‘I don’t know. Probably.’ None of them had ever seen her before. Lavrik must have kept her in the house all the time. She was in her thirties now and still daddy’s girl. They all stood around regarding the barrels for a little longer. The men were silent. There was very little to say and nowhere else to look.
‘Well …’ He thought he’d make it easy on them. ‘Dima, have them get a wagon around and take them to the morgue at the Military Hospital. Maybe there’s something down in there inside, so be careful.’
Back inside the cannery one of the gendarmes had found Lavrik’s trunk behind the door, pushed back into the shadows. They had started to change clothes for some reason, the trunk was opened and clothing bulged out, then there had been an interruption and it had been pushed to one side and ignored. Beyond it, deeper in the shadows, a wide pool of blood had spread out beneath a locker.
Ryzhkov squatted beside the trunk and pulled the clothing out. Down underneath everything was a jewel case which had been emptied, and beneath that a wallet which the killers had missed. It had their passports and a packet of roubles. Beneath that was a stuffed envelope in which he discovered a thick wad of stock certificates.
‘My God …’ said the young constable behind him. ‘It’s a fortune in there, sir.’
‘By our standards a fortune indeed.’ Ryzhkov took the wallet and the envelope, reminded the young gendarme not to let anyone open the locker or trample over the floor until the technician arrived, then went out and made sure that all the arrangements had been made.
Outside the horses were shifting from foot to foot, hungry, cold and ready to loose their harness.
‘I’ll take it in myself,’ he told Dima, and climbed into a carriage.
He told the driver to go all the way across to the mouth of the Fontanka where the St Petersburg police would already be looking for the boat, rejected the idea, and instead changed their route, driving slowly along the university embankment as a muddy yellow sun fought a losing battle against the fog that clung to the freezing surface of the river.
Did Lavrik love his daughter? Did he think that he would cash in his chips, pull a fast one and save her? How could someone do the kinds of things he’d done to Katya Lvova and then claim that it was love he felt for his daughter, that he cared for her, gave her presents, wished for grandchildren?
He half-expected to see angels descending from the snowy skies, the pavements splitting open and tongues of fire erupting to swallow the city. But the only indication that God was watching over Petersburg was the dull ringing of the church bells just as he turned on the Nicholas Bridge to let the irritated horses carry him over the Neva.
TWENTY
He didn’t feel like much of a heroic investigator, not very much of a man, and that’s the way they meant it to be.
They took him awkwardly, at the end of a long day, meeting him in the foyer of his building as he stumbled back home in a blizzard, the wind blowing raw out of the Gulf, the absolute of winter sweeping him along the street, all too eager for his warm bed. While it was happening he was thinking they were lucky because he was exhausted.
Still, they took him.
He knew they were amateurs by the way they talked. They had a man inside waiting, another behind him to make sure they could get him out of the door, one in the carriage to help pull him in. And the driver, of course, a big rascal named Jekes. But then—too quickly, he was inside the carriage with the two other men pinning him back into the seat, the hard barrel of a pistol in his side for emphasis. The one who’d been waiting inside was huge, taking up one side of the covered carriage; his name was Tomlinovich. They started along the embankment of the Obvodni Canal. If he tried to push his way out of the carriage door they’d either kill him or be able to drag him back in before anyone came to his aid.
‘Well?’ he asked the big man across from him. They’d fallen silent. The carriage was so small their knees were knocking together.
‘Monsieur Ryzhkov?’ Tomlinovich asked.
Yes, yes, of course, he thought. Who else are you planning to abduct tonight?
‘Please … just a short ride and a little conversation.’
A moment of panic seized him. They had turned off the Obvodni, along an almost deserted street that ran behind the race track. No one around. A fence closed him off from running into the back lanes. Sharp wooden poles that he would have to try to vault. Ahead of him was the high wall of a school dissolving into a white blur. Everything would be icy, equally slippery for all of them, but still … too far, he thought. Too far to run.
Amazingly they hadn’t taken his knife, and he had the beginnings of a plan, to make a slash at the gunman, bull his way through the door, go after the horses and then … well, run through the snow, hide. Fool, he thought, fool.
