The Case of the General's Thumb (11 page)

“Won't someone be about?”

“Not till evening. Just the odd passer-by. So off you go, and ring when you're clear.”

Shortly before eight the phone rang.

“Niklas Zenn?” asked a man's voice.

“Yes.”

“Listen. By 12.00 be at Monschau. Lunch at Masha's in Flusstrasse, proprietor one Pogodinsky, Aleksandr Ivanovich. Treat him like someone who owes you. Establish who he's transferred, or paid interest to, on profits for the past ten years. Play it by ear, your friend drinking and playing up as he likes. Ring you this evening.”

“How do we get to Monschau?”

“You buy a road atlas,” said the man, and rang off.

“Time to get up?” asked Sakhno.

“Not just yet.”

Nik took a shower, then slipped out to buy both road atlas and coffee.

“Where today?” Sakhno asked.

“Lunch in a restaurant.”

“Then?”

“Back here. I'll explain as we go.”

Monschau was a fairy-tale town of brightly-painted gingerbread houses on a tiny river. Shops, restaurants were all cosily miniature. A sign pointed to the Mustard Museum.

“We could leave the car here,” Nik suggested, seeing a car park.

“No, right outside, let's make the man's day.”

The hearse blocked the whole frontage.

“Think it matters, my not wearing a tie?” Sakhno asked, smiling maliciously.

A bell rang as they opened the door. The restaurant was empty.

“More like a snack bar,” Sakhno muttered.

A grey-haired man in dark trousers and white chef's jacket greeted them in German.

“A Russian restaurant and yet they speak German,” Sakhno grumbled.

“No problem,” came the ready response in Russian, “I've not forgotten it.”

“What about the menu?” Sakhno persisted.

“I'll translate. Do sit down.”

“You must be Herr Pogodinsky,” said Nik.

Pogodinsky tensed.

“You know me?”

“Only from friends. They spoke well of your restaurant.”

“We don't often get Russians here,” he said, adjusting the place settings. “I can do you a good pork chop with onions … Or there's calves' liver … Fresh vegetables …”

“Fine,” said Nik. “Two chops, two salads, carafe of vodka.”

“Pickled cucumber?”

“Need you ask?” Sakhno snapped.

Pickled cucumbers and carafe were quickly on the table, and Pogodinsky went to prepare their order.

“All a bit Soviet periodish,” said Sakhno looking after him. “Though then he'd have had a whole host of cooks and waiters …”

“It's not terribly busy.”

“Probably a money laundry.”

Sakhno filled their glasses.

“Let's hope we strike it rich!”

Glass and slice of cucumber halfway to his mouth, he paused for Nik to respond.

The bell rang, and an agitated German appeared in the doorway and proceeded to harangue them.

“What's he on about?” Sakhno asked.

“Can't get by the hearse.”

“Bloody man!”

Sakhno got up, brushed past the German, and the hearse moved out of sight. A coach full of old age pensioners glided past the window, and until the hearse returned, there was a pleasant view across the river to little houses hung with ornate name signs.

“Why make their buses so bloody wide!” demanded Sakhno, returning wrathfully to the table, and downing vodka.

Nik was beginning to have qualms about having to provoke this inoffensive little old man, proud proprietor, chef, waiter all in one. Only this was not the world he'd known as a soldier, but a more complex one where so much, so many people – this simple, genial, little old man included – were not what they seemed. So why worry? Do as they were told, and all would become clear.

The chops, which were enormous, were served with mushroom sauce, a mountain of chips, boiled beetroot and a ball of green spiced yellow rice.

“More vodka?”

Pogodinsky's eyes, as Nik met them, were blue, strong, alive, smiling, thirty years younger than their owner.

“A carafe.”

“We wouldn't be owing money, would we?” Sakhno asked Pogodinsky as he brought the carafe.

He looked from one to the other aghast.

“Who to?”

“Niklas Zenn, say,” said Sakhno.

Pogodinsky nodded, gazed forlornly about him, and retreated to the kitchen.

“Kills me, your politeness,” said Sakhno.

“Drink up, don't worry,” Nik advised soothingly. “We can't all go chucking our weight about.”

