Vodka

by Boris Starling

  “That’s not what I meant, Syoma.” Sidorouk had assumed that Irk wanted to bribe him to falsify results. “I need your honest appraisal. It’s just that”—Irk waved helplessly at the body—“would you want to investigate that?”

  Sidorouk shrugged. Irk understood that the gesture was one of indifference rather than indecision. Sidorouk dealt with cadavers the way mechanics treat cars, midway between affection and exasperation, with a pitying condescension aimed at those who did not understand. To Sidorouk, corpses were objects to be examined and dissected, stepping-stones on the path to truth. It made no difference to him whether they were young or old, thin or fat, beautiful or ugly; he showed no interest in the kind of person they might have been. In a pathologist, it was an excellent quality; in an investigator, thought Irk, it would have been disastrous.

  Irk wondered how much of Sidorouk’s attitude stemmed from the way other people treated him. It wasn’t that they saw the Chechen first and the person second; they simply saw the Chechen, and that was enough to discourage further interest. As an Estonian, Irk was an outsider too, but he knew there was a difference between white outsiders and black outsiders.

  “It’s the season for deaths, Juku.”

  “It’s always the season for deaths.” Numbers were worse in times of upheaval, but upheaval was constant. In the thirties there had been collectivization, in the forties, war; liberalization in the fifties, retrenchment in the sixties; the seventies had brought stagnation, the eighties perestroika; and now this, freedom or anarchy, depending on whether your vodka glass was half full or half empty.

  “Have you ever investigated a drowning before?” Sidorouk asked. Irk shook his head. “Right, first things first: let’s find out how long it’s been there.” Irk sighed inwardly. The moment Sidorouk had an audience, he treated every autopsy as an opportunity to lecture. Irk had long ago realized that it was easier simply to play along; trying to rush Sidorouk only doubled the journey.

  “The body’s temperature matches that of the river. Bodies in water cool at about three degrees centigrade per hour, twice as fast as they do in air. If the water’s warm, they reach the water temperature within five or six hours; if it’s cold, as it is now, twice that. So let’s say the cadaver’s been there twelve hours, minimum; that’s too long an immersion to run diagnostic tests for blood gravity or plasma chloride levels, even if I could get my damn machines to work.”

  “That doesn’t help me, Syoma. Vladimir was definitely alive on Sunday afternoon, he was definitely dead on Wednesday evening—that’s three days unaccounted for, I need something more specific. What about that?” Irk gestured to the boy’s neck and chest, patched in greening bronze. “Does that tell you anything?”

  “Post-aquatic putrefaction. That’s happened since it was pulled out of the river. Changes happen very fast once a corpse is exposed to the air. Nothing to do with how long it had been in the water.”

  “It,” “the body,” “the cadaver”; Irk envied Sidorouk his facility with the dead, his ability to dehumanize them. Irk came to the mortuary as seldom as he could manage, and when he did he spent as little time there as possible; he didn’t chat to the assistants or poke around the freezer cabinets. Hundreds of people worked there, in the Ministry of Health’s criminal biological department, but Sidorouk was the only one whom Irk knew either by sight or name. It was a world Irk found alien and frightening. There was talk at Petrovka, the central police headquarters, that one of the mortuary assistants, dealing with the body of a catwalk model, had found her charms unblighted by death. Irk knew there was no correlation between how comfortable a detective felt in the autopsy room and his ability to solve a crime—some of the biggest idiots in homicide seemed practically to live in the morgue—but still; this was an aspect of the job he felt he should be handling with more aplomb.

  He shook his head as a dog would when emerging from a lake; he needed to concentrate.

  “So.” Sidorouk clapped his hands. “Now for the main course. Let’s see if this is going to be one of yours or not, eh? This isn’t as easy as it sounds; it can be very difficult to tell whether a body drowned or not. Immersion artifacts occur in any corpse which has been submerged in water, irrespective of cause of death. There are no autopsy findings exclusively pathonomic of drowning, so we have to prove that the victim was alive on entering the water, and exclude the presence of natural, traumatic and toxicological causes of death. Only then can we be sure that the victim drowned.”

