The Holy Thief

by William Ryan

  Korolev wondered whether he was having his leg pulled. He searched Kolya’s face. “I don’t believe this,” he said eventually, shaking his head. Maybe it was the alcohol that was making his mind feel sluggish, but he just couldn’t take Kolya’s story in.

  “You saw Tesak’s body? Where was his tattoo?” Kolya asked.

  “On his arm, his right arm. The bicep.”

  Kolya took off his waistcoat and opened his shirt, Christ’s crucifixion spread across his chest. He pulled the shoulder of the shirt down along his arm, revealing an image of an icon, the Virgin and the Child, Kazanskaya, Our Lady of Kazan. “Only the senior Thieves knew we protected her, but all our clan know she protects us.”

  “What if it is the truth? What of it? What has it to do with me?”

  “Maybe nothing. You want to catch the killer, am I right?”

  “Of course. That’s my duty.”

  “Even if he’s Cheka?”

  Korolev considered yet again the course he found himself on and the insanity of it, the breath-stealing danger of it. But what choice did he have? He was a simple man and this was the road he walked. His job was to catch killers and assist in the administration of justice—he wouldn’t back away from his duty just yet. If it came to a choice between duty and death—well, he’d make a decision then, if he still could.

  “I’m investigating the murders,” he managed to say. “If it’s in my power, I’ll bring whoever committed them to justice.”

  “Soviet justice?”

  “It’s as good as any. The system may not be perfect—I’m not blind. These are eyes in my head. But we work for the future, a Soviet future. And it’s as fair as any damned justice system the capitalists ever lied about.” He could feel his leg trembling against the bale of hay. Was it anger or some other emotion? He wasn’t sure of anything any more. But if he didn’t believe the leadership weren’t working for the People’s future—well, where would he be? What hell would he find himself in then—if it all turned out to be a blood-soaked lie? He spat on the floor to ward off the thought, and then fumbled for another cigarette. He put it in his mouth, reaching for his matches, but Kolya had already extended a lighter.

  “Thank you,” Korolev said, hearing the gruffness in his voice. He offered the Thief the packet.

  “You’re an honest man. And you are a Believer, aren’t you?” Kolya seemed to be weighing him up.

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “Maybe it isn’t. But what if, at some stage, you have to decide between your loyalty to the church and your loyalty to Comrade Stalin. How do you think you would decide?”

  “I’m a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union.”

  “But no Party member. Listen, our aim is to find the icon and see it returned to the Church. We don’t know who stole it from the Lubianka, but we want to make sure it ends up in the right place—we can’t keep it safe here, we know that now, and the icon is more important than our pride. But we’re not the only people trying to find it, as you know, and they’re the ones responsible for Tesak and the Holy Sister, and others besides. I have a feeling they are Cheka, these people, and they’ll stop at nothing. After all, there’s a lot at stake here—the icon is worth a great deal of money. But if we get to it first, we’ll see it safe—out of the country. Now you’ve a decision. Do you tell your bosses what I just told you, or do you keep it quiet?”

  “I can’t see why I shouldn’t tell them.”

  Kolya smiled. “Would you like to know the name of the Chekist commanding the search party? The one who took the icon from us?”

  Korolev nodded, half-suspecting he knew the answer.

  “Gregorin,” Kolya said and Korolev knew the time for choosing between duty and life had come.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The thieves took them back to the stands just as another race finished and Korolev felt his Walther slipped into his pocket, saw Mishka tip his cap in ironic salute and then they were gone, swallowed into the swirling, half-drunk crowd as the last of the runners cantered past the post. Babel, meanwhile, had the inward-looking smile of a man committing to memory each detail of their encounter, and it made Korolev feel trapped, that small smile; as though Korolev were in the middle of a story still being written and over which he had no control. Perhaps it was that sense of powerlessness, or perhaps something more sinister, but he suddenly had a vivid sensation of imminent danger. Looking round the crowd, he could see nothing untoward, but the feeling persisted, and if seven years of war had taught him anything at all it was that such a feeling shouldn’t be ignored. He took Babel’s arm in a strong grip.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Korolev said and began to direct him toward the exit. The strength of Korolev’s hold seemed to shock Babel and he threw him an indignant look, which Korolev chose to ignore. Instead, he shoved at the backs in front of them and dragged the writer along, observing Babel’s confusion with some satisfaction.

