Tarnished Icons ir-11

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Zelach was confused but said he would be willing to learn if Inspector Rostnikov thought it a good idea.

  “Eight o’clock,” said Rostnikov. “At the synagogue.”

  Zelach nodded a confused yes.

  “Mesanovich is a good idea,” Rostnikov said. “Let’s go.”

  Zelach tried not to beam. He couldn’t remember ever having been praised for an idea before by anyone but his mother. His mother. What would she think about his working for Jews, and for nothing? He would, when he had the chance, call her and tell her he was working very late, directly with Porfiry Petrovich. She would only ask if it was dangerous and tell him she would have something for him to eat when he came home. Akardy Zelach was in a very good mood.

  Legwork. The process was essentially the same for the police in every country in the world. Knock on doors of people who might but probably didn’t have information. Interview past victims who had probably told all that they knew. Reexamine any evidence that they might possess.

  “A waste of time,” said Sasha to Elena as they stood waiting in the small outer office of the International Arab Export Corporation. The woman, well groomed and definitely not an Arab, had come into the office from the offices beyond a door and asked if she could help them.

  Elena had asked if it might be possible to talk to Valeria Petrosyan for a moment or two. Both detectives showed their police cards. The woman examined them carefully and clasped her hands together before her.

  “About what?” she said.

  “We believe she witnessed an automobile accident a few weeks ago,” said Sasha: “Hit-and-run. We want to know if the man we have arrested might be the person we are looking for. Of course, we don’t know how good a look she had at him. It will only take a few minutes. We show her the photograph, ask her a few questions.”

  Sasha was smiling at the woman, his best boyish smile.

  “I should ask Mr. Mogabi,” she said, “but he’s in a meeting.”

  Sasha and Elena knew they could simply demand to see the woman they sought, but then she would have to answer questions from her employers, questions she would probably not wish to answer.

  “All right,” the woman said. “I’ll send her out.”

  The room they waited in was small but spotless. There were high-quality reproductions of French impressionist paintings on the walls-a Monet on one wall, two Monets and a Renoir on the other. The floor was carpeted-gray and clean. The four chairs were gray fabric and chrome.

  They had already interviewed four victims of the rapist. Since all of the crimes had occurred in the same general area, the women did not live outside of a manageable circle. Some of the victims did not have phones or did not choose to answer. The detectives had trudged to apartments, and since a number of the victims were retired, Sasha and Elena had found them at home. The first two had answered questions but had been of no help other than to confirm the method of the rapist and his strength. They had not seen him, had heard only a raspy voice, probably disguised, and had been beaten. One of the two suffered severe hearing loss from the attack, and her deafness and size reminded Sasha of his mother. The third woman they found at home simply refused to talk to the detectives. She was younger than the first two, probably about sixty. She had suffered a broken skull and had since experienced blinding headaches that forced her to lie on the floor of her small bathroom in darkness for hours at a time. This she did not tell the detectives. All she said was that she would not talk about the incident.

  The fourth woman had tried to be helpful. She was the youngest of the lot, in her twenties, pretty, dark, worked in the Hotel Russia, where they tracked her down. She had been a young teen when she was attacked. Sasha had told her employer a tale similar to the one he had just told the woman at the International Arab Export Corporation. The girl’s name was Alexandra. She cleaned rooms. The most striking thing about her was her thick glasses, which she took off to speak. The rapist had hit her across the forehead. A week later her eyesight began to deteriorate. The doctors thought it would continue till she went blind, but the deterioration had suddenly stopped. The girl hoped it would not start again. She, too, had been of little help other than to confirm what the others had said. She explained that for years she had tried either to remember details of that night or to forget the event entirely. Neither effort had been successful.

  “I’ll bet this place is a front,” said Sasha, looking around the little room.

  “Front?”

  “Weapons, drugs, something,” he said.

  “Then they probably have the room bugged and are listening to what you’re saying right now,” replied Elena sarcastically.

