“Ilya Gluzman, at your service.” He lifted Masha’s hand to his lips, not so much to kiss it as to express his gentlemanly intentions.
“Masha,” she introduced herself, a little taken aback.
“Innokenty, thank you for bringing such a beauty to visit a lonely old man!” Dr. Gluzman looked at her like a curious bird, tilting his head to one side. “If only I could still fall in love at my age!”
Then he rolled back into the room and gestured to the nurse to put the teapot on a low table. The table was already set with a ceramic bowl of chocolates and a crystal dish overflowing with an artistic mess of dark, nearly black cherries and small, pungent strawberries. After her long workday and visit to the gym, Masha felt her mouth water.
“Please have a seat, mademoiselle!” Their host nudged a teacup in her direction and half filled it with strong amber-colored tea, then added hot water to top it off. Gluzman slid an almost-transparent slice of lemon onto a tiny dish for her, then graciously offered the silver sugar bowl. “Young ladies don’t take sugar these days, do they?”
“You fool!” a creaky old voice suddenly rang out just behind Masha.
Masha jumped in surprise and turned around. Behind her hung an enormous cage, and inside it, an enormous parrot.
“You fool!” the parrot repeated.
“No need to tell me, I know!” Gluzman retorted cheerfully.
Masha laughed. The tension that had accumulated in her body during their long walk to the room was falling away now. Though Gluzman was eccentric, he didn’t show any signs of insanity, as far as she could tell. His dark eyes seemed to take everything in hungrily, and his large mouth was twisted into a wry smile.
“My parrot very much resembles me, don’t you think, my dear? Two silly old good-for-nothings!”
Masha smiled and took a sip from her delicate ceramic cup. The tea was excellent.
“I don’t believe in the green teas and red teas they have these days, with their flowers and buds and petals and little pieces of straw, smelling like anything at all other than tea. I don’t need my tea to be diaphoretic or calmative or anything else. My nerves, honestly, require a stronger medicine.” Gluzman’s fluttering hand performed its ritual over Innokenty’s cup next, and then he sat back in his chair, clearly pleased with himself. “Well then, my young friends! What brings you to my humble abode?”
Innokenty bent down and pulled Masha’s map from his briefcase.
“Dr. Gluzman,” he said, “we need a consultation. Or, actually, a confirmation of my theory.”
Gluzman took a pair of glasses with round, thick lenses from his breast pocket and perched them atop his fleshy nose. The expression on his face remained unchanged, but he tilted his head first to one side, then to the other as he looked the page over carefully.
“I believe there’s a certain pattern to the points marked on the map, Professor. Do you see it?” Innokenty looked nervous, ready to spring up from his chair.
“It might just be a coincidence, but—” Gluzman turned to Masha, removed his glasses, and smiled. The old man’s teeth were blindingly white. “Inno-centi must have seen just what I see here. He’s a wonderful boy, mademoiselle. Don’t you let him get away.”
“I won’t,” Masha said, smiling. “I’ve been holding on to him since we were eight years old.”
Gluzman nodded and turned to the blushing Kenty.
“Never be afraid of your own conclusions, young man! You must trust that whisper inside you! It is formed of knowledge, first and foremost, and of deep intuition. It comes with experience.”
“Heavenly Jerusalem,” Kenty said quietly.
“Heavenly Jerusalem,” repeated Gluzman. “Precisely.”
Masha looked impatiently from one man to the other.
“Masha, dear, judging from the discouraged look in your lovely eyes, you must be unfamiliar with the concept?” Gluzman chuckled and rolled his wheelchair over to the bookshelf that lined one wall of the room. “Here you are, for a start,” he said, pulling out a leather-bound volume. “The Holy Scriptures. Have you read them?”
Masha felt her cheeks going red.
