Russian Roulette (4 page)

Crossing the square, he plunged down a narrow street lined with tall grey warehouses. It was on a slope and at the bottom he glimpsed open water.

A large truck was manoeuvring out of a gateway and he had to stop while it got into the narrow street.

As he stood waiting, a raincoated figure fifty yards

behind him stepped nimbly into a doorway.

The truck grumbled its way down the alley and Simon carried on to the main road at the bottom, which ran along the water's edge. The rain started to come down heavily again. He pulled up his jacket collar in a useless effort and hurried along the deserted road towards the bridge, now dimly seen through the sweeping rain. A few cars swished by and then he was alone – so he thought.

The road had no proper sea wall like the main quay, just a muddy slope, on which were a few beached boats and some small repair yards. The rain began to come down in torrents and he looked for somewhere to shelter. The water was dripping from his eyebrows, half-blinding him, but he could see a crude corrugated iron boat shelter a few yards off the road.

He hurried to it across the sodden grass and dived in thankfully. A wooden fishing boat was propped up inside but no one was in it. The rain beat a deafening tattoo on the tin roof and he had no way of hearing the cautious footsteps squelching up behind him.

He stood with his back to the open end of the shed, idly looking at the boat.

There was a sudden sucking of rubber soles in the mud as the intruder leapt, but Simon had no time to turn.

Fingers closed like a vice around his neck and nails dug into his windpipe. He almost died there and then, out of sheer terror, but clung to consciousness long enough to realize that someone was killing him.

His vision went red, then black – before he collapsed in a head-bursting climax of asphyxia.

Kyrill Pokrovsky, the Chief Purser, and First Officer Yutkevich waited restlessly at the head of the gangway.

The purser looked at his wristwatch about twice every minute, while the other leaned over the rail to peer endlessly through the drizzle at the roadway behind the quayside warehouse.

‘Ten minutes to sailing time!' fretted Yutkevich. He put his head down over the ropes of the gangway platform and called down to a uniformed Finnish dock official, who stood on the wharf below.

‘Any news of them?'

The Finn shrugged and waved towards the office set in the end of the warehouse.

‘They try the hospitals now!' he shouted.

A telephone tinkled inside the hull of the
Yuri Dolgorukiy
and the First Officer stepped inside the oval steel door to answer it.

‘Yutkevich –
da
,
tovarishch
²
captain, we have tried that … yes, telephoned twice … yes, captain.'

He hung the instrument up on the wall of the carpeted foyer and stood staring for a moment at the oil painting of a medieval horseman from whom the ship took its name. His mind was on the captain … he was thinking that he, Yutkevich, should have been giving the orders.

Twenty years with the Morflot fleet and still only a First Officer, while a dozen younger men had gone to the top over him. He snorted and put the bitterness behind him for a moment to concentrate on the problems of the present. He walked back on to the top of the gangway. ‘Blast all British tourists!' he growled to Pokrovsky, ‘Especially those who don't come back when they should.'

Unlike the purser, he found it a continual strain to be polite to Western tourists.

The ship was due to sail from Helsinki dead on nineteen hundred hours and all passengers were supposed to be aboard one hour before this. Today, most of them had returned early because of the rain, but two had failed to show up – Mr Simon Smith and Mrs Elizabeth Treasure.

The news had spread rapidly through the passengers in the usual manner of all happenings aboard ship and a line of curious faces peered over the rails.

After a few moments, Yutkevich gave a final glance at his watch, then craned his neck upwards at the midshipman who controlled the winch that pulled up the gangway. ‘Stand by. We sail in three minutes, whether they come or not!'

He turned to Pokrovsky, still standing alongside him. ‘The comrade captain says we sail on schedule. If these idiots want to lose the rest of their holiday, then they're welcome. No doubt they can raise the price of another ticket from their speculations.'

The purser said nothing. The other man was a dry, humourless fellow but, as he was the ship's political representative, it did no one any good to antagonise him. His rigid dialectics, together with his bitterness at being repeatedly being passed over for promotion, had soured him beyond redemption.

