‘I will not have impertinence in my embassy, sir!’
‘Let’s hope, Mr Ambassador, that you don’t have a murderer, either.’
Richards’s face was blazing. Through tight lips he said: ‘I have an extremely busy schedule. Is there anything else you feel it’s necessary for us to discuss?’
‘Not at the moment,’ said Cowley. ‘But if you do hear something you will tell me, won’t you?’
‘Of course,’ said Richards.
Success of some sort, thought Cowley: he’d trapped a diplomat into telling a direct lie.
Barry Andrews was at his window with the scrap-yard view when Cowley walked into the FBI office. Cowley’s overnight messages were lying on the man’s desk.
‘What the hell have we got here?’ Andrews demanded loudly. ‘You saying she’s the victim of a serial killer?’
‘That’s what I’m saying.’
‘Jesus! The waves this is going to make!’
‘I haven’t told the ambassador. I don’t intend to, yet.’
‘Sure that’s wise?’
‘The bastard is snowing me. I’ve got to talk to people here at the embassy today and I’m going in cold: they can bullshit me all they like and I wouldn’t know it. So what about it, Barry?
You
tell me about Ann Harris. Someone’s got to.’
Andrews shrugged, pouring them both coffee from the Cona machine by the window. ‘I told you already. Attractive girl. Knew she had Uncle Walt back home in Washington, playing short stop. Aloof. Nice enough kid, though.’
‘Barry, someone was fucking her! And it wasn’t a Russian because there wasn’t a trace of anything Russian in that apartment. So who was it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it was somebody from another embassy: there’s fraternization with friendly allies, you know.’
Cowley sighed. ‘In a letter the Russians took from her apartment, she calls life here a prison. I would have thought relationships would be pretty obvious to everyone.’
‘It’s not
that
enclosed.’
‘Tell me about Ralph Baxter,’ Cowley demanded.
‘Ralph? What’s he got to do with it?’
‘I just want to talk to him. About something odd he said. So what about him?’
Andrews sat with his coffee-cup held before him. ‘He’s OK. Baseball fanatic. High flier: already served a lot in Asia. If he had more friends in Washington, I guess he’d have his ambassadorship by now.’
‘He married?’
Andrews nodded. ‘Nice girl. Jane. Great cook. She and Pauline swop recipes and techniques a lot.’ He smiled. ‘Pauline’s still the Goddess of the kitchen.’
‘Would Baxter have been screwing Ann Harris?’
‘Ralph!’ Andrews laughed, aloud. ‘I doubt it. Jane keeps those kitchen knives close to hand: poor little Ralphie is a much oppressed spouse. If Jane suspected he was waving it around, she’d cut his pecker off and put it in the stew.’
‘What about Paul Hughes?’
Andrews put down his coffee-cup, to hold up shielding hands. ‘Let’s ease up a little here, Billie boy. I want to know what’s going on. I need to be filled in on a few things.’
Cowley didn’t like being called Billie boy, but if he expected Andrews to help, he supposed he had to offer some explanation. ‘There appears to have been a lot of telephone contact between him and the girl.’
‘What’s so surprising about that?’ demanded Andrews. ‘She worked for him. Paul Hughes heads the economic unit here. Actually seems to like the place, if you can believe that! Ballet buff. My regular racquet ball partner in the embassy gym; he’s a hell of a player. Always needs to win, every time. Speaks pretty good Russian.’
‘Married?’
‘Angela. Their two kids are at school back home but Angela takes a kindergarten class for the young children who are with their folks here. She was a teacher originally, in Seattle.’
‘What about Hughes? He a special friend of the dead girl?’
There was a gap, before Andrews replied. ‘They’d obviously be closer than Baxter: you think he was the guy in her apartment the night she died?’
Cowley shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Did Ann Harris get involved with the social life of the embassy?’
‘She attended some things … national holiday celebrations, stuff like that. But she wasn’t at the club every night. Lived outside, of course: no way of knowing what she did away from the embassy.’
‘She never talked about it?’
