here very rarely (according to the yard keeper the last time was at the beginning of winter) .
At 12.38 the mark summoned the yard keeper with the bell. Agent Maximenko went up to him, disguised as the yard keeper. Twitchy gave him a rouble and told him to buy bread, salami and two bottles of beer. There was apparently no one in the flat apart from him .
When he brought the order, Maximenko was given the change (17 kop.) as a tip. He observed that the mark was extremely nervous. As if he was waiting for someone or something .
At 3.15 an army officer who has been given the code name ‘Kalmyk’ appeared. (A staff captain with the collar tabs of the Supply Department, a limp on his right leg, short, high cheekbones, black hair.)
He went up to apartment No. 7, but came down 4 minutes later and set off in the direction of Basseinaya Street. Agent Maximenko was dispatched to follow him .
Twitchy did not emerge from the entrance of the building. At 3.31 he walked over to the window and stood there, looking into the yard, then walked away .
At this moment Maximenko has still not returned .
I am presently (8 o’clock in the evening) handing over the surveillance detail to Senior Agent Goltz .
Sen. Agent Smurov
Short and clear, apparently.
Short enough, certainly, but damn all about it was clear.
An hour and a half ago Evstratii Pavlovich, having only just received the report cited above, also received a phone call from the police station on Basseinaya Street. He was informed that a man had been found dead in the courtyard of a building on Mitavsky Lane, with documents that identified him as Flying Squad agent Vasilii Maximenko. In less than ten minutes the court counsellor himself had arrived at the scene of the incident and ascertained that it really was Maximenko. There were absolutely no signs of violent death, nor any traces of a struggle or of any disorder in the agent’s clothing. The highly experienced medical expert, Karl Stepanovich, had said immediately that all the signs indicated heart failure.
Well, of course, Mylnikov was upset for a while, he even shed a tear for the old comrade with whom he had served shoulder to shoulder for ten years – the number of scrapes they’d been through together! And, as a matter of fact, Vasilii had even been involved in the winning of the Order of Vladimir that had led to the genesis of a new noble line.
In May the previous year, a secret message had been received from the consul in Hong Kong, saying that four Japanese disguised as businessmen were making their way towards the Suez Canal – that is, to the city of Aden. Only they were not businessmen at all, but naval officers: two minelayers and two divers. They intended to place underwater bombs along the route of cruisers from the Black Sea Squadron that had been dispatched to the Far East.
Evstratii Pavlovich had taken six of his best agents, all of them genuine wolfhounds (including the now-deceased Maximenko), skipped across to Aden and there, in the bazaar, disguised as sailors on a spree, they had started a knife fight: they carved the Jappos to shreds and dumped their luggage in the bay. The cruisers had got through without a single hitch. True, those lousy macaques had smashed them to pieces afterwards anyway but, like they say, that wasn’t down to us, was it?
This was the kind of colleague the state counsellor had lost. And not even in some rollicking adventure, but from a heart attack.
After giving instructions concerning the mortal remains, Mylnikov went back to his office on Fontanka Street and reread the report about Twitchy, and something started bothering him. He dispatched Lenka Zyablikov, a very bright young lad, to Nadezhdinskaya Street, to check Apartment No. 7.
And then what came up? Well, the old wolfhound’s nose hadn’t led him astray.
Zyablikov had phoned just ten minutes ago, talked about this and that, said how he’d dressed up as a plumber, and started ringing and knocking at No. 7 – no
Christine Zolendz, Frankie Sutton, Okaycreations