Field of Mars

by Stephen Miller

  ‘We would never send one of ours to a client like that. We only cater to the most exclusive of tastes. Men and women of culture.’ Madame Khory shook her head in evident distress.

  ‘All of your customers come recommended, isn’t that right?’ Schliff added helpfully.

  ‘Of course. We’re all too aware of the dangers that our little ones face when we send them off.’

  ‘Perhaps we could talk to some of the children, the girls? Perhaps some of them have had experiences—’ Ryzhkov started.

  ‘No, we always talk afterwards. They never handle the money so they can’t be cheated or intimidated in any way. We know when to expect them back. I can’t remember the last incident we’ve had … well, sometimes you have one person who wants to add a friend at the last moment, things like that.’

  ‘Ah, well …’ Schliff said and got up to go. Madame Khory stood to meet him, plainly relieved, offered her cheek to be kissed, once, twice, three times, and then they were shown the door.

  Hokhodiev, seeing Ryzhkov’s dark mood, turned on the little city detective. ‘Look here, how do you know she’s not lying?’

  Schliff thought for a moment, then faced Hokhodiev with a smile. ‘Strictly speaking I don’t, but she knows I’m not going to pressure her and if she learns something she’ll tell us. Moreover, she knows that if I do catch her in a lie, well …’ He waggled his hand to indicate an entire range of consequences.

  ‘You didn’t grill her very hard in there. It all looked light to me,’ Hokhodiev protested.

  ‘Don’t worry, gentlemen. This is a different world, eh? A different type of investigation.’

  If Madame Khory’s billed itself as an orphanage, the next establishment called itself a school. At the door they could hear the children inside. Apparently they had arrived at breakfast. It was a noisy house, presided over by a husband and wife team. They were both in aprons. No servants. It looked like catering to the paedophile market was a poor way to make ends meet.

  ‘Oh, hello, Iosif. What’s the matter?’ The woman of the house hovered nervously in the foyer.

  ‘Good afternoon, Tanya. We’re just here for some questions. We’re searching for a bad case, someone who enjoys hurting the girls a little too much,’ Schliff said, pleasantly.

  ‘Someone who enjoys killing them a little too much,’ Ryzhkov put in, growing impatient. Schliff turned to him, smiled tightly. The husband appeared at the door, saw Schliff and visibly relaxed.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said the woman. ‘Well, come in, then. We’re all just at breakfast.’ It wasn’t that late for breakfast considering the hours the children had to work.

  Inside was a large room with perhaps a half-dozen children, mostly girls, but with a couple of boys sitting around a long table with all its leaves added, causing it to project out of the dining area and into the front room of the dwelling. It was warm in the ‘school’; the whole place smelled of food and sour milk, Ryzhkov thought.

  ‘Listen, everyone,’ the woman announced. ‘Mr Schliff wants to ask you some questions. Think hard about what he says and then tell him anything that might be helpful, please?’

  Schliff held his hat in his hand and took the centre of the room. As he talked he looked at each of the children in turn. ‘We’re trying to find someone, a man, an old man with white whiskers, but not like Père Christmas …’ The children laughed. ‘No, he’s got a beard here on the side and he divides it into halves sometimes. And not much hair on his head. And we’re trying to find him because sometimes he … gets a little … carried away, you know?’ There was a murmur of understanding from the children. A couple of titters. ‘Can anyone remember meeting anyone like that?’ Schliff looked around hopefully.

  ‘Does he like boys or girls?’ a boy asked from the corner of the table.

  ‘Girls,’ Schliff said. ‘Just girls. Has anyone met someone like that? We want you to think about it, try to remember.’

  ‘There’s a lot of them,’ a little girl said. She was sitting on the floor and playing with a dolly that someone had made from knotted rags. A younger version of Lvova. ‘We can’t be expected to remember everyone, you know?’ she said, ladylike and a little piqued at the whole thing.

  ‘But you would remember him if he had hurt you, yes? He likes to squeeze—’ Schliff put his hands out to choke an invisible child. ‘Like this. Have any of you met anyone of that sort?’ There was a moment when the children began to murmur together. The man and woman looked around and shrugged.

