Guy Adams - The Clown Service

a) Yalta, Crimean Coast, Ukraine, 1962

The man splayed by the side of the pool was dead.

Seated on the lawn, Olag Krishnin smoked a cigarette and watched as a pair of flies circled the wet head of the corpse. The insects danced in the light of the winter sun, a pale yellow fire that added glints to the thin, tousled strands of the dead man’s hair.

The grass of the lawn had been cut ruthlessly short. A fraction further and it would have revealed earth. It reminded Krishnin of the crew cut he had worn in the army. That fine stubble that tingled against the palm like furry static. It didn’t surprise Krishnin that a man like Andrei Bortnik would have taken such fastidious care over his grass (or rather ensured his staff did so). Bortnik had been a man who obsessed on detail. Not the sort of man to tolerate weeds within his garden, literally or metaphorically. That was, after all, why Olag had been forced to kill him.

‘You’ve gone too far,’ Bortnik had said in that wheezy, fat-choked voice of his. ‘I can’t cover for you any longer – even I have my orders.’

Krishnin had known this moment was coming. It had been inevitable as soon as he had joined the committee. Bortnik might be someone who could spend his whole life following orders. Krishnin was not. He had toed the line, given good service – as long as it had benefited him to do so. Now, in anticipation of being plucked from his position of authority, a weed in Bortnik’s flowerbed, Krishnin had reached up and choked the man, stilling the hand that had sought to remove him. It was survival, of course, but also an act of principle. The moment his superiors lost heart they relinquished their right to be his superiors.

‘We cannot do this,’ Bortnik had insisted, his voice suddenly fearful as he realised the danger he was in. ‘There is no honour in a victory like this – we cannot become monsters.’

‘Not monsters,’ Krishnin had replied, gripping the man’s neck, ‘ masters of monsters.’

Bortnik had been surprisingly difficult to kill. Krishnin had expected it to be quick but all men, even weak old men like Bortnik, fought for life when they recognised how close they were to losing it.

He had pushed Bortnik’s head down into the pool, his knee pressed hard between the man’s shoulder blades. The water had bubbled and frothed with Bortnik’s last frantic attempts to breathe. Krishnin had held him there longer than necessary, hypnotised by the slow circling of a leaf that was working its way across the surface of the pool. A thing at the mercy of wind and current. He saw something of himself in that leaf. It felt good to finally be free.

He finished his cigarette, stubbing it out in the grass – savouring this small act of vandalism – got to his feet, and began to walk towards the driveway.

Looking out of one of the upstairs windows of Bortnik’s house, Valentina Denisov, his general maid, thought she saw a man walking across the lawn. She had been startled at the time, knowing that her master had insisted he wasn’t to be disturbed all morning. She would have been even more startled had the angle from the window not prevented her from seeing her master’s corpse. It would be another two hours before the body was discovered. Moving closer to the window, perversely hopeful of a stranger on the property and the panic and anger that would cause, she was disappointed to see there was nobody there. She returned to the boredom of her cleaning.

Later, when the questioning began in earnest, Valentina decided not to mention thinking she had glimpsed someone. After all, it would only cause her trouble. Besides, it must have been a trick of the light: a man cannot just vanish.

b) Vienna, Austria, 1962

The journey between Ukraine and Austria had been leisurely. Krishnin knew that the murder of Bortnik would have set off a panic within the upper echelons of the KGB, but he wasn’t worried that the trail would lead to him. He had certain advantages, not least of which being that the majority of the committee were unaware he even existed. Bortnik would have kept the circle of those who knew of Krishnin tight, and those few privy to the knowledge would now be doing their best to cover up the fact. They would also be worried for their own lives, scuttling to their holiday homes, hiding behind locked doors. Much good it would have done them. If Krishnin wanted them dead, they would be.

But Krishnin had other plans and they took precedence.

He made his way down Schönlaterngasse, stopping not to look at the ornate street lantern that gave it its name but rather at the building opposite. An ancient myth held that in 1212 a baker’s servant had fought a basilisk there. The mythical serpent, said to be hatched by a cockerel from a snake’s egg, was believed so poisonous it would kill with no more than a glance. The servant had held a mirror up to the basilisk, turning its own poisonous gaze back on itself. Krishnin approved. Perhaps there was a metaphor there, he mused. After all, was he not about to turn his enemies on themselves?

He took a seat at a small coffee shop nearby and waited for his contact.

The man was a smuggler, American, but so totally corrupt that his politics had become meaningless. Krishnin disliked the man but was pragmatic enough to take what he needed from wherever he could find it.

‘It’s all there,’ the man said as he dropped a newspaper on the table between them, a buff envelope poking out from between its fold. ‘And my work speaks for itself. I can assure you nobody will bat an eye at any of it. I’m a professional.’

A professional. The use of the word rankled with Krishnin. Nonetheless he picked up the paper and unfolded it so that the ‘secreted’ envelope fell into his lap.

‘I don’t need reassurance,’ he said, pulling from the inside pocket of his coat a similarly-sized envelope of cash and folding it inside the newspaper. ‘If I didn’t consider you reliable, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

He handed the paper back, a false smile on his face, two men sharing a news story in an outdoor cafe.

‘I have a reputation,’ the American admitted, his smile genuine and somewhat arrogant.

‘Indeed,’ Krishnin agreed, finishing his coffee. ‘I hope that one day it gets you shot.’

c) Vienna International Airport, Schwechat, Austria, 1962

Krishnin couldn’t think how they had found him and it was that lack of knowledge that angered him most. He had grown so used to being in a dominant position that the sudden loss of authority seemed a savage insult. He wasn’t overly worried that they would catch him, but a little surprised they were even trying… One of Bortnik’s colleagues must have had more resolve than he had credited. Good for him. If Krishnin ever found out the name he would eliminate the problem in his usual way.

There were two officers waiting by the departure gate and three more milling around hoping to catch him before he got there. Krishnin followed one of them into the toilet, partly to gather intelligence, partly just to vent his anger.

Having slowly garrotted the man with the cistern chain, his legs wrapped around the man like a lover to stop his thrashing feet from making too much noise, Krishnin knew no more than he had five minutes earlier. No matter. Let them send whoever they liked – he would kill them all if need be.