It had been hoped, of course, that the presence in the Goldmann house of a skilled police officer — one with the talent and nerve to reach level one in the small, closed society of SCD10 — would open up the hidden secrets of the launderer’s existence.
He had assumed, as weeks went by and as the family and the minders became more used to him, that he would be increasingly accepted. It hadn’t been that way. Truth was, Johnny Carrick knew little more about the life and criminality of his employer than when Katie had put the file into his hand for him to speed read, than when George, his controller, had done the ‘big picture’ briefing, than when Rob, his cover officer, had talked through the details of communications for routine reports and for a crisis moment. He dealt with the children and with Mrs Goldmann. He lived alongside the housekeeper, Irena, who either did not have English or cared not to use it. He shared the ready room, off the kitchen and in the basement, with Grigori, who spoke only when he needed to and slept in a recliner chair, smoked or watched football on the satellite channels. Simon Rawlings had the access to the Bossman, and was a gossip-free zone.
With Rawlings, when they were together, the talk was of forgotten wars — a tour of Northern Ireland, down by the border, as the ceasefire was shaking down, the advance into Kosovo, the firefights and bombs in southern Iraq — but nothing that had meat on it. He did not believe himself to be suspected by either of the minders, but they seemed to live by a code of total secrecy and silence. In honesty, Carrick could say that he had not learned one item of intelligence that could have been presented as evidence of criminality in the Central Criminal Court.
The target, Josef Goldmann, seemed indifferent to him. Always polite, but always distant. They met rarely — on the stairs, in the hallway — and then the Bossman was remote. Carrick would be asked how he was, how the school drive had gone, how he liked the Mercedes. He was no closer to the man than he had been on the day he had arrived. Always he was greeted with a smile, but behind the smile and the quiet voice was a wall. Light on his feet, almost dapper in his walk, slim and slight, with styled hair cut short on his scalp, the best suits on his back, fashionable stubble on his cheeks and chin, the Bossman appeared like a host of other immigrant businessmen making their names, and fortunes, in London … The frustration of failure gnawed in Carrick when he reflected on his lack of success. It was worst when he had the meetings with his cover officer and his controller. Then he saw the disappointment on their faces. It would be the same the next evening, on the narrowboat, when he told George, the DCI, and Rob, the DS, that he had learned — frankly — fuck-all. There was no bug in the house, and no tag on the big Audi car. Grigori swept the house every other day, and the car each morning.
But for the first time something in the pulse of the household had stirred that day. It beat faster and harder. He didn’t know what it was, only that it was something.
He killed time before the drive to collect the kids. He sat in the ready room, read a paper for the third time and watched the security screens.
It stood to reason: if it didn’t improve — and fast — George and Rob would be hacking at the old calculator, Katie would be offering up an inventory of cost against effectiveness and they’d be cutting the cable. Too damn soon he’d be going to Rawlings and saying, ‘I’m really sorry, Sarge, and it was good of you to get me this little number, but actually I don’t think it’s for me. Reckon I’ll be going, busted leg and all, for protection work overseas. But thanks for what you did for me.’ Simon Rawlings was a good guy, straight. He would be devastated and disappointed. Carrick did not know of an alternative to him coming out, operation abandoned. He might be told of it as soon as the next debrief session on the narrowboat. It bloody hurt, failure did.
Josef Goldmann was taken back in time. He had heard the voice of Mikhail, and later that of Reuven Weissberg, and memories had flooded him.
An ethnic Russian Jew, Goldmann was from the city of Perm, twenty hours by the fast firmeny train south-east from Moscow. It was the city used by Chekhov as the inspiration for his Three Sisters, and its name had been stolen to identify the ‘special regime’ prison camp of Perm-36. A few, today, would have delighted in the city’s association with a considerable man of letters, but many more would have acknowledged the links with an archipelago of gaols where politicals and criminals had been held and had laboured.
From the age of ten, on his entry to secondary school, Josef Goldmann had known Reuven Weissberg. Jews, the minority in the city, either stood together or were bullied, abused, beaten. From its birth, it had been a relationship based on mutual need. Reuven, four years the older, had recognized that Josef possessed an extraordinary ability to understand money, its value and the use to which it might be put, and was sharp with figures that were to become balance sheets: Josef had accepted the need for protection and the source where it could be found. They had become inseparable.
Reuven Weissberg had built little roofs over the heads of schoolkids whose parents were in the nomenklatura of the city’s life. A father was a noted physician in the central hospital, a factory manager or a senior police officer. The roof, the krysha, offered protection not from the snow and the springtime rain, but from the thugs who stalked school corridors and playgrounds. When it was known that Reuven Weissberg provided the roof for a kid, and was paid for it, the thugs had learned quickly to back off. There were fights. Knives flashed. Along with the knives there were clubs with leaded ends. A culture of premeditated and exceptional violence had swept through a school that was in a concrete jungle wasteland behind the Tchaikovsky Theatre of Opera and Ballet, and then the calm had descended.
The head teacher and her department heads had been shocked, horrified, at the sight of scarred and bruised kids attending classes, then had marvelled as peace had fallen across the complex. That head teacher, a perceptive woman, had realized the cause of the violence and the cause of the calm and had, herself, bought a roof from the Jew teenager, Weissberg. For three more years there had been no hospitalization of students, and the pilfering of school property had ended. The head teacher, of course, had never written down in any report for the Education Committee why, for a brief period, the statistics of violence in her school had soared, or why, almost as suddenly as conflict ended on a battlefield, the statistics of property stolen from her students and her school had ebbed away, like water into sand. The conclusion of such a report, which remained unwritten, would have mirrored the judgement of another Jew kid, Goldmann. The provider of the roof had no fear, was a beast of ruthless cruelty, was a man-child capable of inflicting horrific injuries without losing sleep. From the age of eleven to just past his thirteenth birthday, Josef Goldmann was the banker.