The Best of British Crime omnibus (18 page)

His face was about as grim as I'd seen it, and he didn't look as though he were open to argument. ‘They're simply trying to scare the pants off me,' he said, ‘and it's not going to work.'

‘What about Tanya?'

He fell silent. With a hostage in the hands of the police, we were really quite powerless. They'd got us where they wanted us, because they were callous and we weren't. It was a filthy sort of pressure.

‘I think we'd better admit defeat,' I said. ‘You're leaving in a day or two – and the sooner the better. Once you've gone, they'll have no reason to turn the heat on Tanya. You'll be helping yourself and her too.'

‘It means playing their game,' he said savagely. ‘It means they get away with blackmail and everything else. I feel more like handing my exit permit back and sticking around.'

‘Don't be a fool – it's not worth it. They've got all the cards – every single one.'

He gave a violent kick at a piece of frozen snow and plodded on morosely for a while.

‘I guess you're right, George,' he said at last, ‘but by God it hurts. I never thought I'd take a licking from these people.'

‘For that matter,' I said, ‘we were pretty well licked before we saw Ganilov. We've practically reached a dead end. We know how Mullett was killed but we don't know who did it and I don't see how we can hope to find out.'

‘There's that Russian address you've got – you might as well go along there before we call it a day. There's no risk – no one will know you've been if you're careful.'

I said: ‘Perhaps I'll do that.' I glanced quickly around. ‘Are you game for a walk?'

He looked surprised. ‘You don't mean you're going right now?'

‘No – I just want to try a little experiment.'

‘Okay – I'm with you.'

We set off briskly towards the ‘A' circular road. The pale yellow sun was sinking in a clear, frosty sky, and we had to move fast to keep warm. A thermometer on the corner of a building showed minus eighteen Centigrade.

I said: ‘I once cut my face on my pocket handkerchief.'

Jeff grinned. ‘I'll buy it.'

‘It was in Stalingrad, about this time of year. It was so cold the tears ran from my eyes and I dabbed them with my handkerchief. It froze in my pocket. Next time I used it I gouged my face with it. It was thirty-eight below.'

He looked at me suspiciously. ‘Isn't that what you guys call “shooting a line?”

‘I was only trying to keep you interested.'

‘Ah, shucks! Where are we going?'

‘Any quiet spot.'

We stepped smartly up to the Tverskaya, weaving in and out of the home-going crowds. After we'd crossed the circular road they began to thin out a bit and presently I grabbed Jeff's elbow and steered him into a side road. There was no one in sight but a girl walking away from us about a hundred yards ahead.

‘Right,' I said, ‘this'll do.' I stopped and pulled out a cigarette. ‘Give me a light, will you, and keep your eyes skinned.'

He perked up, and snapped on his lighter. He'd cottoned on now. He was just lighting his own cigarette when two men turned the corner and walked past us, paying no attention. They were like a million other Russians – sturdily built, short necked, and broad in the face. One wore a cloth coat with a fur collar and a brown fur hat, and the other a short padded jacket and astrakhan hat. Both carried briefcases. They could have been any two Russian functionaries going about their business, and perhaps they were. In this quiet district, we should soon know.

We waited a moment to make sure that no one else appeared, and then turned in our tracks and set off quickly down the Tverskaya the way we had come. Being ‘tailed' was a new experience for me – the four-letter boys had never bothered with correspondents in the ordinary way. It was the diplomats who always had someone at their heels, ostensibly for their own protection, and I remembered one of them describing to me during the war the various techniques he'd perfected for throwing off pursuit. His favourite method, I recalled, was to hire a rowing boat on the Moskva River and row upstream for five miles at full speed. He was, of course, an Englishman! Some of the things he'd told me might come in handy now.

After we'd walked about fifty yards we stopped in the dusk to study a copy of
Pravda
that was being displayed in a big glass-covered frame for the benefit of those citizens who couldn't get a copy of their own and liked to keep
au fait
with the timber-gathering and house-renovating campaigns. Peering round the edge of the frame, I saw our two men reappear and stand hesitating on the corner. As soon as they spotted us, they turned in our direction.

