A Whisper to the Living (Inspector Rostnikov Mysteries)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Some of this Inspectors Iosef Rostnikov and Akardy Zelach knew before they entered the Moscow Circle Health and Gymnasium, not inside the Inner or Outer Ring but on a run-down street in an eastern Moscow suburb.

  “Have you ever boxed, Akardy?” asked Iosef.

  Iosef was a good-looking man of average height, with the first signs of gray in his short sideburns. He was not as broad as his father, but time was slowly changing that. Iosef was scheduled to be married in less than a week to Elena Timofeyeva. He had evaded the inevitable far too long, and so had she. Love was undeniable, but so was apprehension and even fear.

  “I boxed in school, a little,” said Akardy, whose nickname, the Slouch, was almost inevitable.

  Akardy Zelach, slightly taller than Iosef and about the same weight, walked and stood with an unconfident slouch. At the age of forty-one, Zelach lived with his mother and took care of her. There was almost nothing he thought that he did not share with her, including the way she looked and walked. There was something almost benevolently bovine in their looks. This was mitigated by the glasses Akardy had been forced to wear in the past year. He now had the look of a cloddish university professor who specialized in something vaguely arcane, like plant life in the mountains or literature of the Inuit. This was a false impression. Akardy was, in fact, not very bright. He was a man of many small talents and a wide range of interests, but a stunning intellect was not one of them.

  The two inspectors worked well together and enjoyed each other’s company. Iosef was a born leader, ready to confront authority. Zelach was a follower.

  They mounted the narrow stairs accompanied by the smell of sweat and tobacco. Iosef went first. Above them was the sound of a man shouting. The door at the top of the stairs was marked only with the crude and faded drawing of a boxing glove.

  When the two detectives entered, they could both see and hear the shouting man who paced alongside a floor-level boxing ring. Inside the ring two small men in sweatpants, Tshirts, and headgear were trading punches with oversized boxing gloves.

  There were dirty wall-to-ceiling square windows on one wall and posters announcing old fights, many with renderings of real boxers. The newest posters were of Ivan Medivkin, “the Giant.”

  The room was decidedly cold. The cold did not seem to affect the shouting man who wore trousers and no shirt. A white towel was draped over his left shoulder.

  Iosef and Zelach approached. The man’s hoarse voice vibrated through the room, which was lit only by the morning sun that managed to make its way through the dirty windows.

  “Drop your right one more time and I climb in there and show you what can happen to you,” the man shouted.

  One of the two boxers touched his thumb to his forehead to signal that he understood, and the young men in the ring went at it again.

  “Better. Better, but don’t drop it.”

  “Klaus Agrinkov?” Iosef said.

  The shouting man held up a hand without looking. The movement was designed to stave off for a minute or two whoever had called his name.

  “What happened to your left hand? Are you suddenly paralyzed? Should I call a doctor? Use the damn thing!”

  Klaus Agrinkov turned his head now and looked at the two visitors.

  “Police?”

  Iosef nodded. Zelach adjusted his glasses.

  “You found him?” asked Agrinkov.

  “No, not yet,” said Iosef.

  Agrinkov wiped his face with the towel, looked at Iosef, and said, “I know you.”

  Iosef had seen the man before him fight at the end of his career. It had been a bizarre spectacle in which the six-round boxing match was held after the presentation of a play Iosef had written before he had become a policeman. Agrinkov, paunch already showing and hair already graying, had handily beaten the twenty-year-old sailor who had won the fleet middleweight championship the previous year. It had been no real contest. It had looked to Iosef like a father beating his son in a fury for showing a lack of respect.

  “Gronsky Theater eight years ago. I wrote the play that was presented before your fight.”

  “I remember you, but I never saw your play. I don’t have the patience for plays or movies or books.”

  “That night your patience was rewarded,” said Iosef. “The play was a misconceived effort, a didactic ramble. The audience was wrong, but even so the play should have been staged after the fight. Actually, it should not have been staged at all. The people of Moscow do not need to be lectured about Chechnya.”

