Two Cases for the Czar

by Gorg Huff

  "Tell me about it?"

  Miroslava told her about it. It took a while. And when she was done, Dominika said, "Anya is who you need. She can be hard, but she's one of us, and she knows how to get things done."

  They finished their tea, which had come all the way from China, and a bit later Miroslava went back to the Dacha to talk to Anya.

  Location: Anya's Office, Ufa Dacha

  Anya's office was much the same as the last time Miroslava saw it. Three secretaries, two male and one female, were typing and sorting in Anya's outer office and Anya was still incredibly busy. "What is it that my secretaries can't help you with?" she asked before Miroslava was fully through the door.

  Miroslava closed the door, and said. quietly, "It's about the embassy bureau case."

  "Then you don't need me. You need the cops or maybe the czar. You can see the czar if you need to. He's pretty happy with you after the business with little Larisa Karolevna."

  "I don't think the czar would understand this, and I am sure Pavel Baranov wouldn't. He might be sympathetic, but he would not understand."

  Anya stopped, looked at Miroslava, then said, "You're surprisingly hard to read. Okay. Have a seat and tell me about it."

  "Dominika said you said 'okay' a lot."

  "It's an up-timer word I picked up from Bernie Zeppi. It means . . . Well, it means all sorts of things depending on context. In this case, it means go ahead." She waved at the chair and Miroslava sat.

  After Miroslava had spent the better part of an hour going through her investigation in some detail, Anya sat back in her chair and scratched her left ear. "Dominika sent you to the right person, all right. I am still wanted for the murder of Cass Lowry in Old Russia. Of course, he was going after Natasha, not me. Where's the gun?"

  Miroslava took the gun out of the large bag she was carrying.

  "I'll take that," Anya said. "I can have it cleaned properly and, if necessary, disposed of."

  Miroslava hesitated.

  "What is it?"

  "It's just— I was thinking just this morning that I really need a gun. Something small that I can hide."

  "Yes, you do. But that hog leg isn't what you need. I will talk to the gun shop and get you one of the sort that I carry. Well, we carry. The czarina has one. So do Brandy Gorchakov and Natasha. We'll bill Vasilii for it.

  "All right. I don't know how we are going to handle this yet, but we are going to need to present a united front. So the first step is to go see Natasha. Come along."

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Miroslava was fairly certain she didn't belong here. Natasha had brought in Brandy Bates Gorchakov and Czarina Evdokia. This wasn't the location for a girl like Miroslava. And yet she didn't feel particularly uncomfortable, no more uncomfortable than she always did. Miroslava was never comfortable around people.

  She had, through years of compulsion and many careful beatings, learned to fake it in one specific way. She could act like a bar girl. The care was taken to insure that the valuable property was not damaged. The beatings, most of them at the hands of Madam Drozdov, were intended as instruction, and accompanied by explanations.

  All of which meant that Miroslava knew how to act in a bar, but not in the salon of the czarina of the USSR.

  "So you are Mikhail's Holmes?" Czarina Evdokia gestured to one of the chairs. "It's just us girls here today. Brandy said this is a delicate situation."

  Miroslava went through the investigation, and pointed out the occasional mood altering effects of real vodka.

  "I am familiar with them. It is the preferred medicine of some of the boyars back in Moscow."

  "So you are convinced that it was, in fact, self defense?" Brandy asked.

  "Yes. She is only fifteen and not experienced," Miroslava said. "And the evidence of a beating was considerable."

  "This is inconvenient," the czarina said. She waved a hand. "I sympathize with the girl, Brandy, all of you. But, Natasha, you know the reaction we've gotten over Mikhail's settling of the Chernoff affair."

  Miroslava looked around. No one else seemed surprised at the czarina's comment, but Miroslava didn't know what she was talking about.

  "It's the radio network," Natasha explained. "In the old days, it would take weeks for the news of how Czar Mikhail ruled in the Chernoff case to spread, and more weeks for the people involved to carefully think out their answers. And it would be six months before we had any real idea of what the rest of Russia thought about something that happened in Moscow. But now, if the czar farts in Ufa it's the talk of Moscow by nightfall."

