A Whisper to the Living (Inspector Rostnikov Mysteries) Read online

  Zelach’s mother was in the hospital almost certainly dying from an ailment that the doctors could not identify. Zelach, who was forty-one years old, lived with and listened to his mother. He could not even imagine what life might be like without her. On the other hand, Sasha Tkach dreamt of living without the daily unannounced appearances of his mother.

  Sasha’s mother, Lydia Tkach, was a retired government apparachnik who was given to shouting directions to her son about how to live, what to eat, and what he could do to try to win back his wife and Lydia’s two grandchildren. Lydia was nearly deaf. Lydia had a pair of very effective hearing aids. Lydia refused to wear them. Sasha was sure this was because she had no interest in hearing what anyone else had to say.

  Sasha was still morose and not a joy to be with since his wife, Maya, had moved to Kiev with their two children. Sasha had willingly fallen victim to one woman too many.

  Elena Timofeyeva had her own concerns, primarily the coming wedding to Iosef Rostnikov, son of Porfiry Petrovich to whom she was to be married in five days. It was required that they were to be wed exactly thirty-two days from the time that they registered with ZAGS, the all-powerful office that controlled marriages. At the moment, however, Elena and Sasha were assigned to protect a British journalist about to look at organized prostitution in Moscow.

  Any of them could be pulled from there to concentrate on the Maniac if and when they were needed.

  Rostnikov looked at his watch. It was growing late, but he had one important stop to make before heading home. He had removed his leg and massaged the stump when he had sat back behind his desk. He had no recollection of the time when he was a child and had a functioning left leg. He well remembered his atrophied leg, a burden he had grown accustomed to. He missed the leg, which resided in a large jar in the underground laboratory of the possibly mad scientist Paulinin, who claimed to engage in conversations with the dead. Now Porfiry Petrovich faced the prospect of allowing the never-fully-welcome device to take on much of the weight of his considerable bulk.

  It couldn’t be helped. He picked up the phone on his desk, pushed a button, and told Karpo to meet him two levels below Petrovka.

  Rostnikov knew that the Yak’s assistant Pankov listened to all conversations in both Rostnikov’s office and the shared office of his team from a trio of hidden microphones. Rostnikov took some pleasure in sometimes leading the often-perspiring little man astray. This time, however, there was no deceit.

  It was time to pay a visit to the dark labyrinth of a laboratory on the second level below the ground floor of Petrovka where the bespectacled Paulinin worked on and talked to the dead amid chards, fragments, books, and jars of formerly living parts and tissue of man and animal.

  In one of the larger jars on a shelf not far from the two autopsy tables, Rostnikov’s shriveled left leg floated languidly.

  ______

  “I will need to see them all,” Paulinin said, looking over the top of his rimless glasses.

  He wore off-white latex gloves and a wrinkled but clean laboratory coat with only a few stains of plum-colored blood on the left arm and a small dark ochre splatter on his chest.

  Neither Karpo, who was generally regarded as the closest thing Paulinin had to a friend, nor Rostnikov reminded Paulinin that there were at least fifteen bodies of the Maniac’s victims, two of which now lay naked in front of them.

  Rostnikov nodded his agreement. The MVD would resist. They had no desire to open the door to evidence of any more victims. Rostnikov would need intervention from the Yak, but he was sure he could get it. Karpo did not nod. He would check the reports and notes on his desk to determine where they might seek additional victims.

  Meanwhile, on the two tables in front of them lay the nearly white corpse of an old man with a chest covered by wiry black-and-white hair. The other corpse was of a man about forty-five or fifty who had the dark cast and looks of a person whose ancestry hinted at Mongol. The corpses lay on their sides facing away from each other. Paulinin stood between them, a proprietary hand on the shoulder of each as if he were trying to mediate a dispute between the dead.

  Rostnikov and Karpo could see the back of the head of each corpse. The skulls, shaved by Paulinin and the hair carefully placed in Ziploc bags, were crushed, revealing dark jagged wounds of deep red and black.

