Death Is My Comrade (14 page)

“Did you rest well, Mr. Drum?” he asked. The question was rhetorical. He went right on. “Our office is near the snack bar. Are you hungry?”

“I ate a while ago. Did you say
our
office?”

“I am more or less in charge of security here at Ugolok Ameriki.”

“I thought that was my job.”

“Two in a jeep,” he said, smilingly apologetic. “But of course we will have little to do. My people are orderly, yours are efficient. The security office is air-conditioned. Do you play chess?”

“I play at it.”

So we sat in our air-conditioned office, which had a gray metal desk for Plekhanov and one for me, and whiled away the afternoon. The chess set was a beauty. Plekhanov checkmated me in twelve moves in the first game and fifteen in the second. The third game took him an hour. Maybe he was playing left-handed.

“A sinecure,” he said after that. “How did you ever get the job? May I ask that?”

“I know a guy who knows a guy.”

“I never met a private detective. We don't have them in Russia. Do you really need them in America?”

“We don't have militiamen with unslung machine pistols walking two abreast on every block of Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“Another game?” Plekhanov said, setting up the chessboard for the slaughter.

My mind wandered. He checkmated me three more times. I wondered how Leonid was making out. I thought about Mike Rodin, the scapegoat. I tried to figure out how he intended to get around Vasili Rodzianko's kids. Or Rod-zianko himself, for that matter. Would Rodzianko willingly fly out of Russia with me, knowing his children would suffer the consequences?

“Excuse me, Mr: Drum. I said check.”

I moved my king.

“Checkmate.”

Night came late to Moscow in June, and the stars seemed very close. In their light the pillared facade of the Bolshoi Theater was bone white. Across Teatralny Place and above the lime trees rustling in the night breeze, the. Kremlin tower stars glowed ruby red over their crenelated walls.

Twenty minutes ago, at ten after eleven, Rodin and I had left the Metropole on foot. Gorky Street was thronged with late strollers—women in print dresses, men in open-necked shirts and bell-bottom trousers, Red Army soldiers on leave, armed militiamen prowling in pairs or standing in front of their sidewalk cubicles. In an unfamiliar city at night, and with that kind of crowd, it was impossible to tell if we were being followed. I didn't like that, but there was nothing we could do about it. We'd have to face that problem wherever we went in Moscow, whatever we did.

“We're almost there,” Mike Rodin said. “You think the kid knows what he's doing?”

“We'll find out.”

We turned down Pushkin Street to Pushechnaya. Number Two was a large wooden building, its windows darkened. Right out front stood a militia sentry post, and across the street was a vodka stand with a mob of Muscovites, four deep, clamoring for service.

“There he is,” Mike said.

Leonid Ivanovich Kalmykova set an empty vodka glass on the stand and swaggered across the street in our direction.

“All arranged,” he said. Then he frowned. “Ees sort of all arranged.”

I grasped his arm. “That means what?”

Leonid rolled his eyes, smirking. “The sexy broad, the ballerina, ees mad. Ees no want to coming. I fix.”

“How?”

“Her father in great trouble, I say.”

Mike Rodin asked, almost tenderly: “She loves her father?”

Leonid snorted. “That one loves nobody but Galina Rodziahko. If father in trouble, maybe she in trouble. She come.”

We went up to Number Two Pushechnaya Street. A militiaman with a machine pistol marched toward us. He pretended to look at papers Leonid pretended to show him. He marched on. We went inside.

Up a creaky flight of stairs, Leonid leading, then Mike Rodin, with me trailing. Leonid struck a match which sputtered and showed us a set of double doors with glossy dark-brown veneer. The doors were not locked. Leonid opened them with a flourish. That put us in a large dark cavern of a room with faint light glowing from the half-dozen windows overlooking Pushechnaya Street.

To set up a private meeting in Moscow, I began to realize, was no cinch. Militiamen patrolled the streets, the parks were shut after dark, apartments were generally shared by several families. A public building like the Bolshoi school would be the best bet, if you could get by the militia. A guide like Leonid would be essential, if you didn't mind putting yourself in the hands of a teen-aged kid whose morals would have been bred in the back alleys of a city where political murder was probably more commonplace than necking. I shrugged. Without Leonid we would have got no place at all. But all at once I wished I had a gun. Moscow was that kind of city.

