Eternal Empire (6 page)

T
he next day, Wolfe and Asthana went to the library. Arriving at the St. Pancras branch near King's Cross, they met the head of modern literary manuscripts, who turned out to be in his thirties and remarkably attractive. “We were quite lucky to get Rogozin's papers,” the librarian said. “Normally, we focus on British authors, but given his longtime residence here, we were glad to make an exception.”

After checking their warrant, which they had obtained, for the sake of expediency, by slipping it into a stack of others for the magistrate to sign, he led them down a marble corridor to the manuscripts reading room. Inside, past the rows of carrels, they continued into the stackroom, where Asthana eyed the tall white bookcases. “What's the usual procedure when an archive comes in?”

“We put the papers in the freezer first, to get rid of bugs,” the librarian said. “Then we start sorting through the material, which can take some time.” He turned into one of the rows. “Here we are.”

Following his gaze, Wolfe saw four long shelves, each containing fifteen flat boxes in stacks of five, the spines labeled with a number and Rogozin's name. “Is there a catalog we can use?”

The librarian smiled apologetically. “I'm afraid that what you see is what we have. It generally takes more than a year to fully conserve and catalog any collection. What are you looking for?”

“We aren't sure.” Wolfe regarded the rows of boxes, sensing with a sinking heart that it would take weeks to go through it all. “What about nonliterary materials? Rolodexes, pictures—”

“You're in luck. One of the first things we do is cull anything unusual. We've found some odd things over the years.” Kneeling, the librarian withdrew a pair of cumbersome cartons from the bottom shelf. He handed them the boxes, which were quite heavy. “Follow me, please.”

He led them from the archives to an unoccupied office at the end of the floor, where he smiled politely and left, closing the door behind him. Wolfe counted down three seconds, knowing that this was all the time Asthana needed to make the inevitable remark: “You know, I think he fancies you.”

Wolfe smiled as she lifted off the top of her carton. The mess inside was exactly what she had feared, a jumble of knickknacks and junk thrown together without any thought for order. The second box was more of the same, but in the end, they had no choice but to dive in. Donning gloves, they began to sort through the cartons, working slowly and methodically, with Wolfe checking anything in English and Asthana focusing on items in Russian.

An hour later, they emerged with a dishearteningly small stack of items, including an old address book and a stack of floppy disks in a format that would require a considerable amount of trouble to read. Wolfe, her back and eyes aching, was about to pack up the rest of the materials when she noticed something lying under a stack of magazines. “What's this?”

Asthana looked over. “Oh, that? I saw it earlier. It didn't seem very useful.”

Wolfe picked it up. On inspection, it turned out to be an ordinary London street atlas. Leafing through it, she observed that it was last year's edition, and at first glance, nothing seemed to have been marked or underlined.

She was on the point of setting it aside when she paused, frowning, and flipped back a page. Looking more closely, she saw that a leaf of the atlas had been torn out of its spiral binding. It was probably nothing, but in the end, she tossed the atlas onto the pile. “Let's go. I'm starving.”

On their way out, in the library's reference section, she asked for a copy of the same edition of the atlas, which she brought to a study carrel in the reading room. The absent leaf in Rogozin's copy turned out to contain maps for Acton and Hammersmith, at a scale of three inches to a mile.

Looking over Wolfe's shoulder, Asthana frowned. “That isn't much to go on.”

“I know.” Wolfe turned to the next page, feeling it between her fingertips. “Thin paper, though. I wonder—”

Switching on the lamp in the carrel, she lifted Rogozin's copy of the atlas and held it at an angle to the light. As she studied the page along one edge, she pulled out her phone and dialed. A second later, it was answered by a man who seemed pleased to hear from her. “Rachel. How are you?”

“I'm good,” Wolfe said, still examining the atlas. “Lester, I need a favor—”

A few hours later, they were on Western Avenue, driving through heavy traffic. They had taken the atlas to the police laboratory at Lambeth, where her friend Lester Lewis, a Home Office pathologist, had expedited their request. Electrostatic detection had found indented writing, evidently in Rogozin's hand, on the page beneath the one that was missing. The faint letters left by the pencil's impression had turned out to be an address in East Acton.

