CHAPTER TWO

Lt. Stepanovich and Private Kornikova returned to the main row of offices and storage rooms where Private Georgy Yesipov and Militsioner Private Yuri Inozemtsev, Lebedinsky’s next-in-command, were well into their interviews with the convalescent center staff. Stepanovich took Yesipov and Inozemtsev aside for a progress report.

“Where are we in the effort to question everyone on the staff, Georgy Artyomovich and Yuri Alexandreovich?”

“About a quarter of the way along, Trushin Vasilyovich,” Georgy replied.

Lt. Stepanovich pondered a moment. “Why is that, Yuri Alexandreovich?”

“Because most of the people are young, female, and frightened of us. It is like pulling teeth to get them to calm down and answer questions, and then they don’t know anything.”

“We need to become more efficient. We need answers before this day is out. I propose a different approach.”

He scanned the list of staff members and made several quick marks on the sheets.

“I have divided the list into four groups, one for each of us. Now, the list is pared down to only those people who work in the area of Gen. Lagounov’s room. That is a manageable number. I will start with the security staff. If any one of you finds a lead, let me know immediately; so, we can pursue it and not spin our wheels chatting with uninformed and anxious worker-bees.”

Stepanovich drew a blank in his interviews with the security personnel—two elderly military veterans who were looking forward to their pensions and a bright and overly energetic young man who told Stepanovich at least six times how much he admired the officers of the MYC—especially Lt. Stepanovich—and how much he wanted to join the force. The elderly vets had lived long enough under Soviet rule to know not to give anything but yes and no answers, and the younger man’s excessive verbiage was useless.

Lada Kornikova was the first interviewer to get anything of use. She left her interview room as soon as it was evident that she at least had someone who was in regular contact with the murder victim.

“Trushin Vasilyovich, I have something. The sister who tends to the general almost every day reports the visit of a stranger to the unit.”

Lt. Stepanovich dismissed the man he was interviewing, and he and Lada went directly back to her room.

“Sister Ludmila Mikhailovna, this is our senior officer, the man I told you about. Please tell him what you told me,” Lada said to the submissive country girl.

She stammered for a moment, then gathered her courage and told Lt. Stepanovich, “The general has been in the center for a long time—since before I was given the privilege of working for the glorious Soviet Union in my humble capacity. During the time I cared for him, he never had a visitor, never wrote a letter, never made a telephone call. Then early this morning, a man dressed in gardener’s clothing came onto the unit and asked the head nurse, Sister Maria Nikolayovna Ilyushkin, about where the general’s room was. She talked to him for a few minutes then ordered me to lead the man to the general’s room. I stayed with the two men for a few minutes, long enough to tell that the general was not happy to see the man. The man stood up strong and tall like a military officer; so, I thought he was one of the general’s officers from the Great War. The man ordered me to leave, and I did.”

“That was fine, Sister. Remain calm and tell me anything you heard the man say to Sister Maria Nikolayovna or to Gen. Lagounov.”

Ludmila wrinkled up her brow in thought.

“The man seemed unhappy with Sister Ilyushkin. She said something to him that I could not understand—maybe in German—and the man spoke back to her in what I think could be French. She was shaking her head, and she looked like she might be frightened. The man looked angry. He said Gott verdammt, wo is er?’ I understood that. It means … a swear word then a question, ‘Where is he?’ Sister Ilyushkin just shrugged and pointed down towards Gen. Lagounov’s room.”

“What did you see and hear next, Ludmila?”

Ludmila Mikhailovna was comfortable now. She did not like the domineering and abusive head nurse. She had done nothing wrong, and the policeman was just trying to find out what happened to the old general. She was a simple farm girl, which one could discern at the first glance at her soft, corpulent, bovine figure and round, guileless face. She inspired trust for what she had to say by her more than evident innocence.

“I walked with the gardener man down to Gen. Lagounov’s room. He opened the door and walked in like he was family, or he owned the place.”

“Did you challenge him?”

“No, sir. I do not have authority to challenge.”

“Of course not,” Stepanovich thought to himself; but as he was getting information from the homely young woman, he did not want to upset her and interfere with the flow.

“Did he say anything?”

“Who?”

“Either of the men.”

“The gardener man did. He told me to leave. Not very nice about it either. As I was walking out of the room, the gardener said, ‘Kind of surprised to see me, no, General?’”

“Were those his exact words?”

“Yes, sir.”

Trushin made a note in his murder book.

“Then what happened?” he asked.

“The gardener man closed the door.”

“What did you do?”

“I was busy; so, I left.”

“Did you hear or see anything else that concerned the general?”

“No, sir.”

“No noise or voices or anything?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you seen the man before? Maybe on the grounds or in one of the maintenance sheds, Ludmila?”

“No, sir. I don’t think the man was a gardener or that he worked here.”

“I’m sure you would remember him if he was a longtime employee, but what makes you think he wasn’t a gardener?”

“He looked like a soldier—an officer. Short haircut, tall, large strong hands. And he had a scar on his left face like the German officers sometimes have. His face was hard and mean. I didn’t like to be near him.”

“Did you ever meet a German officer, Ludmila Mikhailovna?”

Stepanovich looked at her face. Her eyes were down. She had paled. He thought she was about to cry.

“Don’t be afraid, my sweet girl, you are safe with me. Did something happen in the war, something that you don’t like to remember?”

Now she did cry—a soft, quiet cry that came from somewhere down deep in a tortured soul.

“Yes, sir. I don’t like to talk about it.”

“Please tell me, Ludmila. It will be our secret. I promise that no harm will come to you if you tell me the truth. I think it may be important for my investigation.”