  “Probably,” said Sasha, as the inner office door opened and a woman in her late forties came out. She was tall and wore a dark suit with a white blouse. Her dark hair was brushed upward off her neck and sat stylishly on her head. Her makeup was light and she was distinctly pretty.

  “Dark hair,” said Elena softly to Sasha. “They are all gray or have dark hair. I wonder if the gray ones had dark hair when they were attacked. I wonder if they were all as slender as this one and the one at the hotel.”

  They knew they had to go back and check.

  “Valeria Petrosyan,” the woman said warily.

  “Can we go out in the corridor to talk for a moment and show you something?” asked Elena, trying to convey the need for more privacy.

  “If you wish,” said Valeria.

  The three moved into the broad hallway of the seven-story building, where dozens upon dozens of Communist Party offices had been vacated and converted shortly after Yeltsin came to power.

  “You are not here to talk about any accident,” Valeria said, looking from one to the other of the two young people before her. “I witnessed no accident,”

  “You were attacked and raped four years ago near the Kropotkinskaya metro station,” said Elena.

  “I thought so,” the woman said with a sigh. “I have told the police all I know, I told them when it happened. I lost a husband because of what happened that night. That was the one good thing about it. The rest … Please make this quick. My employers are engaged in a very sensitive business and …”

  Sasha looked at Elena with satisfaction and turned to Valeria.

  “Please, just tell us once more what you remember of that night,” said Elena.

  “You know I don’t want to remember,” the woman said, her voice deep, controlled. “But there are things one cannot forget. As I told the police, I was on my way home from working late. My husband was supposed to meet me at the metro and walk home with me. He wasn’t there. He was off somewhere getting drunk in his cab. I walked two blocks. There wasn’t much traffic. Some cars. Few people. There was a slight rain. I didn’t hear the man coming. Cars were going by when he pushed me into the doorway, holding me around the neck from behind. He warned me not to make a sound or he would kill me. He showed me a knife. He opened the door. It was a government building. The light had been unscrewed in the entry way. That’s what the police told me later. He threw me down, kissed my neck, punched me hard in my back, and kept warning me to be quiet while he lifted my dress and pulled down my panties. It was fast. It was painful. I know I whimpered. He told me not to turn around when he let me go, not to look at him or he would kill me. He made me say I understood. Then he got up and went out the door. I turned and saw him. He was taller than you.” She looked at Sasha. “Well built, wearing a blue jacket and pants, a stripe on the pants. I think his hair was dark.”

  “You saw him?” asked Elena.

  The tall woman nodded.

  “A uniform?” asked Sasha.

  “I told the police that I thought it was a policeman’s uniform, but I wasn’t sure,” Valeria said softly.

  “You didn’t see his face,” said Elena.

  “A bit of profile, but it was raining and I had been raped. My eyes were full of tears. I couldn’t identify him and I only had the sense when he paused for an instant that he had a white s
car right here.”

  Valeria touched a spot just to the left of her nose.

  “That’s all I know,” she said. “All I remember. Believe me. I have tried. I want him caught. If it were possible, I would like to personally kill him. I believe I could do it.”

  “I believe you could,” said Sasha.

  “Now, if there’s nothing-” she began, but Elena cut her off with, “And you told this same story to the police when it happened?”

  “Probably the same words,” Valeria said. “Now, I should like to get back to work before I get questioned by my supervisor. I need this job. I have a child.”

  “Not …?” Sasha began.

  “No, not from the rape,” she said. “Before-he was an infant when it happened.”

  “Thank you,” said Elena as Valeria turned to the door and said, “You’ll tell me if you catch him.”

  “Yes,” said Elena.

  A few minutes later Sasha and Elena stood on the street. The snow was still heavy but the sidewalk was clear. Only a touch of new snow had fallen during the night, but the temperature had dropped. Sasha shuffled from one foot to the other.

  “She told the police,” Elena said. “Why isn’t it in the report?”

