Tarnished Icons ir-11

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Paulinin was not supposed to use the more sophisticated equipment in the forensic laboratory almost directly above him. Normally he prided himself on what he could discover more from a small piece of dust or a charred strip of human flesh with the equipment in his cluttered laboratory. Paulinin had no friends in the forensic laboratory. They resented his success and his air of superiority, and they were more than just uncomfortable with his air of near madness. Paulinin had unkind words to say about all of them, but his favorite target was the pathologists. Paulinin frequently took bodies when autopsies were completed and discovered crucial evidence the highly respected specialists had missed.

  “The trace proved to be from a plastique-style explosive that the military and even terrorists stopped using long ago,” said Paulinin. “Too volatile. More terrorists than victims died from their ignorance of the sensitive explosive. Iran still has some. Hammas uses it sometimes in Israel. They don’t care if the carrier dies. In fact, that’s the point.”

  “And here? In Moscow?” asked Karpo, knowing when he had heard a cue.

  “Three laboratories worked on stabilizing the explosive as long ago as the 1950s,” said Paulinin. “I made some calls. One man was working on such a stabilization using a particular aluminum alloy from Iran. The man was also working on development of nuclear weaponry. He died almost twenty years ago, radiation poisoning. I knew him slightly from conferences. He was less a fool than most.”

  There was silence. Paulinin smiled, the corners of his thin mouth coming up at the corners. He looked more constipated than pleased, but Karpo had come to know the man well.

  “Then he is not the one we’re looking for,” said Karpo.

  “He had a son,” said Paulinin, springing his surprise. “His son is an engineer, more a technologist than a scientist. He works in the same laboratory where his father worked. I have encountered him, too, at a few conferences. He lacks his father’s skills, but …”

  “And the name of this man and the laboratory?” asked Karpo.

  “Alexi Monochov, Karkov Enterprises,” Paulinin said. “If he is still there.”

  The man known as the Vampire was wearing his coat, as black as the rest of his clothing.

  “Yes,” said Iosef, in awe when Karpo uttered the name he himself was about to speak. “Did he turn himself in?”

  “No,” said Karpo.

  Iosef got up and followed Karpo to the door and out into the corridor, putting his coat on as they walked.

  Twenty minutes later, the two detectives were in the outer lobby of a fashionable apartment building on Chekhov Prospekt. More buildings at this level were hiring doormen, many of whom were former policemen or even former KGB agents. The pay for protecting the tenants from the rash of thieves was better than government pay, though it could be dangerous. Such doormen were always armed. Not long ago a doorman had been confronted by a gang of four children who entered at night. One of the children had an automatic weapon that looked like an old machine gun from an American gangster movie. The doorman had shot the twelve-year-old, whose weapon misfired, and the other three children had fled. The twelve-year-old had survived the wound, refused to name his partners, and boasted that they had planned to terrorize the building apartment by apartment, tearing out telephones so the police couldn’t be called and taking what they wanted. That attack, and most other attempts, failures and successes, had come at night, though daylight apartment robberies were no longer unheard of.

  However, this building had no doorman on duty. Instead of ringing the bell to the Monochov apartment, Karpo took a black leather pouch out of his pocket. The rectangular pouch was about two inches wide and about a quarter of an inch thick. Karpo’s long fingers extracted two small metal tools. One was no more than a bent piece of metal; the other, the size of a small pencil, came to a sharp point. Using both tools, Karpo opened the lock within a minute.

  Iosef noted the procedure as one he hoped to be able to perform in the not-too-distant future.

  The inner lobby was small, tiled, empty. It was late morning. People who worked were at their jobs. People who didn’t were in their apartments or out shopping. People in buildings like this, Iosef thought as he followed Karpo to the elevator standing open before them, had the money to shop.

