‘I thought we were going to spend this weekend together,’ Arkady said the one time he got Zoya alone in the kitchen. ‘How did Schmidt get into it?’
‘I invited him.’ She carried out a bottle of wine.
‘To Zoya Renko’ – Schmidt raised his glass at her return – ‘selected yesterday by her District Committee to speak on new challenges in education before the entire City Committee, making us all very proud – especially, I’m sure, her husband.’
Arkady came out of the kitchen to find everyone looking at him except Schmidt, who was winking at Zoya. Natasha saved Arkady from more confusion by handing him a drink. A sentimental Georgian crooner slipped down on the turntable, and Schmidt and Zoya rose to dance.
They’d danced before, Arkady could tell. Balding, but trim, Schmidt was very smooth on his feet, with a muscular wedge-shaped jaw accustomed to leading. He had the thick neck of a gymnast and the black-rimmed glasses of a Party thinker. His hand almost covered Zoya’s back as she leaned into him.
‘To Comrade Schmidt.’ Misha hoisted a bottle as the song ended. ‘To Comrade Schmidt we drink a toast not because he’s gained a sinecure at a District Committee doing crossword puzzles and selling office supplies on the side, because I can remember once taking home a paper clip myself.’
Misha spilled some vodka and nodded happily at everyone, only getting started. ‘We drink to him not because he attends Party conferences at beach resorts on the Black Sea, because last year I was allowed to fly to Murmansk. We drink not because the District Committee buys him cases of fine wine, because we all get to stand in line for a warm beer from time to time. We drink not because he wants our wives, because the rest of us can always masturbate if need be. Nor because he can drive over pedestrians in his Chaika limousine, because we have the advantage of the world’s greatest subway system. Not even because his sexual habits include necrophilia, sadism and homosexuality because – please, comrades – we are no longer living in the Dark Ages. No,’ Misha concluded, ‘we drink to Comrade Dr Schmidt for none of these reasons. The reason we drink to him is because he is such a good Communist.’
Schmidt showed a smile as hard as a car grille.
Dancing, talking, sitting became increasingly drunken. Arkady was in the kitchen making coffee for five minutes before he realized that the film maker was lying with the dancer’s wife in a corner. He backed out and left his cup. In the living room Misha sleepily danced with his head on Natasha’s shoulder. Arkady climbed the steps to his bedroom, and was about to open the door when Schmidt came out and shut it.
‘I drink to you,’ Schmidt whispered, ‘because your wife is a great screw.’
Arkady hit him in the stomach. As Schmidt, surprised, bounced off the door he hit him in the mouth. Schmidt landed on both knees and rolled all the way down the steps. At the bottom his glasses fell off and he threw up.
‘What happened?’ Zoya stood at the bedroom door.
‘You know,’ Arkady said.
He saw loathing and fear in her face; what he hadn’t expected to see shine so brightly was relief.
‘Bastard, you,’ she said and ran down the stairs to Schmidt.
‘I only said hello to him.’ Schmidt groped for his glasses. Zoya found them, wiped them on her sweater and helped the District Party leader to his feet. ‘He’s an investigator?’ Schmidt asked through split lips. ‘He’s crazy.’
‘Liar!’ Arkady shouted.
No one heard. Arkady realized, his heart pounding at great speed, that Schmidt had lied at the bedroom door. This once, no, they hadn’t quite worked up to fucking – not under her friend’s roof, not while her husband was there. Arkady had believed the lie because it was truer than his marriage, and there was no way to explain that. Everything was backwards. Zoya was militantly outraged; Arkady, the cuckold, was ashamed.
From the front of the dacha he watched Schmidt and Zoya drive off. Her lover’s car was an old two-seater Zaporozhets, not a limousine. There was a full moon over the birches.
‘I’m sorry,’ Misha said as Natasha thoughtfully wiped the rug in the living room.
