The Sin Collector (Masha Karavai Detective Series)

by Daria Desombre

  And so, a year after moving away, Katya had dialed the Karavays’ number, as nervous as she’d ever been. Masha was surprised to hear from her—but pleasantly surprised, thank God. She invited Katya to come visit.

  When Katya had emerged from the metro station at Bolshaya Polyanka and breathed in the gasoline-infused air, she’d felt as if she had finally come home. That feeling only got stronger in Masha’s apartment, so strong she didn’t know what to do with herself. This was the apartment of her dreams, the apartment where she had spent half her childhood, the place she thought of as her real home. She sat down across from Masha at the kitchen table and felt the tears welling up in her throat.

  “What’s wrong?” Masha asked.

  “I missed you,” Katya said, and she wasn’t lying at all.

  Katya had wanted to impress her old friend. Getting ready for that visit, she had put on her makeup very carefully. But now, looking at Masha’s bare face and embarrassed by her own tears (after all, Masha hadn’t missed Katya enough to cry!), Katya realized the truth: she had lost again. Simply because Masha existed on a completely different level.

  An awkward silence settled over the table. Masha and Katya drank their tea quickly, pretending not to notice the obvious: they had nothing to talk about. Katya was devastated. Friendship with Masha was her only excuse for being in this apartment.

  “Know what?” Katya finally blurted out, desperate to break the silence. “There’s a guy with a Harley who likes me!”

  “A Harley?” Masha asked, confused.

  “You know, a motorcycle, the really cool kind? He’s already been in jail for stealing, can you believe it? He told me I don’t look any older than sixteen. So I said, ‘Well, I am sixteen!’ And he said, ‘Don’t tempt me, baby girl!’” Katya jabbered on, her eyes growing bigger and bigger as she continued the story, holding Masha’s gaze the whole time.

  After the guy with the Harley, Katya talked about Sveta, who lived in her new apartment building and whose mother beat her up for wearing eye shadow and lipstick, even though she was already fifteen, can you believe it? Then there was the “Great Silk Road” that ran in front of their building, always filled with the people who sold things at the cheap marketplace next door. And a soldier who had come back from Chechnya sick in the head, who sat in the bushes until his mom came out and told him everyone was gone, the ambush was over, and it was safe to come inside for dinner.

  Katya was turning out to have a real gift for storytelling. She played the part of the terrified vet peering out from behind the bushes, then the self-satisfied dude on the Harley, then Sveta’s mother, cursing her out so loud everyone could hear. Masha laughed till she cried, wiping the tears from her eyes, and when Natasha came home from work, Masha told her mom she had to sit down and listen, too. Katya gave an encore performance of the best parts of her story, perfecting them as she went, and now she felt awesome, triumphant. She had won! It was working!

  It went on like that for years. Katya sort of became Masha’s personal court jester. With other people, Masha held very intellectual conversations. With Katya, she relaxed, and sometimes she would even gossip. That didn’t bother Katya. Neither did the sideways looks Masha’s school friends gave her: Who are you? Where do you study? They could see right away Katya wasn’t one of them. But Katya knew that herself, and she didn’t mind, just went right on playing the fool. Masha always introduced Katya as her oldest friend. Oldest friend. It was like an honorary title. Anyway, she’d be one of them, someday. Maybe even be better than them. There was no rush, she had time—that’s what Katya thought.

  Until Innokenty. Yes. Until Katya noticed Innokenty.

  MASHA

  “Okay, you, too. Talk to you soon,” Masha said, and tucked the phone back in her purse.

  “Your old neighbor friend?” Innokenty lifted his glass of white wine. “You should have had some of this. It’s very light, and it complements the asparagus well.”

  “You’re such a snob!” Masha said happily, stabbing at the asparagus with her fork. “By the way, she’s still in love with you.”

  “Huh.” Innokenty frowned. “And she’s still jealous of you.”

  Masha snorted and shrugged.

  “I wish I had something to be jealous of! You should see how my new boss ignores me. Yesterday he saw me with Nick-Nick. He thinks I’m just an annoying rich girl with no brain.”

  “But you do have a brain.” Kenty smiled.

