Brian Freemantle: Dead Men Living

The dead woman’s clothing-a dark blue three-quarter-length jacket and skirt-resembled a uniform, although there was no indication of any service or rank. There were no pockets in the jacket but two in the skirt. In that on the left side there was a single key. In the right a cellophaned pack of Camels, from which two were missing. The remainder were crushed and broken. Her watch, which had stopped at 12:05, was tin-cased, the strap imitation leather.

The woman’s shoes were down at heel, the mock leather uppersscuffed. There were no stockings. Her underpants were string-tied, with half-thigh legs. She wore only a bra beneath a long-sleeved white shirt, which was marked with several days’ wear at the cuffs and collar. As with the two men, some of the front shirt buttons were open-three, in her case. Around her neck, which was unmarked, a thin chain held a bare silver cross.

Although heavily blood-matted now, her hair had been black and would have been long, practically to her shoulders. Her mouth had frozen into a grimace of agony, and although that had relaxed, the features were still distorted, destroying what once would have been an attractive, even beautiful, high-cheekboned face. Her heavy-breasted body would have been exciting, too. The pelvis was marked with the striae gravidarum of childbirth as well as an appendectomy scar. The shattering wound was more to the left side of the skull and only when Novikov inserted a probe to trace the entry line and locate the bullet did he properly realize that what he’d thought to be leaked blood from the head entry was in fact congealed around an exit wound in her throat, just above the larynx. And that the bullet had not lodged in her body. As he was examining the exit wound-again with the American’s magnifying glass-he isolated small black specks he couldn’t immediately identify, until separately placing them under the closer and more direct arc light on his desk. They were long-dead mosquitoes and gnats. He at once returned to the two men whose postmortems he had completed, making a scalpel incision in each throat. Both windpipes contained insect debris.

The chest, stomach and pelvic opening had virtually become routine. He went almost automatically through the process of examining, extracting, weighing and preserving the organs, all of which appeared perfectly normal. Additionally, with the woman, he extracted the ovaries. They, as well as the spleen, pancreas and remains of the brain, had to go into vegetable pickle jars. Only when he was transferring the scant debris from beneath her very short and in places bitten nails did Novikov remember he had not estimated an age. It was difficult, because of the distortion he now knew to have been caused by the exiting bullet, but he guessed between thirty and thirty-five.

So intently had Novikov worked that only when he looked, virtually for the first time, toward his supposed laboratory and sawdaylight through the skewed window did he become aware he had worked completely through the night. His watch showed six-thirty. Abruptly he was engulfed in a physically aching tiredness he doubted would bring any sleep, so much was there to try to understand.

He stored all three bodies, squinting at the temperature gauges outside each cabinet to ensure the refrigeration was working, shuffled across to his office and slumped into a chair that had lost most of its seat stuffing. He couldn’t immediately decide whether it was good or bad. Mixed, maybe. For him, personally, more good than bad. Certainly enough to make what he hoped would be a sufficiently impressive presentation.

It took a long time for Aleksandr Kurshin to answer his telephone, and when he did his voice was still thick from vodka and it took several more minutes for the homicide detective to recognize to whom and about what he was talking.

“Who are they?” Kurshin demanded finally, his voice still slurred.

“That’s the point,” said Novikov. “Everything and anything that might have identified them has been taken. We don’t know who they are. And there’s no way we’re ever going to find out.”

Yakutsk is six hours ahead of Moscow time, so it was still only midday when the telephone exchanges from the far side of Siberia percolated down through the Foreign Ministry to the interior minister’s secretariat and eventually to Natalia. She made only brief interjections and afterward sat without moving, even though the demand for her to attend was immediate. This could be the problem-the potential disaster-she’d prayed would never arise.

“I’m going to be late,” she told Charlie, who answered the telephone on the first ring.

“What time?” He’d thought it might have been London, although telephones were normally reserved for emergencies. The sum total of his activity that day and too many before it had been to create a delta-winged paper plane that flew completely across his office, through the open door and almost reached the far wall of the outside corridor. There’d been four improvements from that morning’s prototype: it all had to do with the tilt of the wings.

“I don’t know. Can you pick Sasha up from the creche?”

“Sure. Something big?”

“I’ll call when I have some idea of a time,” refused Natalia, ignoring the question.

“I love you,” he said, but Natalia had already replaced the telephone.

When it rang again, within minutes, he snatched it up, smiling, expecting it to be Natalia again. But it wasn’t.

Natalia was not late, but everyone else was already there. Viktor Romanovich Viskov even had his jacket off and collar unbuttoned, and she felt a fresh twitch of anxiety at the thought that the deputy interior minister trying to depose her might have already started an undermining attack in her absence. The room had gone ominously, expectantly quiet at her entry.

Only Dmitri Nikulin gave any formal greeting. Viskov, a squat, stone-faced and professional long-term survivor in the oxygen-starved near-summit of Russian government, remained expressionless. Which Natalia expected. She supposed she should also have expected only the curt, grave-faced nod from Mikhail Suslov, confronted as the man appeared to be, after only four months as deputy foreign minister, with an international situation of potentially enormous proportion.

For herself Natalia accepted that the international perception of Russia was of an out-of-legal-control country dominated by organized crime, which too much of it was, and that of anyone in the room she could be made to appear the person most closely connected to that failure and to that embarrassment.

Which didn’t end that simply. There was the fact that Yakutsk was three thousand miles from Moscow, the capital of a time-warped, antagonistic, near-independent republic and that the murders appeared to have been committed decades ago.

All and every problem of which was compounded by the meeting being convened in the sixth-floor White House suite of Dmitri BorisovichNikulin, chief of staff of the president, whose own quarters were farther along the linking corridor on the same level, a constant although unneeded reminder of the echelon at which the matter was being considered from the outset.

“We seem to have an extremely serious problem,” opened Nikulin. He was a thin, gaunt man who invariably appeared to invite an opinion from the people to whom he was speaking before offering one himself.

“On the face of it,” agreed Suslov, cautiously.

“We hardly know enough yet to make any sort of judgment,” qualified Viskov, just as carefully. Quickly, however, he added, “What is essential today is that we ensure from the very beginning that we are properly prepared, particularly that any investigation is totally successful.” He spoke looking directly at Natalia.