Tomlinovich was a big man. Very big. Obese, dressed in the flamboyant style of an embassy functionary. His face puffy, the flesh exploding over the rim of his shirt collar.
Trying to get away was insane, crazy. But if they were going to kill him they could have just done it in his doorway. ‘All right,’ he said.
‘Good.’ Tomlinovich reached inside his coat and came out with a silver case.
‘You’ve got what you wanted. I’m here now,’ Ryzhkov said firmly. The fear had made him angry. Angry that they would be toying with him in this way, angry that he’d let them surprise him with the phantom carriage.
Tomlinovich had his hands up, like a frightened actor in a film at the cinema, eyes wide as frying eggs. ‘You have my sincere apologies, sir.’ The little man with the gun started laughing.
‘We’re going to a meeting. Really, it won’t be a problem. How long it takes is up to you, of course.’ A bribe, Ryzhkov thought. The carriage, the expensive clothes. The amateur theatrics. A bribe. He nodded. Keep it going, he was thinking. But then Tomlinovich stopped, his expression changing, suddenly grown harder beneath the fat. Maybe he was peeved for some reason, as if somehow he was the one being inconvenienced, as if it was all Ryzhkov’s fault.
And now Ryzhkov was realizing; too late, that they had taken him like amateurs and they were going to kill him that way too.
‘Shall I give it to him?’ the little man with the pistol in his ribs asked.
And—he did go for his knife then, actually had his hand in his pocket before the little man pulled the trigger and everything went black.
Voices.
Voices blurring through his dream. Murmuring, laughing. Recollecting, admonishing. The first clear thought that made it through was ‘alive’, and then he wondered if his dentist had taken his tooth out, and then he remembered that he’d already done all that.
‘Is he awake?’
Someone shook him.
‘Hey, are you awake?’ Followed by a series of little slaps on his cheeks. He opened his eyes and everything was a silvery blur. Maybe I am dead, he thought. Maybe this is some kind of test to see if I get into paradise or not.
Something cold washed across his forehead, he smelled mint. There was a scraping from somewhere and he saw the bare branches of a tree brushing against an old cracked attic window. There were other voices from what he somehow knew was downstairs, a woman’s squawking laugh, the clatter of crockery from a kitchen.
A tall, thin man hovered in the background. He had cadaverous cheeks only partially covered by dark side-whiskers and carried a bowl and a cloth in his hand.
‘Hey, he’s awake now.’ The sound of his feet as he went down the stairs.
The branches scraped against the window again. He was on one of the islands, Ryzhkov decided, in some dacha out on Yelagin Island or Krestovsky. Out on the north side of the city surrounded by nature, out where the rich people spent their summers and watched the leaves change colour and the squirrels run about. In winter there was no one there. No one to hear, no one to witness. There were heavy footsteps on the stairs and Tomlinovich came in.
‘We’ll save a lot of time if you follow instructions,’ he said. ‘How is your th
inking? Is your mind clear, eh?’
Ryzhkov looked up at him, a little insulted. Nodded. ‘I only ask because, well … unfortunately we had to use this.’ Tomlinovich held up what looked like a fountain pen—an aluminium cylinder with a catch at one end. ‘It’s a morphia pistol. Luckily the dose travelled through the cloth of your jacket, unluckily you seem to be quite susceptible to opiates,’ he said, standing there with one hand in his pocket, rocking back and forth.
‘Now—you’re going to tell us all about the baron, you’re going to tell us all about the ones you work for, and you’re going to fill us in on the entire petroleum scheme, yes?’
Ryzhkov sighed. ‘Fine, but look … I don’t know—’ he said. His voice was slurred and cracked like someone who was dying of thirst. He really didn’t know what he had planned to say. Something witty to talk himself out of a bad situation. Petroleum? The best he could do was to stare up at the man for a long moment. ‘I don’t know …’ he repeated.
‘Now, you see, that is just what I mean.’ Tomlinovich stepped over to the bed, gave him a quick kick to the ribs. Just a little warning that knocked the wind out of him and brought tears to his eyes.
‘So …’ Ryzhkov said. His voice rasped. It sounded pathetic and weak, like a feverish child in the night.
‘So, Ryzhkov, you’re going to talk to me, yes?’