  “Watch where you’re going, friend,” someone said, loudly enough for people to turn to see what was happening. The words weren’t intended for a friend, however, Korolev realized as he looked up at a worker in overalls fresh from the factory floor and with a nasty smile on his face. The giant, face etched with engine oil and dirt, had placed a filthy hand on Korolev’s shoulder to hold him still and Korolev had an image of the fingers imprinting themselves into the fabric. What with the earlier razor cut, his only winter coat was having a hard day, and he felt a stab of irritation. He looked round at Babel, but the writer paid him no attention, his eyes fixed on the burly worker in expectant fascination.

  “Leave the citizen alone, Ment. Damned filth—you’re all the same. Pushing your weight around.”

  Korolev was aware of a sudden quietness around them. He wanted Babel’s attention and so he gripped his arm still harder.

  “Now, Isaac Emmanuilovich, come on. We’re getting out of here, like I said.” He intended continuing, but the worker now made to twist him round and Babel’s eyes widened behind his bottle-thick glasses.

  “Leave the Moishe be, do you hear me? We’ll see what his business is later. Right now, I’m talking to you, you dirty terrier.”

  The voice sounded slurred and Korolev turned with the grip, only more quickly than the man expected. A feeling of cold rage filled him as he lifted his hands to grab the man’s shoulders while extending his head back to the limit of his neck’s reach. In his peripheral vision he saw the crowd pulling back from the fight, and then caught a snapshot of the man’s surprise just before the crunch of a breaking bone and the blinding pain in his forehead told him he’d cracked the fellow’s nose like a nut. The worker rocked backward a few paces, blood already spattering down his chin, but he managed to stay on his feet, his hands lifting to his face and then forward in defense. He stood there, legs apart for balance and seemingly mesmerized by the gobbets of blood on his hands. Korolev ignored his own pain and stepped toward him again, taking him by his collar this time and jabbing his knee upward. The worker, still dazed, was too slow to protect himself, and the impact of Korolev’s knee into his crotch brought a soft sigh from the watching crowd, a sound that seemed to combine sympathy for the injury with pleasure at its infliction. The worker leaned forward with a noise not dissimilar to a cow that hadn’t been milked for several days, and Korolev raised his right fist high above his head and brought it down on the man’s neck like an axe. That finished things. The man hit the ground like a bag of flour. Korolev could see the pointed brown caps and red stars of Militia uniforms pushing toward them, but his instincts were still screaming at him to get out.

  “Hey, Ment, try that on me, why don’t you?” came a voice.

  “Look what he did to that poor fellow, for no damned reason at all. Come on, boys, let’s get him.”

  But Korolev was already twenty meters away with a bright-eyed Babel in tow and pleased to find Semionov beside them, looking calm, with one hand pushing out a gun-shaped bulge in his mackintosh pocket and the other clearing a
path through the crowd. If the truth were told, the bang on the head was making Korolev feel a little unsteady on his feet, and when Semionov took Babel’s other arm, it became more like Babel was dragging him along than the other way round. Somehow he staggered on with them through the entrance hall and then they were out on the street and clear. No one appeared to be following.

  “Come on, to the car,” Korolev said, feeling a little better in the fresh air but still half-blinded by the pain in his forehead.

  Semionov ran to the car and the engine was turning over by the time the others reached it. As soon as they were in, Semionov floored the accelerator and the car jerked forward, its tires spinning in the wet.

  “We’re clear, we’re all right. You can slow down,” Korolev said, looking over his shoulder at the receding Hippodrome and conscious at the same time of blood making its sluggish way down the front of his face. He reached for his handkerchief.

  “What the hell was that about?” Babel asked, beginning to laugh.

