The Killer Department

by Robert Cullen

  The exigencies of life forced him to continue scrapping. In 1964, when he was eighteen, the state exacted payment for the education it had given him by requiring two years of service in Nikita Khrushchev's scheme to plow up and cultivate the grasslands of the dry Central Asian steppe, known in Russia as the Virgin Lands. For hundreds of years, the nomadic Central Asians managed to subsist by grazing animals on these lands, using them sparingly, not demanding more than the land could give. Khrushchev decided that the steppe could produce much more, that its lands were the key to Soviet agricultural self-sufficiency. The Party sent thousands of young people out to the steppe. It assigned Viktor Burakov to a barrack with sixteen other men, almost all of them older. Food and water had to be trucked in from the nearest settlement, one hundred miles away. When the delivery system failed, the men simply went hungry and thirsty. Burakov plowed all through the hot, dry summer, and spent the cold, windy winters repairing the equipment.

  In the barracks, the older recruits demanded that the younger ones do the chores—cleaning, cooking, hauling water. Burakov was prepared to do his share, but his pride prohibited him from acting as a servant to another man. He had to back up his pride with his fists.

  The Soviet army drafted Burakov immediately after his two years in the Virgin Lands. The army was more of the same. Soldiers who could drive a tractor were seconded to the collective farms to help with the harvest. And the army had its own hazing system, called dedovshchina, in which the older soldiers tried to force the younger ones to shine their shoes and work their shifts in the kitchen and the latrine. Again, Burakov's pride compelled him to fight.

  When the army released him, he was twenty-two. He found that the Bolshevik collective farm had no openings for drivers, and he had no desire to work in the fields. He moved to the city of Bryansk and got work as a driver of trucks and bulldozers for a steel factory. He married Svetiana, whom he met at a dance, and moved with her into a tiny rented room, called a three-by-three because each side measured only three yards. It was heated so poorly that, in the wintertime, they could see frost on the floor when they awakened in the morning.

  Almost immediately, the Party noticed Burakov's dihgence. He won one of the medals the factory occasionally awarded to its best workers, and he became a foreman supervising older men. He was invited to join the Party, which he did in 1971. He studied in the factory's technical school at night. In many ways, he epitomized the ideal that the Party ceaselessly promulgated in the press, on film, and on television—the ideal of the conscientious Soviet blue-collar worker, rising, with the help of the state, from proletarian beginnings, earning the respect of his comrades, and making his contribution to the building of Communism.

  In 1972, the local Party headquarters received a directive from the center in Moscow. The Politburo had decided to improve the quality of the militsia. Party organizations in every factory and collective farm were to select some of their brightest young men and persuade them to become militsionery.

  In Bryansk, the Party organization in the steel factory selected Viktor Burakov. They called him into the Party office and told him that the kollektiv had entrusted him with this duty.

  Burakov resisted. He had no desire to be a policeman. Moreover, the starting salary was only ninety-five rubles a month. Under the Soviet system, skilled blue-collar workers had the highest salaries—higher than those of doctors, teachers, and even, nominally, politicians. (In reality, being in a position of Mat, or influence, counted for more than money in the acquisition of things like cars and housing.) As a factory foreman, Burakov made as much as four hundred rubles a month if the factory fulfilled its production quotas. As a militsioner, he would earn less than a quarter of his factory wage and little Mat.

  But he soon realized that he had no choice in the matter. The Party organization persisted, calling him in every day to remind him that he was a Communist, and a Communist had a duty to serve where the Party needed him. And he perceived a threat. If he resisted the Party's wishes, the commendations and the medals would cease; instead, there would be complaints about his performance. He would find it impossible to continue to work. He gave in.

  He got the usual few months of rudimentary training, then walked a beat. He thought, at first, that people respected the uniform. He learned otherwise one night when he had to break up a fight in a restaurant. He grabbed the man who started it and tried to arrest him. In an instant, Burakov found himself on the floor, looking up at the faces of people who showed neither sympathy nor an inclination to help him. The man he was trying to arrest, he would learn later, was a master of sport in a Soviet variant of the martial arts called Sambo, from the Russian words for unarmed self-defense.

  Burakov had no pistol or club, just a feeling of shame that a criminal had put him on the floor. He got up but, in a few seconds, hit the floor again. He got up a third time, his uniform by now badly torn, with the same result. But he fought on and, after forty minutes, subdued his man.

  After that, Burakov was assigned to the new criminology academy in Volgograd, a showpiece within the Soviet bloc that was one of the components in the effort to professionalize the militsia. The academy drew students from Cuba, Eastern Europe, and other Soviet republics, as well as from Russia. Burakov filled his spare time with Sambo. He was, by then, twenty-eight—too old to aspire to the title of master of sport and international competition. But he pushed himself through two workouts a day, and he was known for his dogged, stubborn refusal to accept defeat. Once, an opponent inflicted a knee injury that would require surgery. Burakov finished the match in terrible pain rather than pounding the mat and forfeiting.