‘There must be some mis—’ he started.
‘Let’s be very clear.’ Tomlinovich was jabbing him in the chest with one blunt finger. A deep well of resignation began to overtake Ryzhkov. Maybe he could incite Tomlinovich, get him angry enough to explode, get it over with quickly. ‘From now on you’re going to follow my instructions. You’re going to be good and answer questions, eh? Good, we have an understanding.’ He reached inside his jacket and took out a typewritten sheet of paper. ‘When did you first meet the baron?’
‘I don’t know—’
‘They’re not expecting you at work, did you know that?’
‘Ah … no, ahh …’
‘They’re not expecting you because there’s a note from your doctor. We fixed it up.’ Tomlinovich smiled, shook his head sadly. ‘Now look, I thought we had an agreement? You said you were going to talk, eh? So, tell me all about how, when, and where you first met the baron.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Ah-ah-ah …’ Tomlinovich said, and then he hit him, hard this time in the centre of his chest. It knocked him out and when he came back the air was still crackling and Tomlinovich was in mid-lecture. ‘… so there’s no escape. You should be forthcoming. That’s the sensible thing, obviously. If you help us perhaps we can work together. Was it about the money? How much did he give you? We know he put through the Gagental contracts for you? For your bosses? We want their names. He was holding out, wasn’t he. Was he after more?’
‘Wait … money? What?’ Ryzhkov asked, involuntarily. For a moment he wondered if he was dreaming the whole thing.
‘So …’ Tomlinovich nodded. ‘You maintain that you knew nothing about the baron, you are not an associate of his, you are not part of the cabal, you know nothing of the contracts, you’re involved in none of it? This is your side of the story?’ He was frowning, his wide mouth was turned down at the corners. He looked like an immeasurably sad circus bear tricked out in expensive clothing. He came over to the bed again, was about to raise his foot. ‘We can make you talk, boy.’
‘Well, then …’ Ryzhkov did his best to smile and shrug but his wrists were handcuffed to the bedstead.
‘Hard-headed,’ someone said from the shadows; the fellow who’d shot him it sounded like. For a moment they just looked at each other. The tree scraped along the glass, a faint shrieking noise. Tomlinovich heaved a great sigh. ‘Last chance,’ he said quietly. And Ryzhkov could tell that he meant it.
‘I don’t know anything about this petroleum scheme or contracts or whatever it is.’
‘No?’
‘I was following him because … because of what he did to the girl. Trying to bring a case against him, so … There were two of them. I’m looking for the other one now, the one that threw her out of the window.’ He said it flatly, not even looking at them. It came out sounding like an admission of failure; he was a policeman who had tried to play by the book, but sometimes, you couldn’t. Sometimes you didn’t, sometimes, many times, it wasn’t possible to fix things. And he hadn’t. And now he’d been caught.
Tomlinovich came back into the light; his face was twisted in frustration. ‘What girl? What in hell are you talking about?’ He stepped over to the bed and grabbed Ryzhkov by the shirt collar, pulled him up off the bed, the handcuffs riding up the rods so that his arms were pulled back behind him.
‘Start at the beginning, boy. One step at a time,’ he said and then dropped him back on to the bed.
And so he told them. All of it. About stumbling on to the murder, about Lvova, Ekatarina, about Bondarenko, and his visit to the Iron Room, about the boy and his wife. He listened to himself as he told them, almost amazed at how detached he was. His voice oddly controlled, sounding like a priest reading from some ghastly scriptural passage. Thousands died, cities were burned, pestilence, famine and burning sulphur, all of it ending up as dry facts, like a laundry list. So detached that the horror was all burned away. And so, he told it all, as objectively as he could make the sounds come out of his mouth. The only thing he managed to do was leave Vera out of it entirely. At least he could do that much, he told himself. At least that.
When it was all over Tomlinovich sat there for a long moment, nodded and then stood up. He stood there staring at the floorboards for a moment, then put one hand on Ryzhkov’s shoulder like a father consoling a son over some sporting defeat.
‘You better start praying,’ he said, as he left the attic.