The purser was jerked out of his ruminations by the sound of heavy boots rattling on the wharf. A junior immigration officer ran up to the Finnish official on the edge of the quay. They spoke rapidly together, then the older one hurried up the ramp to the Russian officers. He spoke no Russian and they no Finnish, so, as often happened, English rather incongruously became the lingua franca.

‘Telephone from one of the city police stations – they have these English people there. The woman is not sick, but something has happened to the man Smith. They are bringing them to the ship now.'

Yutkevich jumped to the telephone to call the bridge, while Pokrovsky tried to find out more information. ‘What's wrong with this man – if he has some serious disease, we cannot have him back on board.'

The Finn shrugged. ‘I do not know – I think he was picked from the water.'

To save him further talk, a blaring ‘hee-haw' of a motor siren sounded in the distance and within seconds, a cream Volvo ambulance rushed in through the gates alongside the warehouse. It pulled up near the gangway and under the avid eyes of the drama-starved passengers, two attendants got out and opened up the doors at the back.

A pale Elizabeth Treasure was helped down first, to stand by while the ambulance men expertly slid out a stretcher. On it was the even paler faced Simon Smith, muffled up to the chin with a grey blanket.

Before the men could start taking the stretcher up the gangway, there was a commotion on the platform and the captain of the
Yuri
strode out.

He was something of a mystery figure to the tourists; hardly any had set eyes on him before. Fairly young, tall and good-looking, he had a serious set to his jaw that explained how he got the command of seven million roubles-worth of new ship, whilst older men like Yutkevich remained First Officers.

‘Stop those men,' he rapped out in Russian. Yutkevich ran down the gangway at the double. On political matters, he might be able to tell the captain a thing or two, but, when it came to the running of the ship, if the Old Man said ‘Jump!', everyone jumped. The stretcher was slid back into the Volvo and everyone on the quayside stood and waited. Then the more familiar figure of the ship's doctor appeared and together with Yutkevich, went down to the ambulance.

The surgeon climbed into the back, while the First Officer had an animated conversation with Liz Treasure.

After crouching over the stretcher for a moment or two, the doctor came out and climbed back to the gangway platform where the captain had stood impassively all the while.

There was another rapid discussion, then the captain vanished into the ship. The doctor waved a beckoning hand at the quayside and the stretcher was pulled out again. A slow procession climbed the gangway to the accompaniment of a long blast on the ship's siren.

Ten minutes later, the
Yuri Dolgorukiy
was starting to thread her way between the islands lying off Helsinki harbour. By that time, Simon Smith was bedded down in the sickbay of the vessel. Elizabeth Treasure was having another interview with the doctor and first officer – it was necessary to find out what had happened, for entry in the ship's log, explained Yutkevich.

She sat in the purser's room behind the counter in the ship's foyer to tell her story. Her normal haughty veneer was badly cracked and she sat nervously twisting her handkerchief as she spoke.

‘I was supposed to have met Mr Smith on the main quay in Helsinki at two thirty – I felt unwell, and only decided to go much later – so as not to disappoint him,' she added with a trace of her usual condescension.

‘He wasn't there and, as it began to rain heavily again, I started back. As I came over that little bridge …' she fluttered a hand vaguely in the direction of Finland, ‘… I saw a little crowd gathered and naturally went to look. Under the bridge supports, a couple of men were pulling something out of the water – it was a man's body. I thought he had drowned. They started to give him artificial respiration when they got him to the bank, then began shouting – he was obviously alive. I went a little nearer and was shocked to find that it was Simon … Mr Smith!'

Yutkevich looked at her large brown eyes, the jet-black lashes looking almost stark against the pallor of her face, which even make-up could not disguise.

‘Did anyone tell you how he came to be in the water?'

‘No one seemed to speak English, until a policeman came up. He spoke it well and sent someone to phone for an ambulance, but a police van came along first and they put him in that.'

‘What about Mr. Smith – did he recover quickly?'

