The Town By The Sea tof-3 Read online

  Taken by surprise, the man crawling across the floor missed his aim and the bullet flew wide. Vukovich kicked the heavy Mauser pistol out of his hand and at that moment the door gave way under the blows of the security men.

  At first the bandit denied that it was he who had intended to blow up Special Detachment Headquarters and its ammunition stores. But when Doctor Gutentag came to the prison hospital and removed the bullet from the bandit's leg, it turned out to be a bullet from a Webley Scott revolver.

  It was with a revolver of this rather rare pattern that Polevoi had fired at the bandit on that memorable night when Bobir had made such an ass of himself.

  At the second interrogation the bandit gradually began to confess, and soon it came out that he and Kozyr-Zirka, the notoriously ruthless ataman of a regiment of Petlura storm-troopers, were one and the same person.

  In the year when the Pilsudski and Petlura men fled for ever from the Ukraine, it was on Kozyr-Zirka's orders that the cut-throats of the "Carefree Soul" regiment had slaughtered over half the innocent population of the hamlet of Ovruch, including the parents of one of our trainees, Monus Guzarchik. . . It was Kozyr-Zirka who was rumoured among the frightened inhabitants of the Ukrainian border villages to be either the Count of Belaya Tserkov or a runaway convict from Galicia... It was he, Kozyr-Zirka, who when surrounded by a partisan detachment in the village of Privorotye had murdered his orderly, a tall, dark fellow like himself, and, to hoodwink the partisans, thrust his own papers, signed by Petlura, into the pockets of the murdered man. The partisans had thought they had killed the real Kozyr-Zirka and he had managed to escape.

  Vukovich conducted the investigation himself.

  It turned out that Kozyr-Zirka was neither a count nor a runaway convict, but a very ordinary son of a priest from the town of Rovno.

  Having run away from the Red Army to Poland after the unsuccessful alliance between Pilsudski and Petlura, Kozyr-Zirka spent a short time in a Polish concentration camp at Kalish. The camp was visited twice by a well-dressed man in civilian clothes, who wore a black Homburg hat and carried a heavy walking stick. He was lean and dark and spoke excellent Russian. Kozyr-Zirka, like many inhabitants of the part of Volyn that had once belonged to the Russian Empire, also spoke Russian. He and the visitor talked together for a long time, and Kozyr-Zirka became quite convinced that the visitor must be some important Russian whiteguard, one of those who had joined the notorious terrorist, and enemy of Soviet power, Boris Savinkov, in Poland.

  Great was Kozyr-Zirka’s surprise when soon after these visits he was summoned before the camp commandant, the Pilsudski man Nalegcz-Bukojemski, who said to him: "Congratulations, ataman! You have found favour with Captain George Sidney Railey of the British Intelligence Service. Captain Railey is an old enemy of the Bolsheviks. He knows Russia as well as I know this camp and he was very pleased after his conversation with you. By permission of Marshal Pilsudski, Captain Railey is touring all the camps where Petlura troops have been interned. It is his mission to select the bravest and most experienced supporters of the independent Ukraine. At Captain Railey's personal request, I am granting you leave to go home to Rovno for a holiday. Have a rest and get your weight back. You will be found when you are needed. In the meantime you had better forget about our conversation."

  Kozyr-Zirka had other things to think about besides getting his weight back on the free meals at his father's vicarage. Thanks to the dark Englishman, his days of imprisonment behind barbed wire were now over, and Kozyr-Zirka began to seek out the friends who had served with him under Petlura.

  At that time, after the Red Army's defeat of Petlura, many ex-commanders of the Petlura forces found themselves in emigration. Some had run away to Czechoslovakia, others to Canada, others to Austria and Germany, but most of them were still skulking in Poland, particularly in the largest city of the Western Ukraine—Lvov. It was these men whom the former Austrian-paid Colonel of the Galician riflemen, Yevgen Konovalets, began to rope in and register in his secret lists. Konovalets was known in the Soviet Ukraine as the ruthless butcher of the workers of Kiev. He and his riflemen had suppressed the revolutionary uprising of the Arsenal workers, who had shown no desire to support what Petlura called "independence."

  Finding it hard to seek out his old ataman friends by correspondence, Kozyr-Zirka decided to go himself to Lvov, which at that time was swarming with Petlura men and former "gunner-boys." At that time Konovalets was banding together those traitors of the Ukrainian people into his criminal UMO (Ukrainian Military Organization).

