The Sin Collector (Masha Karavai Detective Series)

by Daria Desombre

  Alma offered him a low stool, and perched herself on the edge of the tub.

  “Sorry about this,” she said, nodding at the door. The many-voiced clamor of the big family rumbled on outside their refuge. “What did you want to ask me about?”

  “Well, you see,” said Andrey, pulling some paperwork out of his briefcase, “I’m investigating a case that might be connected to your son’s death.”

  “Did they cut up another soldier?” Kutiyeva asked with a bitter laugh. “Or is this about the money?”

  “What money?” asked Andrey, frowning.

  “They already offered me money,” said Alma, lifting her head. “Must have felt bad, I guess.”

  Andrey, worried, said nothing.

  “You didn’t know?” Alma shoved a hand into the pocket of her old green robe. “A detective came to see me, someone from the Military Prosecutor’s Office. He had a suitcase. He asked me very nicely to forget about it, but my brother and I kicked him out. We don’t sell out our dead.”

  Andrey could see her clenching her hand into a fist under the ragged flannel.

  “They brought my boy home without his insides! Gutted like a chicken! And they claimed he killed himself! What do they think, that we live out in the provinces, we’d never come here to Moscow to fight back? Did they think his mother wouldn’t figure it out? That nobody would speak up for him?” Alma was shouting now.

  Outside the bathroom, on the other hand, things had gone suspiciously quiet. Andrey pictured them all standing out there and listening. He frowned again, hard.

  “I found other mothers! Their sons served in the same places mine did. All boys without fathers, too! Who’s going to protect them? Well, I am. I’ve been in Moscow six months already, and I got them to put a good detective on the case. One from Khabarovsk, like us.”

  Andrey pulled out Yelnik’s photo and handed it to Alma.

  “Could this be your detective, the one from the Military Prosecutor’s Office?”

  Alma quieted down for a moment and slowly drew her hand out of her pocket. She took the picture, then gave it right back to Andrey, as if just looking at it made her sick.

  “That’s him,” she said, her voice suddenly tired.

  “All right,” said Andrey. “Was anyone else at home when he came by?”

  “Just me.” Alma thought a bit. “Then my brother came home. Like I said, we kicked him out.”

  “All right,” said Andrey again. Then abruptly, he took her hand. “I’m really sorry.”

  Alma jumped and pulled sharply away from his touch, and Andrey berated himself. Here she was a Muslim woman, and he was a strange man, sitting with her in these intimate quarters. A bathroom full of laundry! Andrey stood up and tucked Yelnik’s photo away.

  “I’m very sorry. Thank you. I think I’ll be going.”

  She led him silently out of the bathroom, guided him past her relatives into the hallway, and saw him off with a “good-bye” as emotionless as the sound of the door locking behind her.

  Andrey sat awhile on the bench outside the building and smoked. So, then, one more piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. Yelnik had come here himself. Why? Andrey looked thoughtfully at the lilac trees waving in the breeze. Someone had planted them around the neighborhood garbage heap, and they had bloomed early this year. After seeing in the paper that one of the mothers had figured it out, that she was coming to Moscow and making a stink, Yelnik had come here to buy her off—then kill her if she refused the money. But Alma’s brother had shown up and Yelnik had put off finishing his plan. Then someone had finished him off instead. Alma had escaped death thanks to a medieval riddler. Andrey tossed the butt of his cigarette in the trash bin and rubbed his eyes.

  It was time to go home to Marilyn Monroe.

  MASHA

  Masha and Innokenty stood waiting at the apartment door, both of them uncomfortable. Masha felt awkward because she knew they were about to ask one of Innokenty’s acquaintances from his secret world of collectors about the vilest thing they knew: theft. Innokenty probably felt awkward because he didn’t know how today’s visit would affect his future business dealings.

  The door finally swung open to reveal a gaunt elderly man in a faded old shirt and pants that had been ironed to a shine.

  “Pyotr Arkadyevich Kokushkin,” the collector introduced himself. His breath smelled of cheap sausage.