That was all I wanted to know, and we walked back to the hotel without bothering any more about them. Jeff had become rather thoughtful – I think he was convinced at last that Ganilov had not been bluffing. He was even more thoughtful when he returned that evening from a talk with a man named Dowson, a career diplomat at his Embassy who had had a lot of experience of the Iron Curtain countries. Dowson had reeled off a hair-raising list of recent cases where Westerners had been jailed east of the Curtain on fabricated charges. Some of them had been pretty tragic, and in most of them a woman had been concerned. His advice had been emphatic – to get out on the first plane.

There was nothing more I could do that day, for I didn't want to go searching for my Russian address in the dark. The best time, I thought, would be the afternoon of the next day and I made my plans accordingly.

Mullett's funeral took place on the following morning and of course all the delegates went, so the hotel was pretty quiet. I wrote a few innocuous letters and typed out some notes, and just before lunch I went down to borrow a plan of Moscow which I'd seen in Pott's room. The address on my envelope – printed rather laboriously in block characters, as though it had been copied from a letter by someone unfamiliar with the language – was Pushkinskaya 137, and the name of the addressee was A.A. Liefschitz. I located the street on the plan and mentally organised the journey. Just after three in the afternoon, when the homeward rush of workers was beginning to get under way, I left the hotel on foot. The same two M.V.D men I'd seen the day before were hanging about in the vestibule, and there was an M.V.D car near the entrance with two more men in it.

I walked slowly to the Metro station in Teatralni Square and took a ticket for Arbat. The man in the brown fur collar was a few yards behind me. He didn't bother to take a ticket – just murmured something and passed through. He knew that I knew who he was and he obviously didn't mind. I gave him a broad wink and stepped on to the crowded escalator. A few moments later we were both swept on to the platform by a surging tide of humanity.

Fur Collar was beginning to look a bit worried, and with reason, for there is no more congested place on earth than the Moscow Metro and the behaviour of the public is not such as to assist a sleuth. A train comes in, packed to the doors, and stops at a crowded platform. The automatic doors slide open. Those inside fling themselves out. Those outside fling themselves in. There is a frightful
mêlée
for perhaps half a minute, and then the doors remorselessly close. Fifty per cent of those who want to alight are carried on; fifty per cent of those who want to get on are left behind. This keeps the trains up to schedule and the service working efficiently.

As my train came in I pushed and elbowed forward with the rest, cursing and being cursed in accordance with the custom of the country. When I had forced my way sufficiently deeply into the coach to be safe from ejectment, I looked around for Fur Collar and saw that he also had made a lodgement. I moved the sharp end of a hoe from between my shoulder blades, leaned heavily on a sack of potatoes which later turned out to be a small peasant woman, and relaxed.

Successive assaults on the train at intermediate stations left the distance between myself and Fur Collar substantially un-changed. As we approached Arbat, I began to work my way slowly towards the doors by the simple and traditional expedient of exchanging places with anyone in front of me who wasn't proposing to get out. I saw that Fur Collar was bracing himself for a renewal of the chase.

‘Are you getting out, comrade?' I asked a burly worker who was already very near the doors.
‘Da!'
he said. I smiled at Fur Collar and the train slid to a halt.

The platform at Arbat was jammed solid. As the doors opened, everyone went into action at once. The burly worker was shoving nobly just in front of me and I wedged my twelve stone against him and shoved too. Fur Collar was having his own troubles and for the moment his attention was diverted. It was touch-and-go whether we get out or not. As the doors began to close amid howls of protest from all, I suddenly turned and tried to push my way in again. Somewhere down the train a woman screamed, ‘I've lost my galosh!' but you can't have war without casualties and no one took any notice. With a final thrust I just managed to squeeze between the doors before they made contact. I caught Fur Collar's eye as we moved off, and it was plaintive. He was being carried implacably away towards the escalator.