  “My friend here,” said the scientist, patting the arm of the old man on his right, “was homeless before I took him in. He washed frequently but without soap. He cut his own hair. You can see that here. He could not reach all the way back, which suggests arthritis.

  “He had a place in the park near a large oak tree. There are traces of leaf and root fragments of oak in his hair where he ran his fingers through like a brush. Wait. The traces are also on his quite filthy clothing, and some of those traces go back at least a month.”

  Paulinin moved around the tables and into the darkness next to a desk overflowing with books and reports, with barely enough room for the computer. Paulinin used the mouse and scroll and music began.

  “Schumann. Piano. My guests will be more comfortable with Schumann, don’t you think?”

  “How could they not be?” asked Rostnikov.

  With the sound of Schumann behind him, Paulinin returned to the corpses and whispered to the younger dead man, the one who looked like a Mongol, “You have not been forgotten.”

  The scientist continued, “These new friends were killed by the same person. Wounds are so similar that even those idiots who have been looking at the other corpses could see that. What may be even more consequential is that the same weapon was used, a claw hammer, first the blunt end and then the claw. From behind. The killer is strong, probably young. I will know after examining the other corpses if all were murdered by the same person and with the same hammer.

  “If so … ,” he continued, looking at Karpo and Rostnikov to complete his thought.

  “If so,” said Karpo, “he has the hammer, and if we find one where he lives or works you can tell if it is the murder weapon.”

  “I can,” said Paulinin with a grin of satisfaction. “But there is more. The dolts who wrote reports on previous victims noted that there was evidence that they had been drinking shortly before they died. They were correct. It takes no great forensic skill to open a stomach and find alcohol, but …”

  He paused again for his students to finish the sentence.

  “… but what kind of alcohol?” asked Rostnikov.

  He could have used a chair at this point. His left leg was beginning to feel irritation in its mooring.

  “Precisely,” said Paulinin. “The alcohol was a cheap off-the-shelf wine called Nitin from Greece. Cheap though it may be, it is not usually the first choice of the homeless. There are cheaper ways to get drunk.”

  Paulinin paused again, waiting.

  Rostnikov felt like raising his hand as he had done almost half a century ago in school. Instead, he looked at Karpo, who nodded and said, “Therefore it is possible the wine belonged to the killer.”

  “Right. It is too late to be sure it was drunk by any of the victims except, perhaps, for these two and the two or three before them. The autopsy reports on the previous victims mention nothing about the brand of wine. The dolts missed it,” said Paulinin.

  “So,” said Rostnikov, “we check with the shops in a five-mile radius of the park for ones that carry Nitin and see if they can think of any customers who have been buying Nitin at least since the days of the first murder.”

  “Assuming, of course,” said Paulinin, “that he has been using the same wine since he started.”

  There was a soft ripple of the piano and rapid rise to a near-frenzied crescendo.

  “You disabled the microphones?” asked Rostnikov under the frantic pianist.

  “Moments before you arrived.”

  Paulinin’s laboratory was bugged not by Pankov but by some department of the former KGB. It was to be expected, as whoever was listening accepted the likelihood of being discovered. O
nce disabled, someone would come in when Paulinin was not there and move the microphone or microphones. Then the game of Find-the-Bug would begin again. In spite of the clutter, the size of the laboratory, the ones who were doing the listening were having trouble finding a new location for their devices.

  “When you have the next victim,” Paulinin said, “do not let anyone but your people touch it. Bring them exactly as you find them. These two here have been hosed down. They were delivered nice and clean. I want them dirty if dirt was their destiny. I had to look harder than necessary for evidence traces. You understand?”

  “Perfectly,” said Rostnikov.

  “Fortunately, their hosing down was as inept as the examination of the content of the stomachs,” Paulinin continued. “Look.”

  The scientist turned the body of the older man farther on his side, holding him in place and reaching down with his gloved hand to push the dead man’s ear forward.

  “See?”

  Rostnikov and Karpo moved forward to look. Rostnikov saw nothing.

