Dead Men Living

“Agency,” said Brindsley. “And was is the word. He’s out. Any idea how he was blown?”

Miriam shook her head. “None.”

“Could it have been the Brit, Muffin?”

“I don’t see how. As far as I was aware, Packer was Peters’s bodyguard. What was he really supposed to do?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Miriam felt a sudden coldness. “You’re kidding!”

“I didn’t say anything. Don’t know anything.”

“It’s got to be a hell of a thing they want to stay covered up.”

“You still need me to tell you that?”

“Does Peters know who the guy is in the Yakutsk grave?”

“I guess so. I don’t.”

“And what he was doing in Yakutsk?”

Brindsley shrugged. “I don’t know!”

Miriam extended her hands again, a gesture of helplessness this time. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Exactly what you have been doing. Passing back everything. Giving away nothing.”

“Monitoring, not investigating? I could have been told that in the beginning.”

“Now you have been. What about the Englishman?”

“Maybe you should tell Peters he was withdrawn to London the day before me. Left without telling me …” She made a vague gesture again toward the drawer containing the tape cassette. “I don’t understand how Peters’s remark about the British being fall guys squares with your telling me they’ve got as much to hide as us and are cooperating.”

“Neither do I,” admitted the man, miserably. “Like I said, I don’t enjoy working like this any more than you do.”

She was safe, Miriam abruptly realized. She might have gotten the thin-thread lecture, but after today she couldn’t be blamed for the failure of an investigation that had been intended to fail from the very beginning. As the awareness settled, she said, “How’s this going to be marked on my file?”

“I’m not sure that it is going to be marked,” said the department chief. He hesitated. “Is there another copy of the tape?”

“No,” lied Miriam. Altogether, she decided, everything had turned out very satisfactorily indeed. It would still be nice to have Peters kiss her ass; something, in fact, to look forward to with the tape she’d copied. It would be good to have more. To get which she needed to go on poking around, despite what she had been officially ordered to do. Do a Charlie Muffin, in fact. There was no way she could try to access the old OSS files without the Bureau finding out, but there were the Nazi prisoners at Yakutsk and New York was only an hour away from Washington on the shuttle.

Before her transfer to the overseas division, Miriam Bell had been attached to the FBI’s New York office and had twice found the records of the World Jewish Congress on Madison Avenue a mine of information about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust during war crime inquiries.

She was directed to the desk of a man whose nameplate said E. Ray Lewis. He was a small, balding, bearded man whose vaguely distracted ambience of an academic changed at once to obvious daydreams at her approach. Miriam was glad she’d worn the sweater that accentuated her cleavage. He promised to do whatever he could to help her when she showed him her Bureau shield and Miriam knew how he would have liked her to help him.

His fantasies went abruptly the moment she produced her list. He said, “I know without checking who most of them are. The others would be the same. You know what happened to them!”

“I think so. Can you tell me what they did?”

“Immediately,” said Lewis. And he did.

The afternoon sessions had become routine, an examination and often reexamination of everything from the previous twenty-four hours unless there was something Lestov considered more urgent, which hedid the recall of Miriam Bell so soon after Charlie Muffin’s departure.

“You think there’s a connection?” demanded Natalia, who knew well enough from Charlie’s Berlin calls there wasn’t. Would Charlie have come up with anything by the time they next spoke?

“It’s too much of a coincidence,” insisted Lestov.

“What did she say?”

“That she’d been summoned to a reevaluation conference in Washington.”

“How good has her cooperation been, until now?”

“She wants more than she gives. I’d guess we’re holding back in equal measure.”

“What do you think about this?”

“The most obvious is that they’ve identified their victim. Maybe even know why he was there,” suggested the man.

Knowing from Charlie of the soft, late-night knocks on Miriam Bell’s Yakutsk hotel room door, Natalia said, “Who’s cooperated the most, out of the two of them?”

“Nothing in it,” judged Lestov, at once.

“So a reevaluation conference is a lie?”

“Inevitably,” accepted Lestov.

“What do we do?” Natalia invited.

“London and Washington have got to think we’ve got more than we have.”

“Yes,” agreed Natalia, doubtfully.

“Has there been any response about Larisa Krotkov?”

“Nothing.”

“Why don’t we use it?” questioned Lestov.

“Use what, how?” Natalia frowned.

“Issue a statement, without naming Larisa Krotkov, of a further mysterious connection with Tsarskoe Selo: generate the sort of publicity we did with the photograph of Raisa Belous. Maybe hint it has something to do with a second woman. It’ll bring them back, force them into an exchange.”

“Yes,” agreed Natalia, needing only to know what the Americans had. “It would, wouldn’t it?”

In Berlin Charlie eased back in the tiny cubicle that had been made available to him at the former American Document Center, gazing down tired-eyed but briefly euphoric at the photograph included in the comparatively small amount of material devoted to the American OSS period in the city, prior to the CIA. So small, in fact, that it probably shouldn’t have been there at all. And more probably still was unknown to the CIA, which grew from the Office of Strategic Services, or any other Washington department, certainly none overseen by the ubiquitous Kenton Peters.

Incredibly it was the instant recognition of the girl, not of the heavily bespectacled man, that had first registered with Charlie from the copied scrap Miriam found. But this print was intact, not cut as it had been to fit into the dead American’s pocket in the Yakutsk grave. There were a further seven men and two other girls smiling out at the camera. Charlie’s second instant identification was of a dress-uniformed Simon Norrington, without having to read the captioned name. He didn’t need the caption, either, to pick out Raisa Belous as one of the other two girls.

There was none of the previous day’s frigidness from the cemetery registration clerk when Charlie shuffled into her office two hours later. She said at once, nervously, “I’m sorry. We still haven’t sorted it out.”

“I’m sure you’re trying,” soothed Charlie. “I was wondering if you could do me a slightly unofficial favor.”

“Maybe,” the woman said, doubtfully.

“You’ve got contacts with your American counterparts in their Battle Monuments Department?”

“Yes.”

“Do they have their Second World War dead on computer?”