“She left me. Raya. Just like it always happens, for my best friend. For a little while, he really liked Asadov, too.” Andrey smiled again, and poured himself another shot. The vodka went down warm and smooth, and splashed into his empty stomach. His mood still wasn’t improving, but he was determined to finish the tale. “The problem was that she decided to leave me around the same time my father died of a stroke. There I was at his funeral, at the wake, and all I could think about was seeing her again, so she could console me or something, distract me from the nightmare at my parents’ house. Well, she did. She totally distracted me, no doubt about that. I could recite some Asadov for you, if you want. Romantic bullshit.” He tossed down another shot.
Masha smiled uncomfortably.
“A blow like that is nothing to laugh at, Karavay. Not when you’re seventeen. And especially when your head is full of corny poetry. But it turns out I’m a unique specimen! Indestructible! I flew off the fifth floor, and walked away with only scratches. I took too many sleeping pills, and they pumped my stomach. I even lay down on the train tracks, but the bastard hit the brakes in time, and they locked me up overnight for being an asshole. I would have tried some other things, but I started feeling bad for my mom, and I didn’t have enough imagination, anyway.”
Masha looked distraught.
“Did you think I’d give up sooner? I had to show some genuine dedication to get a job serving my motherland like this one!”
Masha moved to say something, but couldn’t make a sound. Instead, her eyes flashed suddenly, not with joy, but with a degrading, feminine pity, and something in her gaze made him tremble, made him desire the same thing he had hoped to find, so long ago, with Raya. Comfort. A reassuring hand on his shoulder.
But it’s way too late for that now, he thought, suddenly angry. And what right does she have to pity me? I’ve done enough of that for both of us!
“I understand,” Masha said suddenly, hiding her hands under the table as if trying to prevent them from reaching out to touch him. “That kind of thing can throw you off course. All you see in life is pain. It’s unbearable.”
“You understand, huh?” he said, smirking. Now Andrey was ashamed of his own cheap exhibitionism, and the mocking irony he had used to pose as the leading man in some sad romance turned abruptly into annoyance. The change was so powerful he could feel his eyes start to water.
“Is that right? You understand? What could you possibly understand, other than your serial killers? You play with them like Barbie dolls! You’re sick, Karavay! Who have you ever lost? You ever lose a love and a best friend and a father, all at once? You’re gonna tell me you know what it’s like to jump from a fifth-floor balcony? What has ever been wrong with your life? Not enough, what, truffles? Oh, I know!” Andrey laughed, loud enough that people at the other tables turned around to look. “They sent you last year’s collection from Italy!”
Masha stood up without saying a word. She put some cash down on the table and walked out of the café.
“You idiot!” Andrey shouted after her, even though he knew she probably couldn’t hear him. “You’re an idiot!” he called again, for the benefit of all those people at the other tables, who hurried to turn back around to their own plates.
The waiter brought Masha’s salad and his stew. But Andrey had lost his appetite. He finished his vodka, tossed some money on the table just like she had, and left.
Generally speaking, it is a bad idea to ever reveal any regrets in front of one’s pet. The animal might start to think its master capable of making mistakes, and that is impermissible, from the point of view both of the master’s reputation and the pet’s education. But Andrey had nobody to complain to but Marilyn Monroe.
“I’m such a jackass!” That had been Andrey’s refrain all morning, and he repeated it to the very understanding mutt again as he fried himself some eggs. “I’m a total jerk. First I play up what a poor victim I am, and then, when I get the effect I’m looking for, I turn on her and cuss her out! I’m a cretin, right?”
Marilyn Monroe’s furry face managed to express two things at once: You’re absolutely right! and You’re not a cretin at all! You’re the most wonderful person in the world! That reminded Andrey that he hadn’t fed his flunky yet. He sighed, and sliced the dog some sausage. Marilyn immediately switched his adoring gaze to the morsel in his bowl.
