For the Good of the State (36 page)

The echoes of Panin’s knocking died away into silence. But then there came an indeterminate sound from inside the house, part scraping, part slithering, followed by a footstep.

‘But first a moment of play-acting.’ Panin nodded to Sadowski again, who seemed to flatten even more against his wall, dead-faced.

The door opened slowly, first only a crack, then somewhat more.

‘Good morning, sir—’ The Russian’s habitually-drooping shoulders had squared, but his voice had stiffened and deepened even more unnaturally. ‘—I wish to speak to Mr Sizzeemeeack. And my name is
Smith
—Chief Detective Inspector, CID, Exmoor Division, West of England Police Authority—and I must
advise
you, sir, that I ’ave a warrant to search these premises, which are surrounded by my officers, acting under my orders.‘ Panin lifted one foot as he spoke, and placed it firmly in the opening of the door.

Audley sneezed again, as a kaleidoscope of bright unreal thoughts and images burst inside Tom’s brain:

Professor Nikolai Andrievich Panin’s foot-in-the-door (like an encyclopaedia salesman who didn’t intend to take ‘no’ for an answer) was as heavily caked in red Devon mud as his own: and the Russian’s stage-policeman’s voice, even down to its one carefully dropped ‘h’, was as unnatural as a two-pound note or a three-dollar bill: and maybe Audley’s sneeze hadn’t been a continuation of his self-pitying common cold, but the beginning of a shared hysteria—

But then Panin added his hand, placed flat against the door in support of his foot-in-the-gap, and his flattened Polish scum edged his shoulder along the wall, closer to the door, with the weapon in his hand aching to be used, not for peace-keeping but for argument-settling if the door started to close. And then it was no kaleidoscope, and the Smith and Wesson under Audley’s raincoat was huge and heavy, and it was no joke—

‘So we don’t want any trouble now, do we?’ Suddenly Panin’s voice also wasn’t funny, as he caught his breath: it was maybe a travesty of the falsely-friendly, deceptively matter-of-fact policeman’s voice in every tight corner, when the unarmed representative of The Law in all its majesty had to humour some mad bastard who was long past law and reason. But then Panin adjusted his position slightly, spreading the hand suddenly towards Audley while keeping his foot in the door. ‘And I have with me … ’ The hand passed Audley ‘ … Sir Thomas Arkenshaw, of the Home Office—’ The hand came back from Tom to Audley ‘—and also Dr David Audley … who wish to talk with Mr Sizzeemeeack … So, if you would be so good as to inform ’im of our presence … then that would be to our mutual advantage,
sir—
‘

Tom struggled against the weight of the Smith and Wesson and his sense of unreality again, knowing that he would nevermore be able to address Jaggard, or anyone else, with such old-fashioned deference: after Panin, with this poor damned anonymous murderous fool, no one could ever be ‘
Sir
’ again!

But …
it was working, it was working
: the door was opening, and Panin was moving into it—and … and even Sadowski was dropping the kissing cousin back into the holster inside his coat—

‘Excuse me, David—’ He pushed past Audley in Panin’s wake, out of the way, ahead of the unwinding Major, too ‘—Minder always comes first—sorry!’

A last breath of rain-sodden wind hit him again, just as he entered the hall:
one door dead-ahead, with half a lavatory-pedestal in view, glimpsed between Panin and his victim; closed doors each side, left and right, with a small table on the left and an old-fashioned hat-and-coat rack on the right, hung with coats; coats under which two cheap, well-worn suitcases and what looked like a golfing bag were inadequately
concealed—they had been the source of that scrape-and-slither he had heard before the door was opened, piled ready for departure in the centre of the hall, he could even see the tramline marks they had left on the dirty linoleum on the floor—

But Szymiac’s man was moving again—crabwise and hesitantly towards one of the doors on the left now, where previously he had backed up unwillingly before the advance of the bogus Chief Detective Inspector Smith of the probably non-existent Exmoor Division; and the man’s smooth unhealthy face was as obsequiously blank as Major Sadowski’s—maybe that was their joint stock-in-trade expression for survival on both sides of the law in their native land.

‘
No
! You stay where you are!’ Now that they were inside, Panin’s hold on Chief Detective Smith’s voice was already slipping: where it should have been a bark it came out as a biting snap. ‘Zzz—’ But he just managed to catch Sadowski’s name before it completed the slip ‘—Major!’

