Blood and Rubles Read online

  Captain Sergei Valarov of the tax police, an ex-Soviet army officer, strode to Elena and Karpo and said, “The building is secure.” Valarov looked like a captain—trim, efficient, with dark straight hair and the hint of a mustache.

  No bullhorn had been brought forth to order the occupants out. No one had knocked on the door of the two-story house. It struck Elena that the front door might very well be open or that a knock might have resulted in a reluctant invitation from the building’s occupant to come in.

  “Thank you,” said Emil Karpo. He followed the captain across the street and through the door of the house, which had been opened by one of the uniformed men who had scaled the building.

  The crowd followed the captain, the vampire, and the young woman across the street, where they were stopped by two dozen uniformed police.

  “As you know,” the captain said as he strode past the saluting officer at the door, “we have been observing this house for some time.”

  Both Elena and Karpo were well aware of this.

  “And,” Captain Valarov added as he walked down a dark, narrow passageway with photographers behind him snapping and flashing madly, “we had reason to believe that a hoard of artifacts of historical significance was being kept by an old man named Dokorov. These artifacts—and we had reason to believe that it was a substantial collection—had never been taxed. In addition to which, some of them might be protected artworks. In that case they would belong to the state.”

  Both Karpo and Elena were certain that Captain Valarov had more than “reason to believe” the house was worth raiding. Otherwise he would not have been instructed to stage the elaborate invasion that would certainly be the highlight of the evening news on television.

  The captain’s step was certain. Elena, Karpo, and a select group of hand-chosen press representatives, some juggling video cameras, struggled through the narrow passageway for a better view.

  What they saw through the next door was beyond what they had imagined, beyond what Valarov and probably his superiors had imagined. The interior of the house had been gutted. They stood in a large storage space with shelves piled almost two stories high, their upper reaches accessible only by the long ladder that leaned against the wall to their left.

  Flashbulbs went wild. Captain Sergei Valarov stood flat-footed looking at the museum before him: rows of books, jewelry, a chandelier, paintings, serving dishes, wooden boxes marked MICROSCOPES, MANUSCRIPTS, and SMALL ICONS, and much more.

  Karpo reached forward and touched the shoulder of the posing Valarov, who showed only the slightest trace of tightening in his cheeks to indicate that this was much more than he had expected to find inside the house.

  “It might be best if the press were taken outside and told that you will be out in several minutes with a full report. Meanwhile I suggest you contact your superiors for instruction.”

  The captain nodded, blew out some air, and turned with the help of three of his men to urge the complaining crowd into the passageway. When they were gone, Karpo motioned to Elena, who closed the door. The two police officers were alone in the room.

  “Notes,” Karpo said, and Elena took out her notebook and a white pen that had BARNES & NOBLE printed in red on its side.

  He walked slowly down an aisle. The noise of demanding reporters could be heard beyond the closed door.

  “Preliminary report,” he said. “Random observations. Family painting of the Romanovs, official. If the date is to be believed, it is the last such portrait of the family. Shelves full of books are held in place by gold-and silver-framed icons.”

  He opened one book and went on. “First edition, Bible, dated 1639, signed ‘To Ilya, Ivan Fyodorov.’”

  Elena touched the book. She knew that Fedorov was the Russian Gutenberg. There appeared to be a dozen similar-looking volumes.

  “There are hundreds of books,” Elena could not stop herself from saying.

  “Several thousand,” Karpo amended, and opened a wooden box on the shelf before him.

  Inside were tiny, fragile magnifying glasses, each in a separate compartment protected by cotton. Lying on top of the glasses was a yellowing page torn from a book. Karpo scanned the page and handed it to Elena, who read, “The microscope was invented by a Dutch oculist in the seventeenth century. It was a simple thing. He made each one himself. They worked surprisingly well. Most have disappeared into private collections or simply been lost. In 1923 a complete box of Leeuwenhoek microscopes was reportedly discovered in a pharmacy in Belgrade. The box had disappeared by the time the police arrived. The pharmacist was ordered to undergo psychiatric examination.”

