The Margin of Evil! (7 page)

'
Yes, I arrested you in 1905 at the 'Moscow Soviet'. Good evening gentlemen.'

'
Bastard!'  Trotsky replied tersely

'
Like you I serve the people ...' with that Georgii took his leave.

Turning around as he left
, he nearly walked right into Anya Trofimov. She gave him one of her icy stares. Walking towards the entrance, Georgii passed a room with an open door. The old man from the public meeting was sitting on a chair. Georgii could see that the guards had worked him over. He felt strangely sympathetic towards the old man.  They made eye contact momentarily. Turning away he walked on to the exit, showed his papers and then walked out into the night. Snow was still falling.

Walking across Red Square he wondered about the
'Old Man.' He wondered what all that 'Betraying the Revolution 'nonsense' was about. He also thought about the moustachioed Stalin who just stood there writing notes into a tatty old notebook. He also thought about Anya Trofimov and the kind of reception he was likely to get from ''The Granite Faced Slag' of Bolshevism' the next day. Forty minutes later he arrived at his lodgings. It was freezing, so he went to bed with all his clothes on.

Georgii needn
't have worried. Next day she ignored him. He had already decided, on the walk in, that he was going to make himself scarce. Georgii sat at his desk and thought about recent events. He was still haunted by the images of the boy Fyodor and the Kremlin heckler. It was the vacant stare of the eyes that got to him. It was the look of utter defeat.

He knew that he was missing something.
He should have been looking for something; a connection or a link. Something that was going to tie things together; it was out there, all he had to do was find it. He reached into his trench coat for his trusty notebook. The Kevshor file might have disappeared, but he could remember most of it from memory. So he wrote ideas out in his notebook and reread through the notes he had made after he had seen Gerhardt. He looked out of the window and thought some more, a whole day had gone, and it was also getting late. He looked back at the book. Everything hinged on, or at least started with, Goldstein.  He picked up the notebook and then reshuffled his in-tray papers, and then it happened again. A sheet of paper fell out of the pile. He must have missed it, the first time he had leafed through it. It was an old Cheka/ Okhrana file. The odd thing was the file itself was quite up to date:

CHEKA Ref: 0713A67BJ3278.

Isaak Goldstein

Faith: Jewish.

Born Moscow 1879 – 1919 (Death not yet confirmed.)

A career criminal, never a lead
er of men always a minor player. At any one time Goldstein has been involved in the criminal worlds of vice; extortion; black-mail; black-marketing and murder. Goldstein has been in and out of prison all his adult life.

He has also been known to have been involved in the revolutionary world.
The Bolshevik party has been known to use him to fix for them on several occasions.

During the war he was known to be active in a black-marketing ring operating in the St Petersburg area.
This ring would track down former bourgeoisie and non-citizens. If they did not kill them during the terror, they would blackmail them first and ransack their houses second. Sometimes they would do all three. This was there modus operandi. It is believed that the gang had connections with the Petrograd Soviet. Investigations into the gang revealed nothing. But it was suspected that Goldstein had got involved with a ruthless gang of Lithuanian Nationalists.

For the last twelve months he has relocated back to the Moscow area.
It is widely believed that he was extorting meat out of The Central Abattoir. Further information suggests that he was a middleman involved in an intricate meat scam. Investigations came up against the usual conspiracy of silence.

The con, it is
believed worked like this - the manager was watched for a period of time, and was known to be siphoning off meat for himself and replacing the meat with meat from corpses procured from the streets and local mortuaries.  Somehow Goldstein and his associates compiled all this information and then gained access to the manager and confronted him with their findings. Goldstein went in dressed as a minor official in the Bolshevik party and told him that, if he did not do his bidding he would blow the whistle on him. The manager was left with no alternative but to comply. Everything went well for a while, until another organized group of criminals moved into the city. These groups started squeezing small time operators like Goldstein out of business. It is widely believed that he ended up working for a Georgian mafia group, but it is also believed that Goldstein was doing some clandestine work on the side. It is our belief that his moonlighting had upset his new paymasters. Once again this information has not been confirmed.

Last seen at Tverskaya Ulitsa Militsya Station on the night of 28
th
January, it is widely believed on the streets that Goldstein has been eliminated. The victim of a gangland killing; a Georgian gang – 'The Kevshors' - is widely believed to be responsible for his murder.

Georgii put the file away inside the bottom drawers secret compartment.
He thought, 'Who is feeding me this information?' It was obvious to him that the Goldstein file raised more questions than it answered. O.K - it had shaded in one or two areas, without really giving him any hard information. If the truth were told everybody had links with the criminal world. You had to in order to survive. Georgii decided that after work he would walk down to the river and take a look at the place where Isaak Goldstein had disappeared. First he had to go to one of Trofimov's daily briefings. It promised to be a briefing with a difference. Burov the political officer was going to be there.

There were about ten people in the office.
Each person, including Georgii, had to update her on his or her progress. That bit went quite well and then Burov started droning on. Because of the late night the night before, Georgii spent the whole time fighting the urge to fall asleep. Eventually the proceedings came to an end, much to his relief and all of those present, Georgii suspected. He got his coat and walked out on to the street.