Sadowski brushed Tom’s shoulder, as he must also have brushed Audley’s in getting ahead of him after Tom, also in the exercise of his minder’s prerogative.

‘Watch this man.’ Panin didn’t take his eyes off this Son of the Eagle. ‘He’s in here, is he? Mr Sizzeemeeack?’

Tom was half-aware of Sadowski on his right, somewhat entangled with the hat-stand-coat-rack and the pile of luggage, but was equally unwilling to take his eyes off the Son of the Eagle, who merely nodded confirmation, as voiceless and obedient as Sadowski himself.

‘Good!’ Panin caught Tom’s eye now, and nodded, almost as though he knew what was under Audley’s trailing raincoat, as he raised his hand and rapped sharply on the door with his knuckles.

Tom stared, transfixed in the first fraction of a second by the action and the sound; and then, in the next fraction, by Panin’s hand as it grasped the door-knob; and then, in the last and almost simultaneous instant of time, by the unwilling acceptance of the thought that Panin was as brave as Audley, when it came to the crunch of actually risking his skin in the front line—

‘Mr Sizzeemeeack—?’ Panin turned the knob. ‘I am Chief Defective Inspector Smith—and I am coming in—do you hear me?’

The thought amended itself slightly as Panin threw open the door: the knock and the challenge were a calculated risk, that the Poles weren’t about to challenge the British police, whatever they might want to do to General Gennadiy Zarubin; to which might be added the Russian’s confidence that Szymiac was the brains, not the brawn of the operation—the brawn which even now was covered by Major Sadowski’s pale eyes behind them. But then the memory of the Russian’s last nod, which had deliberately appealed to him, activated his own reflexes as Panin stepped over the threshold into the room.

‘Mr Sizzeemeeack?’ Panin confirmed his suspicion by taking his second step to one side, after the first one had been forward, to give him something like a clear field of fire.

Again, Tom had the sense of photographing everything, in that split-second.

Insanely, even as he saw the man himself, the room summed itself up for him: it had come down in the world, just as the man himself must have done to be here inside it, far from home and in a foreign land and doing a dirty patriotic job—

‘
Shim-she-ack
!’ Panin snapped the name accurately in Polish.

(In its better days, the room had had pictures on the wall, and other furniture which had left empty ghost-marks behind on the wallpaper; while the man himself was also a shadow, more like the men outside, Sadowski and his charge, but unreal compared with the menace of Panin and Audley.)

‘You know why I am here, don’t you?’ snapped Panin, utterly himself now, in his accentless English. ‘I represent—’

The deafening explosion outside the room which cut him off seemed, in its own fraction of time, more than the gun-shot it was: it was almost a physical concussion of shocked surprise inside Tom, wrong-footing him mentally even as the second shot followed it almost instantaneously.

Ever afterwards he saw the next seconds in slow motion, fragmented frame by frame:
the man Szymiac is staring at Panin, with his mouth open: the mouth is framing a word, but the ringing echoes from the hall, together with a splintering-crashing-thumping all-in-one sound blot out the word; Panin himself is throwing his shoulder against Audley, away from the door on the very edge of his vision: the man Szymiac is also moving, so fast even in slow motion as to be a blur, clawing as he moves inside his buttoned-up jacket; and the sound and jerk of his own Smith and Wesson are overtaken by another and much louder explosion in the doorway behind him; and, finally and somehow always strangely in the slow motion progression, the man Szymiac stops in his sideways movement and is thrown backwards, slammed against the wall by his own and Sadowski’s bullets
.

But the slow motion itself ceased then, as he whirled towards the doorway, flinging aside Audley’s raincoat to face Sadowski and then freezing as the Major slowly lowered his revolver, two-handed, until it pointed at the floor—at, in fact, a single coat-button with a long thread attached to it which lay midway between them on the threadbare carpet.

Tom sniffed, and smelt burnt cloth; which perplexed him for only a moment, as his eye caught the edge of the tangled wreckage of Audley’s coat, through which he had fired; which made him think, with a touch of hysteria,
Mrs Audley won’t like that—poor old David’ll never be able to explain all those burnholes as a carelessly thrown away cigar butt, because none of us smokes—the best thing he can do is say he lost the whole coat somewhere—

‘You … bloody …
bastard
,’ breathed Audley. ‘You …
bastard
!’