  The Monochov apartment was on the eighth floor. The two men approached it at a normal pace. Before the end of the Soviet Union, Karpo had not carried a weapon unless he knew he was likely to run into armed resistance on a case. Now he wore a holster under his coat, and in the holster was a SIG Sauer P 226 that could deliver sixteen 9mm rounds rapid-fire with great accuracy. It was also the safest handgun. The loaded and uncocked gun put the hammer in register with the safety intercept notch, so firing was possible only when the trigger was pulled. It could not go off accidentally. Karpo had the weapon nearby all the time, on duty and off. Armed resistance roamed the streets. Iosef’s weapon, a.32 Smith amp; Wesson, was also under his coat. Karpo didn’t reach for his gun. Iosef followed his lead.

  There was a knocker, silver plated and well polished, on the door. Karpo knocked. There was an immediate bustle inside and then the sound of footsteps.

  “Who is it?” asked a woman.

  “Police,” said Karpo. “Open the door immediately.”

  The door did not open immediately.

  “How do I know you’re really the police?” she asked.

  Even a newcomer like Iosef knew the drill, which might or might not work. He pulled out his plastic identification card and slid it under the door. He knocked on the bottom of the door so the woman would look down.

  They could hear her moving. Silence. Then the door opened to reveal a very frightened looking woman in her seventies wearing a long-sleeved green dress, her white hair tied in a bun atop her head. She held Iosef’s identification card in her hand.

  “You really are police?” she asked, looking at Karpo in fear and then over at Iosef, who smiled.

  The young detective was good-looking, amber-haired, and had a good smile with even, white teeth. He took the card from her hand and pocketed it.

  “Alexi Monochov,” Karpo said, stepping in with Iosef at his side.

  Karpo closed the door.

  “Alexi’s in trouble, isn’t he?” she asked.

  Her face was pink and her gray eyes showed a new fear.

  “You are his mother?” asked Karpo.

  “Yes.”

  “We would like to speak to him,” said Iosef.

  “Speak to …” the woman began, and seemed to lose track of what was happening.

  “Some questions,” said Iosef.

  The woman backed up slowly as if she were being attacked. She backed into a large living room with solid French style furniture. Lots of wood and soft cushions. There was an Oriental rug on the floor.

  “Alexi isn’t here,” she said. “He’s at work.”

  “He called in sick,” Iosef said.

  “Maybe he went to the doctor,” she said. “He’s been complaining about a sore stomach. He doesn’t tell me everything. He is in trouble?”

  “His doctor’s name?” asked Karpo.

  “I don’t know. He’s never told me. He doesn’t talk to me or his sister much. My daughter’s not here. She’s at work. She helps at a school.”

  “When your son left this morning,” said Karpo, “did he have anything with him?”

  “His briefcase,” she said. “I don’t know why he would need his briefcase to see the doctor.”

  “Did he do anything unusual?” asked Karpo.

  “Yes,” she said, looking down. “He kissed my forehead. He never does that.”

  “We would like to see his room,” said Karpo.

  “Which one?” she asked. “The workroom is locked. Only Alexi has a key. His bedroom is open.”

  “Show us the workroom,” said Iosef.

  “It’s locked,” she said.

  “Please,” said Iosef. “Show us.”

  She sighed deeply and looked around the roo
m before speaking again.

  “Alexi won’t like this,” she said.

  “We’ll talk to him,” said Iosef.

  The woman turned and led them through the living room to a hallway with a polished wood floor. There were four doors. She stopped at the last one. Karpo looked at the lock, took out his tools, and went to work.

  “Alexi won’t like this at all,” she said. “No one is allowed in his workroom. No one. Ever.”

  The lock was good. It took Karpo almost two minutes to open it while Iosef and the woman watched. Then Karpo motioned for the others to move away. They did and so did he. He reached over, turned the handle, and the door swung open. There was no bomb triggered to the door, though there might be a delayed one. They stood back for a full minute, and then Karpo went into the room. Iosef and the woman were right behind him.

