dressed in his off-duty sports shirt and grey slacks, Alexei thought he looked more like a professional footballer.

‘You look as miserable as hell, captain,' said Vasily cheerfully. Pudovkin nodded glumly. He knew he should act like his colleagues Ivkov and Shebalin and discourage the junior man's easy familiarity, but he was glad of a bit of companionship after the freeze-up in the sixth-floor apartment.

He realized that Vasily thought a lot of him, too. Alexei provided a father-figure for him – the younger man's parents had both been killed in the Great Patriotic War and Alexei's only son from his first marriage had died in the bombing of Smolensk. So each of them knew, without ever saying anything, that each owed and gave the other something.

The detective captain put his chinking bag on the window ledge and leaned against the wall, basking in the May sunshine.

‘Darya's like a forest bear with the bellyache today – her blasted sister and brother-in-law are coming again tonight.'

‘The one with the warts? Let's hope we have a multiple murder, so you can get called away.'

‘Ay, it would be a mercy. She's cooking enough food up there to feed the whole of our Number One Precinct.'

Vasily cocked a knowing eye at his chief. He had learned to read his moods like a book and he could see that things were even worse than usual. Over the last year, since his operation for a duodenal ulcer, Pudovkin's face had got lined and pinched, his stubbly hair was now grey all over and he was so thin and stooped that his blue uniform hung on him like rags. Over the last few months, Vasily had seen him slow up and withdraw into himself – he seemed to live mainly in the past.

‘I'd better get back up there.' Alexei picked up his bottles, but made no attempt to move. He stared across the street to where the greenness of Gorky Park could be seen between two tall buildings. The masts of a ship on the Moskva river slid past in the middle distance.

‘Reminds me of the Danube at Budapest, Vasily Sergeivich … remember it?'

Moiseyenko laughed and jumped down from the window sill. ‘Don't I just – the best months of my life, so far. You had a whole year of it, you lucky dog. That was
real
police work,
real
living – not stolen bicycles, drunken rapes and
stilyagi
³
fights on a Sunday night!'

A woman walked past, her strident voice accusing her small son of something. Alexei started and the image of his wife forced Hungary from his mind.

‘Must be going, Vasily, or she'll chew my ear off –the damned tribe of relatives will be here before long.'

‘Right, comrade captain!' Moiseyenko threw him a mock salute. ‘See you in the morning – let's hope for something good for a change. It's been dead lately, apart from last night's job … though, of course, low crime rates
are
good for the progress of the State,' he added with a guilty afterthought proper for a young Party member.

Alexei grinned at the boy's earnestness –a rare smile on that leathery face.

‘Perhaps it's the quiet before the storm, Vasily Sergeivich,' he said. If he had remembered his idle comment the next morning, he might have thought himself to have the gift of second sight.

‘Where are they now?' demanded the fat man behind the desk.

Alexei Pudovkin looked at the clock on the wall of the Commissioner's office. ‘It's ten to eleven now – they'll be landing at Sheremetyevo just after noon.'

The Colonel of Militia wriggled a finger in his ear, a habit that indicated deep thought, but one which had revolted Alexei for years.

‘We'd better watch them right from the start,' he muttered. ‘Though what in hell we're supposed to be looking for, I don't know!'

His protuberant eyes peered petulantly at the detective captain, as if it was Pudovkin's fault that the case had been thrust on them.

Alexei pointed at the telegram from Leningrad that he had received half an hour earlier.

‘I know that man Ilyichev … met him at the Detectives' school one year. He's good, wouldn't waste our time.

Commissioner Igor Mitin heaved his vast bulk from his chair and waddled to the window. In spite of his ugliness, his bad temper and his endless complaining, he too was a good policeman.

‘Better ring this Ilyichev, Alexei Alexandrovich – get some more details.'

‘He says in his wire that he's sending them on.'

‘I want to know now!' barked Mitin, his close-cropped head creaking around on his elephantine neck. ‘I want to know what we're supposed to be watching … is it a pickpocket or an assassin?'

Pudovkin's thin, weary face lit up briefly. ‘Let's hope it's an assassin!'

The commissioner glowered at him.

‘Always after the excitement,
tovarishch.
You should have transferred to Uzbekistan and chased bandits!'

He turned back to the window and scowled down on Petrovka Street. It was busy with speeding trucks and cars, many of them police vehicles coming and going from this building; Number 38, the Militia Headquarters of the Moscow City Soviet.

‘Take a car and go out yourself, Alexei – we'd better start this thing the right way, if you keep harping on about how good they are in Leningrad.'

Pudovkin grinned. There was always this pantomime between them, both grown old in the militia. Mitin would grouse and moan, but give every assistance and no interference, whilst Alexei would be the humble, servile assistant until the door shut behind him, when he did just as he pleased.

