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Shepilov? She drew her belt tight against the wind. He would do what was
expedient for Wulff.
Stegman was waiting with a car. He was a lean but powerful man of some forty
years who carried himself like a man ten years younger. He was one of
Zamatev's best men.
"Nothing definite," she told him. "Whatever is done we must do ourselves." She
paused. "Does he know you?"
"I do not believe so."
"I will walk. But what I want is to find out what Comrade Wulff does next. It
could be very helpful."
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Stegman got in the car and drove away around the block; then he parked some
distance off where he could watch the door. Kyra Lebedev went back to the
hotel and getting out the maps she had brought, spread them out on the bed.
She was dismayed. Even she, who had lived and worked in Siberia, was always
amazed at its sheer size. Now, thinking of finding one man in all that
vastness, she was appalled.
So many rivers! So much forest! Yet if he was an Indian he must be a hunter,
and he would try to live off the land. In the dead of winter that would be
almost impossible. Wulff was probably right. The man was dead or soon would
be.
They had to be sure. Studying the map, she started to think, trying to imagine
what the escaped prisoner must have done.
First he had to get away from the prison area, and he dare not be seen. Yet he
might have gone in any direction, and they had no leads, nothing except
Alekhin's belief that he had gone east, a belief based on something so flimsy

A missing knife that might have simply been lost. The chance of some missing
food. The food might never have been there at all, or it might have been eaten
by some hungry workman who came to the place, saw the food, and simply took
it.
Yet she had heard much of Alekhin from Arkady and from two Yakut friends. They
did not like him. He was a surly brute who kept much to himself and was
notoriously cruel. Nonetheless, all agreed nobody was better at capturing
escapees. She must talk to him. But where was he?
The helicopter again  that was the fastest way of searching, and Stegman was
a superb pilot.
Earlier they had tried to check every abandoned building of which there was
record, and they had followed streams and roads and landed to make inquiries
... nothing. Simply nothing.
There was a tap on the door. It was Stegman.
"He left immediately after you did, and he walked to a small building on a
side street." Stegman looked up at her. "The man within deals in furs."
"Ah? In furs. A man, then, who might know trappers and hunters. And Wulff did
not send somebody? He went himself? That's interesting."
"Yes."
She thought about that while Stegman waited. Aloud, she said, "It might be
some personal affair, but if not, why would he go himself and not have
somebody else go?"
"A source?" Stegman suggested.
"Just what I was thinking. Aprivate source." She glanced at Stegman. "Did you
notice the fur coat hanging in his office? Excellent fur."
"Yes."
"I believe I will have a talk with this furrier. Did you get his name?"
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"Zhikarev, Evgeny Zhikarev, in business in the same location for fifty years."
"Ah? A survivor. Well, we shall see."
Her heart was beating faster. Maybe Wulff knew something, maybe he was just
fishing, but a furrier?
Maybe this was it, the break she had been hoping for. If it was 
To move swiftly, that was the thing. If this was the lead she needed, she
might have Makatozi before the week was out. Maybe even today!
She was almost running when she reached the car.
Fourteen
Evgeny Zhikarev was disturbed. He was a small man with rumpled gray hair and
a thick black mustache. He wore steel-rimmed glasses that were perpetually
resting near the end of his nose and seemed in acute danger of falling off. He
wore this morning a gray shirt with a vest of worn velvet on which arabesques
were embroidered in red, gold, and green thread.
Around the shop he wore slippers. Several times during his earlier years he
had undergone torture by the Cheka, and as a result his feet were crippled. He
wore shoes only when it was necessary to leave the shop. As his living
quarters were in the rear alongside his storeroom, his absences were rare.
His father had been substantially well off under the Tsar, operating a highly
successful fur business in what was then called St. Petersburg. The Revolution
had ended all that, and having lost everything in Russia, the elder Zhikarev
had fled to Siberia, where a source of his furs was still operating. There,
far from the seat of power, the Zhikarevs had carried on. There was always a
market for furs in Russia, as there was in Manchuria and China. The Zhikarevs, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]