Blood and Rubles Read online

  “It can’t hurt,” said Sasha, walking down a narrow corridor. There were only six apartments on each floor. It wasn’t hard to find Zorotich’s. His name was finely scripted on a white card pasted to the door.

  Sasha knocked. No answer came from within. He knocked again, this time more loudly. Still no answer. He motioned for Zelach to move away. Zelach did what he was told, but Sasha remained in front of the door, motioning for Zelach to continue down the stairs. Zelach dutifully obeyed, proceeding out the door. Sasha put his ear to the door just above the finely lettered name. He heard a shuffling movement and then he said, “We know you are in there, Zorotich. Open the door, or my partner will break it down.”

  “No,” came a voice inside. “You’ve come to kill me and take my apartment, like Illyna last month.”

  Sasha removed his identification card from his wallet and slid it under the door.

  “You see my card?” he said.

  More shuffling, a move toward the door.

  “It could be a fake. You people can make good fakes.”

  “It’s not fake. I’m a policeman. Your neighbor downstairs said—”

  “The fake cripple? There’s nothing wrong with him. He can walk as well as you or me. He’s crazy. He wants sympathy, a pension.”

  “Last night, late, someone was killed across the street. Did you see anything, hear anything?”

  The man inside laughed bitterly. Zelach was now coming slowly and carefully up the stairs, calculatedly making a good amount of noise. Sasha waved him to the door.

  “So,” said the man inside with a sigh, “if I don’t let you in, you break down the door and kill me. If I open the door, maybe you just kill me. How do I know you are policemen?”

  “Do you have a phone?”

  “Ha,” the old man laughed.

  “My ID, common sense. We are not thieves. We are not some mafia wanting to steal your apartment.”

  A series of locks and chains went into action, and the door came open to reveal a man. He was tall, thin, and quite old and he wore dark trousers, a blue shirt, and a dark sweater vest. At the man’s side was a large white dog.

  “Well, if you’re going to kill me, do it. Just let Petya go.”

  The old man in the doorway, Svet Zorotich, was obviously quite blind. His eyes were a clouded white and his gaze missed both detectives.

  “I’m still alive,” the man said, “so you must be the police or thieves or both. As you will see, there is very little in here worth stealing.”

  Sasha looked around. The man was right. A bed in the corner. Two chairs at a small table. A cupboard. A chair against another wall. A radio on a small table near the chair.

  “Obviously,” Zorotich said, “I did not see anything last night, nor anything since 1971.”

  “Sorry,” said Zelach.

  “Since you’re here,” he said, “maybe you can get that damn cripple to turn down his television at night and go to sleep at a reasonable hour.”

  “We’ll tell him,” said Sasha. “Sorry we bothered you.”

  “You’re not going to ask me, are you?” the old man said. “Hear that, Petya? They want to know what we saw, not what we heard.”

  The dog was alert now.

  “What did you hear?” asked Sasha, certain that the man was going to blame his downstairs neighbor for the murder.

  “Voices, outside,” said the man. “I had the radio turned down out of consideration for my neighbors, a consideration they do not choose to extend to me.”

  “Voices?” Sasha prompted.

  With the help of the dog the man found his way to the chair near the wall and next to the table.

  “I turned off the radio like this,” he said, demonstrating his action. “And I heard him talking to himself on the street, the drunk. Then they came. I could hear them talking to him. I could hear them crushing him with rocks that scraped the sidewalk when they missed.”

  “Do you know who they were?” asked Sasha.

  The old man shrugged and reached down to pet his white dog. The dog moved closer to the man.

  “I recognized their voices,” he said. “They don’t live far away. I’ve heard them in the street at night.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Who knows?” asked the man.

  “If we find them, could you identify their voices?” asked Sasha.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. One of them was named Mark. They used his name. And they live near here.”

  “Anything else you can tell us about these men?” asked Sasha.

  “Men? Who said ‘men’? Not me. They were boys, little boys, children. I knew they were killing and I was afraid to go to the window and shout down, afraid they would come up for me and kill me. So I said and did nothing.”

  “But you’ve told us now,” said Sasha.