‘Not to me. But then she wouldn’t. I didn’t know her that well.’
‘Who
did?
What about one of the women here? She have a particular friend among them?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘What about the scuttlebutt? Everyone must be talking about her, since the murder. What are they saying?’
Andrews shrugged. ‘Nothing that helps, I don’t think. Everyone liked her. Can’t understand what she was doing out in the street, at that time of night; street muggings happen in Moscow, but not particularly in that area.’
‘What about
Russian
male friends? You ever hear her linked with a Russian man?’
Andrews shook his head. ‘It’s not encouraged, for obvious reasons. Wasn’t there any lead, from what the Russians took out of her apartment?’
‘Nothing that amounts to a bag of beans,’ dismissed Cowley. ‘You know what I can’t understand? Everyone keeps telling me that she was Mary Poppins’s doppelganger. And I don’t think Ann Harris was that at all. I think Ann Harris could have gone into business designing bedroom ceilings, from looking up at so many.’
Andrews shook his head again. ‘I still find it difficult to believe she was like that.’
Chapter Sixteen
Ralph Baxter’s office was on the same level as the ambassador’s and Cowley guessed the room had originally been virtually as big, possibly a minor reception chamber or annex. But it was partitioned now by ill-matched plasterboard into a series of smaller working areas, practical-sized suites with no wasted space. Baxter’s had a window, overlooking the ring road. The preventative glazing wasn’t as effective as in Richards’s office: the traffic noise intruded, as a low murmur. The sharply moving diplomat bounded across the room to greet Cowley. The man was in his shirt-sleeves but with the waistcoat of a charcoal-grey suit buttoned completely across a diet-hard body. He smiled openly, offered the predictable coffee, which Cowley declined, and asked what it was he could do to help, insisting if there was anything, anything at all, then he would do it. Cowley decided the man’s moustache was peculiar: it moved up and down when Baxter spoke but seemed strangely out of time with his upper lip, as if it were false and tenuously stuck on. Cowley couldn’t understand why the man wore it at all.
‘At least we’ve got the body returned. It’s already gone back,’ announced Baxter, as if declaring a personal achievement.
‘I heard it was being released,’ said Cowley. ‘I want to ask you about her. Did you know her well?’
‘As well as anyone, I suppose. A wonderful girl. Beautiful. An asset to the embassy. It’s a shocking, horrible thing to have happened.’
‘She seems to have impressed everyone the same way.’
‘There was only one way.’
Cowley felt the frustration rise and then dip, as he suppressed it. Staring directly at the diplomat, he said: ‘Why the hell was she like she was? You know what I’m saying.’
For several moments Baxter gazed blankly across the desk. ‘What in heaven’s name are you saying? I don’t understand.’
‘Not that remark? Not “Why the hell was she like she was? You know what I’m saying.”’
Baxter shook his head, bemused. ‘No!’
‘Wasn’t that what you said, maybe the very words you used, when you learned Ann Harris had been murdered?’
‘No!’
‘You absolutely positive about that? That first day here at the embassy, when Danilov came with the photographs and you met him, with Barry Andrews?’
‘That what Andrews says? He tell you that’s what I said? It’s not true.’
‘Didn’t you say it?’ Cowley sidestepped.
‘No!’
‘That’s what I hear.’
‘It’s not true, I tell you!’
‘Why? About what?’
‘Me. What I said.’
‘What do you think you said?’
‘I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters a great deal, Mr Baxter. It seems to indicate something about Ann Harris quite different from what I’m being told by everyone.’
‘It’s all a misunderstanding!’
‘Clarify it for me!’ demanded Cowley. ‘She was arrogant, wasn’t she? Thought she could do anything – behave however she liked – because of her uncle?’
‘She was strong-willed, certainly.’ Baxter fumbled his rimless glasses from his nose to polish them: it was an interrupting, delaying gesture, not a necessary one.
‘Arrogant?’ persisted Cowley, pushing the demands to a limit but believing he was guessing correctly. ‘Upset a lot of people quite a lot of the time?’