  The punches, grunts, and footsteps of the men in the ring punctuated the conversation.

  “Is there somewhere quiet where we can talk?” asked Iosef.

  Agrinkov shrugged and said, “This way.”

  And then back at the men in the ring he shouted, “Take a break. No, do not take a break. Go work on the bags.”

  As they walked across the gym, Agrinkov exchanged the towel for a blue sweatshirt on a folding chair standing lonely, facing nothing.

  “I’d be better off going into the ring myself next week. In here.”

  He held open a windowless door to let the policemen walk in. He followed and closed the door on a large room with a cluttered desk and what looked like a massage table covered with a thin white mattress. The walls were covered with framed photographs of boxers and unframed posters from past battles. There were five chairs scattered around the room in no pattern. Agrinkov slipped on his sweatshirt and sat behind the desk. Iosef and Akardy both found chairs and turned them toward the desk. They sat.

  “We looked for you at the Novotny Gymnasium,” Iosef said. “They sent us here.”

  “Here,” Agrinkov said with a sigh as he looked around the room. “This is where I started managing eight years ago, picking up promising thugs, like the ones you saw out there sparring, from the streets. Booking whole cards in neighborhood clubhouses that used to be Communist meeting halls. Now I’m here again, hiding from reporters and Ivan’s fans. I may never get out of here again. All I need are bars on the windows. Can you believe this place used to be a chop shop?”

  “Da. It’s a bit surprising that you are back at work a day after your biggest boxer became a fugitive in a murder investigation,” said Iosef.

  “I needed the distraction. Work is the best mask for a broken heart.”

  “You read poetry?” asked Iosef.

  “No, but I’m of a poetic bent. All I have remaining is that talented but stupid lightweight out there. He has heart. His only problems are he drops his hands and won’t let his jab lash out.”

  “He lets his right hand go off the wrong foot,” said Zelach.

  Agrinkov looked at the policeman, who adjusted his glasses yet again.

  “No,” said Agrinkov. “He never …”

  “Slight shuffle just before he jabs when he is punching for power,” said Zelach.

  Agrinkov looked at Iosef, who held up his hands and said, “If Inspector Zelach says he punches off the wrong foot, you can be sure he does. My partner never fails to amaze me with his talents.”

  Agrinkov said nothing but nodded to show that he was taking the assessment of his boxer seriously.

  “What do you think happened?” asked Iosef.

  “The same question reporters from all over the world have been asking on the phone for the last day. I unplugged the phone. The ones who come here are turned away. I’ll probably have to sleep here tonight. What do I think happened? I think Ivan married a very beautiful woman with not enough meat on her bones. I think I made a mistake in hiring a sparring partner for him who was good-looking and had a reputation for bedding down ladies young and old, married and single, willing and coaxable. I think Ivan, who is a trusting fool, found them in the hotel room, lost his temper, and …”

  He let the sentence trail off.

  “How did he know they were at the hotel?” asked Iosef.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where do you think he might be?”

  “Where do you hide a famous
ugly giant? I don’t know.”

  The three-room apartment on Leninsky Prospekt had two great virtues and many drawbacks for Ivan Medivkin.

  The three rooms on the fourth floor of the Stalin-era building were all small. He had nowhere to pace. The ceilings were all so low that he had to bend forward slightly when he walked. Vera Korstov had given her bed and bedroom to him while she slept on the small sofa in the minute living room. The problem was that Vera’s bed in the narrow cell-sized bedroom was not long enough for him. Add to this the thin walls that required him to speak softly and the need to stay away from the windows.

  The two great merits of the apartment were that he was relatively safe and Vera was completely trustworthy and willing to help.

  On this morning following the death of his wife, Lena, and his sparring partner Fedot Babinski, Ivan sat in his undershorts and a red sweatshirt that he had left in this same apartment when he first came to Moscow four years ago and he and Vera had been lovers.