  “To put it plainly, then, it’s a process of elimination.”

  “Exactly. If it is one of yours, you’ll know before you’ll know that it’s not, if you see what I mean.” Sidorouk chuckled and bent over the body; Irk saw veins tracing paths across his crown like those of the Volga River as its delta splays into the Caspian. “Let’s see what the injuries tell us. You see how the body is largely exsanguinated?” Irk nodded; the boy was less discolored than whitewashed. “That’s not surprising. Immersion leaches blood from ante- and postmortem wounds alike. It’ll be virtually impossible even to tell the difference this long afterward.”

  Sidorouk examined the sparse blotches of dusky cyan on the boy’s head and neck. “Cuts and bruises. Again, that’s exactly what I’d expect. Corpses in water always lie facedown, with the head hanging lower than the rest of the body, so it’s these parts that take the brunt of the battering.” He moved slowly down the body. “Three parallel chops, here on the left forearm—propeller cuts, perhaps.”

  “Propeller cuts? How many boats have you seen on the river lately?”

  “Good point. Two straight cuts on the sternum, arranged perpendicular to each other. You see them? The ones that look like an angled ‘T’?”

  “Too neat to be accidental, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes.” Sidorouk pressed at them. “But they’re quite shallow. Not halfway fatal.”

  Irk nodded thoughtfully. “Abusive father? Juvenile gangs? Self-mutilation?”

  “You’re the detective, Juku, you tell me. Tell me this too: what kind of equipment did they use when they fished it out?”

  “Grappling irons, hooks—oh, and ropes as well. He was wedged up against a buttress.”

  “Well, they’re clumsy oafs. Tell them to be more careful next time.” Sidorouk pointed to grazing down by the waist and a gash across the left thigh. “These look like recovery injuries.”

  Sidorouk examined Vladimir all the way down to the toes, his face so close to the body that Irk thought of a sniffer dog, and then straightened with a shake of the head. “Nothing conclusive either way, I’m afraid. And the waters are further muddied—if you’ll excuse my phrasing—by the fact that cold water’s involved. Have you ever heard of vagal inhibition?” He didn’t give Irk the chance to respond. “A sudden and dramatic change in temperature can prompt cardiac arrest or laryngeal shock: instant loss of consciousness, followed by death. It’s still drowning, but atypically so. Pathologically, instant unconsciousness is hard to discern from a prior state of the same; the symptoms can be confusing.” Sidorouk’s goatee stretched around his grin. “You may want to go outside for a cigarette now, Juku.”

  Irk stepped into the corridor and lit up under a no-smoking sign. The first drag made him feel even more light-headed than before, and the sounds from behind the screen doors didn’t help: the petulant whine of an electric saw as it battered against bone, a satisfied squelch as it cut through tissue. Sidorouk’s disembodied head appeared around the corner.

  “You’ve gone even whiter than before.” He was amused, not concerned. “Pack your earplugs next time. Ready when you are.”

  It was bad enough that Sidorouk was so obviously enjoying Irk’s discomfort; what was worse was that Irk couldn’t think of a single thing he could do to return the favor. He walked back into the autopsy room and almost turned right around again; the boy had been sliced open, three cuts forming a perfect ‘Y’ from shoulders to sternum and sternum to waist.

  Sidorouk was cradling a lung as though
it were a lapdog. Patterned in marbles of gray and crimson, it shifted over the inside of his forearms as he moved; it looked like a water balloon, a saturated bladder, voluminous and bulky. Irk peered from lung to cadaver and back again. He couldn’t see how one had fit into the other. Sidorouk placed the lung on the table.

  “You see the lighter zones, here and here?” He indicated patches of pink and mustard yellow. “Those are the areas of more aerated tissue. You want to feel it? No? It’s doughy, and pits on pressure. Look—” Sidorouk’s finger seemed to disappear as he poked at it. “It’s not an unpleasant sensation, you know. Pass me that knife there, would you?” Irk’s hand hovered uncertainly over a stainless steel tray. “Not that one, the one two along. Yes, that one. It’s just like being in the kitchen, isn’t it? Do you cook, Juku?”

