‘Just before you resigned, there was an investigation at Kuntsevo.’
Nod — nod. Orlov reached over to slip a scrap of potato to the dog.
‘A team of GRU investigators visited the clinic and interrogated all the personnel. The leader was called Heltai — yes?’
Nod — nod.
‘I’m sorry to ask about it —’ Kirov said without knowing why.
‘It’s OK, Pyotr Andreevitch.’
‘But I need to know. That’s why I’ve come here.’
‘Sure — why not — it’s OK. I don’t care any more. I used to, but now I don’t. I miss Moscow a little maybe, some of the things you can’t get here, but not much. Hey, did you bring the ham?’
‘It’s in my bag.’
‘Let’s have a piece.’
Kirov fought to retrieve his bag from the floor. The raccoon dog perked up at the smell of meat. Orlov passed a clasp-knife and Kirov cut off a chunk which the three shared between them. Orlov chewed slowly, dreamily, and drove on.
‘How did it go — the investigation?’ Kirov resumed. He phrased the question sympathetically as if he were asking about the other man’s sick mother.
Orlov smiled and said with mild enthusiasm, ‘You should have been there.’
‘I should?’
‘Uh huh. The day Heltai arrived — all the clinic security staff, the guards, the KGB house-chief and his men — all in a line like schoolboys — “yes sir, no sir” to this Heltai, and slipping into his office to tell tales. You should have been there.’
‘Tales — you said telling tales. What sort of tales?’
‘This and that. Maybe you haven’t been on the end of a security drive. Everything comes out. If it’s only a petty crime it’s safest to confess first and not wait for the questions.’
‘Except that Heltai wasn’t looking for gossip. He had a purpose. What was it?’
‘Who knows? Andropov was dead. That was enough cause for an investigation. We’d seen the same thing before when Brezhnev died. No one was too concerned. Andropov died from natural causes.’
‘Did he? Is that what Heltai thought?’
Orlov shrugged. He struggled with the truck as it slid on the compacted snow. ‘You couldn’t tell what Heltai thought,’ he answered. That didn’t help. He tried to expand, tried to help the stranger sitting next to him. ‘He was angry. Andropov was dead and you could feel the anger as though he was supposed to live for ever.’ Nod — nod. ‘Yes, he was dead, so someone had to be guilty of something.’
‘Heltai treated it as if it were a murder enquiry?’
‘Yes — no. It wasn’t like that. It was — like the difference didn’t matter. We were all guilty. Administration, security, doctors, pharmacists, nurses, cleaning staff — Heltai and his men went tearing into us. They split the departments up and interrogated us separately so that we couldn’t compare stories. But afterwards we found out that they’d taken the same line with everybody: we were all personally responsible. If you were a doctor they accused you of a slip of the knife or a wrong diagnosis. If you were a theatre sister, you’d run the place like a pig sty and allowed infection to creep in. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’
‘And you?’
‘Me? I kept a sloppy inventory; I used out-of-date drugs; I dealt on the black market. There was no truth to any of it, but who cared? We were all in the same boat. Do you see what I’m getting at? If Heltai was running a murder enquiry, where was the theory?’
Where indeed? Kirov turned away and watched the road. The raccoon dog looked up, licked its chops and nudged him with its muzzle for more food. There was no theory. Instead there was a fear, a sense of shock and of panic. Something had happened. Something had been learned. And then panic. Kirov stroked the dog behind its ears and looked distractedly out of the window at the frozen lake and the trees, thinking: Neville Lucas would understand. This was the Englishman’s terrain, formless and treacherous, deep in drifts of fact and illusion. You could stick your hand out of the window and touch mystery; and it would feel like snow.
He tried some names out, looking for cues to fit Orlov’s story into the competing versions of events. Viktor Gusev — Nadia Mazurova — William Craig — the jeweller Ostrowsky — the unknown Zagranichny who appeared masked and naked in a pornographic film. Orlov recognised none of them. He was naively puzzled at the idea that these people he never knew were somehow bound up with what had happened to him. He had never heard of the Great Jewish Antibiotics Ring and the name amused him — why Jewish? Was that what all of this was about — a black market in pharmaceutical drugs? Despite Heltai’s questions, the thought hadn’t occurred to him. He had assumed it to be something else.
‘I thought — you know — it’s all happened before!’
‘Heltai said that? He told you this wasn’t the first time?’
‘No. It was — an impression. Despite all the questions, they didn’t really know what had happened. But they were frightened, that was the point. As if something had gone on in the past and they were thinking: is this the same? And they didn’t know, and it scared them. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought: has Andropov been poisoned? Is that what they want to know?’
‘They were asking you about poison?’
‘About contaminated drugs. Other people they asked different things — to keep us guessing, maybe. I knew only my part and it came back to that: had Andropov been poisoned?’
Orlov let his explanation fall there. His manner was flat, strangely indifferent to it. He kept his eyes fixed on the road, which appeared to be going nowhere. The truck continued to rock and bump. The cab lulled the senses with warm air. The raccoon dog crooned as it was stroked.
Kirov focused on the dog. He asked a few questions about it and Orlov gave some story about raccoon dogs being native to eastern Asia and Japan and their being introduced to western Russia for their fur, which in the event proved useless. He talked about other things, about ham and capercaillie and had Moscow changed recently so you would notice, and in the same tone he continued: ‘I wondered — after it was all over and I came here — I wondered was there anything to it all? Had GRU and Heltai been chasing their tails? After all there hadn’t been any murder.’
‘Hadn’t there?’
‘Of course not. We were all alive. What better proof could you get?’
‘What did you do?’
‘What could I do? I couldn’t ask Heltai, could I? I talked to people — wrote to people. I wanted to find other cases of deaths by contaminated drugs. I wasn’t thinking about murder, about poisoning. But maybe there was something to learn, something we were doing wrong. I’m a pharmacist and I wanted to know whether there was a problem connected with the drugs.’
Kirov looked up from the dog. ‘And was there?’
‘There were deaths,’ Orlov said. ‘Not many — perhaps half a dozen in the two years before Andropov died. Not much of a problem, eh?’
‘No.’
‘No —’ thoughtfully. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘But?’
‘It was the names. They were all officials — nobody really important, Party chiefs from out in the republics, a couple of economists from the ministries. But the point was: they shouldn’t have been. The deaths weren’t random enough. There was a pattern. I have the names and I found out who they were and what the connection was.’
‘What was the connection?’ Kirov asked.
‘They were all Andropov’s men.’