  “And this … ?” Elena began.

  “… may well be that box,” said Karpo, holding one of the glass and wire objects in his palm.

  “This room,” she said, looking around, “it must have more treasures than the Kremlin museum.”

  A mouse scampered across an old piece of paper somewhere in a dark corner.

  “Not more, perhaps, but different,” said Karpo.

  “My God,” said Elena.

  Since Karpo believed in neither God nor blasphemy, he continued randomly selecting items, some of which he was unable to identify, but jewelry from the various courts of Russia was certain, including one very ancient ornate gold crown that, if Karpo read the worn inscription properly, had belonged to Ivan the Terrible.

  “We will have to call in the experts on this,” he finally said.

  Elena put her notebook away and touched the crown of Ivan the Terrible. It was, like the room they were in, cool, damp, and smelled of mildew.

  “Millions,” she muttered. “Worth millions.”

  “In rubles,” Karpo said, examining the portrait of a beautiful and quite regal woman, “billions upon billions.”

  “American dollars?” she asked.

  Karpo looked around. “Beyond price. Billions.”

  “But who … ?” Elena asked, just as a frail old woman in a badly worn dress stepped out from behind a set of shelves and said, “Get out.”

  “We are the police,” said Elena.

  The woman advanced on them. She was carrying what looked like a silver scepter embedded with red and green jewels.

  “Out,” she cried.

  “Is all this yours?” asked Karpo.

  “My brother’s and before him my father’s,” the little woman said, holding up her scepter as if to strike. “All purchased honestly, piece by piece, from before the Revolution, until Pavel died.”

  “Your father died?” asked Elena.

  “My brother, Pavel,” the woman said. “Just last week. So now it is mine. All those … those parasites in the street who knew that my family collected, one of them went to the tax police.” The woman spat dryly in the general direction of the front door. “Pavel never bothered anyone. He was a poor electrician for government cafeterias. We didn’t live fancy. He loved … this.”

  The woman stood in front of Karpo, who did not blink, though the heavy scepter was waving before his eyes.

  “There were people—speculators in homes, weapons, rare goods,” said Karpo. “When the Revolution began, they bought these things for a few rubles from the members of the czar’s court and from rich merchants fleeing the Soviet Union who couldn’t carry everything they had stolen from the people. I have heard of such collections smuggled out of the country and sold to dealers, collectors, museums. I have never heard of one this size.”

  Unable to intimidate the pale man, the frail woman looked at Elena, who forced herself to wear a mask of determination. Defeated, the woman put the scepter on a nearby shelf.

  “What were you going to do with all this?” Elena asked as the woman leaned back against a bookcase. Then, suddenly, the woman pushed away from the books and ran down an aisle screaming, “They are mine.”

  Elena started after the woman, but Karpo held out his hand to stop her.

  “It is not the woman we want,” he said, looking around the room.

  Elena,
too, looked around at the roomful of treasures. “This is wonderful,” she said.

  Karpo did not answer. The tax police were outside and would make their claims in the name of the new state. Karpo was certain that whoever controlled this cavern of riches would have enormous political power.

  Karpo picked up a small icon. The dead Jesus, wearing a blanket that covered his head, was surrounded by his disciples, all of whom were wreathed, like Jesus, and clothed in what appeared to be ancient gold.

  Valarov strode back into the huge room, his confidence returned, and announced to Elena and Karpo, “Experts will come in the morning to begin cataloging everything in this room. Meanwhile the old woman will be confined here with guards posted at the doors. I have been instructed to tell the press this much.”

  Karpo, now holding an ancient leather-bound book in his hands, nodded without looking at the captain. Valarov departed quickly, wondering if he might be entitled to a small percentage of what looked like the biggest tax recovery in the history of the tax police. Karpo closed the book gently and placed it back on the shelf, intending to return the next day.

