Red Templar (10 page)

16

After ten minutes in the outfall vent, Holliday and the others reached a side passage. From the smell of it the narrower, brick-lined tunnel led to the sewers. Holliday stopped, turned and listened. So far there were no sounds of pursuit, but he knew it wouldn’t last. It was more than likely that the OMON squad would have at least one or two Spetsnaz special forces types on board, and those guys were relentless. They’d eventually spot the broken hasp on the vent in the boiler room and they’d come after them like baying hounds after a fox.

There was a rusted grille over the tunnel just like the one at the outfall opening, but Holliday used the monkey wrench and levered it off, tearing the old hasp off completely. It didn’t matter; if the OMON squad got this far, trying to fake them out was a waste of time.

“This way,” said Holliday.

“It smells of . . . excrement,” said Genrikhovich, balking and wrinkling his nose. Holliday was suddenly very tired of the Russian. He sighed.

“The outfall almost certainly empties into the river, and they’ll be waiting for you. Personally I couldn’t care less whether you come with us or not. It’s up to you: knee-deep in shit or a bullet in the brain.”

Eddie handed Holliday the battery-powered lamp and the two men climbed up into the sewer tunnel. For a few seconds there was silence from behind them, but alone in the dark, reality set in, and Genrikhovich came after them. The deeper they went into the tunnel, the worse the smell became until it was almost overwhelming.

“¡Querido Dios!”
said Eddie, gagging.
“¡Mierda Ruso huele mucho peor que la Cubana, creo que!”

Holliday didn’t need a translation. “No kidding,” he said with a grunt. They pressed on, the walls and arched ceiling of the tunnel growing damp and mildewed as they continued deeper down the passageway. The bricks of the floor were crumbling with dampness, and every now and again there was a flash of dark shadow that skittered away, chittering sounds of irritation fleeing from the bright beam of light cast by the searching beam of the lamp.

“Ratas,”
grumbled Eddie.
“Odio las ratas de mierda.”

“We know,” said Holliday. Ten minutes after entering the side tunnel they reached what appeared to be a main channel. There was a raised concrete step on either side of a broad, sluggishly flowing stream of brown muck, the thick stew of effluent scattered with floating islands of things more solid that defied description.

The concrete construction was old and crumbling, patched here and there with varying grades of cement. The raised sides of the trough were about three feet above the lavalike flow of the waste, which was flowing right to left. The sides were about two and a half feet wide, covered in sludge and treacherous-looking, the danger made worse by the fact that the walls curved upward, forcing anyone foolish enough to be here in the first place to walk in a half crouch.

Genrikhovich stared, horrified.
“Reka diaryei,”
he said.

“Reki Rossii diaryei,”
corrected Eddie.
A river of Russian diarrhea.

Holliday grimaced at the revolting image and swallowed hard. “I’m lost,” he said. “Which way do we go, left or right?”

Eddie spoke up immediately. “The flow of the
mierda
is from west to east, if that is any help. Perhaps
un poco más al nordeste
as well.”

“You’re sure?” Holliday asked.

“Yes.” Eddie nodded firmly. “I have a thing . . .
una brújula
, in my head,” explained the Cuban. Holliday frowned. Eddie turned to Genrikhovich.
“Kompas?”
he asked in Russian.

“A compass?” Holliday said.

“
Sí, compañero
, a compass. It never fails me.”

“If this is true we should go east,” Genrikhovich suggested. “West is the Neva. East is the center of the city. Perhaps we could find a way to the metro.”

“All right.” Holliday nodded. “Stay close and watch your step.” He ducked down and headed upstream along the slime-covered bank of the swirling river of sludge.

Within minutes of entering the sewer tunnel all three men were filthy as they were forced to reach out and steady themselves against the walls, their clothing scraping the slime-covered bricks and their shoes caking with ancient excrement. As they continued down the passage, each at various times would slip and tumble into the stream of sewage. Finally, covered in filth, they gave up all attempts to keep themselves even partially free of the stinking, oozing effluent and walked along knee-deep in the stream, the footing more solid under them and with far more clearance for their heads. More than once Holliday had felt some strange sort of abnormal movement within the flow they pushed against, and he could have sworn something unthinkable had brushed against his sodden pants legs. Something swimming.