“Ees dance studio,” whispered Leonid as our footsteps echoed in the large room. I tried to make out objects in the room, couldn't. It didn't seem to be furnished.

We reached a door at the far end, where Leonid struck another match. He opened the door, we went into a hall, he shut the door behind us. Pitch darkness on all sides.

Ahead of us light glowed suddenly. Mike Rodin stopped dead in his tracks. The beam of a flashlight impaled us. A voice said something in Russian. Leonid answered. The voice said something else and Leonid answered again, cockily. The light moved, cast its beam on a bare wood wall like the wall of a loft, then on a door ahead of us. There was a pounding sound. The door opened. Beyond it a single bare bulb hung from a chain on the ceiling of a small room. The flashlight went out.

The small place seemed to be a wardrobe room. Costumes, dozens of them, hundreds of them, hung on pipe racks. Leonid and the man who had carried the flashlight parted twin rows of black-and-silver costumes and stepped through the aisle between them. The man was big and not quite fat, but overweight and soft-looking.

“Galina,” he called.

Costumes rustled on their pipe racks. A woman stood there, facing us. She wore a black silk dress with a white collar and a white sash. She was very tall and just missed being angular. Her long hair was brightly blond. It hung straight to her shoulders and framed a pale, high-cheek-boned face with large dark eyes and rather thin lips that could have been cruel or, oddly, sensuous. She had the small high breasts of a ballerina and a ballerina's slender hips and long lovely legs. The over-all effect was exotically and almost startlingly beautiful, like Garbo before she took to self-consciously playing Garbo.

The woman said something. She had a naked throaty purr of a voice. Her lips curled as she spoke. She looked angry and mildly contemptuous, and I realized it was the man with the flashlight she addressed. He answered her in a soft, patient voice. He seemed younger than she was, not over twenty-five. He had a mild round face and Mike Rodin's—or Vasili Rodzianko's—slanting eyes. He seemed afraid of the woman and ready to obey her. Big sister, I thought. Big sister said something else.

Mike Rodin answered her in Russian. That surprised me, until I realized Rodin had been about twenty when he left Russia. He spoke at some length and the woman listened in silence. Then the mild-faced boy, who would be Mikhail Rodzianko—as the woman would be Galina—said something. Smiling, Leonid answered him. The smile turned into one of Leonid's leers. Mikhail's response was an uncertain, tentative smile.

There was nothing uncertain or tentative about Galina's response. She took a lithe step forward and swung her right hand, open, at Leonid's face. When it hit it sounded like a small pistol going off, and Leonid pivoted ninety degrees to his right, stumbled against a pipe rack of costumes and sat down. He looked up at Galina, rubbing the livid imprint of a hand she had left on his cheek.

“Get that kid out into the hall,” Mike Rodin snapped at me. “She isn't happy to see us. If he makes another crack like that, she's liable to call the whole thing off.”

“She's liable to haul down the ceiling and sock him with it. Crack like what?”

“Just get him out of here.”

Leonid stood up and dusted himself off. He backed away from Galina warily. I went out into the hall with him. Mikhail gave me the flashlight. He looked contrite, as if it were he and not his sister who had struck Leonid. He shut the door behind us.

I snapped on the flashlight. Leonid was still rubbing his cheek. “What the hell happened in there?”

“A leetle joke. I tell Mikhail Rodzianko there are fifteen of us at home in three-room flat. I tell him if I live crowded like that I know what to do with sexy seester like Galina. Ees just leetle joke.”

We waited. Leonid told no more jokes.

In fifteen or twenty minutes they came out. Mikhail looked bewildered, Mike Rodin troubled, Galina still mildly contemptuous. Rodin asked Leonid: “You have transportation ready?”

“Cousin Sergei around corner downstairs with truck.”

Mike Rodin scowled at me. “I told them who I was. They thought I was crazy at first. Uncle Mikhail Rodzianko had died before they were born. But then I told them things about their father a stranger couldn't possibly know. The boy's about ready to believe me. The girl is leery. They agreed to let me see Vasili. We're going to Zagorsk.”

“You tell them what we have in mind?”

