A Whisper to the Living ir-16 Read online

  The Yak no longer needed an answer to the question of why the evidence had not been destroyed. Tarasov and probably Misovenski were holding it as insurance should the Prime Minister need to be informed about his nephew. The situation was now one that required some caution. Colonel Yaklovev had long courted the rumor that he and Putin were judo workout partners. In fact, the Yak had, twice a week, left the office giving no information on where he was going, not even to Pankov. The truth was that the Yak indeed worked out at a judo club with a personal instructor, but Vladimir Putin was neither a member nor a friend. All that might change one day when Colonel Yaklovev was ready to ascend to a higher level of influence.

  “I will see what I can discover about this Chenko’s claim of being a nephew to Prime Minister Putin. Why did Tarasov give this evidence about Chenko to you?” the Yak said.

  “Because he does not wish me to open a closed case of suicide,” said Rostnikov, “which I believe was not a suicide but a murder.”

  “Who was murdered?” asked the Yak, hands now folded atop the file.

  “The wife of Major Aloyosha Tarasov.”

  The Yak was silent for a long minute looking at Rostnikov, who continued to allow his fingers to draw without giving thought to the images. He had drawn the compact disc flat beneath the feet of the man with the hammer and soup can. Now he began writing on the disc itself.

  “With your approval, I would like to move a very old couple from their apartment and into a hotel for a few days,” said Rostnikov.

  “They are in danger? They are witnesses to Chenko’s crimes?”

  “No.”

  “Then. .?”

  “I have need of their apartment.”

  “Their specific apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have my approval. I will order Pankov to draw whatever funds you may need. Keep me informed. Thank you, Chief Inspector.”

  A sincere “thank you” from the Yak was almost unheard of.

  The Yak rose. So did Rostnikov, looking down at what he had written, actually printed, in very small block letters: “Georges Simenon and Fyodor Dostoevsky.”

  The plan for Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was definitely inspired by the two authors. He was sure that if he could open the CD cover he had drawn and play what was on the disc, he would hear the two novels that his plan brought to mind.

  When Rostnikov had closed the door behind him, the Yak moved to his desk and picked up his phone without sitting.

  “Pankov, approve anything Chief Inspector Rostnikov requires and get General Misovenski on the telephone when the Chief Inspector leaves. Do not indicate to the Chief Inspector whom you are going to call. You understand?”

  “Yes,” said Pankov in the outer office, where he was perspiring again. He looked up at Rostnikov, who stood patiently and told Pankov what he needed.

  Rostnikov was reasonably certain that the Yak had just told the little man behind the desk that he wanted to talk to General Misovenski

  “You will be attending the wedding party of my son and Elena Timofeyeva?” Rostnikov said.

  “Oh yes,” said Pankov.

  Forty-six years old and Pankov had never been to a wedding, not even that of his only sister. Trina, who had married only two years earlier, had made it clear that he would not be welcome. He made Trina uneasy and nervous. He made his mother uneasy and nervous. He made everyone he knew uneasy and nervous. And now the son of a man on whom Pankov spied on a daily basis had invited him to his son’s wedding.

  Pankov reached inside his pocket for his handkerchief and realized that he was not sweating.

  9

  In Which High-Ranking Policemen Have Coffee

  Ivan Medivkin parked the small pickup truck in a dead-end alleyway alongside the old gymnasium. The trip had been somewhat painful. It had required him to drive with his knees up high, almost against his chest. His foot wanted to fall heavily on the gas pedal. It was a strain to keep it from dropping and sending the little truck into a mad dash that was certain to cause attention and possible destruction.

  He had worried the last fifteen kilometers. The gas gauge had insisted that the tank was nearing empty. He could not stop for gas without being seen and remembered. He was the Giant, Ivan the Terrible, the Man Who Would Be King of the Ring, the Man Wanted by the Police for Murder.

