Field of Mars (23 page)

Not good.

He looked out at the Gulf. The light was growing now into a dark mustard-coloured morning, washed in the sound of foghorns as the boats began their day. Across the mouth of the Neva were the big docks at Gutuevskaya, in the Narva district, and only a little further upriver an entrance where the mouth of the Fontanka met a canal that ran past the Yekaterinhof Park. There was a little island there, Podzorni it was named.

He tossed the cigarette stub over the railing and walked along the pier even further so that he was all the way around the corner of the cannery, with a view across to Podzorni, where the river was narrower.

To get to Galleyhaven they would have had to row their boat directly across and tie up to the pilings just below him. After it was all over, they would have re-crossed south to the Narva side. A carriage would have been waiting, they'd be home and celebrating right now, he thought. Drinking away the chill of it all.

He went back and pulled Kostya away from the group of gendarmes. They were standing there watching the tearful watchman as he slopped about trying to push the heavy casks through the icy muck to where they could reach over and haul them out. They were cursing and laughing at him; he was covered in sludge now, complaining that he had cut one of his hands which made it difficult to get a grip on the barrels.

‘Let's put a call into the police stations at Kolomenskaya two and Narva three, see if any of their constables saw three or four men tie up in a small boat, near the little island, there—'

‘There at the canal?'

‘Somewhere near Podzorni there, I think. Perhaps at Galerni where the canal enters the river, somewhere around there. They would have left the boat and taken a carriage. Someone might have noticed something in the early hours this morning.'

‘Yes, maybe,' Kostya said, and actually smiled, and headed out to find the nearest call box. Probably glad to get a chance to get away from the stench.

‘We're ready now, Pyotr.' Dima came up behind him.

‘Yes, fine.' He walked back to the barge where the casks were being lifted out on to the dock. The watchman was too weak to get out of the barge. He had collapsed at the edge and was methodically beating his head against the soggy wooden gunwale.

‘Take him, throw him in the water to clean him off, then carry him to the Vasilevskaya lock-up and hold him for questioning,' Ryzhkov told the gendarmes.

The casks were standing upright at the top of the pier now, and the men paused there waiting for his permission to open them. There was nothing to distinguish one from the other, but he picked one and one of the gendarmes set about knocking in the top and prying out the boards so they could get a look inside. The men lifted their lanterns higher.

All he could see at first were the feet.

Toes, cruelly bent back and squashed against the side of the wood; it looked all wrong and then he saw that the legs had been broken so that they could be wedged in.

‘More light . . .' he said and someone shone a torch down into the cask and he was able to see it was a man they'd pushed down there. Naked. Lavrik.

‘Christ . . .' he breathed. Lavrik's face peered up at him, one eye half-open staring up from the bottom of the barrel. Locked away like a genie in a bottle. He tried to make himself feel happy about it but instead all he felt was cheated, as if something good had been stolen from him in the night. The monster was dead, but he'd wanted it for himself, he realized. He had wanted him very, very badly.

‘Christ . . .' he heard himself say again. One of the gendarmes was staring at him. He stepped away so they could keep working.

The top of the second cask came off and they had done this one differently. A woman, her brown hair spread out across her face, a slash across the neck where they'd cut her throat. Still a lot of blood smeared across her torso. The cut had opened up wide, like an extra smile under her chin, when they'd bent her head over to hammer the lid down.

‘Is that his daughter?' Dima asked.

‘I don't know. Probably.' None of them had ever seen her before. Lavrik must have kept her in the house all the time. She was in her thirties now and still daddy's girl. They all stood around regarding the barrels for a little longer. The men were silent. There was very little to say and nowhere else to look.

‘Well . . .' He thought he'd make it easy on them. ‘Dima, have them get a wagon around and take them to the morgue at the Military Hospital. Maybe there's something down in there inside, so be careful.'

Back inside the cannery one of the gendarmes had found Lavrik's trunk behind the door, pushed back into the shadows. They had started to change clothes for some reason, the trunk was opened and clothing bulged out, then there had been an interruption and it had been pushed to one side and ignored. Beyond it, deeper in the shadows, a wide pool of blood had spread out beneath a locker.

