Black Knight in Red Square ir-2 Read online

  Karpo, while he did not approve of his superior’s lapses into romanticism, did not interfere. In spite of his less than zealous interest in building the Soviet state, Rostnikov was a good policeman who, in his way, probably did far more for the state than so many of the self-interested Party members.

  “You are the police?” asked the white-haired man impatiently. His voice echoed through the large room. Rostnikov enjoyed the sensation.

  “We are,” replied Rostnikov, moving toward the tables and giving up that instant of relaxation he always enjoyed before plunging into a case.

  “I am Dr. Gregori Konstantinov of the Kremlin Hospital,” said the man.

  The import of that statement was not lost on Rostnikov. The Kremlin Hospital was known as the treatment center for the Soviet Union’s political and military leaders. Dr. Gregori Konstantinov might well be an important man.

  As he came closer to the doctor, Rostnikov could see that he was about seventy, stoop-shouldered, and very irritable.

  “They all died of the same thing?” Rostnikov asked, glancing at the four naked bodies on the tables. Karpo had begun examining each one.

  “It looks that way,” said Dr. Konstantinov, pursing his lips. “If not, we have a coincidence worthy of publication in medical journals. Four men, all dead in the same night. All apparently poisoned. All with blood on their mouths, all pale. All in the same hotel.”

  “Hmm,” grunted Rostnikov standing reflectively as Karpo went from one body to another.

  “What’s he doing?” asked the doctor irritably. “We’ll do a proper medical examination at the hospital. I’ve already looked at the bodies.”

  “Magic,” whispered Rostnikov.

  “Policemen,” grunted the doctor.

  It was obvious which of the four bodies was the Japanese, and had the other three been dressed Rostnikov could probably have told instantly which were the Russians and which the American. Even so, that determination took little thought; the American was the bald man. His face had none of the squinting hardness of the Soviet male.

  “Well, can I take the bodies?” sighed the doctor.

  “A moment,” said Rostnikov.

  “There are sick people back at the hospital who are still alive,” the doctor said.

  “And they will have to wait for you,” Rostnikov replied evenly. “I have never waited less than an hour for a doctor at the hospital. The patients will not notice.”

  Karpo came away from the bodies to speak to Rostnikov. As he paused in the dusty light of one of the high windows, he looked to Rostnikov like a figure in a religious painting by Rublev.

  “They have all been drinking vodka,” he said. “All have swelling at the lymph nodes. All have blood in the mouth. All have the smell, the same smell which I cannot place.”

  “Now can I-” began the doctor, but Rostnikov ignored him.

  “So we have four guests in the hotel who have died from the same thing, probably something ingested.”

  “Quite probably,” agreed Karpo, taking notes.

  “So now we find out if they had dinner or a drink together last night. Who was with them. What they ate. Get the waiters who were on duty last night. Find out if any of these men were with a group, traveling with anyone. Discover-”

  “Chief Inspector,” came a voice from the doorway, interrupting Rostnikov.

  Rostnikov looked toward the doorway and saw the form of a woman against the light. He could not tell her age, but her voice sounded young.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Olga Kuznetsov. I am from the Intourist office in the hotel,” she said, coming forward. “Mrs. Aubrey is here. She is demanding to know what happened. What shall I tell her?”

  “Chief Inspector,” growled the old doctor, “I would like to-”

  “Who is Mrs. Aubrey?” Rostnikov asked.

  “Her husband is the American who died,” said the young woman, her voice wavering. She had seen the four corpses as she came forward, and had taken a step backward and looked away.

  “Shall I talk to her?” said Karpo.

  “No,” sighed Rostnikov. “You find the waiters, check with the elevator operators, cleaning ladies, floor women. We’ll meet in the lobby in half an hour.”

  “Shall we let them open the restaurant?” Karpo asked, putting his notebook away.

  “After the good doctor has seen to the removal of the bodies. I think their removal during lunch might affect the customers and cut into the sales receipts.” Rostnikov looked at the doctor to indicate that the corpses could now be removed.