  “I’m a veteran, you know,” old Zorotich said. “Pension. Terrible pension. Can’t live on it. Got a niece who helps me out as much as she can. Anything else?”

  Sasha looked at Zelach, then said, “Nothing I can think of.”

  Once the policemen were out the door, Sasha said seriously, “He did it, Zelach. The tommy gun was hidden in his closet. He is only pretending to be blind.”

  “Then why didn’t we arrest him?” asked a perplexed Zelach.

  They were almost to the foot of the stairs. Sasha stopped and turned to Zelach. “Svet Zorotich is really blind.”

  “I thought so,” said Zelach.

  “Now we are searching for three children who live in this neighborhood. One of them is named Mark.”

  “That shouldn’t be so hard,” said Zelach.

  “It shouldn’t?” said Sasha with less certainty than his partner.

  When they stepped out onto the sidewalk, they were immediately confronted by the old man in the postman’s cap.

  “Did he confess? Why aren’t you dragging him away?”

  “He is blind,” said Zelach.

  The old man on the crutches looked skyward for help in enduring such fools as these.

  “He is pretending to be blind to collect his pension,” the old man said.

  “I don’t think so,” said Sasha.

  “Then Zorotich had that dog lead him down with the tommy gun and he shot the man, blind or not. Shot him and took his money. A blind man could do that. I saw him.”

  “You were mistaken,” said Sasha. “Do you know any small boys in this neighborhood? Two, three, four of them. One of them is named Mark.”

  The old man suddenly looked terrified.

  “No,” he said, hurrying down the street, almost falling. “I know nothing.”

  Zelach turned to Sasha and said softly, “It may not be so easy.”

  Karpo walked through the hall of the Khovrino Municipal Police Station half listening to the uniformed sergeant who had been assigned to him. The police station had been built in 1946 as a school. Now it was falling apart, as were most of the district stations, which occupied whatever space had been found for them—old apartment buildings, taxi garages, large shops. One district station had once been a toy store. Some of the walls of the former toy store were still covered with fading cartoon drawings of Donald Duck, Elmer Fudd, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Yogi Bear.

  But it was the Khovrino where Karpo found himself through a combination of determination and good luck.

  Beneath his feet were cracked floor tiles. Above him the ceiling was a trail of exposed electrical wires. The wallpaper was peeling badly, and many of the light fixtures had no bulbs.

  “Here,” said a somber young sergeant with a mustache, indicating a door on their right. There was a thick plate of scratched glass at eye level. Karpo looked in.

  Inside were six men. There were six cots lining the walls. Three of the men were seated on the floor playing some kind of card game. One of the prisoners was lying on a cot reading the newspaper, Moskovskiy Komsomolets. He was the only prisoner who wore leg chain
s. The other two men in the room were looking out the barred window on the wall opposite the door. One of the men was talking heatedly.

  “This is where we keep the toughest,” said the sergeant. “Murder suspects, strong-arm robbers. We’ve got two other lockups.”

  Karpo knew all this. He continued looking into the cell, showing no sign that he had heard what the sergeant said.

  “Your man, Voshenko, is the one looking at the newspaper.”

  Karpo looked at the man lying on the cot. The man seemed to sense his gaze and looked up from his newspaper at the gaunt specter at the cell door. Their eyes locked, and neither man wavered.

  “Voshenko’s been in for twenty days. We expect to charge him with murder soon and to transfer him to a prison to await trial,” the sergeant said.

  The man on the cot smiled at Karpo. It was not a pleasant smile.

  “Is the interrogation room empty?” Karpo asked.

  “Yes, I think so,” said the sergeant, looking into the gloom farther down the hall. “The light is not on.”

  “Can you bring Voshenko to me there?”

  “Yes, but …”

  The sergeant had been told by the colonel who was chief of the district to do whatever the strange-looking detective from Petrovka wanted, and to do it without question. The sergeant unlocked the door. The men playing cards and the two men at the window looked at him as he stepped into the cell, his hand on his pistol. The black-clad vampire had disappeared. The sergeant was about to speak Voshenko’s name, but the prisoner had already put down the newspaper and was standing. He was a huge man, dressed like the others in a badly faded blue two-piece uniform. Voshenko’s face was dark, ugly, and freshly shaved. He got up slowly and stepped past the sergeant, who, even though the prisoner was shackled, backed away to give him room.

