Brian Freemantle: Dead Men Living

There was a separate, smaller and more convenient family room in which Charlie had installed the large-screen, transformer-operated and satellite-linked television-imported from England-and three bedrooms, two with four-poster beds around which, despite complete central heating, curtains could be drawn against a Moscow winter the El Nino appeared to have defeated. The kitchen was a burnished, chromium-gleaming contrast to the bygone age, a laboratory of microwave, ice machines, walk-in refrigerators and rotisseries. The entire edifice had been maintained and created for a relative of Leonid Brezhnev, when the most corrupt of recent Soviet leaders had ruled,taken over by subsequent Party tsars until the demise of communism, after which it had come upon the list of diplomatically offered properties through endemic bureaucratic incompetence.

Charlie had gotten it totally by chance, to support his arrival assignment cover as an entrepreneurial intermediary to infiltrate the nuclear-smuggling Russian mafia, and was reasonably confident-although not absolutely sure-that he could manipulate a matching dinosaur of Whitehall bureaucracy to go on living there by right of existing possession, even though the reason for his original occupancy had been successfully concluded.

It wasn’t until the end of the tour, tightly holding her mother’s hand, that Sasha said, “Where’s my room?” and scuttled into the smaller one containing the curtained four-poster to which Charlie pointed. The child stood, legs apart, surveying it and gravely said, “I like it. I want to stay.”

“I’m glad,” said Charlie. Turning to Natalia-knowing in advance he shouldn’t use the child’s remark-he added, “How about Mummy?”

Natalia’s answer wasn’t a direct one. “I’ll tell you if I decide I’m not sure anymore, about you and I.”

“All right,” said Charlie, unable to think of anything better.

“Does that make you think any less of me?”

“No,” said Charlie, honestly. “It took me long enough, but now I’m sure.”

“I want it to work, Charlie. I really do.”

“So you’re going to stay?”

“I might change my mind. Think I should change my mind.”

They’d reverted to English. Feeling neglected again, Sasha said, “Are you going to live here, too, with Mummy and me?”

“Yes,” said Charlie.

“Does that make you a daddy?”

Charlie and Natalia looked at each other. Charlie said, “Yes. Would you like that?”

“I don’t know,” said Sasha with childlike truthfulness.

“Let’s hope everyone makes all their decisions soon,” said Charlie.

The entire town council of Kiriyestyakh, led by the mayor, stood around the softening grave. The bodies were still deeply frozen, theclawed hand stiffly upright, but more earth had crumbled so that they could see the backs of both heads had been shot away.

The mayor, who had fought with the reindeer herder’s father, said, “Definitely foreign. English, I think. And American. I saw uniforms like these in Berlin.”

“What are we going to do with them?” asked his deputy.

The mayor had survived the long years of communism by never once making a decision. “This is in Yakutsk jurisdiction. They’ve got facilities there.”

“They’ve been preserved exactly as they were the moment they were shot,” the awed deputy pointed out.

“English and American,” repeated the other man. “There will be a big investigation. We can get to Yakutsk in an hour.”

“Do we take the bodies with us?” asked a third man.

“We don’t touch them,” warned the mayor. “Let others risk the Eye.”

Yakutsk is the capital of the partially autonomous Russian republic of Yakutskaya, one of the most remote and inhospitable places on earth and provably the coldest, where temperatures plunge to minus eighty degrees centigrade. As well as being certain of the Evil Eye and the magic power of shaman witch doctor priests, the Yakut people who exist there believe unheard conversations freeze in the winter to be heard in the brief summer thaw.

In that region the summer is plagued by mosquitoes that sting so viciously that grazing reindeer and cows and horses that are not driven mad by the pain often suffocate from the attacking clog in their nostrils and mouths. Men and women have been driven insane by a concerted swarm, although the more frequent dementia is caused by the vodka intended to numb every feeling.

The freak weather of the El Nino had awakened the insects early and the melting grave was blackly thick by the time the mayor gotback to it with the two official investigators. The mayor and his council were all Yakuts, less troubled by the mosquitoes than Colonel Aleksandr Kurshin and Vitali Novikov, both of whose ancestry was Russian. Kurshin, the homicide chief, at once lit supposedly repelling smoke candles that made everyone’s eyes sting but did little to drive away the bugs. Novikov, the pathologist, put on a personally adapted and mesh-visored hat and gauze mask and protected his hands with rubber medical gloves. He didn’t have a spare mask, but he gave his extra gloves to Kurshin, who snatched at them.

“Where’s your hat and mask?” demanded Novikov, who’d made the same face protection for the other man, a boyhood friend as well as a professional colleague.

“Forgot,” said Kurshin.

“That’s stupid,” said Novikov. Everyone drank too much in Yakutsk but Kurshin was increasingly drinking more than most and it worried Novikov. Kurshin had stunk out the mortuary vehicle on the way there. The weather and its effect worried Novikov, too. Malaria had never been a problem in such a frigid climate, but if this unnatural weather lasted, the disease could become an insect-borne epidemic. If it remained so warm for too much longer he’d warn the Health Ministry in Moscow, despite Yakutskaya’s independence pretensions. He couldn’t be accused of negligence if he sounded an alarm before a problem arose. It was ingrained in people whose forefathers had been exiled to permanent imprisonment, albeit without jail walls, to arrange defense before accusation.

Novikov was not, however, thinking of malaria at that precise moment. As he stared down into the grave, other thoughts-desperate, half-formed fantasies-were swirling through his mind, so distracting that he had consciously to try to push them back. He looked beyond the grave, squinting through the permanent half darkness of the Yakutskaya day over the flat, empty wasteland. He was sure he was right, but there was nothing to see, not the slightest trace. As if, in fact, a shaman had cast a spell to make everything disappear. How, he wondered, could he make it come back again?

Neither Aleksandr Andreevich Kurshin nor Vitali Maksimovich Novikov were frightened of the supernatural, although they were familiar with all the superstitions. Neither sneered at the folklore beliefs, either. Novikov, who also practiced as a general physician,knew of at least seven shamans in Yakutsk. He knew, too, that the townspeople consulted them as much as they came to him and that sometimes people whose maladies he had failed to diagnose recovered from whatever the shamans prescribed. Novikov considered himself a man of science, but didn’t know of a better medicine than the power of absolute, mind-over-matter conviction. Unable to resist another fantasy, he was curious if he possessed it sufficiently himself.

Kurshin, a fat, rumpled man who had little conviction about anything apart from the anaesthesia of vodka, said, “They look like wartime uniforms.” He couldn’t possibly be expected to solve something that had happened such a long time ago.

“This whole area was closed then, like Yakutsk,” reminded Novikov. His father, like Kurshin’s, had been exiled there during the Stalin era on trumped-up charges of political conspiracy. It had left both with an inferiority complex-an apprehension of authority-that both tried hard to conceal. Too often when he was drunk Kurshin wept for no apparent reason.