Woman Chased by Crows

by Marc Strange

  There were open doors along the fourth floor corridor, curious neighbours, a uniformed policeman taking a statement from the slovenly woman down the hall, evidence of a minor earthquake inside her apartment. That goon had started out energetically, she thought, but he quit in a hurry. The bedroom was almost neat. Drawers pulled open, the mattress flipped. Silly.

  “Can you tell if anything’s missing, ma’am?”

  A handsome young uniformed boy was standing inside her doorway. Still a child, his cheeks were pink. “Nothing missing. I do not have anything to steal.”

  “Ms. Daniel?”

  The uniform stood aside to let someone in. It was the big man, the police chief himself, filling her doorway. Behind him was the woman from the afternoon, the detective with the stylish boots and the dark eyes. “You are too late,” she said. “They have made off with my three-ply toilet paper.”

  “Ms. Daniel. My name is Orwell Brennan. I’m . . .”

  “I know who you are.” She faced him. “It is Zubrovskaya.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t speak any Russian.”

  “Zubrovskaya. That is my name. Anya Ivanova Zubrovskaya.”

  “Very well, Ms. Zubrov . . .”

  “Practice it. Zu-brov-ska-ya. Go ahead.”

  “Zubrovskaya.”

  “Bravo. You may call me Anya.”

  He smiled at her. She almost believed his smile. It was wicked, like a little boy who just found matches in his pocket.

  “Anya. Do you know who did this?”

  “What, this?” A slow pirouette amid the wreckage. “This is nothing.”

  “It looks like a break-in to me. Your neighbour called the police.”

  “How neighbourly of her.”

  “Otherwise they might have still been here when you got home.”

  “I usually arrive earlier than this, but tonight I decided to drink instead.”

  “Are you all right to talk?”

  “I am Russian. Vodka is fuel for talk.”

  “Fine. Do you have any idea who did this?”

  “Certainly. Chernenko did it. Konstantin Chernenko.”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “Not everyone has been informed of his demise.” She turned on the little clock radio atop her refrigerator and located the all-night classical station.

  “And these people are after you?”

  “Not me. They do not really care about me.”

  “Then what?”

  “Bah!” she said. “Schumann. I do not like Schumann.” She lowered the volume, leaned against the refrigerator and looked at him. “You want to hear a story? Do you have time for a story?”

  “Yes, I have time.”

  “Good. I am drunk enough to tell you a story. Let me see if they left my vodka alone.” There was a small bottle in the freezer compartment. She found two glasses in the cupboard above the stove. “Okay,” she said, “turn the couch back over and we will have a drink and I will tell you some things.”

  “Actually, I’m working now,” Orwell said. “I don’t drink when . . .”

  “Do not be silly. If you do not drink with me, we cannot have a conversation. It is not sociable.”

  “All right then.”

  “Good. Now you are being sociable. Tell the other ones to leave us alone.”

  He stepped into the hall. The young cop came to attention. Roy Rawluck’s influence. “Everything sorted out with the neighbours, Constable?”

  “Yes, sir. No eyewitnesses. Some noise. Woman at the far end saw a man going out the fire exit, didn’t get a look. Said he was big.”

  “Okay, see if you can get everyone back in their apartments.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I can go back to the doctor’s office,” Stacy said quietly. “Have another look around.”

  “And keep checking with the hospital,” Orwell said. “I want to know the minute she wakes up.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll stay in touch.”

  “You do that,” he said. “You’ll have to drive me home. She intends to ply me with alcohol.”

  “Watch yourself, Chief. She looks frisky.”

  Orwell sighed and closed the door on Stacy’s smirk.

  “Turn out that overhead light,” Anya said. “I found a lamp that works. I hate overhead lights. Do you?”

  “It’s a bit glaring,” he said.

  “It is punishment,” she said. “Like in jail. Come over here. Take off that big coat and sit by me. Here.” She handed him a small glass half filled with clear liquid. “Nazdrovya!” She clinked his glass with her own.

  “L’Chaim,” Orwell said.

  “Yes, that is a nice one. ‘To life.’ Drink now, do not try to fool with me.”

  Orwell had a sizable bite. Raw Polish vodka, straight. He felt it all the way down to his stomach.

  “There now,” she said. “Now we are sociable.”

  “How did you come to change your name to Daniel?” he said.

  “Do not get ahead,” she said. “I am telling the story. Ah . . . good,” she said, as the music changed. “Borodin. Much better for a Russian story.” She had another drink, and so did Orwell.

  “Anya Ivanova Zubrovskaya,” she began, “came from a family of staunch Party members. She was raised to believe without question in the nobility of the Soviet system. She learned to dance from teachers and choreographers who are legends.” She refilled their glasses. “In 1977 she was a principal dancer with the Mariinsky. You know of the Mariinsky? On tour, it was called the Kirov.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “Well, let’s say I’ve heard of it.”

