The Holy Thief

by William Ryan

  “Comrades?” Korolev asked, looking up. The other investigators were staring at him in open-mouthed fascination, a mixture of terror and pity on their faces. Larinin was wiping sweat from his hairless scalp with his shirt sleeve.

  “The Lubianka, Alexei Dmitriyevich?” Junior Lieutenant Ivan Ivanovich Semionov said. Semionov was the youngest of the investigators, only twenty-two, although sometimes, as now, he seemed even younger. He resembled a Komsomol poster boy with his floppy blond hair, almost feminine good looks and straightforward demeanor. Semionov had only been with them for two months—most of it spent assisting Korolev with simple tasks and learning the ropes—and had yet to learn when not to say what was on his mind.

  “Yes, Ivan Ivanovich,” Korolev replied. “Comrade Gregorin wants me to give a lecture to the final-year cadets at the NKVD Higher School.”

  The three men relaxed. Larinin’s pasty face seemed suddenly a little less pasty, Semionov smiled and Dmitry Alexandrovich Yasimov, a wiry fellow of Korolev’s age with a professor’s face and a cynical wit, leaned back in his chair, wincing as the movement stretched a stomach wound, and pulled at the end of his thin, barbered mustache.

  “So, Lyoshka, that’s why you’re wearing the uniform. I suppose we thought there might be some other reason. It’s rare to see you in one.” Yasimov used the familiar form of Korolev’s name, as was his right after twelve years of working and drinking with him. Korolev looked at the chewed sleeve and scowled. It was true; he preferred to wear civilian clothes. Nothing stopped a citizen confiding in an investigator more surely than a brown uniform, in his opinion at least.

  “It needed an outing, mind you. Look at this—the damned moths have been at it.”

  “And it looks a little tighter now. Putting on weight, are you?” Yasimov’s eyes twinkled and Korolev smiled, the old saber scar that ran along his jaw drawing his left eye to the side and giving him a dreamy look, accentuated by the way his eyes lurked indistinctly under his thick eyebrows. Yasimov would joke that Korolev’s eyes seemed always to be focused on his dinner. But Korolev, while acknowledging an element of truth in the assertion, thought that this dreamy quality made people trust him, and that was certainly useful in their line of work.

  “Muscle, Dmitry. I’ve been in training. Keeps me sharp, stops old ladies from stabbing me.”

  Semionov snorted behind a hastily opened file and Larinin forgot his troubles enough to laugh openly. Even Yasimov had to smile as he rubbed at the spot where an elderly woman had placed the business end of a pair of scissors when he’d tried to help her across the street. It was the uniform, she’d told them later, and Korolev hadn’t been surprised; uniforms made people nervous these days. She’d thought Yasimov was going to arrest her, even though she’d done nothing wrong, and Korolev had had to lift her gently by the arms to stop her puncturing Yasimov for a second time. Even the innocent were jumping at shadows these days, and she’d just happened to have a pair of scissors in her fist when she did so. Korolev tried not to laugh, but to get the better of his friend was such a rare event that he had to put his hand in front of his mouth. Yasimov shook his head in admonishment.

  “Very funny. But yes, I’m following your example now, Lyoshka. Strictly plain clothes after that experience. Anyway, tell us, if you’re passing on your wisdom to young Chekists, on what subject will you be exhibiting your pedagogical abilities?”

  Korolev had found the file he was looking for and now it lay open in front of him; the perpetrator’s arrest photograph staring up at him, bruises dark on his pale young face. It hadn’t been a pleasant case, but still he felt his conscience shy at the sight of the man’s battered features. Korolev hadn’t been in the room when they’d roughed the youth up, and he couldn’t really condemn the uniforms who’d done it—they each had sisters and daughters, after all. Nonetheless, punishment was best left to the People’s Courts—otherwise things would be no better than before the Revolution.

  Distracted by the photograph, he wasn’t really paying attention to Yasimov and when he looked up he cursed under his breath, half-smiling, seeing that Semionov and even Larinin had warmed to the game.

