Two Cases for the Czar

by Gorg Huff

  "Was the lock broken?"

  "No. It was still there, still locked."

  That was a surprise. She waved for Nikolina to continue, and learned that the room, a small room about the size of Miroslava's old room, but cheaper because it was on Tanners Street, had been ransacked. The description by Nikolina wasn't very helpful. "I will need to see the room. I will come by when you get off and we'll go together. For now, I have to go."

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  That afternoon, after her meeting with Tataina, Miroslava returned to the Happy Bottom and walked with Nikolina to her room. It wasn't a nice part of town. It stank of tanning skins and the chemicals used to make them. Nikolina wasn't the best-looking girl at the Happy Bottom, nor was she the nicest or the most pleasant to be around, and the aroma of this part of town clung to her. In short, she wasn't making nearly as much money as some of the girls. That necklace was her sole hope of a retirement other than as a washerwoman somewhere.

  But the room was cheap, the next best thing to free, so that was where she lived. It wasn't good planning, but it also wasn't Miroslava's business. The lock was still on the door, and when it was unlocked and removed, Miroslava examined it and saw small scratches on the copper plate at the bottom. The lock had been picked, either by someone who didn't know what they were doing or by someone who wasn't looking at what they were doing.

  She handed the lock back to Nikolina, and they went into the small room. There was an earthenware jug and a small mug on a box next to the cot. There was a chip on the jug. "Tell me what the room looked like when you got here that night."

  Nikolina told her, with some prompting. The jug and the mug were on the floor. The jug normally held small beer. The beer was soaking into the earthen floor of the room when Nikolina got home that night, so it had been spilled only hours before. The cot was upended and the bag of hay that was the mattress was on the floor. The box was overturned and Nikolina's savings were gone. Going over it again, Nikolina started crying and, uncomfortably, Miroslava held her and comforted her. Miroslava's discomfort was partly because she was uncomfortable touching or being touched, but mostly because she had an excellent sense of smell, and Nikolina was in need of a bath and had been for days.

  But, at the same time, a picture of the thief was starting to come together. Nothing like a complete picture. There was no dead body here with a wound to the chest to tell her how tall the thief was, but the scratches on the lock told her that the thief didn't use a hammer to bust the lock, and didn't have a key. So the thief had to have at least some skill, because most people couldn't pick a lock. So, someone with at least some skills. And someone who went to the trouble of replacing the lock. As soon as she could, she released Nikolina and went outside.

  The room was one of six, all built in a row as a single unit with six doors. Nikolina's door was the second or the fifth, depending on how you counted. Of the six, one other had an actual lock. The others had pegs in the door latches.

  Miroslava knocked on the door on the end next to Nikolina's door, and when the fat old woman opened it, asked if she had been robbed.

  "No, and I didn't see nothing, so you take your questions elsewhere."

  Miroslava then went down the row of doors, asking everyone if they had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary on the seventh of May. One old man saw a man next to Nikolina's door, but he figured a man going into Nikolina's room was to be expected.

  He didn't remember details. Seemed well dressed, but considering the rags the old man was wearing, well dressed meant pants without obvious holes in the knees or seat. He had a beard, but the old man didn't know what color, and he must have had a key because he unlocked the lock.

  The old man worked for various construction companies or builders when they had work and he wasn't drunk. He carried stuff from where they told him to where they told him, and got paid very little for his trouble.

  Miroslava didn't think the old man was the thief, mostly because she doubted he could pick a lock, but she couldn't eliminate him either. He might have hidden talents.

  Location: Chernoff House, Ufa

  Date: May 12, 1637

  All this was going on at the same time as the locked room murder. After she visited Dominika in regard to the locked room, she was almost accosted by Zia Ivaneva Chernoff.

  "I was robbed!" Zia insisted. She wasn't wearing the white pancake makeup that she'd been wearing the last time Miroslava saw her, but she was still the flat-faced slightly overweight woman Miroslava remembered. She was well dressed and wearing makeup in the up-timer style, which was copied by the czarina and, by now, by just about every woman of status in Ufa, and there were over twenty of them here now. As well as at least a hundred of the Russian gentry, and even more streltzi.