After what seemed to be an eternity they reached some sort of two-story hub with sewers on the upper levels sending putrid waterfalls of effluent slopping down into a large pool, the pool itself having several even larger outlets.

Holliday shook his head in amazement and disgust. Catwalks encrusted with filth and mold stretched over the pool—obviously people were actually meant to come to this horrible cathedral, complete with a cathedral organ of accreted matter that ran down the curved brick wall in pipelike stalactites.

On the far side of the pool, reached by one of the catwalks, they found a small concrete chamber that was probably used as a rest stop by sewer workers. Eddie found it excruciatingly funny that the room came with its own toilet cubicle, and for a time he couldn’t stop laughing and muttering under his breath in Spanish. There was also a set of lockers in the room, which held complete sets of protective clothing, along with hard hats, oxygen tanks and masks.

“We change,” said Holliday. “We can’t go back to the real world covered in crap. At least these will make us look official.”

“We are above the metro station at Pushkinskaya,” said Genrikhovich.

“How do you know that?” Holliday asked.

Genrikhovich pointed to a metal sign half-obscured with old sludge:

“We’re
above
the station?”

“St. Petersburg metro lines had to be dug very deep to reach bedrock. The whole city is built on the Neva and the Fontanka estuaries.”

“And if we go up?”

“It is the Vitebsky railway station.”

“Where do trains go from there?”

“Mostly to Western Europe. Also to Kaliningrad and Smolensk, if I remember correctly.”

Eddie shook his head. “They will have eyes at the train stations, even if they are only electronic.”

“How far are we from the Hermitage?”

“A mile. Perhaps a little more than that.”

Eddie frowned. “It is not far enough,
mis compadres
. They will have a security cordon at least that far out by now.”

Genrikhovich spoke up. “My sister Marina and I have a dacha in Novoye Devyatkino. It is the last stop on the number one metro line.”

“I very much doubt your sister would appreciate a couple of fugitives as houseguests,” said Holliday.

“Marina is rarely there. She works at the United Nations in New York. I am there more than she is.”

“We need to get as far as we can,
mi coronel
.” Eddie shrugged. “I would like to have a wash of my body, too, I think.”

“All right.” Holliday nodded. “The end of the line it is.”

17

Marina and Victor Genrikhovich’s dacha, or summer place, in Novoye Devyatkino looked like Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread house in the middle of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini-Green public housing development. Once upon a time, Novoye Devyatkino had been pleasant countryside with scattered farms and the summer homes of the wealthy, set on the banks of streams and rivers, or the shores of the several lakes dotting the area.

Large woodlots of ash and alder, birch and pine covered the landscape, interspersed with rolling hills and meadows bright with wildflowers. In the fifties, following Stalin’s brutal purges, Leningrad had seen something of a ghastly architectural renaissance, and a new kind of forest had grown in Novoye Devyatkino, a forest of blank-faced concrete apartment buildings that looked more like gray high-rise gulags than places for families to live.

The quality of workmanship had been uniformly terrible, the landscaping and services nonexistent, and the day-to-day existence of people forced to live there simply to justify the terminus of the metro main line had been bleak. By the seventies the whole area was a semislum; by the fall of the Soviet Union it had become dangerous.

With the disappearance of Communism, Novoye Devyatkino went through yet another transformation. The old high-rises were knocked down—at least most of them—and new apartment buildings were erected, these with elevators that actually worked, enough square footage to be livable, and enough schools, shopping, restaurants and recreational services to make the revived suburb an attractive, modern alternative to St. Petersburg’s enormous nineteenth-century apartment blocks, with their clanking plumbing, leaking faucets and drafty windows, not to mention their exorbitant rents.

