After driving parallel to it for what seemed forever, Charlie decided that the redbricked perimeter of Sir Matthew Norrington’s Kingsclere estate must have been modeled on the Great Wall of China although probably went on for much longer. The gate he finally located opened noiselessly to his identifying himself at the security voice box and closed just as quickly behind him. The wall was lined inside by trees and there were more meticulously cultivated on either side of the paved drive that ribboned away ahead of him. He could not see the house. Through the trees to his left there was a herd of disinterested, unafraid deer. He thought there were some white ones but wasn’t sure. To his right, sheep grazed. Far beyond them, too far away to distinguish man from machine, a figure rode a disappearing tractor over the brow of a hill tufted with more trees. Would this have been the scene of perfect, safe tranquillity that Simon Norrington thought about kneeling in front of a grenade-made grave on the outskirts of Yakutsk, waiting for a pistol shot?
Not suspecting its length, Charlie had not timed how long it took to circumnavigate the outer wall. It was a full five minutes before the house came into view, a huge square pile-Georgian, Charlie guessed-with creeper-clad walls and a flagpole on the central turret for the proudly flying red cross on white pennant, the whole thing a monument to the permanence of the English landed class.
Sir Matthew Norrington waited by one of three parked Range Rovers, white-haired, tweed-suited and brogued. The spectacles were horn-rimmed. As he got out of the rented car, Charlie decided it was impossible to decide between his or the other man’s whose suit was the more comfortably shapeless.
Norrington said at once, “Glad to see you. I want to understand what this is all about.” The voice was firm, like the handshake.
“I don’t fully understand myself, but I’ll do my best,” promised Charlie.
“But you are definitely in charge of the investigation? That’s what Sir Rupert said on the phone.” There was an impatience in the question.
“Yes,” said Charlie. I wish, he thought.
The house into which the elderly man led him was as comfortably lived in as the suit and Charlie decided that perhaps it wasn’t a monument to anything after all. The cavernous flagstoned entrance hall was lined with oil paintings, which continued along a paneled corridor. Aware of Charlie’s interest, Norrington said, “The Holbein and the Reynolds are ancestral, but a lot of the more modern collection was Simon’s choice. It’s thought to be quite remarkable.”
The door at which Norrington stopped was halfway along the hall, from the far end of which-or maybe from another room-there was the sound of people. A dog barked, very briefly. The library into which Norrington took Charlie was more neatly arranged than Sir Rupert Dean’s but at the same time more obviously occupied. There were more framed oils, men in ermine and robes, bejeweled women and velvet-dressed children with ringlets and spaniel pets, but there was an obvious working desk dominating the window looking out over the rolling grounds. Charlie was immediately aware of a lot of photographs on its top and even more, practically overcrowding, on side tables at either end of the huge, inglenooked fireplace. He recognized a lot of Simon Norrington, two in the uniform the man hadbeen wearing in the Yakutsk ice tomb. Another had him in graduation gown with a man Charlie assumed to be his father, who’d looked remarkably similar to Sir Matthew Norrington now. There was a photograph of a teenage Matthew smiling up toward Simon in visible bigger brother admiration. The chairs, also by the fireplace, were leather, which creaked when they sat.
Norrington said, “Tell me what this is all about.” It was the voice of a man accustomed to being obeyed.
Charlie left out all his supposition and suspicions and anything about a second English officer, so it only took minutes.
“I’d expected more,” the dissatisfied baronet said, at once, with a frown.
“I wish there were more,” apologized Charlie, meaning it.
“They were planned killings? Of my brother and the man in his grave in Berlin?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Why him?”
“I don’t yet know how or why, but I believe art is the most obvious factor: something to do with its looting. But not that by itself. There’s a lot more.”
“Simon despised the Nazis, Rosenberg’s lot, for what they did to art. And the Russians’ Trophy Brigades. Judged one as bad as the other. He knew it would be impossible to reassemble the European art heritage, no matter how hard he and others like him tried.” The man stopped, pointedly. “You imagine you’ll ever find out who killed him?”
Charlie hesitated. “Who committed the actual murders, probably not, not after fifty years. They would have been functionaries.” Which was true, he realized. It had been a Russian bullet that killed Simon Norrington.
“What about the people who ordered it?”