  “Down the hall. To the right,” the sergeant said, stepping into the hall and closing the cell door, which clanged and echoed in the corridors of darkness.

  Voshenko, six feet six, close to three hundred pounds, filled the narrow hallway built for children. He shambled forward, his leg chains rattling.

  “Stop. There,” called the sergeant from a safe dozen feet behind, his weapon now out of the holster.

  Voshenko had been brought in drunk after having killed two people, a man and a woman, in a bar on Kachalova Prospekt. He claimed there had been a fight. No witness stepped forward. Both victims had broken necks. Less than a week after entering the police-station lockup, another prisoner in the same cell as Voshenko had been found one morning with his neck broken. Voshenko denied the killing but admitted readily that the dead man had repeatedly looked at him even after having been told to stop. It was then that he had been shackled. There was no room in the three cells of the station house to place him in complete isolation, and there was no point in asking any of the other stations to take him. No one wanted another mouth to feed on an already meager budget.

  Voshenko looked back over his shoulder at the sergeant, who took a step back before he could stop himself. Voshenko smiled and stepped into the interrogation room. The sergeant moved forward cautiously behind him. When he got to the door, he could see that Karpo was already seated behind the small metal table facing Voshenko, who moved to the chair across from the pale policeman.

  The sergeant was about to close the door and stand ready, weapon in hand, while the strange inspector from Petrovka questioned the giant. The sergeant believed there was no chance Voshenko would even yield his name.

  “Wait outside,” said Karpo. “Down the corridor, next to the cell. I’ll call you when I want you to return.”

  “I don’t think …” the sergeant began, and then remembered his orders.

  What would happen to him if Voshenko broke the neck of this lean ghost? Would the sergeant be held responsible? Yes, without doubt, and he might well find himself in one of the cells. But he did as he was told, locking the interrogation-room door firmly behind him.

  Karpo and Voshenko looked at each other without blinking and without speaking. Finally Voshenko looked away as if in boredom.

  “Do you know who I am?” Karpo asked.

  “The Tatar, the Ghost, the Vampire,” said Voshenko. “Karpo.”

  “Do you know why I am here?”

  Voshenko shrugged. He looked at the peeling, once-white walls.

  “I called many stations and several prisons asking if they had any prisoners with a specific tattoo,” said Karpo.

  Voshenko folded his hands in front of him. They were large with long fingers. On each finger, just above the knuckle, was a minute tattoo of an animal, but only the head of the animal.

  “When you were brought here, you were photographed,” Karpo said, his own hands flat on the table.

  Voshenko did not remember. He had been too drunk. But he knew of the procedure.

  “One of the officers on duty looked through the photographs of all tattooed prisoners,” said Karpo. “He found the tattoo I was looking for on you.”

  Voshenko smiled and shook his head. He started to rise, but there was no response from the man who remained seated in front of him. Voshenko lifted his shirt. He was covered with tattoos, almost as many as the man who had been shot outside the café where Mathilde had been murdered.

  “None of those,” said Karpo. “An eagle with a bomb in its claws. It is on your right buttock. You need not display it.”

  Voshenko hovered over the detective, looking down at him, his fingers spread now within inches of Karpo’s.

  “I do not wish to kill you,” Karpo said calmly. “I have questions to ask you. But I can find another prisoner somewhere with this tattoo. Please sit.”

  Voshenko did not move.

  “Sit,” said Karpo calmly. “Or I shall hurt you very badly.”

  Voshenko laughed. Karpo did not. Down the corridor the sergeant heard the laughter and wondered, but did not move. Voshenko sat.

  “What does that tattoo mean?” Karpo asked.

  Voshenko shrugged, clasped his hands together, and shrugged once more.

  “Answer, Prisoner Voshenko. Or I have no use for you.”

  Voshenko looked at the man. He could easily reach across the table and have the man’s neck before the detective could pull a weapon. Perhaps he would choose to end the interrogation in that manner. But for now he was curious.

