Brian Freemantle: The Watchmen

“Let’s decide the order of priority first,” said Danilov.

“The priority is the priority,” said Cowley, and immediately wished he hadn’t. It echoed like a soap opera sound byte just before the credits ran, to bring viewers back for the next episode. Hurriedly he added, “Whoever, wherever, gets the first break.”

“Let’s hope one of us recognize it,” warned Danilov.

Someone had stolen Larissa’s flowers, which didn’t surprise Danilov. The daffodils he’d brought now would probably go within a day. He cleared the fallen leaves and twigs from the Novodevichy Cemetery grave, unashamedly talking to her as he always did, imagining her replies in his mind.

Remember Bill, the American … big man? That’s right … good to go to America again … get away. Olga’s Olga, just the same …. Of course I miss you-ache for you. Don’t feel like being careful …. All right, of course I will be …. Why couldn’t you have been …. I know, I’m sorry. Not your fault. Yevgennie’s fault-your cheating, bastard militia colonel husband, failing his Mafia masters. Why did you have to be in the car, though? Leave me? I won’t be long …. Wish I could bring you something … see you … be with you. No, I’m all right. No, not all right: able to handle it. Sorry about the flowers. It’s Moscow-Russia. Good night. I love you.

Danilov rose, just as unashamedly staring back at another mourner looking curiously at him. He drove without hurry or interest to Ulitza Kirovskaya, knowing the sound was from his apartment as he stepped out of the elevator. His wife sat in front of the new, blaring set that had been her latest insistence, initially oblivious to his entry. She became aware of it when he went in front of her to reduce the volume.

“It’s too loud!” It was a Russian subtitled Australian series that had been running for weeks. There was a kangaroo that did tricks.

“I like trying to hear the English words.”

“You don’t speak English.”

“Irena says this is a way to learn.”

“She’s wrong.” Irena, who worked in the same ministry office as Olga, claimed to have learned her English from American movies. Danilov, who’d studied languages at the university, reckoned she knew about a dozen words, most of which she mispronounced.

The kitchen sink still had the stalagmite of unwashed dishes that had been there that morning, and on his way to the bathroom to wash Danilov saw the bed was in the upheaval in which she’d left it when she’d gotten up. The Australian soap had ended when he returned.

He said: “What words did you learn?”

“You interrupted me. I couldn’t concentrate.”

“I’m going away.”

“Where!” she demanded, suddenly attentive, turning to him.

“Gorki. What happened to your hair?”

“Igor said I needed this color, while the other tints grew out. What’s in Gorki?”

“That’s what I’m going to find out.”

“Any point in my making a present list?”

“None.”

“That American you worked with was on television before my program. Something about a missile.”

“I spoke to him today.”

Olga’s interest returned. “You’re going to America!”

“Maybe.”

“So I can write a present list!”

Danilov realized for the first time she was wearing a shirt he’d brought back for her the last time. Two buttons were missing and the stain over her left breast looked old and ingrained. Larissa had been wearing the bracelet he’d given her from the same trip. It had been one of the few things that had been identifiable after the bombing of the car.

“It’s the fifth time it’s happened in the last six months!” protested Clarence Snelling.

“The bank’s extremely sorry,” apologized the desk assistant, who’d dealt with the man’s previous complaints. “Computers do make mistakes.”

“No, they don’t!” Snelling replied. “It’s the people who handle them who make the mistakes.”

“It’s twenty-two cents,” the bank official pointed out. “It’s never been more than fifty. And as before, I’ll see that the amount is immediately restored.”

“I want an assurance that it won’t happen again!” insisted Snelling. “And this time I want it kept, which so far you haven’t done.”

“Sir,” said the man, “I promise you we’ll do our very best.”

Dimitri Danilov’s plane came in directly over the joining of the Volga with the river Oka. Briefly it was impossible to see both banks of the waterway that flows for more than two thousand miles from the frozen north to the subtropical Caspian Sea, to separate European from Asiatic Russia. It narrowed nearer to Gorki itself, but there were so many boats and ships-two cruisers large enough to be considered liners-that they looked from the air like discarded debris, without any regulated direction. He tried to locate the canal from the Volga to Moscow that Stalin forced his gulag prisoners to scoop from the earth with their bare hands but couldn’t and decided it must be farther downstream. The vast, flat hinterland of taiga forests was black, not conifer green, pockmarked in a lot of places into total baldness by clear-cutting without replanting. There were also the huge interruptions of uniform, regimented weapons and military materiel manufacturing buildings, each visibly divided from its matching neighbor by watch-towered, fenced perimeters. Two actually on the riverbank were on either side of an enormous man-made canal he could see humped with the pens in which the submarines now hemorrhaging their nuclear core into Murmansk harbor were originally housed, ready to fight America into mutual atomic annihilation. Which factory below was known simply by the number 35 and specialized in another sort of annihilation? Danilov wondered.

The aircraft, surprisingly, arrived exactly according to the schedule he’d given Colonel Oleg Reztsov, head of Gorki’s serious crime division, but there was no greeting officer. There was no waiting militia car outside, either, and Danilov accepted both, sadly, as an augury.

The smell of stale tobacco competed with the even staler stink of body odor in the rattling, sag-seated taxi festooned with dangling trolls and head-nodding toy animals. One had a broken neck. Danilov had forgotten the horizon-to-horizon taiga-covered mosquito bog and marsh. Flying things feasted off him, despite his lowering the window as far as it would go. The incoming breeze didn’t disperse the smell, either. When he told the inquiring driver, who’d smiled expectantly at Danilov’s American-bought suit bag, that he wasn’t going to pay in dollars, the man said having luggage inside the car would cost an extra fifty rubles. Danilov told the driver who he was, and the man said there wasn’t an extra charge for carrying a militia general.

Danilov’s room at the National Hotel overlooked a trash-strewn square at the rear, next to an air-conditioning or heater unit the throbbing of which reverberated into his room. Cockroaches killed by whatever was in an upturned cardboard container in the closet lay atrophied, legs stiffly in the air. There was no soap or sink or bath plug, which Danilov knew he should have anticipated and was annoyed that he hadn’t.

Colonel Reztsov wasn’t available when Danilov called. The woman who answered the telephone said she didn’t know where he was or when he would be back. Danilov suggested she find out to tell the president’s chief of staff when he called from the White House in Moscow in fifteen minutes, and in ten Reztsov came thickvoiced on the line.

“I didn’t think you were arriving until tomorrow.”

“I sent a fax.”

“It must have been mislaid.”

“You do understand how seriously it’s being treated?”