the Soviet frontier. Bombs were thrown into the Party club in Leningrad.
Major Zygmunt Florek offered Kozyr-Zirka a handsome reward in cash from himself and from
Captain Railey if the headquarters in Kishinev Street was blown up. 'The whole world will hear the roar of that explosion and your name will go down in the annals of history, my dear ataman!' said Florek in farewell, giving him a list of addresses and contacts for use on Soviet territory.
Kozyr-Zirka crossed the border at a place he knew well. Lieutenant Lipinsky himself, commander of the Rovno 'frontier-defence corps,' saw him off as far as Zbruch and wished him luck when they parted...
'Write it all down,' Kozyr-Zirka said to Vukovich at the interrogation. 'The game's up. I've nothing to lose now.' Kozyr-Zirka made no bones about telling Vukovich his whole life-story, joking cynically about the many blunders he had made and recalling his crimes with a sneering grin. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, tapping them with his long swarthy fingers and drawing deep, as if he felt every cigarette might be his last. The cardboard holders, scarred with the marks of his sharp teeth, he tossed carelessly into an enamel spitting-bowl.
'What's the point of my hiding anything from you, gentlemen?' Kozyr-Zirka repeated at the interrogations.
'You've got my heart on a plate in front of you. Why should I keep back one rotten little murder or raid I've done. It's all the same to me. You know yourselves I won't be getting any more dollars or pounds. If your frontier guards have shot my chief, that Englishman Sidney Railey, somewhere up near the Finnish frontier, what's the use of my trying to diddle you! The world can come to an end when I'm gone, for all I care. Believe me, I'm confessing to you here, as before God himself on judgement day!'
But Vukovich realized that, although Kozyr-Zirka was confessing to crimes that the OGPU knew nothing about, he was really making a last bid to get his revenge on the Soviets by leaving his friends at liberty.
Vukovich was certain that when Major Florek sent Kozyr-Zirka across the frontier he must have given the bandit at least a few addresses. Without them the bandit would have been quite helpless.
At the interrogation the bandit flatly denied that it was Pecheritsa who had helped him to find his way on to the roof of the shed at headquarters.
'I did it all myself,' Kozyr-Zirka insisted. 'I took a few bricks out of the wall and nosed around a bit to see how things stood in the yard. We're lone wolves of the top class, you know, and we always work alone. That's why our skin is worth more. If everything had come off as I had planned it, I'd be having a good time in Paris by now, and even my dear old Dad wouldn't know where I got all the money from.'
The only offence Pecheritsa had committed against Soviet power, according to Kozyr-Zirka, was that he, had taken pity on a man who was bleeding to death, given him shelter, and called a doctor.
'I had never set eyes on Pecheritsa before,' Kozyr-Zirka insisted. 'If you ask me, he's a completely loyal Soviet citizen. The only thing is he's a bit soft-hearted, I grant you that. I'm very sorry I got him into such a mess.'
According to Nikita Kolomeyets, who told me the whole story, Kozyr-Zirka was very put out when Vukovich called in Polevoi and told the bandit it was our director who had winged him in the attic.
'Well, I'd never have thought it!' the bandit confessed. 'I thought it was a trap you, security men, had laid for me. Shot by a civilian! Why, it's ridiculous! I'll be ashamed till the end of my days!'
'You haven't many more days left!' Polevoi remarked, stung by the bandit's words. 'You're going to answer for your sins!'
Kozyr-Zirka looked savage for a moment, then recovered himself and, smiling, continued to testify in his former cynical manner, as if neither Polevoi nor Kolomeyets were present.
The day after Kozyr-Zirka's arrest someone made an attempt on Doctor Gutentag's life.
Coming home from an evening at the theatre with his daughter, the doctor switched on the light and went to the window to close the shutters. A shot rang out from the bushes in the garden and a bullet, piercing the window-pane about an inch from Gutentag's head, crashed into an antique Chinese vase standing on the shelf behind him.