Panin looked away, to where the man Szymiac lay tumbled awkwardly against the wall, in an inhumanly uncomfortable position and quite without dignity, reminding Tom of Beirut scenes he had been working to forget. Then Panin was looking at Sadowski, who returned the look without the least sign of emotion, let alone apology, before he turned away back into the hall.

‘You bastard.’ On his third repetition Audley sounded almost conversational. ‘You never intended to talk to them—did you?’

Panin faced him again. ‘A most unfortunate accident, Dr Audley. Major Sadowski was obviously forced to protect himself. And—’ He flicked a glance at Tom ‘—and Sir Thomas reacted in the same manner, of course. With the most commendable speed too, if I may say so.’ No trace of irony: the Russian’s tone was as bland as his face was expressionless. ‘But that, of course, was an inevitable sequel to what had gone before.’

‘Yes—of course.’ Audley blew his nose on his bedraggled handkerchief. ‘Do put that damned thing away, Tom.’

Tom slid the Smith and Wesson back into Its holster.

Audley blew his nose again. ‘Or, if not a sequel to a most unfortunate accident, the second part of a most fortunate and deliberate double murder?’

Panin actually produced a frown. ‘A … double murder, Dr Audley?’

‘That’s right: a double murder to which—as you always intended—I have just been a witness. Or practically an accomplice … although not even you could have expected such luck in advance. So just a witness.’ Audley glanced again at Szymiac’s body, and then moved so that he faced away from it. ‘But now, presumably, I am cast as the undertaker, with no questions asked? And the First Gravedigger too, maybe?
With
Sir Thomas as my assistant? Is that my next role? Do let me know, Professor.’

Panin started to shrug, but then stopped. ‘I cannot accept your alternative suggestion, Dr Audley. But … as to what you should do now, I would not presume to advise you what to do, in your own country.’

‘Ah … my own country!’ Audley accepted the scoring point without any good loser’s grace. ‘You’re giving it back to me now, are you?’

‘You misunderstand me—’

‘No I bloody don’t! But do go on—?’

Panin coughed. ‘I was going to say … my Government would certainly not appreciate publicity in this unfortunate matter—’

‘I’ll bet they wouldn’t!’ With Audley, an invitation to ‘go on’ evidently had only a five seconds’ life. ‘And maybe you wouldn’t either? Or was this massacre cleared from the start?’ An edge of bitterness entered the old man’s voice. ‘Without Basil Cole I find it a little difficult to put two-and-two together—as I’m sure you foresaw I might … But I shall pick up all the pieces in the end, never fear!’ He grinned falsely. ‘So what are you offering in exchange for amnesty and oblivion, then?’

Panin seemed taken aback. ‘What am I offering? My good David, if
I
am in some slight difficulty
perhaps
…
then
you
are in some much more considerable difficulty
undoubtedly
, I would have thought!’ He cocked his head slightly at Audley. ‘A shared secret—’

‘—Won’t do!’ Audley shook his head quickly. ‘You are mistaking the nature of our positions again:
my
difficulty may—or may not—be more considerable than yours. But I don’t give a bugger about that: before they can sack me I’ll quit, and warm my feet on my investments, and to hell with them! But
your
difficulty … what makes you think I’m going to sweep this under the carpet? Do you think you can just walk away from this?’

Unlike Audley, Tom didn’t have his back completely to the thing that had been a surprised human being a few minutes before, but which was even now surrendering its body-heat for the last time. And that thought ran cold up and down his spine as he heard the two of them bargaining in the presence of the poor damned thing … Not that the poor damned thing was objecting.

Once again Panin seemed off-put to the point of almost-frowning. ‘You cannot be threatening me, surely?’

‘Threatening you?’ Audley paid the Russian back in his own coin. ‘Would I do that—?’ But as he cut himself off he caught the look of distaste on Tom’s face. ‘What is it, Tom?’

There was no way of expressing the truth of what he felt. So he had to lie. ‘I was thinking that I ought to make a phone-call.’ Must do better than that. ‘In case someone heard those shots.’

Audley made a derisive sound. ‘No one hears anything these days. Or, if they do, they turn up the television, so as they won’t hear anything else — ’ Then he focused on Tom. ‘But if you want to phone—’