Ask No Mercy

by Martin Österdahl

  “What did you do, Sergey? Did you call the police?”

  “Do you think I should have?”

  Mishin furrowed his brow. He thought he understood why Gachov had come to him. It wasn’t because he was an expert on discoveries of this kind but because he was someone Gachov could trust.

  “No. I suppose you didn’t want to,” he said.

  “Sharik was completely beside herself, barking and carrying on.”

  “A tragedy at sea, perhaps?” said Mishin. “Someone fell overboard and drowned? Perhaps you should report it anonymously? So worried friends and relatives can find out what happened?”

  Gachov shook his head.

  “It took me back, my friend. To the times of mass starvation. Have we gotten to that point again?”

  What was his old friend talking about? What he was suggesting was unthinkable. Something they had been free of for at least fifty years, something that had hardly existed in the Soviet Union since they had been children.

  Holodomor.

  When a planned economy was introduced in the thirties as an element of the Soviet Union’s industrialization, certain areas of Ukraine had experienced extreme famine. Because of a food shortage in the Soviet Union, grain had been confiscated from farmers. Some people believed that mass starvation had been an element of Stalin’s terror policy, that Stalin had starved the Ukrainians deliberately in order to keep them under control.

  “What point are you thinking of?” asked Mishin.

  “The point at which human beings eat other human beings.”

  “Have you gone crazy?”

  “No,” Gachov said firmly. “I took a good look at the bones. They were from a human being, Afanasy. And someone had chewed on them.”

  Mishin shivered and swallowed rising bile. Then he looked at Gachov, in whose eyes he saw the strength and conviction of a man who knew what he was talking about.

  “But couldn’t it have been done by an animal?” asked Mishin.

  “The meat was pink, Afanasy. It had been cooked before it was eaten.”

  “Cooked?” Mishin shook his head. Times were hard—there was no getting around that—but this kind of behavior was something that belonged in the distant past, not in today’s Saint Petersburg.

  “Tell me, then, Afanasy,” said Gachov. “What kind of monster is it that has come to our waters?”

  16

  “Something is different about you, Sarah,” Charlie Knutsson said from the other side of the table.

  Sarah wiped the corner of her mouth with her cloth napkin. She realized her thoughts had drifted a little too far as she looked out over Saltsjön, the bay of the Baltic that extended into inner Stockholm. The wind and the sun had washed over her while she had been waiting for him at Skeppsbrokajen Quay. The sky had been high and clear, the air the kind she loved and had never been able to experience in her homeland. It seemed so full of oxygen and filled her with energy and tired her out at the same time. This was a day for reflection and for bringing up matters that troubled her.

  Sarah met Charlie’s look, a look that came from behind round brown glasses and said a good deal. In contrast to the other members of Vektor’s board of directors, the chairman was someone in whom she could confide, and she had no objection to his taking an interest in her affairs, private as well as professional. Over the years, she had almost come to see him as a mentor.

  Charlie was the incarnation of the ideal aristocrat from southern Sweden. He was a man whose clothing and lifestyle were more Anglophile than anything, a man who was proud to own land and treated those who worked on it well and with respect. Old money and old virtues—that was Charlie K.

  “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

  “Always start with the good news,” said Charlie.

  Sarah let her gaze wander across the water of the bay again.

  They were at Charlie’s favorite restaurant, a French bistro just a few hundred meters from his office on the islet of Riddarholmen.

  “I’ve met someone,” she said. She couldn’t help smiling. “I think it has a future.”

  “Converted?”

  Sarah nodded, and Charlie smiled crookedly.

  He knew everything about her marriage to Lisette. He had attended the magnificent wedding and the children’s baptisms. He had encouraged Sarah during the happy years and been there for her when everything had gone to hell and she had thought it was all over. Not just her marriage but her life.

  “I’m happy for you,” he said. “Take care and enjoy yourself now.”

  “Thanks. I’ll keep you posted.”

  A waiter cleared away their plates. They declined coffee.

  “And the bad news?” Charlie leaned forward.

  He knew what was happening in Russia. Charlie was the only board member who read all the reports Sarah and Max wrote. He could give them the perspective of a man who had spent his entire life protecting Swedish culture and Swedish interests at home and abroad.

  Sarah sighed.

  “Pashie, our employee in Saint Petersburg, disappeared a few days ago. I don’t have a good feeling about that at all.”

  “Aren’t she and Max . . . ?”

  “Yes,” said Sarah. “He’s gone over there to find her. He had been planning to go over there to finish working on the pre-election analyses anyway, but now he went off as soon as we heard that Pashie had dropped out of sight.”

  Charlie nodded.

  “So you’re just as worried about him as about her?”

  “Yes.”

  Sarah knew that Charlie saw Max as an armed bomb that could explode when you least expected it. Max was completely fearless, but sometimes this made him put himself in danger.

  “Max has been very occupied by private business recently,” said Sarah. “He’s been digging in the past. Wasting his time, if you ask me. He’s gotten this idea in his head that Carl Borgenstierna might know something about his family’s secret past.”

