Tarnished Icons ir-11

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Sasha, Elena, you keep this. Emil, I need you on the bomber. You get Iosef. I’ll keep the murder of the young Jews. Zelach can help.”

  The three investigators got up. Elena and Sasha wanted to discuss what had happened only this morning, what it meant. Who was Yakovlev? Why had they gotten raises? Karpo had no such questions.

  “When I was a child,” said Rostnikov, leaning forward to draw a bird on a branch over the word washtub, “my favorite color was blue. Now it is red. What is your favorite color, Elena Timofeyeva?”

  She was the least accustomed to such displays of curiosity by Rostnikov, who always seemed genuinely interested in the answers to questions that appeared to be of no great consequence.

  “Purple,” she said.

  Rostnikov looked at Sasha.

  “Green,” he said.

  It was Karpo’s turn.

  “Black,” he said.

  Rostnikov had not really expected an answer from Emil Karpo. He looked up and saw something in the man’s eyes that caused him concern.

  “Thank you,” said Rostnikov. “Send in Zelach, please.”

  The trio of inspectors left.

  Moments later a nervous Zelach knocked at the door, waited to be told to enter, and then slouched in to stand before the desk.

  “Sit,” said Rostnikov.

  Zelach sat.

  “How is your mother?” asked Rostnikov.

  “Well,” said Zelach, “she’ll be happy to hear about the raise. It is true?”

  “True,” said Rostnikov. “Director Yakovlev is a man of his word.”

  He did not add that his word was often something others did not like to hear.

  Zelach was forty-one, unmarried, lived with his mother, and was both loyal and far from bright. When he was told to do something, he would do it, even if it might cost him life or limb. Zelach had lost part of his eyesight in an attack by a criminal two years earlier. His recovery from that and other injuries in the attack had resulted in a long convalescence.

  Zelach was dressed in worn but neat slacks, shirt, and jacket; all selected by his mother.

  “Two questions, Zelach,” said Rostnikov, “and then we go to work. First, what is your favorite color?”

  Zelach looked decidedly confused.

  “Orange,” he said. “My mother’s is white.”

  “So is my wife’s. Second question,” said Rostnikov, “How did your father die?”

  Zelach looked even more puzzled.

  “You know. He was shot.”

  Zelach’s father was a uniformed officer. He had been shot while trying to stop a black market deal in a garage. There should have been no shooting. It was a minor crime, and the black marketeers would probably have been able to bribe their way out of any serious punishment. Still, one had panicked and a single 9mm bullet had taken the life of Zelach’s father.

  “How did you feel about it?” asked Rostnikov, thinking about the bomber to whom he had just spoken.

  “Feel? Sad, angry. I wanted revenge.”

  “Revenge,” said Rostnikov, putting the finishing touches on his bird. “Did you ever get your revenge?”

  “No,” said Zelach.

  “And plainly it has not driven you mad,” said Rostnikov.

  “No,” said the even more confused Zelach.

  “Do you still think of revenge?”

  “No,” said Zelach.

  “Come,” said Rostnikov, rising with difficulty. “Later we’ll have birds to draw, colors to see. Now we catch a murderer.”

  FOUR

  Ludmilla Henshakayova was startled by the knock at her door. She had been sitting at her window looking out at the snow starting to fall again. In the corner a man on the television screen began to laugh. Ludmilla didn’t know why he was laughing and she really didn’t care. He and the electric picture box were there for mindless company. Ludmilla did not like to be alone.

  Another knock.

  Ludmilla did not live in the best of neighborhoods. Her apartment building was in fatal disrepair, and from her window not far from where the trolleys turned she could see only the ancient cemetery and its occasional visitors. Mostly, from the window, she watched the ugly huge crows perch on the tombstones, leaving their claw prints in the snow. Ludmilla was nearly seventy and barely able to survive on her pension plus the money she made selling flowers in front of the Bolshoi when the opera, ballet, or other event was going on. Such events were frequent, and Ludmilla needed the money badly, but recently the cold had gotten to her, and Kretchman, the flower supplier, had suggested that she stop until the weather grew warmer. But how could she?