  “I’ve never been in here before,” the woman said.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Karpo ordered, looking around the small, windowless room. There were shelves up to the ceiling filled with neatly arranged materials. On the opposite wall was a large cabinet, its doors closed. In front of them was a table covered with carefully laid out tools, empty mailing cartons, large brown envelopes, and a box of disposable latex gloves. The two policemen had no doubt about what they were looking at.

  On the wall over the worktable was the framed photograph of a somber man in profile.

  “That’s my husband,” the woman said, and then she glanced at the large picture next to the photograph of the man. The second picture looked as if it had been taken from a newspaper. It showed a large mushroom cloud.

  On the table directly in front of them was a handwritten note on a sheet of lined legal-size paper. It was held down by a small pliers.

  Karpo and Iosef moved forward and began to read the note without touching it. It was addressed to the police and began, “There are duplicate copies of this statement in the mail to a newspaper and a television station in Moscow and to the bureaus of two newspapers, one American and one British. Since I will be dead along with many others when you read this …”

  Iosef blocked the old woman from the note, but she tried to push past him.

  “What is it? This is my house. Alexi is my son. Where is he?”

  SEVEN

  Galina Panishkoya gave each of her granddaughters a hug. The twelve-year-old began to cry. The seven-year-old held back and then ran into her grandmother’s arms. The trio stood together weeping.

  Rostnikov took a seat in the small room. His choices were limited to one of four identical wooden chairs, all very old and scratched. The only other furniture in the room was a wooden dining room table that definitely did not match the chairs. There was a single window with bars. The view from the window was an empty square courtyard below and dozens of similar windows with bars around the courtyard of the square red building. The courtyard was where the prisoners were permitted to exercise twice a day.

  The women’s prison was north of the city and required both a metro ride to the Outer Ring Circle and then a bus ride to the prison. Rostnikov had not told the woman that he was bringing the girls. Too many bureaucratic problems were possible-delays without explanation, excuses without substance. But Rostnikov knew a few people in the prison office and was on cordial terms with the warden.

  Galina Panishkoya was sixty-six years old. She looked like she should have been wearing a babushka and warm coat, not a loose-fitting dress that served as a uniform. When Rostnikov had talked her into giving him the gun in her hand almost two years earlier in the back room of State Store 31, she had been sitting on a stool holding a frightened young employee at gunpoint and looking down from time to time at the manager, whom she had shot. It had all been a blur to Galina. There had been a food riot over cheese supplies. People had tried to grab the cheese, and Galina, after hesitating, had joined in. The manager had pulled out a gun, a 7.65mm Hege, Wlam model, the one with the Pegasus in a circle on the grip. Rostnikov knew it was quite a fickle and dangerous weapon.

  Rostnikov had explained to the woman who sat on a stool that day, gun in hand, with the body of store manager Herman Koruk on the floor beside her in a pool of blood and a sobbing young girl in a white smock splattered with small drops of blood cowering against the wall, what the mythical Pegasus was.

  Galina didn’t quite remember exactly how she got the gun from the manager. Perhaps she thought he was going to kill her or someone else. All the woman knew was that she had two hungry granddaughters at home she had to take care of. The girls’ mother had long ago departed, as had their father.

  Now Galina was in prison for murder. The trial had been quick, coming just as the Soviet Union was about to end. The judge had been in fear of losing his job and had come down with a firm sentence, though he spared her life. Galina was to be in prison for the rest of her days. Now Rostnikov and his wife were trying to get her another trial or parole. Iosef had a friend from his army days who was one of the new lawyers. He was working on the case. It looked promising, but he offered the woman no guarantees.

  When he had first met Galina in the back of State Store 31, the first thing she had asked him was about the leg he dragged behind him. Now, as she sat in one of the chairs, an arm around a granddaughter on either side, she said, “Spahseebah” unable to keep the tears from her eyes.

  Rostnikov nodded.

  “You’re walking better,” she said.

  “He has a new plastic leg,” the younger girl said.

  Rostnikov rolled up his pant leg to reveal the creation.