  “Come on, Comrade,” Yasimov said, “it’s a great honor. You must share the news with your fellow workers. In what area of expertise are you so pre-eminent that a staff colonel should have picked you, an aging captain in Moscow CID, to address the bright young Chekists of the F. E. Dzerzhinsky Higher School of State Security? The cream of Soviet youth, no less. Even our boy hero here wouldn’t get a look in with that lot.”

  He nodded his head toward Semionov, who smiled good-naturedly. The three of them waited for Korolev’s answer, knowing it already.

  “Case file management, you rat,” Korolev said in a rush, unable to stop a smile at his own expense. He was rewarded with a burst of laughter from the other three men.

  “A worthy topic, Alexei,” Yasimov said, pleased that the natural order of things had been re-established. “The little Chekists will learn a thing or two from an old hand like you.”

  “I hope so, Dimka, although I’m surprised they didn’t think to ask you to give a lecture on self-defense.”

  Yasimov wagged a warning finger at Korolev, who was somewhat surprised himself to score off his friend twice in the same morning. Semionov was coughing behind his file and Larinin was looking for something in his bottom drawer, shoulders heaving. Yasimov was about to respond when a loud crash echoed up the stairwell. It sounded like a former General Commissar of State Security’s statue collapsing to the floor and breaking into several pieces, blankets notwithstanding. In the silence that followed the four of them looked at each other. The noise was a reminder, particularly to Larinin, that now was the time for results, not for idle laughter. Soon the only sounds in the room were the rustle of pages being turned in case files and the scratch of Soviet-made nibs against Soviet-made paper. Comrade Stalin looked down on them with approval.

  It was Korolev’s habit to review every page of his case file before it went to the procurator’s office. On the one hand, the purpose of the exercise was to ensure the file contained everything the procurator’s office needed to ensure a successful conviction, but Korolev also performed the task to see if he could identify anything he’d missed in the course of the investigation that, with hindsight, might have brought the matter to a close sooner. It was a practice that often yielded interesting results and was never entirely a waste of time. Sometimes Korolev found patterns of behavior repeating themselves that he found intriguing and stored away for future reference. Now, as he looked at the student Voroshilov’s photograph, Korolev wondered whether the rapist would ever have committed his crimes if he’d stayed in the small town near Smolensk where he’d grown up. Obviously, he must have had an inclination toward this kind of violence, but, perhaps, if he hadn’t been sent to study in Moscow, he might have settled down, married a nice girl and contributed usefully to society. Instead, when he’d been accepted at one of the new Moscow engineering academies, he’d discovered the anonymity, and opportunity, at the heart of a Soviet city in transition, where people, buildings and even entire neighborhoods were in a constant state of flux. Workers coming and going, factories opening, new construction projects: the development of Moscow into a capital worthy of the great Soviet Revolution had given young Voroshilov the space and opportunity to rape six young women over a four-week period, and he’d taken advantage.

  It hadn’t been reported in the newspapers and yet the word had spread. Moscow was a dangerous city at the best of times—long hours, short rations and vodka were a combustible mix—but a violent rapist striking again and again in rapid succession was unusual. Women had been careful walking alone at night, especially in the streets that had no lighting, but still Voroshilov had found opportunities. After the first one, he’d explained when he was arrested, the forced possession of women had become the only thing he thought of. With each attack the violence increased and it was only a matter of luck he hadn’t killed someone. Korole
v turned a page and came across a photograph of the bruised and bloodied Maria Naumova with her four missing teeth, her twisted nose and blackened eyes. Korolev wished he’d caught up with Voroshilov earlier, but sometimes to identify a criminal it was necessary for the dog to continue committing crimes. So he’d tracked him with a patient anger and extracted the information from each crime that had helped him slowly, but inevitably, bring the rapist to justice.

