bell handle, Vukovich was cautiously climbing this narrow, slippery ladder.
As he had expected, no one opened the door. The security men knocked louder. Still no answer. There was a faint sound as someone tip-toed up to the door, moved the brass cover of the spy-hole and, having made sure who was knocking, went back into the flat. Then the security men decided to break the door down.
As he climbed the rickety ladder, Vukovich heard a man's angry voice coming from the open window:
'I tell you we must fight, Ksenia Antonovna!'
'Everything's finished!' the woman said.
'Ksenia Antonovna, you must believe me!' the man shouted.
'It's too late!' Pecheritsa's wife replied and a shot rang out in the room.
'Hysterical fool!' Pecheritsa's guest muttered, crawling to the window, but at that moment Vukovich leapt to him from the window-sill like a whirlwind.
Taken by surprise, the man crawling across the floor missed his aim and the bullet flew wide. Vukovich kicked the heavy Mauser pistol out of his hand and at that moment the door gave way under the blows of the security men.
At first the bandit denied that it was he who had intended to blow up Special Detachment Headquarters and its ammunition stores. But when Doctor Gutentag came to the prison hospital and removed the bullet from the bandit's leg, it turned out to be a bullet from a Webley Scott revolver.
It was with a revolver of this rather rare pattern that Polevoi had fired at the bandit on that memorable night when Bobir had made such an ass of himself.
At the second interrogation the bandit gradually began to confess, and soon it came out that he and Kozyr- Zirka, the notoriously ruthless ataman of a regiment of Petlura storm-troopers, were one and the same person.
In the year when the Pilsudski and Petlura men fled for ever from the Ukraine, it was on Kozyr-Zirka's orders that the cut-throats of the 'Carefree Soul' regiment had slaughtered over half the innocent population of the hamlet of Ovruch, including the parents of one of our trainees, Monus Guzarchik. . . It was Kozyr-Zirka who was rumoured among the frightened inhabitants of the Ukrainian border villages to be either the Count of Belaya Tserkov or a runaway convict from Galicia... It was he, Kozyr-Zirka, who when surrounded by a partisan detachment in the village of Privorotye had murdered his orderly, a tall, dark fellow like himself, and, to hoodwink the partisans, thrust his own papers, signed by Petlura, into the pockets of the murdered man. The partisans had thought they had killed the real Kozyr-Zirka and he had managed to escape.
Vukovich conducted the investigation himself.
It turned out that Kozyr-Zirka was neither a count nor a runaway convict, but a very ordinary son of a priest from the town of Rovno.
Having run away from the Red Army to Poland after the unsuccessful alliance between Pilsudski and Petlura, Kozyr-Zirka spent a short time in a Polish concentration camp at Kalish. The camp was visited twice by a well- dressed man in civilian clothes, who wore a black Homburg hat and carried a heavy walking stick. He was lean and dark and spoke excellent Russian. Kozyr-Zirka, like many inhabitants of the part of Volyn that had once belonged to the Russian Empire, also spoke Russian. He and the visitor talked together for a long time, and Kozyr-Zirka became quite convinced that the visitor must be some important Russian whiteguard, one of those who had joined the notorious terrorist, and enemy of Soviet power, Boris Savinkov, in Poland.
Great was Kozyr-Zirka’s surprise when soon after these visits he was summoned before the camp commandant, the Pilsudski man Nalegcz-Bukojemski, who said to him: 'Congratulations, ataman! You have found favour with Captain George Sidney Railey of the British Intelligence Service. Captain Railey is an old enemy of the Bolsheviks. He knows Russia as well as I know this camp and he was very pleased after his conversation with you. By permission of Marshal Pilsudski, Captain Railey is touring all the camps where Petlura troops have been interned. It is his mission to select the bravest and most experienced supporters of the independent Ukraine. At Captain Railey's personal request, I am granting you leave to go home to Rovno for a holiday. Have a rest and get your weight back. You will be found when you are needed. In the meantime you had better forget about our conversation.'
Kozyr-Zirka had other things to think about besides getting his weight back on the free meals at his father's vicarage. Thanks to the dark Englishman, his days of imprisonment behind barbed wire were now over, and Kozyr- Zirka began to seek out the friends who had served with him under Petlura.
