Russian Roulette (21 page)

Simon took a deep breath and jumped into the treacherous quicksands of confession.
Put a foot wrong and you're in it up to your neck
, he thought.

‘I admit being in Fragonard's room at the time Mrs Treasure states,' he began in a flat, low voice. He stared at Pudovkin's pistol belt; the shining eyes were too unnerving. ‘Fragonard came to my room where I was talking to Mrs Treasure and wanted to talk. It was inconvenient, so we went to his.'

The detective's face remained impassive. If he wondered about the nature of the ‘inconvenience' he did not show it.

‘What was the dead man wearing?'

‘His suit – the same one he had on in the restaurant.' Simon sounded puzzled. ‘I remember now, when we got to his room, he took off the jacket and put on a dressing gown over his shirt and trousers.'

Pudovkin looked around at Moiseyenko, who shrugged.

Liz and Gilbert were listening with rapt attention. Shaw looked bored.

‘What happened in the room?' went on Alexei, remorselessly.

‘Fragonard was a little drunk,' Simon threw this in for good measure, though it was quite untrue. ‘We began to argue and he became abusive – he actually spat in my face!'

As this was true and the memory still rankled, he was able to put genuine feeling into his words.

‘He struck me and I lost my temper and hit him in the eye after struggling with him … he tripped and fell back, hitting his head on the wall or the doorpost. He was unconscious for a moment, but began to recover quickly, so I left him – that's the last I saw of him, alive.'

The next question was inevitable, but Simon had had time to think up his storyline.

‘What was this argument concerned with?'

‘Mrs Treasure here …' Simon spoke diffidently, looking with assumed reluctance towards Liz, using the opportunity to give her the shadow of a wink. ‘Fragonard had been trying to force his attentions on her during the sea voyage – and I objected.'

He threw this in as a weak but better-than-none excuse.

Pudovkin's leathery face wrinkled into a frown. ‘You mean that the small old man was interfering with your woman friend?'

Simon gritted his teeth. The paths of liars were undoubtedly stony.

‘Interfering is perhaps too strong – he was, well … chasing her, inflicting his company on her when it was not welcome – you understand me.'

Simon found himself slipping into basic English for Pudovkin's benefit, as the strain of interrogating in a foreign tongue seemed to be telling on him.

Alexei bobbed his head slowly. ‘And because of this he tried to murder you in Helsinki,' he asked sarcastically.

Simon, pale and drawn, sighed. ‘I told you. That must have been some common thief.'

Alexei let it go. ‘Why did Fragonard call on you and not the other way around – you were the one objecting to his behaviour – so you
say
?'

Simon literally shrugged this off. ‘He was drunk.'

‘And because of this, you struck the old man a violent blow, causing unconsciousness?'

He made it sound shameful, like stealing a blind man's pennies.

‘Hitting his head was an accident – he began the violence,' defended Simon. ‘All I did was punch him back – in the eye …'

For a second, he contemplated telling them about Fragonard pulling a gun on him as an added provocation. This could easily be proved by dipping into the cistern, but would raise all sorts of deep enquiries about Fragonard's motives for being armed in Russia, a topic to be avoided like the plague.

‘And when did you leave the room of the deceased?'

‘Straight away – I wasn't in there more than ten minutes. Must have been back in my own room by eleven thirty or just after.'

‘And no doubt you maintain, still, that you did not go back during the night.'

‘I certainly do – the next thing I heard was all that row at five thirty today. Mrs Treasure came to tell me about it.'

‘You were not out of your room at three in the morning and you say you heard nothing,' stated Pudovkin in frank disbelief.

While Simon agreed vehemently, Moiseyenko whispered something in his superior's ear and the two of them had a muttered conversation in their own language.

Pudovkin returned to the attack. ‘I think you are telling us only half the truth, Mr Smith. You went back to Fragonard's room in the early hours of this morning and killed him with a blow to the throat, did you not?'

‘I did not,' retorted Simon stonily to this frontal attack.

‘You struck him in the throat, killed him and threw his dead body from the window. Were you in the armed forces?'