  “I have one idea,” said Sasha.

  “What?”

  “The old woman was right. The rapist is a policeman. He has access to the files and removed any references to his description, probably weeks or months after the reports were filed.”

  “So,” said Elena, “we look for a well-built policeman with a scar next to his nose?”

  “First, we talk to the other victims and see what else they said that may have been removed from the files.”

  Elena nodded.

  “Tea?” she asked.

  Sasha nodded an emphatic yes.

  Iosef looked at the list before him on his desk and waited for the sound of Elena returning to the office. The list was long and the question seemed to take a while for each government office and business to answer.

  Karpo was not in his cubbyhole. He was down in Paulinin’s laboratory. Paulinin had called about a half hour earlier saying he had more information. Iosef did not want to go back into the mixture of acid smells and staleness. Iosef had asked Karpo if it would be all right for him to stay at his desk and start making the calls.

  “Paulinin may have information that will help with the calls,” Karpo had said, a pale, somber figure in black standing in Iosef’s doorway.

  “If he does,” said Iosef, “I’ll call back the ones I reach.”

  Karpo had nodded and Iosef knew he thought the son of Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was simply trying to avoid the man known in Petrovka as the Mad Scientist of the Underground.

  “As you wish,” Karpo had said, and left.

  Iosef was on his eleventh call.

  “Hello,” he said when a woman answered, “Karkov Enterprises.”

  “I am a deputy inspector in the Office of Special Investigation,” he said. “My name is Iosef Rostnikov. I wish to talk to someone in charge who has been with your company the longest time.”

  “Give me a number I can call to verify who you are,” the woman said.

  Iosef gave his number. She called back.

  “Sergei,” she said. “He was here when we were still part of the Bureau of Energy. You are a policeman?”

  “I am,” said Iosef. “If you’d like to call back again and confirm at a different number …?”

  He looked at his watch. The list was long.

  “No,” she said. “But we have new partners in the company, French. I don’t want to lose my job.”

  “I understand,” Iosef said. “I’ll make it clear to Sergei that I insisted on talking to him.”

  The woman said nothing more. There was a click and a buzz. After about ten seconds a man’s voice came on, high and reedy like a clarinet.

  “Sergei Ivanovich,” he said.

  “Deputy Inspector Rostnikov,” said Iosef. “I have a few questions to ask you.”

  “About?”

  “Do you have any current employee who is suffering from an illness related to exposure to nuclear materials?” asked Iosef.

  “Why?” answered the man nervously.

  “It relates to an important investigation,” said Iosef, finding himself doodling in the margins of the list. He stopped doodling, realizing he was doing what his father did, only Iosef wrote names, ornately. He had written “Elena” four times with curlicues. He also realized that he had doodled with a pen and not a pencil.

  “It is his business,” said Sergei with the reedy voice. “If he would rather the world not know …”

  “It is a murder case,” said Iosef. “We don’t plan to harass innocent people.”

  Sergei paused, coughed, thought.

  “Hell,” he said finally. “I’ll be seventy years old. They’re going to boot me out on a pension I can’t live on anyway as soon as they’re sure they don’t need my memory anymore. It’s almost all on computers now. Then-”

  “The sick person,” Iosef reminded gently.

  “We had two,” said Sergei. “Last year. Oriana died. She and Alexi had accidentally been exposed to an improperly sealed container from Iran. The radiation dose was high. She was dead of radiation poisoning within three months. She was young, a very good worker. It’s all in the records, the reports I was assigned to fill out and submit to the Nuclear Power Committee where someone in the Kremlin probably filed it without reading it.”

  “Alexi?” asked Iosef, looking again at the long list.

  “He was across the room,” said Sergei. “Lower dose. Still high. He has not looked well since a few weeks after the accident. His behavior changed. He was always a little sullen. Didn’t talk much. Like his father. Then he stopped talking to almost everyone, and he has been missing a lot of days, calling in ill. He’s going to his own doctors if he is going.”

