For the first ten minutes, Volkov shouted. He shouted so loudly the microphone crackled. He demanded that Peshkov hide him, get him out of town, give him money, arrange papers.
He said he was being followed, that Denis had been taken, that Igor and Maxim were probably already in custody, and that he was finished unless Peshkov did something right now. Peshkov said nothing. I heard the clink of glass, meaning he was pouring himself a drink, and I could picture the scene.
An older prosecutor in an expensive robe, holding a glass of brandy, listening to a younger predator unravel and calculating his own options. When Volkov finally ran out of breath, Peshkov spoke. His voice was quiet, tired, and completely flat.
He told Volkov he had made the stupidest mistake a man could make in this town. He said there was a list of people you do not touch under any circumstances. And that the Queen’s daughter was at the top of that list, underlined in red.
He said he had warned Sychev, who should have warned Volkov. Either the warning never got through, or Volkov had been too intoxicated by his own sense of impunity to hear it. Peshkov said all this not in anger, but with the cold contempt of a man realizing the tool he used had failed him and now needed to be thrown away before it cut his own hand.
Volkov asked, in a shaking voice, what he was supposed to do. Peshkov didn’t answer right away. He paused, and in that pause I heard him take a sip, set the glass down, and lean back in his chair.
Then he said the sentence that decided everything that followed. “The only thing you can do is turn yourself in, write a full confession, give up names, take the whole thing on yourself, and go to prison. In prison they won’t get to you. There are walls there, guards. Out here, they’ll find you.
“And I can’t help you, because helping you means exposing myself, and I have no intention of doing that.” I listened in the dark of my car and smiled a little. Peshkov thought he was clever.
He thought that by sacrificing Volkov, he could cut off the rotten branch and save the tree. He didn’t know I intended to pull the whole tree out by the roots, and that his name was already sitting in a file the Internal Affairs colonel would receive at the proper moment. But for now, Peshkov was useful to me in exactly this role: the man who would persuade Volkov to surrender.
Because I needed Volkov inside the system. I needed him processed, tried, and sentenced. I needed a real judgment, official and legal, printed on paper with a seal, because what I had planned for Volkov only worked if the system itself delivered him. Volkov resisted for another twenty minutes.
He paced Peshkov’s office like a trapped animal, running through one hopeless option after another. Leave town. Peshkov said I controlled every road out and that not even a cat got out without my knowledge.
Leave the country. Peshkov laughed and asked with what money and what passport. Hide with relatives.
Peshkov said my people would find him anywhere, and that hiding from a man like me was like trying to hide from air. Each rejected option landed on Volkov like a hammer blow, and with every blow his voice got quieter, smaller, more pathetic, until finally I heard the sound I had been waiting for all evening. Volkov started crying…
