Brian Freemantle: The Watchmen

“I’ve got a squad on it already.”

“I’d like whoever’s in charge waiting when I get to your office. Which I will do in thirty minutes.”

“That-” the man began but stopped.

“What?” demanded Danilov.

“Nothing. I’ll send a car.”

Danilov parted with another ten dollars to get his room changed to one with soap and a bath plug and without mummified cockroaches. The mystery throbbing was less intrusive, too. The promised driver waiting in the lobby was a woman and blonde, and the car was a blue BMW. Danilov stopped momentarily-stupidly, he recognized at once-halted by the unneeded and unwelcome deja vu: The vehicle in which his mafia paymasters had blown up Yevgennie Kosov had been a BMW, blue like this one, and Larissa, who’d died with him, had been blonde, although slim and poised and beautiful, not at all like this woman, who was plump and round-faced and waddled. The obvious comparison made his reaction even more stupid. It had to stop, as the one-sided graveside conversations had to stop. He was hovering, Danilov supposed, on the edge of a nervous breakdown-close to some sort of breakdown. Time-long past time-to take hold of himself. Learn to live with the grief, as sensibly mature adult people adjusted to loss, no matter how traumatizing or unbearable it first appeared.

The driver took Danilov’s hesitation to be admiration and said it was Colonel Reztsov’s personal car. Danilov decided Reztsov was either a fool or very arrogant to show off a vehicle that would have cost the man a lifetime’s salary if he’d bought it honestly. And then Danilov accepted that Reztsov was probably neither. What the police chief was, in fact, was a typical senior Russian militia officer, living more than comfortably on a mafia payroll, and eager to show a visiting senior Moscow militia officer he imagined similarly cared for that life was as sweet in the provinces as it was in the capital.

What about his own foolishness? Danilov demanded of himself, settling into the squeaking leather upholstery and initially savoring the aroma from an unseen, perfumed deodorizer after the gagging journey from the airport. Danilov wasn’t a rarity in Moscow policing. He was now an arm’s-length, ostracized oddity, as unknown in modern Russia as the Neolithic long-haired mammoths occasionally found frozen in perfection in Siberian glaciers. So why had he come-alone-expecting honest, find-the-truth cooperation from a major provincial militia? He should, at least, have brought Yuri Pavin, whose apparent elephantine slowness belied a mind of jaguar speed. On something as high profile as this he should have risked the very real and constant backstabbing danger of an unsupervised department to bring his trusted deputy with him. Although Pavin was his deputy, now with the rank of senior colonel, he was still a street-level, gutter-thinking policeman who could smell a lead, like a bloodhound scenting a trail. It was the sort of expertise Danilov suspected he was going to need.

If Reztsov’s car hadn’t been a sufficient pointer, the police chief’s appearance would have been. Danilov wondered if it was an institutionalized psychology for men whose supposed function required uniforms to dress like the mobsters with whom they exchanged money-filled, back-alley handshakes. Reztsov’s single-breasted Western-style suit was blue, practically a match with the car, and had a silky sheen. The watch and its band was gold, balanced by the gold identity bracelet on his right wrist. On the man’s right hand the diamond shone with lighthouse brightness from a knuckle-reaching gold band. Major Gennardi Averin, the other man in Reztsov’s opulent office-which smelled of the same perfume as the car-was a clone of his superior, although the shiny suit was gray and Averin didn’t have a gold identity bracelet.

Both men were as sleek as their clothes, smooth-faced, well barbered, confident of their surroundings and their domination in it. The handshakes were effusive, Reztsov actually retaining Danilov’s hand to lead him away from the officialese of the grandiose desk to a lounge-chaired, plant-dotted informal area close to a book-lined cabinet. There was Chivas Regal as well as vodka already set out. The glasses were cut crystal. Danilov accepted vodka, going along with the charade. Reztsov and the major both had whiskey.

Danilov said at once, “How can you help me?”

“We’ve come up with something from records,” announced Reztsov. “An arms smuggler.”

“What sort of arms?”

“Conventional,” said Averin. “Not something either of us have personally dealt with.”

“What have you done?”

“Waited for you.”

“Was any loss reported from Plant 35?”

“No,” Reztsov said immediately.

“Have you spoken to Plant 35 directly?”

“Decided to wait until you got here,” parroted Averin. “Got an appointment for us with the director tomorrow, at ten.”

“But you have spoken to him?”

“By telephone,” said Averin. “Just to make the appointment.”

“You didn’t ask him if there was anything missing?”

“He said he’d check. Tell us tomorrow.”

It was difficult for Danilov to curb the anger. He wasn’t sure if he should bother, confronted by this almost smirking contempt. “How much conventional weaponry disappears from the establishments here?”

Reztsov made an uncertain movement. “Can’t remember the last time we were called in. Security’s very good.”

“How many official crime families do you have in Gorki?”

Reztsov made another shrug. “Hardly families. Just one or two loose-knit groups.”

“As well as the last case of known thefts from factories here, I’d like all your intelligence on organized crime groups,” set out Danilov. “Particularly those with known links to families in Moscow. I’m having checks carried out there, for connections here. Most particularly-and obviously-I want any known association with America … any supposedly genuine America joint venture businesses here. You’ll put that in hand right away, will you?” The condescension began to go, and Danilov was glad he’d kept his temper.

“That could be quite an undertaking-” Reztsov began to protest but Danilov overrode him.

“If it’s too much for your department, I’ll move militia personnel from Moscow,” he said. “Normal local authority and jurisdiction doesn’t apply. I want an office to work from, and I’d like to start on the organized crime material right away.”

“Yes, of course,” said the now-subdued local police colonel.

Dimitri Ivanovich Danilov read the intelligence dossiers on organized crime in Gorki with the expertise of a detective who had once been on the take and could learn as much from what was not recorded as he could from what was. The slimmest and most inadequate file was on a group headed by Mikhail Sidak, the thickest-and the most actively investigated-on the family led by Aleksai Zotin, which told Danilov they were the biggest two in the city, in turf competition with each other and that Reztsov had most probably earned the sweet-smelling BMW from Sidak for harassing the opposition. There had been prosecutions against four low-level members of a third family headed by Gusein Isayev for importing drugs along the Volga from the opium-producing south. Danilov surmised it was a business in which Sidak was eager to expand.

Both trials of the already identified conventional weapons trafficker, Viktor Nikolaevich Nikov, had failed through lack of evidence. Nikov was described as a bull-the Russian underworld term for a hit man-predictably in the family, or brigade, of Aleksai Zotin. The cases had involved a consignment of Kalashnikov rifles and antipersonnel mines. The chief prosecution witness had been the storeman at Plant 20, a conventional weapons factory, who’d retracted a sworn statement that Nikov had been the man to whom he’d sold the guns and mines. Three defense witnesses had testified that Nikov had been with them in Moscow, buying imported foreign cars for his garages, when the prosecution claimed he had been in Gorki. None of the Moscow defense witness names meant anything to Danilov, but that was hardly surprising, considering the number of brigades in the capital. The only names he knew-ingrained in his memory-were the crews of the Chechen and Ostinkono families whose territorial war had led to Larissa being killed. Some-too many-had escaped, were still alive.