Ludmila squared her shoulders and said in a voice a little above a whisper, “I am from Stalingrad. I was sixteen when the Germans came. My family and I lived on a farm outside of the city. The Germans marched into the area and came to our house. They took all of our food and murdered my father and mother. An officer—a man who looked something like the gardener man who came to our convalescent home today—grabbed my arms. He had a cruel face … he hurt me.”

Ludmila wept out loud now, the horrors of that day and that battle etched into the lines of her face.

“I don’t like to say … I am a good girl….”

“You don’t have to say any more. I know you are a good girl. You have been a real help. Please don’t say anything to anyone else about what you saw this morning, all right?”

“Yes, sir,” she managed to say.

“Ludmila, could you do another thing for me?”

“If I can.”

“My assistant, Lada, is a police sketch artist. Would you sit down with her and see if you can remember the man’s face? It would be a great benefit to the Rodina.”

The young woman had no doubt suffered terribly for the Motherland already. She was a true Russian dedicated to the Soviet Union which had saved her city. She was willing to do anything this Soviet officer required of her.

“I would consider it to be my duty, sir.”

“Good girl, Ludmila. Please sit here until Lada can come to help you with a picture. Oh, by the way, do you happen to know were Sister Ilyushkin is now?”

“No, sir. No one has seen her since this morning when General Lagounov’s body was found.”

Trushin headed straight of the interview room where Lada was currently interrogating the charwoman who had found Gen. Lagounov’s body.

“Lada, let Georgy take over here. I need you to make a sketch. I think your drawing is likely to be of the murderer. Once Ludmila is satisfied that the picture you draw is of the man she saw, bring it to me. We will get it out to the militia all over the city. The NKVD can make sure it is copied and spread around the entire union.”

“I think this woman … her name is Oksana … Oksana Leonidovna Tkachenko … also saw the man. He might have just finished killing the general.”

Stepanovich told Oksana to stay in her seat while he went to find Georgy, but he ran into Private Inozemtsev first.

“Good, Yuri Alexandreovich, I have an important job for you. Do whatever it takes to find the head nurse on Gen. Lagounov’s unit. We must get hold of her. I think she may be the linchpin to this whole plot. If you cannot find her in an hour, come back here to get a picture of our presumed killer. We will have to get that spread around the whole of the Rodina. Move as fast as you can.”

Inozemtsev snapped to attention and saluted Lt. Stepanovich, did a sharp about-face, and hurried out of the room.

Oksana had a surprisingly good memory and a keen eye for details of the stranger’s face when it came her turn for Lada to sketch her image of the presumed murderer. Lt. Stepanovich’s interrogation of the old lady yielded only that when she attempted to enter Gen. Lagounov’s room for the morning cleaning, the man whose face she described to Lada came to the door and rudely closed it in her face. She never saw him again.

It was starting to be dusk out before the militsioners completed their work, pulled back onto the MKAD [Moscow Automobile Ring Road], and drove back to Petrovka 38 Street and the MYC building. The first order of business was to get photocopies made of Lada’s drawings—the two women had described and signed off on remarkably similar images. Lt. Stepanovich and Lada knew that in Western police headquarters, it was a simple thing to make large numbers of faithful photocopies on the office Xerox machine. It was an altogether different story in the Soviet Union as the 1960s began. All copy machines were held under tight control by the KGB for political reasons—that is, to counteract the dissident activity of samizdat.

Counterrevolutionaries all around the Soviet bloc nations reproduced censored publications from government sources and also produced their own crude typed products. The copies were passed from reader to reader by hand, and that grassroots practice designed to evade officially imposed censorship was fraught with nightmarish danger. To be caught with such a document meant that the culprit would receive very harsh punishments meted out in KGB prisons like the Lubyanka. No one emerged from the Lubyanka unchanged.

Copy machines in the Soviet Union were knockoffs of the American-made Xerox technology and never quite worked satisfactorily; but for most of the less technological needs for copies, the Soviet technology served. Photocopy machines were a nightmare for the KGB, and many members of its vast army spent their time policing the use of those machines secreted into the country. The 1960s, like the 1950s, was a culture of secrecy, often carried to absurd degrees. The lack of a photocopy machine was a frustrating nightmare for the nation’s police services; and the exhausted lieutenant of militsya, Trushin Vasilovich Stepanovich, ground his teeth as he set about trying to obtain a machine for the KGB.

This was not the first time Lt. Stepanovich had had to go around proper channels to get a machine. As he usually did, Trushin put a call in to his old Great War commanding officer, Boris Vadimovich Ilyushin, now colonel general—komandarm commander first rank—of the Red Army. It was a measure of the respect accorded Stepanovich that he could get through to the colonel general at all, and an indication of the commanding influence the old man still had that he was able to get through to none other than Alexander Shelepin, the cruel, crafty, and ultimately secretive current head of the KGB [Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti—Committee for State Security].

Half an hour later, Shelepin rousted the sleepy and moderately drunk Rudolph Vladimirovich Fedorchuck II and made things happen. At this point of the early 1960s, the ruling Soviet elite included the KGB’s Fifth Directorate, responsible for ideology and countersubversion, and the Agitprop Department, the party’s main watchdog over “ideological” matters, had full control over the introduction of newly invented photocopying machines—technically speaking, newly stolen from the American company Xerox—and Fedorchuck was its secretive and harsh watchdog of the watchdogs.

Half an hour after that—at midnight—Fedorchuck had twelve new photocopy machines delivered to Petrovka 38 Street. Ever the optimist, Stepanovich had two dozen service staff brought in from around Moscow to launch the largest manhunt in the history of the city to date.