  Masha sighed. “No, not these days, I don’t. I’m just going around in circles. Around what, exactly, I don’t know. I’m looking into these strange deaths.”

  “Aren’t there always plenty of those?”

  “No. These are strange deaths in strange places.” Masha pulled the map of Moscow out of her bag. “Look.”

  Innokenty laid the map out next to his plate and glanced over it while finishing his asparagus.

  Masha watched hopefully, afraid to say anything. She hadn’t told Innokenty anything about the murders, so this map, marked with a cross at each crime scene, was his introduction to her puzzle. But they were used to trusting each other’s mental abilities, and while logic reigned supreme in Masha’s head, erudition guided Innokenty’s.

  Finally, Masha couldn’t wait. “Well?”

  “This is silly.” Innokenty pushed the map away. “Nothing’s coming to mind.”

  Masha obediently took the map back. “I have a little time before I have to get back to work.”

  “Let’s have some dessert! That’ll make you feel better.” Innokenty winked at Masha and insisted on ordering the biggest slice of cake in the display case, a monster covered in fruit and whipped cream.

  “I’ve just made a deal for a fantastic icon,” he told her while they both dug in. “One made for the Old Believers, seventeenth century. I already have a buyer for it, too. I’ll be able to take a month of vacation, and, if you want—”

  “Yelnik is one of them!” Masha interrupted him, nearly stabbing Innokenty with her cake-laden fork.

  “Umm, what?” he asked.

  Masha took out the map again, and Innokenty pulled a heavy gold pen from the breast pocket of his cherry-colored velvet jacket. Masha scribbled some quick circles on her napkin to get the ink flowing, then added a new little cross on the map next to Red Square.

  “Huh.” Innokenty picked up the map again and looked over the points that Masha had marked. “Can I hold onto this for a couple of days? If I think of something, I’ll call you.”

  “Take it. I can make another copy.” Masha smiled happily.

  She loved it when Innokenty took her up on a riddle. It felt like they were kids again, conspiring together. Of course, Kenty was all grown up now, a prominent antiquarian, as he called himself. He owned a private gallery downtown, and judging by his designer shoes and the platinum cuff links on his bespoke shirts, monogrammed A. I. for Innokenty Arzhenikov, Kenty’s little shop was bringing in some money. Yes, her old friend had become quite a dandy, and since Masha had never moved beyond her simple black wardrobe, people often wondered at the odd pair. And they were both so different from everyone else, such introverts. Masha knew he deserved all the credit for their relationship lasting all these years.

  “What does that map remind me of?” Innokenty murmured as he directed the last bite of cake into his mouth. “No, it’s hopeless. I’m never going to remember with my stomach this full.”

  ANDREY

  Where Andrey ate lunch, they were not serving asparagus with a nice Chablis. Nobody was wearing cuff links. Where Andrey ate lunch, it was smoky and stuffy, but the customers didn’t take off their coats to eat. They dined at plastic tables on sandwiches of suspicious origin. They drank beer.

  Andrey was sitting across from Arkhip. Arkhip’s real name was Arkhipov, and he was Andrey’s informant. Arkhip thought Andrey was an okay guy, so he held up his side of their arrangement in good faith. For his part, Andrey never threatened to lock Arkhip up, but despite the valuable information he shared, he’d n
ever developed warm feelings for the man. He was kind of grossed out, honestly, by Arkhip’s acne-covered face, narrow as a knife blade. And Arkhip had a way of moving that face closer and closer as he told you things in confidence, his breath smelling of yesterday’s dinner.

  “Yelnik went straight a long time ago,” Arkhip whispered as he took another gulp of cheap, foamy beer. “After the last trial, nobody had any jobs for him. He went and lived out in the country. He wouldn’t see anyone he used to know. He was, like, stay away from me, let me keep my nose clean in my old age. As if! Turka said some army men used to go see him.”

  “What army men?” Andrey asked, chewing on his stale sandwich.

  “How would I know? Important guys, I hear, even though they always came dressed like civilians and drove crappy cars.”

  “Then how did your guy Turka know they were soldiers?” Andrey asked suspiciously.