  Zia looked better. The makeup had been professionally applied, which was not always the case, and her clothing was of excellent quality. Also, the gray in her hair was covered by a henna dye job. All of which Miroslava noticed, and cataloged automatically. At the same time, Zia was very angry and was holding onto Miroslava's arm hard enough to leave a bruise.

  "Let go of my arm," Miroslava said.

  Zia stopped, looked down at her hand on Miroslava's arm, and seemed to be making up her mind whether to let her go or shake her.

  There was a not quite giggle, not quite laugh from the door, and Dominika said, "Let her go, Zia. She doesn't work for you and attempting to manhandle her won't get you her help."

  Zia let her go.

  "Now, what is this all about? And have you talked to the police?"

  "Yes, of course. The fools were no help at all."

  "Come back into the sitting room, Miroslava, Zia," Dominika said. "It happened last night. And the guards didn't see anything."

  "They were asleep, and we should discharge the lot of them," Zia insisted.

  As she walked back into the sitting room rubbing her arm Miroslava wondered if this might be related to Nikolina's missing necklace. Once everyone was seated Dominika started to explain, only to be interrupted by Zia a couple of sentences in.

  "We could have been killed in our beds, and that fool Gleb was no use at all."

  "Gleb?"

  "Gleb Ivanovich Galyorkin. He's the personal guard that Larisa's grandpa sent to watch over Zia. He's in charge of our security, but he's not allowed to be alone with the baby."

  "Why not?"

  "Because we don't know if grandpa has ordered him to kill her. We know he won't do anything with witnesses because that would get him executed, and grandpa on the gibbet beside him—"

  "That doesn't matter. It's not his orders from Karol. It's his incompetence that is the problem."

  Zia wasn't helping. She was too busy harping on everything that was wrong with everyone, while Dominika seemed more amused than anything. "Why aren't you upset?" Miroslava asked.

  "Well, I am!" Dominika insisted.

  "She keeps her jewels in a safety deposit box in the National Bank," Zia said in disgust.

  "I don't have much. A necklace that I wear only when visiting the palace."

  "Palace" got a snort from Zia. Ufa was a city under construction and the construction had been interrupted, first by the winter, then by the Kazak siege. "The palace" was a half-built wood building on a large empty chunk of land next to the Ufa kremlin. It wasn't up to the stone palaces of Moscow.

  "Madam Chernoff, if you want me to help, you will need to do two things. First, you will need to stop interrupting everything anyone says with commentary on the many ways Ufa fails to live up to Moscow. And, two, when you are asked questions, you need to answer them, not complain about Ufa, your guards, the police, or the shape of the clouds over Ufa."

  That last was Miroslava being sarcastic. Zia Chernoff hadn't complained about the shape of the clouds. Yet. It didn't work, at least not entirely. It took Miroslava almost an hour to get the pertinent facts out of Zia, and at that, she didn't have many. The jewels that were stolen were in a locked box that was kept in Zia's room. It was
a large chest that would be difficult to move, and, aside from the jewels—including several diamond and ruby pendants, necklaces, and two tiaras to be worn with a Russian matron's head covering—it also included clothing. Several gowns made from silk from China and cotton from India. To get to the jewels, you had to move aside the clothing. And the next morning, when Zia had unlocked and opened her chest, the clothing was shifted as if it had all been pulled out, and then stuffed back in with no attempt to fold or straighten it.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  After her discussion with Zia and Dominka, Miroslava went to speak with Gleb.

  Gleb was a taciturn man of middle height with reddish brown hair and a full brown beard. He was also careful and alert. Like Zia and Dominika, Miroslava suspected that he had separate orders from Karol, the elder Chernoff. He watched her like a cat watching an unfamiliar dog. Not afraid, exactly, but cautious and very observant. He showed her the locked trunk. It was locked with a padlock like the one on Nikolina's door; in fact, it looked like the same model. It also had the same sort of scratches on the base just like the one on Nikolina's door.

