A Whisper to the Living ir-16

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  The old man in blue looked ancient now. His head was bald and dotted with meandering blue veins. He was clean-shaven and smiling. He was in the middle of a movement of legs and hands as he gently urged his extended right hand upward, palm forward. The others were mirroring the old man’s moves.

  The old man closed his eyes, dropped his hands at his sides, and bowed his head smoothly forward and back.

  “A giant?” the man in blue said.

  His look was one of incredulity. He turned toward the people in front of him and said, “Have any of you seen a giant?”

  They all shook their heads no except for a woman in the group, who said, “Yes,” so softly that it almost escaped without notice.

  “You saw the giant?” Iosef asked the woman.

  “Yes. He came out of that building.”

  She pointed to the building in which Vera Korstov lived.

  “Where did he go?” asked Iosef.

  “He got into the car that was waiting for him,” the woman said. “Then the car drove off.”

  “What kind of car was it?” asked Iosef.

  “Blue,” said the old man.

  “Green, definitely green,” said another man. “I saw it clearly. One of those little tiny cars.”

  “It was a large dark red car with a significant dent in the left rear fender,” said the old man with calm finality.

  “Thank you,” Iosef said with only slightly disguised insincerity. “You have been very helpful.”

  As he turned to go back to the apartment building to tell the others that a search was unnecessary, he saw Zelach pause, put his feet together, roll his shoulders forward, and place his open palms against each other pointing skyward. Then Zelach bowed his head slowly. All of the sweat-suited people returned the gesture. It was brief. Zelach and the people exchanged a small smile.

  As they walked back toward the apartment building, Iosef said, “What was that?”

  “The bow is a sign of respect,” said Zelach. “A sign that you are giving up self-importance.”

  Iosef shook his head and grinned.

  “Akardy Zelach, you are probably the least self-important human I have ever known.”

  “It is good to remind oneself.”

  “How do you know this?” Iosef asked as they walked.

  “My mother and I used to do tai chi exercises three times a week. We did it since I was eight years old. She is not well enough to do it anymore. She insists that I do it without her, but I do it with an empty heart.”

  Now they were standing at the curb, more or less where the car had picked up Ivan Medivkin. There was nothing there to see. Iosef looked back at the Chinese man and the others, who had returned to their graceful slow movements. Iosef could not imagine Zelach doing this, but Zelach was not lying. In fact, Akardy Zelach was the worst liar Iosef had ever known.

  “Akardy, you are a fountain of confounding information and new revelations. Now if you could only tell me what color that car was. .”

  “It was a large dark red car,” Zelach said as they stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “The Chinese man is the only one who got it right?”

  “Yes. He is the only one both focused and seeing everything around him.”

  Iosef looked back at the Chinese man. His eyes were closed as he moved his arms and hands gently and brought his left leg slowly forward with his foot not touching the ground.

  “He is looking at us now?”

  “Yes,” said Zelach.

  “With his eyes closed?”

  “He senses and sees,” said Zelach, looking across the street at the man about whom they were speaking.

  “A red car?” said Iosef.

  “Yes,” said Zelach.

  “With a dent in the left rear fender?”

  “A significant dent,” said Zelach.

  “Let us find it.”

  “Out all night. I thought you were dead.”

  So Lydia Tkach, mother of Sasha, widow of Borislav, shouted at her son when he came through the door of his apartment, which she had moved into with him almost a year ago. She stood, a small stick of a woman with arms folded, looking at him with a reprimand Sasha had known since he was a small child.

  “I was working,” he said.

  “What?”

  Oh God, thought Sasha, she is not wearing her hearing aids.

  “I was working. Working,” he shouted.

  “At what?” she said, matching the volume of his words.

  There was no point in trying to pass on to her the complexity of what had happened. And even if he did, he would certainly not mention that he had gone to bed with the Englishwoman. Lydia Tkach was a bigot. She distrusted anyone who was not Russian and every nation that was not Russia.

  “Protecting someone. I have just come home to shower and change clothes.”

  “You smell of perfume,” she answered as he moved toward the bedroom. “You should shower and change your clothes.”

  Lydia followed him, arms still folded, into the bedroom where he took clean clothing from the closet and bureau drawers.

  “Who is this woman of perfume?” she demanded.

  “I must shower and perhaps shave,” he answered as he began to undress.

  “She is a flower and a slave?”

  “Yes,” said Sasha. “I took her from the harem of a Turkish pasha.”

  “She was in a bare room and you took her Turkish kasha? You are going mad or you are trying to make jokes at the expense of your mother.”

  Sasha was now wearing only his underpants. He looked at her as he put his thumbs under the elastic. If nothing else would give him respite from his mother, perhaps the sight of his nakedness would force a retreat. He took off his underpants, looking at her as he did so.

  “Did she bite you on the thigh? I see a red welt. Did she bite you?”

  “No.”

  The truth was that he seemed to remember Iris Templeton indeed biting him.

  Sasha moved into the tiny bathroom and reached over to turn on the water as he muttered a prayer that he would not have to shave and shower with cold water. He looked over his shoulder at Lydia, who was in the doorway examining his body in search of other violations of his flesh by this woman.