Chapter Four
Iamskoy said, ‘Your work is, as always, a model. The discovery of this victim’s dental work, coming as quickly as it did, was a bombshell. I immediately ordered a thorough investigation by the organs of State Security. This investigation went on throughout the weekend – while you were away from the city – and involved a computerized review of thousands of foreign residents and known foreign agents dating back five years. The sum result was that not one individual close to the description of the victim cannot be accounted for. It is the opinion of the analysts that we are still dealing with a Soviet citizen who had this particular dental work performed on him while visiting the United States, or by a European dentist trained there. Because all possible aliens have been accounted for, I am forced to concur in this opinion.’
The prosecutor spoke with great earnestness and sincerity. Brezhnev had the same gift that set the style: a direct, low-keyed reasonableness that had taken so much into account that its authority was self-evident and there was no sense in argument; argument, in fact, would be a betrayal of the air of reasonableness so generously set.
‘I’m in the position, Arkady Vasilevich, of determining whether I as prosecutor now insist that the KGB assume responsibility of this investigation or allow you to continue your fine work. The merest chance that there might be foreign involvement is disturbing. Clearly, there is the possibility of your investigation being cut short. That being the case, why not have them initiate their inquiry now?’
Iamskoy paused as if he were considering the question.
‘There is more involved, though. At one time there would have been no question; the MVD would have investigated Russian or foreigner alike, in the same basket without discrimination, without public trial, arrested them and sentenced them without the slightest regard for socialist legality. You know what I’m talking about – Beria and his clique. These were excesses carried out by a handful of men, but we cannot turn our faces. The Twentieth Party Congress dragged these excesses into the daylight and instituted the reforms under which we now operate. The MVD militia now is strictly limited to interior criminal matters. The KGB, likewise, is strictly limited to matters of national security. The role of prosecutors in overseeing and protecting the rights of citizens has been reinforced, and the independence of investigators has been articulated. Socialist legality is built upon this division of powers so that no Soviet citizen can ever again be deprived of his full rights in open court. So what happens if I take the case away from an investigator and hand it to the KGB? It’s a step backward. This particular victim probably was Russian. Didn’t he have other dental work, a steel molar, that was distinctly Russian? There’s no doubt the other two victims were Russian. The perpetrators of this crime and the wide variety of people touched by this inquiry are Russian. Yet here I would be – on no real evidence – muddying the waters of reform, and bringing into confusion the separate powers of our two arms of the law. What does my duty to protect civil rights mean if I do that? What does your independence signify if at the first moment of indecision you abdicate it? Avoiding our responsibilities would be easy, but, I am convinced, wrong.’
‘What exactly would convince you the other way?’ Arkady asked.
‘If you proved the victim or killer was not Russian.’
‘I can’t. But I do feel that one victim was not Russian,’ Arkady said.
‘That’s not enough.’ The prosecutor sighed, as an adult sighs to a child.
‘It occurred to me this weekend,’ Arkady said quickly before he was dismissed, ‘what the victims were doing.’
‘Yes?’
‘Gesso and sawdust and gold dust were found in the victims’ clothes. Those items are all material used in the restoration of ikons. Ikons are a very popular item on the black market, even more to foreign tourists than to Russians.’
‘Go on.’
‘There i
s a chance this one victim was foreign, and from the evidence on his clothes, that he was engaged in black-market activity, where foreigners are heavily involved. To be absolutely certain that we are not dealing with a foreigner, that we are operating within our limits, I want Major Pribluda to deliver tapes and transcripts of all aliens who were in Moscow in January and February. The KGB will never do it, but I want my request and his answer recorded.’
Iamskoy smiled. Both men understood the pressure that such an official request and answer would bring on Pribluda to assume jurisdiction of the case now rather than later.
‘Are you serious? That is a provocative – some would say outrageous – action.’
‘Yes,’ Arkady said.
Iamskoy was taking more time to turn him down than Arkady had expected. Something in the proposal seemed to intrigue the prosecutor.
‘I must say I am always amazed by your intuitive mind. You’ve never been wrong yet, have you? And you are the senior investigator in Moscow. If you really are set on this, would you consider all non-diplomatic aliens?’
For a moment Arkady was too stunned to reply.
‘Yes.’
‘That can be arranged.’ Iamskoy made a note on a piece of paper. ‘Anything else?’