Asthana was clearly less than enthused about the errand. As she sat behind the wheel, she turned, as if to cheer herself up, to a favorite subject. “It's obvious Lewis likes you. You should grab that one while you can—”

Wolfe did her best to deflect the topic. “Lewis and I are good friends. If nothing else, we've been through a lot together.”

“I'll bet you have,” Asthana said, smiling, as they left the main road. “I keep saying you need to bring him to the wedding—”

As she listened, Wolfe realized with a start that Asthana's wedding was less than two weeks away. With so many other things on her mind, she had forgotten all about it, and she didn't want to admit that her bridesmaid's dress was still hanging, unaltered, in the closet of her apartment in Vauxhall.

A moment later, they parked by a strip of vacant land. Opening the glove box, Wolfe took out two flashlights, handing one to Asthana as they emerged from the car into the damp afternoon.

Up the street, a panda car was waiting. As they approached, the door opened and a heavyset constable appeared, his helmet sheathed in a plastic bag. “Afternoon, Officer. It's an honor to meet you.”

Wolfe was never quite sure how to respond to such remarks, which reminded her that there were those who still knew her only as the woman who had taken down Karvonen. “You're sure we can get into the house?”

The constable was already heading around to the trunk of his car. “Yes, with the right tools. Won't be a moment.”

From the trunk, he took a pair of work gloves, a pry bar, and a flashlight of his own. “Used to be a nice neighborhood. Then the road went to three lanes, which ate up the gardens. They were going to do more, but—”

He gave a shrug, his boots squelching in the grass as they crossed the overgrown lot. Wolfe knew the rest of the story. Most of the houses had been bought up years ago with compulsory purchases. By the time the plan to expand the road was discarded, many of the homes had already been demolished, while those that remained had been boarded up and left to decay.

The house whose address had been found in Rogozin's atlas was a forlorn shell with bay windows, its panes now broken or covered in grime, with ivy carpeting the moldering walls. Moving past the weedy garden, they approached the door, which had been boarded up. As the constable set to work with the pry bar, Wolfe noticed that some of the nails in the plywood looked surprisingly new.

Once the boards were gone, the constable switched on his flashlight, pointing it into the house. “I'd watch your step, if I were you—”

They looked through the open doorway, from which there arose a suffocating smell of dampness. Asthana whistled softly. “Bloody incredible. I can't believe this is still standing.”

Wolfe could only agree. Aside from a narrow strip just inside the door, all of the floorboards had been torn up, revealing the thick gray beams underneath. Directing her flashlight toward the gaping hole at her feet, she could see stakes in the basement pointing upward like petrified trees. The ground below was covered in shards of broken porcelain.

“Bailiffs hit this place pretty hard,” the constable explained helpfully. “Smashed it all so the squatters wouldn't take over.”

“So it seems,” Wolfe said. Looking around the ruin of the house, she saw at once that you wouldn't walk along the joists if you could possibly help it. “Give me the gloves. I'm going down.”

With some assistance from the others, Wolfe lowered herself into the basement, her shoes landing with a crunch. Beyond the semicircle of light cast by the open door, it was pitch-black, the air heavy with the smell of wet wood. Beneath the dripping water, she heard a soft scurrying sound.

She paused to tuck her pants into her socks. Then she reached up for the flashlight and pry bar, which the constable handed down, saying uncertainly, “Perhaps I should go instead—”

Wolfe eyed the man's ample frame. “No, I'll need both of you to help me back up. Besides, I've had all my shots.”

Switching on her flashlight, she went into the shadows. With every step, the smell of dampness grew stronger. Countless scraps of wood and flooring material had fallen down to this level as the bailiffs went to work with their hammers and bolsters. Seasoning everything were the small gray clots of mouse turds.

She let her light play across the walls, which were covered in a network of exposed pipes. In one corner stood a sad Hotpoint refrigerator, its closed door coated thickly with dust. A few feet away, lying on the ground, she saw something else. It was a steamer trunk.

