Yuri pushed through the swing gate, picking up the numbering halfway along the open corridor. He hoped the deskman’s attitude was not indicative of a general feeling about the KGB within the militia headquarters. At 12b Yuri knocked politely, and heard at once a muffled ‘Enter’, which he did.
It was a pristine, almost antiseptically clean office: there was even an antiseptic smell which Yuri saw came from a deodorizer device on top of a filing cabinet, arranged against two other filing cabinets in absolute symmetry, every drawer closed. There were two windows at which the blinds had been half pulled precisely to a matching level and a desk the top of which shone. On it were seried In and Out trays, both empty, with a telephone directly in line and an unmarked blotter measurably in its very centre. Behind sat an overweight man neatly encompassed in a well-cut suit with a colour-coordinated tie and a white shirt as pristinely clean as everything else around its wearer.
‘Investigator Bogaty?’
‘At last!’ Bogaty said.
The reply confused Yuri: it could only have taken seconds – two minutes at the outside – for him to have walked from the front hall desk! He said: ‘I have come about Vasili Dmitrevich Malik.’
‘After nine days, five hours and thirty-five minutes!’ said Bogaty, with a policeman’s contempt of a neglected investigation.
‘I do not understand,’ said Yuri, who didn’t.
‘It’s taken nine days, five hours and thirty-five minutes for the KGB – for Colonel Panchenko – to say please. And then he couldn’t do it himself,’ said the investigator.
Yuri understood the reply little better than he had anything else, but he didn’t think comprehension was immediately important. For an unknown reason he had an apparently angry man talking by name of someone he believed to be connected with the death of his father. He said: ‘I am sorry, if it has caused you difficulties.’
‘Hardly me,’ said Bogaty. ‘Have you been put in charge of the investigation?’
Yuri searched desperately for a reply he could regard as safe and couldn’t find one. So he said: ‘Not exactly.’
‘You know it’s too late, don’t you?’
What was the response to that! Yuri said: ‘I hope not.’
‘You haven’t checked the garages, have you?’
A negative question invites a negative reply, thought Yuri, remembering the interrogation lectures. ‘No,’ he said.
‘So it’s too late!’ insisted the detective. ‘I told him! That night, when it happened, I told Panchenko to check the garages, before there was time to get the damage repaired.’
Stoke the apparent outrage, decided Yuri: let the man boil over so he could pick up a lead to what this was all about. He said: ‘I don’t know anything of this.’
‘If you people can’t do the job you’re supposed to do, why don’t you leave it to others who can?’ demanded Bogaty.
‘What would you have done?’ asked Yuri. Lecture me, patronize me, be contemptuous, he thought.
‘Gone through all the garages, particularly the back-street, cash-in-the-hand junk houses,’ said Bogaty. ‘There aren’t any I don’t know. Hassled them until I found a circa 1984 Lada with a smashed light and a crumpled wing…’ Bogaty breathed heavily to a halt. ‘A week,’ he resumed. ‘That’s all it would have taken me. A week. Now you don’t stand a chance. Not a chance in hell.’
What exactly was the man complaining about? A botched inquiry, obviously. But how could he know whether any inquiry had been botched or not? Despite the bewilderment, details were registering with him: a 1984 Lada, with a smashed headlight and a damaged wing. Yuri decided to pique the man’s obvious pride. He said: ‘It certainly seems we should have sought your help sooner.’
Bogaty did not reply at once. Instead he opened an unseen drawer to the right of his desk, extracted a manila folder which he threw towards Yuri, without disarranging the carefully positioned blotter, and said: ‘What good do you imagine this is going to be so late?’
Now it was Yuri who did not respond at once, realization at last crowding in upon him. The folder was a metre away, close enough for him to reach out and touch. And how much he wanted to touch it: snatch it up and devour everything that was inside! But he didn’t. Forcing the calmness into his voice, he said: ‘What’s it say?’
‘What do you think it says?’
Shit! thought Yuri. He said: ‘Facts, not supposition.’
‘The man was hit from behind by a Lada car, which from the glass fragments and paint samples is shown to have been manufactured around 1984,’ said Bogaty. ‘The initial impact broke his back. Tyre marks, in the poor bastard’s own blood, show the vehicle reversed over him, crushing the rib cage and all the organs, including the heart. Died instantly.’
Yuri swallowed at the dispassionate recital, needing fresh control. My father, he thought: that’s my father you’re talking about, like he was a piece of meat in an abbatoir. He said: ‘Run down deliberately?’
‘No question about it,’ insisted Bogaty.
‘And the proof’s there?’ said Yuri, indicating the folder between them. He was hot, flushed, and hoped it was not showing by the colour of his face. So this was why the inquiry had come under the aegis of the criminal division!
‘Of course it’s all there. I told Panchenko at the time it would be.’
‘I didn’t speak directly to him,’ risked Yuri. At the time. Did that mean Panchenko had physically been at the scene? Should he extend the risk, telling the detective who he was and openly seeking the man’s help? No, rejected Yuri, conscious of the neatness of Bogaty’s office. It was inconceivable that someone to whom order was so important would knowingly breach a different sort of order.
‘By taking so long it’s virtually useless,’ insisted Bogaty. ‘Is this how it is in the KGB?’
‘You know how things are,’ shrugged Yuri invitingly.
Bogaty gestured around his sterile office. ‘I know how things are here,’ he said. ‘And I know that if I was aware of technical evidence available I would not have waited nine days, five hours and thirty-five minutes before I collected it.’
Bogaty believed him to be Panchenko’s messenger! The complete and incredible comprehension flooded in on Yuri and he fought against it mentally overwhelming him, recognizing the opportunity it represented but conscious how, by the smallest error, he could be destroyed by it. Hopefully, he said: ‘Was the way it happened obvious, at the scene?’
‘To me it was.’
He had to take the chance, Yuri decided. He said: ‘Did the comrade colonel take the same view?’
‘The comrade colonel did not express any view,’ said Bogaty stiffly.
He had it! There was still the need to proceed with one foot placed just inches in front of the other. No accident, he thought: deliberately run over – the evidence in front of him like a mockery – and Panchenko provably at the scene. More, in every respect, than he’d imagined possible. Would he be able to get out of here with that file? Reaching out, grateful there was no shake in his hand, Yuri said: ‘I’d better be getting along.’
‘I’ll need a receipt,’ announced Bogaty.
‘Of course,’ responded Yuri. Who? he wondered desperately. The name came and Yuri decided it was ironically appropriate, scrawling ‘Igor Agayans’ across the formal hand-over document that Bogaty pushed across the desk at him. He was guilty of forgery, recognized Yuri. Deception and theft, too. Positively committed from this moment on into doing something, although he still did not know what. I think I could kill someone who tried to kill me, he remembered.
‘Best of luck,’ said Bogaty. ‘You’re going to need it.’
‘I know,’ said Yuri, with feeling.
He had consciously to walk at a normal pace back through the militia building, the dossier tight against his side, ears strained for some belated challenge from behind. Incredible! he thought exultantly: incredible and unbelievable but it had happened because of the investigator’s simple assumption, from his desk officer’s introduction. And that for nine days, five hours and thirty-five minutes – no, fifty-five minutes now – Bogaty had been expecting a courier from Panchenko to collect promised technical evidence. He would even perform the function of a courier, decided Yuri. But only after reading and copying everything that was here.
Which was what he did, the following morning, in a public duplicating booth in the GUM department store –