“Surely you have,” said Gluzman, not waiting for her to respond. “But who remembers books like these? Only old dotards like me. Now, let me just find the place . . .” He thumbed through the pages. “Here we are. Listen. From the Book of Revelation: ‘And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’” Gluzman removed his glasses again, and looked up at Masha. “You see, Mashenka, my dear—may I call you Mashenka?—in the religious tradition, the city of Jerusalem was considered the navel of the earth, because it was meant to be a prototype of the Heavenly City. And that Heavenly Jerusalem, in turn, is the kingdom of the saints in heaven.” Gluzman smiled. “If you believe John, it is a city of uncommon beauty, built of materials that shine and reflect the light. Gates made of pearls, walls made of precious stones—jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, topaz, chrysolite, amethyst—and streets made of gold. And this description was not just something the storyteller dreamed up, his own fantasy. No!”
Gluzman looked to Innokenty, and his former student took up the tale.
“In those times, gemstones represented sources of sacred energy. They are eternal, and like eternity, they are perfect, unlike the mortal world of humans, plants, and animals.”
Masha felt lost, which did not escape Gluzman’s attention.
“It’s rather a lot, isn’t it? Here is the important thing. Symbolism aside, written descriptions of the City of Heaven are so precise, so suggestive, that they have allowed human beings, time and time again, to create their own models of that city, in essence transporting it from the heavens down to this earthly realm. Every description is architecturally detailed, and every detail carries symbolic value. For instance, all the descriptions agree that Heavenly Jerusalem is laid out as a square. Its walls face the four cardinal directions, and each wall has three gates, conveying the image of the Creator in all directions.”
Masha cast a helpless glance at Innokenty, who winked back.
“Close your eyes and imagine this city, Masha!” Gluzman went on, reading from the Bible now in a singsong voice. “‘Twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels—’”
Masha had been following his description, her head tilted in concentration, but she stumbled at the angels.
“Dr. Gluzman, I really don’t understand what all this has to do with—”
“Patience, my child. I know haste is the burden of the novice, and you are both still so young. Try to resist your urge to absorb knowledge on the run. Now, where were we? Oh yes. In the Middle Ages, the Gospels were often interpreted as instructions for action. Medieval architects had two models to work from: Heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jerusalem. The real Jerusalem influenced the cities people built to evoke the celestial one. Think of the Golden Gate in Kiev, or in Vladimir here in Russia. Those were intended to copy the Golden Gate in Jerusalem, and later in Constantinople.”
Masha nodded uncertainly.
“Mainly capital cities tried to imitate the earthly Jerusalem,” Innokenty added. “But plenty of smaller Russian cities were designed based on the descriptions of Heavenly Jerusalem. Kiev, as Dr. Gluzman said, but also Pskov, Kashin, Kaluga, and, of course, Moscow.”
“Interesting,” Masha ventured. “I always thought medieval architecture was completely chaotic. Narrow streets leading nowhere, improvised rebuilding every time a city burned down again . . .”
“That is a common theory, but absolutely unfounded,” Gluzman answered heatedly. “As is this idea of the Dark Ages in general. Nonsense! It was a difficult but wonderful epoch, one which gave the world genius works of architecture, art, and literature. What have people ever made that is more wonderful than the spires of Gothic cathedrals, reaching for heaven? Or more noble than the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl? You might argue that by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Moscow had f
ewer poor, fewer orphans, fewer cripples. Less filth, and not nearly as many brothels and saloons per capita. But the idea, the supreme religious idea that governed and inspired life in those earlier times, even for the lowliest pauper—that idea was gone.”
Gluzman rolled back to the bookshelves and took down two more tattered volumes.
“It’s only now, in the twenty-first century with all its blessings, that man has started building things any which way. But in those days, not a single stone was placed without a reason. It took years and years to build a church—three, five generations sometimes. Nothing like these Gebelai projects.”
Masha gave a start at the murdered architect’s name.
“Just think, Masha! People, their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, were born, got married, grew old, and died alongside a cathedral that grew higher and higher. Such a project could never be undertaken without a profound foundational idea around which life could take shape like flesh on a bone.”
Innokenty and Masha exchanged looks. The improvised lecture was impressive. Innokenty was clearly enjoying himself.