  Charlie picked up his napkin from his lap and wiped his mouth. “Why are you worried about this?”

  “Because of how important Borgenstierna and the Baltic Foundation have been to Vektor. I don’t want him bothered. Particularly not now that he’s ill.”

  Charlie’s hand clenched on his napkin. “Is Borgenstierna ill? I didn’t know that.”

  “Max had been trying to contact him recently. Apparently he’d been traveling. And when Max finally found him, he was under sedation at Södersjukhuset following a kidney transplant. Max has been completely obsessed with his research on his family, so much so that he didn’t notice that Pashie hadn’t remained in contact with us.”

  “Or those two have their own agenda,” said Charlie. “Maybe they’ve been working on something on their own and kept you in the dark.”

  17

  Max couldn’t get the image of the bloody handprint out of his mind. It followed him when he opened the heavy door at the university; it was all he saw when he quickly climbed the stairs to the Department of Economics.

  A fax lay on the desk in Pashie’s office. It bore no greeting, but Max knew Ilya had sent it. The message consisted of a handwritten list of the telephone numbers Pashie had called from her cell phone.

  Max sat down at Pashie’s desk, thought for a while that he could smell her scent, saw the handprint in front of him once again. He breathed in a few times, reached for the telephone handset, and called directory information. After a fifteen-minute conversation, he had covered the eleven numbers on the list. For five of the numbers, he got names; for three there were only addresses; one was a foreign number; and for the remaining two there was no information. The woman at directory information thought they might be new cell phone numbers.

  The five names were those of Pashie’s landlady, Mrs. Bili; the Department of Economics; the English-language daily newspaper the St. Petersburg Times; a certain Margarita Yushkova; and a company, Brice & Stadthaller.

  Max decided to start with Margarita Yushkova; perhaps she wa
s an acquaintance of Pashie’s. He dialed her number and heard the call being connected. Soon a young woman answered. “Good afternoon. You’ve reached St. Petersburg GSM.”

  “Good afternoon,” said Max. “I would like to speak with Margarita Yushkova, please.”

  “She’s in a meeting and will be leaving for the day afterward. I think she’s picking up her children from preschool. Can I take a message?”

  “No, thank you. I’ll try again tomorrow.”

  Max furrowed his brow. St. Petersburg GSM? He saw the smiling cosmonaut again and made a note in his notebook.

  There were all kinds of possible explanations for Pashie’s having called the St. Petersburg Times, but Max couldn’t help thinking that the call might have had something to do with her message.

  “I think I have something for you.”

  Max lifted the handset again.

  “Domashov,” a man said.

  “Hello. My name is Max Anger. I believe you spoke with my—”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong person on the wrong day. I have a deadline to meet here. The business section. And I only do Russians.”

  “You only do Russians?”

  “You know what, Max? I’m sure you have something really exciting, but try the switchboard. Ask for someone else. Good luck and ciao.”

  Max raised his eyebrows and put the handset down. Had to smile. Despite his unhelpful attitude, Domashov had given Max a useful lead. The university had a library with an extensive collection of journals and daily newspapers. Armed with the name of the journalist and the area in which he worked, Max could go there and search through the articles he had recently published.

  He realized he was grasping at straws, but at least it was a place to start.

  Max opened the main entrance door to the library and stepped aside as a group of students in the midst of a loud discussion came toward him.

  Russia had matched the education opportunities available in the West; within certain scientific and educational areas, Russia had even surpassed the West. There had never been a shortage of smart people. The young students walking through the doorway now had recently won their freedom. Were they really prepared to give it up again if the Communists won the election, as the polls indicated they would?

  When the door closed behind him, the noise of the students’ conversation was replaced by silence. A middle-aged librarian sat behind the information desk, deeply immersed in a newspaper article. Behind him were many rows of tables for readers.

  Max located the shelf where the St. Petersburg Times was kept and flipped through the various issues. It appeared that the business section was published every other day. If Domashov’s articles had been Pashie’s reason for contacting him, a relevant article must have been published recently, probably during the week when Max had buried himself in his private research.

  Max picked up the four latest issues of the newspaper and walked over to one of the reading tables. He sat down and opened the four issues to the business sections.

  The first of Yury Domashov’s contributions was accompanied by a large, centrally positioned picture of an attractive female entrepreneur from Novosibirsk who had recently opened an underwear shop in Saint Petersburg. Domashov had dedicated most of the space to the photograph of her face. It all looked more like an advertisement than anything else. Max put the article aside; it didn’t look like something that would have attracted Pashie’s interest.

  The second article was about two small businesses. One of them, Beyond Audio, manufactured tube amplifiers. Apparently audiophiles around the world appreciated this old technology. After transistors had arrived and tube amplifiers had been abandoned in most parts of the world, Russia had continued to use the old technology, in part because it was claimed that it would continue to function after a nuclear attack. Russians, then, would still be able to play their music after the United States had dropped the bomb. Max found it hardly likely that this had been the contribution that had awakened Pashie’s interest.