  “Mother, leave me in peace for a few minutes.”

  “Leave you a piece of what?”

  A peace of mind, he said to himself, thanking whatever gods might exist for the hot water he felt with his hand.

  “You look like your father,” Lydia shouted without going into a retreat. “He was too skinny like you. You should be in Kiev on your knees begging Maya to come back to Moscow with my grandchildren.”

  I have been there and I have done that to no avail, he said to himself as he washed.

  “You should not be a policeman,” Lydia cried.

  There were few conversations with his mother during the nine years he had been a policeman that she did not show her disapproval of his profession.

  “Policemen got shot,” she shouted. “There are crazy people out there. Remember when someone shot Karpo?”

  Seven years ago, he thought. That had happened seven years ago and the wound had long since healed.

  Sasha shaved.

  “I have decided,” she shouted. “I am going to Kiev to convince Maya to come back to Moscow.”

  “Good luck,” he shouted.

  A visit from their grandmother, who frightened them, would add their voices to a nyet for Moscow and their father.

  “Do not use language like that in front of your mother,” she cried out.

  Sasha had no idea what distortion of language she had created, and he thought the less he considered it, the better off he would be.

  “Soup,” she shouted when he stepped out of the shower and began to dry himself with the blue beach towel he and Maya had bought shortly after they were married. The towel was still soft against his skin.

  “Yes,” he said, moving past Lydia and beginning to dress.

  “Soup is on the
table,” she said.

  He nodded, unwilling to engage in conversation that would certainly and creatively be distorted. When he had fully dressed, he moved back into the living room and to the round wooden dinner table near the wall by the kitchen area. On the table was a large bright green cup of soup filled with vegetables and beef and a piece of dark bread next to it on a small plate. The cup was one of five Maya had bought for almost nothing at a stall on the Arbat shortly after Pulcharia was born. Everything, everything in the apartment, was a reminder of his wife and children. She had taken nothing but her clothes and those of the children when she had left.

  He sat and drank the warm soup with his mother sitting across from him.

  “Good,” he said.

  “You are my burden, Sasha,” she said with a shake of her head. “You are my only son, my only child. You should be a comfort and a joy as I grow older. Instead you are out all night with sweet-smelling Polish women and you are killing people with a gun.”

  Sasha considered correcting her, but the effort would certainly be doomed to failure. Who, he thought, is the burden at this table?

  “I should have named you Konstantin,” she said. “That means ‘constant,’ ‘reliable.’ I could have called you Kolya. Instead I named you Sasha. Do you know what your name means?”

  “ ‘Defender of men,’ ” he said. “You have told me this hundreds of times. ‘Defender of men.’ ”

  “ ‘Defender of hens’?” she said.

  “Where are your hearing aids?” he asked, pointing to both of his ears.

  “Too loud,” she said. “I hear well enough. You are changing the subject. Like your father. You are changing the subject. Is it any wonder poor Maya left you?”

  “None,” he said. “None at all. Have a good trip to Kiev.”

  “You are missing two bodies, maybe more,” Paulinin said to Emil Karpo, who sat across from him under the bright lights of the laboratory.

  They sat at the scientist’s desk, space on which had been cleared to hold the two mugs of almost black, almost boiling tea in front of them. The laboratory smelled of fetid decay from the two bodies on the table about a dozen feet behind Emil Karpo.

  “I have looked at all you have brought me so far,” Paulinin said, taking a sip of tea.

  His glasses steamed. He removed them and placed them carefully on the desk.

  “And you have discovered?” Karpo prodded.

  “Bodies in a state of unseemly deterioration. The homeless are treated with as little respect when they die as when they lived. However, I did learn some things.”

  Paulinin drank some more tea. This time Karpo waited patiently.

  “Two of the dead were not the victims of your Maniac. Copycat. Buried hastily in the park, heads crushed from behind, but not by a hammer, by a metal pipe or rod. The killer of those two, killed within a few days of each other, was taller, heavier, than your Maniac. When those murders were taking place, your Maniac was hitting harder and with greater efficiency, but the leap in murderous quality is too abrupt. It should be more gradual, which leads me to believe-”

  “That there are some bodies we have not yet discovered,” said Karpo, looking over the mug in his hand.

  “The dolts who were in charge of the case before you took over missed this and, I am certain, missed much more.”

  “Can you tell what time of day each victim was killed?”

  “Ah, good question. Stomach contents. Most of these victims lived on vodka or cheap wine, but the contents of the stomachs with food suggest they were killed at night. But you knew that. Our Maniac would be unlikely to strike in the gray light of day.”

  That was Karpo’s theory. More than fifty people, all killed at night. What if the Maniac could only kill at night because he worked during the day? Karpo had already told this to Porfiry Petrovich, who had not been the least bit surprised.

  Paulinin had supplied Rostnikov and Karpo with information about how tall the Maniac was and that he was right-handed and urged his victims to drink Nitin wine while he indulged in guava juice. More would come.