  A third knock.

  Ludmilla sighed and over the sound of the laughing man on the television shouted, “Who?”

  “Police,” came a woman’s voice.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Ludmilla, looking at the dead bolt and four locks on her door.

  “I’m here with another officer,” the woman who claimed to be a police officer said. “We’ll slip our identification cards under the door.”

  Ludmilla still sat. The man on the television had stopped laughing. Perhaps the snow would stop soon. There was a Mozart opera at the Bolshoi. She couldn’t remember which one, but there would be Americans, French, Canadians. They and the newly rich young Russians were her customers.

  The cards came under the door.

  “They could be forged,” Ludmilla said. “Anything can be forged if you have the money.”

  “We are here to talk to you and about the man who attacked you,” came a young man’s voice.

  “That was ten years ago,” said Ludmilla.

  “Almost,” said the woman outside.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Ludmilla said firmly.

  “We think he is still attacking women,” said the female voice outside. “We think he is hurting them badly, raping and beating them. We think he may eventually kill one of his victims.”

  “Go to them,” shouted Ludmilla, knowing that her next-door neighbor, Maria Illianova, was listening to every word.

  “You are the only one who has seen him,” said the woman.

  Ludmilla sighed, got up on her arthritic legs, and moved slowly to the door. When she got there, she looked down at the two identification cards, but she didn’t bend to pick them up.

  She opened the door.

  Sasha and Elena heard the locks click and watched the door come open. According to their information from the original report of the attack, Ludmilla Henshakayova was a large woman of not yet seventy. The woman before them in a loose-fitting dress was thin and seemed ancient. She looked at Sasha and Elena and then stepped back so they could enter the small apartment.

  Sasha paused to pick up their identification cards and hand Elena hers.

  The door closed and Ludmilla said, “With two police inside, I can lock it later.”

  On the television, the laughing man was now interviewing an actor. Ludmilla couldn’t remember his name but she recognized him. He sat across from the laughing man, confident, handsome, legs crossed.

  “Ludmilla Henshakayova,” Elena said gently to get the woman’s attention.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ludmilla. “I suffer from the Russian diseases of fear, loneliness, melancholy, and a desire to forget the past.”

  The room was not at all what either Elena or Sasha had expected. The neighborhood was nearly a slum and had been for years. Half a block away sat the remains of a building so poorly constructed it had collapsed about four years earlier, killing more than a dozen people.

  But this room was immaculate. The walls were clean. Two framed posters of flowers were side by side on one wall. The other walls were bare. The concrete floor was covered by a large, darkly ornate rug, and the chairs and narrow bed in the corner were covered in matching knitted covers of yellow and green. The fourth wall held a full bookcase that stood about six feet high and fourteen feet across. In the corner were two chairs and a table covered with a bright yellow tablecloth.
On a polished table in a corner sat the black-and-white television where the laughing man and the movie star were talking.

  Both Elena and Sasha saw the low armchair at the window. Elena’s aunt had a chair near their window, where Anna Timofeyeva sat for hours, sometimes the whole day, except to do her prescribed walking and to eat a little. Elena sensed her aunt’s memories in that chair. Sasha imagined his mother, Lydia, in such a chair, but not for long. Lydia had the patience of a fly. Sasha sensed his mother’s fear of loneliness and her ever present impatience. Lydia would not sit still in such a comfortable chair for more than five minutes before she rose and began searching for someone to call, something to do.

  “Sit,” said Ludmilla.

  “May we turn the television off?” said Elena.

  “Yes,” said Ludmilla, going back to her chair at the window.

  Sasha anticipated her, stepped ahead, and turned the chair slightly so it could face the two investigators, who sat in the straight-backed wooden chairs. Sasha glanced out of the window at the cemetery. A trio of crows swooped down on a large tombstone that was leaning decidedly to the right.

