Two Cases for the Czar

by Gorg Huff

  Location: Ufa Kremlin, Police Headquarters

  Date: May 10 1637

  "Pavel! Get in here!" Evgeny Ivanovich Aslonav shouted. He was Pavel's boss and they normally got along pretty well. However, the colonel wasn't comfortable speaking truth to power, and he positively hated being pulled into turf wars. In large part, that was because he was in his twenties, and he knew perfectly well that he was likely to be replaced if anyone noticed how young and unqualified he was.

  "Wasn't my fault, Boss," Pavel shouted back, even as he headed for the colonel's office.

  "Detective Sergeant, you are going to get me fired one of these days. Then some forty-year-old petit boyar will have to deal with you, and I will laugh my ass off. Now why is the embassy bureau pissed at you?"

  "Because someone over there is too clever to be smart."

  "Well, that sounds like them."

  Pavel, because of his acquaintance with Vasilii Lyapunov, knew who James Bond was, and was also aware that if Russia ever had a James Bond, he would work for the embassy bureau. Because the embassy bureau wasn't just Russia's state department. It was also their MI6, CIA, or KGB. Depending on which up-timer reference you were using. "Yes, sir. In this case, they managed to pull off a locked room murder."

  "A what?"

  "It's a murder where you find the body in a locked room with no way for the assailant to get in or out of the room to commit the murder."

  "Sounds impossible."

  "Yes, sir. There's always some clever trick to it that makes it possible. And that sort of clever trick is just the sort of crap that one of those embassy bureau creepers is likely to pull, just because they can. That's what I meant about them being too clever to be smart. If they'd just left the door unlocked, there would be no particular reason to look at them."

  "But now there is." Colonel Aslonav nodded. "So you went bulling into the embassy bureau, and I get to start my day with an official complaint."

  "I didn't bull in anywhere, sir. I very respectfully asked what the China desk was up to, in order to discover if there might be a motive for his death in that."

  "And what is the China desk up to?"

  "I don't know, sir, but whatever it is, it stinks like week-old fish. Otherwise, there'd be no reason for them to get me out of there so fast."

  "All right. I'll put in the request."

  Chapter 2

  Location: The Home of Tatiana

  Date: May 10, 1637

  As long as the oldest profession has been practiced, there have been gradations. Russia in the seventeenth century wasn't Athens in the era of the hetaerai, but neither was it Victorian England. Prostitution was legal, if frowned upon by the church, and at the top of the field were women of both great beauty and skill. Women who could talk politics at the highest levels, knew art, music, and dance, and who lived quite well and had more control over their destinies than most people of the time, slave or free.

  Tatiana was one such, and half a day of questioning had led Miroslava to her door. The building was one of the new hotel boarding houses that were springing up in Ufa since the czar and his court, as well as the dacha, moved to Ufa.

  It was also the sort of place that wouldn't have let Miroslava in the front door before Vasilii had bought her contract. That didn't bother Miroslava now, and wouldn't have bothered her even then. It was just one of the strange rules that she didn't understand but had to follow.

  Now the doorman examined her Dacha ID card with her photograph and sent her up the stairs to Tatiana's room with a bellboy escort.

  The door opened, and a maid looked out at them.

  "Miroslava Holmes to see Tatiana," the bellboy announced.

  There was a voice from inside, soft and gentle. "Show the lady in, Arina."

  Arina stepped aside, and waved Miroslava in.

  In the living room was a lounge and a woman of uncertain age sitting in a plush chair. Miroslava examined her. She might have been eighteen or forty-eight. From the very faint lines around her eyes, Miroslava guessed her to be closer to the latter than the former. She was wearing a dressing gown of purple silk and the new up-timer style makeup. She waved Miroslava to a chair. "What can I do for the czar's detective?"

  "I'm here about Nikola Vetrov," Mirosalva said.

  That produced a slight frown and a lifted eyebrow. "He wasn't one of my favorite patrons."

  "Then you've heard about his death?"

  "No, I hadn't, but I am not greatly surprised."