  "Czars don't fart, Natasha," Brandy said. "They have people to do that for—"

  "Oh yes, they do," Czarina Evdokia said. "Believe me, they do.

  "In this case—I mean the Chernoff case—the howls of outrage are echoing from Poland to the Ural mountains, and from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea. That's not altogether a bad thing. The czar spanking a noble family for staying with Sheremetev is all to the good, even if he did it by putting the family lands into the care of a baby girl whose mother is a peasant. After all, there is the child's great aunt here in Ufa, watching over the child's upbringing, so we have a fig leaf of propriety and the boyars back in Moscow—and with General Shein, for that matter—can maintain their belief that Mikhail isn't so lost to reason as to actually treat the rights of a peasant as valid when they are in conflict with those of a boyar."

  Brandy Bates muttered, but Miroslava had excellent hearing, so she heard every word. "There is no law protecting the rights of a black man that a white man is bound to respect."

  "What did you say, Brandy?" the czarina asked.

  "It's from a Supreme Court case from back up-time. Famously one of the worst decisions in the history of up-time America's Supreme Court. It basically said that black people in America—the serfs from up-time, well, from back then up-time, this was in the 1850s, I think—had no rights that the white people—the boyars and nobles, in general—were bound to respect."

  "And how does that apply?"

  "At first, Evdokia, it was just disappointment, but now that I think about it I think it does apply. Look, the czar determined that it was okay for Stefan Andreevich Ruzukov to punch what's his name and the death wasn't murder, but that was on the basis of military rank superceeding social rank. Then he determined that Larisa Karolevna Chernoff is of the boyar class, even if her mom very much wasn't. If he backtracks from that, it's going to be bad in the long run."

  "But if he doesn't, it's going to harden the reactionaries in Moscow in the here and now," Natasha pointed out. "It's like the slavery issue. We may have to swallow a bad decision to keep the attitudes of the boyars from hardening any more than they are now."

  "I wish this case hadn't come up," the czarina said. "Whichever way it's decided is going to be trouble."

  Anya looked at Miroslava and asked, "What is it?"

  "The reason I came to you, Anya, was that I was wondering if I should tell Detective Sergeant Baranov what happened. At this point, he doesn't know. I don't like to withhold the answer. . . ." Miroslava trailed off.

  "It's a good start, but not good enough," the czarina said. "It can't be left as an unsolved case. For one thing, as long as the case is open, Pavel Baranov is going to keep looking. That's true, isn't it, Miroslava?"

  "Yes. He is very smart, and he works hard. He will eventually realize that the railroad doesn't lead anywhere and will start looking at other suspects, and he will find Melica right there in the hotel."

  "So we make sure that the railroad leads somewhere," the czarina said. "Preferably to some evil agent of Sheremetev.

  "Miroslava, you will point Pavel Baranov at some fictional Russian agent who killed Nikola Vetrov in an attempt to kill the railroad."

  "What's wrong, Miroslava?" Brandy asked.

  "I don't lie. At least, not very well."

  "That's all right, dear," the czarina said. "I am very good at it. And so is Anya. Now, assume that Baranov was right that it had to do with th
e railroad."

  "But he wasn't." Miroslava knew it was the wrong thing to say. And, usually, she was good at keeping her mouth shut. But Miroslava was finding that lying about a case was as hard as saying two plus two was five.

  "Yes, we all know he wasn't," the czarina said, "but you didn't know it was this girl Melica at first. Who did you think it was?"

  "I thought it was a prostitute."

  "Why?"

  It took awhile for them to go through the evidence and come up with a narrative that fit all the facts that Miroslava and the police had found but didn't lead to Melica, but instead led to a secret agent who worked for the Sheremetev clan, who accompanied Nikola Vetrov to his rooms with the intent of preventing the railroad from happening."

  "Why would Sheremetev care?" Miroslava asked.