  “Where is Porfiry Petrovich?” asked Paulinin, putting his glasses back on.

  “In Bitsevsky Park.”

  “Searching for more bodies?”

  “I believe he is walking the pathways, sitting on the benches, and watching the chess players.”

  “In other words, he is working,” said Paulinin.

  “Yes,” said Karpo.

  “You are going to look for the copycats?”

  “Of course.”

  “Becker at Moscow University has run their DNA. They do not appear in the files and I doubt if they themselves were homeless.”

  Karpo knew the dead men as Numbers 30 and 31. There had been several differences from the other victims of the Maniac and these two. Numbers 30 and 31 had been buried more deeply than the others. While a number of the victims had little or no identification, none appeared to have been robbed and all had something in their pockets, slip of paper, an appointment card, something. These two had been stripped of everything. This had been attributed to nothing more than a slight deviation in pattern for the Maniac. After all, he was mad.

  “And?” asked Karpo, sensing that Paulinin had something more to tell.

  “Fingerprint,” he said. “In spite of decomposition. In spite of pitiful irreverence for the dead, I managed to retrieve a fingerprint from the jacket of one of the two victims.”

  Paulinin reached over on his desk to pick up a thin, square white envelope. He handed it to Karpo, who put it in his jacket pocket.

  Before the end of the day, Emil Karpo would identify both of the copycat victims, discover that they had disappeared leaving everything behind, which included not very much, for their niece, the daughter of their long dead sister. The niece, who believed herself very clever, broke down after being interrogated by Karpo in a room at Petrovka.

  Thus, two of the murders attributed to the Maniac were solved, leaving only approximately fifty more that were the work of the still-unidentified Maniac.

  7

  A Prince of Industry Plays with Fire

  Pavel Petrov met Iris Templeton in the lobby of the office building not far from Red Square. He was a bit heavier than when last she had seen him, but he was still handsome and smiling. His suit, Iris could tell, was Italian and almost certainly custom-made.

  “I am very glad you could come,” he said in English, taking her extended right hand and holding it in both of his. “You look as lovely as when last we met at the Trade Congress in Belgrade in 1994.”

  “You have been well briefed,” she said.

  Petrov shrugged and said, “I confess. Come.”

  He led her across the lobby, which included a desk for two uniformed guards and a smattering of well-placed pots with plants sprouting large succulent green leaves. Somewhere a voice, probably in conversation on a telephone, echoed through the lobby and remained with them until the elevator doors closed behind Iris and Petrov.

  “Are you enjoying Moscow this visit?”

  “I have only been here one day and one night,” she said as the elevator slowly rose.

  “And I trust you have been well treated night and day by the members of our incorruptible Office of Special Investigations?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He knew. She was certain he knew she had been with Daniel Volkovich before Volkovich was murdered, certain that he knew where Olga Grinkova, otherwise known as Svetlana, was, certain that he knew that Sasha Tkach had spent the night in her room.

  “Good,” he said.

  The elevator doors slid open and Petrov stepped to one side to allow her to pass onto the highly polished wooden floor.

  “This way,” he said, moving to her side and gesturing with his right hand toward an unmarked and unnumbered door. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass window of a reception area they saw where a young man, in a suit not quite as expensive as that worn by Petrov, looked up from behind his desk as Petrov opene
d the unmarked door.

  She followed him into a large but not ostentatious wood-paneled office that carried the scent of forests. The desk was ancient and highly polished mahogany and the chairs a matching wood and hue.

  He pointed with a palm to the left of the office, where a dark leather love seat and matching chairs faced a low glass table on which sat a pair of cups and a plate of assorted chocolates.

  “I took the liberty,” he said, sitting at the sofa. “I am, I confess, addicted to chocolate. Coffee? I believe you drink coffee and not English tea?”

  You not only believe it, you are certain of it, and you want me to know that you know everything about me.

  “Coffee is fine,” she said, sitting.

  “Black.”

  “Black.”

  He pressed one of the buttons of the console on his desk and said, “Are the chocolates all of the latest choices?”

  He smiled at Iris, pressed another button, and folded his hands on the smooth, shiny brown surface of the desk.

  “Now,” he said, smile broad and voice apologetic, “if you will turn off the tape recorder in your briefcase. I will make a statement and try to answer your questions.”

  “How will I be able to provide evidence of what you say?” she asked.

  “I intend to deal with you honestly, but there is always the chance that I will say something I regret,” he said. “It has happened to me before. Now, the tape recorder please.”

  He held out his hand.

  “You object to my taking notes?” she asked.

  “Not at all.”

  His hand remained out, palm up, waiting. Iris took a tape recorder from her purse, pushed the button to turn it off, and sat back.

  “Next,” he said after checking to be sure the tape recorder was off and placing it within her reach. “If you will please disengage the listening device hidden somewhere on your person.”

  “I don’t have one,” she said, meeting his eyes.

  “Then you are a fool, and I do not believe you are a fool. No, I’ve read your work. I do not believe you are a fool. Disengage or you will leave without coffee, chocolates, and conversation, and I assure you the cookies are the best to be found in all of Moscow.”