'Where is the toilet, please?' the young man asked. Though he spoke in Finnish, this time, instead of the word toaletti, Galakhov heard the Russian pronunciation, twalyet. He almost burst out laughing.
'Wait till you get home,' Galakhov said; then, when the young man's face appeared suitably pained, said, 'I believe the toilet is on the next floor.'
The young man could not quite disguise his satisfaction before he made his face expressionless, and said, 'Follow me, please.' He took Galakhov's suitcase, and walked away towards the glass doors to the car park. Galakhov, seeing his neck still red above the coat collar, even though cautious by nature, and careful of indulging his abiding sense of superiority, could not help but consider how easy the whole thing was going to be.
Vorontsyev had rubbed a small round clearness in the mist of the window, and was staring down into Pyatnitskaya Street. People on their way to work, huddled in heavy clothes, shunted against each other on the pavement six floors below. It was a bitter day, frost bright on the road, the trails of tyres black on its silver.
He had got up at six, washed and shaved, and eaten a good breakfast. The work, and drink, of the previous night had left him and he felt refreshed.
The faces were still on the wall — the diagram of the state on a second, and a huge map of the entire Soviet Union on a third, lapping down over the bureau. He was waiting for the duty officers of his team to arrive. When he briefed them, they would be taken entirely into his confidence. Then he would talk to Kapustin, and seek permission to go to the Finnish border, to discover what Vrubel had been doing.
He posed himself before the faces, and stared up at them. Old men, most of them. Men of distinguished loyalty to the Party, men about whom no questions had been asked, not even during the Kruschev regime. And yet, if they were guilty, it was precisely during that period that they would have been forming this Group 1917, working out its strategy.
He looked at General Ossipov. It was an older photograph than the ones he had studied in his office, and the man was in a light suit, and it was summer in Odessa. He knew the place, had holidayed there with Gorochenko and his wife, just before he began his studies at the Lenin University.
He did not allow himself to idle over the memory, though it was pleasant. Marya Ilyevna Gorochenko retained a special, perhaps sacred, place in his memory.
Vorontsyev smiled at the simplicity of his attitude — like so many other simplifications, or unthinking responses he had made over a lot of years — conforming, accepting, belonging; and yet he could not despise such a sleep of reason. They were good people, both of them. He had wept at her funeral, and many times the prick of tears had come to him when he thought of her. It might have been a luxury, but she had been his mother, childless and grateful for the opportunity; his own mother had died soon after the war, soon after the death of his real father. He remembered her as a faded, untidy, shabby woman. Something that hovered in corners, and did not go out — like a ghost, or something left over that no one wanted.
He skirted the procession of images, and focused again on Ossipov. Why the Far East? And the reference, he suddenly remembered, to Finland Station? Did that mean Finland itself, or Leningrad? Was it a reference to the return of Lenin to Russia, in the sealed train — a symbol of what the coup wished to do ideologically? Was Vrubel's attachment to the Finland border confusing him?
'You cunning old shit,' he said softly to the photograph, 'Where did you go, and who did you meet? And what for?'
He looked above the photograph, to another. Praporovich, commanding Group of Soviet Forces North, a strong man, old-style Communist; he had a blunt, violent language which expressed his hatred of the West, his commitment to the eventual, and military, spread of Communism. Who could be more loyal a servant of the State — on the surface?
Vorontsyev crossed to the chair at the bureau, and pulled out of the old briefcase the file on Praporovich. Then he moved a sheaf of papers from the armchair, and sat down, opening the buff folder on his knees. He had not been seized by a definite idea — merely by the logic of beginning at the top. The Marshal was the most senior man on the wall in front of him. He would require to be investigated first, as was his right, Vorontsyev thought with a smile.
Praporovich was a widower, with two sons, both of them in the army — Vorontsyev checked them immediately, shuffling through the loose papers until he found photostats of their army records. On was a Major in an Airborne Division, the other a Colonel in command of one small section of the northern missile chain — 'Firechain'. Little there. He went back to the old man, looking up once at the hard, square features appearing to regard him with contempt from the wall — a portrait of an old and terrible Tsar. He winked at the photograph, wondering why the Marshal could not smile even at a party following a large-scale military exercise in the DDR. Perhaps he was an habitual stoneface?
The Marshal rarely took holidays — he had a dacha outside Leningrad, and spent a great deal of his off-duty time there, or in his suite of rooms at the expensive Baltiskaya Hotel. He rarely entertained women at either residence, preferring his huge collection of gramophone records and his books — and his persistent hobby of wood-carving. Vorontsyev studied, briefly, pictures of two statuettes in polished wood, and seemed to touch the old man's private self. A boy and a girl — the girl on a small pony.
There were sheets of small prints supplementing the written records. They were less talismanic than the cartridges of slides he had watched of Ossipov, but he studied them carefully, noting the faces he did not know, the possible contacts — though he did not compare them with the supplementary sheets which explained their identities. Not at that moment. He was interested in the Marshal.
Praporovich's movements had been exhaustively documented. Military conferences at the highest level in Moscow, Leningrad and various Warsaw Pact capitals — Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw. Vorontsyev wondered for a moment whether there was sufficient freedom of movement…
But no. He could not be his own courier. He was present at the annual exercises of Group of Soviet Forces Germany — though not at the most recent winter exercises, which were the largest for five years — '1812'.
Vorontsyev felt chilled, as if a door had opened, but no light, only cold, flowed from it. He checked back, his fingers clumsy and gloved with haste. No — Praporovich had not attended every exercise over the past years — seven, eight, ten years; he checked off the references on the grubby photostat compiled by Leningrad SID. He usually attended the summer exercises had been on the 1968 exercise that had led to the intervention against the Dubcek regime — but he had attended two, four of the last seven winter exercises in the DDR. As part of the necessity for all senior Group Commanders to be aware of overall strategy. In case of illness, resignation, death — transfer was easy.
Why not?
Was his staff there?
Vorontsyev scribbled the query on a fresh page of his notepad. He would have to check. He wondered why Praporovich had not been at '1812'. And did it mean…?
He refused to countenance the idea that acceleration was taking place, that there was any vital reason why the Marshal had stayed at his headquarters in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, as if in answer to some subterranean explosion, his hands shivered with the groundshock. The solid structure of the investigation appeared on the point of subsidence, sliding into something horridly real.