As the cadaveric detective made for the door, Colonel Mitin banged his desk. ‘Take this message form and start a file – let's hope it's going to be a thin one … and take a man with you to the airport – you're too old to go

on your own – the sooner you retire the better!'

Pudovkin shut the door on this parting shot and hurried to his own office on the floor below. As senior duty officer that morning, he'd had the telegram brought to him for action, but it seemed so unusual that he felt obliged to refer it to the commissioner of the Detective Department.

The message was very terse and gained in urgency by its brevity –
DTO 09008567 LENINGRAD CENTRAL REQUEST CLOSE SURVEILLANCE ENGLISH TOURIST PARTY TRANSIT MOSCOW HOTEL METROPOL BY AEROFLOT FLIGHT 142 ETA 1205. PARTICULAR INTEREST SIMON SMITH VISA DZ14564 NO OFFENCE YET. WAS ARMED. FURTHER DETAILS FOLLOWING. ILYICHEV.

As an example of tantalising obscurity, it was a masterpiece.

Alexei reached his small office, a partitioned corner of the main CID room on the first floor of Petrovka. He squeezed himself behind the filing cabinets to sit at his desk, which was a regulation size smaller than Mitin's.

After booking a call to Leningrad on the militia line, he read and re-read the telegram, as if hoping to find additional information hidden between the lines. The telephone clicked and rattled as it bridged the hundreds of miles between the two cities, while Pudovkin scowled down at the crumpled paper, elated and yet almost fearful of hoping for too much to come of it.

‘Surveillance?' he repeated between his teeth.

A particularly loud click deafened him and he hastily put the receiver to his other ear. He slid a hand over the mouthpiece and roared at the top of his voice ‘Moiseyenko, come here!'

Within seconds, Vasily put his head around the door. His desk was almost outside Alexei's door and the older man's lung power, deceptively strong and deep for such a scrawny body, acted as their ‘intercom'.

He waved the message at the lieutenant. ‘Start a new file – and ring the transport pool. We're going to Sheremetyevo in a few minutes.'

He waved the younger man away as the switchboard at last connected him with Leningrad Militia HQ.

Pudovkin listened a great deal and spoke sparingly, his pen flying over a notepad on his desk.

‘Thanks, Ilyichev, I'll let you know how things develop.'

He hung up and stared at his scribbling pad. He was even more perplexed than before, but at least he knew a little more background.

A few moments later, he was being driven by Vasily Moiseyenko northwards through Moscow, towards one of the four airports that served the capital.

‘I've opened a file and put Zhdanov on to checking the passport and visa end of it,' reported the lieutenant. ‘I rang the Ministry of the Interior, but they'll take all day to look things up. Didn't have time to contact Intourist, but Zhdanov can do that as well.'

He swung the black Volga expertly into the mid-morning traffic of the Sadovaja-Karetnaya, part of the old circular road that used to mark the limits of Tsarist Moscow.

‘We'll have to step on it to get to Sheremetyevo by the time the plane lands.'

He trod on the accelerator with glee. Pudovkin grunted. He sat hunched in the front passenger seat, looking like some scrawny old eagle, with his hollow cheeks and hooked nose. The coat he wore was black and shapeless; if Darya hadn't complained about it so much, he'd have thrown it out, but now he hung on to it out of sheer cussedness. Today he was wearing it over his uniform, as a screen against curious eyes at the airport. Unlike foreign police forces, the Soviet detectives were not allowed to wear plain clothes – that kind of work was supposed to be left to either the Public Prosecutor's department or to the political police, the KGB Yet it was sometimes advisable to be discreet, and the regulations could be stretched in a remarkably elastic manner. Moiseyenko had his plastic raincoat, so if they both left their blue caps in the car, they would pass as civilians at a distance.

Vasily turned again, this time up into Kalyayevskaya Street and tore past a string of heavy trucks, their green tailboards with the foot-high registration letters crawling along to annoy any driver in a hurry The speedometer needle crept well above the town limit as they passed the stadium and the railway station in Butyrskaya Street, then they flashed under a flyover and were on the de-restricted motorway of the Dmitrovskaya Highway leading northwards out of the capital.

‘Don't go and kill us just before the best case we've had this month, young fellow,' grunted Alexei, as the Volga ripped past the other traffic.

‘Safe as the Kremlin, boss … what's the drill when we get there?'

‘No idea … our Fat Father upstairs told me to watch and observe, whatever that might mean.'

The suburbs of Moscow sped by, then some industrial estates, but soon they were in open country, the famous ‘green belt' around Moscow. Moiseyenko slowed down after a few kilometres and took a left-hand turn off the highway into a secondary road winding through the birch woods.