  “A little girl detective,” Ludmilla said with a shake of her head as if she expected no more than madness from the new Russia. “A pretty little girl.”

  Elena wasn’t sure whether she should be flattered or insulted.

  “The attack,” Elena said.

  They had decided that whichever one of them seemed to have the better rapport with the woman would lead the questioning.

  Ludmilla now looked at Sasha.

  “And a boy detective, too. A boy detective with eyes as old as mine. You know, I used to be a poet. I can show you some of my books, the magazines in which I was published, some posters for readings I did all over the Soviet Union.”

  She paused and looked up at the two posters on the wall. Sasha and Elena followed her gaze. Indeed, under the flowers both posters carried printed announcements of appearances and readings. One poster was in French. The other was in Russian.

  “I no longer write poetry. And then …”

  She trailed off, pulled her distant memories in, and sat up to say with renewed strength, “Tea?”

  “No, thank you,” said Elena. “We know it has been a long time, but we have very little information on the attack.”

  If it hadn’t been for Karpo’s notes, the information they had found in the general files would never have led them to this woman. There had been only a brief entry. Ludmilla’s name, age, and address. There was also a note on the standard form indicating the location where she was attacked and a description of both the method of attack-knife, sneaking up from behind, hand over the eyes-and the attacker. The attacker’s description was simply “Young man, dark hair, brown eyes, khaki jacket. Attempted to take victim’s purse. She fought him off.”

  There were no other entries on the case, and neither Sasha nor Elena thought that there had been any follow-up investigation. It was Karpo’s notes that indicated the victim was a highly regarded poet. It was Karpo who had written in his notebook the address of the apartment building in which they now sat. The official report had the wrong address.

  “What is he doing to these women?” asked Ludmilla.

  “Violent rape,” said Elena. “So far he hasn’t killed anyone, but …”

  “I used to be big and strong,” said the old woman. “Now I am not as weak as I look, but I have lost my need to write what I see and feel.”

  “Can you remember the man clearly?”

  Ludmilla smiled, rivulets of wrinkles forming around her narrow mouth. There was irony but no mirth in the smile.

  “Yes. You want to know what he looked like then and what he looks like now?” she said.

  “Now?” asked Tkach. “You’ve seen him recently?”

  “I saw him.”

  “Did you call the police?” asked Elena.

  The smile again.

  “Do you think they would care?” she asked. “Do you think they would even write down what I would tell them, an old woman claiming to see the man who attacked her almost ten years ago?”

  Both Elena and Sasha knew that the woman was right. In a Moscow gone mad with violence, there was neither time nor inclination to follow up reports about old crimes. There were approximately one hundred thousand policemen in a sprawling city of nine million. Few wanted to be policemen. Even armed with Kalishnikov automatic weapons and wearing bulletproof vests, the police, who worked twelve-or fourteen-hour days, were no match for the new mafias and street gangs who were better armed. The police of Russia, unlike those of America, were permitted to fire on suspects who tried to flee or looked as if they would fire weapons at them. The death rate among criminals was high. Official statistics showed that the Moscow police had fired weapons more than fifteen hundred times in the past year compared to the Los Angeles police, who fired only one hundred fifty times in spite of a much higher rate of violence.

  “Where did you see him recently, this man who attacked you?” Elena asked.

  Ludmilla looked back at Elena. There was something of herself as a young woman in Elena’s face. The silence was very long.

  “Would I have to identify him?”

  “Possibly,” said Sasha. “Probably not, if we can find evidence or find out where he lives. Perhaps we could persuade him to confess to one of the recent attacks.”

  “You won’t do anything,” Ludmilla said, eyes scanning the small room from bed to bookshelves to television and then back to the two children who were detectives. “And if you talk to him, he might come and find me. He might kill me. I am resigned, not depressed, and I choose to live a while longer.”

  “How could he possibly find you? We won’t give him your name,” said Sasha, tossing back his hair.

  “The same way you found me,” the old woman said.