  “Whaddya think?” Arkhip sputtered. “Their posture, first off. And the way they walked, like they were in a parade, and faces like bricks. Looked at you like they were expecting a full report. Definitely no lower than a colonel.”

  Andrey thought for a minute, took another sip from a mug of warm swill the café called coffee, and frowned.

  “Listen. Last time Yelnik was in, who did he do time with?”

  “I can find out.”

  “Do it. Send me a text.”

  “Okay.” Arkhip wiped his mouth. “I’m off.”

  Andrey just nodded.

  So, Yelnik had gone straight. And then someone killed him. What was the logic in that? Punishment for getting out of the game? Some old score that had to be settled? And what did these military types have to do with any of it? He remembered the grimace on the dead man’s face. The hollow body. The worthless, rusty coins. Some sort of mysticism? Andrey decided it was time to pay a visit to Yelnik’s place in the country. He headed for the counter to pay for his lunch and Arkhip’s.

  In the hallway, Andrey ran into his intern—literally—as he charged around the corner with his characteristic fury. They bounced off each other like tennis balls, and the girl fell down hard, gasping. Andrey was scared at first that she was hurt, but then he saw the papers scattered all around her, copies of photographs.

  He awkwardly sat down next to her and began gathering them up, quickly at first, then more slowly. The numbers on the murder victims at Bersenevskaya waterfront looked black in the photocopies, but Andrey vividly remembered how they had been written in blood. A close-up of a biceps tattooed with a 4. His own memory served up the image of the fourteen on Yelnik’s neck. Andrey got up off his haunches the same time the girl did. She was as red as a lobster.

  “So you’re doing some investigating, then?”

  The intern nodded nervously.

  “Very good,” said Andrey, surprising himself, and suddenly realized that Intern Karavay’s eyes were exactly level with his. Those expressive eyes—light green, with dark, almost wet-looking lashes—were embarrassed on the one hand, but on the other defiant. Her pursed, pale lips bent into a smile when he said those words.

  “I’ll do my best,” Karavay said, and she walked away around the corner.

  Man, she’s tall! thought Andrey, without resenting that quality for once.

  He needed to get some things together and head to Tochinovka, the village where Yelnik the hitman had attempted to retire.

  MASHA

  Masha sat on a narrow bench near the district police station and pretended to listen attentively to the young patrolman Dima Safronov. Dima was glad to be sitting here with this piece of ass from Petrovka, smoking expensive cigarettes, wondering if he should ask her to the movies. After that, naturally, he’d need to get her drunk . . . But something told him this chick wasn’t much for dive bars.

  He was telling her about Kolyan. But there wasn’t much to tell. Guy was a complete and total alcoholic, but there were plenty of those around. Harmless. Not the criminal type. Must have been brought up right, because he didn’t just piss wherever he felt like it. Kolyan had mostly stuck to the neighborhood, so how had he ended up at Kutafya Tower? Did he go there to die someplace beautiful? The cops are thick on the ground there, too. It was a nice enough place to finish off a bottle, but Kolyan had an apartment for that sort of thing. Why travel so far? Later, when that uptight coroner got ahold of him, he found out it wasn’t Kolyan’s heart that had killed him. He’d suffocated to death. The coroner thought a liquid dripped continuously into his throat had made his throat swell up.

  “What kind of liquid?” Masha interrupted. She was still replaying in her head the slapstick scene of her running into Yakovlev in the hall. What an idiot she was.

  “Vodka, what else? I read the report. You do it drop by drop, it’s some kind of medieval torture. I think they tortured people in China that way.”

  “Not just in China,” Masha said, frowning as she felt the shadow just behind her back.

  Seeing her eyes go all weird—distant and sad—Dima decided he definitely wasn’t asking the chick from Petrovka out. But he had more to tell her.

  “And in his apartment,” he said, “they didn’t find a single fingerprint! Not in the kitchen, not in the hallway, not in the bedroom. On the one hand, any asshole could see that it’s murder. On the other hand, why murder a harmless drunk? Maybe he saw something he shouldn’t have?”

  “Maybe,” Masha said. That was a perfectly reasonable motive that could explain everything away, and Masha hated it.