‘No!’
‘Did she upset you?’
‘No!’
‘Never?’
‘No.’
‘“Why the hell was she like she was?”’ quoted Cowley, yet again. ‘That sounds like you were exasperated. Angry. Upset, certainly.’
‘Exasperation isn’t anger,’ tried Baxter.
Cowley snatched at the doubt. ‘But you did say it!’
‘I don’t remember, precisely,’ said the diplomat, qualifying further. ‘I resent this inquisition! Won’t have it. You’ve no right.’
‘An American embassy is American territory, irrespective of the country it’s in,’ Cowley reminded him. ‘An FBI agent is empowered by federal statute of the United States of America to investigate murder within the territory and jurisdiction of America. That’s the law.’
‘I’m sorry … I didn’t mean … you confused me …’
‘Why are you confused, Mr Baxter?’
‘I want to help, really. But this
is
harassment. An inquisition …’
The diplomat was rocky, Cowley judged: but enough to blurt out something without thought? ‘“You know what I’m saying,”’ he quoted, relentlessly, going on like a dog picking at the last scraps on a bone. ‘What
were
you saying, Mr Baxter?’
‘Just that,’ said Baxter, desperately. ‘That she was arrogant. Exasperating.’
‘Sufficiently arrogant and exasperating to be murdered?’
‘No! That’s ridiculous! You’re twisting words!’
‘Were you her lover, Mr Baxter? Had you been with her that night?’
‘No! This is intolerable! I won’t be treated this way!’
‘Who was then?’ persisted Cowley. ‘I know, from the scientific examination, that no Russian was in the Pushkinskaya apartment last Tuesday.’
‘I don’t
know
!’ Baxter shouted so loudly that his voice cracked, causing the man more disorientation. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quieter now but still unsettled. ‘You
are
harassing: not giving anyone time to think.’
‘There’s nothing to think about. All I want from this enclosed, insular embassy is to know the name of Ann Harris’s lover, so that I can talk to him. Just a name. That’s all.’
‘I don’t have a name,’ said Baxter, stubbornly, face set more firmly. ‘
Why
has her lover necessarily got to be attached here?’
Cowley decided the man had pulled himself together; withdrawn behind the barrier of a professional diplomat. Not so rocky after all: the annoyance now was at himself, for allowing the escape, not at the foot-shuffling evasion he believed he had been encountering. ‘So you can’t help me?’
‘I’m afraid not: not on this line of inquiry.’
‘Or won’t?’
‘That’s a contemptible question I will not answer.’
‘This isn’t going to go away, Mr Baxter. If there are embarrassments, nothing can stop them coming out.’
Baxter’s face flinched but became impassive again as he regained control. ‘I don’t choose to comment upon that remark, either.’
‘Think upon it then,’ urged Cowley. ‘If you decide there
is
anything you can help me with, I’d like to hear from you.’
The economic section was on the most dispiriting side of the embassy, directly fronting a shabby Moscow apartment block over a tangle of barbed-wire security and almost completely obscuring the beautifully restored town-house of Fedor Chaliapin, the opera singer rehabilitated after years of being banned as a non-person during the reign of Stalin. So depressing was the outlook – and so little of the Chaliapin mansion visible – that the windows were boarded from ceiling to floor, so that lights had to burn permanently to enable the financial staff to work.
Again the department had been formed by partitioning a huge original room into smaller units. Paul Hughes occupied the largest part of the conversion, befitting his position as controller. The designation was actually spelled out on a door inscription and again on another name-plate on a large mahogany desk. The entire area to the left of the desk was occupied by two computer terminals, with connected printers, and tape storage facilities. Directly in front were telephones on short leads to attach to the computer modems. There were two large framed photographs on the desk, one of a smiling woman holding her hair from her eyes in an obvious breeze, the other of two children, a boy and a girl, in Sunday-best clothes, posing formally. The girl was smiling but awkwardly, trying to conceal rigidly braced teeth.