  ‘I met someone like that, but you said he liked girls, so …’ another one of the boys said.

  ‘Was he old, with white whiskers?’

  The boy searched his memory for a moment. ‘Not then but he could have dyed his hair!’ The children laughed. Now they were playing detective.

  ‘When was it?’

  ‘Last year. He liked to squeeze, but he wanted me to squeeze him too.’ There was more laughter at the wordplay. Schliff smiled.

  ‘Thank you, but we don’t think he’d dye his hair. If anyone does see him … any of you girls, make sure to tell Tanya or Georg, eh? If you find him, Inspector Ryzhkov here will bring you all a big package of sweets.’ A cheer from the children. The little girl stood up and hugged his leg before they left.

  ‘My God,’ said Hokhodiev as they got in the carriage. Schliff was still making conversation at the door with the patrons. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’ve slipped into a dream … a nightmare. Something where up is down and nothing makes sense.’

  ‘He’s obvious being paid off by all these people,’ Ryzhkov said. He was frustrated. They were going nowhere. It reminded him of the kind of visits you made after Christmas to see the relatives and parade your latest pair of shoes. Talking about nothing, niceties and gossip. All that was missing was the tea and cakes.

  ‘Oh, I don’t doubt it. All these boys who till the fields at the bottom, they’re always on the take. If they weren’t, you’d suspect them of something,’ Hokhodiev said sourly.

  Schliff was coming back from the door. He seemed pleased. ‘Only four more to go, gentlemen,’ he said.

  ‘Look, are you sure this is getting us somewhere?’ Ryzhkov said, harder than he meant to. He was trying to be patient, but …

  ‘Certainly, as I said, before, it’s a different type of investigation.’ He smiled and reached out to tap their driver on the back. ‘We’re going to Nevsky Prospekt. All the way to the end, a little place behind the monastery.’

  The rest of the day was like that, a series of ‘schools’, ‘foundlings rescue societies’ and ‘boarding hostels’ all of which were, in reality, dispatching agencies for child prostitutes. As the hours passed, the owners they dropped in on had grown increasingly irritable and it was obvious that the children were being bathed, dressed and coached for their nightly chores. Little cheeks were being rouged, little nails clipped, little teeth brushed. Everyone was too busy to talk to them. They called it a day and agreed to meet in another two days when Schliff would have had time to draw up a fresh list of establishments they could investigate. When they returned to headquarters one of the St Petersburg police clerks handed them a buff folder. Schliff waved goodbye. It was almost the dinner hour, the start of his normal workday.

  In the droshky on the way back to 17 Pushkinskaya Ryzhkov looked through the dossier. It was a series of single-spaced typewritten pages—a master list of children who had either been found murdered, or had simply disappeared within Petersburg over the last three years.

  There were fourteen pages in the file.

  FIFTEEN

  The bomb exploded before dawn, and by the time Ryzhkov dragged himself out of bed and got to the little house off Baltiskaya Street, it was all over but the cleaning up.

  It had detonated by accident just as a terrorist had been ascending the steps from a second bomb factory, only a few streets away from the one the Okhrana had been watching. The terrorist, or terrorists (no one knew exactly) had been blown into a fine spray of flesh that had spattered the
walls of surrounding buildings; a few dozen windows had been shattered by the blast. The front of a little rooming-house had been knocked off its foundations, collapsed, and immediately caught fire.

  No one knew if this second bomb factory had any connection with the group that were now being arrested by the St Petersburg gendarmes, the anarchists taken by surprise, caught asleep in their various boltholes, enfeebled by the noxious fumes in their ‘laboratory’.

  Now Ryzhkov and Hokhodiev stood in the background, trying not to gag as Baron Colonel Tuitchevsky, commander of the local Okhrana bureau, strode through the devastation, with a grave and embarrassed expression on his face, angry and worried that he would be blamed for overlooking the second set of terrorists. Clearly he was looking for any excuse he could find; a way to treat the explosion as a great victory would be best, but failing that, someone else’s career was going to have to go. Eventually Tuitchevsky came around to Ryzhkov, shook his hand, but completely ignored Hokhodiev, who just stood there calmly, having seen it all before a million times.