  When the leaders of a secret counter-revolutionary organization admitted Kozyr-Zirka to their ranks, he did not tell them the real reason why he had got out of Kalish so quickly. Kozyr-Zirka had taken good heed of the camp commandant's advice to forget about their conversation and the dark Englishman's repeated visits to the camp. True, Kozyr-Zirka doubted whether he could be found and made to repay the favour he had received. Captain Railey, however, had taken good note of the bandit with the raven-black hair and dashing side-whiskers, and through his secret agents found Kozyr-Zirka even in Lvov.

  In the summer of 1925, arriving one day in Lvov, Kozyr-Zirka stopped at the People's Hotel.

  Scarcely had he taken his bath arid dried his stiff blue-black hair, when a porter knocked at the door and said that someone was asking for 'the gentleman from Rovno" on the telephone. A woman's voice asked him to come at once to the neighbouring Hotel Imperiale where an important and intimate matter awaited his attention. Very intrigued to think that anyone should have been able to find him so quickly in Lvov, 'Kozyr-Zirka got dressed, performed a hasty toilet and went, as the unknown woman had suggested, to the Hotel Imperiale, a favourite stopping-place for merchants from the out-of-the-way townships of Galicia.

  He was very surprised when on knocking at the appointed door a loud man's voice told him to enter. As soon as Kozyr-Zirka crossed the threshold, an immaculately dressed Pilsudski officer rose to meet him.

  This was Major Zygmunt Florek, a veteran officer of Polish military intelligence, who was working in Lvov simultaneously for Marshal Pilsudski and a foreign intelligence service.

  "And so we have found you, my dear ataman!" said the major. "Forgive me for asking you to call on me. I am rather well known in this town and if I had paid you a visit rather a lot of people would have got to know about it. Your organization has been accused often enough already of being in league with the Polish authorities."

  Taken aback by the major's first words, Kozyr-Zirka was even more surprised when Florek told him that Captain Railey sent him personal greetings and wished him success in his first and rather dangerous mission.

  Major Florek told Kozyr-Zirka that governments all over the world were preparing for war with the Soviet Union,. Anxious to convince the priest's son from Rovno that this' was so, Florek produced from his bag a recent copy of an English newspaper and translated part of an article which declared that Bolshevism would be smashed that year, and that Russia would return to the old life and open her frontiers "to those who wish to work there."

  "And she will open them to you too, my dear ataman!" Florek said. "Do you know who wrote that? Henry Detterding, the biggest oil manufacturer in the world. He has already sacrificed millions of rubles in gold to crush Bolshevism and he'll give as much again to see it accomplished. You can trust what he says."

  Having offered Kozyr-Zirka a fine position in the Ukraine when Soviet power was crushed, Florek asked him to carry out an important task.

  Major Florek instructed Kozyr-Zirka to cross over, to the Soviet side and blow up Special Detachment Headquarters in our town, and all its stores. Major Florek was speaking the truth when he told Kozyr-Zirka that war with the Soviet Union was imminent. Egged on by foreign imperialists, Pilsudski's generals were preparing to make war on the Soviet Union that year. Their hired agents assassinated the Communist Pyotr Voykov, Soviet plenipotentiary in Poland, on the platform of a Warsaw station. The Polish general staff began massing
troops on the Soviet frontier. Bombs were thrown into the Party club in Leningrad.

  Major Zygmunt Florek offered Kozyr-Zirka a handsome reward in cash from himself and from

  Captain Railey if the headquarters in Kishinev Street was blown up. "The whole world will hear the roar of that explosion and your name will go down in the annals of history, my dear ataman!" said Florek in farewell, giving him a list of addresses and contacts for use on Soviet territory.

  Kozyr-Zirka crossed the border at a place he knew well. Lieutenant Lipinsky himself, commander of the Rovno "frontier-defence corps," saw him off as far as Zbruch and wished him luck when they parted...

  "Write it all down," Kozyr-Zirka said to Vukovich at the interrogation. "The game's up. I've nothing to lose now." Kozyr-Zirka made no bones about telling Vukovich his whole life-story, joking cynically about the many blunders he had made and recalling his crimes with a sneering grin. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, tapping them with his long swarthy fingers and drawing deep, as if he felt every cigarette might be his last. The cardboard holders, scarred with the marks of his sharp teeth, he tossed carelessly into an enamel spitting-bowl.

