Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express ir-14 Read online

  To which the audience always responded with a loud, cacophonous “Nobody.”

  “That’s right,” the Naked Cossack would answer and launch into a new song filled with anger and attack, love for those who hated, and hatred for those who loved. He sang of strength and sex and the rights of those who were strong. The stompers. The raised fists. The heavy polished boots.

  Misha moved to the bars of his cage and shouted with a driving angry voice that was all performance, “I’m the Naked Cossack, you dumb shits. What the hell do you want?”

  For most of the first day Misha had maintained an angry scowl, had muttered curses, had been afraid that he was going to be killed. He had a dream the first night that he was a ritual sacrifice. There was an altar. He was tied down with ropes. The altar was outdoors, an uneven rock that scratched his back. A huge man with a bald head approached with an ax. On the blade of the ax was a swastika.

  The man who looked familiar had clearly said, “We know you are Jew.

  Misha had awakened, cold, sweating. The dream was the enactment of “Sacrifice the Son of God,” in which a Jew is killed on such an altar. It was one of Misha’s own songs. He had shivered. Not knowing if it was night or day, he looked at the ceiling light outside his cage, thinking for an instant that he was looking into the sun.

  At that moment, Misha had lost some of his fear. If they had wanted him dead, he would already be dead. No, they wanted money, ransom. They were not rappery or rapists. They were not fans kidnapping their idol so they could have him for their own. They were simple kidnappers. They would keep him alive. If they had discovered who he was, they would go to his father for money. His father would pay. He hoped they would bleed him dry. If they did not know about his father, they would go to Acid, Anarchista, and Pure Knuckles. They would pay as long as it was not too much money. They needed the Naked Cossack. He was the band. He was the attraction.

  All Misha had to do was to remain the Naked Cossack, the singer, guitarist, poet who didn’t give a shit.

  But he was hungry. He was thirsty. And he had to use a toilet. He couldn’t imagine squatting in a corner and existing in the same space with his own feces. He had written about such things, sung of them, suggested that the weak enemies of all who heeded his word deserved the fate he was now enduring. But he didn’t deserve it.

  Misha shouted again.

  “I need a toilet. I need food. I need something to wear.”

  He let out the yowl of a wolf. He laughed. His throat went dry. The lights went out. He was in total darkness, sudden total darkness. He stepped back. He could hear the door to the room outside the bars open, but no light came in.

  There was a sound of footsteps on concrete.

  Misha staggered back. Something clanked to the floor beyond the bars. The footsteps retreated. The door opened and closed. The lights came on again.

  Outside the bars were a cracked metal pot, a roll of toilet paper, a metal platter with a half loaf of bread and a piece of sausage, and a metal cup of water.

  Misha had trouble getting the pot through the bars. He had to force it. It was the single item he needed most.

  Chapter Four

  “It was a meaningless comment,” Iosef Rostnikov said to Elena Timofeyeva as they headed slowly down the corridor two levels below Petrovka.

  “It was not meaningless,” Elena said, eyes forward, stride steady.

  “So, I said what? That there is a resemblance between you and your aunt? That is meaningful? An insult?”

  “My Aunt Anna and I are alike in only one way physically. We both have a tendency, as does my mother, to be overweight. You were suggesting that I am growing fat.”

  Iosef stopped walking. “I … your aunt is a shrewd, intelligent, highly capable person. See, I said person, not woman. That was the comparison I was making.”

  A pair of uniformed policemen walked past them, talking softly and emphatically, taking a quick step to the side to avoid collision with the couple who now stood facing each other.

  “I am watching my weight,” she said. “I eat carefully. I exercise. I am fit. I am also genetically disposed toward a certain plumpness which, I thought, pleased you.”

  “This is not the place …”

  “I’m well aware of that,” Elena said. “But where is a good place and when will we next be there? You said I am like my aunt. I am. She taught me to face situations when they arise, to accept confrontation rather than allow incidents to become infected.”