  It could have been much, much worse; only one bystander had been killed, no one important, only a newsboy who had the misfortune to be standing outside on the corner in the early hours waiting to pick up his papers for the day. He was blown into the street and died quickly from the concussion. There were fragments of Russian Word floating about the street, or turning into soggy mush from the water the firemen had soaked everything with. Now they were rolling up their hoses and smoking cigarettes.

  ‘Oh, God …’ Ryzhkov heard Hokhodiev mutter behind him, and he turned to see a thickset woman running up. She went from gendarme to gendarme tugging on their lapels trying to find her son, but no one knew where he was, perhaps they had already taken him away.

  From the neighbours Ryzhkov learned something of the ownership of the building. It was a property managed by a banking firm as it turned out, undoubtedly purchased for speculative purposes by a rich investor. Hokhodiev telephoned and informed a bank clerk and they promised they would send someone out right away; the basement was leased to a family named Popov the clerk said. They had only rented a few days before and had paid up to the end of the month.

  Ryzhkov walked around in the soggy embers and peered down the stone stairwell into the flooded basement. ‘Popov’ would undoubtedly prove to be an alias. He wondered if there were any other bodies down there and how long it would take the police to sift through the wreckage.

  ‘What I cannot fathom—’ Colonel Tuitchevsky was complaining behind him, ‘—is why we had no indication, no indication at all. We followed them, your people were listening to the others, yes? But you say you didn’t hear anything did you?’ His eyes were narrowed and he had focused on Ryzhkov. ‘Where’s Zezulin? I thought he was in charge of this entire case? Why isn’t he here?’

  ‘I don’t know, Colonel. We were all called from our station, so … Perhaps he is en route,’ Ryzhkov said. In reality Zezulin had probably slept through any telephone call he would have received in the early morning.

  ‘Well, we were told about the one set of bombers, now it turns out there were two. I suppose Zezulin simply missed it entirely, eh?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say, Colonel. There were several telephone calls from the other site, from the bakery. Perhaps some were made to this group. We really have no way of knowing.’

  ‘Hmmph …’ Tuitchevsky looked at him for a moment, the trace of a smile. He could see as well as anyone when someone was protecting his boss. ‘Well, don’t worry. I’ll get to the bottom of things,’ he said. Tuitchevsky kicked a charred window frame with his shiny boot. In fact no one would ever know what had happened. The explanation had gone up in smoke. ‘What is that?’ The window frame had slid down a hill of debris and Tuitchevsky was bending down to look at something gleaming in the cinders.

  ‘It’s a hand.’

  ‘Good God!’ Tuitchevsky abruptly took a step back. ‘There’s a ring,’ said Ryzhkov bending closer, taking out his handkerchief. ‘See the corrosion? That’s probably from the chemicals.’

  ‘The hand of the bomber?’ Tuitchevsky’s eyebrows had shot up.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Now the colonel came closer and squatted down over the relic. From the dark hairs and blunt nails, the hand had once belonged to a man. There was a thick band around the ring finger, too tarnished to tell if it was gold or silver. ‘The hand of the bomber …’ Tuitchevsky breathed wonderingly. And when Ryzhkov turned he saw that Tuitchevsky was smiling.

  ‘I want this,’ Tuitchevsky said in a hushed voice, almost amazed at himself. ‘I want this for my collection. There ought to be a way to preserve it, don’t you think?’

  ‘I … I really don’t know. I suppose … but we need it first.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tuitchevsky said reaching out and touching the hand for the first time, turning it over to examine the calloused palm, the shredded flesh at the wrist. ‘It’s beautiful, in a way. I mean, it is beautiful, you can’t deny that, eh?’

  Ryzhkov shook his head. For a moment he thought he was going to faint. Dizzy, knocked out from lack of sleep, from an overdose of absurdity.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I do,’ Tuitchevsky said quietly. ‘I do say so.’