  "How often does Zia open this?"

  "Lady Chernoff," he specified repressively, "opens it every morning, and several times each day."

  "So the theft had to have taken place last night, or she would have found it sooner."

  "Yes."

  Miroslava went over the room systematically, in what one of her books called a grid pattern. It was a considerably larger room than Nikolina's, and aside from the large bed with the down-filled mattress and the up-timer innovation of box springs, there was a dressing table with a mirror. The room also had chimneyed oil lamps and a wardrobe. There was a porcelain mug and a carafe of water on the sideboard across from the door. And none of it had been disturbed. The window to the outside was shuttered. Miroslava examined the shutters and the latch. The shutters came together leaving only a narrow space between the wood panels, and half way up the wood panel was a latch. It was wood, and it was scratched at the bottom, just where a knife would push against it to lift it up from the outside.

  It was still possible that someone had slipped in by way of the door, came down the hall, opened Zia's door, and slipped in, but Miroslava doubted it. There was way too much chance of being spotted doing it that way, even in the middle of the night, especially if there were actually guards on duty.

  "Do you think the guards fell asleep?" she asked Gleb, who hadn't let her out of his sight from the moment he'd been instructed to show her the room.

  "No!"

  Miroslava looked at the door next to which he was standing. She could look directly at people, but it still made her uncomfortable. She could see him out of the corner of her eye. He was upset about the notion that he or his guards could be at fault. "Come look at the window," she said. It wasn't best practice, according to the detective novels or the police manuals imported from Grantville, but the world didn't follow best practice. A thing that Miroslava had been aware of for as long as she could remember. She didn't like it, but there it was.

  She showed him the scratches on the underside of the window bar.

  "But we're on the second floor. Did the thief have wings? Or was he just really tall?"

  "I believe he climbed," Miroslava told him. "But I will have to look at the back wall to be sure."

  The front of the hotel was on Irina Way, but the Chernoff rooms were facing away from the street. Not that the view was much better, but it was away from the street noise. It was also away from any passersby who might spot someone climbing the wooden walls.

  In Ufa there were two ways of building a house or building. One was to chop down a bunch of trees, trim off the branches and a bit of the bark, lay them on their sides and hold them together with pegs until you had a wall. The other was to make actual boards. Making actual boards cost about twice as much, because back in the fall of 1636 when Ufa became the new capital, the only way to make boards was to have two men with a long saw saw them out of the log, then let them dry. The hotel, being a high-end sort of establishment, had compromised; the interiors were done with expensive boards, but the exterior was made of slightly trimmed and partially debarked logs. During the winter such walls had the advantage of keeping the building at a fairly constant temperature, six to eight inches of solid wood being an excellent insulator of heat and sound.

  Outside, the wooden walls bore the marks of the hasty construction last winter, and ageing and drying logs shifting, and having to be recaulked over the winter and spring. They also bore other marks which Miroslava deduced were the marks of spikes that the thief used to reach the window. In part that was because they were fresh, whereas most of the other damage was several days to months old and weathered, but also because they formed a fairly direct line from the ground floor to the second floor window of Zia's room.

  "I don't believe it. How could he hammer the spikes in and then remove them without being heard?" Gleb asked.

  But Miroslava, watching him out of the corner of her eye, realized that he was starting to believe it. He kept glancing at the shutters of a particular room, the room of Larisa Chernoff. And Miroslava remembered the fact that Gleb probably had two sets of orders. And the second set probably involved removing baby Larisa from the line of succession, if he got that chance.

  Still looking at the wall and the marks, Miroslava said, "Don't do it. I will see to having better locks put on that window. And—" She still didn't look up from the wall. "—I will find you and kill you if you do manage it."

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Gleb looked at the czar's divining witch, and shuddered. She was still examining the wall, not looking at him. And she'd spoken so calmly, like she was talking about the weather.