‘And current tapes,’ Arkady added quickly. Who knew when the prosecutor would ever be so agreeable again? ‘The investigation will also be expanded to other areas.’
‘I know you to be an investigator of infinite resources and zeal. The day is early.’
Beauty lay on the autopsy table.
‘Andreev will want the neck, too,’ Levin said.
The pathologist put a wooden block under the neck, making it bow up, and pulled back the hair. With a rotary saw he sliced through the bones. The smell of burning calcium spread. Arkady had no cigarettes; he held his breath.
Levin cut under the seventh cervical vertebra along the angle of the vertebra’s spur. As bone separated, head and neck rolled off the table. Arkady reflexively caught the head, and as quickly put it back. Levin switched off the saw.
‘No, Investigator, she’s all yours now.’
Arkady wiped his hands. The head was thawed. ‘I’ll need a box.’
What were the dead, anyway, but witnesses of man’s evolution from primate indolence to civilized industry? And each witness, every bundle of bones hacked out of peat moss or tundra, was itself a new clue to add to that mosaic called prehistory. A femur here, a brainpan there, perhaps a necklace of elk teeth, all were dragged out of their ancient graves, packed in newspapers and dispatched to the Soviet Academy’s Institute of Ethnology overlooking Gorky Park, there to be cleaned, wired together and scientifically resurrected.
Not all its mysteries were prehistoric. For example, an officer returning to his Leningrad boardinghouse at the end of the war noticed a stain on his ceiling. Searching the attic for the stain’s source, he found a dismembered, half-mummified body, which the militia identified as the corpse of a man. After a long, unsuccessful investigation, the militia sent a cast of the skull to the Institute of Ethnology to be reconstructed. The problem was, the anthropologists reconstructed the face of a woman, not a man. Disgusted, the militia destroyed the face and closed the case, until the boardinghouse yielded a photo of a girl. Her picture matched a picture of the face the anthropologists had made, she was identified and her murderer was convicted.
Since then the institute had reconstructed from skulls or parts of skulls more than a hundred faces for criminal identification. There was no similar method used by any other police anywhere. Some of the institute’s reconstructions were merely crude sculptures in plaster; others, the creations of Andreev, were striking not only in their detail but in their animated expressions of anxiety or outright fear. The effect in court when one of Andreev’s heads was revealed was always a prosecutor’s moment of triumph.
‘Come in, come in.’
Arkady followed the voice into the gallery of heads. The nearest cabinet displayed national types – Turkman, Uzbek, Kalmuk, etc. – assembled with the sort of vacant gazes that typify group portraits. A cabinet of monks came next, then one of Africans and so on. Beyond, in the haze of a skylight, was a table of busts of freshly memorialized cosmonauts, their paint still fresh. Not one he saw had Andreev’s touch, until Arkady passed the skylight and stopped short. In the shadow at the end of the room, startled by the investigator’s approach and startling him with their mute suspicion, were some semi-humans in a row. Peking Man, his lips pulled back over yellowed fangs. Rhodesian Man, trying to concentrate without a forehead. Something female with the woeful cheeks of an orangutan. A Neanderthaloid, heavy-lipped and sly. A young dwarf with vigorously curly hair, his elongated head crossed by a single brow, his hands and cut-down laboratory smock white with plaster. The dwarf slid off a stool.
‘You’re the investigator who called?’
‘Yes,’ Arkady looked for someplace to put his box.
‘Don’t bother,’ Andreev said. ‘I’m going to do the head for you. I don’t do forensic work for the militia anymore, not unless the case has been unsolved for at least a year. It’s a selfish rule, but you’d be amazed how often the militia is able to solve a crime on its own within a year. Someone should have told you that.’
‘I knew about it.’