  Sidorouk sliced into the lung. Dirty water spurted from the gash and flowed over the edge of the table. If Irk had been a moment later in stepping back, his shoes and trousers would have been soaked. He thought he was going to be sick.

  “As I thought.” Sidorouk seemed pleased. “No fluid.”

  Irk pointed at the spreading pool on the floor. “Then what the hell’s that?”

  “Oh, that’s water.” He sniffed. “The river’s finest, by the smell of it. No, I was looking for fluid, the sort you get when air and water have been actively inspired. Passive flooding of lungs with water looks quite different. Not that this proves anything, mind you. The fluid’s not always there, and when it is, it’s indistinguishable from that caused by a pulmonary edema.”

  “The sort you get in head injuries?”

  “Lenin be praised, they teach you something in cop school after all. Head injuries, yes; also heart failures and drug overdoses. Anyway, there’s no sign.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means—no, it suggests—that you might be getting this case whether you like it or not.”

  “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “A man should take pride in his work, Juku. The days seem so long otherwise.”

  Sidorouk tripped happily over to a set of scales and lifted a small bag from the bowl.

  “Stomach?” said Irk queasily.

  “Juku! You’ll be after my job next.” Sidorouk looked closer at Irk’s face. “Perhaps not. Yes, the stomach—and it’s as good as empty. Drowning victims tend to swallow all kinds of material: water, of course, but also sand, silt, weeds, and other foreign matter. When it comes to the Moscow, you could probably make a nuclear bomb with all the shit that’s floating around in there; it’s moot as to whether you’d drown or be poisoned first. Where was I?”

  “Empty stomach.”

  “Oh, yes. Talking of which, have you had lunch?” Irk clamped his teeth together and shook his head. “Probably for the best. Anyway—when the victim’s dead before it enters the water, very little matter gets as far as the stomach. What you find is usually confined to the pharynx, trachea and larger airways.” He held the stomach out toward Irk. “Hold this, will you?”

  “Fuck off.”

  Sidorouk laughed. “You should see yourself.”

  “Just get on with it.”

  Sidorouk put the stomach back in its bowl, returned to the corpse and lifted its right hand. “What do you see?”

  The hand was clean and flat. “Nothing.”

  “Precisely. Victims struggling in water tend to clutch at whatever objects they can, objects that can be very hard to dislodge from fists in cadaveric spasm. But there are none here. There’s nothing under the fingernails either. I even checked for bruises to the scaleni and pectoral muscles from thrashing around. No sign.”

  Irk pointed at a russet patch that ran over the boy’s left collarbone. “Then, what’s that?”

  “Hemoglobin inhibition, I would imagine. Uneven putrefaction can cause such areas to develop in the muscle. It’s easy to confuse this with hemorrhaging.”

  Irk sighed. “There’s not much doubt, is there?”

  Sidorouk gestured extravagantly toward the corpse, a waiter showing off the chef’s special. “Investigator Irk, I present to you your latest case. And don’t bother asking me to look for fingerprints or hair strands or bodily fluids either. They’ll all have been sluiced off long ago.”

  Petrovka—technically, number 38 Petrovka Street, the headquarters of the Moscow police—hulked a dirty beige, shabby and in need of a good cleaning. The grime was almost comforting on Petrovka’s hideous main building; on the winged porticos that faced north and south down the street, however, it seemed an affront.

  You could distill vodka in the time it took for the elevator to arrive. Irk climbed the stairs to the fifth floor, and reflected ruefully on the panting evidence that he was getting no younger. He was still catching his breath when he saw that there was someone in his office—someone sitting in his chair, in fact. Sabirzhan.

  “A rare pleasure,” Irk said as he entered. “All the Lubyanka men I know see us as second-class citizens. They’d rather stick pins in their eyes than slum it in Petrovka. So to what do I owe the honor?”

  “There’s no need for you to get involved in the Vladimir Kullam case, Investigator.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m personally conducting Red October’s internal investigation into this tragedy, and I need hardly remind you of my qualifications in this matter. Vladimir Kullam’s father works at Red October. The distillery is being privatized. That makes it a political case.” The public prosecutor’s office investigated all crimes except political ones and those involving foreigners—those went to the MSB, the KGB’s successor organization. “A very sensitive political case, at that. You can imagine how twitchy the government will be about anything that threatens to derail the reform program. You’re also no doubt aware of … of an incident on Saturday evening? At a florist’s in Zamoskvareche?”

