William Ryan - The Twelfth Department

“You see it?”

“I see it.” Korolev spoke grimly, realizing he’d have to go down and look at it.

“Think that’s where your rats got in?”

“I wonder.”

He ducked back out onto the landing and took off his jacket. There was no point in ruining it. He slipped the torch into his trouser pocket and squeezed himself back into the tiny ladder space. It was tight and, not for the first time, he considered whether it might not be time to lose a few pounds. At least he could only fall to the left, he supposed—there was damn-all space in any other direction. He sighed, made a brief acknowledgment of the infinite power and holiness of the Lord above, and began to move downward, lowering his entire weight with his arms, feeling for the next rung beneath him with both feet. If only Slivka were here—she was the right size for a job like this. Although if he found what he suspected he was going to find, then it was just as well she wasn’t.

Rung by rung he descended—it was slow going and, despite his fear of heights, he found that all he could think about was his almost-new shirt and how hard shirts were to come by these days. Perhaps he should have taken it off altogether. If it was ruined he might never find another.

Now he could hear voices in the gloom—a couple were arguing somewhere beneath him and, by the sound of it, someone on a floor above was shouting at a subordinate down the telephone, threatening the direst consequences if a delivery of piping wasn’t made immediately. The ventilation system seemed to be funneling the sounds of the apartments into the lift shaft.

Then he felt the top of the open grille under his foot. Good. He nudged it shut and carried on until he was just beneath it, reached for the torch and turned it on. There was a lock that should have held the grille shut—he examined it closely. There were small scratch marks around the mechanism and if it hadn’t been picked, then he’d be very surprised. If this had been an ordinary investigation he’d have stopped at this point and had the forensics men take over. But this wasn’t an ordinary investigation.

He opened the grille and pulled himself up till he was on the same level. The torch lit up a long square-shaped crawl space, off which more passages ran. If every floor was the same then, by the look of it, if you were small enough you could access any room in the building. There was a fair amount of dust, as you’d expect, but it had been heavily disturbed—and not by rats, or even mice. Well, well, well.

Korolev examined a small hand-shaped mark—an adult would be cramped in such a space, and this looked too small to have been made by a grown man or woman. Had children been scurrying around the ventilation system? But why had only this grille’s lock been picked? Korolev considered what it might mean. One thing was for certain—it opened up new possibilities. It most certainly did.

Korolev lowered himself back down and pushed the grille shut above his head, then began the slow, hard work of dragging his body back up the ladder. He’d only gone up six rungs when there was a noise from beneath him. He stopped, unsure what it might be, and then heard the unmistakeable bang and judder of a cable connecting to the weight of the lift below. It occurred to him in an instant that there was more of him than would fit inside the ladder’s narrow shaft.

“The Lord have mercy upon me,” Korolev muttered over and over again as he began swinging himself up from rung to rung.

He caught a glimpse of Timinov’s face above him and thought about shouting out to him, but he had to concentrate on damned well climbing because that damned lift was still coming.

The doorway was tantalizingly close now, but the lift catching up with him and it was traveling at remorseless speed. He wasn’t going to make it. He looked down in horror as it glided upward past his feet, past his knees. He tried to suck himself in but he was just too wide—and then the lift stopped. If he’d wanted to he could have leaned down and touched the roof—it was only centimeters away from crushing him.

There was a moment of silence then he heard the lift doors open and Timinov speaking directly beneath him.

“Good morning, Comrade Shepkin. Which floor are you going to?”

“The eighth, of course,” a bad-tempered voice answered. “And why weren’t you downstairs when I came in?”

But before the irritated resident had finished berating Timinov for his failure to keep the building secure only days after a “serious murder” had been committed on the premises, Korolev had made it to the tiny door. He glanced down as he arrived, and was struck by the incongruous sight of three shrunken apple cores on the roof of the lift, almost invisible against its dark surface. He blinked, looked again to check he’d seen what he thought he had, and then swung himself through the tiny door, struggling for breath and dripping sweat.

He was still there, leaning against the wall, considering being sick and thinking better of it, when Timinov came up behind him.

“A close call,” the doorman whispered.

“Why didn’t you just tell him I was in the damned lift shaft?” Korolev asked, moving from relief to irritation.

“Because the ventilation shafts are State Security business.”

There was a sink in the basement and Korolev allowed the doorman to lead him to it. He did his best to clean himself up with the towel Timinov provided, while listening to him whisper about the ventilation system.

“Can you say that again?”

It seemed his having nearly been crushed by a lift had affected his concentration. Korolev placed his face into the cool water he’d scooped up with both hands and savored it, before letting it run through his fingers back into the sink.

“I was just telling you”—Timinov’s whisper wasn’t much louder than an exhaled breath—“how, although you can’t tell when you’re in the apartments, there’s room enough for a small man to crawl around right above you. And they do crawl. I’ve had to climb down to a few lifts that have got stuck between floors and I’ve seen things I wasn’t meant to see. Devices.”

“Listening devices?” Korolev whispered back and immediately regretted it. Although the basement should be safe enough, shouldn’t it? Or perhaps that was why he wasn’t a Chekist—perhaps basements were the very place State Security would want to listen in on? Where better to overhear a whispered conspiracy?

“What else would they be for? One of the other men told me the building was built this way on purpose—that the plans were altered by the Chekists—and it’s true they come here so often these days they should run a shuttle service. There’s barely a week goes by that they don’t arrest four or five of the residents.”

Korolev considered this for a moment. If the Chekists had wanted Azarov out of the way, surely they’d more efficient methods than shooting him from the ventilation system—they could just have added him to the list of those who were to be arrested that week. Not that he’d had any indication they had wanted him out of the way. And how to account for the small handprint? Certainly it seemed unlikely that State Security employed a pygmy assassin—but could it belong to a woman? If he were able to ask Ushakov to look at it, perhaps he’d be able to tell him something—but that would put Yuri at risk. In fact, this whole line of inquiry was putting Yuri at risk. On the other hand, if what Rodinov had said about him was right, then Zaitsev wasn’t to be trusted when it came to Yuri’s safety anyway. At least if he worked out who’d killed the scientists he’d have a bargaining chip—whether it would be worth anything was another question.