  “No wonder they called you the Steamroller, Alexei Dmitriyevich.” Semionov was grinning with delight. “That was some demolition—Komsomol’s word on that. Pow, pow, pow. Goodnight and farewell.”

  Korolev turned the rearview mirror toward him and inspected the wound, hoping most of the blood belonged to the other fellow. There certainly seemed to be a lot of it. He wet his handkerchief with spit and began to clean it away.

  “Maybe he was just a drunk hooligan or maybe he was something else, but I wasn’t hanging round in the middle of a half-cut crowd of hungry workers to find out which.” Dark blood swelled from a deep purple cut. “The Devil take it, I need stitches in this. Come on, we need to go to the Institute anyway. Chestnova will fix me up.”

  Semionov took the next turn to the right and they drove in silence. Korolev felt a little nauseous, and his head hurt like blazes, but he was also strangely elated. He thought back over the details of the encounter, the stale vodka on the man’s breath, the rough feel of the collar in his hands, the eyes widening in surprise. He’d been in control of himself throughout, he was sure of that. He’d been angry, yes, but not at the worker so much as finding himself in the middle of this ridiculous case. Everyone pushing him this way or that—Popov, Kolya, Gregorin. Babel was at it too, in his own way—even now he was busy scribbling notes in the back seat. All of them pulling strings, laying false trails, observing him—setting him up for a damned big fall if he didn’t watch out. Gregorin had never even had the politeness to pretend he wasn’t using Korolev in whatever game he was playing, feeding him leads and scraps of disconnected information without, as it turned out, having the decency to tell him that he’d been the fellow who recovered the icon in the first place. And then some big ox of a mechanic decides to push him around? Well, no wonder it had felt good to crack the brute’s nose. The grease monkey had picked out the wrong Ment on the wrong day to go pestering and putting his paws on. He dabbed at the cut again and hoped the bastard’s nose was flattened to pulp.

  “So what did Kolya have to say for himself?” Semionov asked.

  “Some things which need to be checked, nothing very useful.” Korolev tried to keep his tone nonchalant. Split-open head or not, Korolev didn’t like what Kolya had told him one little bit. It was the kind of information that could kill a man, and Semionov had his whole life ahead of him.

  Semionov turned the car in through the gates of the Institute and then pulled in beside a muddy ZIS, which Korolev recognized from the Militia car pool. Several trucks were parked on the gravelled area in front of the entrance, their bonnets slick with rain. Chemical Warfare Defense Unit was painted in large white letters on each of their canvas sides. The drivers huddled beside them with damp cigarettes and a mutinous air, watching the Ford come to a halt as though it were bringing more bad news. There was a city-wide Civil Defense exercise the following day and these fellows must be part of it. The Fascists hadn’t used gas in Spain, so far, but he supposed they would sooner or later.

  “Larinin must be here,” Korolev said, gesturing to the ZIS.

  “Who?” Babel asked.

  “A colleague. Isaac Emmanuilovich, do you mind waiting here in the car? The autopsy area is restricted, so your presence would compromise Dr. Chestnova. Vanya, do you mind keeping Comrade Babel company? I’ll send for you if you’re needed.”

  . . .

  He found Chestnova in her office, with her feet up on the desk, reading Sovietsky Sport.

  “What happened to you?”

  “I walked into a door,” Korolev said with a scowl. “Can you fix me up?”

  “Unlucky door. Here, let me have a look at it. Ah, it’s not so bad. A couple of stitches and a bit of disinfectant.” She pointed him toward a small metal box with a red cross painted on its front that stood in the bookshelf beside the door. In the meantime she went to the sink in the corner of her office, where she washed her hands. Out of curiosity, Korolev opened the magazine the doctor had been reading.

  “Don’t worry, Alexei Dmitriyevich, I’m not planning to take up athletics.”

  “It’s never too late, I hear.” Korolev winced as she stretched the edges of the wound apart. “Where’s Larinin, by the way? I saw his car outside. You didn’t slip him into the incinerator, did you?”

