Russian Roulette (14 page)

The rest of the Trans-Europa tour were scattered about the restaurant, excitedly discussing the dramatic reduction in their number, but otherwise, life in the Metropol seemed to go on as usual.

‘I'm going shopping this morning – we don't have to go to this art place till two, do we?' asked Liz at the end of the meal.

‘No … do you mind if I don't come with you – I hate bloody shops and I've got a few things to do.'

She agreed with a readiness that rather puzzled him – in fact it seemed that if he wanted to go with her, she was ready to give him the brush-off again. He chalked up another question mark in his mind against the delectable but mysterious Mrs Treasure.

He made his way to the foyer and stood idly looking at the books and postcards at the newspaper stall. As he looked at some souvenirs displayed in a case behind the counter, he caught sight of a face mirrored in the glass. It was staring intently at him from over a newspaper, but as Simon turned around, the paper was hurriedly hoisted up in front of the man's eyes. He was a stocky fellow, dressed in a blue plastic raincoat and sat at the back of the foyer with his legs behind a small table. Simon had the idea that he had seen the same chap there the previous evening, but couldn't be sure.

There were a dozen other loungers in the foyer and another score milling up and down the steps from the entrance. Simon reasoned that half the Russian population were burly and short-necked and wore plastic mackintoshes, but the uneasiness remained. He began the trek back to his room in a thoughtful frame of mind. In the lift, he went over the mystery of Fragonard's death again, still worried that he himself might be the cause of the man's fatal fall.

There was something odd about his body … he had realized that when he looked from the window earlier on, but couldn't pin it down then. Now it came to him – pyjamas! Fragonard had been wearing a silver-grey suit beneath his dressing gown when Simon had left him last night – yet he died in those awful lime-green things! So surely the crack on the head couldn't have been all that bad if the Swiss had been able to change his clothes.

He felt relieved that this helped to salve his conscience – even though Fragonard was a killer and had damned nearly shot Simon himself, he had no wish to be a self-appointed executioner.

He got to his room, looked at his wristwatch and began pacing up and down, uneasy about the man in the foyer. Going to the desk, he took out his map of Moscow, including the plan of the Metro system. He spent a few moments concentrating on the layout of certain streets and stations.

Satisfied with his homework at last, he put on his raincoat and slogged back to the foyer. He bought a copy of the
Morning Star
at the news-stand and saw that ‘Blue Coat' was carefully taking no notice of him.

Leaving the hotel, he crossed the square and made for Gorky Street, the main thoroughfare of Moscow. He walked up the right-hand pavement for a while, ambling along past the shops and offices, trying to confirm the suspicion he had about the man in the foyer.

Hurrying crowds surged past him in both directions, men in uniform, pretty girls in high heels, old grannies in black headscarves and hundreds of ordinary citizens, half of them in blue plastic raincoats. Though he looked surreptitiously behind a few times, it was impossible to make out his own ‘friend' in the crowd.

Simon turned off the pavement as soon as he could; a small park had been built around an equestrian statue and he saw a vacant place in the benches around the edge.

He squeezed between an old
babushka
rocking a baby in a perambulator and an equally old man dozing with a translation of
Hamlet
across his knee.

In a moment, he saw the burly man from the corner of his eye. He arrived at the street side of the park and stood hesitantly looking around, trying not to notice Simon. There were no other empty seats and he began walking aimlessly up and down the other side of the park, looking for a place to sit.

Simon pulled out his
Morning Star
, the only English paper on sale at the hotel, and pretended to read, much to the undisguised interest of the grandmother on his left.

His eyes strayed above the page to watch Blue Coat. He had worked himself around the square and was waiting to jump into a vacant space that a woman seemed about to leave.

Simon wanted to keep him in sight all the time, but was suddenly distracted. A bony elbow dug him in the ribs.

‘They're going to take it down, you know!'

He turned in surprise to see the face of the old woman looking up at him like a wrinkled prune. Her dark eyes twinkled, looking about a hundred years younger than the rest of her face.

‘Take what down, mother?' he asked in Russian.