  “Games,” grumbled the old man. “Bureaucratic games. They never change.”

  “Never,” agreed Rostnikov. And then to the young woman from Intourist he added, “I’ll see Mrs. Aubrey in your office.”

  “No need for that,” came a voice behind him. It was a woman’s voice, older than the Intourist woman and quite startling, for she spoke in English.

  Rostnikov turned as gracefully as his leg would allow.

  “Mrs. Aubrey?” he said, also speaking in English. “This I think is not a good place for us to talk.”

  “If you’re thinking of my feelings, I can take care of them myself. That is not my husband lying on that table.”

  “It isn’t?” said Rostnikov, giving the woman his full attention now. She was about thirty-five, very trimly built in a blue skirt and jacket. Her hair was black and long, her eyes dark, and her glasses large and quite Western. Her lips were full and pouting. Quite an attractive woman.

  “My husband’s soul, if he had one, departed when he died.” She nodded toward the corpse. “That is the shell only, a symbol. I would like to know what happened. Who killed him and why?”

  Karpo nodded and walked out, passing Mrs. Aubrey, who took a step back when she saw the giant figure approach her from the darkness. Then the doctor stalked out in search of attendants to take the bodies away. The Intourist woman stood uncertainly, her hands clasped in front of her. Rostnikov nodded at her, and she left. Then he turned to Mrs. Aubrey.

  “If we go slowly,” he said, “we can speak in English without a translator. Would you prefer?”

  “That will be fine,” she said, her eyes fixed on Rostnikov.

  Rostnikov did not want to take another look at the body, not because he was squeamish, but because he didn’t want Mrs. Aubrey to catch him and possibly figure out his thoughts. It wasn’t necessary to look at the body again to know this woman was at least ten years younger than her dead husband, probably much more.

  “May I ask you questions?” Rostnikov asked.

  “You may ask,” she said. “I’ll decide if I wish to answer.”

  Rostnikov did not like the way she was looking at him, the challenging superiority of her attitude. Though he recognized that there were many ways to cope with sudden family tragedy, this American woman provoked him, and he wanted her respect.

  “You show no grief,” he said.

  “I feel it,” she replied. “I don’t wish to share it with you.”

  “Why have you not demanded to see the American consul? It is the first thing to do in such a situation.”

  “I plan to do so in my own time,” she said. “What has this to do with my husband’s death?”

  Rostnikov wasn’t sure whether he had caught the meaning of all her words. His English was almost totally confined to reading American detective novels. The spoken words sounded strange to him, and he was always surprised to find that he had been mispronouncing so many of them in his mind when he read them. The word “husband” was not pronounced “whose-bend” but “huzz-bind.”

  “Your husband,” he said, careful to pronounce the word as she had, “was here for the film festival.”

  “He is-was a writer, a famous writer,” she said. “He was covering the festival for several American and English magazines.”

  “Can you think of reasons, why a murder might be done upon your husband?”

  “None,” she said, turning her head as two young
men in white linen uniforms came in carrying a stretcher.

  “Would you like to talk in another place?”

  “That is not my husband,” she repeated, proving her conviction by looking directly at the naked body of Warren Harding Aubrey.

  “Would you like to sit?” Rostnikov tried, doing his best, to ignore the two attendants at their work.

  “No,” she said.

  “Would you like to cry?” he went on.

  She didn’t reply. He waited. She still didn’t reply.

  “Did you have great affection for your husband?”

  “Yes, he was a fine journalist,” she said softly with something like feeling.

  “You had love for him because he was a fine journalist?”

  “I don’t think I like you, Inspector,” she said, and Rostnikov thought he detected the first sign of breaking emotions.

  “I am sorry,” he said with contrition. “I have my tasks.”

  The burden of speaking English was making it difficult for Rostnikov to think. The extra step of translation in his mind was giving the woman too much time between questions, too much time to recover. But it was too late.