  There was something off in that, but—even for Miroslava—identifying the precise meaning of facial expressions or nonverbal communications in general was a hit or miss proposition, affected by circumstance and the abilities of the person being observed. Tatiana was highly skilled, and Miroslava wasn't at all sure what, if any, her conection to the murder was.

  "Then why did you say he wasn't one of your favorite patrons?"

  "Because he wasn't. I don't understand your question."

  "Why 'wasn't' rather than 'isn't'?"

  "Oh." Tatiana paused and looked at Miroslava. "Because he was no longer a client, even before he died."

  That was almost certainly true, but it wasn't all. Miroslava thought it likely that Tatiana had known that Vetrov was dead before she told her. But she couldn't be sure. "Why did he stop being a client?"

  Again that pause to examine Miroslava before Tatiana answered. "There are rules to my profession that you might not be aware of."

  Well, that wasn't hard to read at all. In fact it was clear that Tatiana wanted her to hear the emphasis on "my" and "you," and Miroslava was sure that she was supposed to be insulted. Tatiana felt that the difference between what she did and what Miroslava had done in the Happy Bottom was so great as to be a difference in kind.

  Miroslava wasn't insulted. Not because she'd only rarely had sex with her customers. That didn't matter to her. The reason Miroslava wasn't insulted was because she didn't see why she should care. You did what your talents and circumstances allowed you to do. Very few people had much of a choice in the matter. Miroslava certainly hadn't, still didn't, though she liked her situation better now. She knew intellectually that most people put some sort of value on what they did, either greater or lesser. But though she liked detecting better than dancing naked, she didn't think it was "better" in any sort of moral sense. "What rules are you referring to?"

  "Confidentiality. I don't discuss my friend's tastes."

  "Even former clients?"

  "Even former clients!"

  "I ask you to reconsider that position in this case for two reasons. First, because Nikola Vetrov is dead, so no longer cares about his privacy. Second, because I will keep his tastes private. I don't understand why he or you should care. But I don't understand a lot of what most people care about. For me, knowing that they care is enough to keep me silent on the matter."

  "If you're silent on the matter, how will it help you?" Tatiana asked. It was a good question.

  "Because it might tell me where to look for his murderer. Can you tell me where you were last night?"

  "Are you asking if I killed him?" Tatiana looked offended at the very thought. "I did not."

  "If you were somewhere else and have a witness who can confirm that, we can eliminate you from the pool of suspects."

  "I don't see why I am in that group in the first place," Tatiana said, rather heatedly.

  Miroslava considered the woman. She wasn't happy and she might even be a bit frightened. That would make sense whether she was involved in the death or not. Miroslava was aware that you didn't have to have committed a crime to hang for it, and there was little doubt that Tatiana was as aware of that fact as Mirosalva was. "I have good evidence that you knew Nikola Vetrov. You are roughly the right size to be the murderer, and you have been reticent about your relationship with him."

  Tatiana was clearly frightened now. Unfortunately, that didn't make her easier to read. "I do have a witness for my whereabouts for yesterday evening and a good part of last night
."

  "Good. Who is it? I will talk to him and . . ."

  Tatiana was shaking her head. "I can't tell you who it is. I already told you why."

  "Yes, confidentiality. However, that leaves you as a suspect." That might mean that Tatiana was true to her code, or simply that she didn't have an alibi.

  Miroslava was learning that questioning of suspects, especially suspects who hadn't been tortured, wasn't how it was in the books. It was a slow grind of guesses checked against other guesses until you had a good idea what happened. She already had a good idea what happened, just not who was in the room. Tatiana fit the size range, and her profession fit the circumstances.

  "So tell me about Nikola Vetrov's tastes, or at least why he was no longer a client."

  Tatiana considered her yet again. "Do you think I did it? Not a pool of suspects, or the proper procedures. You, Miroslava Holmes?"

  "I don't know." Someday Miroslava might learn to lie convincingly, but she hadn't yet, in spite of the requirements of her former profession.