At that time, after the Red Army's defeat of Petlura, many ex-commanders of the Petlura forces found themselves in emigration. Some had run away to Czechoslovakia, others to Canada, others to Austria and Germany, but most of them were still skulking in Poland, particularly in the largest city of the Western Ukraine—Lvov. It was these men whom the former Austrian-paid Colonel of the Galician riflemen, Yevgen Konovalets, began to rope in and register in his secret lists. Konovalets was known in the Soviet Ukraine as the ruthless butcher of the workers of Kiev. He and his riflemen had suppressed the revolutionary uprising of the Arsenal workers, who had shown no desire to support what Petlura called 'independence.'
Finding it hard to seek out his old ataman friends by correspondence, Kozyr-Zirka decided to go himself to Lvov, which at that time was swarming with Petlura men and former 'gunner-boys.' At that time Konovalets was banding together those traitors of the Ukrainian people into his criminal UMO (Ukrainian Military Organization).
When the leaders of a secret counter-revolutionary organization admitted Kozyr-Zirka to their ranks, he did not tell them the real reason why he had got out of Kalish so quickly. Kozyr-Zirka had taken good heed of the camp commandant's advice to forget about their conversation and the dark Englishman's repeated visits to the camp. True, Kozyr-Zirka doubted whether he could be found and made to repay the favour he had received. Captain Railey, however, had taken good note of the bandit with the raven-black hair and dashing side-whiskers, and through his secret agents found Kozyr-Zirka even in Lvov.
In the summer of 1925, arriving one day in Lvov, Kozyr-Zirka stopped at the People's Hotel.
Scarcely had he taken his bath arid dried his stiff blue-black hair, when a porter knocked at the door and said that someone was asking for 'the gentleman from Rovno' on the telephone. A woman's voice asked him to come at once to the neighbouring Hotel Imperiale where an important and intimate matter awaited his attention. Very intrigued to think that anyone should have been able to find him so quickly in Lvov, 'Kozyr-Zirka got dressed, performed a hasty toilet and went, as the unknown woman had suggested, to the Hotel Imperiale, a favourite stopping-place for merchants from the out-of-the-way townships of Galicia.
He was very surprised when on knocking at the appointed door a loud man's voice told him to enter. As soon as Kozyr-Zirka crossed the threshold, an immaculately dressed Pilsudski officer rose to meet him.
This was Major Zygmunt Florek, a veteran officer of Polish military intelligence, who was working in Lvov simultaneously for Marshal Pilsudski and a foreign intelligence service.
'And so we have found you, my dear ataman!' said the major. 'Forgive me for asking you to call on me. I am rather well known in this town and if I had paid you a visit rather a lot of people would have got to know about it. Your organization has been accused often enough already of being in league with the Polish authorities.'
Taken aback by the major's first words, Kozyr-Zirka was even more surprised when Florek told him that Captain Railey sent him personal greetings and wished him success in his first and rather dangerous mission.
Major Florek told Kozyr-Zirka that governments all over the world were preparing for war with the Soviet Union,. Anxious to convince the priest's son from Rovno that this' was so, Florek produced from his bag a recent copy of an English newspaper and translated part of an article which declared that Bolshevism would be smashed that year, and that Russia would return to the old life and open her frontiers 'to those who wish to work there.'
'And she will open them to you too, my dear ataman!' Florek said. 'Do you know who wrote that? Henry Detterding, the biggest oil manufacturer in the world. He has already sacrificed millions of rubles in gold to crush Bolshevism and he'll give as much again to see it accomplished. You can trust what he says.'
Having offered Kozyr-Zirka a fine position in the Ukraine when Soviet power was crushed, Florek asked him to carry out an important task.
Major Florek instructed Kozyr-Zirka to cross over, to the Soviet side and blow up Special Detachment Headquarters in our town, and all its stores. Major Florek was speaking the truth when he told Kozyr-Zirka that war with the Soviet Union was imminent. Egged on by foreign imperialists, Pilsudski's generals were preparing to make war on the Soviet Union that year. Their hired agents assassinated the Communist Pyotr Voykov, Soviet plenipotentiary in Poland, on the platform of a Warsaw station. The Polish general staff began massing troops on