  “It is a patriotic work,” said Voshenko. “The strength of the nation, now lost by weaklings.”

  “It is the sign of a mafia that deals in nuclear material,” said Karpo.

  Voshenko’s bushy eyebrows went up slightly and then back down again. “If so, it is a coincidence,” he said. “For me it is a patriotic picture.”

  “Stanislav Voshenko, there was an attack by members of your mafia, the assassination of a German businessman named Heinz Dieter Kirst. Why did your people want to kill him?”

  Voshenko shrugged and said, “I don’t know any Germans and I don’t belong to a mafia.”

  “I wish to know where I can find the leader of your group,” Karpo persisted.

  “I belong to no group,” Voshenko said, placing his hands flat on the table again, ready.

  “No more lies,” Karpo demanded.

  Voshenko lunged across the table. One hand slammed down on Karpo’s hand. The other hand went around Karpo’s throat. Voshenko looked at his victim with a mad grin of satisfaction, but the pale face of the policeman showed no fear or pain. Voshenko lost his grin and continued closing his thumb and finger, cutting off the air. He had done it many times, always without concern for the consequences. And this time he had nothing to lose. They would never let him out anyway. They would give him a quick trial and shoot him against a wall. But until that moment he would brag that he had killed a policeman.

  And then Voshenko felt a sudden pain, an electric shock in his left hand. He pulled it back as if he had been bitten. He held his grip on Karpo’s neck as he painfully lifted his left hand. His thumb hung loosely and his hand was rapidly swelling.

&
nbsp; In the instant that the prisoner looked away, Karpo grabbed the massive thumb that was pressing his windpipe and jerked it back hard. Voshenko sat back and tried to pull his hand from Karpo’s grasp, but the policeman held fast. Voshenko reached up with his left hand, but with his thumb broken it was useless.

  “And when I break your other thumb, you will be unable to attack or defend yourself,” said Karpo. “I think your cellmates might find that interesting.”

  “They are cowards,” said Voshenko, clenching back the pain. “Break the thumb. Then kill me. If you don’t, I will find and kill you the first chance I get. Today. Tomorrow. In a year.”

  “I will find your leader, and when I do I will inform him that it was you who betrayed him.”

  “He won’t believe you,” said Voshenko, still trying to free his hand. “You don’t have the power to free me.”

  “I will see to it that the moment I learn the name of your leader, you will be set free,” said Karpo. “It can be done. Will your leader believe that the police just let you walk out the door?”

  Voshenko tried to laugh, but it had none of the crazed power of his earlier laughter. He shook his head to indicate that he would not speak. Karpo bent the thumb back even farther.

  “Then I shall break this thumb too,” said Karpo.

  “Why does it mean so much to you?” growled Voshenko, now sweating and breathing heavily.

  “Talk now or you will have no thumbs,” said Karpo. Voshenko knew that he meant it.

  SIX

  Moonlight on the Golden Spire

  IT TOOK LESS THAN AN hour on the phone back at Petrovka for Rostnikov to find the first garage where there was a mechanic named Artiom. He had continued to call garages and had located two more Artioms.

  “We’ll start with these three,” Rostnikov said, standing slowly.

  His desk was in the corner of a large office that had been divided into four cubbyholes with low fiberboard walls over which one could both look at and hear one’s neighbors. Each little section had a desk, a phone, and two chairs. There was no uniformity to the furniture. It was whatever Pankov had been able to scrounge, beg, and steal from other offices in Petrovka. There was a cubbyhole office for Rostnikov and one each for Emil Karpo, Sasha Tkach, and Elena Timofeyeva. The only sign of Rostnikov’s superiority was that his cubicle was the one with the window. When he had been a chief inspector with the procurator general’s office several flights down, he had had his own office. It had also been small, however, and his window had looked out not at the outside world but at a line of desks of those of lesser rank. He had not liked that office. He definitely preferred his present cubbyhole. From the sixth floor of Petrovka he could look down into the rapidly decaying courtyard and guard gate, where two armed officers stood, one of them smoking, an act that would have meant his job a year before. Now no one except the corrupt, the desperate, the stupid, and the psychotic seemed to want the low-paying, dangerous, and despised job of being a police officer.