The Case of the General's Thumb (19 page)

He thought of Tanya, provincial and mildly foreign in her fluffy head scarf. Odd how concerned she had been about the container, and how little about her husband.

Getting out the Bronitsky file, he looked again at Wojciech's photos. Tsensky's gentle intelligence was in marked contrast to the sharp intensity of Sakhno's. They were like extremes, juxtaposed for contrast: Tsensky involved out of desperation, Sakhno for the sake of money. And where was he, this Tsensky? Still in Germany?

The Paris to which Nik came by train was awakening to grey morning: newspaper sellers setting up kiosks, joggers jogging, water carts spraying, shop shutters opening with the swish of katyusha rockets. But there was a café, and amazingly at such an hour, someone sitting reading a paper.

Nik ordered coffee.

“Counter or table?”

“Meaning?”

The patron pointed to a slate inscribed “4 francs counter, 8 francs table, 10 francs terrace”.

Nik opted for a table.

Lowering his paper, his fellow customer wished him bonjour, before raising it to reveal the headline F
RENCH
B
ANKER
M
URDERED IN
M
OSCOW
.

Old habits died hard.

By 10.00 he'd found a cupboard-sized room-with-breakfast in a cheap hotel in the rue de Cléry, and taking one of the street maps provided free, walked, stopping off at two cafés en route, via the boulevards St Denis and de Magenta to the Gare de l'Est, where Tourist Information gave him the address and telephone number of Aeroflot.

Seeing Izvestiya and Kiev Gazette on sale at a kiosk, he bought a copy of the latter.

The news from Ukraine was not encouraging: miners demanding their last year's wages and picketing Parliament; one corrupt set of government ministers replaced by another; mafia street warfare resulting in dead and wounded; Ukrainian “godfathers” at murdered State Deputy's funeral. On the credit side, Parliament was discussing the financing of General Goloborodko's Ukrainian Federal Bureau.

Life, like his lone, probably vain quest for billions, went on.

Later he took the métro to the Champs Elysées and the Aeroflot office, where, pretending to study the flights on offer, he established that of the five name-tag-sporting males, none was Pierre.

Next day he assessed the female counter assistants at Aeroflot, liked the look of petite, auburn Tatiana, and when she left the office at five that evening, now in a short fox-fur jacket, he was waiting and followed her.

She window-shopped, seeming in no hurry, visited a parfumerie, examined lingerie in a boutique, but bought nothing at either. At
one of the brightly lit newspaper kiosks she looked at the papers on display, and took a copy of Moskovskiye novosti.

“Excuse me, do you speak Russian?” Nik asked, seizing the opportunity.

“I do,” she said, pleasantly surprised.

“I've got a map, but I'm lost. Rue de Cléry is what I want.”

“Let's go over to that jeweller's, where there's more light.”

In the light from the jeweller's Nik began unfolding the map but was soon in difficulty.

“It might be easier to pop into that café and open it on the table,” he suggested.

“Good idea.”

She quickly marked the route in pencil, after which they sat on over coffee and ice cream.

Tatiana was from Belarus. She and her parents had moved to Moscow after the break-up of the Soviet Union. Her father, formerly a Party worker, had obtained a post at the Ministry of Agriculture, and he had managed to get her a job abroad. She had been here for five months now, since graduating in Germano-Romance Studies at Moscow University. She earned enough to live on and had a tiny one-room flat in Belleville, the Sino-Arabic quarter near Père Lachaise Cemetery. These and other commonplace details poured forth as if for the first time in five months, and were eagerly absorbed by a smiling Nik. At last, her own facts exhausted, she asked if he was married.

Nik told of the accident to his wife and son, and for a while they sat in silence. When they next spoke, it was about Paris and people in general. Nik asked what her colleagues were like, but the hoped-for name did not figure.

“Isn't there a Pierre somebody?”

“Tall, small moustache?”

“That's him.”

“Tereshchenko. He's Pyotr really but prefers Pierre.”

For the first time in his life Nik found himself seen home by a girl.

The rue de Cléry was deserted, and at admirably regular intervals on the opposite side from his hotel stood rubbish bins stuffed with dressmakers' remnants.