“Now let’s take a look at Moscow.” Gluzman took on a calmer tone, and with the practiced gesture of an experienced speaker, adjusted the glasses on his bulbous nose. “You see, Mashenka, people often speak of Moscow as the Third Rome. But that idea is more secular or political—imperial, if you will. The idea of Moscow as a second Jerusalem is much older, and it has deep roots in Russian Orthodoxy. Moscow, as you no doubt learned in school, is the heir to Byzantium. On May 29, 1453, the Ottomans sacked Byzantine Constantinople, renamed it Istanbul, and made it the capital of their empire. With Constantinople gone, the political and spiritual leaders here shifted their focus to building a New Jerusalem where Moscow stood.
“With all our little daily worries, we cannot begin to imagine the power this idea of transforming Moscow into the City of Heaven wielded, in a young nation with no television, no radio, scarcely any literacy. Every single person, from the great tsars to the lowliest serfs, worked to make this city into the New Jerusalem. Just imagine if today the bums on the street and the oligarchs in their mansions joined forces. Our medieval forebears believed that if Moscow were to become the New Jerusalem, all the Christians residing here would be first in line to enter heaven itself. That’s why they started hauling in holy relics from all over the world. The more sacred items Moscow could collect, the more sacred the city would be!”
Gluzman moved the sugar bowl carefully to one side to make more room for an aging tome. He leafed through the yellow pages until he found the one he needed.
“This is the famous map from Sigismund von Herberstein’s Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii. His contemporaries called him the Columbus of Russia. Herberstein visited Moscow in 1517 and 1526, and his map dates to 1549. Here is another map, from the Blaeu atlas, dated 1613.”
Innokenty and Masha bent over the map.
“Look. Old Moscow is arranged in a circle, symbolizing eternity—the eternal Kingdom of Heaven, more precisely. Now compare that to the Book of Revelation: ‘The City of Heavenly Jerusalem is new . . . and had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates . . . On the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.’ Moscow’s old defensive walls, the Skorodom, perfectly match this description. An even earlier iteration of the city had the same arrangement of gates, three facing in each of the four directions.” Gluzman looked up at Masha. “So what does this mean, mademoiselle? It means that Moscow was twice encircled by the twelve-gated walls of the City of Heaven, first in stone, then in wood. Now, moving on.
“‘And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth.’ The length of the Skorodom fortress, north to south, was just under three miles, and almost the same east to west. You will agree, I think, that this cannot be a coincidence. And the height of the walls? In Heavenly Jerusalem, they are ‘a hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel.’ If we assume a cubit is more or less one and a half feet, and multiply that by one hundred forty, we have two hundred ten feet—too high for a medieval wall. But the Spasskaya Tower was intended to be exactly one hundred forty-four cubits tall!
“Next, the color. Heavenly Jerusalem was decorated with green jasper, symbolizing the eternal lives of the saints, blue sapphires for the sky, and gold for righteousness. Moscow’s cupolas could be only those three colors.”
Now Innokenty joined in. “And in the seventeenth century, all the churches were covered in specific patterns, not just the carved stone and colored tiles we still have today, but also engravings of flowers and plants. You can see evidence of those in fragments remaining from the tile walls of the Cathedral of the Dormition on Goncharnaya, in places where they’ve stripped off the layers of plaster that got added on later. And—”
“Kenty,” said Masha, quiet but determined. “Can you get to the point?”
“Mashenka!” said Gluzman, grinning victoriously. “The marks you made on your map? There is an explanation for every one of them. A very specific explanation.”
ANDREY
Andrey sat holding the beeping receiver of his office phone in one hand and staring into space. The prisoner known as the Doctor, one Oleg Zitman, had apparently moved to Israel after being released early for good behavior. How had he managed to pull that off? Andrey had always thought jail time was supposed to make it difficult to get residency somewhere else.