“That’s who I’m trying to find. If I do, we’ll know why.”
Norrington stirred in his chair, which creaked again. “What are your chances?”
A lie wouldn’t help and Charlie didn’t want to slip sideways into his theories and guesses, either. “I’d like them to be better. I’d appreciate a lot of your time.”
Norrington shrugged. “As much as you need.” He got up. “I drink gin.”
“Whiskey.”
The old man returned from a separate side table with their drinks, settled noisily and said, “So?”
“You were, what, sixteen when it happened?” Charlie spoke looking at the young Matthew gazing up at his elder brother.
“Just seventeen, at the war’s end. Felt cheated. Was an officer cadet at Eton, all ready to go. Wanted to go even more when Simon was killed; thought it had been in action then, of course. Imagined I’d find the actual person who did it.” The man snorted humorlessly. “Some irony about that now, isn’t there?”
“Let’s hope not,” said Charlie. “You can remember everything about the time? Not simply the death but immediately before? And afterwards?”
“All of it.”
Everything from the family, recalled Charlie, remembering the Berlin conversation with the military attache. Charlie indicated the photographs of Simon Norrington on the table closest to him and said, “He was-is-obviously deeply mourned?”
“My father was devastated. We all were, naturally. But my father took it dreadfully. The war was over, for God’s sake!”
Charlie thought it was too much to hope, but he hoped, just the same. “How did you learn?”
The older man frowned. “Letter. Official notification. June third.”
That was encouraging, thought Charlie. “There were some personal belongings returned?”
“Arrived much later, from his unit: cigarette lighter-it matched a case my father gave Simon when he graduated-his wallet. Family ring. There was a personal letter of regret, too, of course. From his commanding officer.”
“And then there was the notification of the burial?” coaxed Charlie.
There was another snorted, empty laugh. “Of the wrong man.”
“But you visited the grave?”
“Once, with my father. He was annoyed that we hadn’t been asked about the body: that it had been already buried. We’ve got our own chapel and vault here, in the grounds. But there was a dedicationservice in Berlin and afterwards we decided to leave Simon … we thought it was Simon … where he was.”
“How many times did you go?”
“Just the once with my father, for the service. It was an official affair, for a lot of families with relatives there.”
Charlie was immediately alert to the qualification. “Was there any sort of registration at the official ceremony?”
“Not then.”
“But?”
“I went again, by myself, on the first supposed anniversary. My father was ill by then, couldn’t travel. There was some form-filling nonsense that time.”
Charlie realized he’d drifted away from the directions in which he’d been heading but decided to finish this now. “How many other times did you go: need to fill in the visitor’s form?”
“That was the only occasion,” said Norrington. “Father had a commemorative plaque put into the chapel. We could mourn well enough here.”
Which almost brought him back on track, Charlie recognized. “Who else from the family, apart from you, visited the grave you thought was Simon’s?”
“No one.” The man frowned. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m trying to build up as complete a picture as I can,” Charlie avoided, not wanting to enter still-unexplored territory. Quickly he said, “You mourned here?”
“Yes.”
Charlie indicated the picture-crowded tables and desk again. “You kept a lot of photographs?”
“Yes?” There was a defensive sharpness in the questioning reply.
“What about other things? Did you keep the notification of Simon’s death-the personal things that were returned?”
“I told you my father was devastated. In the first two or three years it was almost a shrine. It worried me.”
Sometimes it worked to hope against hope, Charlie decided. “Do you still have it all?”
“Yes. Father kept everything. So I did, too.”
Don’t rush, Charlie warned himself. It still might be another blind alley; this was going far better than he’d expected and there stillmight be more Norrington could help with. And there were the names from Berlin. “Later, when we’ve talked some more, could I see it all?”
Norrington hesitated. “Could it help you find the people you’re looking for?”
“It’s my best chance so far,” replied Charlie, honestly.
“Some of the letters are personal.”
“Letters!”
“I told you, Father kept a lot of stuff. Letters that Simon wrote when he got posted abroad. And before.”
Now it was Charlie who hesitated, and when he spoke he did so slowly, not wanting to lose the chance. “Sir Matthew, I have what could be leads to whoever murdered your brother. But I don’t know how to follow them. How, in fact, to take this investigation very much further. What you have, of your brother’s, might show me.”