“You know what the worst part is? Yesterday she was acting like—” Andrey stopped to think and chew his eggs. Like a real friend, he thought. But he didn’t say that out loud, not even to Marilyn Monroe. It seemed fitting to call Masha Karavay a real friend, but also, somehow, disappointing. Andrey sighed, and pushed aside the cup with the rest of his instant coffee. He gave Marilyn a pat and walked out of the house, intending to make it in record time to Petrovka. And to Masha, damn it!
Half an hour later, when Andrey walked into the office and saw Masha’s part of the desk was empty, another sickening wave of guilt crashed over him. He picked up the phone, determined to call Masha all day, if he had to, until she answered. But then he remembered he didn’t have her number. Masha had always been the one to call him. He stood still for a second, then began rummaging through the pockets of the lighter denim jacket he reserved for warm weather. Somewhere in there should be a sturdy white business card, inscribed Innokenty Arzhenikov, Antiquarian in fancy calligraphy.
Innokenty Arzhenikov, antiquarian, would definitely have Masha’s phone number. And something told Andrey that Kenty knew it by heart.
Finally he found the elusive card. Innokenty answered.
“Hello,” said Andrey. “This is Andrey Yakovlev, Masha’s, um, boss.”
“Of course.” Andrey might have been imagining things, but he thought he caught a hint of irony in the antiquarian’s voice. “What can I do for you?”
“Masha isn’t at work,” Andrey said flatly. He was mad. “Given what’s been happening lately—” He paused.
“Right.” Innokenty sounded worried now, too. “That’s strange. Do you have her phone number? I’ll give it to you.”
Andrey wrote it down, said good-bye to Innokenty, and was just about to punch in Masha’s number when the telephone rang with an internal call. Anyutin was summoning him for a reckoning. Immediately.
Katyshev was waiting in the colonel’s office, too, trying to look as unobtrusive as possible, but Andrey knew the rules of this game. Without letting his eyes drift over to the prosecutor, he reported what he knew about the situation at Pushkin Square. The lack of clues and horrific crime scene matched the murderer’s signature. There was no doubt, Andrey told them, a serial killer was loose in Moscow. Anyutin and Katyshev exchanged a look.
“Any theories?” Anyutin asked Andrey.
The captain made his decision. “My intern, Maria Karavay, has a theory that is somewhat unusual, but fits the overall scenario very well.”
“Let’s have it,” said Katyshev, tilting his gray head to one side.
“Heavenly Jerusalem.” Andrey had never actually pronounced that magical combination of words out loud before, and they resonated strangely in the colonel’s office.
“How’s that?” asked Anyutin, sounding lost.
Katyshev just stared at Andrey without a word.
“Heavenly Jerusalem. It’s some sort of legend, from the Bible. A holy city in the sky,” Andrey said, beginning to feel ridiculous. “There are points all around Moscow that are symbolically connected with it or with the real Jerusalem. That’s where the bodies are turning up. At first, we weren’t sure why the killer was moving the bodies, or parts of them. We thought he was trying to cover his tracks, maybe confuse us about timing. But he wanted to point us to places connected with Jerusalem and with the Middle Ages. He even uses medieval execution methods. We actually brought a historian in on the case,” Andrey added coolly, looking Anyutin right in the eye. “Now he’s predicted where we might find the next body.”
“Ridiculous!” Anyutin blurted out, but Katyshev hushed him.
By the time Andrey returned to his desk an hour later, he knew that his bosses believed him. Or, at least, they wanted to believe him. Andrey couldn’t blame them for being skeptical. He couldn’t completely believe it himself, even now. He needed to do some more digging. He would try to talk Anyutin into assigning a team to the case. They needed more help than a lone antiquarian could provide. He hadn’t forgotten about apologizing to Masha, but his guilt had dissipated a little. How many times had he stressed to Anyutin that this bold theory was all the intern’s work? It was kind of humiliating, sure, but it was only fair to give her the credit.
He really should try to reach her. But he also had a crapload of work to do.