  He was, in that moment, very tempted to pull the knife he always carried hidden under his clothing at the small of his back and kill her. It would be a pious act, because it was obvious that she was a witch, whatever fancy title the czar chose to put on it. The fact that she'd shown him the marks on the window facing and on the walls in no way diminished his suspicious dread. It was unnatural, the way she saw such things. Besides, how would he dispose of the body?

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Miroslava wasn't all that calm herself. She wasn't blind to behavioral cues. Quite the reverse. She couldn't help but see them all. And she knew that Gleb was not far away from deciding to kill her. She turned and walked away, like she didn't know what he was thinking. Well, as much like she didn't know what he was thinking as she could. She wasn't nearly as good at hiding her cues as she was at seeing others. But he let her go, continuing to examine the window to the nursery and the wall beneath it, while Miroslava walked around the corner and then rushed back to have a few words with Dominika.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Dominika was with Zia. Miroslava told them about the issue with the windows, and that Gleb was now aware of the gap in the baby's security.

  Dominika wasn't sure what to do and neither was Zia.

  "You need a different sort of lock on the window shutters in the baby's room, one that can't be opened by using a knife through the gap between the two panels."

  "That smith," Zia said, "the one whose wife is in congress. We should go see him."

  "Yes, but Larisa isn't going to be out of my sight until the new lock is on on the shutters."

  "Fine. But I want new locks on the shutters to my room too. I was the one who was robbed, after all."

  Miroslava left them to it. She had to go see Anya.

  Chapter 7

  Location: Room 22B, Ufa Dacha

  Date: May 12, 1637

  That night Miroslava and I talked about the burglaries. And Miroslava mentioned her concern about Gleb. I assured her that I would talk to Anya about getting her a gun and that I would see about having one made for myself at the same time. I'm no Conan the Barbarian, but I am a member of the Russian service nobility and so have been taught the use of weapons: sword, bow, and long gun, as well as pistols.

  Miros
lava told me about the theft of Zia Chernoff's jewels, and I found myself somewhat admiring the thief. He was skillful and not stupid, more like the cat burglars of up-time books than a common thief.

  "You may get your way, Vasilii," Maroslava told me while we cuddled under the blankets. It was a chilly night. "We don't have many clues as to who he is. Just the witness from Nikolina's room. And, even assuming he's remembering accurately, we don't know for sure that the man at Nikolina's door was the thief."

  "Fingerprints?" I asked.

  "I don't carry around a fingerprint kit with me. Besides, the theft was two days old when I was called in. Even if the thief's prints are there, how would we identify them?"

  I could see someone figuring out how to pick a lock just by examining the lock and several keys, but that, combined with the gear he had to use to climb that wall . . . That's another clue to who he is. It didn't prove that he had access to up-timer books, but it suggested it rather strongly. "Do you think he might be from the Dacha?"

  "Why?"

  I explained my reasoning and Miroslava sat up in bed, which let in the cold air while exposing her breasts in the dim lamplight. Both those things were distracting in the extreme, but the breasts took pride of place. "Maybe," Miroslava said, "but which Dacha?"

  Well, I'd been distracted. Miroslava, not so much.

  I lay back on my back, and looked at the ceiling. "It doesn't have to be either. It could be the Grantville desk of the embassy bureau.. Either Grantville desk. For that matter, mystery books aren't the sole province of the Dachas and the Grantville desks. All the entertainment books and stories were copied, along with everything else. Still are, probably."

  It was surprising how many books and pamphlets were available in Grantville. A small West Virginia mining town with no great pretension of education had, after the Ring of Fire, proved to have more—and more varied—books than anyone would have guessed before the Ring of Fire. And Russia, thanks to Vladimir Gorchakov and his team, was endeavoring to copy every scrap of it and ship it to Russia. Where it was, bit by bit, being translated into Russian. Including the complete Ellery Queen mysteries in book form. I read them in the original English, but I know that back in the Dacha, before the move to Ufa, there was a group that was translating them into Russian, complete with a change in the name and background of Ellery Queen to Eduard Kuklin, and his being the younger son of a fictional boyar. Those were being printed using mimeographs and regular printing presses and sold throughout Russia, along with Dennis the Menace and other such things.