  When they finally got in their carriage they passed the woman again. She was sitting on the kerb, rocking back and forth, clutching a blue cloth cap in her hand. Another child was standing beside her, too young to understand, one hand on her mother’s shoulder. It only took a few moments to drive past her and neither of them said anything about it.

  Ryzhkov dropped Hokhodiev off and continued on with Tuitchevsky’s hand to the Military Hospital so that the ring could be removed and cleaned. It turned out to be a common silver band. An assistant took fingerprints from the hand so that Ryzhkov could take them back to the External branch’s Records Division.

  Bondarenko came in right at the end of it. The grisly nature of the project seemed to catch his interest. ‘Well … it’s a wedding band, or perhaps an engagement present. Not of great quality, I’d say. There is a jeweller’s mark beside the inscription. It’s somewhat worn. You might be able to find something via the fingerprints, and at the Records Division there is an extensive library of jeweller’s marks.’ He used a pair of tweezers to put the ring back in its envelope.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor. Ah … Colonel Tuitchevsky wants, for some reason … well, he’s asked me to enquire if the hand itself could be preserved somehow? Is that possible?’ Bondarenko had suddenly lost his good humour. He frowned.

  ‘Preserved?’

  ‘Yes … I don’t know …’

  ‘I’m not a taxidermist,’ Bondarenko said, offended. ‘Tell him it’s absolutely out of the question.’ Bondarenko abruptly turned away and retreated into his labyrinth, shaking his head and muttering curses under his breath.

  Upstairs in the lobby Ryzhkov borrowed a telephone to check in with 17 Pushkinskaya and got an excited Izachik on the line. ‘Monsieur Zezulin has found out about this morning’s events and wishes everyone to come in, sir, and also for you there is a message from’— a pause—‘an Inspector Schliff.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, sir. He asks you to meet him at the front of the Haymarket, sir.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes sir. He seemed to think it was important.’

  The boy sat across the room. It was a large dusty open space, where rows of seamstresses had once worked. The fine wood floor had holes drilled through it that had been puttied over when they removed the machines but never repaired.

  ‘He says he only wants to speak to you.’

  ‘How did he know about me?’ Ryzhkov asked.

  ‘I’ve been passing the word around. He heard somehow, went out and telephoned in. He’s scared that he’s in trouble,’ Schliff said quietly, not quite whispering.

  ‘I can’t imagine he could get in worse trouble than in this place.’

  ‘He’s not worried about trouble with us, just with the
old man that owns him,’ Schliff said. ‘See, if you go investigating in places like this, if you want to get anywhere, you have to stand between the pimp and the bird. I spent a little on him, just so you know.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A twenty.’

  ‘All right,’ Ryzhkov said. He had no way to tell if Schliff was just lining his own pockets. It didn’t matter. It was the price of doing business; he would put in a request when Zezulin was asleep.

  They walked across the open room. The boy looked up at them. He was about twelve years of age—or maybe he was older and just looked younger. Schliff had already told him that the boys were forced to move on when they got older. Either sold to individuals, or the homosexual brothels, or, if they were very handsome, to more luxurious establishments that catered to wealthy female clients. Any one of those choices was considered lucky. If they failed to land a position in one of the bordellos a life on the street was the only other possibility. It was the great dividing line in the life of a prostitute. The boy looked at him steadily.

  ‘This is Teodor,’ said Schliff. ‘Teodor, this is Inspector Ryzhkov. He’s investigating the murder of a vertika that happened recently. Tell him about your friend.’

  ‘First I tell you, then I have to tell him,’ the boy complained.

  ‘Fine, stop whenever you want to.’

  ‘You’re looking for an old man. White hair, big side-whiskers like that?’ The boy put his hands up to show them.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He likes to squeeze girls?’

  ‘We think so, yes.’

  ‘He killed this other girl?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The boy looked at both of them for a moment. Making up his mind. He was older than twelve, Ryzhkov decided. Or maybe just old before his time.