I brushed my teeth, gargled vigorously with a mint-flavored mouthwash, and got dressed. With only one fresh suit remaining and the others at the cleaners downstairs, I opted for khaki Dockers, soft-sided black Rockports, and a dark blue polo shirt that didn’t come with an alligator or a penguin or any other animal on it. Then I reached for my clipboard and steno pad and stuck a couple of pens inside my shirt. It was time to go.
The Three Crowns wasn’t much—Cramer had permanently ruined me for lesser lodgings when he booked me into the Europa—but from the outside, it looked serviceable enough, and reminded me somewhat of an old Ramada Inn. Even the logo on the sign looked similar. The clock underneath showed 3:27 and probably had done for some time. Five and a half hours from now, it would be correct.
We’d agreed to meet in the lobby, but when I went inside, I didn’t see Lori anywhere. I got a small but lousy cup of coffee from a table near the reception desk, and by the time I finished it, it was ten past ten and Lori still wasn’t there.
I walked over to the reception desk, where a man wearing a faded green blazer and no tie was engrossed in a chess magazine. I stood for a moment to give him a chance to acknowledge me; when that failed, as I knew it would, I moved just enough to let the shadow of my head eclipse his magazine.
Still nothing. Either the chess problem was an especially abstruse one, or this was just a rude guy. Could have been both but whatever the case, Employee of the Month, he wasn’t. I glanced down at the diagram that had his attention.
“Move the rook to e7,” I said in Russian.
He looked up, offended. “May I help you?” he asked, in a tone that suggested it wouldn’t be worth his while to do so. I decided to try to disabuse him of that notion. I reached into my pocket and produced my press pass.
“My name is Paul Mallory,” I told him. “I am an American journalist accredited to the Cramer Press Syndicate. Although I am here to cover the handball tournament, I am at liberty to write about whatever I wish. Such as the lack of civility in certain St. Petersburg hotels, if you take my meaning. If you play your cards correctly, you and your establishment will soon be famous throughout all of Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Am I making myself understood?”
The man didn’t exactly prostrate himself before me, but at least I had his attention now. “Yes?” he said.
“I am here to interview one of your guests,” I said, switching back to English and civility. “A Miss Lorelei Schachter. She was to meet me in the lobby at 1000, but she is not here. Would you ring her room, please?”
He looked at a computer screen for a few seconds, then jerked a thumb to his left. “Room 416. Courtesy phone there,” he grunted, seemingly unaware of the irony.
“Many thanks,” I told him, but he already had his head back in his magazine. That was fine: I’d given him the wrong rook move anyway.
I walked over to the phone and punched in Lori’s room number. I let the receiver buzz ten or so times, but nothing happened.
“Well, shit,” I muttered under my breath. Then I looked around the lobby once more without result, walked over to the elevator, and punched 4. Nobody stopped me.
416 was at the far end of the hall. When I got there, I saw that the door was slightly ajar. I wondered why, but the building was an old Soviet-style one, maybe fifty, sixty years old, and didn’t look like it had had any maintenance since the days of Leonid Brezhnev. As a sop to security, the locks were newer, at least—the kind where you slid a card into a slot in order to open the door.
Unless the door was already open, that was. I knocked, and the door swung back wide. The room was pitch dark, and I sensed a strange and pervasive metallic smell. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck rose in automatic protest.
“Lori?” I called out.
Nothing. I took a step inside “Lori?”
Still nothing. I found the light switch, threw it—and immediately wished I hadn’t. Not that it would have changed anything.
Lori lay face down across the bed, her head hanging over the side away from me. She was covered only in blood and a brief and flimsy nightgown that might once have been white. There was no way to tell. She wasn’t moving, and she wasn’t breathing.
I took another step inside and saw why. Her head wasn’t hanging over the side.
Her head wasn’t there at all.
The room swayed before me, and I felt bile rising in my throat. I closed my eyes, took a few deep breaths, and tried to regain my equanimity. Then I opened my eyes again.