“Look, how lovely!” Tatiana cried, pulling out a scrap of material that sparkled in the lamplight. “Lamé. Height of fashion.” Folding and slipping it into her handbag, she raised the collar of her fox-fur jacket against a sudden icy blast. “I must be off,” she said.

“Do you know the way?”

“I've explored most parts. If I go straight on I get to the boulevard de Sébastopol. From there it's twenty minutes by métro.”

“Are you on the phone?”

With the sweetest of smiles, she handed him a card.

Lying in his box of a room, he wondered what exactly had so happily prompted his choice. Her name? Her kind open face? Her attractively big eyes?

Over the de rigueur breakfast of coffee and croissant, Nik's thoughts turned to Pyotr Tereshchenko, and the necessity of discovering whether he was in fact Weinberg's Pierre.

That evening Nik took up position under a plane tree where a Moroccan was selling roast chestnuts, and kept watch on the Aeroflot office.

First to emerge were the counter assistants, among them Tatiana, who went her way alone. Ten minutes later several men came out, none of them recognizably Pierre.

Twenty minutes later, there he was: tall, small moustache, long dark raincoat, dark hat, elegant shoulder-suspended leather briefcase. He locked the massive glass door behind him, checked his watch, then set off at a leisurely pace in the direction of the Arc de Triomphe. Nik followed, keeping well back. At Georges V they boarded the same crowded métro, and travelled to an outlying part
of the city, where Pierre disappeared into a Chinese restaurant, leaving Nik out in the cold and hungry.

When at long last Pierre reappeared, he was accompanied by a balding, heavily-built man in a sheepskin coat.

“I'll be in touch the moment there's news,” the man said, taking leave in the Russian manner and getting into a large Peugeot. He seemed edgy and displeased.

Pierre walked slowly on, as if lost in thought.

Following at a distance on the other side of the deserted street, Nik saw him enter a two-storey house sandwiched between taller buildings. Lights went on in the three downstairs windows, 134 was the number, all he needed now was the name of the street.

Ravenous, he retraced his steps to the restaurant, where a young Chinese divested him of his jacket. With a sense of mission completed, he ordered canard à l'orange and a carafe of red, thinking, as he drank, of Sakhno and his “mines”.

Driving home in the duty Zhiguli, Viktor took it easy as far as Southern Bridge, and was beginning to accelerate on the better sanded surface beyond when a minivan swung into his lane and made straight for him. Viktor swerved, skidded, and struck the barrier, before regaining control. The minivan was the familiar one often parked outside their block.

He slowed, needing time to recover, then, struck suddenly by an appalling thought, drove like a madman.

“Hell of a racket from your place,” drooled the drunken neighbour he encountered as he darted from the lift.

Hurling open the door of his flat, Viktor rushed in.

Sprawled on the living-room floor lay a man in an Adidas track suit and spotless trainers. Beneath his left eye, was a bullet hole,
and gripped in his dead hand an automatic. And cowering in a corner, terrified, speechless, Ira.

“Where's Yana?”

Ira gestured towards the corridor.

“Have they taken her?”

Ira shook her head.

He found her safe in her pram.

“All right, all right. Daddy's back …” he soothed, taking her in his arms and returning her to Ira.

“What happened?”

“He tried to shoot me.”

“How did he get in?”

“He was here when I got back from taking out the rubbish.”

The dead man had a receiver attached to one ear, and a microphone at the collar of his track suit. In his shoulder holster he had a mini automatic with silencer, and clutched in his plastic-gloved hand was Refat's curious backfirer taken from on top of the cupboard.

He rang Georgiy.

“Go through his pockets.”

Reluctantly Viktor obeyed, but found nothing of interest.

“It's a nasty bunch we're up against,” said Georgiy. “What you must do now is to put Ira and Yana into warm coats, and drive towards town. I'll phone as you go. What sort of door lock have you got?”

“The standard sort.”

“Right. Lock up normally.”

Easing the Refat automatic from the corpse's cold grip, Viktor substituted the dead man's own weapon, before conducting Ira and Yana down to the car.

Having learnt from Tatiana that Pierre had left unexpectedly for the Midi for a week on business, Nik found himself at a loose end.