  Ivan managed to get the door open and drop his feet to the ground. Then he bent over and came out of the truck crouching. Night was coming soon. There was still a pale wash of dying sun and long gray shadows.

  There was a huge green Dumpster against a wall. The top of the Dumpster was open. Things scuttled among paper and garbage, and the smell was sweetly decaying. Ivan walked behind the truck and moved to a wooden door behind a trash can. Something scuttled in that too. Ivan pushed the trash can out of the way and tried the door handle. It was not only locked; it was also held in place by decades of not being used.

  The door was wood, once a thick wood, now a wood decaying from the outside in. Ivan threw his shoulder against the door. The door shot open. The ease with which he had opened the door surprised him. He fell over into the equipment storage room, breaking the fall with the palms of both hands. Then he rolled on his side and looked around the room panting from the effort and surprise. Dim twilight through the doorway covered him.

  Two heavy punching bags, both with holes that would leak sawdust if they were moved, leaned against each other in a corner, suggesting, at least to Ivan, a pair of dead bodies. A cardboard box stood against a wall, a thick rope dangling from it like a snake that had died trying to escape. A stationary bicycle faced the door, its chain broken. A few feet from Ivan Medivkin lay a deflated brown leather punching bag. The punching bag seemed particularly sad, a defeated head on its side with no eyes with which to see and no body to carry it.

  Ivan had spent little time training in this gym in the early days of his career. He and Klaus Agrinkov had moved to the more upscale boxing facility on a one-block street off of Kalanchevkskaya. Ivan rose and moved to the door to the gym. This door had felt frequent openings and closings. He opened the door and stepped through, closing the door behind him. He could hear voices ahead of him down the dark, narrow corridor. He followed them and came to yet another door. This one he opened slowly, cautiously.

  The gym was large, a great dank-smelling place. The ring was opposite where he stood in the doorway. Two men were sparring, young men. Both were small, fast. Ivan knew that without being told. Sitting in a wooden chair outside the ring, his back to Ivan, was his manager and friend, Klaus Agrinkov.

  Ivan took a step forward and stopped. From the shadows on his right and left the familiar, and not unpleasant, smell of dank sweat engulfed him. He felt a sad murmur of mourning for his damaged career.

  Something emerged from the nearby shadows. Two men. One man was large, well built, though not nearly as large or well built as Ivan. The other man looked less formidable. He slouched forward and wore a look of great sadness on his face. He wore round simple glasses with reflecting glass. He turned his head toward Ivan.

  That was the point at which the well-built man lifted his hand to reveal a gun pointing at Ivan.

  Ivan considered turning and running back through the open door. The man with the gun might shoot, but he probably would not. Ivan began to raise his hands.

  “That will not be necessary,” said the man with the gun.

  “Thank you,” said Ivan.

  “We have been waiting for you,” the man with the gun said.

  “You knew I would come here?”

  “Where else would you go?”

  They met on neutral ground, the British chain Costa Coffee shop on Pushkinskaya Square. Colonel Yaklovev could not bring himself to suggest one of the new Starbucks or the Moka Loka and did not want to go to a Shokoladnitsa coffee house, where there was a slight chance he might be recognized. Yaklovev was secretly addicted to frothy flavored lattes, particularly those made at Shokoladnitsa. With Moscow’s ratio of one
coffee house for every 3,187 people, however, it was not difficult to come up with a suggestion that General Misovenski did not veto.

  Coffee houses were especially good places to meet in public.

  They were crowded and noisy and the two men were unlikely to be recognized. Indeed, without their uniforms, they simply looked like businessmen out for a coffee break.

  A few people might comment that Yaklovev looked somewhat like Lenin or that the dark Misovenski with deep-set eyes looked a little like the British actor Ian McShane.

  Given the subject that they were going to discuss after having a satisfying sip of their drinks, both men felt confident that the other would not be recording the conversation. What they were about to discuss could lead to the fall of both men.

  “It is good,” said the General in the gravelly voice that was familiar and forbidding to his department of 220 men and women.