“Then you must see it all,” agreed Norrington, at once. “Now?”
“Let’s talk a little more,” said Charlie. There had to be something in what was promised: by the sheer law of averages and the way his luck was running, there had to be something that took him forward! Which made waiting a minute-a second! — close to impossibly difficult, but he kept to the determination not to hurry. Get it all, he reminded himself: an inch at a time, a step at a time.
“What else can I tell you?” questioned the baronet. He got up to go to the drinks tray.
Charlie shook his head against the gestured invitation. “It was big jump, wasn’t it, from Free French liaison at the War Office to a special art-looting unit?”
Norrington frowned on his way back to his chair. “You don’t know anything at all about Simon, do you?”
He didn’t and it made this encounter too long overdue, Charlie conceded, although refusing completely to blame his personal situation in Moscow. There had been reason enough to remain there as long as he had. “The Ministry of Defense can’t find any records about your brother.”
Norrington’s smile was slow, an expression of belated understanding. “He didn’t tell me that.”
It came close to Charlie’s breath being taken away by a deluge offittingly iced water. “Who didn’t tell you what, sir?”
Norrington got up again, went to his desk and took the small rectangle of pasteboard from a top drawer. “Burbage, Lionel Burbage. Defense Ministry. Said there was a confusion about the records, which was why he wanted what I had.”
The iced-water feeling stayed with Charlie. “Did he take them?”
“Asked to, but I wouldn’t let him, like I’m not going to let you. Allowed him to read them, as you can. That’s all.”
Charlie began to feel warm again, not just at the reassurance but at his determination not to hurry. “When was this?”
“Four days ago.”
He’d met Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Jackson, the military attache, in Berlin five days ago. It fit the urgency of the Ministry of Defense panic. “Did you make your brother’s letter available to him?”
“Didn’t come into the conversation. He asked specifically about the official War Office communications and that’s all he saw. That’s why I asked you when you got here if you were in charge of the investigation, although Sir Rupert had already told me you were when he telephoned.”
“What did Burbage tell you?”
“That he was.”
“I am,” insisted Charlie. “It’s been a problem from the beginning, too many departments, getting in each other’s way.”
Norrington nodded in further understanding. “Burbage asked me to tell him if anyone else approached me about Simon.”
“Did you tell him I was coming?”
Norrington shook his head. “I didn’t know you were, then. Decided to wait. See you first. Hear what you had to say.”
“I certainly don’t know of him. But it makes sense to stop this duplication. Which I will. Can I have Burbage’s number?”
Norrington carried the card back with the whiskey decanter, adding unasked to Charlie’s glass. All that was listed was the name and a telephone number. No ministry was identified. Neither was any department. Norrington said, “You haven’t told me what you’ve got to say, Mr. Muffin. Not properly. Not why, for instance, Sir Rupert asked me when we originally spoke to keep secret the discovery of my brother’s body in some place I’d never heard of, nor make anypublic announcement about finally burying him as he should be buried, after all these years. I think I’ve been remarkably patient, but now that patience has gone.”
Shit, thought Charlie. Shit! Shit! Shit! Family pride, he told himself desperately: family pride and honor. “Your brother was officially in Berlin; his death there was accepted. His being in Yakutsk is considered, even now, something that shouldn’t be made public. Until we find out why and how he came to be there-to be one of at least four victims in a planned killing-it’s still considered a potential national problem.”
“That’s very difficult for me to accept. Or understand.”
“It’s even more difficult for me to ask you to accept or understand,” pleaded Charlie. “Which is why I’m asking you for all the help I can get.”
“My brother would not, under any circumstances, have done anything wrong: illegal or unofficial! He was proud to be an officer. To serve his country.”
An opening, Charlie recognized. “He couldn’t have been where he was unofficially. He was obeying an order. Which was what I told you when we first began talking: what I’m trying to do is find out who gave that order. Which it would seem the Ministry of Defense is also trying to find out.” If Burbage was from the Ministry of Defense, which Charlie now doubted.
“According to the newspapers, the Americans consider their officer to have been a hero. There’s a hero’s burial planned. Why hasn’t the same been said-planned-about Simon? And why was I asked to say nothing, do nothing, about burying him?”