  “You did not share the room with journalist Aubrey?” Rostnikov went on as the two attendants hoisted the Japanese onto the stretcher. They were going to take the lightest weight first, which meant that Aubrey would be last. Unless they were doing this by nationality, in which case Rostnikov had no idea which the second corpse would be.

  “I just arrived in Moscow this morning,” she explained. “I’m a writer, too, and I finished an assignment. How did Warren die?”

  “Painfully, I think,” Rostnikov said, purposely choosing to misunderstand.

  “That’s not…” she began, and the trembling started in her lips. She had probably come here directly from the airport, and the disaster was still new and alien. She had taken on a competent exterior as defense, and while it stood, she was of little help. Rostnikov had been trying to chip away at it, and now the pieces were beginning to fall away. It was, he knew, a cruel and unfair battle, but her defeat and subsequent cooperation were necessary and inevitable.

  “I think you must sit,” he said, stepping forward and taking her arm firmly. She wore some Western perfume and smelled quite nice, he thought. Her arm was firm and she started to resist, but Rostnikov was a strong man. With his free hand he pulled over a nearby chair and guided her into it. She looked up at him, surprised by his action and strength.

  “It could have been in the food,” he said, looking down at her. “It could have been simply an accident. It could have been he was murdered but one of the other men was the intended victim. You understand?”

  She nodded, her eyes now wet, but not so wet that she needed a handkerchief.

  “From you I need to know what your husband was doing here. Who he talked to. Who might want to harm him dead. If you will think and answer and not hate me in place of the person who may be responsible, we can be finished quick. You understand?”

  “I understand,” she said.

  “Good,” sighed Rostnikov, pulling up a chair for himself so he could get some relief for his leg. “Then we start again.”

  All four bodies had been gone for half an hour when Rostnikov finished questioning Myra Aubrey. The attendants had taken one of the Russians second, Aubrey third, and then the other Russian. Rostnikov had discovered that Warren Harding Aubrey had been named for a U.S. President who was in ill repute in American history. The idea and the name fascinated Rostnikov, but he could find nothing in Mrs. Aubrey’s tale that might indicate a reason for her husband’s death.

  “I’d like to have my husband’s things,” she said when Rostnikov finished questioning her. “He didn’t have much with him.”

  “When we have looked through them, I will suggest that they be returned to you,” he said. “You will be staying here?”

  “Intourist has me at the Rossyia,” she said, not looking at the table where her husband’s body had been. “I don’t…”

  Rostnikov touched her shoulder. She didn’t shrug his hand away.

  “You are strong,” he said. “Call upon that strength while we discover what has here taken place.”

  The line had come from some American novel he had read years before. He had always wanted to use it, but now that the time had come it felt awkward. Above all, he did not want this woman to laugh at him.

  “The Rossyia is a marvelous hotel,” he said.

  “It is a massive joke,” she replied. “My God, I can’t believe I’ll never talk to him again. It’s like seeing a movie and having the film tear.”

  The analogy made no sense at all to Rostnikov but he nodded knowingly nonetheless.

  Miraculously, perfectly, the Intourist woman Olga Kuznetsov reappeared and guided Mrs. Aubrey out the door. She had recovered her composure and turned to remind Rostnikov that she wanted her husband’s things. He repeated that he would do his best to get them for her. Then she was gone.

  A search of the rooms of the four dead men revealed little. The Japanese had more than a dozen rolls of exposed film in one of his suitcases. He also had a number of pamphlets in Japanese with what appeared to be stills from movies that bordered on the pornographic. Rostnikov wondered if there was a market in Russia for such films. Where would they be shown? Among private collectors?

  Investigation of the rooms of the two Russians revealed that one of the men had a small supply of English pounds hidden in his jacket and the other had several boxes of chocolate candy.

  The two Russians and the Japanese had been in Moscow alone, no family, no traveling companions.