  The first victim came from a town not forty kilometers from where Voroshilov had grown up and had recognized his accent. The second remembered his new knee-length leather boots—an almost astonishing fact in itself for a student, Korolev thought ruefully, moving a toe about inside one of his old felt valenki and wondering if they’d last the winter. The third girl had seen enough of the rapist’s face to give a good description of him, and one which turned out to be more accurate than most. The fourth victim, Masha Naumova, had barely remembered her own name by the time Voroshilov had finished with her, but the fifth had snatched a piece of paper from his pocket as he’d pressed down on her in a patch of waste ground near the Moskva. She’d rolled it up in her fist and hidden it beneath her. It was a list of lectures. But it had taken them a day to identify the academy he was studying at—time that allowed Voroshilov to attack his sixth and final victim.

  They’d been waiting for him when he returned to the student hostel where he shared a tiny cubicle with three other young men. A youth like any other, it seemed to Korolev when he saw him, except for the blood-dotted scratch that ran down his cheek. He hadn’t resisted and, when they’d taken him away in the black police car, he’d seemed more relieved than frightened. The Militiamen at the local station had scuffed their knuckles on him and then thrown him into a holding cell with a bunch of Thieves. By the time the morning came, Voroshilov had an idea of just how unpleasant ten years’ hard labor could be for a rapist, and the beginning of an understanding of what the Thieves did to “furry burglars” when they fell into their hands.

  Korolev closed the file and wrote a brief summary in his elegant handwriting. A priest’s hand, his mother used to say proudly, dizzy at the possibility of young Korolev entering the tsarist bureaucracy, or perhaps even the Church itself. But then the German War had come and he’d enlisted and, when the Germans and Austrians were finished with, the Civil War had begun and so he’d fought the Whites, and then finally the Poles. By the time he’d made it home, his mother was dead and clerical jobs were few and far between in the new order. How could his poor mother have imagined that, twenty years on, all that would be left of the old regime would be a few well-mannered scarecrows scratching a living off what little manual work they could find, and selling the last of their possessions for food in the currency shops? And that there would be only a handful of churches still open in a city that had one on every corner? He finished the note and took a stamp from the cluster that stood together on the windowsill. He marked the cover For Attention of Moscow Procurator’s Office with satisfaction, and was thankful for the opportunity to contribute usefully to the creation of this new society, hard though the process was.

  “A job well done, Alexei,” Yasimov said, for once not joking.

  “He’s Kolyma-bound for sure,” Korolev replied, tucking the folder under his arm as he stood up.

  “He won’t last long there,” Larinin said, emboldened by the earlier laughter. “The Thieves will have him at the train station. The burglar will be burgled even before he gets to the Zone.”

  Waves of laughter rolled up his shirt front and his stomach heaved itself up a few inches onto the desk. His eyes, half hidden by fat at the best of times, were now mere slits of skin from which he wiped away tears, not noticing that the others didn’t join in. Yasimov turned away with a frown and even Semionov looked as if he’d eaten something unpleasant. Korolev wondered how many years they’d given Knuckles on Larinin’s evidence, and what the Thieves did to ex-Militiamen in the Zone. He left the room quickly, his fingers longing to squeeze Larinin’s throat until it popped.

  Outside on the landing Korolev took a long deep breath and heard the laughter come to a stop, then Larinin’s uncertain voice asking was it not amusing that the rapist would be raped? He received no response. What would the Thieves do to a cop like Knuckles? You never knew. Their sense of honor was strange. And Knuckles had been fair in his own way. He might have a chance.

  There was no answer when he knocked on the general’s door, but he opened it anyway—being familiar with his boss’s ways. Popov was looking out at the passing traffic—his back to the room and his massive shoulders filling the window, his three-quarter length leather jacket reflecting the sunshine.

  “Comrade General,” Korolev said, holding himself at attention. There was something about General Popov that encouraged his men to behave like tsarist guardsmen.

  “Does no one knock in this damned place any more?” the general growled, without turning.

  “My apologies, Comrade General. I did knock, but perhaps not hard enough.”

  After a lengthy pause, General Popov turned to examine Korolev, picking up his spectacles from the table to do so more closely. Even with his glasses on, he still looked every inch the Soviet hero, handsome as a statue and with hair and eyes as black as coal. Seeing that Korolev was the previously blurred figure in front of him, his chiseled features softened into a smile.