The assassin got away, but this shot told Vukovich that there must be someone else in town connected with the people who had sent Kozyr-Zirka.
A little later Vukovich learnt from a peasant refugee who had fled from the Western Ukraine that at about that time the chemist Tomash Gutentag had been murdered by unknown bandits in the town of Rovno. The murderers had shot him in his shop and stolen much of the medicine.
On the night of the unsuccessful attempt on Doctor Gutentag's life, frontier guards at a remote post in the village of Medvezhye Ushko, twenty versts from our town, detained a half-witted old beggar, who had tried to slip away to Poland. In the collar of his lice-ridden shirt the guards found a rolled slip of paper containing the following code message,
'Dear Mum,
'The doctor sold the bull to strangers, I'm taking back the deposit. Gogus has moved to another flat, God damn him. Find him yourself and have a business talk with chemist G.
'Your son, ' Yurko.'
Lying in the prison hospital until his wound healed, Kozyr-Zirka knew nothing of the capture of this beggar, who was in reality a messenger for a spy group working on Soviet territory. Kozyr-Zirka was also firmly convinced that Pecheritsa's wife, before putting a bullet through her head, had burnt all secret documents that might incriminate her husband.
Indeed, when the security men seized Kozyr-Zirka, Vukovich, who at once opened the brass door of the stove in Pecheritsa's study, discovered a heap of charred papers smoking in the grate. But before his sudden flight from the town Pecheritsa had apparently forgotten to warn his wife about something that was hidden in the left-hand drawer of their wardrobe. Or perhaps Ksenia Antonovna in her panic had forgotten about the drawer?
At the bottom of the drawer, which was full of clean linen marked with the initials K- P. and Z. P., Vukovich discovered a neatly-folded handkerchief.
It was very well ironed and embroidered at the edges with light-blue thread. Beside it, at the bottom of the drawer lay several other handkerchiefs of the same kind. To Vukovich, however, it seemed that this particular handkerchief was slightly different from the others. The material was the same and the embroidery was the same, but the handkerchief itself seemed a little thicker.
When Vukovich unfolded the handkerchief, he found that it contained a document printed on a fine piece of cambric.
'The bearer of this document, Cossack Lieutenant Zenon Pecheritsa has remained behind during the withdrawal of our troops to Galicia to perform work which is to the advantage of the sovereign and independent Ukraine. We request all military and civil institutions, when our army returns to the greater Ukraine, under no circumstances to accuse Zenon Pecheritsa of Bolshevism.
'Colonel Yevgen Konovalets, 'Commander of the Galician Rifle Corps.'
That was all. No further trace of Pecheritsa remained.
True, thanks to the message taken from the sham beggar, Vukovich was able to guess that Pecheritsa
and the 'Gogus' who had changed his flat were one and the same person. '
My encounter with Pecheritsa in the train might help Vukovich to solve the other riddles.
The records concerning Pecheritsa that remained in the files of the District Education Department showed that he had been born in Kolomya, had served first in the legion of Galician riflemen, then in a detachment of the so-called 'Ukrainian Galician Army.' When a group of officers and men from this army had refused to return to Galicia, which was then under Pilsudski rule, Pecheritsa had remained with them in Proskurov, and then moved to Zhitomir.
The questionnaires, the testimony of his fellow-officers, the good references of organizations in which Pecheritsa had worked before coming to our town all tended to confirm this. But the forgotten fragment of cambric with its printed message and, above all, the personal signature of Yevgen Konovalets in indelible ink made Vukovich think otherwise.
Vukovich was well aware that Colonel Yevgen Konova-lets had been working ever since the First World War for German military intelligence and had been supplied with German marks. When he withdrew his men from the Ukraine, Konovalets had left behind quite a number of secret agents with instructions to conceal their true function by pretending to be revolutionaries and supporters of Soviet power. A few of them had even succeeded in attaining very high positions in the People's Commissariat of Education. Later on, in the thirties, these spies were unmasked:
