“Considering your apparent belief that another English officer was involved, you seem remarkably relaxed,” suggested Hamilton.
“That, above all else, is what we need to discuss,” said Patrick Pacey, the political officer.
“Perhaps we’d get a more comprehensive picture if we let Charlie talk without so much interruption,” proposed the director-general.
“A comprehensive picture would be very welcomed, if it’s at all possible,” said Williams, overstressing the condescension.
Fuck you, like you want so badly to fuck me, thought Charlie. While he sat, waiting, he decided that although he scarcely needed any preparation, the previous night’s never-happened encounter with the director-general had been more than a useful rehearsal, sifting in his mind the gold nuggets to keep back from the obscuring silt. Reminded by the same conversation, Charlie decided that so many organizations, agencies and people
were
involved that there was absolutely no risk of his inadvertently even hinting at his very special
source. Abruptly, disconcertingly, Charlie was seized by the thought that he’d missed something, failed to realize or recognize something that he should have. The men at the table began to shift impatiently—Jeremy Simpson very obviously looking questioningly at the political officer—and Charlie tried to push the unsettling impression aside but only partially succeeded. He had to force the intended ridicule. “I thought I’d wait to make sure the finance director had finished.”
Gerald Williams’s face flooded red. Before the man could speak, Dean said tightly, “I think we’re all waiting,” and Charlie acknowledged he’d gone too far. He still thought, Fuck it.
Then he thought bullshit baffles brains and set out his encapsulation in what appeared great detail, beginning chronologically, from the reindeer herder’s discovery of the bodies. He went through the first and second autopsies, itemizing what had—and had not—been found in the grave and on the bodies. He gave a lot of time to the entrapping press conference—conscious of Gerald Williams’s smirk at the admission of being tricked—to illustrate the animosity between Yakutskaya and Russia. He talked of Gulag 98 being a special prison, although keeping back his first nugget, the names of the fifteen German prisoners who had been there in 1945. Neither did he say anything about his full discovery from the Document Center in Berlin. And he didn’t disclose the name of the dead American as George Timpson. With their art-connected background the presence of Raisa Belous and Simon Norrington had in some way to be linked to looted Nazi art treasure, a suggestion Charlie offered with the reminder that Raisa had belonged to the specially formed Russian Trophy Brigade that matched and at times exceeded the Nazis in Moscow’s indiscriminate art rape of Europe. The injuries to the skeleton in the Berlin grave proved, Charlie insisted, that the man had been killed to provide the identity for Simon Norrington, from dog tags and personal items stripped at Yakutsk and put on the Berlin body: the face of the victim had been destroyed beyond recognition, all teeth smashed and no finger ends—and therefore no possible fingerprints—left.
“Killed to order?” demanded Jeremy Simpson, the prescient lawyer. “Are you suggesting Norrington was killed to order? A far-reaching, carefully calculated conspiracy?”
“It fits,” asserted Charlie, unworried by the obvious disbelief from everyone in the room, even shared maybe by Sir Rupert himself. What concerned Charlie more was the still persistent, intrusive feeling of having overlooked something!
“Stuff and nonsense!” sneered Williams, who never swore. Addressing the lawyer, Williams said, “Is there anything we’ve been told this morning that you’d be prepared to argue in a court and expect to be taken seriously?”
“I’d like better proof,” conceded Simpson, uncomfortable at being Charlie’s critic instead of his defender. Pedantically he said, “Your main premise that there was another Englishman at the murder scene is the apparent finding in the grave of a button from a British officer’s battle-dress uniform, as well as a torn-out label and British-caliber bullet? But we don’t definitely know about the button; that’s based on a remark the Yakutsk pathologist
thinks
he overheard the Russian forensic scientist make when the man was using his laboratory facilities?”
“Yes,” said Charlie, accepting it to be his weakest evasion but with no way of telling them how he knew the button to exist.
“What on earth does a Yakutsk medical examiner know about an English officer’s battle dress or its fastenings?” demanded Hamilton.
“Absolutely nothing!” snatched Charlie. “Which is why he couldn’t have misheard or imagined the remark! Moscow knew it was an apparent British officer before sending their forensic expert. Who would, obviously, have been chosen for knowledge beyond his particular discipline. He
would
have known what a British uniform—and its buttons—looked like!” On second thought, maybe it wasn’t as weak as it had initially sounded. The rehearsal really had been useful.
“I think the suggestion is absurd,” rejected Williams. “Does the report of the Berlin pathologist state that the body in Norrington’s grave was murdered?” This really was going far better than he could have hoped, Williams thought. The man was being made to look ridiculous.
“No,” admitted Charlie. “That would be impossible, after so long.”
“So it’s purely your interpretation!” sneered Williams.
“The body was chosen to be that of Simon Norrington—had the
man’s identity planted on it,” Charlie pointed out. If Gerald Williams hadn’t existed, he would have had to be invented; the man’s unthinking determination to oppose and argue with everything was taking all their minds from any awkward questions. Most importantly Charlie was able so far to avoid volunteering anything new.
“You think it could have been the Russians who tampered with the visitors’ records at the cemetery?” asked Patrick Pacey.
It could, even, have been possible, Charlie accepted, but he had to be careful with the reply. “The Russians took Berlin—totally controlled it, initially—and were responsible, I suppose, for the burials during those early days. But the Four Powers were in control when the Allied cemetery was created.” If there’d been colored ribbons and a stake tall enough, he could have led everyone a merry dance around the maypole. He was aware of the director-general regarding him quizzically.
“I don’t consider there’s anything to support the idea of another British officer being involved in this,” insisted the political officer, siding with Williams. “I expected a lot more from this meeting.”
“So did I,” said Hamilton.
“In fact,” said Williams, recognizing his support, “I think you should go back to Moscow as soon as possible, pick up whatever crumbs drop from the table of others and leave us to reach far more sensible and acceptable conclusions than you’re offering.”
Charlie gazed unspeaking at the fat man for several seconds, aware at last what had been nagging him, the feeling at once relief more than apprehension. Quietly, almost humbly, he said, “There are some more inquiries I want to make here first.”
“Which I’ve approved,” came in the director-general quickly, ahead of any opposing argument. “There’s certainly the need to speak again to Sir Matthew Norrington.”
“Isn’t the more immediate urgency finding out what the FBI in Moscow wants, as well as what this latest Russian declaration is all about?” demanded Hamilton.
Charlie was almost sad at the adjournment, so well did he consider the encounter to have been going, but it gave him time fully to consider Gerald Williams’s slip. The assertion to Sir Rupert Dean the previous night that Williams’s participation was entirely financial was unarguable. How, then, could Williams have known that Miriam
Bell had been in contact with Richard Cartright unless he, in turn, had been in direct touch with the SIS officer in Moscow? Cartright’s communication route was through his own, separate department. Which in turn, according to regulations, should have advised the director-general—as the Foreign Office had told the political officer—not the finance director. So Gerald Williams was talking, unofficially, to Richard Cartright. Who in Moscow had formed some relationship with Natalia’s sister. What silly men, Charlie thought. What silly, silly men.
The connection, from a side office off the director-general’s suite, was immediate. Miriam said, “You don’t write, you don’t phone, you don’t send flowers … ?”
Forced cool, judged Charlie. “You called?”
“You didn’t, before you left.”
“It was a rush.”
“You still in London?”
Keep the pot bubbling, decided Charlie. “People aren’t happy.” Maintaining the pretense, he said, “Particularly when I’m here and Moscow’s issuing enigmatic statements.”
“It’s something to do with Tsarskoe Selo is all I know. I don’t know how it fits. If it fits at all, although I suppose it’s got to, somehow. Lestov wants to know when you’re getting back.”
Charlie frowned, not just at the immediately volunteered information—which he knew from Natalia to be accurate—but more at the tone of Miriam’s voice. “What’s the matter?”
“Problems with Washington. I could do with your being back here: talk through some stuff. When
are
you getting back?”
“A few things to sort out here first. You want to talk now?”
“Later. But not too much later. And you watch your back, you hear?”
“You think I need to?” asked Charlie, seriously.
“Yeah, I think you need to. Maybe we both do.”
“You think this new Tsarskoe Selo stuff is important?” Charlie pushed on.
“Lestov says it’ll take a few days to sort out.”
There was his excuse for not immediately returning, Charlie recognized. Still more, possibly. “You called the embassy twice?”
“Thought we had a deal. Wondered what happened to it.”
Ignoring her implied question, he said, “You spoke to Cartright?”
“My call got redirected. Anything wrong?”
“Not at all,” assured Charlie, who hadn’t initiated such an arrangement. “Obvious person to backstop.”
“There really are things to talk about when you get back.” Now that she was working to her own, different agenda there was no reason why she shouldn’t tell Charlie of the conversation with Kenton Peters, although she wouldn’t throw it away. She wouldn’t offer too quickly what she’d gotten from the World Jewish Congress, either. She had a lot of things to trade: to buy insurance with.
By the time Charlie got back to the conference room, the coffee was cold. They didn’t bother to reassemble for the result of his phone call.
“It seems very much like the blind leading the blind,” said Williams.
But who’ll be seeing more clearly by the time it’s all over? wondered Charlie.
Richard Cartright wasn’t happy with the way things had evolved. It was, for all intents and purposes, a combined operation that initially and on the face of it had made quite acceptable his talking as he had with Gerald Williams. But he wasn’t sure any longer. From the sheer restriction of anything and everything he was begrudgingly being allowed to know by his own department—against their constant and unremitting demands for any scrap from him—it had become increasingly obvious this was a very important assignment indeed for someone on his first tour of duty and that it was anything but the combined operation he’d first imagined it to be.
And now he was trapped. On the one hand he’d already cooperated too much with someone from another department suddenly to seek authorization for doing so from his own controllers, which too late he now realized he should have done from the start. On the other, and by the same measure, he didn’t see how he could abruptly refuse, not knowing how much power or influence Gerald Williams possessed.
“You’re not saying a lot,” complained Irena. The man she believed to be mafia was in the restaurant again and if the evening didn’t pick up soon, she was considering changing partners.
“Sorry. Things on my mind. Seen Natalia lately?”
Irena shrugged. “We had a row.”
“So you didn’t know Charlie was back in London?”
“Permanently?”
“Just a discussion recall, as far as I know.”
“Probably banking his profits,” suggested Irena. “Not a bank I’d trust in this city.”
Cartright regretted most of all telling Williams of Charlie Muffin boasting of currency speculation. “I can’t think you’re right about that.”
“You imagine he could afford that apartment any other way?”
It was difficult, acknowledged Cartright, although if Charlie Muffin was doing something as bloody silly as that, it did justify his cooperation with the man’s finance controller. It was a total mess and he desperately wanted to be out of it.
After driving parallel to it for what seemed forever, Charlie decided that the redbricked perimeter of Sir Matthew Norrington’s Kingsclere estate must have been modeled on the Great Wall of China although probably went on for much longer. The gate he finally located opened noiselessly to his identifying himself at the security voice box and closed just as quickly behind him. The wall was lined inside by trees and there were more meticulously cultivated on either side of the paved drive that ribboned away ahead of him. He could not see the house. Through the trees to his left there was a herd of disinterested, unafraid deer. He thought there were some white ones but wasn’t sure. To his right, sheep grazed. Far beyond them, too far away to distinguish man from machine, a figure rode a disappearing tractor over the brow of a hill tufted with more trees. Would this have been the scene of perfect, safe tranquillity that Simon Norrington thought about kneeling in front of a grenade-made grave on the outskirts of Yakutsk, waiting for a pistol shot?
Not suspecting its length, Charlie had not timed how long it took to circumnavigate the outer wall. It was a full five minutes before the house came into view, a huge square pile—Georgian, Charlie guessed—with creeper-clad walls and a flagpole on the central turret for the proudly flying red cross on white pennant, the whole thing a monument to the permanence of the English landed class.
Sir Matthew Norrington waited by one of three parked Range Rovers, white-haired, tweed-suited and brogued. The spectacles were horn-rimmed. As he got out of the rented car, Charlie decided it was impossible to decide between his or the other man’s whose suit was the more comfortably shapeless.
Norrington said at once, “Glad to see you. I want to understand what this is all about.” The voice was firm, like the handshake.
“I don’t fully understand myself, but I’ll do my best,” promised Charlie.
“But you are definitely in charge of the investigation? That’s what Sir Rupert said on the phone.” There was an impatience in the question.
“Yes,” said Charlie. I wish, he thought.
The house into which the elderly man led him was as comfortably lived in as the suit and Charlie decided that perhaps it wasn’t a monument to anything after all. The cavernous flagstoned entrance hall was lined with oil paintings, which continued along a paneled corridor. Aware of Charlie’s interest, Norrington said, “The Holbein and the Reynolds are ancestral, but a lot of the more modern collection was Simon’s choice. It’s thought to be quite remarkable.”
The door at which Norrington stopped was halfway along the hall, from the far end of which—or maybe from another room—there was the sound of people. A dog barked, very briefly. The library into which Norrington took Charlie was more neatly arranged than Sir Rupert Dean’s but at the same time more obviously occupied. There were more framed oils, men in ermine and robes, bejeweled women and velvet-dressed children with ringlets and spaniel pets, but there was an obvious working desk dominating the window looking out over the rolling grounds. Charlie was immediately aware of a lot of photographs on its top and even more, practically overcrowding, on side tables at either end of the huge, inglenooked fireplace. He recognized a lot of Simon Norrington, two in the uniform the man had
been wearing in the Yakutsk ice tomb. Another had him in graduation gown with a man Charlie assumed to be his father, who’d looked remarkably similar to Sir Matthew Norrington now. There was a photograph of a teenage Matthew smiling up toward Simon in visible bigger brother admiration. The chairs, also by the fireplace, were leather, which creaked when they sat.
Norrington said, “Tell me what this is all about.” It was the voice of a man accustomed to being obeyed.
Charlie left out all his supposition and suspicions and anything about a second English officer, so it only took minutes.
“I’d expected more,” the dissatisfied baronet said, at once, with a frown.
“I wish there were more,” apologized Charlie, meaning it.
“They were planned killings? Of my brother and the man in his grave in Berlin?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Why him?”
“I don’t yet know how or why, but I believe art is the most obvious factor: something to do with its looting. But not that by itself. There’s a lot more.”
“Simon despised the Nazis, Rosenberg’s lot, for what they did to art. And the Russians’ Trophy Brigades. Judged one as bad as the other. He knew it would be impossible to reassemble the European art heritage, no matter how hard he and others like him tried.” The man stopped, pointedly. “You imagine you’ll ever find out who killed him?”
Charlie hesitated. “Who committed the actual murders, probably not, not after fifty years. They would have been functionaries.” Which was true, he realized. It had been a Russian bullet that killed Simon Norrington.
“What about the people who ordered it?”
“That’s who I’m trying to find. If I do, we’ll know why.”
Norrington stirred in his chair, which creaked again. “What are your chances?”
A lie wouldn’t help and Charlie didn’t want to slip sideways into his theories and guesses, either. “I’d like them to be better. I’d appreciate a lot of your time.”
Norrington shrugged. “As much as you need.” He got up. “I drink gin.”
“Whiskey.”
The old man returned from a separate side table with their drinks, settled noisily and said, “So?”
“You were, what, sixteen when it happened?” Charlie spoke looking at the young Matthew gazing up at his elder brother.
“Just seventeen, at the war’s end. Felt cheated. Was an officer cadet at Eton, all ready to go. Wanted to go even more when Simon was killed; thought it had been in action then, of course. Imagined I’d find the actual person who did it.” The man snorted humorlessly. “Some irony about that now, isn’t there?”
“Let’s hope not,” said Charlie. “You can remember everything about the time? Not simply the death but immediately before? And afterwards?”
“All of it.”
Everything from the family, recalled Charlie, remembering the Berlin conversation with the military attaché. Charlie indicated the photographs of Simon Norrington on the table closest to him and said, “He was—is—obviously deeply mourned?”
“My father was devastated. We all were, naturally. But my father took it dreadfully. The war was over, for God’s sake!”
Charlie thought it was too much to hope, but he hoped, just the same.
“How
did you learn?”
The older man frowned. “Letter. Official notification. June third.”
That was encouraging, thought Charlie. “There were some personal belongings returned?”
“Arrived much later, from his unit: cigarette lighter—it matched a case my father gave Simon when he graduated—his wallet. Family ring. There was a personal letter of regret, too, of course. From his commanding officer.”
“And then there was the notification of the burial?” coaxed Charlie.
There was another snorted, empty laugh. “Of the wrong man.”
“But you visited the grave?”
“Once, with my father. He was annoyed that we hadn’t been asked about the body: that it had been already buried. We’ve got our own chapel and vault here, in the grounds. But there was a dedication
service in Berlin and afterwards we decided to leave Simon … we thought it was Simon … where he was.”
“How many times did you go?”
“Just the once with my father, for the service. It was an official affair, for a lot of families with relatives there.”
Charlie was immediately alert to the qualification. “Was there any sort of registration at the official ceremony?”
“Not then.”
“But?”
“I went again, by myself, on the first supposed anniversary. My father was ill by then, couldn’t travel. There was some form-filling nonsense that time.”
Charlie realized he’d drifted away from the directions in which he’d been heading but decided to finish this now. “How many other times did you go: need to fill in the visitor’s form?”
“That was the only occasion,” said Norrington. “Father had a commemorative plaque put into the chapel. We could mourn well enough here.”
Which almost brought him back on track, Charlie recognized. “Who else from the family, apart from you, visited the grave you thought was Simon’s?”
“No one.” The man frowned. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m trying to build up as complete a picture as I can,” Charlie avoided, not wanting to enter still-unexplored territory. Quickly he said, “You mourned here?”
“Yes.”
Charlie indicated the picture-crowded tables and desk again. “You kept a lot of photographs?”
“Yes?” There was a defensive sharpness in the questioning reply.
“What about other things? Did you keep the notification of Simon’s death—the personal things that were returned?”
“I told you my father was devastated. In the first two or three years it was almost a shrine. It worried me.”
Sometimes it worked to hope against hope, Charlie decided. “Do you still have it all?”
“Yes. Father kept everything. So I did, too.”
Don’t rush, Charlie warned himself. It still might be another blind alley; this was going far better than he’d expected and there still
might be more Norrington could help with. And there were the names from Berlin. “Later, when we’ve talked some more, could I see it all?”
Norrington hesitated. “Could it help you find the people you’re looking for?”
“It’s my best chance so far,” replied Charlie, honestly.
“Some of the letters are personal.”
“Letters!”
“I told you, Father kept a lot of stuff. Letters that Simon wrote when he got posted abroad. And before.”
Now it was Charlie who hesitated, and when he spoke he did so slowly, not wanting to lose the chance. “Sir Matthew, I have what could be leads to whoever murdered your brother. But I don’t know how to follow them. How, in fact, to take this investigation very much further. What you have, of your brother’s, might show me.”
“Then you must see it all,” agreed Norrington, at once. “Now?”
“Let’s talk a little more,” said Charlie. There had to be something in what was promised: by the sheer law of averages and the way his luck was running, there had to be
something
that took him forward! Which made waiting a minute—a second!—close to impossibly difficult, but he kept to the determination not to hurry. Get it all, he reminded himself: an inch at a time, a step at a time.
“What else can I tell you?” questioned the baronet. He got up to go to the drinks tray.
Charlie shook his head against the gestured invitation. “It was big jump, wasn’t it, from Free French liaison at the War Office to a special art-looting unit?”
Norrington frowned on his way back to his chair. “You don’t know anything at all about Simon, do you?”
He didn’t and it made this encounter too long overdue, Charlie conceded, although refusing completely to blame his personal situation in Moscow. There had been reason enough to remain there as long as he had. “The Ministry of Defense can’t find any records about your brother.”
Norrington’s smile was slow, an expression of belated understanding. “He didn’t tell me that.”
It came close to Charlie’s breath being taken away by a deluge of
fittingly iced water. “Who didn’t tell you what, sir?”
Norrington got up again, went to his desk and took the small rectangle of pasteboard from a top drawer. “Burbage, Lionel Burbage. Defense Ministry. Said there was a
confusion
about the records, which was why he wanted what I had.”
The iced-water feeling stayed with Charlie. “Did he take them?”
“Asked to, but I wouldn’t let him, like I’m not going to let you. Allowed him to read them, as you can. That’s all.”
Charlie began to feel warm again, not just at the reassurance but at his determination not to hurry. “When was this?”
“Four days ago.”
He’d met Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Jackson, the military attaché, in Berlin five days ago. It fit the urgency of the Ministry of Defense panic. “Did you make your brother’s letter available to him?”
“Didn’t come into the conversation. He asked specifically about the official War Office communications and that’s all he saw. That’s why I asked you when you got here if you were in charge of the investigation, although Sir Rupert had already told me you were when he telephoned.”
“What did Burbage tell you?”
“That he was.”
“I
am,”
insisted Charlie. “It’s been a problem from the beginning, too many departments, getting in each other’s way.”
Norrington nodded in further understanding. “Burbage asked me to tell him if anyone else approached me about Simon.”
“Did you tell him I was coming?”
Norrington shook his head. “I didn’t know you were, then. Decided to wait. See you first. Hear what you had to say.”