  “I didn’t-,” Iosef said, holding out his hands.

  “You did,” she said. “And you are smart enough to know that you did. I would not love you if I thought you were a self-deluded generic man.”

  “You are being too sensitive,” he tried.

  “That is what generic men say when they wish to avoid responsibility. The woman is being too sensitive. Perhaps the man is being too insensitive. Do you wish to marry me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Definitely. Without question. As soon as possible.”

  “Good,” Elena said.

  A door opened behind her. She could hear the tapping of shoes behind her.

  “Let’s talk to Paulinin,” Iosef said as a slight older woman in a dark suit walked past them quickly, a pile of files cradled in her arms like a baby.

  “Iosef, I am what I am destined to be.”

  “And that is what I want,” he said. “I-”

  “Later,” she said as he advanced and stood in front of her. She touched his right hand with her left and his cheek, with her right hand and then turned to continue down the corridor.

  A few dozen steps farther and they were before a heavy metal door. The door was unnumbered and there was no plate on it indicating what lay behind. Elena knocked.

  Paulinin did not look pleased when he answered the door to his laboratory. Elena and Iosef were no happier to be here.

  “The dead man on the subway,” Elena said.

  “Your case?” asked Paulinin, adjusting his glasses with the back of his hand.

  The scientist was of average height, a bit on the thin side, with wild white hair that was beginning to show definite signs of thinning. He wore a less-than-clean lab coat that had once been white but was now tinged with hues whose source neither of the detectives wished to consider.

  “Our case,” said Elena. “May we? …”

  “Come in,” Paulinin said, throwing open the heavy metal door and turning his back on his guests.

  They stepped in, and Paulinin pushed the door shut behind them. A fluorescent bulb dying slowly tinkled deep inside the vast room which had once been used for file storage. It had been a haven for Paulinin for at least two decades.

  The man was, at best, eccentric. More likely he was a bit mad.

  Paulinin was twenty paces ahead of them, maneuvering around familiar objects that formed the maze of his sanctuary-laboratory tables covered with metallic and glass contrivances, most of which were his own peculiar invention and which no one else would know how to use, stacks of books and scientific journals on the floor and on lower tables and two desks, one of which was missing several drawers. Along the walls were shelves up to the top of the ten-foot ceiling. On the shelves were cardboard and wooden boxes, each with a large number in black on its sides. There were also jars ranging in size from a gallon to five gallons or more. Something floated in each of the jars. A brain, a kidney, a small animal, and, somewhere, the left leg of Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov; and, according to Petrovka lore, the brain of Josef Stalin.

  Elena and Iosef wended their way toward Paulinin, who now stood behind a table on which lay the naked body of a man who appeared to be about fifty. The corpse was neither fat nor thin, tall nor short. He was not particularly handsome; neither was he ugly. Stripped of his suit, the dead colonel was simply a corpse with seven deep, long, clotted knife wounds on his neck, arms, and stomach.

  Paulinin’s arms were out and resting next to the body. When he leaned forward, the strong overhead light cast a shadow in the
sockets of his eyes. The visitors to Paulinin’s lair had a wide variety of options with which to respond, ranging from amusement to discomfort and fear.

  Iosef thought Paulinin would have been a particularly sad and isolated creature were he not sustained by his own paranoia, delusions, and self-confidence.

  “This should be Emil Karpo’s case,” Paulinin said.

  The closest thing the scientist had to a friend was the silent pale detective. At least once a week they lunched together. Karpo was a good listener. Paulinin was a talker.

  “We take the cases we are assigned,” Elena said.

  “I didn’t suggest otherwise,” Paulinin said with irritation. “I made an observation. It is bad enough that those bunglers up there”-he looked up toward the ceiling-“treat the dead with ignorance and no respect,” he went on. “Do you know what Bolgakov did?”

  Neither Elena nor Iosef knew who Bolgakov was.

