This room was the smallest in the house, and the slanting mansard walls that met at the roof made the space even tighter. The furniture was minimal — a bed and a chair, and the small easterly window failed to do justice to the Alps.
On the properly vertical wall over the bed, there was a decent copy of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
When Frau Hasler tactfully went downstairs to wash the dishes, Malinin asked Constantine to help him remove the painting. Behind it, protruding from the wall, was a hidden safe.
“Can you imagine it?” Malinin said, turning the knob. “Of all the places in the world, I store sensitive documents in an old-fashioned safe behind a painting.”
“Sometimes the most obvious is also the most deceptive,” Constantine said.
The tumblers clicked into place, and Malinin opened the safe. It was long and wide, almost equaling the dimensions of the painting concealing it, but only as deep as the thickness of the wall allowed.
Inside, there was a single object. A Samsonite attaché case slim enough to fit the width of the safe.
“Damn, this thing is heavy… Help me pull it out…”
Despite its modest size, the case felt like it weighed a ton. Constantine set the case on the bed, and then locked the safe and replaced The Starry Night back on the wall.
“The thing is, I slightly modified the Samsonite. It’s waterproof, bullet-proof and incombustible. The combination is triple zero,” Malinin informed him as the locks on the case unclasped. “Factory settings. Like you said, the most obvious…”
Raising the top, Malinin revealed the Samsonite’s contents.
Filling all the space of the attaché case were bundles of euro notes, a digital memory disc and a sheaf of yellowed pages bearing scraggy handwritten script.
“Listen to me carefully,” Malinin said, his eyes boring into Constantine. “The money is one hundred thousand euros — what I call an emergency survival kit. The disc contains everything I know about the Fourth International — member list, cell structure, inventory of assets, past activities, sources of funding, everything.”
“And the papers?”
“These,” Malinin wheezed, placing his palm over the pages, “are the missing papers of the late Lazar Kaganovich.”
“Stalin’s right-hand man?”
“The same. As Minister of Transport, he was in charge of the secret consignment in 1941.”
Constantine shuffled through his memory. “Yes, I remember that Kaganovich’s memoirs were published in the mid-nineties, but they didn’t contain anything groundbreaking. Typical rants about the joys of Communism.”
“The published memoirs were indeed quite shabby, especially for a man who had basked in the epicenter of Soviet power for a period of forty years, and spent another forty years writing about it! By the way, do you know the circumstances of his death?” Malinin asked.
“Kaganovich died in 1991, aged 97, at his writing desk.”
Malinin’s eyes glistened.
“Precisely, at his writing desk! He was in perfect health and continued to work on his memoirs until the last moment. Don’t you find it odd that the cardiac arrest killed him only days before the Soviet Union collapsed? Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost made the country uncontrollable. The wind of change permitted him to divulge the tale of the missing relics. Lazar committed himself to publishing the story as part of his epic memoirs. The Fourth International could not allow it.”
“You mean, the cause of his death… It wasn’t natural? That seems a little too far-fetched, to be honest.”
“Oh yes, Kaganovich was murdered.”
Constantine shook his head. “How can you be so certain?”
Malinin sat on the edge of the bed, shoulders stooping.
“I was the one who killed him.”
13
Downstairs, the doorbell rang, distracting Frau Hasler from her housekeeping chores. There were sounds of Frau Hasler stomping her way to the front door and yelling her usual “Who is it?” which was followed by an explanation that unfortunately she had no rooms on offer today, but surely, tomorrow one of her tenants would vacate—
Her scream was harrowing.
The guttural sound of Frau Hasler’s death was abrupt, echoed by the crash of the front door breaking off its hinges.
Startled by the commotion, Malinin pivoted in the direction of the staircase. Then he looked at Constantine with realization in his terrified eyes.
“My God, they are here!” the old man mumbled. “I’ve doomed you.”
Constantine never lost his composure. He shut the attaché case, grabbed it, and dashed to the window. The latch was jammed, and the couldn’t open it. Swinging the briefcase, he hit at the window, disintegrating glass. Using the Samsonite’s bulk to clear away the shards jutting from the frame, he yelled, “Come on, we can get out through the window. The second-floor balcony is directly below.”
Malinin’s reply was a cry: “Take cover!”
Constantine pivoted.
A man rushed into the room, aiming a submachine gun.
With the muffled shots coming from the gun’s suppressor, Malinin’s body erupted with blood as he blocked Constantine from the line of fire.
Instinctively, Constantine dropped to the floor, his back against the wall, holding the Samsonite in front of him with one hand, pulling out the pistol with the other.
Angry slugs hammered the metal case, but his shield protected him.
He fired two quick shots.
He’d never thought he could do it. The bullets from the SIG-Sauer speared the gunman’s abdomen. The gunman collapsed, slamming against the floor, blood gushing out from him in a red fountain.
The pistol’s blasts had deafened Constantine. His heart pounded. One part of his brain told him to approach the gunman’s body and retrieve the silenced submachine gun. The other part told him to get the hell out of there before anyone else came shooting at him.
The other part won.
His eye measured the balcony below. It was long and wide, extending at least five meters out from the side elevation, forming a portico at the rear entrance of the house.
Constantine dropped the attaché case. It landed on the glass-sprinkled tiles of the balcony.
Tucking the SIG-Sauer under his belt, he swung his legs over the window sill, preparing to jump a level down, and then froze.
Attracted by the fall of the case, another gunman ventured out on the balcony.
Constantine’s muscles tensed. This gunman had the same type of submachine gun which Constantine now recognized as a Heckler & Koch. The muzzle of the gun was sweeping a three-sixty turn, searching for targets. It would be seconds before the man looked up and behind him — and locked his sights on Constantine.
Just as the man was turning, Constantine came down on him, pulverizing the shooter’s chest with his knees, and they tumbled onto the layer of broken glass.
The impact had knocked the H&K from the man’s hands. On the floor, struggling to choke each other, neither of them was able to reach for the weapon. With a sudden movement, Constantine swung his arm back and elbowed the man in the temple, cracking the weak bone, and he went down.
Bullets zinged past. Constantine rolled sideways.
The fire was coming from inside the house, through the open French doors. Constantine’s hand found the H&K. Blindly, he unleashed a volley into the room and heard a body hit the floor.