After a long silence, Andreev nodded and approached, bow-legged, a short arm gesturing to the busts around him. ‘As you are here, let me give you a short tour before you go. Our collection of humanoids, which so caught your eye. They’re fairly striking. Usually stronger than us, sometimes with a greater brain capacity, even contemporaries of ours in some cases, but condemned for their inability to write the texts on evolution, so let us pass them by.’ His rolling step brought him close to Arkady and a gilded case containing the bust of a nomadic Tartar. Arkady was surprised he’d missed it. The face was flat and square, not alive but having lived, as if its cheekbones’ deep lines had been sliced by wind instead of a sculptor’s knife. A mosque-shaped crown, red mustache and spade beard were ever so slightly tattered, thinned as an old man’s are. ‘Homo sapiens. Tamerlane, the greatest killer in history. The skull showed a left-sided paralysis. We also had his hair to work with, and some mildew on his lips where the mustache grew.’
Arkady stared at the Tartar until Andreev turned on the light inside a second gilded case, which contained an oversized man’s head slumped against the rough monk’s cowl. Though the forehead was high, the rest of his face, its long nose, purple lips and beard, sagged from gravity or self-loathing. The glass eyes seemed not so much dead as extinguished.
‘Ivan the Terrible,’ Andreev continued. ‘Buried as a monk under the Kremlin. Another killer. He poisoned himself with the mercury he rubbed in to ease the pain of arthritis. He also had an occlusion of his teeth that must have made his smile a grimace. Do you find him ugly?’
‘Isn’t he?’
‘Not unusually. He did avoid court painters in his later years, as if he wanted to bury that face with him.’
‘He was only a murderer,’ Arkady said. ‘He wasn’t stupid.’
The two men were now near the door Arkady had entered through; he was aware the gallery tour was at its end. He made no move to leave, and Andreev began studying him.
‘You’re Renko’s son, aren’t you? I’ve seen his picture many times. I don’t see much of him in you.’
‘I had a mother, too.’
‘Sometimes that is a distinction.’ Empathy almost showed in Andreev’s face; his horse-sized teeth nearly smiled up at Arkady. ‘A man who’s willing to admit that should at least be listened to. Very well, let’s see what you brought. Maybe someone else wants to waste their time.’
Andreev led the way to a corner that held a potter’s wheel under a fluorescent light. While he climbed a stool to pull the light cord, Arkady opened his box and brought the head out by its hair. Andreev took the head and put it on the wheel and softly fanned out the long brown hair.
‘Young, about twenty, fe
male, Europoid, nicely symmetrical,’ Andreev said. He cut Arkady off when he started explaining about the three murders. ‘Don’t try to interest me in your case; three more heads hardly matter here. The mutilation is, of course, unusual.’
‘The murderer thinks her face is erased. You can bring it back,’ Arkady said.
Andreev pushed the wheel, and shadows swung within the orbital cavities of the head.
‘Maybe she walked by here that day,’ Arkady said. ‘It was early in February. Maybe you saw her.’
‘I don’t spend my time looking at women.’
‘You’re a man of special powers, Professor. You can look at her now.’
‘There are others here who do very nice reconstructions. I have more important work.’
‘More important than the fact that two men and this girl were murdered almost in sight of your windows?’
‘I only reconstruct, Investigator. I can’t bring her back to life.’
Arkady put the box on the floor. ‘The face will do.’
People whispered about the Lubyanka, the KGB prison on Dzerzhinksy Square, but most Muscovites who broke the law and got caught ended up in Lefortovo Prison on the east side of town. A guard took the investigator down in an elevator that was a pre-Revolutionary cage. Where was Zoya now? She’d called to tell him not to expect her back at the apartment. Thinking about her, he couldn’t recall anything except her face at the bedroom door in Misha’s dacha. The triumph on her face, as if an opponent had played a trump card too soon. Other than that, there was very little. Meanwhile another phenomenon was taking place. Iamskoy had ordered tapes from Pribluda. A head had been delivered for reconstruction. Under the guise of pretense, without his will, a real investigation was taking shape.
The subbasement. Arkady went down a hall of small iron doors that looked like furnace mouths, past a guard scribbling at a desk, by an open room stuffed with mattresses and reeking of mildew, to a closed door that he opened to see Chief Investigator of Special Cases Chuchin, the blandest figment of a man, staring, eyes aglitter, one hand clutching his belt buckle, and a woman, sitting, turning away to spit into a handkerchief.
Gorky Park Page 7