Simon stared blankly at this twist in the accusation.

‘The army … yes, like most men in my age group.'

‘You saw fighting?'

‘Yes – what of it?'

Was this going to be some political angle?

‘And all your troops, like Soviet soldiers, receive training in physical combat?' This was more a statement than a query.

Simon saw the relevance at last. ‘No, I wasn't taught that – only special assault troops learn unarmed combat.'

Pudovkin shrugged and left it. ‘The matter will now be out of my hands – my remaining duty is only to take you into custody, I am afraid. The future will be dealt with by the Public Prosecutor.'

He rose to his feet and looked around at the rest of the party.

‘The Prosecutor will also decide on who he requires as witnesses – has anyone else anything to add?'

Elizabeth gave a loud sniff and laid her hand consolingly on Simon's arm.

Gilbert looked shocked, his mouth twitched and his prominent Adam's apple bobbed up and down like a yo-yo. ‘Terrible affair!' he gulped at last. ‘Some ghastly mistake, old boy … look, I'd better muster the Consul and Embassy, eh?'

He even forgot ‘London Office' in his consternation, though that, no doubt, would come to haunt him before long. He hopped up, his lanky body as tall as Pudovkin.

‘I'd better nip off to the phone and see if I can raise any one at the Consulate at this time of night.' He rapidly changed to Russian and began a quick-fire exchange with Pudovkin.

The militia officer handed him a passport and Gilbert sat down again to copy the passport and visa numbers into his diary.

Pudovkin's eyes strayed to the silent member of the group, Michael Shaw. ‘And you … have you anything to say?'

Michael shook his head slowly. He was in a ‘delicate situation', as diplomats are wont to say. He had kept his mouth shut about hearing Simon in Fragonard's room and had not offered any more damning fabrications of his own. This was not from any friendly spirit, but to avoid his being precipitated into the affair by Simon.

He saw that it was bound to come sooner or later, once Smith had chance to weigh up the balance between confessing to his espionage role and being wrongly accused of murder. As soon as he saw that there was no escape from a life sentence for a murder he hadn't committed, he would undoubtedly split on Shaw.

So the bearded Irishman eyed Pudovkin with veiled wariness. The essence of this particular situation was time. As a professional freelance agent, ex-criminal and confidence trickster, he had been in as tight a spot as this before and got away with it. His recipe for survival was thorough pre-planning. If he could keep things off the boil until eight o'clock the following morning – even if it meant vanishing into the back streets of Moscow overnight – he was sitting pretty.

Before leaving Stockholm, he had arranged an expensive, but vital, link in his travel arrangements. Through a telephone call to a contact in Vienna, he had booked a seat on a MALÉV
⁷
flight from Moscow to Budapest, leaving at eight next day – he had estimated that two days in the Soviet capital would see the tool steel business finished for better or worse.

The flight was booked under a Czech name and he had a corresponding set of false papers. The passport and visa carried photographs of him before he grew his beard – a few minutes' work with scissors and a razor would see him through to Budapest, as the security arrangements between internal transit points in Eastern Europe were far less stringent than on the usual East-West frontiers.

From Budapest, it was child's play to a man of his experience to cross into Austria. The ‘Iron Curtain', now very rusty and perforated, was more like a colander to people of his calibre, especially on the Hungarian border. He reckoned that by the day after tomorrow, he could be back in Paris for the big pay-off from his American sponsors – rivals to the outfit that had employed Kramer.

All these considerations clicked through his mind as he faced Pudovkin and the answer about what to say appeared in his brain like the printout from a computer.

‘I've nothing to add at all, captain – I think there must be some great mistake here. Mr Smith is the victim of some terrible coincidence.'

His volubility was right out of character, but he reasoned that, by siding strongly with Smith, he had a better chance to confuse the issue in the man's mind, to give him a better chance of a getaway.

Pudovkin nodded abruptly and turned to face Simon again.

‘Then we must go, Mr Smith. Lieutenant Moiseyenko will accompany you to your room to fetch your clothing and necessities like shaving materials.'

