The new room was small, windowless and in darkness save for a glimmer on one wall which revealed a narrow table and a bentwood chair. The table held a film camera fixed to a rostrum and a tape recorder. On the floor in the far corner were a projector and a tripod-mounted screen rolled up and stowed in a vertical position. The faint sheen of daylight came through a sheet of one-way glass set into the wall flanking the bedroom. ‘Fuck your mother,’ Bogdanov murmured. ‘It looks like Viktor was in the film business.’
They searched the room and found nothing else except a box-shaped case that might have held films or tapes but didn’t. A check of the camera magazine and the tape deck showed that both were empty, and the dismantled light-fitting revealed no more bugs. They returned to the main room and in silence smoked a cigarette.
Bogdanov stirred himself first. ‘Any theories as to what’s going on? I’ll fix a drink while you think that one out.’ He got up and busied himself among the remains of bottles in the cocktail cabinet, leaving Kirov to think his thoughts and flip through a couple of issues of Literaturnaya Gazeta. He studied Gusev’s notes, which were brief but frequent: I don’t understand — why this conclusion when the opposite could be true? — bullshit! — I don’t understand!! The latest numbers were without notes and appeared unread as if Viktor Gusev had given up his struggle to comprehend.
‘Well?’ Bogdanov handed over a glass of Ararat brandy. He took a sip of his own, crossed the room and tried the light switch against the fading day. ‘Well? What is it all about?’
‘I know why GRU investigated the Bulgarian factory,’ Kirov answered.
Bogdanov expressed no surprise, just a weary, ‘Go on, tell me.’
‘Someone thought that Yuri Andropov was murdered.’
‘Wonderful! This, I take it, explains why an antibiotics racketeer has a gut full of diamonds and a secret dacha complete with camera for taking dirty pictures. I can’t wait to hear it.’ He halted there then added in a regretful murmur, ‘Fuck them! Who cares what they do to each other? Just don’t tell me the details. It’s not our problem, boss, just something we bumped into in the dark. All we have is a little case of racketeering — nothing to make us stars, but enough to give us a glow of satisfaction in the evening. There’s no connection with the other thing.’
‘Maybe.’ Kirov realised that wasn’t enough for an answer.
They finished their drinks. Bogdanov volunteered another. He asked, ‘Did Grishin give you this story?’
‘He told me there was a rumour.’ No, not a rumour. Grishin had implied a more substantial basis, urged the point upon him and then withdrawn it. Like bait. Solve that one if you can. ‘He had something else to say. He told me how the Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring got its name.’
‘Why Jewish? He gave you the answer to that one?’ Bogdanov’s laughter suggested that this was the joke of the century. A belly laugh with ornaments of tears and coughing, another time and place you might have believed it. Instead it reverberated around the empty building and as abruptly died.
‘Do you remember Yakovlevitch,’ Kirov continued, ‘the surgeon who was allowed to leave for Israel?’
‘No — but if you say so.’
‘Yakovlevitch and some other Jewish doctors were going to be implicated in the antibiotics black market.’
‘Grishin told you that? Is there any truth in it?’
‘The story is true, but the plot was a fiction. Andropov set it up as a warning to the refuseniks. After his death Chernenko dropped the idea.’
‘And the connection? Are you telling me there’s a connection?’ Bogdanov pressed him, but now more circumspectly.
‘There’s no connection,’ Kirov answered. ‘It’s just a story.’
Andropov’s death, Yakovlevitch’s departure and the death of Viktor Gusev. Stories.
The rest of the search turned up nothing but further hints of Viktor Gusev’s ambiguous character and signs of the carefulness of the first searchers. The two men locked up the house and stepped out into the rain, which had blown in from the west and spattered from a dark sky onto the debris beneath the trees. Bogdanov pulled down his hat and took long ungainly strides across the soft ground, talking the while above the rainfall.
‘So who was here and did they find what they were looking for?’ He paused and added, ‘The diamonds — do you still have them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you filed a report on them or told Grishin?’
‘No.’
‘Why not, for God’s sake?’
‘Because there are people who want to know what happened to them. And as long as they keep looking for them we have a chance to find out who they are and the significance of the diamonds.’
Bogdanov stared up at the sky and made a comment about the weather. His glance fell down and wandered among the trees before returning to Kirov. ‘Get rid of them,’ he said. ‘Turn them in. If they’re discovered and you haven’t reported them…. You know what I mean. Don’t give Radek a case against you.’
‘Radek has nothing to do with this.’
Bogdanov shook his head. ‘Radek wants your scalp. He may be a shit, but he isn’t a fool. Get rid of the diamonds.’
When they reached the clearing where the car was parked, Kirov remembered the shack that lay along the other path and suggested they inspect it. They took the narrow path, weaving between the brambles and the dripping boughs until the cottage came into view, a paraffin lamp driving the twilight from the window. They halted there and heard a crack of a twig breaking somewhere in the trees, but that was all it was and nothing happened, just the cottage built of rough cut logs, earthed-up at the base of the walls, with a corrugated iron roof that was patched with tar paper. The rain drummed on the roof and ran off into puddles. A wood pile was stacked next to the shack and next to that was a privy and then a chicken run occupied by sodden hens. A loose pig paused from rooting in the birch mast and gave them a cold glittering stare.
They knocked on the door and it opened on shaky hinges. An old man stood in the doorway. He wore a shawl and a rabbit-skin hat with the flaps down and was smoking a pipe of pungent makhorka tobacco.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Friends, grandad,’ said Bogdanov. ‘Let’s just call us friends.’ He stuck his foot in the door.
The old man examined them indifferently. ‘All right, “friend”, you’d better come in.’ He stood back and let them enter a single room dimly visible in the smoky light of an oil lamp. A fug of tobacco and woodsmoke from an iron stove in the middle of the room made the air as thick and tangible as if it were nailed to the walls, and beneath this covering the place was densely furnished with an old man’s junk, of which a large part was a number of elaborately carved musical instruments and a collection of photographs in silver frames. The bed was a straw palliasse and a pile of newspapers. The rain made a rhythmic drumming on the roof.
‘Walking in the country, were you, comrades?’ The old man eyed their shoes slyly. ‘A right pair of farm-boys, I think.’
‘How did you guess, grandad?’ Bogdanov picked his way through the maze of the old man’s litter and peered through the window in the direction they had come from. ‘What do you say, boss, is there someone out there or not? No? Any opinion, grandad?’ Kirov had moved some papers from a stool and taken a seat. The cottager took a place opposite him, leaned forward and leered like an old sinner. ‘Good view,’ Bogdanov commented. ‘I say “good view”, grandad, you hear me? Yes?’ The old man spared him a brief glance of amused malevolence.