  "Ha," the czarina laughed. "Mostly because the Sheremetev clan can't stand the idea of anyone making any money without them getting a piece of it, and the larger piece, at that. But also because a railroad, any sort of trade route between Ufa and China, would make us stronger and make it less likely that he would survive."

  "How would he have heard of it?" Natasha asked.

  "He wouldn't have had to," Anya said. "He just had an agent in Ufa who heard about it."

  "And how would that agent have heard about it? I didn't know about it until Mikhail told me after Vetrov was killed."

  "He was selling stock," Miroslava pointed out. "You have to tell people about the project to sell stock, and we have his books. We know who he sold what stock to."

  "So we pick one of the people in his books . . ." Brandy started.

  "Is there any reason to pick out a particular person?"

  "Because we need a trail," Anya said. "A path that led us to the spy. The sneaky, crafty spy who killed Vetrov when he wouldn't give her his books. The spy who intentionally locked the door in such a way as to confuse the police because she needed the time to slip out of Ufa and return to Moscow to report."

  "Why not use the radios?" Brandy asked.

  "Because we keep a record of radio messages and so do the other stations," Mirorslava said. "And if we insert a false message into the record, it won't match the records of the other stations."

  "Fine. I get that, but why wouldn't the spy use the radio?" Brandy asked.

  "Because she was afraid that even if we couldn't decipher the radio message, we would discover that one was sent. But no one can be sure of all the people who come and go from Ufa," Czarina Evdokia said.

  "Yes, but we wouldn't know that," Miroslava said. "So if someone asks, we just shrug."

  "To sum up," Anya said, "an agent was in Ufa on other business, perhaps planning something, or maybe just gathering intelligence. It was a woman about five two. She may have been working alone, but she might have had a partner. We aren't sure of that?" Her voice made the last a question.

  "No," said Miroslava. "You almost never have all the details. A story that has all the details in place is fiction. Made up to throw you off the trail. We will need to know how we found out all this information. We know the height within a couple of inches, but the height of the pistol when it was fired, that is confirmed by Melica, who is five feet one inch tall."

  "Well, we don't want to implicate Melica, so let's make our spy five three," Brandy offered.

  "How do we know she's five three?" Miroslava asked.

  "A witness saw her leaving the apartment and had their own reasons for not coming forward until they were found," Natasha said.

  "No, let's use our customer. The person we decide leaked the information to the spy."

  "That still leaves why didn't they come forward," Miroslava said.

  "Because he was involved in an illegal stock deal," Natasha explained.

  "If we use a real person, he's going to know that we're lying because he will have never met our spy."

  "So we redact his name and use a fake investor. And the reason his name isn't mentioned is the spy was a woman and he leaked the information as pillow talk. Not something he would want his wife knowing," Natasha expanded her explanation, getting into the spirit of the thing.

  "And why are we keeping his secret?"

  "He's wealthy . . . No. Better, he's politically connected. So not even his name is revealed."

  "And why don't we suspect him?"

  "He's five nine," Miroslava said, "and he has the wrong blood type."

  "Blood type?" Czarina Evdokia asked.

  "We found a drop of blood at the crime scene and typed it. It was A and our witness volunteered a blood sample. His is O," Miroslava said

  "We can type blood, and have been able to from the time we got to Ufa. We had typing kits made in the Dacha on the Czarina when we arrived," said Natasha.

  "And we can use those to identify people?" asked Evdokia, who had never read a mystery story in her life.

  "We can use them to eliminate people, shrinking our suspect pool," Miroslava explained. Since getting together with Vasilii, she'd been having every mystery he had read to her, and then questioned the reader about terms like DNA tests, blood tests, fingerprints, ash patterns, and everything else she ran across. "It won't tell us that someone did it, because there could always be someone else with the same blood type, but it can tell us that someone didn't do it because the blood types don't match."

  "To summarize again," Anya said repressively, "our spy . . . we need to name our spy."

  "Honey Ryder," Miroslava offered immediately, but in Russian. "Med Nayezdnikovna."