  “Alexi’s last name?”

  “Alexi Monochov,” he said instantly. “He’s not here today. Called in sick. He doesn’t get paid when he’s sick, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Lives with his mother and sister. I think they have money. They have a good address. I don’t believe in God. I lived my whole life under the godlessness of Communism. Even became a Party member. But there can be coincidental ironies that make you wonder, don’t you think?”

  Iosef had the definite belief that Sergei of the reedy voice had very little to do at work and welcomed a caller, any caller.

  “Yes,” said Iosef.

  “It is an irony that Alexi’s father died of the same thing that may be killing his son,” said the man.

  Iosef stopped doodling Elena’s name.

  “His father died of radiation poisoning?”

  “Yes,” said Sergei. “Caused a prostate cancer. Monochov was brilliant. Moody. Thought he wasn’t sufficiently appreciated, that others above him were getting credit for his work. To tell the truth, he was right. That was a long time ago. We weren’t so careful then. Deaths were almost common. Then his son comes to work here. Almost as brilliant as the father. And he may be dying of the same malady. Good thing Monochov isn’t married and doesn’t have a son.”

  “His address,” said Iosef.

  Without hesitation Sergei Ivanovich gave an address on Chekhov Prospekt.

  “When Monochov returns,” said Iosef, “we would prefer that you not tell him about this call.”

  “I haven’t exchanged ten words with him in over a year,” said the old man. “I doubt if he’ll tell you much.”

  Iosef paused and then decided to ask a question, which well might be a bad idea, but Sergei was a talker.

  “Do you think Alexi Monochov could make a bomb?”

  Sergei laughed and said, “Anything from a hydrogen bomb to a shrapnel bomb the size of a pen. It’s his specialty, detonation. It was his father’s, too.”

  “Spahseebah,” said Iosef, keeping calm. “Thank you. And remember …”

  “I won’t tell anyone you c
alled,” the old man said. “I hope Alexi isn’t in trouble. I can’t say I like him, but he’s been through enough.”

  Iosef hung up and looked down at the notes he had just taken. It looked good. It looked like a possible match. He had no trouble finding Alexi Monochov’s name on the list of those to be called if the bomber threatened another attack.

  The door to the offices opened. Iosef heard footsteps and Karpo appeared at the door.

  “I think we may have a good lead,” Iosef said, trying to remain calm.

  “Alexi Monochov,” said Karpo before Iosef could say the name.

  Karpo had sat listening to Paulinin without saying a word. Paulinin had much to say.

  Karpo had, at the scientist’s insistence, sat on a wooden stool while Paulinin displayed the fragments of letter bombs on a wooden table he had cleared. The various shapes, some no more than the size of a fingernail, were back in zippered see-through plastic bags. It looked like a jigsaw puzzle.

  “Fragments,” said Paulinin with satisfaction, pointing at the pieces laid out neatly in front of him. “But a piece here, a piece there, some tentative conclusions. If only the dolts who had collected all this had been more careful, but that would be asking too much …”

  Paulinin paused, patted down his mat of hair, looked at Karpo, and waited. It was like a magician’s act. Paulinin had something to say, but he would say it in his own way, in his own time, knowing that Karpo would be one of the few people, perhaps the only one, to appreciate what he had done.

  “Conclusions?” Karpo prompted.

  “Fragments,” Paulinin repeated. “On one thin piece of metal a strange letter is stamped. At first glance it looks like random scratches. It is incomplete, but I recognized it and matched it. It is Arabic.”

  Paulinin pointed to one of his exhibits. Karpo looked. There was a small piece of paper and an even smaller darkened and jagged piece of metal. No scratches were clearly visible, but Karpo had learned to trust the scientist.

  “Second,” said Paulinin, “some of the more recent bombs, particularly the one you brought today, had a similar odor, a residue of chemicals. I found traces, traces so small that I needed the electron microscope when everyone was out of the lab upstairs.”