  “Woman, dead inside the Kremlin gift shop,” Paulinin said. “Greek. Just fell. Boom. Like that. No one saw. She was in a corner, supposedly alone. And Bolgakov, that oaf who could not see an elephant without an electron microscope, looks at the body, declares she had a heart attack. Case closed. The great Bolgakov has spoken. I get the body after they have pawed it with no sense of respect or dignity. I read the report. Broken nose. Bolgakov says she fell on her nose when she had her attack. Cheek bones are intact. Bone in the nose is thin. The nose had been broken before, twice. One rib had been broken before. Simple X rays showed that. Given her weight, even if she didn’t fall flat, the nose should have been flattened, pulp. You understand?”

  “Perfectly,” said Iosef patiently.

  “Heart attack,” Paulinin went on. “Pills in her purse for angina. Bolgakov, the language expert, can read the pill bottle in Greek but just enough to make out the medication. I get the bottle. Can I read Greek?”

  “I do not know,” said Elena.

  “I cannot,” Paulinin said with a smile. “But I do not pretend to. I find a Greek. There’s one at the newsstand on Kolpolski Square. I give him the bottle. The pills belong to the woman’s husband. She was carrying them for him. I go back to the body, look at the heart, the arteries. Bolgakov had not bothered to open her. There was nothing wrong with her heart till it stopped. She died of a stroke brought on by a blow to her head. Something hit her in the face. She fell back and struck her head. Hematoma under the hair. Any idiot could see it if he looked, but not the great Bolgakov, chief medical examiner for the Homicide Division.”

  “So what did happen?” asked Iosef, knowing that they would not get to the dead man before them till Paulinin’s story was over.

  “I asked to see the husband of the dead woman. He was leaving with the body that very day. They had waited two days to get the dead woman to me. I talked to Karpo. He stopped the man at the airport and brought him here. You know what I found?”

  “What?” asked Elena, resisting the urge to look at her watch.

  “Signs of broken capillaries in the knuckles of his right hand. That is what I found. They had fought. He had punched her. She had fallen and the fools upstairs had missed it.”

  “He confessed?” asked Elena.

  “Of course,” said Paulinin. “I laid out the evidence. One, two, three, four, five. Built a tower of steel truth. He was a wife beater. Greece has as many as we do in Russia, but possibly Russian women have thicker skulls.”

  He looked directly at Elena, who met his eyes.

  “Interesting,” she said. “The man on the table.”

  “You want some coffee? Tea?”

  “No, thank you,” said Elena.

  Both she and Iosef had made the mistake in the past of accepting Paulinin’s offer of coffee or tea. They had suffered for their attempt to get on his good side, not knowing at the time that he had no good side. The coffee had come in small glass jars with hints of white powder and something that did not look like coffee grounds floating in the tan liquid. They had drunk the vile brew, trying to avoid the floating dots.

  “Business, then,” said Paulinin. “My friend here,” he said, touching the hairy chest of the corpse, “and I have had a long talk. He told me all about his attacker.”

  With this Paulinin looked down at the face of the dead man, whose eyes were closed.

  “And he told you?” Iosef prompted.

  “She is five foot and six inches tall, or within an inch. Approximately one hundred and twenty pounds. About thirty years of age. Right-handed but with a sprained wrist. Strong. Determined. If you find her, I can definitely identify her from the description given by our friend.”

  He went silent and looked at each of the detectives with a knowing, secret smile.

  Iosef briefly considered not asking Paulinin how he knew all of this, but that would be cruel. The man had nothing but his skill and vanity and the need for a small appreciative audience.

  “Two of the surviving victims of this woman said she had used her right hand,” he said, holding up his right hand as if clasping a knife. “The others didn’t remember. Our friend here was stabbed by someone with the knife in the left hand.”

  “A different attacker?” asked Elena.

  “No,” said Paulinin. “Same knife in all the attacks. Same general pattern, but this time the strokes came across from the left and were not as deep. Mind you, they were deep, but not as deep as those she had delivered in the past with her right hand. Hence, there is something wrong with her right hand, probably a strain. She strikes hard, very hard. She could well cause herself injury. The spacing and location of the blows suggest an attacker without plan or pattern. She simply lashes out, probably screams when she attacks. Her height is evident from the angle of the wounds, and her weight is more than suggested by the depth of her thrusts.”

