‘The way I see it, Korolev, both of us have an interest in finding out who’s behind this little caper and putting a stop to them.’
‘I do, but you?’
‘I have a reputation, Korolev, and you don’t think I’d just stand back and let these people damage it, now do you? Why else do you think I’m down here with my best men? It’s too cold for the swimming.’
‘But why do you need me? It sounds like you’re doing all right, so far.’ It wasn’t that Korolev was objecting but he knew it was against the Thieves’ code to talk to the Militia.
‘We’ve hit them as hard as they’ve hit us, true, but we know these people are bringing in these guns some other way, and once that happens things won’t be so easy. Much less easy if these fools are successful. This is a weed needs pulling up by the root and it seems to me that if we work together we’ve more chance of doing the job properly, once and for all.’
‘Give me names and every one of them will be in a Chekist cell by lunchtime.’
Kolya shook his head.
‘Think about it, Korolev. If the information was coming from where you and I might dare to think it might have been coming from, or even if it looks like it was coming from that person – well, who would be the ones who’d end up in the cells? Think about it very carefully.’
They were almost at the bottom, and the port was now no longer visible past the city’s train station, from which large numbers of people were emerging. The funicular juddered to a halt at its small lower platform, where a crowd was waiting to board.
‘The morphine, Kolya,’ Korolev said, before he’d even thought about it. ‘The girl was drugged.’
Kolya looked at him sharply, then nodded. ‘I’ll look into it. Listen, Korolev, be careful – for some reason beyond fathoming our fates seem tied together on this. Your partner’s from good stock and she’ll watch your back well enough. And whatever’s going on – the dead girl is the key. I’ll be in touch.’
And, with that, he was gone, stepping forward into a group of red-faced sailors, jolly with alcohol, and walking quickly off.
Chapter Twelve
Korolev followed Kolya for a few paces, then stood watching his retreating figure, pushed his hat back, rubbed the scar on his cheek, and tried to make sense of it all. Had Kolya really suggested that Lenskaya had been a spy? And who the hell were these Ukrainian counter-revolutionaries? Not for the first time since the Chekist’s knock on the door did he wish he was back in Moscow investigating a nice straightforward homicide. A crime, a motive and a killer – now that’s what a murder should be. Spies and gun-smuggling and faked suicides and angry NKVD men and damned aeroplanes and what sounded like a full-scale gang war, albeit quietly done, well, he’d happily leave all of that to some other detective. Or the angry NKVD men – even better.
He looked at his watch and saw that, on top of everything else, it was a good forty minutes since he’d left Slivka. And what was it that Kolya had said about Slivka being of good stock? What the hell had he meant by that? Korolev glanced up at the steps – there were a lot of them, but they’d be quicker than the funicular. He sighed and started up them two at a time, his mind racing.
The first thing he did was remind himself that, short of a miraculous intervention, there was no obvious way out. He looked up at the sky half-hopefully, but there was no sign of a saint coming to sweep him away in a fiery chariot, more was the pity. Anyway, these people were traitors, so it was his duty to track them down and that was that.
It would be dangerous, that much was certain, and the danger wasn’t only from the counter-revolutionaries. If the People’s Commissar of State Security, the man supposed to be defending the State from such things, had been having an affair with someone who was slipping secrets to the enemy, then the investigation was a time bomb waiting to blow up in Korolev’s face. Particularly if she’d been borrowing the secrets from the said People’s Commissar. Duty or not, it would be wise to follow Kolya’s advice and keep quiet, for the moment anyway. He took a deep breath as he reached yet another platform – he was already struggling and he wasn’t even a quarter of the way up the damned stairs. Anyway, Korolev reasoned to himself as he began to climb again, what had he got to tell? A second-hand story from a Thief who’d never repeat it, even if Korolev managed to produce him for questioning. Which was unlikely. He was practically doing his duty by keeping his mouth shut.
Halfway now, and his legs burnt with effort. There were hills in Moscow, it was true. The Sparrow Hills, or the Lenin Hills as they were known now, were definitely hills by any standards, but that didn’t mean he went running up them every day. He’d become unfit – too much sitting in cars and at his desk. When he got back to Moscow, he’d get back into training. If he got back to Moscow, of course. He sighed. To look at the investigation from another point of view, though – why had he been sent down in the first place? Rodinov must think something was up, clearly, but wasn’t quite sure what it was. After all, if they knew about Lenskaya and wanted to cover it up, it would have been better to have had the local uniforms declare it a suicide and leave it at that. Korolev wasn’t the greatest detective in the world, but it hadn’t taken too long to work out he was dealing with a murder. Maybe they really did want to find out the truth about the girl’s death.
There were still two more flights of steps to go and he wasn’t entirely sure he’d make it. Despite his exhaustion, however, it seemed clear to him that he must investigate the case to the best of his ability, and as if he’d never had a conversation with Kolya. He’d put the evidence together, sift it, weigh it and come to conclusions, same as he always did. And if something came up that backed Kolya’s story or the Thief contacted him again – well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it. He reached the top, his lungs raw, his heart thudding in his ears and his legs screaming their surrender. To recover some sort of dignity he turned and looked down at the harbour. A breakwater curved around the bay towards a white and red lighthouse. It was a busy scene, with small boats cutting in and out between the larger vessels, with bustle on the portside and trucks coming and going, but the sea itself was calm and the sun was beginning to break through the cloud once again. And somewhere down there, in one of those ships perhaps, there might well be a stash of German weaponry. Damn it, he was in trouble this time.
The Bebel Street Militia station was a substantial building, four storeys high and a good fifty metres wide. It wasn’t a new construction, looking as if it had been built at the end of the previous century, but its forensic department seemed well equipped, with a filing cabinet that contained the fingerprint cards of all the known criminals in the area, photographic equipment, microscopes, plaster casts of shoeprints and tyre-tracks, weighing scales, a small library of reference manuals and an assortment of odds and ends that Firtov had picked up along the way in the hope or expectation that they might come in useful in due course. Firtov gave Korolev and Slivka a guided tour before they got down to business.
‘It wasn’t an easy crime scene,’ the tall forensics man said. ‘As I told you, it’s more than likely that someone cleaned the place pretty carefully. We did find a few human hairs, but from their colour it seems likely that they belong to the girl, and even if they don’t – who’s to say how they got there? Not exactly a bloody fingerprint on an axe handle, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the Greek is looking into it.’
He nodded over to Papadopoulos, who was sitting bent over a microscope.
‘From what we know so far, it seems nearly everyone had good reason to be in Lenskaya’s office or the dining room at some stage or another,’ Korolev said.
‘Yes,’ Firtov replied, ‘I thought as much.’ His moustache hung heavy over his mouth so it seemed as if his voice came from behind whiskery curtains. His eyebrows were nearly as thick, but his gaze was sharp and Korolev was confident the fellow knew what he was up to. ‘I’ll tell you one thing, though,’ Firtov continued, ‘I’ve been working in Odessa since ’twenty-one, and the only people who clean up this well after themselves are of the professional ilk. As in they have tattoos or they have identity cards.’
‘Professional?’
‘If it isn’t a Militiaman or someone from one of the other Organs, and I’m presuming it isn’t, then I’d say it’s a Thief. And an experienced one at that.’
Korolev put his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and sighed. It could also be a well-trained foreign agent, of course.