  The Yak put his cup down and nodded his agreement.

  He did not like drinking coffee from paper or Styrofoam cups. He thought the coffee before him only minimally satisfying. To avoid the possibility of future profiling for the General’s files, the Yak had ordered a straight medium-sized black coffee.

  “If Aleksandr Chenko is arrested and brought to trial,” said the Yak, “he will very likely tell the prosecutors and the court that he is related to Prime Minister Putin and that you had him in your grasp a year ago, as many as twelve murders ago, and that you let him go to protect the reputation of Prime Minister Putin.”

  The Yak, with evidence provided by Emil Karpo, knew that Chenko bore no relationship to Putin. The familial tie was an invention of Chenko.

  “I am listening,” said the General, offended by the lack of political subtlety being shown by this man he outranked.

  “I have that evidence, or at least a copy of it, in my possession,” said the Yak as a young and pretty girl with long black hair bumped into their table. The girl said, “Oops,” and moved her coffee cup away before it spilled on either man.

  “And what do you propose?” asked Misovenski.

  “If Chenko does not make it to trial, perhaps does not even make it to arrest, my office will be given credit for catching the worst serial killer in the history of Russia, and neither your office nor mine will have to embarrass Prime Minister Putin. You can simply issue brief congratulations to the Office of Special Investigations. My name need not be mentioned. The case will be closed. We can both control the flow of information about Chenko, perhaps even manufacture a suitable biography.”

  Since Karpo did not have the imagination for such a task, the Yak had given the assignment to Pankov, who would certainly stain any hard copy with sweat. He would sweat, but he would do a good job.

  The General nodded to show his approval.

  “It will have to be accomplished soon,” said the Yak.

  “You have a person in mind for the task?” asked the General.

  “Yes,” said the Yak, deciding he could drink no more of this coffee in a cardboard cup, listen to no more of the babble of boys, the chatter of women, the laughter of girls.

  “You approve then?” asked the Yak.

  “Yes,” said the General, rising.

  Protocol and his superior rank meant that the General should choose his moment of departure and that the Colonel should remain in place till the higher-ranking officer had left.

  “You have not finished your coffee,” the General added.

  “Perhaps in a moment or two.”

  Another nod from the General and he made his way through the evening crowd and out the door.

  Yaklovev left as soon as he could, dropping his half-full cup in a trash container whose lid opened greedily.

  Igor Yaklovev had written nothing, but he had come well prepared. Before the meeting he had carefully gone over the Bitsevsky Maniac files pulling out names, searching. An hour before the meeting with Misovenski, the Yak had narrowed the list down to five. Half an hour before the meeting his list was down to two, and now, after this meeting, the list was down to one.

  The only problem might come from Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov or one of his people who might get hurt or even killed. It would be tragic but acceptable, though the Yak would far prefer not to lose Rostnikov. The Chief Inspector was vital to the Yak’s plans, but even that could be dealt with.

  He had decided who would kill Aleksandr Chenko.

  Two dented cans of Norwegian salmon.

  In twelve years, Aleksandr Chenko had not been responsible for a single dented can, not one can. Nor had he broken a jar or caused a hole in a box of cereal or noodles or anything else.

  He had watched the blue-and-white cans roll across the aisle. He had heard them clunk to the floor and wobble in three directions. Customers had been present. He wanted to tell them that nothing like this had ever happened to him before, never, but he said nothing, just chased down the cans and gently dropped them in the carton on the flatbed before starting to return them to the shelf with great care.

  That was when he had found the two dented cans.

  He would have to tell Juliana Horvath, the storeroom supervisor. He hoped she would not make the dented cans a subject of extended conversation, but he knew she would acknowledge this event in some way. And she did.

  Juliana Horvath was just over fifty, stocky, homely, with short, straight dyed yellow hair. She was neither too smart nor too stupid for her position, and she took it seriously.

