The Fuller Memorandum

“Oh yes!” His expression brightens considerably. “Yes indeed! A restoration project, I am to understand…?”

“Possibly.” The woman swings her violin case up above the glass counter then gently lowers it. “Our client has asked us to obtain a preliminary valuation, and also to inquire about the cost of certain necessary restoration work for an instrument of similar manufacture that is currently in storage in a degraded condition-it’s too fragile to move.” She reaches into her handbag again and when she takes her hand out, she’s holding an envelope. “Before examining the instrument, I would like you to sign this non-disclosure agreement.” She removes a thin document from the envelope.

Mr. Dower is surprised. “But it’s just a violin! Even if it’s a rarity-” He does a double take. “Isn’t it?”

The woman shakes her head silently, then hands him the papers.

Mr. Dower scans the first page briefly then glances up at her. “This isn’t from Sotheby’s-”

“If anybody asks you who I am and why I’m here, you will tell them I’m Cassie May, from Sotheby’s auction house, inquiring about a valuation.” She doesn’t smile. “You will now read the document and sign it.”

Almost as if he can’t help himself, Mr. Dower’s eyes return to the document. He scans it rapidly, mumbling under his breath as he turns the three pages. Wordlessly, he produces a pen from his inside jacket pocket.

“Not like that.” The woman offers him a disposable sterile needle: “First, you must draw blood. Then sign using this pen.” She waits patiently while he presses a digit against the needle, winces, and rubs the nib of the pen across the ball of his thumb. He makes no complaint about the unusual request, and doesn’t seem to notice the way she produces a small sharps container for the office supplies and carefully folds the document back into its envelope. “Good. By the authority vested in me I bind you to silence, under pain of the penalties specified in this document. Do you understand?”

Mr. Dower stares at the violin case as if stu

The woman who calls herself Cassie May unclips the lid of the violin case and lays it open before him.

Mr. Dower stares into the case for ten long seconds, barely breathing. Then he shudders. “Excuse me,” he says, hastily covering his mouth. He turns and stumbles through the bead curtain. A few seconds later she hears the sound of retching.

The woman waits patiently until Mr. Dower reappears, looking pale. “You can shut that,” he tells her.

“If you want.” She shrugs. “I take it you’ve seen one before.”

“Yes.” He shudders again, his gaze unfocused. He seems to be staring down i

“You give me a written evaluation.” She has another piece of paper, this one containing a short list of bullet points. “As I said, a preliminary estimate of the cost of repairing such a… relic. A half-gram sample excised from the corpse of another identical instrument. All necessary materials to be provided by the customer. If you can assess the nature of the bindings that hold it together, my employers would like to be able to replicate them.”

He stares at her. “Who are you from? Who sent you here?”

“I’m from the government department responsible for keeping instruments like this out of your shop. Unfortunately there is a time for business as usual, and then… well. Can you do it?”

Mr. Dower stares at the wall behind her. “If I must.”

“Good. If you attach your invoice to the report I will see that it is processed promptly.”

“When do you need the report?” he asks, shaking himself as if awakening from a dream.

“Right now.” She walks over to the door and flips the sign to CLOSED.

“But I-” He swallows.

“I’m required to stay within arm’s reach of the instrument at all times. And to remove it from your premises when you are not working on it.” The woman doesn’t smile; in fact, her expression is faintly nauseated.

“Why? To prevent me stealing it?”

“No, Mr. Dower: to prevent it from killing you.”

I’M BACK IN MY OFFICE AFTER THE BLOODY BARON MEETING. The committee have minuted that I am to try and think myself into Angleton’s shoes (ha bloody ha); the coffee mug is cooling on the mouse mat beside my cranky old HP desktop as I sit here, head in hands, groaning silently and wishing I’d paid more attention in history classes rather than staring at the back of Zoe McCutcheon’s head and thinking about-let’s not go there. (Sixteen-year-old male: fill in the blanks.) All this Russian stuff is confusing the hell out of me-why can’t we go back to worrying about Al Qaida or pedophiles on the internet or whatever it is that intelligence services traditionally obsess about?

There’s a pile of dusty manila folders sitting on my desk. Angleton said they were interesting, right before he went missing, and if that wasn’t a deliberate clue I’ll eat my pants. He’s a slithy old tove and I wouldn’t put it past him to have meant something significant, damn him. But all I’ve got is a list of hastily scrawled file reference numbers, pointers into the shelf positions documents are stored at in the stacks-nothing as simple as filenames, of course, that would be giving valuable information to the enemy. How like Angleton.

I pick up the first folder and open it. It contains a creased, dog-eared, and much folded letter, handwritten on paper that’s a weird size. I peer at the faded scrawl, trying to make head or tail of it. “Jesus, boss, what the hell…?” Luckily I have a sca

CLASSIFIED: S76/45 Dear John, First of all, greetings from Reval! I sincerely hope this letter finds you experiencing a more clement climate than the Estonian autumn, which has clamped down in earnest this past week. Please give my best regards to Sonia. I assume you have already received word through the wires about the execution of the Beast of Dauria last month. By all accounts he was given as fair a trial as the Reds could manage, and if even a tenth of the allegations leveled against him are true then I can’t see that they had any alternative but to shoot him. I have been paying special attention to the reports filtering out of Siberia about Semenov’s bandits, and Ungern Sternberg was by far the worst of a bad bunch. It was a beastly affair, and a bad end to a thoroughly bad fellow, and perhaps we should thank the Reds for ridding us of this monster. However, his death leaves certain questions unanswered. I decided to visit his parents-not his father, but his mother and her husband, Sophie Charlotte and Baron Oskar Von Hoyningen-Huene. They live in Jerwakant, and although the weather is dismal-the snow is already lying four feet thick on the ground-I was able to arrange a weekend visit. As you probably know, madness stalks the Ungern Sternberg line; the Baron’s father Theodor-once a keen amateur geologist, noted for his interest in unusual fossils-is in a sanatorium to this day. In my estimate Sophie Charlotte suffered considerably by proximity, for he deteriorated while they were still married; it is a difficult topic to raise in conversation, especially in light of the unfortunate fate of her son, and so I did not seek to disturb her, but made my observations indirectly. The Hoyningen-Huene estate is a stately home that would grace any family of means, in any country. By winter it presents a fairy-tale face to the world, its steeply pitched roofs and turrets peaceful beneath a blanket of snow, an island of tranquility in the middle of the gloomy pine forest. But it is a fairy tale out of the Brothers Grimm, rather than the bloodless and bowdlerized fare that our parents’ generation sought to raise us on! This is a castle of the German aristocracy, descendants of the Teutonic Knights and servants of the Russian Empire until the late upheaval deprived them of the object of their loyalty. And it is an estate that has been cut down to size, thanks to the decrees of the Riigikogu relating to land reform and the rights of the peasants to the fruits of their labor. Evgenia and I visited with the Hoyningen-Huenes last weekend, ostensibly to write a tub-thumper for the Guardian about the equitable settlement in Rapla County, which has not seen so much turbulence and persecution of the former rulers as other areas: I put it about that we would also like to see the countryside thereabouts, and talk to some of the local landlords about the recent changes. The Guardian’s status as an English newspaper outweighs its political reputation in the backwoods: I had no shortage of correspondents, mostly of the Indignant of Colchester variety so familiar to us from the letter columns. On Sunday afternoon, after the obligatory morning visit to the chapel-which was very Lutheran in that ma