  “That information is in police records only,” said Sasha.

  “Exactly,” said Ludmilla, leaning forward.

  There was a chill in the room. It had been there since they had come in. Elena and Sasha had kept their jackets on, but now they were acutely aware of the heavy chill.

  “You mean …?” Sasha began.

  Ludmilla closed her eyes and nodded.

  “He is a policeman?” said Elena.

  “He is a policeman,” echoed Ludmilla.

  The package had been delivered to Petrovka. It was addressed to Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, Office of Special Investigation. Karpo, Iosef, and Paulinin stood looking down at the package. The four people who worked in the mail room had been told to leave.

  After the bomber had contacted Rostnikov, the small army of callers had been put into motion and the warnings had begun. People in the energy industry and others even vaguely connected to or supporting nuclear power had been told “penguin,” and the callers had checked off the names of everyone they reached. Later Karpo and Iosef would go over the report, providing, of course, that the package they were looking at did not contain a bomb that killed them.

  Paulinin was a forensic technician. He had a laboratory on the second underground level of Petrovka and was an expert in everything from examination of bodies to explosives. Most of the officers of Petrovka and all of the scientific employees, including the part-time pathologists who conducted autopsies, shunned Paulinin, who was considered a walking encyclopedia but more than a bit eccentric. He looked rather like a bespectacled, nearsighted monkey with an oversize head topped by wild gray-black hair. His office-laboratory was cluttered with piles of books and objects from past investigations. Here a pistol with the barrel missing. There, on the tottering pile of books on the edge of a desk, some false teeth in a mason jar.

  The disheveled scientist adjusted his glasses. He put down the cheap red plastic toolbox he had brought with him, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a pair of rubber gloves in a plastic bag. Paulinin put on the gloves, returned the empty plastic bag to his pocket, and got on his knees before the brown package that looked rather thick to
be containing only a five-minute message.

  Paulinin appeared to be praying to the package. Around him letters and packages sat in unattended piles. Ancient cubbyholes of various sizes were stuffed with mail.

  Paulinin leaned forward and sniffed at the bundle from one corner to another. Then he put his right ear next to the package, not quite touching it. He removed a stethoscope from the red plastic box, put it on with a flourish, and looked into space as he gently listened to the parcel. Next he ran his fingers along the rim of the package, pausing at one point. Still on his knees, he slowly turned the bundle over, touching only the rim. Iosef held his breath as Paulinin began to tap gently at the parcel with his rubber-covered fingers. Then, suddenly, he stood, picked up the package by the edges, and said, “I’d say it contains a single sheet of paper and a solid block of wood, probably birch, judging from its weight. I’ll x-ray, then check for fingerprints if I am able to open this and see what else the contents tell me.”

  Karpo didn’t bother to answer. Once the package was in Paulinin’s hands, he would do what he wanted with it in his huge, cluttered laboratory in the basement. Karpo had learned that Paulinin was indeed brilliant. He was also, to put the matter kindly, considered to be a bit mad. But it was a madness Karpo had learned not only to accept but to deny. Paulinin was lucid and prone to his own tastes and angers. The anger he sometimes displayed was aimed particularly at all the Petrovka pathologists. He was only a little more tolerant of the so-called forensics experts who at least were not, according to Paulinin, prone to prance like pathology divas. Few things delighted Paulinin more than to be brought a corpse the pathologists had examined and autopsied, for he was always certain of finding something they had overlooked. What he delighted in even more was to be given the corpse first. Such luck came his way only through the Office of Special Investigation and a handful of inspectors in other offices and departments who knew of Paulinin’s skills.

  Karpo also knew that Paulinin was a lonely man who had made gestures of friendship toward the Vampire. The overtures had been small: a cup of tea in a suspicious beaker in Paulinin’s laboratory and, much later, an invitation to share the lunch Paulinin had brought with him that day. Twice now the strange pair had gone out to relatively inexpensive cafeterias for lunch. Paulinin considered Emil Karpo his only friend.