by Child 44
And what did it have to do with him anyway? This wasn’t his town. These weren’t his people. He hadn’t pledged to the girl’s parents that he’d find the killer. He hadn’t known the girl or been touched by the story of her life. What’s more, the suspect was a danger to society—he’d taken a baby. These were excellent reasons for doing nothing and there was one more reason besides:
What difference can I make?
The receptionist returned with a man in his early forties, Doctor Tyapkin, who agreed to show Leo down to the morgue as long as it didn’t involve any paperwork and on the condition that his name didn’t show up on any documents.
As they walked the doctor expressed doubts as to whether the girl’s body was still there:
—We don’t keep them for long unless we’re asked to. We were under the impression the militia had all the information they required.
—Did you carry out the initial examination?
—No. But I’ve heard about the murder. I thought you’d already caught the man responsible.
—Yes, it’s possible.
—I hope you don’t mind me asking but I haven’t seen you before.
—I arrived recently.
—Where are you from?
—Moscow.
—Transferred here?
—Yes.
—I was sent here three years ago, also from Moscow. No doubt you’re disappointed to be here?
Leo remained silent.
—Yes, don’t answer. At the time I was disappointed. I had a reputation, acquaintances, family. I was good friends with Professor Vovsi. I felt coming here was a demotion. Of course, it turned out to be a blessing.
Leo recognized the name—Professor Vovsi was one of many leading Jewish doctors arrested. His arrest and the arrest of his colleagues had marked the acceleration of a Jewish purge driven by Stalin. Plans had been drawn up. Leo had seen the papers. The removal of key Jewish figures within influential spheres was to be followed by a wider purge, targeting any Jewish citizens whether they were prominent or not, plans cut short by Stalin’s death.
Unaware of his companion’s train of thought, Tyapkin blithely continued:
—I was worried I was being sent to some rural health clinic. But 379 has become the envy of the region. If anything it’s a little too successful. Many of the mill workers prefer a night in our clean beds with inside toilets and running water rather than their own homes. We got wise to the fact that not everyone was as sick as they claimed. Some of the mill workers went as far as cutting off part of their finger in order to guarantee a week in here. The only solution was to have MGB officers police the wards. It wasn’t that we didn’t sympathize with the mill workers. We’ve all seen their homes. But if overall productivity fell due to sickness then we’d be accused of neglect. Keeping people healthy has become a matter of life and death not just for the patients but for us doctors as well.
—I understand.
—Were you a member of the Moscow militia?
Should Leo admit to being a member of the MGB or lie and pretend he was merely a member of the militia? A lie would be easier. He didn’t want to ruin the doctor’s talkative mood.
—Yes, I was.
The morgue was in the basement, built deep into ground that was frozen throughout the long winter. As a result the corridors were naturally cold. Tyapkin led Leo to a large room with a tiled floor and a low ceiling. On one side there was a rectangular vat, shaped like a small swimming pool. On the far side of the room was a steel door which led through to the morgue itself:
—Unless relatives can make arrangements we incinerate bodies within twelve hours. The TB victims are incinerated within an hour. We don’t have much need for storage. Wait here, I’ll be back.
The doctor unlocked the steel door and entered the morgue. Waiting, Leo approached the vat, peering over the edge. It was filled with a dark, gelatinous liquid. He was unable to see anything except his own reflection. The surface was still, black, although from the stains on the concrete sides he could see it was in fact dark orange. On the side there was a hook, a long metal pole with a barbed prong on the end. He picked it up, tentatively prodding the surface. Like syrup, it broke and then reformed, becoming smooth once again. Leo sank the hook deeper, this time feeling something move—something heavy. He pushed down harder. A naked body rose to the surface, slowly rotating one hundred and eighty degrees, before sinking again. Tyapkin emerged from the morgue pushing a gurney:
—Those bodies are going to be packed in ice and shipped to Sverdlovsk for dissection. They have a medical college there. I’ve found your girl.
Larisa Petrova lay on her back. Her skin was pale, crisscrossed with blue veins as thin as spiderweb. Her hair was blonde. A large part of the bangs had been unevenly cut off: the part Varlam had taken. Her mouth was no longer stuffed with soil—that had been removed—but her jaw was still open, locked in the same position. Her teeth and tongue were dirty, stained brown with the remnants of earth that had been forced in.
—There was soil in her mouth.
—Was there? I’m sorry, this is the first time I’ve seen her body.
—Her mouth was stuffed with soil.
—Perhaps the doctor washed it out in order to examine her throat.
—It hasn’t been kept?
—I would think it very unlikely.
The girl’s eyes were open. They were blue. Perhaps her mother had been transferred from a town near the Finnish border, from one of the Baltic regions. Recalling the superstition that the face of a murderer was captured on the surface of a victim’s eye, Leo leaned closer, studying the pale blue eyes. Suddenly embarrassed, he stood up straight. Tyapkin smiled:
—We all check—doctors and detectives alike. It doesn’t matter if our brains tell us that there’ll be nothing there; we all want to make sure. Of course it would make your job a whole lot easier if it was true.
—If it was true then murderers would always cut out their victim’s eyes.