  Aubrey’s room revealed little more. There was, however, a notebook in the pocket of Aubrey’s jacket with names and comments. It took Rostnikov a few minutes sitting on the bed to decipher Aubrey’s scrawl and to discover that in the past two days he had interviewed various people connected with the film festival. The list included James Willery, whose name sounded English or American, possibly Canadian; Wolfgang Bintz, clearly a German; and Monique Freneau, almost certainly French. Rostnikov recognized none of the names, but the notebook gave him an idea. He made a thorough but fruitless search for Aubrey’s notes or tape recordings of the interviews. Then he made a note to ask Mrs. Aubrey how her husband took his notes.

  The chief inspector placed himself so that he could watch the hotel desk and the people crossing the vast carpeted lobby while he listened to Karpo’s report. He did not expect to witness anything directly related to the case, but he was beginning to feel that if he was going to solve this case, he would have to cultivate a more specific understanding of foreigners. As he sat listening and watching, Rostnikov decided that East Germans looked the most like Americans. Several registered and let their accents give them away even across the expanse of the lobby.

  He learned in the course of the next twenty minutes that the four dead men had indeed shared a bottle of vodka in the Metropole restaurant the previous night. In fact, they had shared two bottles of pepper vodka, a number of dark beers, a very large order of smoked salmon, and some caviar. The empty bottles and remains of the food were nowhere to be found.

  Apparently Warren Aubrey had absented himself from the party for about an hour. A waiter had heard him say something about finding a woman. Under pressure from Karpo, the waiter had explained that it was his impression that the American was going to seek a prostitute.

  “And next?” asked Karpo, closing his notebook which, after he copied his comments for official use, would go into the extensive library of black notebooks in his small apartment, notebooks containing every detail of every investigation he had been involved in for the past twenty years. He would index and cross-categorize the notes, and he would later return to the notebooks if more information turned up.

  “Next,” sighed Rostnikov, “we get something to eat. Then you make yourself ominous at the police laboratory until they give you a report on what killed those men.”

  Rostnikov also gave him
the task of tracking down the prostitute Aubrey might have been with, then added, “Oh, yes. I have some names from a notebook, people who must be interviewed. Foreigners who are here for the film festival. Do you speak German?”

  “No.” Karpo shook his head.

  “Then I’ll talk to the German one,” Rostnikov said, leading the way to the Metropole dining room. He would personally interrogate the kitchen staff.

  “Do we have anyone who speaks French?” he asked.

  “Tkach,” answered Karpo, staring down a hotel guest who gave them an angry look when the two detectives pushed past him into the dining room.

  “Good. Tkach gets the Frenchwoman. I’ll find him after we investigate the kitchen.”

  THREE

  The beatings had been particularly brutal but none of the seven victims had died. Sasha Tkach, though only twenty-eight years old, had seen a great deal in his three years as a police detective. He had seen decayed corpses, old men so frightened that they had messed their pants while being robbed, and even the body of a very young boy whom Tkach had been forced to shoot. But these rape victims were the worst he’d ever seen-their faces swollen, bones broken, teeth punched out, hearing destroyed, ribs cracked. The victims were all women of about fifty.

  All-at least those who could speak-told the same story. As they were walking home from a store or from work at dusk, four or five young men had appeared from nowhere and dragged them behind a nearby building or into a hallway. First they beat the women. Then they raped them, robbed them, and left them to be discovered, their clothes ripped, their bodies torn.

  Tkach felt sick with rage, especially after talking to the third victim, who reminded him of his wife Maya. Tkach and Maya had been married less than a year, and he worried about her. Moscow was not plagued by gangs and random violence, but such things happened. As a policeman he knew this far better than the citizens, who were given the impression that crime was almost nonexistent in the Soviet Union.

  This victim even had Maya’s Ukrainian accent. Tkach nervously ran his hand through his blond hair throughout the interview, and by the end of it, he had abandoned all professional detachment. It had happened to him before. Maya had warned him not to become personally involved in a case. So had Chief Inspector Rostnikov. But it was not something Tkach could control.