“I couldn't.” Mike Rodin shook his head. “I will, after I see Vasili.”

“Excuse me,” Galina said in her throaty voice. “What is it you have in mind that you neglected to tell us?” Her English was better than Leonid's, as good as Comrade Plekhanov's.

“You didn't tell me you could speak English,” Rodin gasped.

“You didn't ask me.” Galina repeated coldly: “What is it you have in mind?” and added sarcastically, “uncle.”

“Later,” Mike Rodin said. “When I see your father.”

Galina walked lithely toward the studio door. Leonid sprang out of her way. We all went through after her. I took the lead across the studio with Mikhail's flashlight. But then for some reason it turned into a walking race between me and Galina. She overtook me. We strode toward the door together. I stepped out, reached it a half stride ahead of Galina.

It opened before I touched the knob.

Lights went on in the. studio. Beyond the door stood two militiamen, machine pistols held diagonally across their black tunics.

“Stoy!”
one of them shouted.
“Nazahd.”
He gestured with the machine pistol.

Galina laughed throatily.

“They want us to get back into the room,” Mike Rodin said.

“Skaray!”
the militiaman barked.

Galina said coldly: “The jackal told us our father was in trouble. But if that were true, we have ways of knowing.” She cocked an eyebrow in Mike Rodin's direction. “Who is in trouble now?”

The more aggressive of the two militiamen, the one who had done the talking, took one step across the studio threshold. He was short and stockily built, with powerful shoulders. We hadn't done anything particularly heinous yet, even by Soviet standards, but if the cops interrogated us the first thing they'd want to know would be the reason for the clandestine meeting. The second thing they would want to know would be Mike Rodin's real identity. He was in Moscow under the name of Williams; his real name in the States was Rodin; he claimed to be Vasili Rodzianko's brother. Galina would tell them that, probably cheerfully. And if she did, as Vasili Rodzianko's rescuers we were dead.

“Rookiv vayrh!”
the first militiaman shouted.

Obeying the order, Mike Rodin and Mikhail raised their hands. I brought mine up too, Mikhail's flashlight in my right hand. I slammed it against the militiaman's bull neck, at the same time grabbing the barrel of the machine pistol. He fired a burst at the ceiling, and then I drove the butt of the heavy weapon into his gut. He thudded to his knees. I wrenched the machine pistol from his hands. The volley he had fired echoed in the studio. They could have heard it all the way to Nishgi Novgorod.

The second one raised his own weapon. I slashed the barrel of the one I held across his face. At first I thought I had missed. I felt nothing. Then a red line appeared like magic from alongside his ear to the point of his jaw, and blood welled from it. He fired wildly over my shoulder. I smashed the butt of my machine pistol against his hands. He dropped his weapon and howled. Then he stumbled back three steps and swung his arms frantically for balance as he reached the top of the stairs.

He went crashing and thumping down them like a dropped steamer trunk.

All that took maybe five seconds. The first militiaman was crouched over, like a Moslem praying. Leonid looked at him, his eyes big.

“My God,” Mike Rodin said. “What do we do now?”

“Zagorsk,” I said. “Get a move on. Place will be crawling with cops.”

Leonid took Mikhail's arm. The big, soft boy moved jerkily past the fallen militiaman, not looking at him. Galina called something in Russian. Mikhail turned around to show her his empty hands.

Mike Rodin told me: “She said she's not going anyplace with us.”

“She's got to. Now.”

Galina backed away from us. Mikhail was still waiting. I tossed the machine pistol at Mike Rodin. He almost dropped it. Galina tried to claw my face as I reached her. I caught her hands, jackknifed a shoulder into her stomach and hefted her in a fireman's carry. Her hands drummed at my back, her feet at my midsection. I took her shoes off and tossed them on the floor.

Carrying her like that, I went out after Mike Rodin, who was following Leonid and Mikhail downstairs.

We hit the street ten seconds later. The militiaman who'd fallen down the stairs was gone. He'd run for help. I heard the shrill bleat of a whistle. Galina hung limply over my shoulder. She'd stopped struggling. Across the street a trio of drunks at the vodka stand saw us and laughed. One of them staggered toward us and shouted something. The others held him back.