He stepped back and jerked his head at Vasily.

Simon looked around the faces, all of which became white blurs.

So this was the moment, then.
Arrest, a prison cell –then what
? His mind seized up completely. Like an automaton, he stood up and started to walk for the last time to the lift and the endless cavern of passages on the fourth floor. As he passed Liz Treasure, she stared at him as if he were already a ghost.
Never make you now, darling
, he thought, with a tinge of regret.

But the nightmare was not yet over.

Before Simon was halfway to the swing-doors, there was a tramp of feet outside. The panels flew apart with a crash and Pomansky had to step smartly aside to avoid being trampled by three burly men. They were almost identical, dressed in extra-long fawn raincoats and wide-brimmed felt hats.

They stopped a few paces inside the doors and looked around with grim faces. One of them walked up to Pudovkin and showed him a card embossed with the insignia of the Ministry of the Interior.

Alexei had already recognized him as an official from the Kalinin Street branch of the KGB, an office that dealt with some of the internal security matters of the capital city itself. The militia officer remembered him from behind-the-scenes activities in a famous trial three years before … his name was Odilov and he was a very hard nut indeed.

Odilov spoke rapidly to Pudovkin. Although everyone in the room except Elizabeth spoke Russian, none of them could pick up the words, not even Moiseyenko, who was torn between edging up to his chief to eavesdrop and looking after his prisoner, whom everyone seemed to have forgotten.

Pudovkin's eyebrows climbed higher up his forehead. ‘But I've just arrested the fellow!' he exclaimed testily. These were the first words any of the others managed to catch.

Odilov turned around and faced the British contingent for the first time. Simon, his wits partly restored by the interruption, noticed his flat, Slavic face, which could have jumped straight from the unkind pen of any Western cartoonist portraying the typical Russian.

The man swept his small eyes mound the group and let them settle on Michael Shaw.

He stood motionless for a moment, his short legs sticking out like tree stumps from under his long mackintosh. The Chicago-style trilby was pulled well down over his eyes and if the situation hadn't been so tense, it would have looked like some send-up of a third rate spy thriller.

‘Mr Shaw – I think you lost your watch in the Hotel Moskva.'

His voice was flat and expressionless – he still spoke in Russian.

Simon felt devastated by the anti-climax.
All this pantomime, just to return a bloody wristwatch, in the middle of me being carted off to life imprisonment
, he thought bitterly.

He was wrong.

Shaw's face reddened and he slowly rose to his feet, towering over the KGB man.

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' he rumbled, deliberately speaking in English.

Odilov smiled forbearingly and repeated himself in English, with sarcastic clarity.

‘Nonsense – here's my watch!' snapped Shaw, jerking up his sleeve.

Odilov slowly withdrew a hand from his side pocket and dangled another wristwatch by its strap. He held it high, almost under Shaw's nose.

‘This one says ‘Made in England' on the face … I have no doubt that the one you are wearing will say “Made in the USSR”.'

He slowly lowered the watch and gazed sadly at the face.

‘A pity – the hands seem to be detached – I wonder if the hands on yours are loose, also. May I see?'

He held out a hand.

Shaw made no movement, but his eyes flickered a little beneath lowered lids, as if he was seeking a way of escape.

‘Let me see it!' said Odilov, more sharply this time.

His two henchmen closed in slightly. Pudovkin, Vasily and Pomansky stared in fascination, Simon Smith now forgotten.

Michael Shaw stood immobile for a few more seconds, then, ever so slowly like a film running at half speed, undid the buckle of his watch strap. He handed it reluctantly to the security man.

Odilov put the other watch back in his pocket and with a quick movement, bent down and put Shaw's on the terrazzo floor. He raised his heel and brought it down on the glass with a crack that echoed like a pistol shot around the deathly still room. Then he bent down and picked up the shattered timepiece and shook it gently over his cupped hand.

A black metallic powder trickled out from the battered face.

Michael Shaw watched it as if it were his own lifeblood draining away.