She wasn’t the first dead person I’d seen who had died by violence, or even the fifth, but I’d never seen one who had been brutalized like this. The sickly sweet stench of her iron-laced blood filled the room and my field of vision went red around the edges. I couldn’t fight it down. My stomach heaved once and I ducked into the bathroom, throwing up the coffee I’d just finished into the sink. Then, sick and sweating, I went out and looked at what was left of Lori again. From a distance. There was so much blood that I couldn’t even see her wounds—not that I examined her all that closely. There was no reason to. I switched the light back off and as I turned to leave, I collided with the maid, who was on her way in. Her eyes went wide with fright, and her mouth dropped open.
“Ni hodi tuda,” I said quickly. “Don’t go in there. There has been an accident.” Which was the lie of the century, I thought, but I was doing it for her own good.
The woman reached past me and threw the light switch on again. She saw Lori’s body on the bed and I heard her sharp intake of breath. Then she screamed. And screamed.
I was going to have some explaining to do.
Chapter Thirteen
“How was it done?” I asked.
“You do not know?”
“No. How in the hell could I know? I didn’t look that closely. All I saw was blood. I’d say someone savaged her with a knife, but I’m only guessing.”
“An educated guess, Mr. Mallory?”
I shook my head. “I’m a sportswriter,” I said. “My education in crime comes solely from watching too much television. What puzzles me is why someone would do something like that to her.”
The man on the other side of the hotel manager’s tiny desk nodded. Police Inspector Captain Dmitri Borzov looked like something that walked straight out of Central Casting and into the part of a police detective in a 1940’s noir movie. Large, grizzled, and built like a superhero action figure, his voice was deep—nearly as deep as Cramer’s—and gravelly from the Marlboro cigarettes he smoked continuously, lighting them one off the other. His suit, rumpled and obviously off the rack, was gray, his shirt a dingy white, and the knot of his black tie currently rested an inch above his sternum. Even his face and hands seemed more gray than flesh-toned. An imposing figure, but his manner was personable, even solicitous. Maybe a little too solicitous.
“You look pale, Mr. Mallory,” he said. “May I get you some coffee? Tea? A soft drink, Perhaps, under the circumstances, something more…substantial?” He pulled a hip flask from his pocket. “Vodka,” he said, extending the hand with the flask toward me. “Or I can have that idiot of a manager bring you whatever you like.”
I waved the booze away.
“Nothing, thanks.” I was virtually numb with shock, and I could still taste the rancid Three Crowns coffee that I’d so recently drunk and then thrown back up. My head buzzed like I’d stuck it in a beehive and my stomach was in a million little knots. “If we could just—”
“Quite, quite. But if it is all the same to you, may we continue our business in Russian? I am reliably informed that you speak our language far more competently than I speak yours.”
So much for being clever, I thought. For the sake of putting “that idiot” of a hotel manager in his place—not to mention warning the maid—I’d given myself away. There was nothing in the world wrong with Borzov’s English, but I couldn’t see that it mattered all that much one way or the other. I gave up. All I wanted was for this to be over. I shrugged.
/> “Why not,” I said in Russian. “Make it easy on yourself.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Understand, of course, that you are not in any way a suspect in the woman’s murder. The doctor has tentatively placed the time of death at between midnight and three, during which time you are positively established as being in your room at the Europa Hotel.”
How had he positively established that, I thought, but I satisfied myself with nodding in agreement.
“It’s not much, but I call it home. So if it’s not me, how can I help you? Who is your suspect, then?”
Borzov lit another cigarette. The cramped and poorly ventilated manager’s office was already full of smoke. Too much more of this, and I’d be throwing up the rest of my breakfast any second now. It was a miracle I already hadn’t. He smiled. Some of his lower teeth seemed to be made of stainless steel.