  Masha forced herself not to shoot an astonished look in Innokenty’s direction. He, meanwhile, seemed to have lost the keen sense of smell he was so proud of. He grasped the hand shot through with dark veins and contorted with arthritis, shook it heartily, and introduced Masha. Kokushkin muttered something welcoming and ushered them inside. It was completely dark in the apartment, and the only sound they could hear was the old man closing the door and setting at least ten locks in place. Then Masha felt a gentle prod at her back. Feeling her way along, she moved down the dark corridor.

  The apartment stank of the frailty of old age: medicine, dust, mothballs. Finally, Kokushkin turned on a light, a single bulb hanging in the middle of the hall, and Masha gasped. Every wall was hung with pictures, crowded so tightly together it was impossible to see the wallpaper underneath. Lithographs, watercolors, pencil sketches, and scenes from the theater done in gouache paint. She saw famous signatures: Dobuzhinsky, Somov, Bakst. Masha froze in front of a sketch for the Ballets Russes, until she received another slight but palpable nudge. She turned around.

  “This is for Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, yes,” Kokushkin grumbled in agreement, and Innokenty winked at her. Masha hoped that meant she was making a good impression.

  The room they entered was no less claustrophobic. The window looked out onto the wall of another building, and it was covered with a metal grate. There was no sign of any attempt to make the place cozy. No curtains, no flowers on the windowsill. A bookshelf stood in the corner, stuffed with volumes about art. There was one armchair, and a small dining set from the seventies. The place was like a remote, provincial hotel before perestroika. But the walls! Just like in the hall, they were covered in artwork. Masha walked along one wall, fascinated. She saw photo collages by Rodchenko, classical still lifes by Robert Falk, Nathan Altman, and Aleksandr Deyneka, and original book illustrations by Vladimir Lebedev and El Lissitzky. Masha was no expert on avant-garde Russian art or surrealism, but even she could tell that a fortune hung on these walls. Innokenty watched her, obviously pleased. The old man trudged into the kitchen, where a kettle was already whistling.

  He returned soon, his felt house slippers flapping, and poured the tea into old cups with chipped rims. Masha took a sip of the almost-transparent brew. It tasted like old straw. Innokenty had somehow smuggled in a box of candy, and now he took it out with a flourish.

  “Drunken cherries?” Kokushkin grinned in delight, rushing to rip the gleaming wrapper off the box.

  Innokenty smiled. “Your favorite.”

  “Ah, you remembered! You know what an old man likes!” Kokushkin’s wrinkled face filled with a look of sweet rapture, which did not fit his physiognomy in the slightest. He grabbed a piece and tucked it away inside one cheek. “I never buy myself chocolate. My whole life, there’s just two things I’ve loved: art and candy. I had to sacrifice one for the other. Actually, I sacrificed everything, not just candy!”

  His Adam’s apple jumped as he gulped some sweet saliva. Then he turned to look at Masha, a little more favorably this time.

  “Young as you are, you must be thinking, here I am, an old man sitting on a fortune, and I won’t even buy myself candy. A real miser, right? You wouldn’t believe all the people who have come to see me. Vultures from the bank, idiots who think it might be fun to invest in art. Ha! Nobody in Russia has any brains left! No honor, either, and no taste! We had art, once. We had one moment of greatness, and then it was gone, thank you very much to the Father of Nations, that champion of realism, all those Repins and Surikovs and their ilk! Get out of
here, I told those dirtbags, go invest in your Aivazovskys and Makovskys, for God’s sake! But keep your dirty hands off my babies! Here’s what I’ve got for you!”

  Kokushkin’s bony old hand flipped into an obscene gesture, and he thrust it proudly into the air. Masha gaped, alarmed and embarrassed by the man’s fury and by the chocolate-tinted spray from his lips.

  Exhausted by this outburst, Kokushkin started coughing. Kenty had to pound on his skinny, bent back, and lift the man’s teacup to his lips. Their host slurped at the hot water, then sank, panting, into his armchair, which was covered with dainty flowers and less-than-dainty rips and tears.

  “One of those little morons showed up here to fuss over me. Psychologists, they call themselves. This one said he’s writing his dissertation on how collectors think differently from other people. He even thought up a system to classify us, the idiot!”

  “Really?” asked Innokenty with a smile.