The other tidbit he’d picked up was even more curious. The good doctor had made his fortune traveling around Russia, and sometimes Moldova, Ukraine, and other former Soviet backwaters too, buying human organs on the black market. Poverty and desperation drove people to sell whatever parts they had that came in pairs. Kidneys were most in demand. Here, former collective-farm workers, abandoned by the system, found hope again in fifteen- or twenty-thousand-dollar payouts. They fixed their homes or bought a cow, and while all around the world physicians and lawyers carefully debated whether or not to legalize the sale of donated human organs, Dr. Zitman grew very rich. But the world community finally rejected the idea, and the good doctor was caught and convicted, much to the dismay of many Moldovan peasants—who now had both their kidneys, but no prospects for making money.
Then Zitman did time with Yelnik, and naturally he would have told him how he ended up in jail. What would Yelnik have thought? Perhaps what Andrey was thinking now: selling organs was nice work if you could get it. But Yelnik was no doctor. The only reason he’d ever held a knife was to murder somebody. Had Zitman and Yelnik joined forces? One could have done the killing, and the other could have collected the organs.
Andrey needed to find out the last time Zitman had visited Russia, and also, if possible, when he’d last contacted Yelnik.
He called around to every big security agency in and around Moscow. Printouts began coming through the fax machine thirty minutes later.
First Andrey skimmed a list of phone calls, looking for Israel’s country code. Nothing. That would have been too easy. Besides, the numbers didn’t mean anything by themselves. Yelnik could have used any number of phones and names. But just then, the Israeli embassy returned Andrey’s call. No, they told him, Mr. Zitman had not crossed the Russian border since receiving his Israeli citizenship.
The tantalizing door that had opened in Andrey’s mind slammed shut. Organs need to be transported quickly and carefully. Yelnik never could have handled them without the doctor. Still, Yelnik’s own gutted belly was too strong a connection to ignore. Andrey nudged the door open again with one foot. Could Yelnik have worked with a different corrupt doctor, if not Zitman?
He squinted again at the densely printed faxes. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, just try to spot anything unusual. Another country, a distant province, calls that lasted too long or came too frequently.
Andrey searched and searched, and finally he found something. Several calls, a month apart, lasting ten seconds eac
h. Andrey underlined them in red. He turned back to the computer. Bingo! The number belonged to a government office, one at the Ministry of Defense. Andrey sat back in his chair. So there was Yelnik, an unidentified doctor, and the mysterious military men. Andrey grimaced. It was all starting to come into terrible focus.
Night had fallen over Moscow. He was exhausted and starving, and he still had to stop and pick up some food for that shameless dog. Maybe some of those nasty brown pellets the commercials said were a guaranteed hit with hungry canine pests.
As he closed the office door behind him, Andrey looked one more time at Karavay’s desk, and the thought crossed his mind—without the bile he’d previously associated with her—that his intern had probably been asleep for hours already.
MASHA
But Masha was only just getting in bed.
She and Innokenty had driven back from the hospital in silence. Masha needed to let Dr. Gluzman’s lecture stew for a while. It was crazy, fantastical, impossible. But the impossible and fantastical fit so well into the pattern Masha had already spotted in the murders. It was logical, in an insane way. Masha’s studies of serial killers had taught her that insane yet logical justifications were their forte. She stared out at the Garden Ring Road flying by her window. She needed to get into the killer’s head. Who are you, Mr. Heavenly Jerusalem?
Expensive cars rushed by. Ah, Moscow. It was a city that never slept. Restaurants flashed by, too, and the lights from exclusive strip clubs. The last trolleybus of the night lumbered past, looking like a plant-eating dinosaur next to the Jaguars with their predatory grins. The bus was full of people with a very different look from that of the driver of the Porsche convertible waiting next to them at the stoplight. Masha frowned at his smug face.
“I bet our guy couldn’t afford a Porsche,” said Innokenty, seeming to read her mind. “He’s probably a bus rider. On the other hand, if they haven’t caught him yet, he must be well educated.”
The Sin Collector (Masha Karavai Detective Series) Page 7