Having never studied a dead body before, at least with any forensic interest, Leo was unsure how to proceed. To his mind the mutilation was so frenzied it could only be the work of someone insane. Her torso had been ripped apart. He’d seen enough. Varlam Babinich fitted the bill. He must have brought the soil for his own incomprehensible reasons.
Leo was ready to leave, but Tyapkin, having come all the way down to the basement, seemed to be in no hurry. He leaned closer, staring at what appeared to be nothing more than a savaged mess of flesh and tissue. Using the tip of his pen he probed into the mangled midriff, examining the wounds:
—Can you tell me what the report said?
Leo took out his notes and read them aloud. Tyapkin continued his examination:
—That fails to mention her stomach is missing. It’s been cut out, severed from the esophagus.
—How precise, I mean in terms of . . .
—You mean did a doctor do this?
The doctor smiled, remarking:
—Possibly, but the cuts are ragged, not surgical. Not skilled. Although I would be surprised if this was the first time they’d handled a knife, at least to cut flesh. The cuts aren’t skillful but they are confident. They’re targeted, not random.
—This might not be the first child that he’s killed?
—I’d be surprised.
Leo touched his forehead and found that despite the cold he was sweating. How could the two deaths—Fyodor’s little boy and this girl—have anything to do with each other?
—How large would her stomach have been?
Above the girl’s torso Tyapkin indicated a rough outline of a stomach’s shape with his pen tip. He asked:
—Was it not found nearby?
—No.
It was either missed in the search, which seemed unlikely, or it had been taken away by the killer.
Leo remained silent for a moment, then asked:
—Was she raped?
Tyapkin examined the girl’s vagina:
�
��She wasn’t a virgin.
—But that doesn’t mean she was raped.
—She’d had previous sexual encounters?
—That’s what I’m told.
—There’s no trauma to her genitals. No bruising, no incisions. Also notice that the injuries weren’t targeted at her sexual organs. There are no cuts to the breasts or to her face. The man who did this was interested in a narrow band below her ribcage and above her vagina, her guts—her digestive organs. It looks savage but actually it’s quite controlled.
Leo had rushed to the conclusion that this was a frenzied attack. The blood and mutilation represented chaos to his mind. But it was no such thing. It was ordered, precise, planned.
—Do you label the bodies when you bring them in—for identification purposes?
—Not that I’m aware.
—What is that?
Around the girl’s ankle was a loop of string. It had been tied in a tight noose and a small length drooped down off the gurney. It looked like a pauper’s anklet. There were burn marks where the string had rubbed against the skin.
Tyapkin saw him first. General Nesterov was standing at the door. It was impossible to say how long he’d been there, watching them. Leo stepped away from the body.
—I came here to familiarize myself with procedure.
Nesterov addressed Tyapkin:
—Would you excuse us?
—Yes, of course.
Tyapkin glanced at Leo, as though wishing him luck, before moving away. Nesterov approached. As a crude way of deflecting attention, Leo began summarizing the recent observations:
—The original report doesn’t mention that her stomach has been removed. We have a specific question to put to Varlam: why did he cut out her stomach and what did he do with it afterwards?
—What are you doing in Voualsk?
Nesterov was now standing opposite Leo. The girl’s body was in between them:
—I was transferred here.
—Why?
—I can’t say.
—I think you’re still MGB.
Leo remained silent. Nesterov continued:
—That doesn’t explain why you’d be so interested in this murder. We released Mikoyan without charge, as we were instructed to.
Leo had no idea who Mikoyan was.
—Yes, I know.
—He had nothing to do with this girl’s murder.
Mikoyan must be the name of the Party official. He’d been protected. But was a man who beat a prostitute the same man who murdered this young girl? Leo didn’t think it likely. Nesterov continued:
—I haven’t arrested Varlam because he said the wrong thing, or forgot to attend a march in Red Square. I arrested him because he killed that girl, because he’s dangerous, and because this town is safer with him in custody.
—He didn’t do it.
Nesterov scratched the side of his face:
—Whatever it is that you’ve been sent here to do, remember that you’re not in Moscow anymore. Here, we have an arrangement. My men are safe. None of them have ever or will ever be arrested. If you do anything to endanger my team, if you report anything which undermines my authority, if you disobey an order, if you derail a prosecution, if you portray my officers as incompetent, if you make any denouncements regarding my men: if you do any of these things, I’ll kill you.
20 MARCH
RAISA TOUCHED THE WINDOW FRAME. The nails that had been hammered in to keep the bedroom window shut had all been prised out. She turned around, moving to the door and opening it. In the hallway she could hear noise from the restaurant downstairs but there was no sign of Basarov. It was late in the evening, his busiest time. Shutting the door and locking it, Raisa returned to the window, opening it and glancing down. Directly below was a sloping roof, part of the kitchen. The snow had been disturbed where Leo had climbed down. She was furious. Having survived by the thinnest of margins, he was now gambling with both their lives.
