Dead Men Living

chaotic.”

“Something like that.”

“How’d it work out?”

“Pretty good, I think. We’ll talk about it.”

“We need to,” she said, pointedly.

The final good-bye to separating integrity, he guessed: it would be a giant leap forward. “I can keep you ahead, believe me.” I hope, he thought.

“What about Yakutsk itself?”

“Unbelievable.”

“How was the American girl?”

“Clever.”

“She looked a mess on TV.”

Charlie frowned at the obviousness. “That’s why I didn’t sleep with her.”

“You get the chance?”

“Natalia!”

“I was joking.”

Charlie wasn’t sure she had been, but either way that was an improvement, too. Past pressure or whatever had arisen now? “So was I.”

“When will you be home?”

“It’s going to be a busy day. Do you want to talk on the telephone?” It was a coded question.

“Maybe not.”

So she wasn’t sure if the Lesnaya telephone was clean. But it was his apartment: if their telephone was tapped, their being together had already been discovered. Natalia wasn’t thinking clearly. “We could lunch?”

“Maybe walk, like we used to a long time ago.”

She was worried, Charlie realized. During his phony defection, when their relationship would have meant automatic imprisonment or, for her, even worse, they’d risked trysts in the botanical gardens on Botanicheskiy Sad. “Noon,” he suggested.

“It is good to have you back.” Her relief was obvious.

“For me, too.” The second line on his console began flickering urgently. “I’ve got to go.”

“At last!” greeted the director-general, when Charlie pressed the button.

“No one’s going to like the idea of another English officer being a killer,” criticized Dean at once. The man had the calm, encouraging voice of the university professor he’d once been, inviting debate.

“The inside of a uniform jacket would have been the obvious place to look for names, the tailor’s or the owner’s,” set out Charlie, patiently. “The inside of a trouser band wouldn’t be, to anyone but another Englishman who would know British military tailors duplicate like that. Only officers get their uniforms tailored. Only another officer would have known.”

“Tenuous,” challenged the other man.

“The Russian military Makarov fires bullets slightly larger than those of the nine-millimeter German Walther from which it’s copied,” said Charlie. “They weigh ten grams, the weight and size of the two recovered from the male bodies. The bullet that killed the woman was.38 caliber. The British army Mark IV Webley fires.38.”

“By 1944-the marker date on the coin in our man’s pocket-every army was fighting with every other nation’s weapons!”

“I think a British caliber bullet is significant and I think it’s worth checking, against the tailoring” persisted Charlie. “And we can check. We’ve got sufficient label material for a positive identification. And it shouldn’t be particularly difficult.”

“Take me through it,” demanded the director-general.

“There are only five military tailors in London: I checked the London directory as soon as I got back here this morning. And only one of those five has a name with an initial letter to match a scrap of the label left inside the trouser waistband. It’s so small it looks like a C, but it’s not. I think it’s G-Gieves and Hawkes, at 1 Savile Row, London. From the inscription in the cigarette case we’ve gotthe initials of the customer’s name, S. N. And his specific measurements, to help the trace ….”

“It all sounds remarkably simple,” agreed Dean.

“The cigarette case inscription helps a lot, apart from the initials,” suggested Charlie. “You’ll know far better than me, but I don’t believe there were more than a handful of universities in England in 1932, when we know he graduated. We know, too, that he got a First, which should narrow the search down. And we also know-for whatever reason-there was only a father. No mother.”

Charlie heard the rustle of turning pages from the other end. Dean said, “The marks of a missing signet ring? No wallet? No military identification? Why take away the obvious identification but still leave enough from which we can possibly get a name anyway?”

“I don’t have an answer to that,” admitted Charlie. “Maybe they thought they had it all: did the obvious, as you say, but didn’t look for other things. They were killed in what passes for summer there: the medical examiner found insects in all three bodies. Yet they had to use grenades to get them buried as deeply as they did. Perhaps they never thought there’d be a thaw this severe. There hasn’t been, for more than fifty years.”

“You’re sure there would have had to be official Russian knowledge of their being in Yakutsk?”

“Totally,” said Charlie, at once. “That was a closed penal colony-not even known about in the West during the war.”

“So how did a British and American officer come officially to be there? And then get murdered?”

“Another question on a long list I don’t have the answer to,” said Charlie, in further admission. “Something else I think we should bear in mind is our man’s uniform. Buttons on officers’ uniforms usually carry their regiment’s insignia, don’t they …?”

“I believe so,” agreed the director-general.

“The buttons on this lieutenant’s uniform don’t,” reminded Charlie.

“You suggesting a secret intelligence unit?”

“I’m not ruling it out.”

“A British officer, possibly intelligence-linked, in a part of the Soviet Union where he had no right to be-and therefore no permission to be-killed for being there,” mused Sir Rupert Dean, reflectively.“Working, somehow, in some way, with an American of matching rank. Somewhere there has to be a record.”

“Of the operation, perhaps,” accepted Charlie. “What would it say about their disappearance?”

“Stalin was too paranoid ever to have allowed British and American intelligence into a place like Yakustkaya,” insisted the sociopolitical professor. “Whoever got them to Yakutsk did it without Kremlin knowledge or agreement.”

“So they just had to disappear, without explanation?”

“It was wartime,” said Dean, reminding in return. “Hundreds-thousands-disappeared without explanation. Stalin was our ally. Neither Britain nor America could have admitted spying on him, although of course we did.”

“That’s all a long time ago,” said Charlie.

“But not to be dismissed until we know what they were doing there,” persisted the director-general. “It is a long time ago. All the history has been written: tidied up, as history always is. Two possible intelligence officers, together as they were, where they were, is phenomenal. If the secrets of what Stalin had created in Yakutskaya had leaked out-after the war had turned in our favor??it could have been enough to break the West’s alliance with Russia. And had the West split with Stalin, there wouldn’t have been the division of Europe at Yalta and Potsdam. Imagine that. No Soviet Union, no forty years of communist stranglehold on Eastern Europe, no Cold War, no God knows what else ….” He snorted a laugh, unamused. “You could have been inches from the truth, not fantasizing, when you talked of wartime mysteries!”

Charlie Muffin, who prided himself as an Olympic-class mental sprinter against his physical difficulty to reach a shuffling trot, recognized that his academic controller was practically out of sight ahead of him. Struggling to keep up-an unpleasant experience-Charlie said, “Can we speculate that much, this early?”

“We can imagine a possible scenario,” insisted the other man. “Gulag 98 is the obvious key.”