  When he finished the academy, he was assigned to Rostov. His upbringing had produced, in many respects, a typical Russian male, a man who took great pride in his physical strength, a man who enjoyed working on a kollektiv with other men, a man capable of both sentimentality and, when he thought it necessary, cruelty. What distinguished him from his peers was the diligence his parents had instilled in him, the desire, bordering on an obsession, to see a job through to the end, the pride that prohibited him from giving up a task short of completion.

  In March 1983, Burakov received assurances from the commission that doled out apartments to militsia workers that he would get his new apartment regardless of any transfer to the syshchik squad. Burakov promptly moved from the forensic laboratory to a dingy room on the third floor of the main wing. It was called the Greek Temple, because it was the largest room in the building. Eight detectives worked at battered desks in the Greek Temple; a portrait of Lenin presided sternly over their labors. They were the mainstays of a sub-unit called, in classically heavy bureaucratese, the Division of Especially Serious Crimes. Burakov went to work on the case that the detectives had begun to refer to as the ksopolosa killings.

  In the Temple, Burakov first read the files on Lyubov Biryuk and the skeletons, still unidentified, found in the woods. In March, there was one identified victim, Lyubov Biryuk, and three unidentified skeletons. The most recent victim had been found in January, not far from the train station in Shakhty. Like Lyubov Biryuk and the two previous unidentified corpses, the fourth had wounds in the eye sockets, apparentiy from a knife. The corpse had lain, undiscovered, for about six months, according to the autopsy report. No soft tissue was left, and the determination that the body was a female's rested largely on circumstantial clues. The search of the scene had disclosed some women's clothing nearby, and the skeleton was short, only a couple of inches over five feet. So it was listed as a girl, between the ages of fifteen and nineteen when she died.

  Officially, the militsia treated the four corpses as murders that might or might not be related. But to Burakov, as well as to others, the wounds around the eye sockets suggested that one person, almost certainly a male, had killed them all. Few killers, in his experience, bothered with the eyes of their victims; they struck at more vital organs. Four corpses, all found within the same general area, all killed within the same year, and all wi
th wounds to the eyes almost had to be the work of a single murderer. There was, he knew, an old Russian superstition that the image of a killer remained in the eyes of his victim. Maybe the killer believed it, and had cut out the eyes to destroy evidence. More likely, Burakov thought, the killer simply could not stand to look his victims in the eyes. That, in turn, suggested that he spent time with each victim before she died. The wounds to Lyubov Biryuk indicated he spent enough time to inflict dozens of knife wounds. Perhaps, Burakov thought, the killer was a teenager, someone not yet hardened enough to look into the eyes of his victims without shame, but someone old enough, and perverse enough, to take pleasure from inflicting pain and watching blood flow.

  The four corpses had substantially increased the militsia's interest in reports of missing girls. Fetisov and Kolyesnikov had such a report on their desks. A girl named Olga Stalmachenok, ten years old, had disappeared after her piano lesson on December 11, 1982. The militsia in her hometown, Novoshakhtinsk, had failed to find her or witnesses. For Burakov's first assignment, Fetisov and Kolyesnikov decided to send him to supervise the search, letting other members of the team continue to work on the Biryuk murder and the three unidentified corpses.

  Novoshakhtinsk (the name means, roughly. New Mining Town) lies some forty miles north of Rostov in the coalfield region of the oblast. Driving to it, Burakov passed mile after mile of rolling collective farm fields, just emerging from the winter snows, waiting to be sown with corn and sunflowers. Outside the town, huge, dirty piles of coal tailings, bigger than Egypt's pyramids, stand like sentinels on patrol. Once in a while, one of them catches fire, sending black, acrid smoke into the skies over the city. Though it has more than one hundred thousand residents, Novoshakhtinsk is really a collection of villages, each clustered around a particular mine. People live in cottages like the one Burakov had in Rostov or in the newer apartment blocks. Nearly all the inhabitants have empty fields and piles of coal tailings within walking distance of their homes.

  Burakov checked into Novoshakhtinsk's only hotel, the Zarya, at 52 Lenin Street, around the corner from the local militsia station. He got room No. 21, down a dark hallway from a fetid, fly-infested toilet. The shower was downstairs, and there was a miners' cafeteria down the street.

  The next morning, Burakov had a local militsioner drive him to the Stalmachenoks' home, at the northern edge of the city, on a dirt street named for Pravda, the Communist Party's newspaper. Both of the missing girl's parents worked in the mines, Natalia as a machinist and Anton as a fitter. They owned a small house that Anton built himself. It was a simple place, with a kitchen, a bedroom, and a sitting room that contained one luxury—a piano.

  Natalia was a hefty woman, with dark hair and gold-capped teeth, given to walking around the house in a faded cotton dress, her feet bare and dusty. She had premature wrinkles around her eyes, and Burakov guessed her age to be thirty-five, seven years older than in fact she was. She had been eighteen when she married Anton and eighteen when Olga, their first child, was born. She had, by the time Burakov called on her, told what she knew to many militsionery, and she had little but contempt for all of them. She answered his questions in a tone of tired disdain.

