“What are you getting at?” asked Mariya, tilting her head to one side.
“Cults,” said Janos. “I’m wondering about cults.”
“You suspect a connection between the Orthodox orphanage and the fire?”
“What do you think?” asked Janos.
After a pause, Mariya said, “The two men in the van … childlike, yet having a purpose. And the young woman with them said … Wait, give me a moment.” Mariya closed her eyes and spoke softly. “She said, ‘Hell is hot … but sometimes it is cool … especially at night when stars come out.’ She told me I would not be harmed. She said listen to what I was told. After this, the young man returned and gave his warning about pursuing any investigation.”
“You have a good memory, Mariya.”
“At night, when I am alone, I wish it was not so good.”
“I understand. Yet I must reveal something difficult. I have a source who indicates Arkady Listov, the militia investigator from Darnytsya who knew your husband, may have been involved in human trafficking.”
Janos was a question machine, asking so many questions she began to feel as though everything—Viktor’s death, the meeting at Borispol Airport, and her kidnapping this afternoon—had taken place years earlier. It was a marathon question-and-answer session, purging bad blood by hanging leeches on her. After she recalled the young man in the van saying Viktor was a recruiter, Janos kept pressing her and began standing up and sitting down and tugging at something in his back pocket. Suddenly, he had a pained look on his face.
“Is something wrong?”
“Normally, I would say no,” said Janos. “However, I admit I am in pain.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“It is embarrassing.”
He told her about the explosion in his office, explaining and, at the same time, animating the circumstances. He went into detail about sleeping at his desk and getting hit by glass through the cutout in the back of his chair. He told about the ordeal at the hospital during which an emergency room resident picked glass from his cheeks while several nurses looked on.
“After all this, you still have glass in you?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Janos. “They told me my skin will be pushing out slivers for a month, like sitting on steel wool. They were correct. Once, when I was a boy, an uncle took my sister and me horseback riding for an entire day. He was an old horseman from the steppes and thought calluses were hereditary. Sonia and I had blisters and could not wear pants for a week. This glass is almost as bad.”
“It sounds terrible,” said Mariya, trying not to smile. But when Janos smiled, she knew she’d been smiling.
Janos made a sad, yet silly, face and reached for his belt buckle. “You think I am joking? You want me to show you?”
“No, I believe you.”
“Good.” He returned to the sofa and eased himself down. “It’s been like this. Okay to sit for a while; then I must stand. My mother pushed me into pre-seminary when I was a boy. I should have gone on to seminary as she wished.”
“Because you would have avoided being bombed?” asked Mariya.
“No, because everyone stands at the Orthodox service. My mother’s greatest dream, she said, was that I would someday give her Communion.”
“And your father?”
“He died after the first tuition payment.”
“You are joking.”
“No. He died of a heart attack shortly after we received the first bill from the seminary. Of course, everyone said it had nothing to do with tuition, but I’ve always wondered.”
“So you went from almost being a priest, to becoming a militiaman, to becoming a private investigator. What was your motivation?”
“A girl,” said Janos.
“Did she desert you?”
Janos looked down at his hands. When he looked up, there was no trace of his earlier sad-silly smile. He said, “She was killed in a robbery attempt at a shop where she worked. We were engaged. Obviously, I had abandoned the priesthood by then. The result of her death sent me to the militia with vengeance in my blood. After thoughts of vengeance were drowned in bureaucracy, I learned the investigative craft from my mentor, Lazlo. But he escaped to America, leaving me to the mercy of Aleksandr Vasilievich Shved, who lured me into private business. And so, here I sit. Last week, when you tried to contact me, I was in the Carpathians hiding from whoever tried to kill me. Or, to put it another way, giving the situation time to cool.”
Janos paused a moment, staring off into the distance. “Shved saved my life once,” he said in a quiet voice. “We were at one of the older apartment complexes in Podil. The armed robbery suspects we pursued fired at me from an upper floor while I ran through the courtyard toward the building entrance. A uniformed militiaman with me was killed. Shved rammed the car through the chain-link fence and took bullets in the shoulder and arm saving me. I will never forget how angry Shved was in the hospital when he was told our chief investigator complained about the damage to the car in his report. Besides the damage caused by the fence and the bullets, Shved had broken the Zhiguli’s door off its hinges when he skidded to a stop to pick me up.”
Janos smiled again as he turned to her, his dark brown eyes unblinking.
“You are a strange man,” said Mariya. “First you cheer me up; then you depress me. Why did you tell me this?”
“Because I must be certain you still want to go through with an investigation. There are no guarantees, only danger, both for you and for me. But for me, it is my job.”
“I need to do this, Janos. I am frightened. But after what happened today—”
Janos stood and held out his hand. “I wanted to be sure.”
When he shook her hand, he held on longer than necessary, smiling and looking sad at the same time.
“Good night, Gypsy.”
“Good night, Mariya. I will call tomorrow after I do some investigating.” He handed her a card. “If you need me, call my cell phone. If you need immediate help, the guards will be out in the parking lot. You will stay here at least twenty-four hours. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
She watched through the window after he left the apartment. He spoke with the militiamen at their green Zhiguli and then walked to a faded orange Skoda, which looked like it had been abandoned in the weeds at the back of the parking lot.