She took a skinny hand from the pram handle and pointed up at the armoured horseman on its plinth. ‘Him … Yuri Dolgorukiy. They're going to take him away and put another Yuri in his place.'

In spite of his preoccupation, the name rang a bell. As well as being the name of the ship where all the trouble began, it was the name of the founder of Moscow in the twelfth century. By some useless quirk of memory, Simon recalled that Yuri was the grandson of King Harold who lost the Battle of Hastings!

The old woman cackled and gave him another jab in the loin. ‘Ay … Gagarin, of course. Horses are out of date now, it's
sputniks
people want!'

Simon smiled at her, and made some comment in colloquial Russian, then turned his eyes back to his watcher.

He was nowhere to be seen. The vacant seat had been taken by another woman and of Blue Coat there was no sign.

Simon cursed under his breath at his own inattention, and hurried back to Gorky Street and along the pavement again.

A little way further on, he came to another little open space, this time with a monument to Pushkin. He sat down again here and waited. It was no good trying to dodge a chap if you didn't know where he was, he reasoned. He took a bench facing the street, with the
Izvestia
offices on his right and an ultra-modern cinema behind him. Sure enough, within a minute, the heavy-footed ‘tail' appeared on the pavement. This time he walked straight past, but Simon knew full well that he had been noticed.

He chewed his lip anxiously. He had to throw this fellow off in such a way that it would look accidental – any deliberate evasion would draw immediate suspicion on himself.

He thought deeply for a moment, joining Pushkin in his attitude of profound contemplation.
Why am I being followed
? he ruminated. He optimistically hoped that all the fourth floor members of Trans-Europa were getting the same treatment and that he was not singled out for special attention.

An idea came eventually and, with a little prayer for success, he got up once more. ‘May as well try it – nothing lost if it doesn't work,' he said aloud to the consternation of a passing Armenian in a little round hat.

Simon crossed Gorky Street at a set of pedestrian lights; his shadow dutifully waited for a second change of lights before following and Simon obligingly slowed down so that he wouldn't lose the man, before continuing to the Mayakovskaya Metro station. Blue Coat followed at a respectable distance as he went through the ‘magic eye' barrier and down to the ornate palace underground.

There were quite a few people on the southbound platform which went back to the city centre. Simon moved in among the thickest patch and stopped behind a group of Vietnamese students. He noticed that his ‘tail' had stopped exactly one car's length away so that he would be able to enter the same carriage through a different door.

A few seconds later, a train rushed in behind a wave of compressed air, looking almost identical to any train on London's Central Line. The doors opened with exactly the same ‘pssst' and the Asian students jabbered their way inside the car.

Simon followed more slowly, noting that his shadow was waiting until the last moment, to make sure that Simon really did get on the train. He climbed in and saw that the other man followed suit at the other end of the car.

Deliberately, Simon stared down the central aisle and the thinly disguised militiaman hurriedly made his way to a seat to make himself less conspicuous.

Simon timed things perfectly.

He remained standing near the door, but looked around as if choosing a seat in the half-full carriage.

His ears were tuned for the platform guard shouting ‘Mind the doors'. As soon as it came, he gave a rapid but convincing pantomime of patting his pockets in alarm, then as the doors were actually sliding shut, he leapt sideways through them as they hissed together inches behind him.

Outside on the platform, he continued his charade of furiously turning out his pockets in a futile search for his wallet.

The train was already accelerating rapidly, having started with a jerk as the doors slammed shut. He saw with relish that the betrayed sleuth had hurled himself from his seat to the doors, but by now the train was doing twenty miles an hour. A few seconds later, the car had flashed into the tunnel at the end of the platform, carrying the frustrated militiaman with it. Simon sighed with relief, stopped fishing in his pockets and walked to the opposite edge of the platform to catch the next northbound train in the opposite direction to the enraged follower.

He travelled to the next stop, Byelorusskiy, and changed again to begin the longer circle route to Gorky Park Station.

