Dead Men Living

averages and the way his luck was running, there had to be something that took him forward! Which made waiting a minute-a second! — close to impossibly difficult, but he kept to the determination not to hurry. Get it all, he reminded himself: an inch at a time, a step at a time.

“What else can I tell you?” questioned the baronet. He got up to go to the drinks tray.

Charlie shook his head against the gestured invitation. “It was big jump, wasn’t it, from Free French liaison at the War Office to a special art-looting unit?”

Norrington frowned on his way back to his chair. “You don’t know anything at all about Simon, do you?”

He didn’t and it made this encounter too long overdue, Charlie conceded, although refusing completely to blame his personal situation in Moscow. There had been reason enough to remain there as long as he had. “The Ministry of Defense can’t find any records about your brother.”

Norrington’s smile was slow, an expression of belated understanding. “He didn’t tell me that.”

It came close to Charlie’s breath being taken away by a deluge offittingly iced water. “Who didn’t tell you what, sir?”

Norrington got up again, went to his desk and took the small rectangle of pasteboard from a top drawer. “Burbage, Lionel Burbage. Defense Ministry. Said there was a confusion about the records, which was why he wanted what I had.”

The iced-water feeling stayed with Charlie. “Did he take them?”

“Asked to, but I wouldn’t let him, like I’m not going to let you. Allowed him to read them, as you can. That’s all.”

Charlie began to feel warm again, not just at the reassurance but at his determination not to hurry. “When was this?”

“Four days ago.”

He’d met Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Jackson, the military attache, in Berlin five days ago. It fit the urgency of the Ministry of Defense panic. “Did you make your brother’s letter available to him?”

“Didn’t come into the conversation. He asked specifically about the official War Office communications and that’s all he saw. That’s why I asked you when you got here if you were in charge of the investigation, although Sir Rupert had already told me you were when he telephoned.”

“What did Burbage tell you?”

“That he was.”

“I am,” insisted Charlie. “It’s been a problem from the beginning, too many departments, getting in each other’s way.”

Norrington nodded in further understanding. “Burbage asked me to tell him if anyone else approached me about Simon.”

“Did you tell him I was coming?”

Norrington shook his head. “I didn’t know you were, then. Decided to wait. See you first. Hear what you had to say.”

“I certainly don’t know of him. But it makes sense to stop this duplication. Which I will. Can I have Burbage’s number?”

Norrington carried the card back with the whiskey decanter, adding unasked to Charlie’s glass. All that was listed was the name and a telephone number. No ministry was identified. Neither was any department. Norrington said, “You haven’t told me what you’ve got to say, Mr. Muffin. Not properly. Not why, for instance, Sir Rupert asked me when we originally spoke to keep secret the discovery of my brother’s body in some place I’d never heard of, nor make anypublic announcement about finally burying him as he should be buried, after all these years. I think I’ve been remarkably patient, but now that patience has gone.”

Shit, thought Charlie. Shit! Shit! Shit! Family pride, he told himself desperately: family pride and honor. “Your brother was officially in Berlin; his death there was accepted. His being in Yakutsk is considered, even now, something that shouldn’t be made public. Until we find out why and how he came to be there-to be one of at least four victims in a planned killing-it’s still considered a potential national problem.”

“That’s very difficult for me to accept. Or understand.”

“It’s even more difficult for me to ask you to accept or understand,” pleaded Charlie. “Which is why I’m asking you for all the help I can get.”

“My brother would not, under any circumstances, have done anything wrong: illegal or unofficial! He was proud to be an officer. To serve his country.”

An opening, Charlie recognized. “He couldn’t have been where he was unofficially. He was obeying an order. Which was what I told you when we first began talking: what I’m trying to do is find out who gave that order. Which it would seem the Ministry of Defense is also trying to find out.” If Burbage was from the Ministry of Defense, which Charlie now doubted.

“According to the newspapers, the Americans consider their officer to have been a hero. There’s a hero’s burial planned. Why hasn’t the same been said-planned-about Simon? And why was I asked to say nothing, do nothing, about burying him?”

“The American is being buried as an unknown victim,” seized Charlie. “Your brother won’t be, after I’ve found out the truth. Then, maybe, he’ll be accorded the honor he’s due.”

“No,” agreed Norrington, quietly. “Simon won’t be buried as an unknown. And I don’t want any maybes about his being accorded every honor to which he’s entitled. I’m not given to threats, Mr. Muffin-the need to prove myself. So what I am going to say isn’t a threat. It’s a statement of fact. I am not without official influence-access to private as well as public platforms. I am prepared totally and fully to cooperate with you in every way I am asked. But with a time limit. Unless I am convinced otherwise-and you must understandI will take a very great deal of convincing-I will announce two weeks from today that it was Simon’s body in the Yakutsk grave. I will disclose that somebody else was killed to fill a grave in his name in Berlin. And I shall demand a public inquiry into the circumstances of both deaths, and although it will offend me deeply I shall turn my brother’s burial here into a media event. I don’t, of course, expect you to be the messenger. I’ll telephone Sir Rupert to tell him myself. Do you think what I’ve said is unreasonable?”

Charlie said, “I think you’ve already shown a great deal of patience and I’m grateful for another two weeks. In your position I’d have probably kept it to one.”

Norrington’s smile was abrupt and open. “Interesting reply. When I said roughly the same to Burbage, he said he’d stop me doing anything under the Official Secrets Act, and when I told him I wasn’t a signatory to it, he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and that it didn’t matter whether I’d signed it or not. That’s the real reason I didn’t call him when I agreed to your coming. Didn’t like the fellow. Very rude.”

But far more important, very stupidly indiscreet, bullying like that. Suddenly reminded of Richard Cartright, Charlie decided the standard was definitely going down.

Charlie refused the offer of lunch from Norrington’s willowy blond fourth wife who said to call her Davinia and whom he guessed to be half the baronet’s age. Instead he accepted rare beef sandwiches he didn’t get around to eating at the borrowed library desk, working steadily through the two wooden boxes of personal effects under the frozen, smiling gaze from three pictures of the man whose mysteries he was trying to solve.

He did so careful to retain the exact order in which each item had been kept, not removing one until that which preceded it had been replaced. The crocodile wallet was an early disappointment. It contained Simon Norrington’s English driving license and visiting cards in his own name-both necessary and easy identification, Charlie acknowledged-but no one else’s cards, letters, photographs or anything connecting him to Berlin or his unit. His army pay book was endorsed for his pay to be credited automatically to a Coutts Bank account on the Strand and although he didn’t expect it to lead to thelong-lost army records Charlie made a note of the pay book number. Charlie looked over it all, laid out on the desk in front of him, every item perfectly preserved, intact and undamaged, despite its age. How, he asked himself, could it have been accepted, apparently without a single question? Carried as it would have been, in the breast or inside pockets of the uniform, it should-and would-have all been totally destroyed by the massive force of whatever had killed the substitute Berlin victim.

The official notification of Simon Norrington’s death was as cold as the grave in which the man had lain for fifty years, a formal printed notice with the choice of striking out sir or madam, whichever was inappropriate, and gaps in the text for the details of names, relationship and date of death to be inserted by hand.

Charlie got the first of what he considered important information from the handwritten letter of condolence to