‘Oh yes – he suddenly coughed and struggled to sit up – he could hardly speak, though – still can't, in fact.'

‘He has said nothing about what happened?'

‘No – not to me. The policeman told me that his head had been caught on one of the bridge supports at water level, holding his chin above water – that saved him from being drowned.'

Yutkevich wrote everything down in a notebook and then she was courteously led back to her cabin by a stewardess who offered to stay with her if she was needed.

The two officers made their way to the captain's cabin, where the ship's doctor was already waiting. He had just come from examining Simon Smith in the sickbay.

After a short, very serious conference, the radio officer was sent for and he soon was hurrying back to his transmitter, clutching an urgent message for Leningrad Marine Radio.

The captain, Pokrovsky, and Yutkevich then made their way as unobtrusively as possible to cabin forty-five. For the third time, his belongings were searched, but this time in a tidy, methodical manner. All his cases were opened, the drawers and cupboards checked in an amateur, but efficient way.

Pokrovsky removed the mattress from the vacant upper bunk and Yutkevich started on the one below, while the captain watched.

‘Ahhh!' … a triumphant bellow came from the politically minded First Officer. He had found proof indeed of the rascally intentions of the capitalist infiltrators!

The others pushed forward to look as he dragged the mattress further off the bunk. There, nestling against the bulkhead, was a small black automatic pistol.

Ten minutes later, the radio was rattling out another urgent signal to Leningrad Marine.

²
Comrade

Chapter Three

Detective Captain Alexei Pudovkin shrank deeper into the armchair and glared balefully at his stockinged feet. He concentrated on a small hole developing over his left big toe and, using this as a Yoga focus, tried hard to blot out his immediate surroundings.

It was useless. He had already tried putting his fingers in his ears, but the sound still came through. He had even used a trick remembered from his childhood –making a deep humming noise and holding his nose to force the sound up to his ears. This might have been proof against midnight house noises fifty years ago in Minsk, but as a defence against Darya's shrill nagging, it was a miserable failure.

She came to the door of the living room now, wiping her reddened hands on her apron as if practising manual strangulation.

‘… and why is it that you work later than Savitsky almost every night, eh?
He
can get home to take his wife to the stadium or the cinema a couple of times a week … you're senior to him, but you have to stay at that old Petrovka all hours!'

Alexei had given up God to join the Party, but now he found great relief in a muttered blasphemy.

Darya Pudovkina vanished back into her kitchen, to bang pots around with needless violence. Alexei sighed and groped a hand over the arm of the chair, feeling for his bottle of beer. As he poured the remains into his glass, he thought wistfully of the glorious decade before his second marriage.

A rapid rise from superfluous detective officer to captain in the Moscow Militia and the freedom of bachelorhood – or more precisely, widowerhood – were a delight to the memory.

Now all he had was Darya and the weariness of advancing age. Even the police force seemed monotonous these days – he wondered what had happened to all his old enthusiasm and ambitions. He would never rise to major now – even crime and its detection seemed dull – or was it just the creeping mental paralysis of approaching senility?

He drank some more beer and tried to drown the distant tirade from the kitchen with reminiscences … that murder in Sokolniki Park, that was a good one. The bomb scare in the Byelorusskiy Voczal railway station … and oh, that year's secondment to Hungary in fifty-eight, that was the high spot.

His wife's voice crashed into his daydreams like a tank hitting a brick wall. A rolled-up string bag struck him on the side of the head.

‘Here, take that and get off your backside down to the store!'

Alexei hauled himself to his feet, swearing, but softly enough not to be heard.

‘… and leave those socks for me to mend tonight. What will all the other wives think when they hear that their husband's Division Captain goes around like a gypsy!'

He finished his beer, shuffled his feet into his shoes and pulled on his blue uniform jacket.

Darya appeared in the doorway like a puppet on strings. ‘Get a bottle of sour cream and some nice sweet wine – you know my sister likes it! Last time she was here you deliberately got that sour Kazakh stuff to annoy me …so mind you get Georgian tonight!'