Ryzhkov squatted beside the trunk and pulled the clothing out. Down underneath everything was a jewel case which had been emptied, and beneath that a wallet which the killers had missed. It had their passports and a packet of roubles. Beneath that was a stuffed envelope in which he discovered a thick wad of stock certificates.

‘My God . . .' said the young constable behind him. ‘It's a fortune in there, sir.'

‘By our standards a fortune indeed.' Ryzhkov took the wallet and the envelope, reminded the young gendarme not to let anyone open the locker or trample over the floor until the technician arrived, then went out and made sure that all the arrangements had been made.

Outside the horses were shifting from foot to foot, hungry, cold and ready to loose their harness.

‘I'll take it in myself,' he told Dima, and climbed into a carriage.

He told the driver to go all the way across to the mouth of the Fontanka where the St Petersburg police would already be looking for the boat, rejected the idea, and instead changed their route, driving slowly along the university embankment as a muddy yellow sun fought a losing battle against the fog that clung to the freezing surface of the river.

Did Lavrik love his daughter? Did he think that he would cash in his chips, pull a fast one and save her? How could someone do the kinds of things he'd done to Katya Lvova and then claim that it was love he felt for his daughter, that he cared for her, gave her presents, wished for grandchildren?

He half-expected to see angels descending from the snowy skies, the pavements splitting open and tongues of fire erupting to swallow the city. But the only indication that God was watching over Petersburg was the dull ringing of the church bells just as he turned on the Nicholas Bridge to let the irritated horses carry him over the Neva.

TWENTY

He didn't feel like much of a heroic investigator, not very much of a man, and that's the way they meant it to be.

They took him awkwardly, at the end of a long day, meeting him in the foyer of his building as he stumbled back home in a blizzard, the wind blowing raw out of the Gulf, the absolute of winter sweeping him along the street, all too eager for his warm bed. While it was happening he was thinking they were lucky because he was exhausted.

Still, they took him.

He knew they were amateurs by the way they talked. They had a man inside waiting, another behind him to make sure they could get him out of the door, one in the carriage to help pull him in. And the driver, of course, a big rascal named Jekes. But then—too quickly, he was inside the carriage with the two other men pinning him back into the seat, the hard barrel of a pistol in his side for emphasis. The one who'd been waiting inside was huge, taking up one side of the covered carriage; his name was Tomlinovich. They started along the embankment of the Obvodni Canal. If he tried to push his way out of the carriage door they'd either kill him or be able to drag him back in before anyone came to his aid.

‘Well?' he asked the big man across from him. They'd fallen silent. The carriage was so small their knees were knocking together.

‘Monsieur Ryzhkov?' Tomlinovich asked.

Yes, yes, of course, he thought. Who else are you planning to abduct tonight?

‘Please . . . just a short ride and a little conversation.'

A moment of panic seized him. They had turned off the Obvodni, along an almost deserted street that ran behind the race track. No one around. A fence closed him off from running into the back lanes. Sharp wooden poles that he would have to
try
to vault. Ahead of him was the high wall of a school dissolving into a white blur. Everything would be icy, equally slippery for all of them, but still . . . too far, he thought. Too far to run.

Amazingly they hadn't taken his knife, and he had the beginnings of a plan, to make a slash at the gunman, bull his way through the door, go after the horses and then . . . well, run through the snow, hide. Fool, he thought, fool.

Tomlinovich was a big man. Very big. Obese, dressed in the flamboyant style of an embassy functionary. His face puffy, the flesh exploding over the rim of his shirt collar.

Trying to get away was insane, crazy. But if they were going to kill him they could have just done it in his doorway. ‘All right,' he said.

‘Good.' Tomlinovich reached inside his coat and came out with a silver case.

‘You've got what you wanted. I'm here now,' Ryzhkov said firmly. The fear had made him angry. Angry that they would be toying with him in this way, angry that he'd let them surprise him with the phantom carriage.