Through it all a few of the original family cottages had remained. The Genrikhovich dacha was a two-bedroom two-story with a board-and-batten second floor with brick facing and fieldstone below. The little house had a steeply sloping roof covered in split cedar shingles and trimmed in rustic gingerbread. There was a makeshift carport tacked onto one side with an old UAZ Buhanka
parked beneath it. The Buhanka, or “loaf” in Russian, was a knockoff of the old VW bus. This one was covered in patches of primer paint and looked almost as old as Genrikhovich.

The big living room had a large stone fireplace with a dining room and country kitchen in the rear. There was a floor-to-ceiling brick-and-board bookcase in the living room crammed with what turned out to be English-language crime novels going back to the nineteenth century.

Marina had squeezed in a powder room where there had once been a pantry, and large windows in the dining room had been replaced with French doors leading out to a small deck. There were two bedrooms and a full bathroom separating them on the second floor.

The furniture was old and mostly Victorian, with braided rag rugs and a few willow-twig armchairs that looked extremely uncomfortable and had probably come with the house.

“It was part of my great-grandmother’s dowry when she married my great-grandfather,” said Genrikhovich. “She was the daughter of an admiral and he was a professor at the old Naval Guards Academy. He taught celestial navigation and mathematics. They kept him on after the revolution because, as he put it, ‘Even Stalin could not alter the course of the stars.’ He was good at his job, so they let him keep the dacha; it has remained in our family ever since.”

It had taken them almost an hour to descend through a series of tunnels and manholes to the Pushkinskaya metro station. They’d come up on the track bed in their rubberized protective suits, suddenly finding themselves in the ornate, arched, pale marble station. Genrikhovich led them onto a Number One line train, and by the time they reached the end of the line at Novoye Devyatkino they had the entire car to themselves, the stench emanating from the suits having driven everyone else away.

Marina Genrikhovich’s dacha was on a narrow lane well away from the nearest apartment block and was completely private. While Genrikhovich ran himself a bath, Holliday and Eddie took a bar of soap down to the fast-running creek at the end of the property, stripped off the suits and took the plunge. The water was freezing but neither man cared. They were more than willing to endure the cold just to get the smell of the sewers off.

“Your sister must be a large woman,
amigo
,” said Eddie, slipping into a red dragon-motif silk bathrobe that came only to his knees. Genrikhovich had built a blazing fire, and Eddie sat on a velvet footstool, warming up.

“Yes. Even as children I was the one who ate no fat and Marina at no lean. She has a freezer in the kitchen with enough food to last through the next ice age.”

“Good,” said Eddie. “I could, how you say it, eat a horse.”

“I think she has some
sudzhuk
sausage, if you’d like some.”

“What is this
sudzhuk
?” Eddie asked.

“Horse meat. It is a delicacy in the Ukraine.” Genrikhovich shrugged. “You said you could eat one.”

“Jesucristo, los rusos están locos,”
said the Cuban in his dragon robe. “
No, muchas gracias, mi amigo. Tal vez la próxima vez
. Maybe next time.”

Holliday had fared a little better in the clothing department and had managed to squeeze himself into a spare pair of Genrikhovich’s trousers and an old sweater that fit him like a sausage skin.

“The first order of business is getting some clothes. Eddie doesn’t have anything fit to wear, and I wouldn’t want to go too far dressed like this.”

“No problem,” said Genrikhovich. “I will drive Uncle Joe to the
univermag
and get what you need, and then I will make us something to eat. You have money?”

“Sure, I’ve got money,” said Holliday. “But what’s a
univermag
and who is Uncle Joe?”

“A
univermag
is a . . .” Genrikhovich turned to Eddie.

“A
univermag
is a . . .
¿cómo usted lo dice, almacenes grandes?
” The Cuban snapped his fingers. “A
departamento
store, a mall.”

“And Uncle Joe?”

“Dyadya Dzho, Kreml’ Highlander,”
Genrikhovich tried to explain.

“Stalin,” Eddie translated dryly.

“The minibus outside—it is the name Marina and I gave to it.”