  Chestnova scowled. “Esimov is assisting your esteemed colleague. I thought it best to leave them to it. The magazine is Esimov’s. Esimov gets to look at your colleague and the dead Thief for an hour or so, and I get to look at bare-chested Soviet athletes in their shorts. It’s as good as a refresher course in anatomy that magazine, I can tell you.”

  “It seems like a fair division of labor.”

  “Ha. Now hold still when I do this, like a good Militiaman.” She dabbed at the cut with a piece of cotton wool impregnated with something yellow and strong. His eyes were watering even before it touched his forehead.

  “There, it’s not so bad, is it?” she said in a mischievous voice.

  “Just put the stitches in and get it over with,” Korolev said, feeling sweat dampen his armpits and wanting to be somewhere else. For some reason he felt a strong desire to vomit.

  “A moment, a moment,” Chestnova said, as she threaded a needle. “Hold still, will you?”

  “I am holding still,” Korolev said as he recoiled from the needle’s point.

  “That’s better. By the way, an interesting body arrived in this morning. Found in a church that was being demolished. The explosives didn’t blow and when they were checking the charges they found a dead drunk. I wondered if there might be a connection. Seeing as he was found in a church. Not the usual dumping spot—churches.”

  “Are you finished?”

  She patted his cheek and put the bloodied needle in a metal bowl.

  “More or less. You should be careful for a day or so—that was a nasty bang. Have you felt dizzy at all? Nauseous? A headache?”

  “I’m fine,” Korolev said, ignoring the spinning floor. He was damned if a bump on the head was going to slow him down.

  Chestnova looked into his eyes for a moment, then held up some fingers.

  “How many fingers?”

  “Count them yourself. I’m fine.” Korolev wasn’t about to admit there were six of them. Even in his state he knew that was too many.

  “Concussion’s no fun—it’s up to you, of course.”

  “I’ve had bigger knocks on the head, believe me.”

  “Oh, that I believe,” Chestnova said with a smirk.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The mortuary was empty when they entered and he followed Chestnova into the smaller of the autopsy rooms. The blinds had been lowered, but a gray light filtered in anyway—just enough to show a dead man on the stainless-steel table, his clothes covered in muck and blood. When Chestnova turned on the light, however, Korolev saw that the corpse’s face was black with bruising.

  “Could we clean him up a bit? See what he looks like?”

  “Of course. Help me off with his clothes
first.”

  Chestnova had to cut the fabric of the military-style jacket in several places to remove it, and then do the same with the shirt underneath. As the shirt collar came unstuck from the blood-caked neck, she whistled.

  “Well, well,” she said. “He’s picked up a bullet hole along the way. Strange—drunks don’t often get shot in the back of the head. What do you think of that?”

  She leaned closer to examine the small dark wound. Enough of the crusted blood had been removed with the shirt to reveal a circle of burned powder that had impregnated itself into the skin around it.

  “The Devil,” Korolev said, his stomach making its presence felt. “Let’s see if he picked up any other interesting injuries.”

  Chestnova nodded and, the dead man’s upper body now naked, she began to clean it with the small hose.

  “He’s been beaten to a pulp, all right, and look—cigarette burns.” Chestnova pointed to some blackened circles—someone had certainly gone out of their way to cause the man pain.

  “Do you think they did all this in the church?”

  “Who knows?” Korolev said, angry that the uniforms had just dumped the body at the mortuary.

  “Your colleagues were at the end of their shift and they needed the body out of the church before they demolished it,” Chestnova said, seeing the anger in his eyes. “Nobody bothers too much about dead drunks these days. We get two or three in here a day. Often looking like this. Most of the time they died from what they drank, rather than a beating. The Militiaman who dropped him off was called Nikitin, if that helps. I’ll have a record upstairs of which station he’s based at.”

  The dead man’s mouth was missing several teeth, but his nails were clean and the palm and fingers soft—clerk’s hands. Not that usual for an alcoholic, Korolev thought to himself. Then he saw that the wrists were rubbed and raw, just as the girl’s had been, and that several of the corpse’s fingers were twisted out of shape.