  Aleksandr had carefully restacked the cans in the same display form as before, replacing the dented cans with new ones. Everything was even, symmetrical. A customer would sooner or later remove a can, but that did not matter. Aleksandr would have done his job.

  As it turned out, Juliana Horvath had simply accepted the two dented cans and made a small x on the bottom of each so that they could be placed in the reduced-price bin at the front of the store. The saving would be small. The store would still make a profit.

  “You look pale,” said Juliana Horvath in her slightly hoarse cigarette-destroyed voice.

  “I am fine,” Aleksandr had said.

  “You do look a bit-” Ilya Grosschekov had started to observe, but Aleksandr had cut him off with an uncharacteristic firm, “I am fine.”

  “It is just two dented cans,” said Juliana Horvath.

  They had no real pride in their work. They came, did the job, collected their pay. Aleksandr took pride. What was the point of working eight or ten hours a day if one did not derive satisfaction from what one did? As it was for cans of Norwegian salmon, so it was for the lost souls in the park.

  When he checked out later, Aleksandr had walked slowly, full cloth grocery bag in hand, containing the two cans of Norwegian salmon that he had purchased, to Bitsevsky Park. He had come there earlier, on his lunch break, on this cool, clear, crisp day, in search of the policeman with the artificial leg, but the policeman had been at none of the benches. Aleksandr had eaten his cheese and lettuce sandwich on a fresh roll while he searched. No policeman.

  Maybe he was ill. Maybe he had been taken from the case, as had been the previous police detective Aleksandr had approached. That policeman had taken Aleksandr into custody, put him in a room for many hours, asked him hundreds of questions, and then released him, causing Aleksandr to lose half a day of work. His mentioning a family connection to Putin may have helped. Aleksandr lied extremely well and was proud of his ability to do so.

  The policeman with the artificial leg could not be gone. He was to complete the task. He was, if possible, to be the sixty-fourth sacrifice. Aleksandr planned to approach the washtub of a detective, lure him into the bushes with the excited promise of evidence accidentally uncovered, and then crush the man’s skull from behind with a skilled blow with the hidden hammer. He would do all this in broad daylight, probably on his lunch hour, this time leaving the bloody hammer next to the body, and return to work.

  As he now walked through the park looking for the policeman, he considered that the man might not be Number 64. Al
eksandr had been counting the first two he had killed, the young man he had pushed from the window and the girl he had strangled and buried far from the park. Maybe he should do more than fill the board just to be sure.

  It was the girl who had started him on this path, given him the idea after she had kissed him twelve times in eighteen days and told him that she liked him. Then she had said her boyfriend had come back. Come back from where? No boyfriend had been mentioned. They were in the park. She was being kind and sincere. Aleksandr had strangled her with hands grown strong from honest, hard work. He had buried her and then sought out the boyfriend and pushed him from the window.

  Those two were the impetus Aleksandr needed to start the task, and now he had almost achieved the goal. Maybe he would be caught when he finished. It would not matter greatly. If they did not catch him, he might stop, but then again he might not. He might start a fresh 64. He wanted to win this game and then be recognized as the champion, the record holder, the one who stood in a steel cage at his trial imagining a gold medal around his neck.

  Aleksandr took the path he almost always took and went winding toward the street and a block of Stalin-era high-rise apartment buildings. Twilight was upon him. There were adult couples and trios and joggers. Few were alone in Bitsevsky Park as the hooded sun sank under gray clouds. Later there would be the drunks, the mad elderly, the occasional fool who had not heard of the Bitsevsky Park killer. He did not like being called “Maniac,” but he had little choice and, besides, it had a satisfying frightening echo to it.

  Stepping out onto the sidewalk, Aleksandr looked both ways at the light traffic and crossed in the middle of the street directly in front of his apartment building. He took out his key as he moved and opened the outer door to the cigarette smell that would never go away. He opened the inner door with the next key to what most considered the sickening-sweet odor of strong cleaning liquid. He did not find it distasteful.