“The American is being buried as an unknown victim,” seized Charlie. “Your brother won’t be, after I’ve found out the truth. Then, maybe, he’ll be accorded the honor he’s due.”
“No,” agreed Norrington, quietly. “Simon won’t be buried as an unknown. And I don’t want any maybes about his being accorded every honor to which he’s entitled. I’m not given to threats, Mr. Muffin-the need to prove myself. So what I am going to say isn’t a threat. It’s a statement of fact. I am not without official influence-access to private as well as public platforms. I am prepared totally and fully to cooperate with you in every way I am asked. But with a time limit. Unless I am convinced otherwise-and you must understandI will take a very great deal of convincing-I will announce two weeks from today that it was Simon’s body in the Yakutsk grave. I will disclose that somebody else was killed to fill a grave in his name in Berlin. And I shall demand a public inquiry into the circumstances of both deaths, and although it will offend me deeply I shall turn my brother’s burial here into a media event. I don’t, of course, expect you to be the messenger. I’ll telephone Sir Rupert to tell him myself. Do you think what I’ve said is unreasonable?”
Charlie said, “I think you’ve already shown a great deal of patience and I’m grateful for another two weeks. In your position I’d have probably kept it to one.”
Norrington’s smile was abrupt and open. “Interesting reply. When I said roughly the same to Burbage, he said he’d stop me doing anything under the Official Secrets Act, and when I told him I wasn’t a signatory to it, he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and that it didn’t matter whether I’d signed it or not. That’s the real reason I didn’t call him when I agreed to your coming. Didn’t like the fellow. Very rude.”
But far more important, very stupidly indiscreet, bullying like that. Suddenly reminded of Richard Cartright, Charlie decided the standard was definitely going down.
Charlie refused the offer of lunch from Norrington’s willowy blond fourth wife who said to call her Davinia and whom he guessed to be half the baronet’s age. Instead he accepted rare beef sandwiches he didn’t get around to eating at the borrowed library desk, working steadily through the two wooden boxes of personal effects under the frozen, smiling gaze from three pictures of the man whose mysteries he was trying to solve.
He did so careful to retain the exact order in which each item had been kept, not removing one until that which preceded it had been replaced. The crocodile wallet was an early disappointment. It contained Simon Norrington’s English driving license and visiting cards in his own name-both necessary and easy identification, Charlie acknowledged-but no one else’s cards, letters, photographs or anything connecting him to Berlin or his unit. His army pay book was endorsed for his pay to be credited automatically to a Coutts Bank account on the Strand and although he didn’t expect it to lead to thelong-lost army records Charlie made a note of the pay book number. Charlie looked over it all, laid out on the desk in front of him, every item perfectly preserved, intact and undamaged, despite its age. How, he asked himself, could it have been accepted, apparently without a single question? Carried as it would have been, in the breast or inside pockets of the uniform, it should-and would-have all been totally destroyed by the massive force of whatever had killed the substitute Berlin victim.
The official notification of Simon Norrington’s death was as cold as the grave in which the man had lain for fifty years, a formal printed notice with the choice of striking out sir or madam, whichever was inappropriate, and gaps in the text for the details of names, relationship and date of death to be inserted by hand.
Charlie got the first of what he considered important information from the handwritten letter of condolence to the father from Norrington’s commanding officer, a colonel who signed himself John Parnell, and which was dated July 2. After the predictable eulogy of Norrington’s bravery and dedication to duty, it read:
I cannot, of course, disclose the nature of Simon’s very special work in these most recent months but I can say he was the only person in the unit with the very necessary qualifications to carry it out. Neither can I give any precise details of how or when he died, although of course we have made strenuous efforts to discover both. His body was returned to us from a Russian-occupied part of the city. The Russian documentation merely indicates that he was found dead, by Russian troops, on or around May 10. You will be aware that at that time there was still sporadic fighting in Berlin, an indication of the bravery of your noncombatant son to which I have already referred.
So much and yet so little, agonized Charlie, easing briefly back into the bucket chair, which creaked like all the other leather furniture. What was the work so very special that only the noncombatant Lieutenant Simon Norrington was able to undertake it in the Russian sector of Berlin in which there was still fighting? But who hadn’t been there at all but thousands of miles away?