  "What's the point of my hiding anything from you, gentlemen?" Kozyr-Zirka repeated at the interrogations.

  "You've got my heart on a plate in front of you. Why should I keep back one rotten little murder or raid I've done. It's all the same to me. You know yourselves I won't be getting any more dollars or pounds. If your frontier guards have shot my chief, that Englishman Sidney Railey, somewhere up near the Finnish frontier, what's the use of my trying to diddle you! The world can come to an end when I'm gone, for all I care. Believe me, I'm confessing to you here, as before God himself on judgement day!"

  But Vukovich realized that, although Kozyr-Zirka was confessing to crimes that the OGPU knew nothing about, he was really making a last bid to get his revenge on the Soviets by leaving his friends at liberty.

  Vukovich was certain that when Major Florek sent Kozyr-Zirka across the frontier he must have given the bandit at least a few addresses. Without them the bandit would have been quite helpless.

  At the interrogation the bandit flatly denied that it was Pecheritsa who had helped him to find his way on to the roof of the shed at headquarters.

  "I did it all myself," Kozyr-Zirka insisted. "I took a few bricks out of the wall and nosed around a bit to see how things stood in the yard. We're lone wolves of the top class, you know, and we always work alone. That's why our skin is worth more. If everything had come off as I had planned it, I'd be having a good time in Paris by now, and even my dear old Dad wouldn't know where I got all the money from."

  The only offence Pecheritsa had committed against Soviet power, according to Kozyr-Zirka, was that he, had taken pity on a man who was bleeding to death, given him shelter, and called a doctor.

  "I had never set eyes on Pecheritsa before," Kozyr-Zirka insisted. "If you ask me, he's a completely loyal Soviet citizen. The only thing is he's a bit soft-hearted, I grant you that. I'm very sorry I got him into such a mess."

  According to Nikita Kolomeyets, who told me the whole story, Kozyr-Zirka was very put out when Vukovich called in Polevoi and told the bandit it was our director who had winged him in the attic.

  "Well, I'd never have thought it!" the bandit confessed. "I thought it was a trap you, security men, had laid for me. Shot by a civilian! Why, it's ridiculous! I'll be ashamed till the end of my days!"

  "You haven't many more days left!" Polevoi remarked, stung by the bandit's words. "You're going to answer for your sins!"

  Kozyr-Zirka looked savage for a moment, then recovered himself and, smiling, continued to testify in his former cynical manner, as if neither Polevoi nor Kolomeyets were present.

  The day after Kozyr-Zirka's arrest someone made an attempt on Doctor Gutentag's life.

  Coming home from an evening at the theatre with his daughter, the doctor switched on the light and went to the window to close the shutters. A shot rang out from the bushes in the garden and a bullet, piercing the window-pane about an inch from Gutentag's head, crashed into an antique Chinese vase standing on the shelf behind him.

  The assassin got away, but this shot told Vukovich that there must be someone else in town connected with the people who had sent Kozyr-Zirka.

  A little later Vukovich learnt from a peasant refugee who had fled from the Western Ukraine that at about that time the chemist Tomash Gutentag had been murdered by unknown bandits in the town of Rovno. The murderers had shot him in his shop and stolen much of the medicine.

  On the night of the unsuccessful attempt on Doctor Gutentag's life, frontier guards at a remote post in the village of Medvezhye Ushko, twenty versts from our town, detained a half-witted old beggar, who had tried to slip away to Poland. In the collar of his lice-ridden shirt the guards found a rolled slip of paper containing the following code message,

  "Dear Mum,

  "The doctor sold the bull to strangers, I'm taking back the deposit. Gogus has moved to another flat, God damn him. Find him yourself and have a business talk with chemist G.

  "Your son, " Yurko."

  Lying in the prison hospital until his wound healed, Kozyr-Zirka knew nothing of the capture of this beggar, who was in reality a messenger for a spy group working on Soviet territory. Kozyr-Zirka was also firmly convinced that Pecheritsa's wife, before putting a bullet through her head, had burnt all secret documents that might incriminate her husband.

  Indeed, when the security men seized Kozyr-Zirka, Vukovich, who at once opened the brass door of the stove in Pecheritsa's study, discovered a heap of charred papers smoking in the grate. But before his sudden flight from the town Pecheritsa had apparently forgotten to warn his wife about something that was hidden in the left-hand drawer of their wardrobe. Or perhaps Ksenia Antonovna in her panic had forgotten about the drawer?