“Good health, then!” said Sakhno, downing his vodka and crunching cucumber.

The ensuing silence, calming at first, began to weigh on Nik. Casting around for loudspeakers or tape recorder, and seeing neither, he was about to go in search of Pogodinsky when the latter brought him an envelope.

“Anything else?” the old man asked with a look of great weariness.

“Two coffees and the bill.”

“Well, what's the score?” demanded Sakhno.

The envelope contained a cheque for ninety thousand DM in favour of Niklas Zenn, which, as Pogodinsky brought the coffee, Nik put out of sight.

“And the bill?”

“You're not serious?”

“We are!”

Pogodinsky made the bill out, and Nik paid over the forty-seven DM it amounted to.

Pogodinsky stood holding the money as if at a loss what to do with it.

“May I suggest you don't try cashing it in Monschau,” he said suddenly. “Go somewhere bigger. Düren or Aachen.”

Though not clear why they should, Nik nodded.

Sakhno finished what remained of the vodka, and they left.

The hearse moved slowly away, restoring to view the well-loved beauty and tranquillity for so long part of Pogodinsky's unpretentious but far from simple life.

Pulling off the road, Sakhno leant his head against the door and closed his eyes. Nik got out and strolled amongst the pines until himself overcome with weariness. Climbing into the back of the hearse, he stretched out in the coffin space.

The surrounding pines made early evening seem like night.

Viktor spent most of the next day in his office awaiting events and telephone calls. At least twice, and secretly laughing at himself for so doing, he went and checked the boot of his car. There were no new corpses. Nor did Georgiy phone.

Zanozin looked in several times to report that Grishchenko had neither appeared for duty nor returned home. When, towards evening, Georgiy rang to say that the body in the boot was that of Senior Lieutenant Grishchenko, the news came as no surprise.

“And tomorrow morning why not just pop back to where you dumped him? Look the house over. You never know what you might find.”

“How about who lives there?”

“Lying in the morgue. They opened fire instead of the door. Go early. You won't be challenged.”

Setting off next morning, after once again checking the boot, he was surprised how few people there were about, until he remembered it was Saturday, when normal folk would still be abed. He remembered, too, that he'd not told Ira he was going, but no matter, he would be straight back.

The garage door was half open, as also the wicket beside the main gate of the house. He came first on an empty kennel, then a dead Alsatian, still attached to a running-leash cable.

The solid oak door yielded at a push, and he entered. The silence was unnerving. Where, then, were Georgiy's watchers? The short hall terminated in another open door. He glanced in, then mounted the creaking wooden stairs.

The attic had been converted into a lounge with three settees, a large dining table and wide-screen Sony television and, in the far corner, a desk littered with invoices, letters and copies of the glossy weekly Itogi.

The desk drawer, which he opened with his handkerchief, contained a notebook, a Dictaphone, a couple of cassettes, and a stainless steel box with handles, such as syringes for Granny's injections had been kept and sterilised in, when he was a boy. This one, he saw, lifting the lid, contained a scalpel, three tiny, different-toothed saws, and surgical forceps.

He returned the handkerchief to his pocket – others had been here disturbing prints before him. He would take what seemed of interest.

His phone rang.

“How's it going?”

“It's odd. No security, but any amount of stuff.”

“So?”

“Thought I'd take the best of it back to the office.”

“Four plus out of ten! Four for back to the office, but you get a plus for effort.”

“Office not the right place?”

“No, home, and ring when you get there. Security's present, but you're not seeing it.”

A tiny video camera in a corner of the ceiling! Kilometres away someone was watching, or recording, as with SVI radio traffic!

Sensing suddenly that it was time to leave, he swept everything off the desk into a large carton, throwing in the surgical box and contents of the drawers for good measure, and carried it out to his car.

Taking another look round on the ground floor, he discovered an iron manhole in the kitchen leading to the cellar, but was unable to raise it.

He pulled the wicket gate to behind him, shut the garage doors more securely, and left.

Some five minutes after the red Mazda had returned to the smooth asphalt of the Zhitomir highway, the Miller Ltd minivan drew up outside the house. The driver opened the garage doors and reversed in.

