The Margin of Evil! by Simon Boxall Page A

worried. Next day she ignored him. He had already decided, on the walk in, that he was going to make himself scarce. Georgii sat at his desk and thought about recent events. He was still haunted by the images of the boy Fyodor and the Kremlin heckler. It was the vacant stare of the eyes that got to him. It was the look of utter defeat.
    He knew that he was missing something. He should have been looking for something; a connection or a link. Something that was going to tie things together; it was out there, all he had to do was find it. He reached into his trench coat for his trusty notebook. The Kevshor file might have disappeared, but he could remember most of it from memory. So he wrote ideas out in his notebook and reread through the notes he had made after he had seen Gerhardt. He looked out of the window and thought some more, a whole day had gone, and it was also getting late. He looked back at the book. Everything hinged on, or at least started with, Goldstein.  He picked up the notebook and then reshuffled his in-tray papers, and then it happened again. A sheet of paper fell out of the pile. He must have missed it, the first time he had leafed through it. It was an old Cheka/ Okhrana file. The odd thing was the file itself was quite up to date:
     
     
    CHEKA Ref: 0713A67BJ3278.
    Isaak Goldstein
    Faith: Jewish.
    Born Moscow 1879 – 1919 (Death not yet confirmed.)
    A career criminal, never a lead er of men always a minor player. At any one time Goldstein has been involved in the criminal worlds of vice; extortion; black-mail; black-marketing and murder. Goldstein has been in and out of prison all his adult life.
    He has also been known to have been involved in the revolutionary world. The Bolshevik party has been known to use him to fix for them on several occasions.
    During the war he was known to be active in a black-marketing ring operating in the St Petersburg area. This ring would track down former bourgeoisie and non-citizens. If they did not kill them during the terror, they would blackmail them first and ransack their houses second. Sometimes they would do all three. This was there modus operandi. It is believed that the gang had connections with the Petrograd Soviet. Investigations into the gang revealed nothing. But it was suspected that Goldstein had got involved with a ruthless gang of Lithuanian Nationalists.
    For the last twelve months he has relocated back to the Moscow area. It is widely believed that he was extorting meat out of The Central Abattoir. Further information suggests that he was a middleman involved in an intricate meat scam. Investigations came up against the usual conspiracy of silence.
    The con, it is believed worked like this - the manager was watched for a period of time, and was known to be siphoning off meat for himself and replacing the meat with meat from corpses procured from the streets and local mortuaries.  Somehow Goldstein and his associates compiled all this information and then gained access to the manager and confronted him with their findings. Goldstein went in dressed as a minor official in the Bolshevik party and told him that, if he did not do his bidding he would blow the whistle on him. The manager was left with no alternative but to comply. Everything went well for a while, until another organized group of criminals moved into the city. These groups started squeezing small time operators like Goldstein out of business. It is widely believed that he ended up working for a Georgian mafia group, but it is also believed that Goldstein was doing some clandestine work on the side. It is our belief that his moonlighting had upset his new paymasters. Once again this information has not been confirmed.
    Last seen at Tverskaya Ulitsa Militsya Station on the night of 28 th January, it is widely believed on the streets that Goldstein has been eliminated. The victim of a gangland killing; a Georgian gang – 'The Kevshors' - is widely believed to be responsible for his