  “Take it off for her,” said the younger girl.

  The older girl tapped her sister on the head.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Galina with a smile. “I have seen men with one leg before.”

  “How does it go, Galina Panishkoya?” asked Rostnikov.

  The woman shrugged and pulled her granddaughters even closer to her.

  “Bweet zayela, every day life has challenged me, but I work and I eat. I’m making dresses here,” she said, “all the same kind, like this one. I am useful. I don’t have to stand. I used to work at the Panyushkin dress factory, but that was long ago.”

  Rostnikov knew this, but he nodded as if it were new information.

  “The light is not always good here,” she said. “But they let us read. They gave me reading glasses. I read better now.”

  Rostnikov shifted his weight and pulled a tattered paperback from his pocket. He put it on the table in front of Galina. It was an Ed McBain novel called Mischief. Porfiry Petrovich had read it three times.

  “Thank you,” Galina said, looking at the book.

  “Galina Panishkoya,” he said, “you still don’t remember what happened that day in the store on Arbat Street?”

  “No,” the woman said. She could pull her grandchildren no closer but she tried. “Not clearly.”

  It was the right answer. The woman had always said she didn’t remember getting the gun or firing the shot. There was no doubt that she had done it, but Iosef’s friend, the lawyer, said that there was something called “temporary insanity” in the United States and other countries. Galina Panishkoya had ample reason to go insane that day. With the legal system still in post-Soviet chaos and no one knowing what laws to follow, the lawyer was trying to schedule a hearing with a sympathetic chief district judge, one of the new ones who might be willing to blame the Communist system for the woman’s temporary madness. The judge who sentenced Galina had been fired in disgrace. The trial had been a typical mockery, with the old woman sitting in a cage in the middle of the small dirty courtroom and being referred to by her own appointed lawyer as “the criminal being tried.” Things were different now. A well-timed request for a new trial before an election might be effective. Then, possibly with a vzyatka, an unofficial payment for services, including the judge’s, a new trial could be scheduled. There was even the possibility, though Iosef’s lawyer friend held out only a little hope, that a high enough judge might be willing si
mply to free the woman on the grounds that she may, in fact, not have fired the shot at all but picked up the weapon in a state of complete confusion. Such a ruling, however, would take a bribe far beyond what Rostnikov and his wife could come up with. Still, the possibility existed.

  “Porfiry Petrovich,” the woman said meekly, “please thank your wife for taking in my granddaughters.”

  “It is our pleasure,” the detective said. “It has been good to have children in the apartment.”

  “He lifts weights on bars,” said the older girl proudly.

  “And he fixes toilets,” said the younger one. “And tonight he’s going to fix some heating thing for some Jews.”

  “Jews?” asked Galina. “You are going to work for Jews?”

  “Mrs. Rostnikov is Jewish,” said the older girl.

  “She’s Jewish?” asked Galina, looking at the detective.

  He nodded.

  “So many new things have come to me at such an old age,” the woman said, shaking her head as a male guard entered the room to indicate that the visit was over.

  The woman and the detective both stood slowly, each for a different reason. The girls gave their grandmother hugs and kisses. Then the guard ushered them into the hall when Rostnikov motioned for him to do so. Rostnikov stood facing the woman who, he had noticed, now had a full set of teeth. When she had gone into prison, she had the brown minimum of teeth common in Soviet citizens. Rostnikov had arranged through a charitable fund he had once dealt with to have them removed and a false set fitted.

  “You will bring them back?” she said, holding her hands together in a gesture of near prayer.

  “I will,” he said.

  “Can you, might you, bring your wife so I can thank her personally?”

  “I will try,” he said. “Are you giving up hope, Galina?”

  “No,” she said with a little smile. “I miss my girls. I want to be out of here, but I am at peace and the other women look at me as a grandmother. I am safe. I don’t think about hope. I make dresses. I read. I’m fed. I remember the good things outside, what few there were.”