  He had not seen her in more than three years. She had not changed. She was a tall woman of thirty-one with short black hair and a pleasant face. She was firmly built, with breasts that Ivan had always thought adequate, though nothing like those of his wife, Lena, Lena who was beautiful, tall, twenty-five, with long, always-shining straight hair that touched her creamy shoulders.

  Four years ago Vera had taken him in when he knew no one in Moscow but his manager and was considered an ugly curiosity by those who passed him on the street. When he began to box in Moscow, that changed. He no longer looked ugly to the fans, nor, apparently, to Lena Golumbievski, who asked him for his autograph following his sixth knockout.

  Now she was dead and he had sought refuge with Vera, who snuck him into her apartment when he called her at two o’clock in the morning.

  The day was overcast. Vera had not turned on the lights. She poured him more coffee.

  “I did not kill them,” Ivan said, holding the bloodstained towel to his nose.

  The towel was wrapped around ice, and the pack seemed to have stopped the bleeding.

  “I know,” she said.

  It was at least the tenth time he and she had said this.

  “Your clothes will be dry in a few more hours,” Vera said, getting up to retrieve the bread from the toaster.

  Ivan looked up at the clothes on hangers over the door to the kitchen. Vera had to duck to get under them.

  “No blood?” he asked as she returned and placed a plate of six pieces of toast and a jar of English lemon curd in front of him.

  “Clean,” she said. “It is easy to get blood out of clothing.”

  “No,” he said, reaching for toast and a knife. “I do not think it is.”

  She took the wet blood-soaked towel from him. Ivan’s nose was still red and bruised, but the bleeding had stopped. He had explained that he had tripped and fallen when he left the hotel room.

  “I’m sorry for your trouble,” she said.

  He nodded and said, “Da.”

  They were silent for almost a minute while they ate and drank their coffee.

  “I called in,” she said. “Sick. Lots of people have the flu. I’m never sick. I won’t have to go to work for at least a few days. They can shoot around me.”

  Vera had been a talented high jumper who had made it to the Olympics in 1996. She had not won a medal though she leaped a personal best of six-foot-four. Then, in need of an athletic type, a producer cast her in a movie, and she proved to be a consummate actor, moving on to a series of movie roles, generally playing the strong-willed and supportive best friend of the female star.

  And now she was ready to support her downcast former lover.

  “What will you do?” she asked.

  “Think,” he said.

  “About?”

  “Killing the person who murdered my wife and my friend.”

  “The police think you did it. Maybe you should just tell them what—”

  “I ran away. I hit a policeman. They wouldn’t believe me.”

  “You have a plan?” she asked.

  He shook his head and said, “No.”

  “I have,” she said.

  Ivan looked up, coffee in one hand, toast in the other.

  “What?”

  “You tell me all the people in Moscow who your wife knew and all the people your sparring partner …”

  “Fedot, Fedot Babinski.”

  “… knew. And I’ll question them.”

  “Why should they tell you anything? What if you question the killer?”

  “I can be very persuasive,” she said.

  “I’ve lost everything,” he said.

  “Not quite,” said Vera. “Not quite.”

  She smiled and reached out to touch his massive hands on the table.

  “After we’ve made the list, I have a question for you?”

  “Ask it now.”

  “Why did you go to the hotel room?”

  “I got a call. A man at the hotel said I should come right away, that he was calling me because he was a fan, that he thought I should know what was going on in the room, that Lena was there.”

  “And when you got there … ?”

  “The door was unlocked. I went in. They were dead. I went to Lena, picked her up. Her face … She was covered with blood.”

  “And the police came through the door how long after?”

  “A few minutes. Before I could call them or the hotel desk.”

  “I think your fan called them,” said Vera. “I think your fan wanted the police to find you in that room with your dead wife and sparring partner.”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s make that list.”