  Olga, she told him, was an ordinary girl. No outstanding talents. No unusual interests. Yes, she got along with her parents. She did reasonably well in school. She liked to read. She wanted to become a music teacher. Yes, her parents had encouraged her in this ambition to find a career outside the mines. Though neither of them played, they bought a piano. Since the age of six, Olga had taken piano lessons twice a week, after school, in the city's music conservatory in the center of town. For the first three years, one of her parents had accompanied her to the conservatory and brought her back. But this trip took more than an hour each way and required changing buses. The Stalmachenoks, in addition to their work underground, had another daughter, four years old. Beginning in the summer of 1982, they let Olga go to her piano lesson alone, although Anton always tried to meet her bus when it arrived at their stop, to take her home in the sidecar of his motorcycle.

  They had never taught her to be afraid of strangers. This was understandable. In pre-glasnost Soviet society, the newspapers and television almost never reported crimes against individuals, particularly children. Such crimes, according to the official line, afflicted bourgeois rather than socialist societies. When crime news did appear in the press, it almost always involved economic crimes, committed by people who had succumbed to the capitalist disease, greed. Their captures and punishments were depicted as little morality plays.

  Still less would someone like Natalia Stalmachenok know about psychiatric disorders that might impel someone to assault a young girl. The Party, since Stalin's time, had imposed a strict puritan-ism on the Soviet media. Books and articles available to the general public almost never mentioned sex. Films showed nothing more explicit than a kiss, and a popular entertainment that explicitly portrayed a sexually depraved killer was unthinkable. As far as anyone could learn from the media, Soviet children received only love and sage advice from their elders. The propaganda slogan, hauled out by editors every time they printed pictures of the opening of a new school or swimming pool, was "Children are our only privileged class."

  Soviet culture encouraged children to look upon their elders almost as family members. Language itself was suggestive. An accepted way for children to address even unknown adults was to call them uncle, auntie, or grandma. Natalia Stalmachenok had raised her daughter Olga in precisely that spirit.

  On the evening when Olga disappeared, Natalia told Burakov, they had expected her home by seven o'clock. When she failed to turn up, they did not panic. Buses often broke down or were delayed, and Olga had occasionally come home from her lesson as late as nine o'clock. Her father thought she might have gone to visit a friend. Although the night was chill and damp, he got back on his motorcycle and began making the rounds of her schoolmates' homes.

  But by eleven o'clock, panic had set in. While Anton Stalmachenok continued the search in their neighborhood, Natalia took the bus downtown, to the classical, ocher-colored building of the music conservatory on Lenin Street. At the bus stop in front of the conservatory, she saw two militsionery.

  "I told the two of them that my daughter was lost," she said. "They just laughed and told me to go down to the station to file a report. So I went to the station and they said she'd probably just gone off to a friend's." Natalia Stalmachenok never got over her feeling that the Novoshakhtinsk militsia reacted cavalierly, in the first days, to Olga's disappearance.

  Her grudging, monosyllabic responses to his questions disappointed Burakov. He had gone to her in hopes that he could elicit some additional bit of information that might be helpful in finding her daughter. He took her reticence not as an understandable reaction to her experience with the militsia but as evidence that she was an indifferent mother or one, perhaps, whose work had worn her body and spirit down. Had one of his own children disappeared, he thought, he would have racked his brain to give the militsia any and all details that might help them find him. He had learned nothing from Natalia Stalmachenok that the local militsia hadn't known in December. He had nothing new to go on.

  He did not tell Natalia Stalmachenok, but he was already convinced the girl was dead. Three days after her disappearance, the Novoshakhtinsk militsia had posted fliers around the city with her school picture, showing a pretty young girl in her school pinafore, her hair combed back in bunches and held in place by white bows. The local radio station and newspapers had reported that she was missing, and that the militsia were looking for any witnesses who might have seen her on Lenin Street early in the evening of December 11. Despite the fact that the street had been crowded at that hour with people going home from work or shopping, no witnesses came forward. Militsionery had gone door to door in the neighborhood around the conservatory, interviewing people who worked nearby or regularly passed through. They found no one who had seen her. They had even used tracking dogs
in an effort to find her. They found no scent.

  They had one dubious clue to work on. Several weeks after news of Olga Stalmachenok's disappearance began to circulate in Novoshakhtinsk, her parents had received a postcard, mailed from the city. In a shaky, immature hand, someone had written in pencil that if they wanted to find their daughter, they should look in the Daryevsky woods at the southwest end of the city. More ominously, the writer had warned that "we" would be taking and killing a total of ten young girls during the next year. Olga was just the first. The writer signed himself "Sadist-Black Cat."

  By the time Burakov arrived in Novoshakhtinsk, the local militsionery had thoroughly combed the Daryevsky woods, finding nothing. Burakov doubted that the Black Cat writer could be the man who had killed four, and possibly five, girls and young women without leaving a trace. The Black Cat's words were ungrammatical, almost incoherent. To Burakov, they suggested the opposite of the cunning he imagined the killer to possess. And, given the fact that nearly everyone in Novoshakhtinsk knew the girl had disappeared, the writer needed to have no inside knowledge of the crime. He could be a psychotic or a warped prankster completely unconnected to the girl's disappearance. But the postcard was all they had to go on, and they began trying to identify the handwriting.