“That thing actually runs?” Holliday asked, astounded.

“Certainly,” said Genrikhovich. “It is a classic.”

*  *  *

True to his word, the Russian drove off in the rumbling, popping Uncle Joe and reappeared after what seemed to be a very long time, beaming and carrying a number of shopping bags. He’d purchased three complete sets of clothing, including a blue-and-white satin Dynamo Moscow bomber jacket for Eddie and a military-style
ushanka
fur hat with an old hammer-and-sickle emblem on the front for Holliday.

As dusk fell and the evening air cooled, Holliday and Eddie dressed themselves in their new outfits and sat down to a remarkably tasty meal prepared by Genrikhovich—broiled steak with onions, mushrooms and fresh tomato slices from the little vegetable garden beside the cottage. With dinner finished and coffee in hand, they gathered around the fire in the living room once more. Genrikhovich had even managed to get Eddie a box of Partagás Habaneros cigars at the
univermag,
one of which the Cuban was happily enjoying.

“Much better,” said Holliday. “You have skills as a cook, Dr. Genrikhovich.”

“Please,” said the Russian, “you must call me Victor.”

“All right, Victor,” said Holliday. “The meal was great, but we still have a real problem.”

“Which is?”

“If the FSB knows who you are they’ll eventually find this place. We can’t stay long, and the phony IDs we picked up in Odessa are useless now.”

“The dacha is still under my great-grandmother’s family name—Kornilov—but you are right; they will find it eventually. As to the matter of our papers, I have been giving this a great deal of thought and I believe I have discovered an answer.”

“Do tell,” said Holliday.

“It is in these books.” Genrikhovich smiled, waving a hand toward the rickety brick-and-board bookcase.

“Which books?” Holliday asked.

“A number of them,” answered Genrikhovich. “From Baroness Orczy’s
The Scarlet Pimpernel
and Mark Twain’s
The Prince and the Pauper
to Wilkie Collins’s
Armadale
and even Ian Fleming’s
Moonraker
.”

“I’m not seeing it,” said Holliday, shaking his head and wondering what the old man was so excited about.

“
The Talented Mr. Ripley?
The False Inspector Dew?
”

“Nope,” said Holliday. Eddie puffed on his cigar, the titles going right over his head.

“The Day of the Jackal?”
Genrikhovich said, exasperated.

Finally Holliday got it. Each of the books the Russian had mentioned involved someone taking on somebody else’s name.

“Identity theft,” he said.

“Yes.” Genrikhovich nodded. “In particular, a technique called ‘ghosting,’ taking the identities of the newly dead.”

The Russian reached into the inside pocket of his frayed suit jacket and brought out a slip of paper. He handed it to Holliday. It appeared to be a list of addresses.

“What’s this?” asked Holliday.

“When I went to the
univermag
I was thinking about this problem, so I stopped at FloraQueen, a florist store, yes? They send flowers.”

“We’ve got the same thing in the States.” Holliday smiled.

“Yes, well, it seems that tomorrow there are to be six funerals of people from Novoye Devyatkino, three Orthodox, two nondenominational and one Jewish. The Jewish cemetery is in Obukhovo in the far southern part of the city. The Orthodox cemeteries are at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Ligovka-Yamskaya in the east, and the two nondenominational funerals are being held at the Novodevichy Cemetery near the Moscow Triumphal Gate.

“All of the cemeteries are at least an hour away by metro from Novoye Devyatkino. Three of the interments are scheduled to take place at eleven in the morning, two will take place at one in the afternoon, and one will take place at two. During those periods the apartments of the deceased will presumably be vacant.” The Russian grinned ghoulishly. “I have known very few corpses who took their passports, identification and wallets with them to the grave.” There was a long silence.

“¡Es brillante!”
Eddie whispered finally, eyes wide.

Genrikhovich beamed. He looked at Holliday. “What do you think?”

“Victor,” said Holliday, “I think we may have seriously underestimated your potential. You have a truly criminal mind.”