There were thirty-two letters, all still in their envelopes and all indated sequence, which was how Charlie read them, searching for people with whom Norrington had worked, particularly for references to the names he’d gotten from the Berlin photograph. A Jessica appeared in the third letter, addressed from London when Norrington was clearly still attached to the War Office, and by the fourth it was obvious she was employed there with him. From the way the next was written, she’d spent a weekend at Kingsclere. Norrington had been glad his father liked her as much as he did, but she disappeared from the correspondence just before Norrington’s transfer to the art-loss unit. Norrington was relieved at the transfer: Bloody French go on all the time as if I was personally responsible for Dunkirk and seem to forget we got almost as many of their soldiers out as we did our own.
There wasn’t another name until Charlie was halfway through, and then it was clearly a nickname, Scotty. Norrington described him as a good man, salt of the earth. But hard. There were frequent references after that, but none of them hinted at particular friendship, more admiration. Then there was someone identified only as J, and as more single initials followed, Charlie guessed, disappointed, at Norrington’s own effort to obey wartime censorship rules. J was a tyrant, but fair, who knows his art. HH was a bully who’d clearly made an early choice about being a criminal himself and decided to step the other way over the line. And then there was the appearance of G, at which Charlie felt the tingle of recognition as he read. The letter was dated February 9, 1945. G was brilliant: I sit at his feet. G saw telltale brush detail-despite his problem-which Norrington missed: three fakes, in one day. It’s good to know the Nazis were cheated but it would have been even better if we thought they’d paid good money instead of stealing them.
By March they were a two-man team with the highest identification rate in the combined group. It was exhilarating to be so immediately close to it all. But the scale of the pillaging is indescribable: so much lost that will never be recovered.
Practically every letter written after Norrington had been posted to Europe exhorted his father to keep Matthew from enlisting, whatever you have to do. War was filthy. Men were animals. It was inconceivable what one could do to another. I don’t want Matthew seeing what I’ve seen, hearing what I’ve heard, doing what I’ve done to conform and despised myself for not being brave enough not to do it. The lastletter was dated April 2. The concluding sentence read: It truly will be over soon. I shall be coming home.
Finally, after fifty-four years, thought Charlie: hardly soon enough.
“Well?” demanded Sir Matthew Norrington from the doorway.
“Your brother probably does deserve a hero’s recognition,” said Charlie.
“Give it to him, then.”
“I need to talk more,” said Charlie. Always more, he thought.
“Tell me about your brother?” asked Charlie, simply.
“Simon was the golden boy,” declared Norrington, at once and admiringly. “There was nothing he couldn’t do or achieve, usually twice as quickly and twice as well as anybody else. Everything came naturally, easily, to him. Our mother was French, so we grew up bilingual. I stopped there, but Simon didn’t. He was practically as fluent in German and went on from Greek-which he took as part of art history-to more than passable Russian.”
“He spoke German and Russian!” seized Charlie. There was a reassuring foot twinge.
“Both, very well,” confirmed Norrington.
Abruptly recalling what now seemed a long-ago half thought, Charlie said, “What about reading it?”
“Of course,” said Norrington, appearing surprised at the qualification. “He read both as well as he spoke both.”
“He left the War Office at the end of 1943, to join the specialized art unit?”
“Yes.”
“But obviously didn’t go to Europe until after June 1944-after the invasion?”
“Almost immediately after: before the end of June. That was his job, trying to identify the national heritages that had been plundered and trace where they’d gone. He needed quick access to captured Germans, before they were dispersed.”
As fifteen Germans were dispersed to Yakutsk, recalled Charlie. “Did he ever get leave, come home after being posted abroad?”
“Once,” said Norrington. “December 1944. Father had his first heart attack. Simon was in Belgium then, I think. Wherever, hewangled a compassionate trip. Just forty-eight hours.”
“Did you talk about what he was doing?”
“Of course. It upset him, the degree of Nazi looting. It was so complete: whole museums, galleries, stripped.”
Charlie paused, unsure how to phrase his question, hoping for the answer he wanted but not wanting to lead. “What about anything else?”
Norrington, who had resumed his former seat, stared steadily across at Charlie. “You need to explain that.”
“Did you ever get the impression, from anything that Simon said, that his function had been in any way expanded-that he’d been given a role beyond the location and recovery of looted art?”