  But the next morning, when the three antique dealers and four professors from Moscow State University entered the room accompanied by Valarov and his men, they found it quite empty.

  The man lay sprawled on his back over the front hood of the blue Lada, his arms extended out wide as if he had been frozen in the middle of a rather intricate Olympic high dive. At least that was Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov’s first impression, an impression dispelled by the fact that the man was fully clothed, certainly dead, and staring wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and upside down at him. The body on the car fascinated Rostnikov. The man’s head was bald and covered with a minutely perfect tattoo of a flying eagle carrying something in its talons.

  From the position of the body, the line of bloody holes in the man’s black shirt, and the Kalashnikov automatic weapon lying on the ground a few feet away, Rostnikov concluded that he had probably been shot at close range on the sidewalk and blown backward over the hood of the Lada.

  The Lada was the only car parked on the block. Other cars had certainly been there, but in the four or five minutes it took for the police to arrive, their owners had hurried to move them before they could be impounded as evidence.

  The body of another man, clothed in a leather jacket identical to that of the bald man, lay in the street on his face. There was no weapon near him.

  The glass of a telephone kiosk on the sidewalk not far from the Lada was shattered, as were the windows of two small shops, a pharmacy and a café, on this side of the street, a few feet from the dead man on the car. Inside the pharmacy a woman was being treated for a gunshot wound to her right shoulder. She whimpered and looked around for a friend or relative. Her eyes met those of Rostnikov.

  In the café there were three dead people: a foreign-looking little round man and a woman, who had been seated at the same table, and their waiter. In his right hand the dead man at the table clutched a Freedom Arms Casull .454, capable of bringing down an elk at one hundred yards.

  Uniformed police had roped off the street for twenty yards in both directions, stopping afternoon traffic. Cars were backed up for half a block; their drivers, unaware of the slaughter in front of them, were angrily and uselessly honking their horns. Two men, one thin and marked by a large mole on his face and one quite old and marked by an apoplectic anger that might threaten his life, were being held back by two policemen across the street from Rostnikov and the man with the tattooed head.

  “Who is that crippled lunatic staring at the dead man?” asked Irina Smetenova of no one in particular.

  Irina, who had been standing in a long line waiting for bread at what might be a nearly sane price, had been present just after the shooting and well before the police drove up and began sending would-be looters scurrying away. Now she was surrounded by others, men in jackets and open collars, babushkas and businessmen, smartly dressed women carrying boxes of certainly expensive things, which they tried to hide in plain plastic bags marked PEPSI-COLA or ORANGINA.

  No one answered Irina’s question, though others had noticed the boxy man in a dark jacket, his weight decidedly on his right leg as he moved. Now the man was standing still, hands in pockets, while police hurried to cover bodies, find witnesses, seek evidence, and make phone calls. Irina shifted her heavy shopping bag from her right hand to her left and her little white dog from her left to her right.

  Rostnikov, the crippled lunatic, had been a boy soldier who got his leg run over by a tank in 1941. The fool of a boy, whom the adult Rostnikov could not clearly remember, had stepped into a street in Rostov not much different from the one in which he stood now. The boy had stepped out of a doorway and, with a lucky grenade and a hail of bullets from the machine pistol he had taken from a dead German, had destroyed the tank. The cost had been a nearly destroyed left leg, which he would have to drag slowly and often painfully behind him throughout the rest of his life.

  But that was not the event that caused the boy to become the man who now somewhat resembled the German tank he had destroyed. When he was a young policeman, he had caught a drunken thief named Gremko assaulting a young woman outside the Kursk railway terminal. The drunk had nearly killed Rostnikov with his bare hands, but a well-placed knee to the groin had turned the tables.

  It was after that incident that Rostnikov began lifting weights, first in the hope of building the muscle that a policeman’s life on the street seemed to require and later as a routine he could not and did not wish to break, a meditation of sweat and determination and—he had long ago admitted to himself without benefit of a state psychiatrist—a way to compensate for the nearly useless leg. A few years ago he had quietly entered the annual competition for men and women fifty and over in Sokolniki Recreation Park. He had easily won the competition and a gold-painted aluminum statue, which rested, the gilt already chipping in spite of his care, on a bookshelf in his living room. The June afternoon when he had been presented with the trophy by the great Alexeyev himself had been one of the great memories of Rostnikov’s life.