The woman who had lost her galosh screamed all the way to the next station without a break – she couldn't have made more noise if she'd lost her leg. I travelled on for two more stations after that, and then fought my way out and changed into a train going in the opposite direction. A quarter of an hour later I emerged from the Metro near the Central Market, and set out briskly for Pushkinskaya.

Having thrown off my pursuer I assumed that my difficulties were pretty well over, but I was wrong. I found Pushkinskaya quite easily, but I couldn't find Liefschitz's residence. It simply wasn't there. Number 135 Pushkinskaya was an apartment house, number 139 was an apartment house, but number 137 turned out to be a squat, new-looking building of two storeys which, from its lack of chimneys and its blank walls, I judged to be some kind of warehouse. Its heavy doors were locked and there was no one about.

I thought perhaps I had made a mistake, and checked with the address on the envelope. On closer scrutiny, and with the help of a little imagination, it seemed just possible that the figure ‘7' which had no stroke through it, might have been intended for a 1.' I walked back to number 131 and tackled a woman who was just coming out. No, she said, she didn't know of a Liefschitz there. I showed her the envelope, and explained my difficulty about number 137.

‘Oy yoy,'
she said, looking at me as though she thought me rather simple, ‘you won't find that. Number 137 was bombed during the war. There haven't been any apartments there for nine years.' And she went on her way.

I felt baffled, and more than a little aggrieved. Probably not more than a couple of dozen buildings in the whole of Moscow had been seriously damaged by bombs, and mine had to be one of them. Liefschitz's correspondent was evidently as out-of-date as I was.

Well, there was nothing for it now but to apply the old reporter's technique. There was a newspaper kiosk fifty yards along the road and I strolled along there and browsed for a minute or two and finally bought a paperbacked edition of Stalin's
Problems of Leninism
for twenty-five copeks. ‘I've had a journey for nothing,' I grumbled to the vendor while I waited for my change. ‘I hoped to visit someone at number 137, but I'm told the place was bombed.'

‘Ah, yes, citizen,' he said with a shake of his head. He was an oldish man, with white hair and a pointed beard. ‘You're behind the times. A stranger in Moscow, I dare say?'

‘Yes, I'm from the Ukraine. I had a relative, a cousin, who used to live at number 137. Name of Liefschitz. It's very disappointing.'

The man nodded understandingly. People in Russia were always trying to trace missing relatives. ‘The Bureau might be able to help you,' he said, without much confidence.

The Bureau was a tracing agency for people who had been lost sight of during the war, and it was about the last place I wanted to visit. I said, ‘Thanks, comrade,' and was just turning away when he called after me. ‘I've just remembered – they moved some of the families from 137 into that big red building across the way – number 128. Those that weren't killed. You might learn something there.'

I thanked him again, less perfunctorily, and crossed the road to 128. It was a very tall, very narrow-chested apartment house of the cheapest brick, with a rusty fire escape zigzagging down one side and ferro-concrete balconies that had never been properly finished off – a typical example, I reflected, of ‘Five-Year-Plan-in-Four-Years' architecture. It looked as though it might have been flung up in about a fortnight. However, by Moscow standards it was a desirable residence, and if Mr Liefschitz had been squeezed in there he could count himself lucky.

I climbed the crumbling front steps, pushed open the paintless door, and stepped into a dark hallway. There was a strong smell of cabbage and
makhorka,
but no sign of life. I peered up the well of the stone staircase. No doubt most of the residents had just got home from work and were busy indoors preparing their afternoon meal. I estimated that there were about twenty flats in the building, and was just thinking of starting a door-to-door inquiry when I heard someone coughing a few yards along the hallway. I investigated. In a poky little room hardly bigger than a cupboard I found an old crone with a shawl over her head, warming herself at an iron stove and nibbling a hunk of black bread. This, presumably, was the janitor.

She gave me an indifferent glance.
‘Da?'
she said.

‘I'm looking for a Citizen Liefschitz, who used to live at 137. Does there happen to be anyone of that name here?'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘but he's just gone out.'