  Karpo said, “A small green spot.”

  “A stain,” said Paulinin with a smile.

  “What is it?” asked Rostnikov.

  “Juice. Guava juice,” the beaming scientist said, still holding up the body.

  “You analyzed it?” asked Rostnikov.

  “I tasted it,” said Paulinin.

  The image of Paulinin touching his finger to his tongue after pressing it, probably moist, against the tiny dot was less than tantalizing to Porfiry Petrovich.

  “Would you like to try?”

  “I don’t care for guava juice,” said Rostnikov.

  Karpo declined with a nod.

  “Suit yourselves,” said Paulinin, easing the body down. “It is a distinctive taste. In any case, I shall see if there is a trace of guava juice in our silent friend’s stomach. If not …”

  “Then the killer may have been the one drinking guava juice,” said Karpo. “The wine was for the victims.”

  “Precisely, but in fact he did not have to drink the wine or the juice,” said Paulinin. “Just touch them.”

  “Who,” asked Rostnikov, looking down at the dead man, “would have guava juice on his fingers without having drunk it?”

  “How should I know?” asked Paulinin impatiently. “Maybe someone who works with guava juice. Moscow cannot be crowded with purchasers of guava juice and Nitin wine. You are the detective. You find out.”

  “We will,” said Rostnikov.

  “You want to see your leg?” asked Paulinin.

  “Why not?” asked Rostnikov with a shrug. “Why not.”

  Aleksandr Chenko carefully removed the cans of sweet potatoes and lined them up on the shelf, labels facing forward, after carefully and quickly examining each can for rust or dents or torn labels.

  He had been refilling the shelves of the Volga Supermarket II for the past nineteen years. He was good at it. No, he was perfect at it. It was taken for granted that Aleksandr would have the shelves full, report low inventory or damaged or no-longer-fresh produce, help customers find what they were looking for. Six store managers had come and gone in the past nineteen years while Aleksandr never missed a day, was never sick, never late for work. His reward for this was that he was almost completely unnoticed. It was easy to go unnoticed among the seventy employees in the hypermodern twenty-four-hour supermarket. He could lose himself among the shopping carts and the high metal shelving in the huge storeroom at the back of the store. He could report various damaged cans of juice and take them home. Nitin wine he had to pay for.

  Aleksandr had the face of a forty-year-old Russian, smooth shaven, brown hair evenly cut. He was not handsome, but neither was he homely. His face was without blemish, his body neither heavy nor thin, and he was a few inches under six feet tall.

  He was paid every two weeks. He never asked for a raise, though he had received four since he had taken the job. Assistant managers rose from the ranks between the many brightly lit aisles under twenty-five-foot-high ceilings and in the dank, dull light of the back rooms. That was fine with Aleksandr, who now backed up to examine the line of asparagus cans in even rows, close together but not quite touching one another.

  Aleksandr Chenko believed in setting goals for himself and working to achieve them. The goals could even be arbitrary. Any set of goals worked to give meaning to life. As it happened, Aleksandr’s goals were meaningful. When he completed his quest, he would be famous. That would be good, but the discipline of working toward his goal would be more rewarding.

  Aleksandr lifted the empty box and carried it through the door to the rear of the store. The smell of fresh-cut meat greeted him. That was good, one of the many smells he enjoyed: fresh meat, fresh fish, particularly salmon, fruit, vegetables, strong cheese. He placed the box on the floor, took out his cardboard cutter, and gracefully and efficiently broke down the box.

  When the day’s work was done, he would take off his always clean apron and place it on the hook behind the door next to Max’s always dirty apron. He wondered how a slacker like Max could do so little work and make his apron so filthy. Aleksandr would select a few items for his dinner and say good night to all. He would smile. They would smile back. He was liked, perhaps not well liked because of his reclusive ways, but liked nonetheless.

  He would walk through Bitsevsky Park as he always did, barely looking into the snow-covered trees. He would pass close to where his two latest victims had been found only two days ago.

