Dead Men Living

The homicide colonel, bristle-chinned and light-headed from a totally sleepless night at his desk, shook his head. “It was my first chance fully to examine the records of Gulag 98, after getting them back from Travin. We all missed something important. They’re perfect. No omissions, no gaps. It was a very special camp indeed, at least while it existed.”

“So?” demanded Natalia.

“Look at the plot numbering,” urged the man. “It’s consecutive, a name recorded against every plot in a cemetery that no longer exists. There isn’t an entry for Larisa Krotkov. She was sentenced to life imprisonment, but there’s no record of her dying there. Or being buried there.”

What possible connection could there be with the disappearance of the visitors’ slips in Berlin? Natalia wondered, remembering the previous night’s telephone conversation with Charlie. “Gulag 98 was closed very soon after Stalin’s death. Inmates were either released or transferred.”

“She wouldn’t have been released, for conspiring with the enemy ….” He gestured to the mound of papers in front of Natalia. “Two hundred people were transferred. Every name is there. Larisa Krotkov’s isn’t.”

“What have you done about it?”

“Asked St. Petersburg for trial depositions. There aren’t any, for her. There are for five others, all men, accused of the same crime directly after the siege was lifted. The sentence was mandatory: execution.”

Natalia had spread the papers across her desk for comparison. Slowly she began stacking them, one on top of the other. “Conclusion?”

“Larisa Krotkov wasn’t sentenced to Gulag 98. She was sent there, a supposed prisoner, for a reason. And the only possible reason is something connected with Tsarskoe Selo. Which links her with Raisa Belous.”

It was wildly speculative, thought Natalia. But then so was everything else. “It could only have been with the knowledge-the positive direction-of the NKVD.”

“A search would need your authority,” Lestov pointed out.

Always looking backward, thought Natalia. “We’ve got a name and a date. It shouldn’t be too difficult to locate, if anything exists. She could even still be alive!”

“All we need to understand it all is someone living, not dead,” agreed Lestov.

“I’m station chief!” yelled Saul Freeman.

“And I’m the person you were happy to assign to this becauseyou were too fucking frightened of all the political implications to get involved yourself!” Miriam shouted back. She was red-faced, sweating, needing to support herself as she leaned across his desk to confront him, which was what she’d been waiting to do when he’d entered the office that day. Her overnight cable to Washington and its response lay between them.

“I don’t remember you putting up much of a fight.”

“I’m putting one up now. It’s totally political, isn’t it?” She put a flat hand close to her chin. “Right up to here? And I’m the fall guy if anything goes wrong-so fucking anxious to get there, fight for everything, that I didn’t see the curve. You bastard!”

Freeman picked up the cables. Miriam’s read, Demand immediate OSS identification of American victim, which understand British already have. Further understand London about to go public.

Freeman said, “You should have cleared this with me.”

“If I’d known what the fuck was going on, I would have. And that’s what I’m going to tell each and every inquiry when I get back to Washington, as ordered.”

Freeman made a warding off movement toward Miriam. “Ignoring all the rules, first cabling, then calling Kenton Peters direct at the State Department instead of going through headquarters, was unforgivable! You know that! What else did you expect?”

“What I expected-but sure as hell didn’t get-was to be properly treated as a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And told the true reason for monitoring an investigation by Britain and Russia which I was not intended in any way to contribute to. And obstructed as much as possible so that I couldn’t.”

“What did Peters tell you?” sighed Freeman.

“That I didn’t have to bother. That Russia would never find out and if they did, would admit nothing. And that whatever Charlie Muffin and his department came up with would stay as buried as it had been for the last fifty years and that they were fall guys, too. And then he realized what he’d said-including me as a fall guy-and said he hadn’t meant it the way it had sounded and that I was to forget that, too.”

Freeman indicated Miriam’s just-replaced telephone. “And then you called him a son-of-a-bitch and to kiss your ass.”

“And enjoyed doing it: he qualifies.”

“He might. It was still the worst career move you ever made.”

“You going to tell me what it’s really about-not some shit about saving the current president?”

“I don’t know! Peters said it would embarrass the president now, although it was a long time ago. That it was all I needed to know-that anyone needed to know.”

“You feel good about this, about screwing me like this?”

Freeman lifted and let drop Miriam’s cable. “You sent it. I wouldn’t have let you.”

“Conscience clear, right?”

“Conscience clear. Say hello to Washington for me.”

“You can kiss my ass, too!”

“I did, remember?”

“All I remember is that you were a lousy fuck. At the time it was just a physical judgment. Not now.” The bastard would shit himself if he knew what she had, but she wanted a bigger reaction than the one she’d get from Saul Freeman.

Directly after the war and the control division of Berlin between the four Allied powers, America created the most comprehensive archive of the taking of the city and its postwar history right up to the bringing down of the Wall in 1991. It was called simply the Document Center and after 1991 America made a gift of it to Germany. There were more than a million photographs included in the material.

The hair of the archivist who greeted Charlie appeared to have receded in equal proportion to his beard, as if it had simply slipped from the top to the bottom of his face. His English was faultless but sibilant. He said, “We’ve had researchers come for a month work for more than a year, there’s so much here.”

“I’ve got quite a narrow time frame,” said Charlie. “And a positive direction.”

“That should certainly help,” agreed the man.

“I hope it will,” said Charlie. It would be good not having to work in the rain, although not for more than a year.

“We understand each other?” demanded Kenton Peters, who had come personally to Pennsylvania Avenue rather than have the FBIdirector come to him at Foggy Bottom, which was unprecedented.

“Yes sir,” said the director.

“It’s totally unforgivable.”

“I agree.”

“And you understand about the investigation?”

“Yes.”

“I want this to be the last I hear about it from this Bureau.”

“It will be,” assured the other man.

26

There was still too much fury-fueled adrenaline for Miriam Bell to feel tired, although she would have liked to shower, but the car was waiting at Dulles, as she’d been told it would be, so the strip-down in the aircraft toilet