MASHA
Masha was sitting on her bedroom floor in the empty apartment, listening over and over to her and Kenty’s interviews. Books were heaped around her bed, stacked up on the chair, covering every inch of her desk. She was too tired to read, so now she was listening, thinking there must be something in their intonation, in the pauses between their words, in the subtle modulations of their voices, that could reveal a secret. A clue that would give her insight into those damn numbers written in blood, carved into skin, shaved into scalps. A broken medal. Bracelets on a dead wrist. Masha could almost hear the killer who collected sins whispering just over her shoulder: Seven, eight, nine, ten . . . Ready or not, here I come!
She shook her heavy head like a horse trying to scare off a fly and rewound the tape to the first recording.
“But I don’t think Slava ever had a real girlfriend before me. He wasn’t all that attractive, really. He was a joker. Skinny, kind of a wimp. I don’t have, like, a maternal instinct when it comes to men—”
Masha looked up at the photograph on the wall. Her father looked down at her with his usual calm warmth.
“It’s been another year, Papa,” Masha whispered. “And I still haven’t figured it out. What use am I? I’ve been trying so hard.”
At twelve, Masha had put her dolls away, and started playing with maniacs and monsters instead. The young Masha had a ninety-six-page lined notebook, but it wasn’t for song lyrics, or photos of pop stars, or dried flowers. It did not contain friendship oaths or names of cute boys from school. No, not quite.
Instead, it had a sketch of Gilles de Rais. He was the world’s first convicted serial killer, a comrade-in-arms of Joan of Arc, and the inspiration for Bluebeard. He tortured and killed over one hundred forty children in his medieval castle. Then there was a reproduction of a lovely watercolor of Darya Saltykova wearing a lace bonnet. She was a pious widow with a fondness for using hot curling irons to batter her serfs. She also had a picture of Ted Bundy, the American serial killer who raped, tortured, and killed women from 1974 to 1978—and who practically made serial killers fashionable—and the darling young David Berkowitz, who operated from 1976 to 1977.
The Soviets were all there, too—Chikatilo, Slivko, and Golovkin—notable for just how ordinary they looked. She had newspaper clippings, printouts from web pages, carefully notated tables classifying mental pathologies, analyses of criminal profiles, and excerpts from the memoirs of FBI agents who specialized in catching serial killers. The excerpts Masha had copied out herself, point by point, when she was fourteen. (1) Think of yourself as a hunter. (2) Become a psychologist to discover how your victim thinks. (3) Craft the perfect plan to lure the victim onto safe ground. (4) The hunter cannot afford to make mistakes.
And there were pages and pages of quotes. Quotes from Chikatilo’s interrogation. Quotes from Robert Ressler, the real-life detective who people say inspired The Silence of the Lambs. Quotes by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, whose groundbreaking Psychopathia Sexualis was published in 1886. There were even quotes from Sherlock Holmes, which were comparatively lighthearted in this company. Her favorite line was “Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home.”
Two theories. There had been two theories about her father’s death. The first, and most likely, was that it was a contract killing. Fyodor Karavay had a brilliance and sense of humor that allowed him to emerge triumphant from even the most complicated trials. There are always a few star lawyers in any legal sky, but the elder Karavay was undoubtedly the brightest of them all. He was known to quote Shakespeare fluently when defending a jealous husband. He hauled antique statues into court to demonstrate the angles at which a victim might or might not have been stabbed. He educated the judges, he confounded them, he made them laugh. But most of all, Karavay taught them to question their assumption that they’d always support the prosecution. He taught them judicial ethics. And they learned from him.
Once university students started to sit in on Karavay’s trials, Masha’s father had felt emboldened to take on a different category of cases. Karavay began representing journalists accused of slander, families whose children had been attacked by skinheads, and ministry officials accused of espionage.
Karavay had his enemies, certainly, and there were any number of people who might have had him killed out of simple spite. That kind of murder, halfheartedly disguised as a robbery gone wrong, was a very popular way out of sticky situations for a certain class of powerful people at the time. Masha had eavesdropped outside the kitchen door while Nick-Nick tried to explain to her mother that, even if they could catch the person who’d stabbed her husband three times, they’d probably never ID the man who’d ordered the hit. It was typical for hitmen not to know who they were working for—that way, they couldn’t rat anyone out, which the cops didn’t mind one bit. Why would they want to dig too deep into the schemes brewed up by local bigshots? It was a dead end.