  Aleksandr Chenko wondered if the police would figure out what he had been doing for the past two years. He wanted to tell them, but he was no fool. There would be no phone calls, no e-mails, and no notes to the media.

  Once in the one-room, always neat apartment in which he lived alone, he would put away his groceries, prepare a small meal, have a half glass of nearly black Georgian dry Saperavi. Working in a supermarket had advantages. There was still a boycott of Georgian and Moldavian wines, a punishment for dealing with the West. However, various products, like Georgian wine, could always be obtained from longtime suppliers. Aleks would drink the wine after dinner and then sit back and wait an hour or so to see if the feeling would come. If it did, he would retrieve the hammer, go to the park, and kill someone. It really didn’t matter who. It was neither “the who” nor “the when” that mattered; it was “the how many.”

  Yes, he wished to succeed in his goal, but he was not, as the frightened public or the police certainly believed, insane. He could wait for the feeling, wait indefinitely. It was not a compulsion, barely an urge. He made no plans to kill but would strike when the feeling was upon him.

  There was a problem. He was never certain about how many of those he killed had been found by the police. It was essential that they be found. He did not bury them and did not really hide them. He did not go into the depths of the park dragging the dead and bleeding.

  It was incredible that so many police regularly searching the park were unable to find the dead.

  Aleksandr waited awhile and then said, “Not tonight. Not yet.”

  After eating a hot pork sandwich, Aleks got undressed, removing all his clothing, and then moved to his bed in the corner with the book he had been reading. He put an arm behind his head atop the two pillows, placed the book on a third pillow on his stomach, and began to read.

  He did not turn on the radio or listen to music. He had never understood the lure or pleasure of music. The instruments that created these sounds had struck him since early boyhood as ridiculous toys. He preferred silence.

  Later he would turn out the light, put the bookmark in the page, and place the book on the floor. Finally, in the darkness, he would reach down and gently fondle his testicles. There was nothing consciously sexual in his doing this. It was comforting and helped him fall asleep.

  “Perhaps tomorrow,” he would tell the darkness. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

  2

  Where Does a Giant Hide?

  Ivan Medivkin was a giant.

/>   Not a literal giant, but at six-foot-ten and weighing 310 pounds, he qualified in the eyes of most people. Ivan’s face was slightly contorted and his head shaved. He could charitably be called homely. Those with less charity called him ugly.

  Everything about Ivan was a bit off, even his smile, which came out as a horrific grin. He did have strong, white, and even teeth, though most were not his own. When he removed them, even he beheld himself in the mirror as incredibly homely.

  However, Ivan was admired throughout Russia. People came to see him, wish him well, give him advice, ask for his autograph, or have a photograph taken with him. Ivan always obliged and tried not to grin when he heard the click of the camera button.

  Ivan was a boxer, a very good boxer whose record as a professional was twenty-nine wins and no losses, with eighteen knockouts.

  He was not only powerful—his right hand was compared to a trip-hammer—but he was also a surprisingly agile boxer who used his long arms to fend off jabs and tie up opponents who tried to get in close to throw a desperate punch.

  It had happened by chance. First, in the small town of Galich where he was born. He was recruited to play basketball. He had no talent for it. His parents were a midwife and a postal clerk of average height and no great skills. And then he had been discovered by Klaus Agrinkov, who was visiting his sister in Galich. Klaus had been a middleweight until age and a soft belly had ended his career. Klaus had achieved world-class rating and even fought his way into contention before being knocked out and suffering a dangerous concussion at the hands of a promising Kenyan who went on to the championship. Klaus jokingly sparred with Ivan for a photo in the Galich newspaper. Klaus was impressed by the big man’s natural ability.

  And so it began.

  And now five years later Ivan the Terrible was scheduled to fight in New York for the championship of the world. But an adjustment, postponement, or cancellation of the bout would have to be announced because Ivan Medivkin was being sought for the murder of his wife and his sparring partner, both of whom had been furiously beaten to death in a room in the Golden Apple Boutique Hotel.