  Long before he was assigned as chief inspector in the Office of Special Investigation, he had earned a variety of nicknames including “the Refrigerator,” “the Kiosk,” and “the Washtub.”

  Behind Rostnikov, each body was being uncovered and photographed. Overworked police shouted at one another. The crowd warmed itself with speculation.

  “Inspector,” said someone at his side.

  Rostnikov nodded, still fascinated by the tattoo.

  “Inspector,” Sergeant Popovich repeated, just a touch louder. Popovich had recently been promoted. He was thirty, had a child on the way, and hoped one day for yet another promotion. With a salary of less than ninety thousand rubles a month, about ninety dollars or less at current rates, it would have been impossible to feed his family if he, like most of the 100,000 police officers in Moscow who had the opportunity, did not take bribes ranging from sweet juices from street vendors to serious rubles from gangs large and small.

  This time Rostnikov grunted. Popovich took this as a signal to report.

  “Five dead. One, the pharmacist, injured. She saw nothing. Just heard guns going off. Appears to be a battle between two mafias.”

  “Witnesses?” asked Rostnikov.

  “They don’t want to admit it,” said Popovich, “but …”

  “Bring a witness over,” said Rostnikov.

  Popovich nodded and headed toward a police car whose lights were flashing across the street.

  Rostnikov looked away from the upside-down dead man with the tattoo on his head and over at the café whose windows had been blown out by gunfire. Cloth sheets covered the bodies of the man and woman that were still half-supported by the table. A wisp of the dead woman’s hair showed from under the cloth. Rostnikov had recognized the woman. Perhaps he was wrong, but still he put off finding out.

  “A witness, Chief Inspector,” Popovich said.


  Rostnikov barely heard, so intently was he reexamining the head of the dead man who looked at him upside down with eyes as defiant as they must have been in life.

  “Popovich, what is your first name?”

  “Vladimir. Vladimir Andreyevich Popovich.”

  “Vladimir Andreyevich,” Rostnikov said, shifting his weight slightly to remind his left leg to retain some semblance of life. “Have you ever seen Snegourotchka (The Snow Maiden)?”

  “I …” Popovich began in confusion.

  “It’s an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov, taken from a children’s story,” said Rostnikov. He looked toward the dead woman in the window of the café. “After finally succeeding, by the last act, in getting her beloved Miskar to fall in love with her, the Snow Maiden steps forward before dawn to receive the blessing of the czar. In her joy and happiness she has forgotten the warning of the fairies, and as the first rays of sun touch her beautiful face, she melts away forever, and Miskar in his anguish throws himself into the lake and drowns.”

  Popovich had heard of the chief inspector’s eccentricities, but telling fairy stories to a witness in the midst of this bloody madness went beyond eccentricity.

  “You know what we must do, Vladimir?” Rostnikov said, putting his hand on the young policeman’s shoulder.

  “I believe I know the proper procedure.”

  “We must keep Miskar from drowning himself,” Rostnikov said. He walked around the rear of the Lada and headed for the devastated café. He didn’t bother to avoid stepping on the broken glass, though he did avoid the spatters of blood on the sidewalk in front of the shop.

  “Witness,” said Rostnikov, walking through the broken window of the café to the table where the dead man and woman sat under the cloth, their heads down as if they were taking a slight nap.

  “I saw it all,” said a man eagerly.

  Rostnikov kept looking down at the dead couple.

  “I saw it all,” the man repeated eagerly. “I saw it. Lots of them saw it. The guy with the little table, the Napyerstochnik, the thimbler who plays that three-card game with the fools across the street. He saw it. He’s out in the crowd somewhere, I think.”