Gypsy. Not that he lacked a permanent residence. It was his personality, his way of cutting through bullshit, his way of looking at her with those eyes. When he glanced back toward her window, she knew he was thinking he should have asked to stay the night. And, the way she felt now, she was not sure if she would have refused.
It took over an hour to get to the campground south of Kiev where he’d left the camper van. On the way, he watched to be certain he was not followed. Perhaps it was still too close to the incident with Mariya to expect a tail. In a day or two, they would catch up with him. In a day or two, he would need to be more careful.
He parked the Skoda behind the campground’s restroom building and walked away from its bright overhead light along the dirt road toward his site. It was a clear moonless night with stars glistening. As he approached his camper van, he heard harsh whispers. He stood perfectly still in the darkness, waiting with his hand on his pistol inside his jacket. It sounded like two people arguing in a tent near his camper van. When he’d left that morning, the tent had not been there. But this was normal. Many people used a campground near Kiev for a cheap overnight stay.
He walked silently into the empty sites across the dirt road until he was opposite his camper van. Now he could hear the voices clearly. A man and woman, not arguing, but shushing one another and giggling.
“Shh,” whispered the man. “You will wake the baby.”
“You are the one who sounds like a steam engine,” whispered the woman.
Janos let go of his gun and crossed the road, putting his camper van between him and the tent. Then he knelt and crawled along the side of the ca
mper van on all fours, stopping occasionally to look beneath it. He had come full circle, and now the bright light above the restroom building was beyond the tent, the light filtering through a portion of the tent he realized was a screened-in porch attachment.
“What if someone sees?” whispered the woman.
“No one will see,” whispered the man.
“Why must we do it this way?” whispered the woman.
“Because your spine arouses me,” whispered the man.
They were on a cot in the screened-in porch of the tent, outlined against the glow of the light in the distance. The woman sat astride the man. A young woman, breasts cupped upward in that exquisite curve as she swayed atop a confused blur lying prone on the cot. When the man’s knees rose up, Janos realized his head was behind the woman. She sat backwards astride him, leaning back on her outstretched arms, her breasts and face and long hair outlined in the distant light as the man massaged her back.
As he lay in the cold grass watching the man and woman, Janos imagined a czardas played faster and faster by a Gypsy orchestra. Once again, he recalled the night with Svetlana Kovaleva in the moonlight. Then, suddenly, the image of Svetlana Kovaleva faded and Mariya Nemeth was there with him, the cool of the night licking their naked bodies, the two of them transported back in time to a Gypsy camp.
The woman in the tent had leaned full back upon the man, arching her body toward the distant light. The man and woman breathed heavily and in unison, and Janos realized he was also breathing heavily, panting like a dog in heat.
He stood, crept to the other side of the camper van, took out his key, and opened the door. Once inside, he turned on the light and looked at himself in the full-length mirror mounted to the narrow closet door. Mud caked both knees and the elbows of his jacket. He made a face at himself, probably one of the same idiotic faces he had made when he was with Mariya Nemeth. It was late, and he was a fool. He had work to do in the morning. The militia would not allow him into Shved’s office, but he must go there. The best time was after dawn during morning traffic when people scurried about disregarding Gypsy investigators.
Janos poured himself a shot of vodka, tossed it down, and went to bed, where his thoughts, instead of focusing on the couple next door, returned again to Mariya Nemeth.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Aleksandr Vasilievich Shved’s office was a walkup in a cluttered mix of Soviet-era buildings outside Podil’s “upper-class” district. If his office were a seat on a train, it would definitely be “hard class.” The entrance to the stairway was between a greasy-windowed auto parts reseller and a travel agency with yellowed brochures, specializing in excursions to Mother Russia. The street level door was unlocked, but the door at the top of the creaky stairs required his knife blade for the lock bolt and his foldout wire cutters for the official militia seal. Before Janos used the cutters, he checked to make sure the seal kit he’d brought with him matched the one on the door. It did—all but the serial number. But no one checked serial numbers as long as the seal was intact. As he opened the door, Janos stepped in carefully so as not to give militia Inspector Nikolai Kozlov or anyone else reason to think he’d been there.
Shved’s case files and expense files were more organized than his. Everything in order; everything—at least every case Shved had told him about—accounted for. As he looked through the files, Janos remembered the last time he’d seen Shved.
It had been months earlier, before the bombing at Janos’ office. He and Shved were both at Kiev militia headquarters digging for information. Janos wanted to have lunch with Svetlana, but she was unavailable. So he and Shved had lunch in the first-floor cafeteria with uniformed militiamen and nervous-looking civilians waiting for news of relatives or friends in the basement lockup, which was rumored to have windows with excellent views of hell.
Shved always called Janos a “goddamned melancholy romantic.” And that day, Shved shouted it, frightening nearby civilians. Shved was large, and most people left him alone. He remembered how Shved’s handlebar moustache became greasy from a thick pork sandwich.
He told Shved about his cases, and Shved told him about his.