Norrington took a long time to answer. “Nothing specific,” the man said, finally.
“What wasn’t specific?” persisted Charlie, refusing to give up.
“There was something about the languages he could speak-that he was often called upon by other people, in other units, to help them.”
“Did he say which other units?”
The older man shook his head. “Not that I can remember.”
He couldn’t avoid leading, Charlie accepted. “Nothing about military intelligence? Intelligence of any sort?”
“No,” said Norrington, positively.
“Who was Jessica?” demanded Charlie, abandoning one direction for another.
“One of the personal things I mentioned.”
Charlie waited.
“Someone he met in London. There was talk of an engagement. They had a flat, in Pimlico. He had to interpret one night at a reception. Churchill, de Gaulle, a lot of Roosevelt’s staff; America was in the war by late 1943, remember. There was an air raid. When he got back to Pimlico, their block had been destroyed by a land mine. Jessica was one of the ten who died.”
“What about people Simon worked with?” Charlie hurried on. “Did he talk about any in particular? Refer to anyone as a friend?”
Again Norrington took his time. “There were things in the letters, but not until after he went back for the last time that December. I never knew who they were.”
“I want to put some names to you,” said Charlie, taking from his pocket the list from the Berlin group photograph. “I know it was a long time ago, but one might trigger something.”
“I doubt it. But let’s try.”
“Wilson?”
“No.”
“Allison?”
“No.”
“Larisa Krotkov?”
“Russian?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t ever remember him talking of working with Russians.”
“What about using the language?”
“No.”
“Smith?”
“No.”
“Raisa Belous?”
“She’s the woman found in the grave! The Russian woman?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose he must have known her, mustn’t he?”
“You don’t remember his ever mentioning her?”
“No.”
“Bellamy?”
“No.”
“Timpson?”
“No.”
“Dunne?”
“No.”
“Jacobson?”
“No.”
Silence fell between them.
Norrington said, “Who are they?”
“People I believe Simon worked with.”
“Where’d you get the names?”
“America,” said Charlie, which was close enough to the truth. “Some of them were American.”
“He worked with the Russian women, as well?”
“There was a connection. I don’t know what, not yet.” Would he ever? Charlie asked himself.
“I’m sorry,” apologized Norrington. He gestured over his shoulder, toward the two repacked boxes. “I know everything there by heart. If there’d been a hint, I would have recognized it. I was waiting for an obvious Scots name, for ‘Scotty.’” The man paused. “I’ve already spoken to Sir Rupert: told him what I told you, about my time limit.”
“What did he say?”
“That he hoped you’d meet the deadline.”
“So do I,” said Charlie.
“The media release brought the American woman back but not the Englishman?” demanded Nikulin.
“Yes,” said Natalia. There were just the two of them in the chief of staffs office. He’d served tea and sweetmeats.
“And he hasn’t been in contact?”
“Not since the day he left.” It had been a bad mistake for Charlie not to have telephoned Lestov.
“There’s no doubt that the button found in the grave was British?”
“None,” said Natalia, uncomfortably.
“They must know who the second man was: have an identity they want to hide.”
“Possibly.”
“Everyone knows Stalin was a monster, that the regime then is not the government of today. Why don’t we turn the announcement of this new discovery into the finding of the evidence of a second mystery Briton? Put pressure upon them? We could even keep our understanding of cooperation: tell London what we’re going to do, before we do it. And we’d have to tell them direct if their man isn’t here, wouldn’t we?”
Exposing Charlie to every sort of criticism, Natalia thought. How could she manipulate a delay? “I don’t understand how the woman, Larisa Krotkov, can have disappeared so completely.”
“You think you’re being blocked?”
“Yes,” exaggerated Natalia, eagerly.
“Then let’s see if the obstruction extends to the president’s office,” accepted Nikulin.
“Perhaps we should wait until we establish that-and a reason, if it is the case-before moving on the British idea?”
“Not for much longer,” determined the man. “So far we’ve been ahead in virtually everything. That’s how I want us to stay.”
On the other side of Moscow, Fyodor Ivanovich Belous nervously opened the door of his apartment only sufficiently to see it was Vadim Lestov, backed by a three-man squad.
“Don’t be shy, Fyodor Ivanovich,” said the militia colonel. “We’ve come back for a second look.”