“I shall have to watch my step with you, my friend,” he said. “I realize that you are a journalist and therefore unable to stop yourself from asking questions; but for the moment, you must leave the questions to me, if you please.”
“Oh. So you don’t know who did it yet.”
He shook his head. “Please. This is not an American television program, and I am not, what is his name, Columbo. Even I cannot solve every crime within the constraints of a sixty-minute time frame. Tell me, Mr. Mallory, how well did you know the victim?”
“I didn’t know her at all. We spoke for about five minutes three days ago.”
“Tell me this, then, Mr. Mallory. Your profession requires you to be observant—a student of human nature. What were your initial impressions of the young lady, may I ask?”
“Nothing special. Intelligent, articulate, serious, takes—took—great pride in her job. I didn’t really have time to find out much else about her.”
“What about the other woman, her partner? Karin…”
“Fessler?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing. I asked Miss Schachter at the time whether Karin would be interested in being interviewed as well, but Lori didn’t seem to think she would be. I never spoke to her directly.”
Borzov reached for his rapidly dwindling supply of cigarettes and lit a fresh one off the remains of its nearly exhausted neighbor. Smoke laced my eyes, and I had already written off the clothes I was wearing as a total loss. Wash them a hundred times, and I’d still never get rid of the smell.
The detective drew deeply on his Marlboro and courteously blew the smoke out to his left. It made no difference. Then Borzov stared at me through the haze.
“You have not asked the obvious question,” he said.
“You told me to restrain myself. I suppose the obvious question is, have you talked to Karin Fessler yet?”
“Precisely.”
“Well?”
“We don’t know where she is. Schachter was in room 416. Fessler was in 418. But except for a few of her belongings, room 418 was empty when we searched it.”
If that was supposed to get a reaction, it failed miserably. Except in her role as a handball referee, Karin Fessler meant nothing to me—but obviously, either she was mixed up in Lori’s death or she was in trouble herself. It had to be one or the other—I supposed it could even be both—but there was no way to know which.
“Cherchez la femme,” I said dully. “That’s always a good place to begin.”
“Precisely,” Borzov said, smiling. His teeth, even the stainless steel ones, were distinctly yellow, but looked strong enough to bite through a two-by-four. “Did you learn that from television as well?”
“No, from Alexandre Dumas. And from Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band.” The words escaped me automatically, I don’t know why. Death does funny things to people sometimes.
Borzov stared at me. He even stopped smoking for three or four seconds.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Dr. Buzzard released a song by that name back in late 1976,” I told him. “Cory Daye sang the lead vocals. Gloria Estefan did a cover version in the early nineties,” I added helpfully.
Borzov kept staring. I never passed up a chance to be a moron. Job interviews that weren’t really job interviews, arguments with girlfriends, bloody decapitated corpses in hotel rooms, exposure to enough carcinogens to kill a whole laboratory full of rats—when it came to showing off my stupidity, nothing could slow me down.
“I see. And now, do you have anything—pertinent to add?” the detective asked. “Any questions?”
I shook my head. It was difficult to breathe in that atmosphere—and impossible to talk. Unless I was sharing something important, like music trivia.
We stood up and shook hands.
“I won’t insult you by asking you to keep what you saw to yourself,” Borzov said. “I realize that you have a job to do—and this story will soon become common knowledge in any event. I would ask you, however, to confine yourself strictly to the facts of the case and refrain from any conjecture pending the results of our investigation.”
I looked at him.
“If you knew me,” I told him, “you wouldn’t have to ask.”
He smiled again.
“That is sufficient. In that case, I think our business is concluded, Mr. Mallory,” Borzov said. His expression softened—to the extent that his expression could soften. “I am sorry you had to become involved in this affair. Sorry, too, about the girl. I have been in this business for over twenty-five years, but I have seldom seen anything to compare with this. I cannot conceive of anything she might have done to deserve such a fate. But that is my affair now. Thank you again for your cooperation. You may go.”
