Ken Follett - Fall of Giants

A moment later a voice barked. “Hoyle here. Who are you?”

“Lev Peshkov, Vyalov’s son-in-law.”

“Where are you?”

Lev ignored the question. “If you can have a reporter on the steps of police headquarters in half an hour, I’ll have a statement for you.”

“We’ll be there.”

“Mr. Hoyle?”

“Yes?”

“Send a photographer too.” Lev hung up.

With Olga beside him in the open front of the van, he drove first to Josef’s waterfront warehouse. Boxes of stolen cigarettes were stacked around the walls. In the office at the back they found Vyalov’s accountant, Norman Niall, plus the usual group of thugs. Norman was crooked but pernickety, Lev knew. He was sitting in Josef ’s chair, behind Josef ’s desk.

They were all astonished to see Lev and Olga.

Lev said: “Olga has inherited the business. I’ll be running things from now on.”

Norman did not get up out of his chair. “We’ll see about that,” he said.

Lev gave him a hard stare and said nothing.

Norman spoke again with less assurance. “The will has to be proved, and so on.”

Lev shook his head. “If we wait for the formalities there will be no business left.” He pointed at one of the goons. “Ilya, go out in the yard, look in the van, come back here, and tell Norm what you see.”

Ilya went out. Lev moved around the desk to stand next to Norman. They waited in silence until Ilya came back.

“A hundred cases of Canadian Club.” He put a bottle on the table. “We can try it, see if it’s the real thing.”

Lev said: “I’m going to run the business with booze imported from Canada. Prohibition is the greatest business opportunity ever. People will pay anything for liquor. We’re going to make a fortune. Get out of that chair, Norm.”

“I don’t think so, kid,” said Norman.

Lev pulled his gun fast and pistol-whipped Norman on both sides of the face. Norman cried out. Lev held the Colt casually pointed in the direction of the thugs.

To her credit, Olga did not scream.

“You asshole,” Lev said to Norman. “I killed Josef Vyalov-do you think I’m scared of a fucking accountant?”

Norman got up and scurried out of the room, holding a hand to his bleeding mouth.

Lev turned to the other men, still holding the pistol pointing in their general direction, and said: “Anyone else who doesn’t want to work for me can leave now, and no hard feelings.”

No one moved.

“Good,” said Lev. “Because I was lying about no hard feelings.” He pointed at Ilya. “You come with me and Mrs. Peshkov. You can drive. The rest of you, unload the van.”

Ilya drove them downtown in the blue Hudson.

Lev felt he might have made a mistake back there. He should not have said I killed Josef Vyalov in front of Olga. She could yet change her mind. If she mentioned it, he decided he would say he didn’t mean it, but just said it to scare Norm. However, Olga did not raise the matter.

Outside police headquarters, two men in overcoats and hats were waiting beside a big camera on a tripod.

Lev and Olga got out of the car.

Lev said to the reporter: “The death of Josef Vyalov is a tragedy for us, his family, and for this city.” The man scribbled shorthand in a notebook. “I have come to give the police my account of what happened. My wife, Olga, the only other person present when he collapsed, is here to testify that I am innocent. The postmortem will show that my father-in-law died of a heart attack. My wife and I plan to continue to expand the great business Josef Vyalov started here in Buffalo. Thank you.”

“Look at the camera, please?” said the photographer.

Lev put his arm around Olga, pulled her close, and looked at the camera.

The reporter said: “How did you get the shiner, Lev?”

“This?” he said, and pointed to his eye. “Oh, hell, that’s another story.” He smiled his most charming grin, and the photographer’s magnesium flare went off with a blinding flash.

The Aldershot Military Detention Barracks was a grim place, Billy thought, but it was better than Siberia. Aldershot was an army town thirty-five miles southwest of London. The prison was a modern building with galleries of cells on three floors around an atrium. It was brightly lit by a glazed roof that gave the place its nickname of “the Glasshouse.” With heat pipes and gas lighting, it was more comfortable than most of the places where Billy had slept during the past four years.

All the same, he was miserable. The war had been over for more than a year, yet he was still in the army. Most of his friends were out, earning good wages and taking girls to the pictures. He still wore the uniform and saluted, he slept in an army bed, and he ate army food. He worked all day at weaving mats, which was the prison industry. Worst of all, he never saw a woman. Somewhere out there, Mildred was waiting for him-probably. Everyone had a tale to tell of a soldier who had come home to find that his wife or girlfriend had gone off with another man.

He had no communication with Mildred or anyone else outside. Prisoners-or “soldiers under sentence” as they were officially called-could normally send and receive letters, but Billy was a special case. Because he had been convicted of betraying army secrets in letters, his mail was confiscated by the authorities. This was part of the army’s revenge. He no longer had any secrets to betray, of course. What was he going to tell his sister? “The boiled potatoes are always undercooked.”

Did Mam and Da and Gramper even know about the court-martial? The soldier’s next of kin had to be informed, he thought, but he was not sure and no one would answer his questions. Anyway, Tommy Griffiths would almost certainly have told them. He hoped Ethel had explained what he had really been doing.

He received no visitors. He suspected his family did not even know that he was back from Russia. He would have liked to challenge the ban on his receiving mail, but he had no way of contacting a lawyer-and no money to pay one. His only consolation was a vague feeling that this could not go on indefinitely.

His news of the outside world came from the papers. Fitz was back in London, making speeches urging more military aid for the Whites in Russia. Billy wondered if that meant the Aberowen Pals had come home.

Fitz’s speeches were doing no good. Ethel’s “Hands Off Russia” campaign had won support and been endorsed by the Labour Party. Despite colorful anti-Bolshevik speeches by the minister for war, Winston Churchill, Britain had withdrawn its troops from Arctic Russia. In mid-November the Reds had driven Admiral Kolchak out of Omsk. Everything Billy had said about the Whites, and Ethel had repeated in her campaign, turned out to be correct; everything Fitz and Churchill said was wrong. Yet Billy was in jail and Fitz was in the House of Lords.

He had little in common with his fellow inmates. They were not political prisoners. Most had committed real crimes, theft and assault and murder. They were hard men, but so was Billy and he was not afraid of them. They treated him with wary deference, apparently feeling that his offense was a cut above theirs. He talked to them amiably enough but none of them had any interest in politics. They saw nothing wrong with the society that had imprisoned them; they were just determined to beat the system next time.

During the half-hour lunch break he read the newspaper. Most of the others could not read. One day he opened the Daily Herald to see a photograph of a familiar face. After a moment of bewilderment he realized the picture was of him.

He recalled when it had been taken. Mildred had dragged him to a photographer in Aldgate and had him snapped in his uniform. “Every night I’ll touch it to my lips,” she had said. He had often thought of that ambiguous promise while he was away from her.