“Is there a second theory, then?” Mama had asked, her voice flat and dull, and little Masha had pressed her ear to the door so hard it hurt.
“Well . . .” Nick-Nick had probably waved his hand in dismissal. “It’s a silly one. Not really worth considering. Over the past five years, there have been a handful of murders around Moscow with similar types of wounds inflicted. Petrovka is exploring the idea of a serial killer.”
Masha remembered the silence that had fallen on the other side of that door. Then she’d heard the sound of a stool being hastily pushed back and a drinking glass falling over. The syrupy smell of the Valocordin Mama was taking for her nerves had seeped out from under the door.
Months later, Masha had asked Nick-Nick a question. He was still stopping by regularly at that point, trying and failing to get Natasha to talk to him. He and Masha always ended up playing chess instead.
“How do you catch a serial killer?”
Nick-Nick had peered at Masha from under his eyebrows. “It’s not easy. Serial killers are not so much a criminal-justice problem as an anthropological one.” When he’d seen the perplexed expression on Masha’s face, he’d smiled. “That means we don’t really understand how a person can take pleasure in killing. In most cases, serial killers are mentally competent, and they lead seemingly normal lives. They go to work, love their wives, raise their children . . . Why, then? One fine day—or night, or morning—why does a model family man put down his crossword puzzle and go out to murder someone? And if we can’t figure out why, then how are we going to find him? What clues would we have? Detectives also have another important challenge: How can they anticipate the killer’s next victim, pick them out of millions of ordinary people?”
That was the first step down a long road. That was the day Masha found purpose. From the two possible explanations of her father’s murder, she’d picked the second, less likely option. Contract killings, back in the late 1990s, were too ordinary. If it were a serial killer, though, that was strange, exceptional, and—according to Sir Conan Doyle—there was hope of finding the killer after all! She just needed to understand him. That understanding would help Masha finally banish the terror and grief that kept waking her up at night in a cold sweat. Every time it happened, she was relieved to realize she’d
only been dreaming, until she remembered that her nightmare was all too real.
Masha finally tore her gaze away from her father’s portrait. She stood up, gathered all the library books in an enormous shopping bag, grabbed the key to her stepfather’s car, and headed for the front door. Suddenly, she turned and ran back to her bedroom to check an address on the computer. She heard her phone ringing, but she ignored it. There was someone who could help her! Why hadn’t she thought of it before?
A thunderstorm was rolling in. The birds had fallen silent in anticipation, the old trees stretched upward as if preparing for battle, and the light-yellow hospital building in the depths of the park almost glowed in contrast with the darkness moving in from the south. Masha dashed through the humid air into the lobby, where an air conditioner hummed quietly.
“I’d like to see Professor Gluzman,” she told the receptionist.
“Do you have an appointment?” the girl asked sternly.
“No.”
The girl dialed a number, listened for a second, and then hung up.
“I’m afraid Professor Gluzman cannot see anyone right now.”
“I must see him,” Masha told her firmly. She pulled her Petrovka credentials out of her bag and gave the receptionist a strict look. The woman frowned, and Masha cringed a little at throwing her weight around like this.
“I’ll call someone to escort you,” the girl said drily.
A nurse silently led Masha to Gluzman’s room. Masha never would have been able to find the right door herself in that endless corridor, as white and featureless as a hallway in some sci-fi thriller. The nurse knocked. When a voice inside told them to come in, she stepped aside and let Masha enter. Inside, the room was dimly lit. Gluzman’s lap was draped with a blanket, and he was wearing pajamas. He sat facing the window, continuously smoothing the blanket over his knees, apparently bewitched by the scene outside. The rain had not yet started falling, but the wind had picked up, sending the summertime dust spinning.
The Sin Collector (Masha Karavai Detective Series) Page 18