  “He thinks we collect because of childhood trauma. That we just have to collect something, anything. As if I didn’t even care what I collected! Stamps, candy wrappers, tchotchkes, whatever. Tchotchkes! ‘Sure, or I could collect jackasses,’ I told him, but he didn’t get the hint. ‘For you, Mr. Kokushkin,’ this jackass told me, ‘collecting is a psychological need dictated by your fear of death.’ Must have gotten that idea from that old quack Freud. ‘Collecting things protects you from the future and preserves your past.’ For God’s sake, what kind of past do I have that I should want to preserve it? My parents, shot? My two years in the gulag? And the future! In the future, this headshrinker said, we’ll have more and more of the investment types of collectors. You already know what I think about them.”

  Masha sat and listened to the diatribe, uncomfortable. Even as he held forth, Kokushkin was racing through the box of candy. When it seemed completely empty, Innokenty winked at Masha again and lifted the padded sheet of paper, uncovering another whole level of treats. The old man grinned, and he picked up a new piece, turning it around lovingly in his fingers.

  “That fool also told me about a type of collector who’s mostly interested in the social aspect of collecting. Like dumb kids, you know? He said when a couple collects the same things, they’re less likely to get divorced. Poppycock! I only had one love affair in my life, in the late forties, and she wasn’t some silly little biddy. Never scolded me for not giving her silk stockings, nothing like that. But when I told her I wanted to buy a fascinating miniature by Somov, the woman went reactionary on me! She told me I was fetishizing bourgeois art, the fool!”

  Kokushkin turned to Masha. “What about you, young lady? Do you like Somov?”

  “Yes, very much,” Masha said honestly. But even if she didn’t, even if she agreed with the long-lost lover that Somov was sort of petit bourgeois, Masha wouldn’t have had the courage to admit it.

  “There you have it,” said Kokushkin, smacking his lips. “There’s a new generation now. Maybe they’ll have better taste. And there was one last part to his classification scheme.” Another in a long line of chocolates left its cushy, gold-plated nest. “This moron from the university told me that people collect art when they already have everything else. A house, a garden, suits from Savile Row. You know what really kills me, young lady? The idea that art is just a way to decorate their tawdry palaces in Rublyovka or some other ritzy suburb. Know how I bought my first paintings? There I was, still a grad student, a lab assistant. My salary was a joke. I couldn’t buy myself shoes, much less an estate. I bought my Lebedev then—for pennies, but even at that I didn’t eat for two weeks. I drank cheap kefir, I bummed bread from friends, I went around with holes in my socks. I let my beard grow so I wouldn’t have to buy razors. All I ever did for fun was wander around antique shops and run errands for old women, who later sold me these priceless canvases at a friendly price. Pretty soon everyone knew who I was, and you know what they called me? Crazy Pierrot, like the clown! Now I’m always getting calls from the Tretyakov Gallery, inviting me to their parties. They think if they get me drunk on cheap champagne, I might leave my collection to them. But these paintings are like my children. It won’t be too long till I die. Who can I trust to take care of them?”

  Suddenly, the acrimony vanished, and the old man was all sentimentality, his eyes misting over. The transition was startling. This man could bring an audience to tears, thought Masha. His performance was worthy of Stanislavsky.

  Out loud, she said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Kokushkin, you have some time to think about it. You’re still in very good shape! As it happens, Innokenty and I came to talk to you about the Chagall you lost a while back.”

  “Come with me.” Kokushkin stood up with a wheeze and stalked out of the room.

  Kenty and Masha exchanged looks, then followed him farther down the hall.

  Kokushkin opened the door to a narrow room, and Masha and Kenty found themselves staring dumbly at a toilet, its plastic seat yellowed with age.

  “You’re looking in the wrong place,” the old man croaked. He pointed around to the other side of the door. There, hanging perfectly at eye level for anyone sitting on the toilet, was a landscape of a Belarusian village by Marc Chagall. There were no lovers flying off into the dense aquamarine sky, but Masha—much as she did admire Somov—was always swept off her feet by Chagall. She gasped quietly in appreciation. Kokushkin was clearly pleased.

