Владимир Беляев - The Town By The Sea

If you do your duty as a doctor and save my friend, it will be good for you and it won't be bad either for your chemist brother who lives in Poland, in Pilsudski Street in the town of Rovno."

Even before Doctor Gutentag's story was over, Vukovich realized that he had done the right thing that day in issuing a warrant to search Pecheritsa's flat.

About five minutes after the doctor had finished his story, two groups of mounted security men rode out of headquarters.

One group led by Vukovich turned in the direction of the red-brick' building in Trinity Street.

Auntie Pasha, whom the security men from the second group found at the Education Department office, said that Pecheritsa had run into his office about five minutes ago. He had brought a small suit-case, put some papers in it out of the office safe, asked Auntie Pasha for a towel and told her that he had been summoned urgently to the border village of Chemirovtsy. Before leaving the building he had slipped into the wash-room where he had remained for two or three minutes.

Security Officer Dzhendzhuristy rang up at once from the education department and ordered a party of mounted security men to be sent after Pecheritsa to Chemirovtsy.

The hands of the station clock pointed to past seven when the security men arrived at the station. By that time the train taking me to Kharkov had already passed the first little station of Balin.

Meanwhile the group led by Vukovich surrounded the big house in Trinity Street.

Vukovich knew that Pecheritsa's flat had no back door but he also knew that a fire escape reaching from the ground to the roof passed near one of the bed-room windows. At the very moment when one of the security men walked up to the front door with a metal plate bearing the name "'Doctor Zenon Pecheritsa" and pulled the brass bell handle, Vukovich was cautiously climbing this narrow, slippery ladder.

As he had expected, no one opened the door. The security men knocked louder. Still no answer. There was a faint sound as someone tip-toed up to the door, moved the brass cover of the spy-hole and, having made sure who was knocking, went back into the flat. Then the security men decided to break the door down.

As he climbed the rickety ladder, Vukovich heard a man's angry voice coming from the open window:

"I tell you we must fight, Ksenia Antonovna!"

"Everything's finished!" the woman said.

"Ksenia Antonovna, you must believe me!" the man shouted.

"It's too late!" Pecheritsa's wife replied and a shot rang out in the room.

"Hysterical fool!" Pecheritsa's guest muttered, crawling to the window, but at that moment Vukovich leapt to him from the window-sill like a whirlwind.

Taken by surprise, the man crawling across the floor missed his aim and the bullet flew wide. Vukovich kicked the heavy Mauser pistol out of his hand and at that moment the door gave way under the blows of the security men.

At first the bandit denied that it was he who had intended to blow up Special Detachment Headquarters and its ammunition stores. But when Doctor Gutentag came to the prison hospital and removed the bullet from the bandit's leg, it turned out to be a bullet from a Webley Scott revolver.

It was with a revolver of this rather rare pattern that Polevoi had fired at the bandit on that memorable night when Bobir had made such an ass of himself.

At the second interrogation the bandit gradually began to confess, and soon it came out that he and Kozyr-Zirka, the notoriously ruthless ataman of a regiment of Petlura storm-troopers, were one and the same person.

In the year when the Pilsudski and Petlura men fled for ever from the Ukraine, it was on Kozyr-Zirka's orders that the cut-throats of the "Carefree Soul" regiment had slaughtered over half the innocent population of the hamlet of Ovruch, including the parents of one of our trainees, Monus Guzarchik. . . It was Kozyr-Zirka who was rumoured among the frightened inhabitants of the Ukrainian border villages to be either the Count of Belaya Tserkov or a runaway convict from Galicia... It was he, Kozyr-Zirka, who when surrounded by a partisan detachment in the village of Privorotye had murdered his orderly, a tall, dark fellow like himself, and, to hoodwink the partisans, thrust his own papers, signed by Petlura, into the pockets of the murdered man. The partisans had thought they had killed the real Kozyr-Zirka and he had managed to escape.

Vukovich conducted the investigation himself.

It turned out that Kozyr-Zirka was neither a count nor a runaway convict, but a very ordinary son of a priest from the town of Rovno.

Having run away from the Red Army to Poland after the unsuccessful alliance between Pilsudski and Petlura, Kozyr-Zirka spent a short time in a Polish concentration camp at Kalish. The camp was visited twice by a well-dressed man in civilian clothes, who wore a black Homburg hat and carried a heavy walking stick. He was lean and dark and spoke excellent Russian. Kozyr-Zirka, like many inhabitants of the part of Volyn that had once belonged to the Russian Empire, also spoke Russian. He and the visitor talked together for a long time, and Kozyr-Zirka became quite convinced that the visitor must be some important Russian whiteguard, one of those who had joined the notorious terrorist, and enemy of Soviet power, Boris Savinkov, in Poland.

Great was Kozyr-Zirka’s surprise when soon after these visits he was summoned before the camp commandant, the Pilsudski man Nalegcz-Bukojemski, who said to him: "Congratulations, ataman! You have found favour with Captain George Sidney Railey of the British Intelligence Service. Captain Railey is an old enemy of the Bolsheviks. He knows Russia as well as I know this camp and he was very pleased after his conversation with you. By permission of Marshal Pilsudski, Captain Railey is touring all the camps where Petlura troops have been interned. It is his mission to select the bravest and most experienced supporters of the independent Ukraine. At Captain Railey's personal request, I am granting you leave to go home to Rovno for a holiday. Have a rest and get your weight back. You will be found when you are needed. In the meantime you had better forget about our conversation."

Kozyr-Zirka had other things to think about besides getting his weight back on the free meals at his father's vicarage. Thanks to the dark Englishman, his days of imprisonment behind barbed wire were now over, and Kozyr-Zirka began to seek out the friends who had served with him under Petlura.

At that time, after the Red Army's defeat of Petlura, many ex-commanders of the Petlura forces found themselves in emigration. Some had run away to Czechoslovakia, others to Canada, others to Austria and Germany, but most of them were still skulking in Poland, particularly in the largest city of the Western Ukraine—Lvov. It was these men whom the former Austrian-paid Colonel of the Galician riflemen, Yevgen Konovalets, began to rope in and register in his secret lists. Konovalets was known in the Soviet Ukraine as the ruthless butcher of the workers of Kiev. He and his riflemen had suppressed the revolutionary uprising of the Arsenal workers, who had shown no desire to support what Petlura called "independence."

Finding it hard to seek out his old ataman friends by correspondence, Kozyr-Zirka decided to go himself to Lvov, which at that time was swarming with Petlura men and former "gunner-boys." At that time Konovalets was banding together those traitors of the Ukrainian people into his criminal UMO (Ukrainian Military Organization).

When the leaders of a secret counter-revolutionary organization admitted Kozyr-Zirka to their ranks, he did not tell them the real reason why he had got out of Kalish so quickly. Kozyr-Zirka had taken good heed of the camp commandant's advice to forget about their conversation and the dark Englishman's repeated visits to the camp. True, Kozyr-Zirka doubted whether he could be found and made to repay the favour he had received. Captain Railey, however, had taken good note of the bandit with the raven-black hair and dashing side-whiskers, and through his secret agents found Kozyr-Zirka even in Lvov.