  At the bottom of the drawer, which was full of clean linen marked with the initials K- P. and Z. P., Vukovich discovered a neatly-folded handkerchief.

  It was very well ironed and embroidered at the edges with light-blue thread. Beside it, at the bottom of the drawer lay several other handkerchiefs of the same kind. To Vukovich, however, it seemed that this particular handkerchief was slightly different from the others. The material was the same and the embroidery was the same, but the handkerchief itself seemed a little thicker.

  When Vukovich unfolded the handkerchief, he found that it contained a document printed on a fine piece of cambric.

  "The bearer of this document, Cossack Lieutenant Zenon Pecheritsa has remained behind during the withdrawal of our troops to Galicia to perform work which is to the advantage of the sovereign and independent Ukraine. We request all military and civil institutions, when our army returns to the greater Ukraine, under no circumstances to accuse Zenon Pecheritsa of Bolshevism.

  "Colonel Yevgen Konovalets, "Commander of the Galician Rifle Corps."

  That was all. No further trace of Pecheritsa remained.

  True, thanks to the message taken from the sham beggar, Vukovich was able to guess that Pecheritsa

  and the "Gogus" who had changed his flat were one and the same person. '

  My encounter with Pecheritsa in the train might help Vukovich to solve the other riddles.

  The records concerning Pecheritsa that remained in the files of the District Education Department showed that he had been born in Kolomya, had served first in the legion of Galician riflemen, then in a detachment of the so-called "Ukrainian Galician Army." When a group of officers and men from this army had refused to return to Galicia, which was then under Pilsudski rule, Pecheritsa had remained with them in Proskurov, and then moved to Zhitomir.

  The questionnaires, the testimony of his fellow-officers, the good references of organizations in which Pecheritsa had worked before coming to our town all tended to confirm this. But the forgotten fragment of cambric with its printed message and, above all, the personal signature of Yevgen Konovalets in indelible ink made Vukovich t
hink otherwise.

  Vukovich was well aware that Colonel Yevgen Konova-lets had been working ever since the First World War for German military intelligence and had been supplied with German marks. When he withdrew his men from the Ukraine, Konovalets had left behind quite a number of secret agents with instructions to conceal their true function by pretending to be revolutionaries and supporters of Soviet power. A few of them had even succeeded in attaining very high positions in the People's Commissariat of Education. Later on, in the thirties, these spies were unmasked:

  Yevgen Konovalets did not give every agent such protective authorizations. One had to have served under this pro-Polish commander in more than one of his bloodthirsty campaigns through the Ukraine to win his trust and be given one of those strips of cambric.

  People who had stored away these cambric strips for years in hope of using them one day had friends and helpers. There could be -no doubt that the fleeing Pecheritsa also had such friends. Otherwise he could never have discovered that Doctor Gutentag, having performed several urgent operations at the hospital, had gone straight to security headquarters. It was these friends and assistants of Pecheritsa’s who had sent the old mad-looking beggar to Major Florek in Poland. When he was questioned, this beggar simply muttered a lot of nonsense. Left alone in his cell, he suddenly started singing Cossack ballads and dancing the gopak in the middle of the night. He did everything he could to make people think he was mad.

  Vukovich, however, waited patiently for the beggar to give up his pretence. Vukovich guessed that besides this beggar Pecheritsa's friends had sent yet another messenger , to Poland who had been the cause of the mysterious death of the chemist Tomash Gutentag in the town of Rovno.

  It was obvious that some of Pecheritsa's associates had remained in our town. The most convenient way of tracing them, of course, would have been to enlist the aid of Pecheritsa himself. But Pecheritsa had "moved to another flat..."

  All this was told to me by Nikita Kolomeyets that night, after we had been to district OGPU headquarters. Not everything, of course, that Nikita told me then had the same shape that I give it in-retelling his confused story today. There was much that Nikita could- still only guess at, and many of the details were supplied by his own suppositions, and I too, it must be confessed, have been helping him all these twenty years, investigating quite a number of black spots in the biographies of the priest's son from Rovno and of Doctor Zenon Pecheritsa, making inquiries in what is now Soviet Lvov to discover for sure whether everything really happened as we thought in those far-off days of our youth.