Crossing the floor, Wolfe went up to the trunk, which turned out to be the kind covered in canvas, now old and brittle, secured by a brass clasp. When she tried the lid with one gloved hand, she found it wouldn't budge. She called up to the others. “Can you give me more light?”

Asthana and the constable obliged at once. Wolfe set down her own flashlight, then took the pry bar in both hands. Rearing back, she struck it against the lock of the trunk, the metal ringing under the blow, and felt the clasp give slightly. A second blow knocked the lock off altogether. She set the pry bar aside. Then she reached down and lifted up the lid.

Inside was a mouse's nest. Wolfe saw countless pairs of tiny eyes turn in her direction, paws scampering as the rodents fled from the thicket of grass and leaves that had been woven together inside. At the back of the trunk, there was a hole the size of her fist where the mice had gnawed their way in.

Wolfe tried to laugh but couldn't. A second later, she clearly saw the absurdity of what she was doing. Rising, she picked up the pry bar and flashlight. “This is ridiculous. I'm coming up.”

Turning away from the trunk, she began to move gingerly back across the basement floor. As she did, her eye fell on the refrigerator in the corner. It was an ancient model, the kind with a metal door pull, and before she could quite understand what she was doing, she reached for the handle.

The door opened with surprising ease. Looking at what lay within, Wolfe knew at once what had been left here for her to find. But for a long moment, she could only stare silently at the man's body, its withered legs tucked under its chin, that had been awaiting her arrival for so long.

M
addy put her plan into effect the following morning. For two hours, she had been studying the files on her desk, a stack of financial records from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. As the clock on her computer crept toward twelve, however, she found it increasingly hard to concentrate, and her eyes kept straying to the open door of her office and its view of the hallway beyond.

Over the course of many surreptitious observations, she had determined that each of the binders in the file room had a date on its spine. Most binders seemed to cover a single year, while a few years were divided across two or more. Above each date, there was a printed word in Russian. Yesterday, while glancing at these labels on one of her trips along the corridor, she had finally seen the word that Powell had taught her to recognize:
zhurnal
, or
journal
.

The file room itself was frequented primarily by the head of financial operations and his assistant, who shared an office down the hall. The two men ate lunch at their desks and were rarely more than a few feet from the files. To be safe, Maddy knew that she had to wait until both of them were gone.

At shortly before twelve, the moment came. Through her office door, Maddy heard footsteps, followed by voices in Russian. Rising quietly from her desk, she went over to the window, which looked out on the walled garden next to the extension. A minute later, she saw the two men appear outside in their coats, sharing a smoke where the view was most pleasant.

Maddy turned and went back to her desk, on which she had set a black plastic binder identical to the ones in which the financial records were kept. Earlier that morning, she had taken this binder from the archives room where she did most of her authorized work, having already determined that it was the same kind as the ones in the file room next door.

The binder she had selected happened to contain provenance information for works by the artist Nicholas Roerich, a number of whose paintings the foundation had recently acquired. On the spine, in a transparent plastic sleeve, was a descriptive label printed on a square of white cardboard. Keeping an eye on the door, Maddy slipped this label out and set it aside.

From her pocket, she took a second label of the same size, a close copy of the ones used for the cash journals, which she had prepared after discussing her plan with Powell. She slid this label into the sleeve on the binder's spine. Then she picked up the binder and headed for the door.

Outside, the corridor was deserted. Maddy went up the hallway, binder in hand, until she was a few steps away from the file room. Up ahead was a pair of offices occupied by other foundation employees, and beyond that, the reception and security desks, both out of sight from where she stood.

Maddy paused. If she turned left, she would be in the file room; right, and she would enter the archives. It was her last chance to do nothing. She already had the job. If she liked, she could simply stick to the work she had been contracted to perform, and Powell couldn't do anything about it.

For a moment, it seemed like a tempting idea. In the end, however, she turned left instead of right, moving invisibly past the point of no return. Because part of her, she realized, did care after all.