Tomlinovich had his hands up, like a frightened actor in a film at the cinema, eyes wide as frying eggs. ‘You have my sincere apologies, sir.' The little man with the gun started laughing.

‘We're going to a meeting. Really, it won't be a problem. How long it takes is up to you, of course.' A bribe, Ryzhkov thought. The carriage, the expensive clothes. The amateur theatrics. A bribe. He nodded. Keep it going, he was thinking. But then Tomlinovich stopped, his expression changing, suddenly grown harder beneath the fat. Maybe he was peeved for some reason, as if somehow he was the one being inconvenienced, as if it was all Ryzhkov's fault.

And now Ryzhkov was realizing; too late, that they had taken him like amateurs and they were going to kill him that way too.

‘Shall I give it to him?' the little man with the pistol in his ribs asked.

And—he did go for his knife then, actually had his hand in his pocket before the little man pulled the trigger and everything went black.

Voices.

Voices blurring through his dream. Murmuring, laughing. Recollecting, admonishing. The first clear thought that made it through was ‘alive', and then he wondered if his dentist had taken his tooth out, and then he remembered that he'd already done all that.

‘Is he awake?'

Someone shook him.

‘Hey, are you awake?' Followed by a series of little slaps on his cheeks. He opened his eyes and everything was a silvery blur. Maybe I am dead, he thought. Maybe this is some kind of test to see if I get into paradise or not.

Something cold washed across his forehead, he smelled mint. There was a scraping from somewhere and he saw the bare branches of a tree brushing against an old cracked attic window. There were other voices from what he somehow knew was downstairs, a woman's squawking laugh, the clatter of crockery from a kitchen.

A tall, thin man hovered in the background. He had cadaverous cheeks only partially covered by dark side-whiskers and carried a bowl and a cloth in his hand.

‘Hey, he's awake now.'
The sound of his feet as he went down the stairs.

The branches scraped against the window again. He was on one of the islands, Ryzhkov decided, in some dacha out on Yelagin Island or Krestovsky. Out on the north side of the city surrounded by nature, out where the rich people spent their summers and watched the leaves change colour and the squirrels run about. In winter there was no one there. No one to hear, no one to witness. There were heavy footsteps on the stairs and Tomlinovich came in.

‘We'll save a lot of time if you follow instructions,' he said. ‘How is your thinking? Is your mind clear, eh?'

Ryzhkov looked up at him, a little insulted. Nodded. ‘I only ask because, well . . . unfortunately we had to use this.' Tomlinovich held up what looked like a fountain pen—an aluminium cylinder with a catch at one end. ‘It's a
morphia pistol
. Luckily the dose travelled through the cloth of your jacket, unluckily you seem to be quite susceptible to opiates,' he said, standing there with one hand in his pocket, rocking back and forth.

‘Now—you're going to tell us all about the baron, you're going to tell us all about the ones you work for, and you're going to fill us in on the entire petroleum scheme, yes?'

Ryzhkov sighed. ‘Fine, but look . . . I don't know—' he said. His voice was slurred and cracked like someone who was dying of thirst. He really didn't know what he had planned to say. Something witty to talk himself out of a bad situation. Petroleum? The best he could do was to stare up at the man for a long moment. ‘I don't know . . .' he repeated.

‘Now, you see, that is just what I mean.' Tomlinovich stepped over to the bed, gave him a quick kick to the ribs. Just a little warning that knocked the wind out of him and brought tears to his eyes.

‘So . . .' Ryzhkov said. His voice rasped. It sounded pathetic and weak, like a feverish child in the night.

‘So, Ryzhkov, you're going to talk to me, yes?'

‘There must be some mis—' he started.

‘Let's be
very
clear.' Tomlinovich was jabbing him in the chest with one blunt finger. A deep well of resignation began to overtake Ryzhkov. Maybe he could incite Tomlinovich, get him angry enough to explode, get it over with quickly. ‘From now on you're going to follow my instructions. You're going to be good and answer questions, eh? Good, we have an understanding.' He reached inside his jacket and took out a typewritten sheet of paper. ‘When did you first meet the baron?'