  "Why?"

  "The first Bond girl," got blank looks from everyone but Brandy, who groaned. That led to more explanations and more groans before they could get back to Anya's summary. "Anyway, Med Nayezdnikovna was spying and found out about the railroad. Then, in an attempt to keep it from—"

  "No. She would want the names in the book for blackmail," Natasha said.

  "Maybe," the czarina said. "But we want it to be an attempt to destroy the railroad project."

  "We wouldn't know her motives without questioning her," Miroslava said, "so we would just be guessing anyway."

  "To continue," Anya said, more repressively, "she tries to get the books and Vetrov catches her."

  "Vetrov was drunk on Nizhny Novgorod vodka, which contains herbs that can have all sorts of effects."

  "Explain that, please," Brandy said. "In my world, vodka is pretty close to pure alcohol and water. Mostly alcohol."

  "Vodka in this time is as much medicine as drink. Infused into the liquid are many herbs and medicinal plants," Czarina Evdokia explained. "Every manufacturer has their own recipe, that, in turn, is affected by the season when the vodka is made."

  "Nizhny Novgorod vodka," Miroslava added, "is sold as an aphrodisiac and a cure for depression, and I know that sometimes when people drink it, they see things that aren't there."

  "So Vetrov would have been drunk, stoned, horny, and delusional." Brandy shook her head. "And probably paranoid. All Honey would have had to do was mention the railroad to set him off."

  "Not even that," Miroslava said. "I understand Vetrov liked it rough. All she had to be was there."

  "Well, since we're making this up," Anya said, "we will assume that she tried to get the railroad books from him and he lost it. They fought. She got hold of the gun, and shot him.

  "Having shot him, she left, using the trick he used to lock the door behind her so that he wouldn't be discovered by the hotel staff. She didn't know that his blood would drain into the hallway."

  "What happened next?"

  "She realized that he would be discovered and that his books would be found. That would lead the police to her, so she had to get out of town. She packs up and leaves."

  "How do we get the gun?" Natasha asked.

  "She sells it to a pawnbroker, and we find it in his shop. Good steady police work," Miroslava said.

  "How does that work?" the czarina asked.

  "The pawnbroker is a police informant. He tells the cop about the gun, and the poli
ce test the gun. And, finding that it's the murder weapon, buy it from the pawnbroker."

  "Why buy it?" the czarina asked.

  "Because they want him to tell them about the next suspicious gun that he buys. That also gives us another description of the woman. What does she look like?"

  "Five three, we've already decided. And honey blond hair. Anything else?" Czarina Evdokia held her hand under and in front of her breasts. "Big breasts."

  "Shapely," Anya said. "And even features, no pock marks or anything like that. Good teeth. Pretty."

  "Is she wearing makeup?" Brandy asked.

  "When she talks to our informant, yes. At the pawnbrokers, no."

  And it went on until they had it all worked out. All but one point. "How do we get all this into the records?"

  "We need Pavel to put it in the records," Miroslava said, "and he's not going to like that."

  "I will talk to Mikhail," Czarina Evdokia said, truly sounding like the czarina for the first time since Miroslava had gotten there.

  Chapter 5

  Location: Ufa Kremlin, Police Headquarters

  Date: May 14, 1637

  Detective Sergeant Pavel Baranov looked up from the report he was slowly struggling through, wishing that he hadn't been promoted. Learning to read in your mid-thirties is no picnic.

  Miroslava and a woman in the new Ufa court dress came in. The court dress looked strange to Pavel, since it was a combination of traditional court dress with strong up-timer influences. Zippers, for instance, were prominent and there was no attempt to hide them.

  "I am Natasha Gorchakov. We need to speak privately." Her gown was calf length, and it was one of those split skirts with zippers on both sides. There was also a zipper around the waist, connecting the skirt to the blouse. The Chinese silk it was made from could have been sold for a sum of money sufficient to feed a family of four for a decade, and that didn't count the gold brocade made with real gold thread.