As she had expected, the file room was empty. Without turning on the lights, Maddy went to the shelves, already knowing which binder she needed. Reaching up, she slid it out with her left hand, then, in the same motion, replaced it with the duplicate binder in her right. Then she turned and left the room.

Walking up the hallway at a casual pace, the binder tucked under one arm, she did not think that she had been seen, although her heart was pounding. Back in her office, she shut the door, regretting that there was no lock on the inside. Through the window, she could see the two accountants finishing their smoke.

Maddy opened the binder on her desk. She had been careful to pick a journal from an earlier year, one she didn't think the back office would need that day. Inside was a thick stack of papers organized into sections with dividers and tabs. She began to flip through it, scanning the numbers and unrecognizable words.

At first, not finding what she had been expecting to see, she feared that she had taken the wrong binder. Finally, she saw a page with the layout she had memorized. Ten columns. A date on the far left, followed by a check number, a name, a description in Russian, and a final amount. It was the record of cash disbursements for the entire foundation.

Leaving the binder open, she took out her cell phone. The guard who searched her purse each day wouldn't have allowed her to bring a camera into the building, but fortunately, the camera in her phone worked just fine.

Maddy switched on the camera and held it above the binder. A blurred grid of numbers appeared on the preview screen. She pulled back until it snapped into focus, holding the camera a foot above the desk, and snapped a picture covering slightly more than half the page.

She studied the result. The numbers were small but readable. Going back to camera mode, she took a shot of the second half, then repeated the process on the next page, continuing until she had images of cash disbursements for a total of six months. She had just taken the final picture, and was about to close the journal and slide it into her desk, when there was a knock on her office door.

There was no time to think. Maddy pocketed her phone, then took the stack of files that had been on her desk all morning and dropped it on top of the open binder. Sitting in her chair, she pretended to be looking at something on her computer and called out in a voice that was almost totally calm: “Come in.”

The door opened. It was Elena Usova. “We need to talk. Do you have a minute?”

“Of course,” Maddy said, clicking her mouse as if to shut a nonexistent window. As she turned to face Tarkovsky's assistant, it took all of her willpower to keep from looking down at the files.

Elena took a seat, her eyes straying down idly to the pile of papers on the desk, on which only the documents from Virginia were visible. “Are you finding everything you need?”

“Yes, for the most part,” Maddy said, her voice excessively bright in her ears. “The archives have been very useful.”

Elena picked up the file on top of the stack, a copy of the museum's most recent quarterly statement, and began leafing through it. “What about the overall project? Are you close to making a proposal?”

Maddy nodded, aware that the back of her blouse was sticky with sweat. “I've found what looks like a possible approach for repatriation. I just need a little more time to finalize it.”

“I see. As it happens, this is what I wanted to talk to you about.” Elena tossed the file back on the desk, then turned her cool eyes on Maddy. “We've been forced to move up the timeline. Vasily and I are flying to Washington this week for a series of meetings. He'd like to visit the museum as well. Before he goes, he'll need you to present your recommendation.”

Maddy saw the other woman watching for her reaction. “That's ahead of schedule.”

“I'm aware of that. But it seemed best for Vasily to combine the two visits. I hope it won't be a problem. Of course, if you aren't prepared, I might be able to convince him to postpone—”

Hearing a hint of satisfaction in the assistant's voice, Maddy wondered if conducting both visits on the same trip had been Elena's idea. In the end, she had no choice but to meet the challenge. “You'll have the report tonight.”

Elena rose from the chair. “Very good. In that case, we'll expect you to be packed and ready tomorrow morning. The car will arrive at the usual time to take you to the airport.”

Maddy, who was relieved to see that the assistant was leaving, didn't understand what she meant. “The airport?”

Elena smiled. “Oh, didn't you realize? You'll be coming with us to Virginia.”

The assistant went to the office door, then paused, turning back to Maddy, who was still staring at her from behind the desk. “I'm sorry,” Elena said, one hand on the knob. “Door open or closed?”