  3

  An Englishwoman in the Jungle

  The Zaray Hotel on Gostinichnaya Street was Iris Templeton’s favorite hotel in Moscow. It was a short walk to both the Main Botanical Garden of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Vladykino Metro station. Iris knew her way around Moscow.

  The last time she had been here Iris had done a freelance story for The Globe on Putin’s tightening of the flow of gas through the Ukraine. She had interviewed the managing director of Gasprom, the largest natural gas company in the world and possibly the largest corporation in the world. The story had earned her two prizes, one in England and one in Denmark. It had also earned her several enemies in Moscow.

  This time Iris was on her own, fully freelance. She intended to do a story on the wealthy and powerful of Moscow who take advantage of and are even complicit in the beatings and deaths of prostitutes. Iris had already done much of the groundwork and probably could have enough information from the Internet to do a satisfactory job, but that wasn’t the way of Iris Templeton, armed with her compact computer in a briefcase that never left her side when she was in any country other than her own.

  She did, however, frequently leave Philip, her husband, who was a quite successful London barrister. They were good friends, and occasional lovers and independent souls.

  Iris was not a fool. That there was some degree of danger in her pursuit was without question. Therefore, she did not reject the offer of police protection, though she decided that she would examine those assigned to guard her to be sure that they did not simply offer another possible danger. She didn’t really think the Moscow mafia or the government would risk killing her and setting off a new international outrage. Better to let her probe, see to it that she obtained nothing too embarrassing, and let her sell her tale. Besides, she could use a chauffeured ride in her pursuit.

  She sat in the bar of the Zaray Hotel drinking coffee, computer in its case on the table, while she waited for the arrival of her promised protectors.

  Sasha and Elena had not spoken all the way from Petrovka to the Zaray Hotel. She had driven. They were not arguing. They simply had nothing more to say right now. Sasha was, as he had been for months, lost in thought about Maya, his wife, who now lived in Kiev and showed no signs of wanting to return to him or to Moscow. He had tried, but his f
requent infidelities had been too much for her. Now she said she wanted a divorce and had a good man who wanted to marry her. When Sasha went to Kiev to try to retrieve his family he had met the man. Sasha had liked the man. Sasha had admitted to himself that Maya would be better off with the man. But still Sasha had hoped that would not be dashed by his mother, who haunted his apartment and shouted the shouts of the deaf.

  Elena had a wedding to worry about and something Iosef had to be told. It was time to tell Iosef.

  “Yes,” she said emphatically.

  “What?” asked Sasha.

  “Nothing. Just thinking aloud.”

  “Dangerous.”

  Elena parked in front of the hotel, adjusted the police identification on the dashboard, and got out, locking the doors after Sasha.

  She wore a clean dark suit and white blouse. He wore trousers and a jacket neatly ironed by his mother. His tie was unwrinkled, his face shaved, and his hair trimmed. He had been warned gently but firmly by Rostnikov that he must overcome his brooding or risk the ever-present possibility for any policeman that he would not be ready when the need arose. Sasha made a very conscious effort to heed the warning. To lose his family was a tragedy. To lose his job would be a horror.

  They entered the lobby and strode side by side to the bar where they had agreed to meet the English journalist.

  Only one person sat in the bar at this morning hour, a woman of about forty in a black dress with a jacket draped over the chair next to her and a computer on the table.

  The woman was dark with very pale, clear skin and blue-gray eyes. She was also decidedly pretty. She looked up at the detectives as they approached and removed her glasses. At first her look was probing and cautious, and then she examined Sasha Tkach and smiled.

  “Iris Templeton?” asked Elena.

  “Yes,” answered Iris, holding out her hand.

  “Inspector Elena Timofeyeva.”

  Elena took the hand, relinquished it, and watched as the woman extended it to Sasha. She gripped his hand firmly and looked directly into his eyes.

  “Inspector Sasha Tkach,” he said, and added in halting English, “We have been assigned to serve as your escorts.”