  “That’s right. Those oligarchs might piss in golden toilets, but I’ve got a Chagall in front of my pisser! The older I get—and you know I’m not modest about these things anymore—I have the honor and the pleasure of staring at this little Chagall of mine many times every day, for a good long while, too.” Kokushkin pulled the door shut. “Is that the painting you’re wondering about?”

  Masha nodded. “Yes.”

  Kokushkin headed back to the living room and sat down stiffly in his armchair.

  “They stole it from me. I get robbed all the time. It’s the cross a lot of collectors have to bear. Six months ago, they ripped off that Chagall, then a month later the police brought it back. I remember thinking they must have finally learned to do their job. I didn’t ask any questions—they just turned it over, thank God. A few years back I testified against a sonovabitch who robbed me and a couple of my friends. He got off, believe it or not! There he was, his face like a brick, the asshole! I’ll teach you to take my Zinochka, I thought—I had this wonderful study by Zinaida Serebriakova missing—you’re gonna rot in jail, you pig! Later Ardov told me—and he lost even more than me, ten paintings gone—that the thief had been hired by one of those gazillionaires to beef up his collection. So the guy was very selective. He knew what his boss wanted. He knew how to work the court, too.”

  Kokushkin nodded to himself for a bit, and Masha took advantage of the lull to take a file full of photographs out of her bag.

  “Mr. Kokushkin, I have a strange favor to ask of you. But I think, maybe, with a professional’s visual memory—” Masha laid out several enlarged photos of the arm found on Red Square the past winter.

  “Well now.” The old man put on some ancient glasses held together with tape. He looked the picture over for a while, frowning in revulsion. “I recognize it. Sure. That’s him. The one who took my Zinaida.”

  Masha froze. “Are you sure?” she asked, not quite believing her own luck.

  Kokushkin pushed the photo away impatiently. “Listen up, young lady. I’ve got arthritis, osteoarthrosis, bad veins, and high blood pressure. But I’m not senile yet! No problem there! The lout’s name was Samuilov. He had two tattoos on his fingers. The whole time I was testifying, he was digging around in his ears with those fingers. Looks like he can’t do that anymore!”

  “No, he can’t,” Masha said quietly, picturing a one-armed body rotting in a ravine somewhere. She gathered up the photographs and put them back in her bag. “Thank you very much, Mr. Kokushkin. You can’t imagine how much you’ve helped us.”

  “Oh, I can imagine.” Kokushkin was still grumbling,
but he was obviously flattered.

  After a certain amount of ceremony at the door, she and Innokenty finally made their exit.

  “There’s nobody like that old guy!” said Kenty enthusiastically as they walked down the stairs. “I’ve met a few collectors in my time, but there are legends about Kokushkin. He could be rich as Croesus, certainly have enough for electricity, groceries, even his precious candy. He only parts with a painting when he can exchange it for one he wants more. You didn’t even see his bedroom or his pantry. He’s got canvases lined up there in rows, facing the walls, and he knows where everything is. He’ll pull out whatever picture he likes, give it some light, dust it off, and hang it up—maybe in the bathroom!”

  “He really did help us out, Kenty,” Masha responded. “Now we know that the arm they found with the stolen Chagall belonged to a professional thief.”

  “Well, we could have guessed that, seeing as the painting was stolen.”

  “Sure, but now we can do some more digging about that guy, and—”

  “Maybe, my dear,” said Kenty, shrugging. “But it seems to me that the arm could be more like a symbol for thievery. We’ve been trying to figure out why these people, specifically, were murdered, right? With this Samuilov, it seems more straightforward than the others, doesn’t it?”

  Masha nodded, still thinking.

  Back at home, Masha hung up the phone, dumbstruck. Katya’s mother had just told her, in a strangled whisper, that Katya was dead. She had driven full speed into a concrete barricade on Nikolskaya Street. Death was instantaneous. The funeral would be Friday.

  Masha’s mother walked in and asked, annoyed, where Masha had left their car this time. When her daughter turned around to face her, Natasha saw with a start that something was terribly wrong.

  “What happened?” she asked, taking her daughter’s clammy hand.

  Masha said nothing, just stared at her mother the way she used to stare at her father, pleadingly. Please make my pet beetle come back to life! Please don’t let the wolf eat Little Red Riding Hood! Please tell me that you, of all people, will never, ever die . . . Please!