  “Alexei Dmitriyevich, is it? Come to shut down the Voroshilov file? That rat. Ten years, would you say? If I’d my way . . .”

  But the general knew Korolev was familiar with his preference for summary criminal justice and so made do with slapping a hand onto his desk with some force.

  “On his way to Siberia soon enough, I expect, General.”

  “He won’t see the spring. The Thieves give fellows like him a taste of their own medicine. They don’t last long.” The general smiled at the thought. “Enough talk of that wretch. Sit, Alexei, and listen for a moment. I’ve some news.” The general took the file from Korolev and signed it quickly beneath Korolev’s note. “You did a good job here. An excellent job. Not the first time, of course. I give you all the hard cases, the crimes that look like they’ve been committed by ghosts, and yet you always find the devils and bring them to me. The highest conviction rate in the division and you don’t even beat the confessions out of them.”

  The general paused for a moment to look at Korolev with a hint of reproach, his unruly eyebrows drawing together in a frown as he considered the investigator’s suspiciously liberal methods.

  “I do my best, Comrade General,” said Korolev, and Popov sighed in response.

  “And your best is very good. You’re a terrier. Isn’t that what the Thieves call us? Terriers? It describes you, you know. Once you’re on the trail the bandit might as well hold out his wrists for cuffing. And excellent performance deserves recognition and reward. Comrade Stalin himself has made this clear, time and time again, and the General Secretary knows a thing or two about life. So I’ve had a word with Comrade Kurilova over at housing and asked her if she could find me something for my best man. I can’t have you sharing a room with your cousin out in the back of beyond forever, can I? I want you close at hand for when I need you. And in a way, as Comrade Stalin wants the best workers rewarded, I’ve no choice in the matter.”

  Korolev found himself beginning to hope. Ever since his divorce two years before he’d been living with Mikhail, two tram rides and a long walk from Petrovka Street. He liked his cousin, but he wished he lived a little closer and drank a little less.

  “Thank you, Comrade General. I’m grateful for your efforts on my behalf.”

  “Efforts? I did better than efforts. She called me this morning and said that for the man who caught the filthy rapist Voroshilov—and how she knew about him, I don’t know, but that woman knows when a sparrow farts on the Lenin Hills, I’m sure of it. Still, it worked in your favor—for the man who felt Voroshilov’s collar nothing less than a big room on Bolshoi Nikolo-Vorobinsky would do.
Fourteen square meters. Some furniture as well. Here.”

  The general pushed across a requisition form from the housing department signed by the sainted Kurilova. Korolev took it from him, feeling his face grow warm. Forty-two years old and still he blushed. He was glad Yasimov wasn’t there to see it.

  “I was only doing my duty, Comrade General,” he began, but the general interrupted him.

  “Enough. It’s a shared apartment, so don’t get too excited. But you’ll have your own room and as for the area—well, Kitaj-Gorod is not to be sneezed at. Full of VIPs and Party cadres. It’ll do them good to see a real worker for a change.”

  The general smiled at Korolev’s discomfort.

  “Don’t worry, Alexei, I don’t talk this way in front of Larinin and his like. Not that Larinin won’t be back directing traffic on Tverskaya soon enough if he doesn’t get off his backside and catch a criminal. We’ve quotas here, same as everywhere else, and he’s not pulling his weight. Anyway, best get over there before they change their mind—the head of the building management committee has the keys. And as soon as you’ve finished, call in. There’s been a murder over on Razin Street; it sounds like the work of a maniac—just your kind of thing. I’m going over to take a look.”

  Korolev got to his feet so quickly that for a fraction of a second he felt dizzy.

  “Comrade General,” he began and he could feel the gratitude making him pompous, but the general shook his head almost shyly, took Korolev’s hand in a firm grip and held it for a moment or two while he regarded his subordinate with affection. Then his face became grave again, as befitted a Soviet leader of men, and he turned away toward the window, his voice rough when he spoke.

  “I said enough, Comrade, no need for a speech. Go on, quickly now—get your belongings moved in. You deserve it. Hurry, before I change my mind.”