  Dima tossed his cigarette on the ground and stood up. Masha followed suit, and shook his hand in a very official manner.

  “Thank you for your time,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” answered Dima, embarrassed by all these good manners. “Call me if you have more questions.”

  “I will.” Masha carefully withdrew her hand from his, just a little later than she would have liked. She had already crossed the street when she turned back and caught Dima watching her go.

  “The tattoo on his arm!” Masha called. “The number four. Had you seen that before?”

  “No. Kolyan didn’t have a tattoo!” Dima shouted back. “He went around most of the time in just an undershirt, so I would’ve seen it.”

  A satisfied smile spread across Masha’s face. She waved good-bye and hurried on.

  ANDREY

  Tochinovka turned out to be the kind of village you might see in a documentary about the dying Russian countryside. More than half the houses were boarded up, and the ones that were still inhabited seemed to be light-years away from the glamorous capital instead of sixty miles. While the gilded young people of Moscow tweeted on their smartphones at university lectures and learned the correct way to eat imported oysters, while they injected Botox into their jaws so they wouldn’t grind their bleached teeth at night from the stress of modern life—here there was a stinking outhouse behind each little shack, like something out of the Middle Ages, and the villagers hauled water from a distant well and warmed it up over propane. The distance between those two realities could be measured in centuries. The people spoke the same language, but they didn’t understand each other. Nobody in Tochinovka knew anything about oysters, Botox, or Snapchat. The only person here who had seen the world and all the paradoxes of the twenty-first century had been Yelnik. He was like a double agent. And he’d been murdered.

  Andrey sat and smoked, pondering, without any particular bitterness, a remarkable quality all Russians seemed to share: complete disdain for an ordinary, decent existence. Disregard by the people in power for everyone else, for four generations now, at least. The abject humility of these people, who’d been the workhorses of socialism, who’d wired the whole country for electricity, but didn’t think to ask for hot water or a sewage system. As if it were just the way of things, that of course you have to trudge through the snow when nature calls in winter, wipe your ass with torn-up newspaper, and rinse your hands with water from some rusty old bucket.

  What on earth had Yelnik been hoping to fi
nd here? He had been set up well enough. He could at least have afforded a heated bathroom after he got out of prison.

  The door to Yelnik’s run-down house was locked, so Andrey, checking for a key in the usual places, peeled back the mat and felt around the heavy window shutters. Nothing. The property wasn’t big, but it was well cared for. There were some vegetable beds, a small potato patch, even a greenhouse. That door was unlocked, and Andrey went inside. In contrast to the healthy garden, the greenhouse was badly neglected, which made sense since the gardener had disappeared over the winter. The air was hot and heavy, but it didn’t smell of the usual cucumbers and tomatoes. No, it smelled of death and decay. Andrey shuddered. There was a dead bird lying on the floor, its thin bones glowing white through matted black feathers. Must have flown in during the winter and, when no one opened the door again, it couldn’t get out, Andrey thought. So Yelnik’s killer had a bird’s blood on his hands, too.

  “What makes people different from birds?” Andrey mused aloud as he stood, undecided, before the porch, playing with the coins in his pocket. “People know how to open doors.”

  He pressed a coin from his pocket firmly into the palm of his hand. He had a paper clip in there, too, precisely for occasions such as this. Andrey looked around stealthily. Not a soul.

  “You understand, right, Yelnik? It’s because I was raised on the streets, it’s because of my poor family, it’s all the bad examples in my life,” Andrey muttered as he straightened out the paper clip. “Idle minds and so on!”

  Andrey went to his car and opened the trunk, humming contentedly as he pulled out a narrow wrench. There was a gentle bounce in his step when he walked back to the front door of the house. He glanced around one more time. Still quiet. Andrey inserted the wrench in the lower part of the keyhole, then slid the paper clip into the upper part, tip pointed up. He turned the paper clip slowly, counting the contacts: one, two . . . five. There was a tiny click with every turn. Andrey looked dreamily at the summer sky, dotted with cheerful white clouds. He gave the door a gentle push and it swung open without so much as a creak.