Today had been Raisa’s second day at Secondary School 151. The school’s director, Vitali Kozlovich Kapler, a man in his late forties, had been more than happy with Raisa joining his staff since she’d be taking over many of his lessons, enabling him, he’d claimed, to catch up with his paperwork. Whether her arrival was actually freeing him up to do other work or just allowing him to do less work, Raisa couldn’t say for sure. On the basis of first impressions he seemed like a man who preferred bookwork to teaching. But she’d been more than happy to start work immediately. From the handful of classes she’d taught so far she’d found the children less politically savvy than students in Moscow. They didn’t break into applause at the mention of key Party figures, they weren’t fiercely competitive about proving their loyalty to the Party, and generally they seemed much more like children. They were made up of a patchwork of different backgrounds, families plucked from all corners of the country—their collective experiences wildly contrasting. The same was true of the staff. Almost all of the teachers had been transferred to Voualsk from different regions. Having experienced a similar upheaval to the one she’d just gone through, they treated her nicely enough. They were suspicious of her, of course. Who was she? Why was she here? Was she all that she seemed? But she didn’t mind, these were questions everyone asked of each other. For the first time since arriving in this town Raisa could imagine creating a life here.
She’d lingered at the school until late in the evening, reading, preparing for her lessons. School 151 was considerably more comfortable than a noisy room above a stinking restaurant. The shabby conditions had been intended as a punishment, and while they bothered Leo they were an ineffective weapon against her. Above all else she was supremely adaptable. She had no attachment to buildings or cities or belongings. These sentiments had been taken from her, stripped out the day she’d witnessed the destruction of her childhood home. During the first year of the war, seventeen years old, she’d been foraging in the forest, mushrooms in one pocket, berries in the other, when shells had begun to fall. They’d landed not near her but in the distance. Climbing the tallest tree, feeling the vibrations through the trunk, she’d perched on a high branch, like a bird, watching as several kilometers away her hometown had been transformed into brick dust and smoke, a town literally flung up into the sky. The horizon had disappeared beneath a man-made fog, beaten up from the ground. The destruction was too swift, too widespread, too complete for her to have felt even the slightest hope for her family. After the shelling had finished she’d climbed down from the tree and walked back through the forest in a state of shock, her right pocket dripping juice from the crushed berries. Her eyes had streamed—not tears of sadness, for she hadn’t cried then or since—but a reaction to the dust. Coughing on an acrid cloud, all that remained of her home and family, she’d realized that the shells hadn’t been fired from the German line, they’d whistled overhead, direct from the Russian front line. Later, as a refugee, she’d heard confirmation that their country’s army had instructions to destroy any towns and villages which might fall into German hands. The complete annihilation of her childhood home had been a:
Precautionary Measure
With those words any deaths could be justified. Better to destroy your own people than there be a chance a German soldier might find a loaf of bread. There were no qualms, no apologies, and no questions allowed. To object to the killings was treason. And the lessons her parents had taught her about love and affection, the lessons a child learns from watching and listening and living around two people in love, were pushed to the back of her mind. That behavior belonged to a different time. Having a home, a sense of place—only children held on to such dreams.
Stepping back from the window, Raisa was struggling to remain calm. Leo had begged her to stay with him, detailing the risks in leaving. She had agreed for no other reason than that this was her best bet, not much of one, but the best all the same. And now he was jeopardizing their second chance. If they were to survive in this new town they had to remain inconspicuous, do
nothing out of the ordinary—say nothing and provoke no one. They were almost certainly under watch. Basarov was almost certainly an informer. Vasili would most probably have agents in the town spying on them, just waiting for a reason to go the extra distance, to upgrade their punishment from exile to internment to execution.
Raisa turned the light off. In the dark she stood, staring out of the window. She could see no one outside. If there were agents working surveillance they’d almost certainly be downstairs. Maybe that’s why the window had been secured. She would have to make sure Leo brought back the nails so they could be replaced. Basarov might check them when they were at work. She put on her gloves and coat and climbed out of the window, lowering herself onto the icy roof, trying not to make a sound. She closed the window behind her and clambered down to the ground. She had made Leo swear to one condition—they were to be equals as they’d never been equals before. Yet he’d already gone back on his word. If he thought that she would silently stand by him—the obedient, supportive wife—while he endangered her life for his own personal reasons, he was mistaken.
SAME DAY
AN AREA WITH A RADIUS of roughly five hundred meters from the point where Larisa’s body had been found had been searched as part of the official investigation. Even without any experience in murder investigations that area seemed small to Leo. Nothing had been discovered except the girl’s clothes, discarded some forty or so paces from the body, deeper into the forest. Why were her clothes—her shirt, skirt, hat, jacket, and gloves—located in a neat pile so far from her body? The clothes showed no trace of blood, they bore no knife marks, no slashes or cuts. Larisa Petrova had either been undressed or she’d undressed herself. Perhaps she’d tried to run away, toward the edge of the forest, only to be caught just before the clearing. If that was true she’d been running naked. The killer must have persuaded her to accompany him, maybe offering money for sex. Once hidden in the relative depths of the forest, once she’d taken her clothes off, he’d attacked. But Leo was finding it difficult to apply logic to this crime. The incomprehensible details—the soil, the removal of the stomach, the string—were alien to him and yet at the same time he couldn’t stop thinking about them.