Returning to Euskirchen, thoroughly chilled by their night in the hearse, Nik and Sakhno went straight to bed.

Nik woke at noon. The sun was shining, German birds were singing. He made coffee, made sure that the cheque was still safe in the pocket of his jacket, discarded on the floor, then roused Sakhno.

Sakhno was all for cashing the cheque in Cologne, but Nik insisted on Düren as closer and offering fewer temptations.

Düren was a drab little town. They left the car in a two-storey car park, and soon found a bank.

“Slip me ten marks, and I'll wait in that café,” said Sakhno, “while in you march, singing your head off, as they say in the army.”

Nik handed the cashier the cheque and watched her fingers dart over her computer keyboard. Suddenly they stopped.

“It's dated the year after next,” she said, passing it back over the counter.

“Give me two hundred,” said Sakhno, sitting before a tall glass of beer.

“Haven't got it.”

Nik showed him the cheque.

“Bloody man! We'll have his guts for garters!”

Finding Masha's shut, they found their way to the back. Sakhno hammered hard on the solid door, then forced the catch and entered. Nik, who had been keeping watch by the dustbins, followed.

Sakhno, when he caught up with him, was in the kitchen eating ham from an open fridge.

“Can't have gone for long, leaving all this food. Look upstairs.”

Nik made his way up to a carpeted landing with a watercolour of St Basil's on the wall. Of three doors, the first opened into a small
bedroom: wooden double bed, dressing table, small television, two faded still lifes, metal-framed photograph of a middle-aged woman. Next, a tiny study: desk, two walls of bookshelves, revolving easy chair, single window giving onto the embankment. Then to the sitting room, where he found Pogodinsky, hanging by a strap from a hook which had supported the chandelier, now on the floor beside an overturned chair.

“Come and eat,” said Sakhno, sitting over beer and ham at a corner table in the restaurant, “we can do ourselves well till Pogodinsky comes back.”

“Pogodinsky's still here. Upstairs. Hanged.”

“Sod the bloody fool! Well, dig in all the same!”

Nik ate, contemplating the black, fire-guarded void of the hearth and doing his best not to think.

Bringing beer and a glass, Sakhno poured for them both.

“Any cash about?”

“Haven't looked.”

“I'll have a go. Finish the beer first.”

Sakhno rummaged noisily upstairs, and eventually came down with a bulging carrier bag and a tortoise.

“Found it under his desk … Can't leave it to starve … Seventy marks, that's all the money … No sign of a safe … There's a chequebook so the bank's where the cash is. But let's go. We've sat here long enough.”

It was getting dark as they made their way back to the hearse, Sakhno cradling in his arms the carrier bag which now contained the tortoise.

They left Monschau at about 10.00, and drove for a long while before realizing that they were lost.

“Game for a second bivouac in the forest?” Sakhno asked, and as Nik said nothing, passed him a flat stainless steel flask from the carrier bag.

Whatever it contained was pleasantly bitter to the tongue, aromatic and very strong – like Riga Balsam.

“To hell with the wretched man!” Sakhno said, reaching for the flask. “But at least we shan't freeze!”

The kitchen was becoming increasingly like a night office, but Viktor's sleepless hours there were not especially fruitful. No sooner did the Bronitsky case seem on the point of getting somewhere, than it raised fresh questions and puzzles. And Georgiy the Invisible, while clearly more in the picture than Viktor, appeared in no hurry to share what he knew.

The notebook he'd brought from the house outside Kiev contained as many Moscow telephone numbers as Kiev ones. Its owner – of whom Viktor knew no more than that he was dead – had lived in both capitals and dealt with, amongst others, Ivin and Kozitsky of the Bronitsky circle.

He rang Georgiy.

“Since you ask,” Georgiy said, not, apparently, surprised to be rung at such an hour, “the notebook will have belonged to Vasily Prorokov, also known as ‘Mr Blessed', and now reposing in the morgue. A real crook's crook. Came to these parts from Tula a year ago. With him on the slab are the District Tax Police Chief, Voronezh, his younger brother, and A.N. Other, carrying no papers and so far unidentified. I'll ring you on that one.”