I went, quickly closing the door behind me so that the guests and staff wouldn’t think the place was on fire. I reeked of smoke and my stomach quivered, and rolling down the car windows on the way home didn’t help.
I didn’t try to do any theorizing: between the smoke and the image of Lori’s half-naked and mutilated, blood-soaked body burned permanently into my psyche, I had all I could do to remember how to get back to the hotel. While I drove, I used the three percent of my mind that was still working to figure out whether I had a story.
No, I didn’t; not even close. Not yet. Borzov was right. I had a dead woman in a hotel room, but that was all I had, and the rest of the facts would have to come from the cops. If I held my fire, maybe Borzov would remember me later.
When I got to my room, I sent Cramer a paragraph-long summary, then added the word “Developing” to make it sound like I was hot on the trail. Then I stripped down and threw everything into a plastic bag—socks, underwear, everything but the shoes. I pulled on a pair of clean shorts, tied the bag up, took it down the hall, and shoved the lot into a large trash can.
But I could still smell the smoke on me. I even thought I could still smell the blood. It had permeated my hair and seemed to ooze from my pores. I turned the shower up as hot as I could stand, and stood in there scrubbing off as many layers of skin as I could afford to lose. I stayed in until long after the water had gone cold, but when I finally got out, I felt at least marginally better. Two or three more showers like that one, and I would be as good as new.
That is, if you didn’t count the memory of a dead girl whom I’d known for exactly five minutes and had already come to like. I poured myself a tall Scotch sans water, added a couple of ice cubes, and walked out onto the terrace to look across at the “Spilled Blood” cathedral.
Spilled blood, indeed. I took a very long drink. I couldn’t be sure, but I’d have bet money that Aleksandr II hadn’t spilled nearly as much blood as Lori had. I grimaced and went back inside, because that’s where the booze was. It wasn’t even noon yet, and I felt like I’d been awake for the last three days.
I topped off my drink, took another slug, and plopped down into a large upholstered recliner. Some of the Scotch slopped out of the glass and onto my arm, but that was okay, too: it would counteract the smell of Borzov’s cigarettes, and besides, there was more where that came from. A
cup holder was built into one arm of the chair. I set my glass in the holder, set the recliner all the way back, and closed my eyes.
My breakfast was long gone, and the liquor hit me as quickly as if I’d hooked myself to an IV. That was a good thing. Finish this one, I figured, take another shower, pass out on the bed for about fourteen hours, wake up, and go back to work. Nothing to it. I could only hope that my sleep would be dreamless.
A knock came at the door, startling me out of the reverie I’d already fallen into without knowing it. Automatically I glanced at my watch. Half past eight in the evening. I’d been asleep in the chair for almost nine hours. My mouth was dry and my head was groggy. Had someone objected to my clothes in the trash can? I levered myself out of the chair and, still wearing nothing but my shorts, staggered over to the door and opened it.
And then, for the second time in the last three days, a small blonde woman ran into my arms.
I grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her out to arms’ length before yanking her inside and banging the door shut with my foot. Then I swung back to face her.
It wasn’t an hallucination. Lorelei Schachter stared up at me, red-eyed, tear-streaked, and generally disheveled—but indisputably alive.
I stared. “How in the fuck did you—”
She wrapped her arms around me again and buried her head into my chest, but I still heard every word she said.
“I did it, Paul,” she sobbed. “I killed her.”
Chapter Fourteen
Elsewhere
Corner of Ul. Krasnaya and Karpov Prospekt
St. Petersburg, Russia
Late Sunday evening, a gray Moskvich sedan pulled up to the corner. The passenger side door opened from the inside and Irina Sokolova climbed in. When she did, her already short blue dress rode all the way up to her hips, enough that even her driver, who was paid to watch where he was going and nothing else, couldn’t resist stealing a glance and a half at his passenger. Her panties, he observed, were black and almost nonexistent. He wondered whether her bra would match them. Or whether she was wearing one at all.
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