  Tatiana's lips twitched in a smile. "He liked it rough. He had a lot of anger in him and I was afraid he might go too far at some point. You know how it works. You don't take it personally. You can't."

  Miroslava nodded. That fit all too well with what she'd seen in Nikola Vetrov's rooms. Unfortunately, it neither exonerated Tatiana or proved her responsibility. It could be that Tatiana was the woman in the room, and Vetrov got rough, and Tatiana ended it with a pistol. Or it could be that she refused to see him and Vetrov went to another woman. "Is there anyone who can confirm that you had stopped seeing him?"

  "There may be, but I can't tell you his name without getting his permission."

  "What about the person you were with last night, can you get their . . ."

  "No. The person I was with last night would never give permission, and I wouldn't ask for it."

  After leaving Tatiana with her address at the Dacha, Miroslava went by the cop station in the Ufa Kremlin.

  Location: Room 22B, Ufa Dacha

  Date: May 10, 1637

  "How was your day?" I asked as Miroslava came in.

  "Frustrating, Vasilii. Very frustrating."

  "Mine too," I admitted. "Even with the forced air, we're not getting enough cooling in the condenser."

  "You should be." Miroslava frowned. She didn't like it when the real world didn't match the math. She was used to it, but she still didn't accept it. Not really. I felt myself smiling as she came over to my drafting board and looked at the notes. By now, of course, she knew her numbers, and could follow math and use a slide rule. "One of your assumptions is wrong," she pronounced like a judge pronouncing sentence.

  "Yes, dear, I know. But I don't know which one. We know we aren't getting laminar flow in the hot box. There's no way we could. With all the heat exchange fins we have there, we don't even want it. The guys are thinking that it's the airflow that's the problem." I put a hand over the scribbled calculations. "What was so frustrating about your day?"

  "Tatiana may be a murderer, may have acted in self defense, or may be completely uninvolved. And she is the only—" Miroslava grinned at me and finished. "—lady of the evening who I can confirm was associated with Nikola Vetrov."

  "Huh?" Aside from the whole lady of the evening bit, which Mirolsava had had read to her from one of my mysteries and just loved for some reason, none of it made any sense to me. I'd spent the day reading gauges in the shop and finding that not enough steam was turning back into water.

  So for the next hour or so, Miroslava told me of her day. How the state of the room told her that Vetrov was trying to have sex with some one shortly before he died, and that something had gone wrong, leading to violence and his being shot.

  "Why do you assume that the person he had sex with was a lady of the evening?"

  "He wasn't married."

  For all her experience, Miroslava was in some ways quite unworldly. Men had sex with their wives and ladies of the evening, sometimes both. Sometimes both at once. But a category that was neither didn't fit in her world view. A thing I hadn't realized until that moment.

  "Men and women sometimes have sex when they aren't married and when it's not a buisness arrangement."

  "It's always a business arrangement," she insisted. "Marriage is a business arrangement too." She took my hand, and I realized that she was explaining how the world worked to me. "It doesn't mean it's not fun, or one party doesn't like it, or like the other party, but it's always a business arrangement."

  She was wrong, but she was wrong in the way that Miroslava was often wrong. She saw very clearly. Especially she saw all the details, but she often missed subtlety. The hard part was going to be explaining that to her, because she wasn't entirely wrong. There was an aspect of negotiation, business, in all human relationships. Not just sexual ones, all of them. "Yes, but that is rarely all there is. People agree to do things for a lot of reasons."

  "I don't think this girl agreed, at least not at the last."

  "Then what was she doing there?"

  "That is why I spent the day looking for a lady of the evening."

  "So you're sure now that it wasn't a lady of the evening?"

  "No. Just that it's no one I know, or no one that I know knows. Or at least can direct me too."

  That was true enough. The girls at the Happy Bottom, even at all the clubs like the Happy Bottom, weren't the only women making their living at the oldest profession. There were still at least two men for every woman in Ufa. It was a seller's market, which was why Madam Drozdov had brought her girls to Ufa in the first place.

