The girls, made fearful by his blatant sexuality, jumped up, collected their belongings and ran towards the Croisette.
He taunted them as they ran. 'I've something bigger if you want. Big big,' he shouted.
Then he turned back to his task, to watch the German group, at the last table before the jetty. He could hear them laughing, enjoying their champagne.
With some hundred metres to go, he pulled the thin steel tube, some seven inches long and no thicker than a finger, from the bag he carried round his waist. He connected the firing pin which would ignite a small charge, inserted a glass ampoule in the mouth of the tube, then wrapped the assembly into a copy of yesterday's 'Nice Matin'. To an onlooker, the Stashinsky gun was only a crumpled and harmless newspaper.
He slowed as he approached them; it was not in his interest to arrive too early. He walked towards the beach restaurant, under the sign over the jetty that read 'Carlton Hotel InterContinental'.
The peddler was now only a few metres from the Germans, their laughter accompanied by the soft music that drifted out from the shelter of the inner restaurant. Above the restaurant, on the wide boulevard Croisette, the crowds mingled and watched in the December sun.
Very few people bothered about the small group at the end of the jetty.
The Senegalese, after a quick look to ensure that he was not about to be discovered, pulled the newspaper from under his arm and moved rapidly towards them.
The laughter had stopped, frozen suddenly in the realisation by the group that danger was upon them.
Gloria screamed as she saw the peddler rushing towards them, a metal tube held out from under his newspaper, pointing directly at her.
'He's got a gun!' shouted Mitzer, trying to get to his feet.
The peddler turned to Kushmann and held the Stashinksky tube towards him. He pulled the trigger, released the deadly vapour from the prussic acid capsule.
Peddler
The peddler swung round and was surprised to see a young gendarme advancing towards him from the restaurant. Realizing he was trapped, he reached under his tunic and brought out a sawn-off shot gun. The gendarme, realizing the danger, fumbled with the clip on his holster in his panic, tugged frantically at his gun which refused to come out of its leather pouch.
The German group scattered, Trudi Trimmler screaming, as the black peddler bore down on them in his panic, the shotgun aimed directly at her.
The crowds on the Croisette, the other occupants of the restaurant, attracted by the screams, craned to watch the drama that was exploding in front of them.
The peddler suddenly turned to Trimmler and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The safety catch was still on and he clawed at it with his thumb, attempting to release it.
At that moment, the gendarme, his gun finally free, fired. He missed, but deflected the assassin from his target. The peddler turned and ran towards the gendarme. But it was an old shotgun, not maintained as well as it should have been, the sand trapped under the safety catch. The peddler frantically pulled at the trigger as he ran.
The second shot from the gendarme's pistol, more by accident than design, caught the Senegalese in his left eye and killed him instantly. The spasm of death jerked the black man's thumb and its force kicked the safety catch free. The same spasm tightened his finger and triggered off the shotgun. As he fell, the full blast of the released twelve bore cartridge shattered Willi Kushmann's chest and sent him spinning backwards across the wooden floor and onto the sand.
What no-one realised was that the young lawyer was dead before the pellets tore into him, the deadly cyanide already having done its work.
Ch. 9
Alexei Rostov was a devoutly religious man who also happened to be the Director of the KGB.
To him there was no conflict in this situation. He did what was right by his Christian God, but never allowed himself to forget that he was a Russian who had been blessed with certain responsibilities. Since the early days of perestroika and glasnost, the spread of religion had, at first, been tolerated, then encouraged. Political leaders soon understood that religion was a source of comfort to many, and at a time of dramatic social change they needed all the help they could get.
Rostov had always believed in a divine power beyond man himself. As a member of the Communist Party in his youth, he appreciated that the Party was created by man in man's image. If you believed in God, as he had been secretly brought up to by his parents, then God was bigger than the Communist Party. With that belief, Rostov had worked his way up through the Party and KGB ranks to the very top. Apart from a three-year sojourn as a military attache in Washington, where he both enjoyed the freedom to worship every day in a church and controlled one of the most efficient letterbox networks in the United States, he spent his entire career in Moscow where his exceptional organisational abilities were quickly recognised. Moving up the promotion ladder was easier than he thought. He was never frightened of tackling the toughest assignments, of resolving the most complicated tasks, however distasteful they appeared. He saw no hypocrisy in his actions, had no desire to become a martyr. Time, and God, would resolve the situation.
It actually turned out to be a politician named Mikhail Gorbachev who changed the climate, who made God officially acceptable, though not respectable, in the eyes of the Party. Then the Party too, disappeared, after an unsuccesful August coup in 1991, and Russia set out on the uncertain road to democracy. In a changing climate, the Church and the KGB stood for what Russia had been, and what Russia would become.
Rostov was quick to embrace his childhood faith and made a point of visiting at least one of the many churches that were opening up in Moscow. He would leave Dzerzhinsky Square at lunchtime and be driven in his official Zil car to his chosen place of worship. He allowed his Party membership to lapse and attended prayer meetings as Moscow churches started cautiously to open the doors to their congregations. His superiors, both in the KGB and in government, tolerated his actions. He was an exceptional officer and a loyal Russian. They needed him, both for his ability and as a symbol of their new policies. The result was that he was pushed even faster up the promotion ladder until he found himself, at the age of forty six, the Deputy Director of the gigantic organisation that was the KGB, or the TSSA as it was now known, a futile gesture by the government to appease those who hated the power of the KGB. In truth, very little had changed, apart from the name; to those who governed and worked in the department, it was still, and would always be, the KGB.
Today, after a busy morning dealing with administrative problems that had arisen since they had taken the decision to transfer the decades of typed secret archives to a new computer, he had decided to pray at the Church of the Resurrection in Kadashakh. It was in the area known as Zamoskvorechie, translated as 'area beyond the Moscow River'. The surrounding houses and the four great churches that still stood had been built built by the weavers who dominated the textile trade and made it the production centre for cloth over many centuries.
The Church of the Resurrection in Kadashakh, built by an unknown architect, is the most famous of the four. Unlike many of the Russian churches, this one had escaped the ravages of Stalin's reconstruction, had not been vandalised and turned into a working man's club as had its sister down the road, The Church of our Lady of Iberia.
Rostov sat on a bench at the back, his head bowed as he prayed. The church was half full and the Russian Othodox priest at the altar led the prayers. As he listened to the priest, he felt the peace that always came at such times envelop him. He took strength from such moments, an inner calm that allowed him to deal expeditiously with the many unsavoury events that landed on his desk each day.