At eleven twenty, the phone rang in Pudovkin's office. He was outside in the main CID room, holding his cup under the spout of the coffee pot, and Moiseyenko answered it for him.

‘It's Lev Pomansky – sounds as if he's in trouble again. Wants to speak to you,' he reported sardonically.

Alexei came to the phone and listened. A scowl passed over his face, then he sighed. ‘All right, get back to the Metropol and watch for his coming back – do you think it was deliberate or genuine?' He listened for a few more seconds, then dropped the phone back with a grunt of annoyance.

‘What's he done this time?' asked Vasily.

‘Lost the Smith fellow – on the Metro!'

Vasily whistled. ‘He gave him the slip?'

Pudovkin shrugged and dropped into his chair. ‘Don't know – Lev seems to think it could have been an accident.'

‘His usual bumbling stupidity, you mean,' retorted the lieutenant severely. ‘What happened?'

‘Smith got on to a train, then hopped off just as it was leaving – appeared to have forgotten his wallet or something – by the time Lev got back, he naturally had vanished.'

‘Sounds fishy to me … couldn't we arrest him on suspicion?'

‘We have to convince the Public Prosecutor first … and he seems to be taking an unusual lack of interest in the case. No, we'll have to sit tight and wait for someone to make a false move.'

Moiseyenko looked impatient. ‘But three events now – the attack in Helsinki, the gun in the cabin and the murder …'

Alexei turned up his palms. ‘So what – none of those is justification to knock off Smith. The pistol especially – no prints, nothing. We just can't connect it with him.'

Moiseyenko looked dubious. ‘You seem to have a soft spot for him – but you must admit, he's the only possible candidate so far.'

‘So who attacked him in Finland?– He didn't do that that himself.'

‘Could have been some common drunk or thief.'

Pudovkin snorted. ‘Now who's talking about coincidences … the obvious answer is that Fragonard was the attacker.'

Vasily nodded slowly. ‘That occurred to me, too – and Smith retaliated last night either in revenge or to stop Fragonard having another go at him. But why come right across Europe to act out their vendetta?'

Alexei shook his head ponderously. ‘They both came for a reason – but I'm damned if I know what it could be. It's ludicrous to think of espionage agents acting in such a way … perhaps that's why the KGB lads haven't shown up – it's beneath their contempt.'

‘Huh – nothing's below that. Those ferrets would spy on a dogfight if they thought one of the animals came from a foreign embassy.'

Alexei found himself scratching his ear. ‘I suppose you're right … let's hope the laboratory people turn up something to help us.'

While the two detectives were mulling things over in Petrovka, Simon Smith was coming up the escalator at the Metro station on Zubovsky Boulevard, just the other side of the Krymsky river bridge from Gorky Park.

As he came out into the sunlight, he hoped that Gustav Pabst would be at the meeting place, after all the trouble he'd had shaking off the militia shadow.

When he had visited the East German's flat the previous evening, he had left that note – written in poor German – to tell the renegade to meet him in Gorky Park with the steel sample, between eleven and twelve that morning.

As Simon's only knowledge of the place was from his city map, he chose the main entrance as the rendezvous point and had asked Pabst to carry two newspapers under his arm as a recognition sign, as neither knew what the other looked like.

Now, as he crossed the bridge over the wide river, he looked to his right and saw the huge expanse of the park stretching down the further bank. Trees and a huge Ferris wheel partly hid the more distant buildings of the Academy of Sciences. In the distance, over the bend in the river, was the green band of the Lenin Hills, with the new skyscraper university needling up to the clouds. His mind was not on scenery, however. He had a sudden nagging fear that perhaps he wasn't so clever after all.

The prospect of walking straight into a trap jumped abruptly into his consciousness and he stopped walking.

For a panic-stricken moment, he almost turned on his heel and walked back to the Metro. Then the cash register in his head jangled to remind him of the two thousand pounds he stood to lose. Anxiety again struggled with avarice, and the greed won. He rapidly changed his plans and instead of walking straight along the pavement to the high, colonnaded entrance a few hundred yards away, he turned sharply down on to the river embankment.