  "Let's go to dinner. We can both get started on our headaches in the morning."

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The next morning, I suggested that she join Pavel on his hunt for the embassy bureau suspect.

  Location: Ufa Kremlin, Office of the Czar

  Date: May 11, 1637

  "Come in, Bernie." Czar Mikhail waved. He was standing at the sideboard of his office, fixing himself a glass of tea. The samovar he was using was based in part on pictures and descriptions gotten from Grantville, but it wasn't much of a change from the authepsas that were present in Russia before the Ring of Fire. The two big differences were that this one had a built-in space for the fire and a place for a tea pot above the water boiling part. The tea was a gift from Salqam-Jangir Khan. He didn't have the lemons that would be part of the mix in that other history, but he had honey and cream. He held up a wire frame holding a glass. "Want one?"

  "No, thank you." Bernie preferred coffee, which was available from the Turks. Besides, he wasn't in the mood. "What's going on?"

  "Tea, as it happens. The addition of the Kazakh Khanate as the first state in the USSR opens up more possibilities than we first thought. Both for them and for us. We have the river routes from Ufa to the Caspian Sea—and, with a very short rail line, to the Black Sea. Also the links to the Arctic Ocean, and—if we win—to the Baltic and the rest of Europe. That's not new, but with a rail line from Ufa to Shavgar, we're a good part of the way to northern India, Tibet, and China. And—" Czar Mikhail held up the glass of hot tea in the metal framework. "—this. As well as Chinese silk, Indian cotton, and a host of other goods."

  "Not possible! The iron rails alone—"

  But the czar was already holding up a hand. "Wood, single rail, and a graded road that can be used for carts and wagons when not used by the trains."

  "Okay," Bernie said, slowly. "What do you want me for?"

  "Nikola Vetrov got put on the China desk at the embassy bureau back before we had any idea that a route for the China trade might open up. We were all focused on Sheremetev and holding Kazan. He's well connected in the nobility and no more corrupt than most. The rail line was his idea. And now he's dead, murdered in a locked room. The city guard had to break the door down to get in."

  "Okay," Bernie said, even more slowly.

  Czar Mikhail grinned. "Yes. It gets worse, or at least more suspicious, when you learn
that my head of the embassy bureau isn't giving our new detective sergeant the time of day. And the way I found out about the project is from stock certificates and books found in Nikola Vetrov's wardrobe. I don't own any stock in that venture, so I'm curious."

  "You think he was offed by another of your spies over the potential China trade that may be opened up by Kazakh joining the United Sovereign States of Russia." Bernie avoided using the initials since he'd been rudely interrupted by Gerry Simmons. The song had taken off in Russia, at least in Ufa and Kazan in the last couple of weeks and you haven't lived until you have heard "Back in the USSR" sung in Russian, backed by Russian guitars, and— Bernie shuddered just thinking about it.

  "I don't know what to think, but I'm not at all sure that Colonel Milktoast Aslonav, the head of my police department, is up to bearding the embassy bureau in its lair."

  "And you want me to go back up Detective Sergeant Baranov."

  "See? I knew you were the man for the job." Czar Mikhail grinned, then sipped his tea and sighed in contentment. "And while you're at it, find out who else over there knew about this railroad."

  Bernie nodded his head in agreement and left.

  Location: Ufa Kremlin, Police Headquarters

  Date: May 11, 1637

  The place looked the same as it had the last time Bernie was here. Streltzi coming and going most of them effectively beat cops, a couple of sergeants who oversaw the mess, and in a corner at an up-time style desk was Maksim Vinnikov, with his boss sitting at a table next to him, drinking a mug of small beer. Small beer was beer with a much lower alcohol content than regular beer.

  Pavel looked up when Bernie came in, said something to Maksim, and left. Maksim stood and brought some papers to Bernie.

  Bernie's Russian was passable by now, and he recognized the Arabic script of the Kazakh Khanate. He didn't need it. Maksim was already saying, "They're railroad stock certificates. And you should see the books."