  The other business Domashov had written about that day manufactured handmade rubber boots decorated with jewels and massive gold chains. They were sold in a single luxury-goods shop in Moscow and cost $18,000 and up.

  The third of Domashov’s contributions bore the headline “The Telephone War.” A relatively new telecommunications company was working hard to become the leading provider of cellular services in a quickly growing market in northwestern Russia. There were no pictures of the entrepreneurs behind the company, but Max recognized the logo of St. Petersburg GSM in the picture accompanying the article: a cosmonaut floating weightlessly in space with a cell phone held against his helmet.

  Margarita Yushkova worked for St. Petersburg GSM. Was that just a coincidence?

  If it had been this article that had caused Pashie to call Domashov, then maybe St. Petersburg GSM was one of the companies she had been asked to examine for Vektor?

  The company’s cellular network was the first one in Russia to have gone over to the new digital GSM standard. The advantages it offered were supposed to make the cellular telephone an item every Russian would want, and St. Petersburg GSM’s sales were increasing rapidly. The company was characterized as a true Russian operation, in contrast to most of the other operators in Russia, which were joint ventures involving Russian and various American and Western European companies.

  According to the article, the city was proud of St. Petersburg GSM, and the city’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, said that it represented the Saint Petersburg of the future and would likely become a major employer in the city. Its director was described as a magnate who was reluctant to grant media interviews, being much too occupied with expanding his company and increasing the profits of his already extensive business empire to speak with the newspapers. In the article he was quoted only as having said, “Making it possible for Russia’s workers to be in contact with their loved ones anywhere and at any time—this is our vision.”

  This sounded to Max like classic Soviet rhetoric.

  And no doubt that was how it had sounded to Pashie.

  18

  Nestor Lazarev twisted his head from left to right to relieve stiffness and then grasped the handle of the door to the storage room.

  The pickup had gone precisely as planned. As soon as the chemicals had taken effect, her muscles had relaxed and she had collapsed in his embrace. It had been easy to lay her in the trunk of the Mercedes.

  He had searched the garage for clues but found nothing connected to the question she had asked Rousseau. The question about where they had gotten the technology. Everything she was working on seemed to have to do with the coming election.

  He had cut the tips of her fingers and used the blood to create a scene in her bathroom that made it look as though she had been assaulted there. She had been so knocked out at that point that she had felt nothing. But now her fingertips would certainly be burning.

  Lazarev opened the door and pressed the light switch. The naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling slowly came alive. There she sat, in a corner, with her back to the metal shelves. Pashie Kovalenko. She twisted her body, tried to free her bandaged hands from the handcuffs and chains bolted to the wall. When she saw him enter the room, she started screaming again.

  She was not sobbing but screaming in rage. Resistance, not fear. A brave woman. That much more interesting. He could imagine what she would be screaming if the duct tape over her mouth were not preventing her from doing so. Not beautiful words spoken by a fine young lady, certainly. The words of a howling Tatar bitch, more likely. It was obvious that she had no idea why she’d been abducted.

  What could have brought these old questions back up to the surface? Lazarev couldn’t understand it. First a journalist. Now this whore. He would have to find out what organization they belonged to. He felt certain that Pashie Kovalenko was the key to the mystery and that she would soon tell him everything.

  He bent down, looked her in the eyes.

  You have no rig
ht to do this to me, her look said.

  I have every right in the world, his own said. You’re scared now, aren’t you? I won’t kill you quite yet. First I have to get you to talk.

  When he sensed that she had calmed down a little, he took the duct tape off her mouth. He knew that his advanced age had a calming effect on people in her situation, as though advanced age represented a lesser threat.

  Pashie looked at him with eyes that seemed to grow larger every second. Was this resistance in her gaze? Or had the fear gained the upper hand?

  “I understand you’re interested in my company,” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  “You’ve asked questions about where I got the technology on which I’ve built my company. Why?”

  Pashie still gave no sign that she would answer him.

  “If you answer my questions, I won’t hurt you. If you don’t, your worst fears will prove justified.”

  She swallowed with difficulty and cleared her throat. Her facial expression changed. Her surprise had changed to a determined and focused look. Her lips formed a little o, and then she sent a projectile of saliva and phlegm directly into his face.

  “You can go fuck your mother in hell,” she said.

  Lazarev got up. He took a handkerchief from the pocket of his suit coat and wiped the spit from his face. Then he reached for an object high up on the shelves. He looked at the gray plastic tube for a moment; it had been many years since he had used it.

  The plastic was as hard as steel; the tube was about ten centimeters long and six centimeters in diameter. On the outside of the tube there were barbs made to be connected to another tube.

  He took hold of her jaw muscles and pressed as hard as he could to open her mouth as wide as possible. In his youth he had been known for his strong grip, and now, energized by rage, he found that that strength was still there. The iron claw.

  He pushed the tube into the bitch’s mouth. When he had pushed the tube as deep as it would go, he released her jaw. There was nothing her facial muscles could do but let her lips close around the gray plastic.