Brian Freemantle - No Time for Heroes

Olga wished he would stop talking about boring police business. ‘No.’

‘We will. Let me know if he calls, won’t you? I’d like to hear what’s happening. Now that we’re going to be partners.’

‘If you like,’ she said, uninterested.

What could he tell Gusovsky and Yerin, to convince them he was useful, stop them doing anything? ‘There should be a celebration when he comes back. You’ll tell me, won’t you?’

Olga brightened. ‘The moment I hear from him.’ She was vaguely disappointed when he led her back to the car. Not that she wanted to make love to the man: not as quickly as this. She wouldn’t have objected if he’d tried to kiss her, though.

It was far more difficult to resume the following day. Cowley, remorseful for letting himself be trapped in the first place, was now swamped by the conviction, which Danilov could not argue him out of, that he was responsible for Lena Zurov’s murder. And when Maksim Zimin was brought before them the Mafia man was, initially, less frightened.

The second problem was easier for Danilov to handle than the first. He let the resumed interview run for less than five minutes before snapping off the recording machine, calling the other Russian a fool and ordering him to be returned to the life-sentence wing. Zimin obviously did not think he was serious until the guards began to manacle him again. He began to scream, as he must have screamed most of the one night he’d spent there, and fell baby-like on to the floor. Danilov let it go on for quite a long time before calling the guards off.

‘Don’t fuck with us!’ he warned, taking over Cowley’s command of the previous day. ‘I’ve seen the photographs. You don’t have any pressure, not from here, where you are. We can do with you exactly what we like. I am prepared to talk a deal, although not for the pictures you don’t anyway control. You do what we want, you won’t ever be put in the pit downstairs. Try to be stupid – just once – and I’ll guarantee that’s precisely where you’ll go, after your trial here…’

‘… What do you want?’ broke in Zimin.

Danilov told him, without any authority to make the promise, the tape still turned off to prevent a record of the bargaining: it wasn’t possible for a detective to be completely honest, ever, Danilov thought, in faint justification.

‘I want to be back in Russia, before I agree,’ said Zimin, in weak desperation. ‘Want it discussed, with my own lawyer present. Get the guarantees.’

Danilov was about to press further but Cowley forced himself into the interview, straining his professionalism to the utmost. ‘You’ve got more to tell us here, though: prove your co-operation here and you get the rest. Our guarantee.’ All the arrangements were going Danilov’s way: he still had two murders in Washington he now understood but was no closer to solving. He wanted something, too.

Another unrehearsed intrusion, thought Danilov, irritated. He’d have to let it go. He was later to be eternally glad that he did.

‘What?’ demanded Zimin again.

‘Details of the Swiss account. How it worked. What Paulac did and who he did it with, in America.’

‘I don’t know any of that.’

‘How could you negotiate a ten million dollar deal with Sicilian and American Mafia without knowing the details?’ challenged Danilov.

‘The Swiss part was handled by Gusovsky and Yerin.’

‘What about Zavorin?’ demanded Cowley. ‘You called him the money man.’

‘He was to discuss and agree the financial arrangements, if we got to that here: the contracts. But we didn’t get to it.’

They could sweat Zimin again in the pit, but Danilov was impatient now. ‘Zavorin knows you’re on the komitet?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’re going to tell him – order him – to tell us everything he knows. Now! Otherwise it’s back downstairs.’

Ivan Zavorin did not need the theatre of dungeon cells to persuade him to talk: they’d broken Zimin, and so it had been the correct, American-led strategy to concentrate upon him, but Danilov thought they would have got something, in time, from this man, too. Zavorin’s stutter was more pronounced, after the time he had spent in custody, and he seemed almost pathetically grateful when he was brought into the interview room and told by Zimin to disclose all he knew about the Swiss arrangement.

It wasn’t as much as either investigator had hoped, but what he did disclose was enough for Cowley later to admit they should have pressed the accountant harder and sooner. Zavorin’s understanding was that the embezzled Communist Party funds were not in a secretly numbered account, as they had wrongly assumed, but held by an anstalt , an even more secret trust corporation that could be untraceably manipulated by its founders. He didn’t have the directors’ names, nor that of the corporation. His role, Zavorin insisted, had been limited to financing the drugpurchasing with accountants to whom the Liccio clan and John Palma had been supposed to introduce him, after the initial meeting at which they had been seized. He did not, personally, have access to the anstalt; when they’d left Moscow, that was being negotiated by his lawyer-accountant partner, Sergei Mikolaivich Stupar.

‘You don’t have access yet?’ demanded Cowley, confused.

‘There was a transfer going through. I don’t know any more than that.’

Only Cowley realised at once there was now a paper trail to follow, because only Cowley knew there was a legal treaty between Washington and Bern under which the traditional bank secrecy laws of Switzerland could be abrogated if there was evidence money involved was intended for, or the proceeds of, drug trafficking. Which Zimin’s confession provided. The only thing of which they couldn’t be sure was that Ilya Nishin – Raisa’s father – and Serov himself would be directors whose names could guide them to the corporation itself.

Both family names were there. In less than thirty-six hours, there came confirmation from the Swiss capital that a corporation named Svahbodniy existed, with a Geneva registration address: because of the proof of its drug intention, any trading activities of the corporation had been frozen. Neither Cowley nor Danilov commented that svahbodniy was Russian for ‘free’.

During those thirty-six hours there were two more sessions with Zimin. The man provided a lot more Mafia identities and two addresses – a restaurant on Glovin Bol’soj, and Gusovsky’s house on Kutbysevskij Prospekt – which were virtually Chechen headquarters. When Danilov challenged the other Russian that he knew more, Zimin nervously admitted that he might, but that he wanted to be back in Russia before disclosing it. Anxious to get to Switzerland, they decided it wasn’t worth pressing him further.

On the eve of their departure, a prominent anti-Mafia judge and three of his bodyguards died in Palermo when their car was blown up. Melega insisted it was a retribution attack for the Villalba arrests. He also said the three Sicilians continued to refuse to talk about Villalba, even though they had been taken point by point through Zimin’s admission: so did John Palma. The only reaction to the Russian confession had been Umberto Chiara’s soft-spoken insistence that Zimin would be killed in whatever jail he was sentenced to, anywhere in Italy. Danilov thought it would probably be difficult keeping the man alive in any penitentiary in Russia, as well.

That night Melega hosted a farewell dinner in a restaurant near the Spanish Steps, which had an eerie unreality because it had to be cleared of all other diners and surrounded by armed carabinieri. There were toasts to future anti-Mafia successes and assurances of lasting friendships and reunion plans for their return to give evidence at the eventual Italian trial. Throughout, Cowley sat rigid-faced and unresponsive. The only toast for which he showed any enthusiasm – or even properly drank – was to David Patton, who had recovered sufficiently to be flown back to America.