Владимир Беляев - The Town By The Sea

In the summer of 1925, arriving one day in Lvov, Kozyr-Zirka stopped at the People's Hotel.

Scarcely had he taken his bath arid dried his stiff blue-black hair, when a porter knocked at the door and said that someone was asking for 'the gentleman from Rovno" on the telephone. A woman's voice asked him to come at once to the neighbouring Hotel Imperiale where an important and intimate matter awaited his attention. Very intrigued to think that anyone should have been able to find him so quickly in Lvov, 'Kozyr-Zirka got dressed, performed a hasty toilet and went, as the unknown woman had suggested, to the Hotel Imperiale, a favourite stopping-place for merchants from the out-of-the-way townships of Galicia.

He was very surprised when on knocking at the appointed door a loud man's voice told him to enter. As soon as Kozyr-Zirka crossed the threshold, an immaculately dressed Pilsudski officer rose to meet him.

This was Major Zygmunt Florek, a veteran officer of Polish military intelligence, who was working in Lvov simultaneously for Marshal Pilsudski and a foreign intelligence service.

"And so we have found you, my dear ataman!" said the major. "Forgive me for asking you to call on me. I am rather well known in this town and if I had paid you a visit rather a lot of people would have got to know about it. Your organization has been accused often enough already of being in league with the Polish authorities."

Taken aback by the major's first words, Kozyr-Zirka was even more surprised when Florek told him that Captain Railey sent him personal greetings and wished him success in his first and rather dangerous mission.

Major Florek told Kozyr-Zirka that governments all over the world were preparing for war with the Soviet Union,. Anxious to convince the priest's son from Rovno that this' was so, Florek produced from his bag a recent copy of an English newspaper and translated part of an article which declared that Bolshevism would be smashed that year, and that Russia would return to the old life and open her frontiers "to those who wish to work there."

"And she will open them to you too, my dear ataman!" Florek said. "Do you know who wrote that? Henry Detterding, the biggest oil manufacturer in the world. He has already sacrificed millions of rubles in gold to crush Bolshevism and he'll give as much again to see it accomplished. You can trust what he says."

Having offered Kozyr-Zirka a fine position in the Ukraine when Soviet power was crushed, Florek asked him to carry out an important task.

Major Florek instructed Kozyr-Zirka to cross over, to the Soviet side and blow up Special Detachment Headquarters in our town, and all its stores. Major Florek was speaking the truth when he told Kozyr-Zirka that war with the Soviet Union was imminent. Egged on by foreign imperialists, Pilsudski's generals were preparing to make war on the Soviet Union that year. Their hired agents assassinated the Communist Pyotr Voykov, Soviet plenipotentiary in Poland, on the platform of a Warsaw station. The Polish general staff began massing troops on the Soviet frontier. Bombs were thrown into the Party club in Leningrad.

Major Zygmunt Florek offered Kozyr-Zirka a handsome reward in cash from himself and from

Captain Railey if the headquarters in Kishinev Street was blown up. "The whole world will hear the roar of that explosion and your name will go down in the annals of history, my dear ataman!" said Florek in farewell, giving him a list of addresses and contacts for use on Soviet territory.

Kozyr-Zirka crossed the border at a place he knew well. Lieutenant Lipinsky himself, commander of the Rovno "frontier-defence corps," saw him off as far as Zbruch and wished him luck when they parted...

"Write it all down," Kozyr-Zirka said to Vukovich at the interrogation. "The game's up. I've nothing to lose now." Kozyr-Zirka made no bones about telling Vukovich his whole life-story, joking cynically about the many blunders he had made and recalling his crimes with a sneering grin. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, tapping them with his long swarthy fingers and drawing deep, as if he felt every cigarette might be his last. The cardboard holders, scarred with the marks of his sharp teeth, he tossed carelessly into an enamel spitting-bowl.

"What's the point of my hiding anything from you, gentlemen?" Kozyr-Zirka repeated at the interrogations.

"You've got my heart on a plate in front of you. Why should I keep back one rotten little murder or raid I've done. It's all the same to me. You know yourselves I won't be getting any more dollars or pounds. If your frontier guards have shot my chief, that Englishman Sidney Railey, somewhere up near the Finnish frontier, what's the use of my trying to diddle you! The world can come to an end when I'm gone, for all I care. Believe me, I'm confessing to you here, as before God himself on judgement day!"

But Vukovich realized that, although Kozyr-Zirka was confessing to crimes that the OGPU knew nothing about, he was really making a last bid to get his revenge on the Soviets by leaving his friends at liberty.

Vukovich was certain that when Major Florek sent Kozyr-Zirka across the frontier he must have given the bandit at least a few addresses. Without them the bandit would have been quite helpless.

At the interrogation the bandit flatly denied that it was Pecheritsa who had helped him to find his way on to the roof of the shed at headquarters.

"I did it all myself," Kozyr-Zirka insisted. "I took a few bricks out of the wall and nosed around a bit to see how things stood in the yard. We're lone wolves of the top class, you know, and we always work alone. That's why our skin is worth more. If everything had come off as I had planned it, I'd be having a good time in Paris by now, and even my dear old Dad wouldn't know where I got all the money from."

The only offence Pecheritsa had committed against Soviet power, according to Kozyr-Zirka, was that he, had taken pity on a man who was bleeding to death, given him shelter, and called a doctor.

"I had never set eyes on Pecheritsa before," Kozyr-Zirka insisted. "If you ask me, he's a completely loyal Soviet citizen. The only thing is he's a bit soft-hearted, I grant you that. I'm very sorry I got him into such a mess."

According to Nikita Kolomeyets, who told me the whole story, Kozyr-Zirka was very put out when Vukovich called in Polevoi and told the bandit it was our director who had winged him in the attic.

"Well, I'd never have thought it!" the bandit confessed. "I thought it was a trap you, security men, had laid for me. Shot by a civilian! Why, it's ridiculous! I'll be ashamed till the end of my days!"

"You haven't many more days left!" Polevoi remarked, stung by the bandit's words. "You're going to answer for your sins!"

Kozyr-Zirka looked savage for a moment, then recovered himself and, smiling, continued to testify in his former cynical manner, as if neither Polevoi nor Kolomeyets were present.

The day after Kozyr-Zirka's arrest someone made an attempt on Doctor Gutentag's life.

Coming home from an evening at the theatre with his daughter, the doctor switched on the light and went to the window to close the shutters. A shot rang out from the bushes in the garden and a bullet, piercing the window-pane about an inch from Gutentag's head, crashed into an antique Chinese vase standing on the shelf behind him.

The assassin got away, but this shot told Vukovich that there must be someone else in town connected with the people who had sent Kozyr-Zirka.

A little later Vukovich learnt from a peasant refugee who had fled from the Western Ukraine that at about that time the chemist Tomash Gutentag had been murdered by unknown bandits in the town of Rovno. The murderers had shot him in his shop and stolen much of the medicine.

On the night of the unsuccessful attempt on Doctor Gutentag's life, frontier guards at a remote post in the village of Medvezhye Ushko, twenty versts from our town, detained a half-witted old beggar, who had tried to slip away to Poland. In the collar of his lice-ridden shirt the guards found a rolled slip of paper containing the following code message,