  The Chechens, Irk thought, always the Chechens, first to be blamed for everything. “Karkadann’s shop?”

  Sabirzhan nodded. “A triple homicide. Which I believe Yerofeyev is handling.”

  “Or not, as the case may be.” Yerofeyev was Irk’s counterpart in the organized crime division. Homicide, Irk’s section, handled only non-Mafia killings, even though murder and the Mafia were hardly strangers.

  “I spoke to him just now. Active work for the solution of the case is not being done at the present time.” The doublespeak was pure Soviet; Sabirzhan’s voice carried no mimicry.

  “Shelved within twenty-four hours, if I remember rightly. Something of a record, even by Yerofeyev’s standards. It was one of yours, along with Karkadann’s wife and child, is that right?” Sabirzhan nodded. “Yerofeyev would have beaten Pontius Pilate to the basin on that one. But what’s that got to do with Vladimir Kullam?”

  “Karkadann wants control of Red October, that’s no secret.”

  “And?”

  “How better to pressure Lev than by killing Vladimir Kullam?”

  Irk laughed. “You’re joking.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Even by KGB standards, that link’s extremely tenuous.” Even as he said it, Irk knew that people had been sent to the salt mines on flimsier evidence.

  Sabirzhan raised his eyebrows, picked up Irk’s phone, dialed, muttered something unintelligible and held the receiver out to Irk.

  “Hello?” Irk said.

  “This is Lev. I’ll tell you what happened in the florist’s if you keep it off the record.”

  “All right.” It was no loss. Irk could have recorded the statement and had Lev sign it in triplicate and it would make no difference. Yerofeyev could lose a smoking gun on the way from one hand to the other. He was reputed to be the richest cop in Petrovka.

  “Karkadann killed them all: my man, his own wife, his own son. He left one of my men alive to pass on this message: ‘He makes me kill my wife; I will kill all his women. He makes me kill my son; I will kill all his children. He makes me kill my friend; I will kill all his friends.’”

  “For
give me, but I still don’t see what this has to do with Vladimir Kullam.”

  “I’m a vor. We don’t have families.” Lev didn’t tell Irk that the oath Karkadann had taken was uncomfortably close to that of the vory, whose own ancestry could also be traced back to bandits who, before setting out on raids, had sometimes killed their own wives and children to stop them falling into enemy hands. “Vladimir was the child of one of my employees. He also attended the school run by Red October. I regard all those children as my own, Investigator. Don’t scoff, please. I’m absolutely serious when I say that. These people are my responsibility. Karkadann knows that. It has started.”

  Irk took Sabirzhan up one floor, to the prosecutor general’s office.

  Denis Denisovich Denisov had the best office in Petrovka: floor-to-ceiling windows looking south through one of the porticos. Were it not for the snarled traffic and the thick Moscow sky outside, the room would have provided the perfect backdrop for prerevolution aristocracy. Not that Denisov would have appreciated this; he was the kind of man who seemed unaware that the Soviet Union no longer existed. On the wall behind him, posters of socialist advancement curled back onto themselves.

  Sabirzhan reiterated what he’d told Irk: that the case was political or criminal, possibly both, but certainly not a matter for homicide. Denisov shook his head.

  “You think you can come in here and push us around like that? You can’t pull that state security crap on us anymore—those days are gone. This case is ours, Juku’s—unless and until he finds evidence to the contrary.” Denisov turned to Irk. “You find me a concrete link between the murder and either the privatization process or organized crime, then you can pass it on. Only then.”

  Denisov had three perfectly symmetrical lines of skin under each eye; they could have been remnants of a melted candle, perhaps, or tribal markings. The rest of his face was perfectly ordinary, standard homo sovieticus. Photograph Denisov and superimpose a black strip across his eyes, like they did in pictures of Spetsnazy special forces soldiers, and he’d be unrecognizable.