Владимир Беляев - The Town By The Sea

"Dear Mum,

"The doctor sold the bull to strangers, I'm taking back the deposit. Gogus has moved to another flat, God damn him. Find him yourself and have a business talk with chemist G.

"Your son, " Yurko."

Lying in the prison hospital until his wound healed, Kozyr-Zirka knew nothing of the capture of this beggar, who was in reality a messenger for a spy group working on Soviet territory. Kozyr-Zirka was also firmly convinced that Pecheritsa's wife, before putting a bullet through her head, had burnt all secret documents that might incriminate her husband.

Indeed, when the security men seized Kozyr-Zirka, Vukovich, who at once opened the brass door of the stove in Pecheritsa's study, discovered a heap of charred papers smoking in the grate. But before his sudden flight from the town Pecheritsa had apparently forgotten to warn his wife about something that was hidden in the left-hand drawer of their wardrobe. Or perhaps Ksenia Antonovna in her panic had forgotten about the drawer?

At the bottom of the drawer, which was full of clean linen marked with the initials K- P. and Z. P., Vukovich discovered a neatly-folded handkerchief.

It was very well ironed and embroidered at the edges with light-blue thread. Beside it, at the bottom of the drawer lay several other handkerchiefs of the same kind. To Vukovich, however, it seemed that this particular handkerchief was slightly different from the others. The material was the same and the embroidery was the same, but the handkerchief itself seemed a little thicker.

When Vukovich unfolded the handkerchief, he found that it contained a document printed on a fine piece of cambric.

"The bearer of this document, Cossack Lieutenant Zenon Pecheritsa has remained behind during the withdrawal of our troops to Galicia to perform work which is to the advantage of the sovereign and independent Ukraine. We request all military and civil institutions, when our army returns to the greater Ukraine, under no circumstances to accuse Zenon Pecheritsa of Bolshevism.

"Colonel Yevgen Konovalets, "Commander of the Galician Rifle Corps."

That was all. No further trace of Pecheritsa remained.

True, thanks to the message taken from the sham beggar, Vukovich was able to guess that Pecheritsa

and the "Gogus" who had changed his flat were one and the same person. '

My encounter with Pecheritsa in the train might help Vukovich to solve the other riddles.

The records concerning Pecheritsa that remained in the files of the District Education Department showed that he had been born in Kolomya, had served first in the legion of Galician riflemen, then in a detachment of the so-called "Ukrainian Galician Army." When a group of officers and men from this army had refused to return to Galicia, which was then under Pilsudski rule, Pecheritsa had remained with them in Proskurov, and then moved to Zhitomir.

The questionnaires, the testimony of his fellow-officers, the good references of organizations in which Pecheritsa had worked before coming to our town all tended to confirm this. But the forgotten fragment of cambric with its printed message and, above all, the personal signature of Yevgen Konovalets in indelible ink made Vukovich think otherwise.

Vukovich was well aware that Colonel Yevgen Konova-lets had been working ever since the First World War for German military intelligence and had been supplied with German marks. When he withdrew his men from the Ukraine, Konovalets had left behind quite a number of secret agents with instructions to conceal their true function by pretending to be revolutionaries and supporters of Soviet power. A few of them had even succeeded in attaining very high positions in the People's Commissariat of Education. Later on, in the thirties, these spies were unmasked:

Yevgen Konovalets did not give every agent such protective authorizations. One had to have served under this pro-Polish commander in more than one of his bloodthirsty campaigns through the Ukraine to win his trust and be given one of those strips of cambric.

People who had stored away these cambric strips for years in hope of using them one day had friends and helpers. There could be -no doubt that the fleeing Pecheritsa also had such friends. Otherwise he could never have discovered that Doctor Gutentag, having performed several urgent operations at the hospital, had gone straight to security headquarters. It was these friends and assistants of Pecheritsa’s who had sent the old mad-looking beggar to Major Florek in Poland. When he was questioned, this beggar simply muttered a lot of nonsense. Left alone in his cell, he suddenly started singing Cossack ballads and dancing the gopak in the middle of the night. He did everything he could to make people think he was mad.

Vukovich, however, waited patiently for the beggar to give up his pretence. Vukovich guessed that besides this beggar Pecheritsa's friends had sent yet another messenger , to Poland who had been the cause of the mysterious death of the chemist Tomash Gutentag in the town of Rovno.

It was obvious that some of Pecheritsa's associates had remained in our town. The most convenient way of tracing them, of course, would have been to enlist the aid of Pecheritsa himself. But Pecheritsa had "moved to another flat..."

All this was told to me by Nikita Kolomeyets that night, after we had been to district OGPU headquarters. Not everything, of course, that Nikita told me then had the same shape that I give it in-retelling his confused story today. There was much that Nikita could- still only guess at, and many of the details were supplied by his own suppositions, and I too, it must be confessed, have been helping him all these twenty years, investigating quite a number of black spots in the biographies of the priest's son from Rovno and of Doctor Zenon Pecheritsa, making inquiries in what is now Soviet Lvov to discover for sure whether everything really happened as we thought in those far-off days of our youth.

There is one thing I will confess. This world of secret war into which Nikita Kolomeyets had plunged me on that long-to-be-remembered night when we sat until dawn; on the rails of the cliff stairway seemed

to me very terrible and dangerous.

Until then I had been very simple-minded. I had never thought that among us there could be scoundrels who, like Pecheritsa, lived the crooked double life of spies. I just could not imagine that among those who rubbed shoulders with us every day there were slinking creatures who while pretending to be sincerely in favour of Soviet power were only awaiting its downfall and looking out all the time for a chance to stab us in the back. How great, how noble, and how dangerous is the work of the frontiermen, who, like Vukovich, at the risk of their lives, penetrate that dark terrible world where these crimes are plotted, and manage to thwart the enemy just when he is least expecting it!

And Nikita's story also made it clear to me how much the world capitalists and their agents hated us, Soviet people, and I realized that we must be on our guard against them.

Three days later, not long before the dinner-break, Kozakevich, our instructor, walked into the foundry. The weather was so warm - that he had been across Hospital Square to the office without a cap. He had even left his heavy metal-scorched tarpaulin jacket behind in the foundry.

The sleeves of his faded blue blouse were rolled up showing his big muscles.

"Mandzhura! A message of vital importance for you!" he said with a wink, handing me a folded slip of paper.

From the tone of his voice I concluded that Kozakevich was in a very good mood.

I took the note and read it.

It was from Petka Maremukha.

"Vasil, mind you come and see me at dinner-time today. Something important has happened.