There had been a time, and this
included the old times as well, when you could gauge the people by the mood on the street. Now you couldn't tell, you had to tread carefully. Because nowadays, there always seemed to be an air of desperation that permeated everything. Georgii knew only too well that 'God Fearing' people in certain situations would even go to the lengths of committing murder. Even a Cheka man could no longer rely on prestige and status to save him from the blood hungry desires of 'The Mob'. These were definitely strange times and you had to learn to walk carefully.

Georgii arrived at The Moscva River.
He got out his notebook and looked for the exact location of where Goldstein, or whoever's corpse, had been pulled out. What was even more interesting was the river tended to be frozen over this time of year. So the persons that recovered the two bodies must have had to drag the bloated corpse over the ice to get it on the shore.

He arrived at his destination and looked around him.
In front of him there was a makeshift slipway leading down to the frozen water's edge. Further on there were some sheds. He looked over the river to the other side; he could make out some vague shapes nothing else. The light was fading fast. Georgii looked around him and then down on to the ground. If it had been him he would have transported the body back down to where the slip was. He walked down to it. Then he would have been faced with two options. Drag the corpse out to where there was a channel running through the middle of the ice or, two, cut a hole in the ice near the river bank and lower the weighted body through it and into the river. The second option was the least dangerous. Georgii now walked up to the edge of the dock and peered over. The ice was pretty white; it had snowed virtually every day, and sometimes all day over the intervening weeks since the body had been recovered. He started to walk over to the far side of the slipway. Georgii walked up the other side and stood there looking down on to the ice. There it was, it was just about visible, even in this fading light. But there it was nonetheless. In the ice, one part slightly dipped, not only that, it was also slightly faded.  Could this be the place where bodies were lowered into the Moscow River? He walked back; this time he examined the ground. He pulled out his Swiss army knife, and then started to dig around. Below the snow there seemed to be evidence that indicated that a car might have drawn up to the docks edge. There was also an oil stain in the ice. Georgii Radetzky pondered all of this and then looked up and down the river. This was a perfect location for the disposing of evidence. The whole place was deserted. No one ever came here; no barges ever docked, not since the economy had died. If they did they unloaded further up river. No, this place was ideal if you wanted to get rid of someone. It was remote enough, yet near enough to the centre of town. To do it elsewhere, out in the forest or the country, there was no telling whom you would bump into you out there. No, here was the place. He thought long and hard. He turned around and then had the shock of his life. Standing in front of him was a young boy and a young girl. The girl was holding a teddy bear!

Chapter Five

Georgii and the two children stood staring at each other for what seemed like an eternity. The young boy spoke first.

'
We've been watching you, we know why you`re here,' he said

'
You're here because of what happened,' the girl said.

'
And where have you been watching me from?', Georgii said. He reached into his pocket. The two children turned their heads and pointed in the direction of the empty sheds further down the dock. He reached into his pocket and produced a lump of stale black bread. He broke it in two and gave the kids a piece each.  Then they carried on talking. 'My names Georgii what's yours?'

'
Mines Pyotr,' the boy replied.

'
And mines Anna,' said the girl.

Georgii also became aware that there were others p
resent. He thought for a minute and then said.

'
You two had better come with me.'

With that the three of them walked off.
They walked silently down almost deserted city streets. It was the boy that spoke first.

'Where are you taking us?'
Pyotr said.

'
Home and food; you can stay at my lodgings tonight,' Georgii replied.

Georgii looked at the two children.
The girl clutched her teddy bear tightly. Like most people, they only had the possessions that they stood up in. He also wondered what he was going to do with them. The 'Party Stooge' would not take too kindly to two extra lodgers moving in. Georgii would have to smuggle them in via the back fire escape. He himself would enter the house from the front. The time was eight thirty and they all entered from different directions.

Georgii passed
the Concierge, and rushed upstairs and let the children in through the first floor hall window. They entered his rooms. He shut the door behind them. The two kids were hungry, so he gave them some black bread and soup.

Addressing the boy Georgii said. 
'Why did you say you knew why I was there?'

'
Because we saw what happened two weeks ago!'  The girl exclaimed.

'
You're the first stranger we have seen since then… apart from the locals that always come and go,' Pyotr said.

'
Who might they be?'

'
Oh they`re just the people that sleep and take shelter in the sheds,' the boy said.

'
So what happened two weeks ago then? You both said you knew why I was there!'  Georgii asked.

'
Can we stay here forever?' The girl asked.

'
So what happened at the dock that you think interests me?'  Georgii said.

The two children looked at each other in an uneasy way. Then they turned to face him.

'It was just after dark, and two cars drove in, like they always do, in quick succession. One parked under the shed roof. The other stopped near the water's edge. Three men got out of the car. One lent against the side of the car and lit up a cigarette.  The second set up a table and the third heaved a sack out of the boot. The two men worked quickly.  They emptied the contents out onto the table,' Pyotr said.

'
We were hiding in one of the sheds ... we could see everything that was going on,' Anna said.

Pyotr started again. 
'The man laid some Big Choppers on the table. He picked the body up and started hacking away at it.'

'
We soon realised what it was. It was a body and it seemed that the man was cutting off the head, hands and the feet!

Georgii sat there and listened to the two children
's stories. It pretty much tied in with his own suspicions.