The Margin of Evil! Read Online Free PDF Page B

headed for the City Mortuary. If he was lucky he would be able to have a chat with Matvei Ismaylov the mortuary attendant.
    The journey was uneventful and he arrived at the morgue on time. Georgii walked in, the place seemed deserted. It was like that English ship, now what was it called, ah yes, 'The Marie Celeste.'
    ' Ismaylov, where are you?' he shouted.
    ' Down here,' came the reply.
    Georgii set off in the direction of where the voice had come from. He looked around. The place seemed a lot tidier than when he had last visited. That was at the height of 'The Terror.'   At that time there were bodies stacked up all over the place, the smell was unbearable and the flies were as big as may bugs.  He could see Ismaylov; the mortician was washing his hands.
    ' Comrade Radetzky, what can I do for you?'
    ' Oh, I just wondered if you had had anything that you might deem was slightly unusual turn up, in the last couple of weeks.'
    Not really, nothing springs to mind ... just the usual half eaten corpses found decaying in tenements. Bodies of women and children; frozen to death in the night, all because they cannot find a roof to sleep under and because their pride won't let them resort to prostitution.   We get them in here Georgii and they are still cuddling each other. We have to force them apart with crowbars. Bodies found rotting amongst rubbish, that's the usual kind of thing we deal with here. We log them, give them a number and then send them to the communal graves.'
    Georgii had heard of these graves. They were nothing more than pits. These places were guarded by Red Guards, because the previous summer, Black Marketers recognising an opportunity, when they saw one, dug up the corpse's, skinned them and sold them as fresh pork on the black market. The authorities, Georgii seemed to remember, were hard pressed to get on top of it. It wasn't so much the issue of cannibalism that caused panic, when the word eventually got out onto the street. It was the fact that as 'The Good Comrades,' slowly realised that their lot in life was now much worse than it ever had been under 'The Tsar', and in the aftermath of Kerensky. The mood became ugly; 'Confrontation' became the very catchword in the slums. The Bolsheviks reacted in the only way they knew how, with violence and empty rhetoric.
    Anything out of the ordinary turn up in the last few weeks? Anything at all,' Georgii repeated.
    ' Nothing that I can really think of ... wait a minute there was ...'  Ismaylov's voiced tailed off, and he went over to a table and opened a ledger. 'Here it is! Body pulled out of the river. Corpse had no identifying features. No head or hands, there was only one feature of any note, a tattoo of a cross in between two shields. It looked like this.' Ismaylov drew it for him on the page (+).
    ' Two questions, the first, I take it that the body is long gone. Do you know where it went?   Secondly do you know exactly where the body was pulled out?'
    ' Hang on, I do have that information. But we are not a mausoleum; we get rid of the bodies as quickly as we can. The body was disposed of into a communal grave at Krasnogvardeyskaya. The body was found, let me see, here it is, it was found by the bridge on Ustinsky Prospekt. Here Radetzky, you now have all the information on this corpse. Now if you don't mind, I must get back to my work!'
    Georgii had had quite a few dealings with Is maylov over the last few months.  He knew that he was not going to get any more information out of him. When he told you to go, you took your cue and went. He made a few notes in his notebook.
    Shoutin g at the now departing Ismaylov; 'Haven't got a pair of size eleven riding boots?'
    The next port-of- call was the old Okhrana building.  He turned his collar up and held on to his new acquisitions and then strode off towards the centre of town.
    Forty minutes later he walked into the old Okhrana building. The place was now almost deserted. He announced himself to the