  “And you can identify her?” asked Elena.

  “Bolgakov didn’t bother to examine my friend here closely. Look at his fingers.”

  Both detectives leaned forward to examine the white fingers.

  “Under the nails of his right hand,” said Paulinin. “He held up his hands to ward her off after the first two or three blows, but it was too late. He touched her face or arm. There were tiny, very tiny pieces of surface skin under his nails. Definitely a woman.”

  “DNA,” said Iosef.

  “Absolutely,” said Paulinin. “Find her. Look for a woman with a weak right wrist, possibly bandaged. You know her height, her general description. Questions?”

  “We have spoken to those who have survived this woman’s attacks. They have given us a description,” said Elena, removing the artist’s sketch from her pocket. “They say this is a reasonable representation.”

  Paulinin adjusted his glasses and leaned forward to examine the sketch.

  “She is not that thin in the face,” he said. “Given her weight she could not be. Your surviving victims got only a glimpse before they were struck. They had childhood images of witches to pull from deep inside their surprise and fear.”

  “We will adjust the sketch,” Iosef said.

  “It will help, but you are seeking a woman, not a witch. She probably looks like a mouse. No, not a mouse, a timid rabbit, unnoticed, shy, and then she strikes. And then she is gone.”

  “You know this to be a fact?” asked Elena.

  Paulinin stepped back, clearly offended.

  “My friend here told me,” he said. “By his wounds, his former life, his whispers without words that only those of us who listen closely can hear. I gave you facts. Any more questions?”

  “None,” said Elena.

  “Then go,” he said. “My “friend and I still have much to talk about.”

  “What goes on in here is nothing compared to what goes on in.the streets,” said the paunchy man with the clean-cut goatee and short-trimmed dark hair.

  They were in the club and bar called Loni’s on Kropotkin Street. Loni’s took up two floors of a former ten-story apartment building. It was vast and dark and smelled of alcohol, sweat, and the
ammonia being used by the cleaning crew. Six women were working slowly, sweeping, mopping, scrubbing graffiti from the walls, taking down torn posters of leather-clad, electric-guitar-holding young men with open mouths and angry faces, and putting up fresh posters very much like the ones they removed. The women moved silently, pushing buckets of water ahead of them.

  The paunchy man in a black T-shirt was Karoli Stinichkov. He was the day manager. His duties involved seeing to it that Loni’s was ready for the nightly crowd-clean, well stocked-and that the money from the preceding night, which ended at almost four in the morning, was correctly accounted for.

  Karoli had a partner who worked evenings and nights. The men met late every afternoon for an hour, and every morning for an hour, to hand over the keys and give a report to the other.

  This worked well because neither man liked the other. They were brothers-in-law. The sisters they were married to didn’t like either of the men.

  “You’ve got crowds of homosexuals hanging around in front of the Bolshoi, drug dealers right in Derzhinski Square where State Security can look out the windows of Lubyanka and see them. You’ve got …”

  “Misha Lovski,” Emil Karpo interrupted.

  “Misha Lovski?” the man asked.

  “Naked Cossack,” said Zelach.

  “Oh, him,” said Karoli. “His name is Lovski? Between you and me and nobody else, he’s a bastard son of a bitch. But what can we do? They like him. They go crazy for him. Between you and me and nobody else I don’t understand half of what he says, but then I don’t really have to listen to him or any of them much. My partner’s here at night.”

  “When was he last here?” asked Karpo.

  “My partner?”

  “Lovski.”

  The gaunt detective made Karoli nervous. He had a great deal to hide, though almost none of it was related to the prick who called himself and his group of addle-brains Naked Cossack. Karoli shrugged and reached for the Diet Sprite with ice that was bubbling on the bar.