A mild, cheek-reddening breeze with a hint of still distant spring did nothing to vary the rhythm of a Paris whose motor horns woke him each morning at the same hour, and whose breakfasts continued with the de rigueur coffee and microwave-warmed croissant.

One evening he took Tatiana to a Greek restaurant he liked the look of, where they ate fried octopus, drank chablis, and talked and laughed. It was as if he had left and shed his whole life up to that moment outside in the street. He was light-hearted, in no mood to come down to earth. He had, he felt, fallen for Tatiana, and even more exciting than that, she had clearly fallen for him.

From the restaurant they decided to walk to Tatiana's flat in Belleville. It took them a good hour and a half, and it was getting on for 11.00 before the narrow street became bright with tiny Arab restaurants and cafés, in one of which they paused for coffee and pastries oozing pistachio-and-honey syrup.

Her one-room flat, though small, had an air of comfort that made it seem larger. There was a small reproduction glass-fronted cupboard, a little table, a large pink fabric-covered lampshade diffusing pale, soft light, a broad couch and two bentwood chairs.

They sat in the kitchen at a small round table, drinking wine and talking about nothing in particular, as if to hear each other's voices was all that mattered. At 2.00 in the morning they set about making a salad, and at 3.00 they ate it.

Next morning, after a quick breakfast of coffee and cheese, they set off together, Tatiana all tenderness, Nik buoyed up by the feeling of being wanted and restored to normality. And when the time came
for her to dive into the métro, he walked on to his hotel in a state of joyous, emotional weightlessness. He thought of Sakhno's abandoning everything for his blonde Uli. Just as he, Nik, had now no need of anyone except Tatiana. It was all so strange and at the same time natural. He had found happiness, and a shell in which to conceal himself – a beautiful, invisible shell called Paris.

Coming to the Père Lachaise Cemetery, he went in. It had an air of calm, of peaceful happiness, the stones and inscriptions seeming to breathe kindliness, well-being, blissful serenity.

For three days Viktor, Ira and Yana had been holed up in an old brick-built house with a glassed-in verandah, on a one-way street in the sought-after holiday suburb of Pushcha-Voditsa. It looked out across a road not to other houses, but to a wood and a view of the lightly frozen lake through leaf-denuded trees.

Ira, now recovered from her recent shock, spent a couple of hours washing the kitchen equipment, old-fashioned crockery and stainless steel cutlery. Judging from the state of the house, no one had lived there for years, but someone had put the water system in order. There was spotless linen in a period cupboard, and in the sitting room, under an embroidered napkin, a Slavutich TV. The kitchen store cupboard contained a stock of tinned fish and tinned peas.

Phoning Georgiy about Miller Ltd, Viktor asked if he might pick up one or two things from the flat, and was told to hang on for a bit, but with no indication of how long “a bit” might be. As to Miller Ltd Suspended Ceilings, there was no such firm in Kiev.

“Was there no phone number?” Georgiy asked.

“No,” said Viktor.

The unaccustomed quiet of Pushcha-Voditsa, broken only by the occasional faint familiar clank of a distant tram, was beginning to play on Viktor's nerves.

Sitting on the bench with wrought iron arms outside their wooden shed, he rang District and told Ratko he wouldn't be in for a bit.

“So I'd gathered,” was the reply. “And you, by the way, are being ‘sought'.”

“Who by?”

“The Ministry, so our duty officer says.”

At a loss what else to do, Viktor was standing at the gate contemplating the empty road, when, to his surprise, a motorcycle combination ridden by a man in quilted jacket and knitted hat, drew up.

“Viktor Slutsky?” he inquired. “Your mate's broken down at the turn-off. Tipped me five dollars to bring you this box.”

The contents, unpacked on the veranda, proved not unlike the rations occasionally received in District: a length of sausage, a jar of mayonnaise, packets of powdered soup, vermicelli, cornflower margarine, etc. There was also an envelope containing the message: “Potatoes in cellar reached via shed – Georgiy.”

“The man in the flat,” Ira said suddenly as they drank tea after lunch, “I'm sure I've seen him somewhere before, only I can't remember where.”

“Try.”

For a while they sat in silence.

“Don't worry. It'll come back,” Viktor comforted.