It took them all that day, through the night until the next morning to check on what he’d told them. They came and went grim-faced, saying nothing; gave him food and unhooked one wrist. He slept. The smallest of them, and probably the most dangerous, was Dziga. He uncuffed him so he could shit in a bucket they’d brought up and then stood there watching and making jokes. He had bad teeth and a big smile and a brown, nearly bald head that had scars with little twisted stumps of black hair growing out of it. He looked like an acrobat who had escaped the circus to become a dishwasher. When he finished Dziga took the bucket away. ‘Don’t spill any,’ Ryzhkov called after him as he went, and drew one of his sharp little laughs.
They brought him a big plate of soup and a loaf of bread and after he’d got started Tomlinovich came in and took a seat. He had more paper to read from and a new man—a shorthand typist to take down all the answers. Basically Ryzhkov recounted his connection with Lavrik, the details of the surveillance, the progress of his attempt to bring charges in court. He didn’t say anything about petroleum or cartels. After he’d finished the list of questions, Tomlinovich tipped back his hat and settled down in the chair.
‘Do you want some wine with that, eh?’
‘Why not,’ Ryzhkov said between bites. He had to lean over to use the spoon. ‘That’s no good,’ Tomlinovich said as he watched him eat. ‘Dziga, put the shackles only on his feet. We’ll catch him if he tries to shuffle away from us … You’re not going to try to run away are you, boy?’ Tomlinovich laughed. It came out as a series of wheezes.
They let him eat at the table and the one they called ‘Doctor’ brought up a tray with two glasses of wine. When he finished the soup they brought him another plate. Tomlinovich took the time to go fishing. The tall secretary took it all down.
‘Have you ever visited Lavrik’s firm, or spoken to members of his staff?’
‘You mean the banking place?’
‘Mendrochovich and Lubensky, 112 Nevsky. Ever been there?’
‘Walked past it, maybe.’
‘We were following Lavrik, that’s how we saw you.’ ‘Mmm.’
‘But now we don’t know who to follow, you see? You shat in our eggs, boy.’
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Ryzhkov shrugged and finished his second plate of soup. ‘Who are you anyway?’ he said, standing and taking the glass of wine with him to the bed, exhausted from the meal and eager to fall asleep as soon as they decided to leave him alone.
Tomlinovich didn’t quite answer the question. ‘I admit we were surprised to learn you were a gorokhovnik. Yes … And you’re sure you don’t have anything to add to that, eh?’
‘No.’ Ryzhkov burrowed in the sheets and held his arm up for Dziga to chain it to the rail.
‘Yes, well you shat in our eggs, boy, and now you’re going to eat them.’
‘Whatever you say.’
‘Everything has changed. We’re thrown off the track. So now, things have stepped up, we have to move. We don’t have time to coddle you, eh?’
Ryzhkov stared at the ceiling, almost at peace. He was trying to conjure up a picture of Vera. He could almost animate her, see her dancing in one of the Komet extravaganzas, her smile … genuine or not, it didn’t matter. He wondered if they had put something in the wine. ‘Has it occurred to you that perhaps he deserved to die,’ he said dreamily.
‘Undoubtedly he did,’ Tomlinovich said softly. ‘But then again, who among us doesn’t?’
Ryzhkov shook his head. Now he was dreaming of Vera dancing up on an orange-lit stage. Dancing just for him, watching him watching her. There were voices in the stairwell. Tomlinovich stood up, and so did the secretary. Vera made her exit and Ryzhkov opened his eyes to see a new fellow. Someone important. He looked like he had just come from an evening at the theatre. He smelled of women’s perfume and cigar smoke and he was dressed in tails and decorations. Sleek. He took a chair beside Ryzhkov’s bed and looked at him for a long moment.
‘We’ve been investigating your story, of course,’ the sleek fellow said. The voice sounded like a mother giving her child the background to a lullaby she was about to sing.
‘The newspapers are describing the baron’s death as the result of a “crime of passion” perpetrated by a jealous lover. This is plausible since the baron was known to have a series of liaisons, not only with children—although he did meet frequently with children, some of them the children of his friends and associates. Did you know that?’ The new man could not keep the disgust out of his voice. ‘In some circles this is considered fashionable. Do you want a cigar?’
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