Dead Men Living

“And he definitely had you under surveillance?”

“Definitely,” insisted Charlie. “I think it should be officially logged.”

“So do I. And it will be. And I’ll ask Washington for an explanation, through the Foreign Office. It’ll all be denials and claims of misunderstanding, of course.” There was a pause. “You think you’ve removed the danger?”

“The publicity will have frightened Peters.” I hope, thought Charlie.

“Wonder how the Moscow press got on to him?”

“No idea,” said Charlie.

The confirmed recognition of the woman in the Yakutsk grave came on the fourth day after the publication of her photograph and literallyrelegated the Henry Packer fiasco to a one-day wonder. The identification came from a man who walked into the offices of the English-language Moscow News, which with admirable journalistic initiative obtained what they believed to be everything it was conceivably possible to get from Fyodor Ivanovich Belous before contacting either their local militia station or the Interior Ministry. And in addition to what Belous had to tell, which upon analysis was quite meager, the well-documented background ensured a story that within a further twenty-four hours brought the announcement of movie intentions from a leading Hollywood studio. One of the photographs Belous produced of his mother, Raisa, even appeared to show her in the same white shirt, dark jacket and skirt she had been wearing when her body had been found.

Belous’s story was of never having known either his father or mother. His entire knowledge of them had come from his now-dead maternal grandparents, who had brought him up in Moscow, where he had lived his entire life, mostly as a clerk in the central division office of the Communist Party and latterly as a bookkeeper at the Moskva Hotel.

His father, Ivan, had died in 1943, just days before the end of the Germans’ nine-hundred-day siege of Leningrad. His mother had fled, unaware of being pregnant, one week before the siege began in September 1943. She had worked in the curators’ department at Tsarskoe Selo, the “Tsar’s Village” of five spectacular palaces established on the outskirts of St. Petersburg by its founder, Peter the Great. Raisa Belous’s particular responsibility had been the palace of Catherine the Great. It had been her job to organize the rescue convoy to Moscow of as much of the Catherine palace treasure as she could, in advance of the Nazi army and its Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg fur die Besetzten Gebiete, named after Alfred Rosenberg, who in 1940 had been personally appointed by Hitler to confiscate, loot or steal every work of art from Nazi-occupied territory for the world’s most complete museum Hitler planned for his Linz birthplace.

It was a matter of historical record that the Catherine Palace had housed one of the world’s greatest but now lost art treasures, the Amber Room presented to Peter the Great in 1711 by the Prussian warrior-king, Friedrich Wilhelm. And that Hitler had personally orderedthat the twenty-one honey-yellow amber panels, four gold-framed with jeweled landscapes picked out in Florentine mosaic, the others carved in flower and fruit motif, should be restored to their original splendor in East Prussia’s Konigsberg Castle in what he intended to be his personal study.

According to Belous’s grandparents, his mother’s greatest regret had been her failure to strip the three- hundred-year-old amber from the Catherine Palace walls to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Nazi E.R.R. looters. As it was, for what she had saved, Raisa Belous was made a Hero of the Soviet Union by Stalin. It was to let as many people know-not just in Moscow but in the West-that his mother had been such a heroine that he had approached an English-language publication.

As well as the photograph of his mother dressed in what she had been found in the Yakutsk grave, Belous produced four others, one of her standing in the middle of the Amber Room showing it in the dazzling glory that earned it a nineteenth century British ambassador’s description as the eighth wonder of the world. There was also the official notification of his mother’s death, which he now didn’t understand and wanted explained.

It was recorded as having occurred in Berlin in early April 1945. Raisa Belous had died, according to the notice, in an antipersonnel mine explosion.

“Which will have caused severe facial injuries,” predicted Charlie, during one of the twice-daily telephone conversations he maintained with London.

“I think you should come out of Moscow: pick up things here,” said Sir Rupert Dean.

“I want to speak to Belous myself,” avoided Charlie. “And there’s Gulag 98.”

The inmate register of which, building up the impression of a momentum, landed on Natalia’s desk the following day.

It was one of a batch of ten, all former camps in the immediate vicinity of Yakutsk itself, and was one of the few to have been divided between male and female prisoners. The batch brought to fifty-three the number through which Petr Pavlovich Travin was supervising the search-already extended since the emergence of Fyodor Belous-for anyone whose history hinted German, English or American connections or art or antique links.

The Gulag 98 records were among the largest and certainly the most complete so far delivered, the main dossier running to three hundred pages, annexed to which were the personal files of what, from the dates, appeared to be the last inmates sentenced before the camp’s 1953 destruction. Only the names remained, in faded sepia-brown ink, of the original thirty artists, writers and teachers who with little more than their frostbitten hands had built the original camp in 1932. Five were registered as having died during the construction. Against the names of all-and the majority who had followed in the subsequent nineteen and a half years-were listed unspecified crimes against the state. Fifteen years appeared to be the minimum sentence, thirty the maximum. Hard labor, within the dozens of mines, was mandatory. Without exception, permanent exile followed every jail sentence.

Charlie and Natalia had exhaustively researched the discovery. The year of the coins found on Norrington and the April 1945 dates for the Berlin burial provided a year-long time frame for Natalia to work within. From that period she gleaned the names of fifty-five men and thirty-seven women whose records-spanning a range of art, art history and academic professorship-suggested people or occupations that might have been sufficient to lure the three murder victims to Yakutsk. Among the men were fifteen whose names and details identified them as German. There were no personal records for any of those fifteen, nor any reason for their imprisonment. Each was simply described as being of “special category.” Twelve were marked as having died before the closure of the camp. The location to which the other three had been transferred was not given.

Following the step-by-step preparation she had gone through with Charlie, Natalia delayed sending the Gulag 98 dossier to the man who was still her official deputy, needing to copy what she considered relevant sections. With the rest she sent a note, duplicated to everyone involved, reminding him the concentration upon anyone with fine art or antique expertise was now even more important in view of Raisa Belous’s history. Because it was also a connected part of the necessary further undermining of Viktor Romanovich Viskov and Petr Pavlovich Travin, she ambiguously worded her agreement toLestov sharing with the British and American investigators that afternoon’s interview with Fyodor Belous as if it were the homicide colonel’s idea rather than hers, curious if Charlie would again be proved right.

He was.

To Viskov’s anticipated, within-the-hour objection, copied to the same circulation list to which she had also sent hers, was attached the minutes of their very first coordinating meeting, at which Dmitri Nikulin had specifically forbidden such cooperation. Viskov’s memo demanded an explanation for her disregarding the instruction of the presidential aide.

Natalia’s rebuttal was even quicker than Viskov’s to her: she’d had it already prepared, complete with her marked version of the same initial meeting. Dmitri Borisovich Nikulin had also specifically ordered that everything should be done to discover the undisclosed progress of the two Western investigators, which they might be able to estimate by carefully monitoring a shared interview with someone whose story was already public knowledge. Unable to prevent the bubble of uncertainty, Natalia wrote that she regarded the intervention of the deputy interior minister even more counterproductive than his brief cancellation of the gulag search. As the authority of Dmitri Borisovich had been invoked in both their exchanges, she was, of course, prepared to defer to his judgment, but unless she heard from the president’s chief of staff she intended the shared encounter with Belous to go ahead as planned.

No intervention came from Nikulin.

Charlie’s invitation to the Interior Ministry, personally telephoned by Lestov, was the prearranged signal that