“I have heard noises in the street,” Shved had said. “Followers of Father Vladimir Ivanovich Rogoza are not pleased with you. Apparently, being deputy chairman of the Synodal Department for Relations with Armed Forces and Other Law Enforcement Agencies gives him precedence to recruit physically fit church members from nearby health clubs. Something has made him sensitive to criticism.”
Janos wondered if Shved saw the gasoline and the flames coming while at Viktor Patolichev’s video store, or if he was already dead. What about Shved hearing street noise about the double-base, single-base nitrocellulose magnesium colloid before it came through Janos’ window?
There was nothing in Shved’s case files connected with bombings or Rogoza. What Janos did find was a file marked “Adults Only.” Mariya’s husband, Viktor, was in the file, along with the names and addresses of several other video stores. At the back of the file were names with phone numbers. Some of the numbers had out-of-area prefix codes. The file seemed recent, incomplete. Janos copied all the names and numbers and put the file away.
Besides the filing cabinet and the desk, the only other storage area in the office was a black steel cabinet in the corner. He tipped the cabinet, found it fairly heavy. He used a skinny knife in his foldout tool to open the cabinet and was greeted by a slick pile of pornographic magazines that spilled out onto his shoes.
As he searched through the lurid collection of sadistic, masochistic, gay, and, to his horror, child pornography, he tried to imagine Shved having such interests but could not. He flipped through pages looking for notes or some clue that this was part of an investigation. He found nothing but page after page of children in situations staged by so-called adults. What the children were photographed doing did not upset him as much as their eyes looking out at adults lurking behind cameras. The moments in time captured in the photographs made him want to destroy the creatures hiding behind the cameras, like vermin hiding in their filthy crevices. Janos shoveled the mess back into the cabinet and locked it up.
On his way back to his car, Janos pictured Aleksandr Shved again, his handlebar moustache springing up and down as he chewed a pork sandwich. The more he pictured Shved, the more he convinced himself the pornographic collection was either a plant, or it was there because Shved was trying to do something about the creatures who did this to children.
It was still early morning, and Janos drove around for a time, making sure he had not grown a tail. He called Lazlo’s niece Ilonka, but she was not in, so he left a message, saying Lazlo seemed in good spirits when they last spoke and he would keep in touch.
At militia headquarters Janos found Svetlana Kovaleva at her desk with three young male investigators who looked at him as if he had crawled out of a vat of mackerel. Svetlana got rid of the three with a simple tilt of her head and a single word. “Business.”
Janos sat in the chair next to her desk. He could smell men’s cologne.
“Is the odor for your benefit?” asked Janos.
“Of course. But more important, I heard about Mariya Nemeth’s abduction. How is she?”
“She is a strong woman. What is the rumor here?”
“You probably know it already,” said Svetlana. “No physical evidence that anything happened. Inspector Nikolai Kozlov says he’ll check her story, but the insurance is an overriding factor. He thinks she knew her husband was planning to set a fire, and by putting the blame on someone else, she assumes she will get the money.”
“Has Kozlov passed his theory on to Chief Investigator Chudin?”
“Yes. The chief investigator says he wishes to see you. Word has most likely reached him you are here.”
Svetlana stood with him and pulled a slip of paper from beneath the phone on her desk. She handed him the slip. “I have further information on the tan Zhiguli station wagon. It was tur
ned in at Metro Vehicle Rental’s Borispol Airport location late yesterday. Here is the name and address given by the woman who rented the car. She paid cash.”
“Does Nikolai Kozlov know about this?”
“I told him about it last night,” said Svetlana. “He seemed unenthusiastic, and when I called the manager at Metro he said nothing about being questioned.”
Janos put the slip of paper in his pocket. “Kozlov is not Sherlock Holmes.”
“He is not,” said Svetlana. “Perhaps if the militia investigation stalls, you should dig deeper into Kiev’s fabric.”
“An informant?” asked Janos.
“Of course,” said Svetlana. “When the time is appropriate, contact Comrade Strudel. He will know what information flows in Mafia circles. As you taught me years ago, the Mafia has ears everywhere in Kiev, and Comrade Strudel lives in their ear canal.”
“Have you contacted him recently?”
“I have, Janos. But our promise to one another stands. Comrade Strudel belongs only to you and to me.”
Chief Investigator Boris Chudin sat at his desk poking at frizzy curls of hair above his forehead. There were more curls on Chudin’s skull now than when Janos had last seen him. Obviously Chudin had undergone additional hair transplant sessions. It was widely known Chudin was fanatical about his appearance. His obsession was most apparent when female militia recruits arrived. Janos remembered when Svetlana joined the unit. Chief Investigator Chudin had gone mad, enduring several sessions at a tanning spa and purchasing new suits. Janos pitied Chudin because his attempts to appear young and active were not limited to appearance. On several occasions, Chudin had rushed to an active crime scene, usually an armed person with hostages, and risked his life so he might appear on Kiev television and poke at his transplants.
Chudin waved his hand for Janos to close the door, waited for him to sit, and stared at him for a moment before speaking. “So, tell me, Janos. How do you get yourself into these situations?”
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