  “Believe me when I say it was the best. The finest ballet company in the world. Nureyev came from there. Baryshnikov, other ones you never heard of who were just as great, believe me, maybe greater. Sergeiev, Dudinskaya, Yuri Soloviev, he was maybe the greatest of them all.”

  “I’ve heard of Nureyev, of course,” Orwell offered.

  “Of course you have. But trust me, the Kirov had more than one Rudi.”

  “I believe you.”

  She drank again. Orwell pretended to.

  “Anyway, I must not bore you with ancient history.”

  “It’s your history I’m interested in,” he said.

  “Of course. My history with the Kirov. It ended in 1978. An asshole named Grégor dropped me during the Swan Lake pas de deux. Dropped me like a sack, in front of an opening night audience. The Supreme Soviet was there with all their medals. Fucking Brezhnev was there, may he rot forever in the hottest corner of hell. It was supposed to be a big night for me. And he dropped me. I ruptured my Achilles tendon. I made it worse of course. I finished the performance. Artists are so vain, so stupid.”

  She drank for a while in silence. Orwell sipped his drink and watched her. A commercial for a package tour to the Bahamas came on, and then one for a funeral insurance plan. Finally, music again. Orwell recognized Mozart. The string quartet seemed to pull her back from some sad place.

  “I took a year and a half to recover. But I was not the same. I was good. Do not kid yourself. I was very good. Just not quite Kirov-good. Not yet. So they let me go.”

  “That must have been devastating.”

  “It happens,” she said. “I would have made it back. I was almost there.” She filled her glass again, topped his up. “You are pacing yourself. That is okay. Keep your wits. This is where it gets interesting.”

  She rose and began to move around the room as in a stately dream, no trace of intoxication, light, measured steps instinctively keeping time with Mozart’s lacy figures, her head held high, her eyes almost closed.

  “It was in 1981,” she began, “late in the year. Brezhnev was going to die soon.” At that she smiled. “And all the shitheads were trying to decide where their loyalties lay. Andropov, the
king of the KGB, was moving to the head of the table. He held too many secrets to be ignored. And the one with the most to lose was Chernenko, Brezhnev’s bum boy from the beginning. He was going to have to watch his back.”

  Anya crossed the room and picked up her coat where she had dropped it on the floor. She patted her pockets and took out a bent package of Players and a Bic lighter.

  “Have a smoke with me,” she said.

  “I quit some years back,” he said.

  “Do not be unsociable,” she said. “I’m giving you a great story here.”

  “Okay,” he said. He let her light it for him and was deeply dismayed at how good it tasted. There will be hell to pay when I get home, he thought.

  She looked at the glowing tip of her cigarette. Waved it in a tiny figure eight. “You see this pretty red light?” she said. “Imagine this red light as big as a pullet’s egg.”

  Orwell, with his newfound interest in fancy chickens, had a good idea how big that would be. “Okay,” he said.

  “It was called the Ember,” she said. “Some called it the ‘Sacred Ember’ but that was back when Russians believed in God.”

  “What was?”

  “Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna’s ruby. Ninety-seven carats, mounted like a heart in the centre of a crucifix, surrounded by sapphires and diamonds and pearls. On their own, the stones around it were worth a great fortune, the four sapphires alone were worth a million. But the ruby, the ruby itself was priceless. Maybe the largest in the world. Flawless. Burmese. Blood red. And deep in its blood-red heart it had the magic thing they call a ‘feather.’ A star. It was very special. But a stolen treasure requires careful marketing.”

  She put her glass beside the sink and found a saucer for an ashtray. The radio on top of the refrigerator now gave her something that made her swoon. Tchaikovsky. “Ahhh,” she sighed. “Now you are talking. I have danced to this.”

  She lifted her arms above her head and there, in the small disordered apartment, Orwell saw for a fleeting moment how she might have looked on a stage. The music curved her back and extended her neck. She rose on her toes, bent forward at the waist, and lifted one leg behind her, impossibly high, held the position for a full measure of the melody. And then she looked at him and raised her eyebrows. “Yes?”

  “Lovely,” he said. And meant it.

  She returned to the couch and settled in, with glass, ashtray and freshly lit cigarette, tucked her legs under her and wiggled herself into the corner.

  Orwell had another sip of vodka, another illicit puff of tobacco. “What happened to the ruby?” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Back to business.” She emptied the bottle into their two glasses, in equal measures. “How Chernenko got his hands on it no one will ever know,” she said. “All the big ones robbed when they could. They were looting from before the Revolution. They never stopped. But Chernenko knew if he had to run, maybe he shouldn’t show up in the West with a state treasure in his pants pocket. So he called up one of his old friends, Yuli Vystovsky, who ran the Moscow black market the way De Beers runs the diamond business. Vystovsky delegated the actual smuggling and fencing to a man named Piotr Romanenko. Do not try to remember these names. They are all dead now anyway.” She smiled at him as she watched him take a deep delicious drag on the cigarette. “I knew you were a sinner in your heart,” she said.

  “True,” he said. “All too true.”

  “So,” she went on, “this Romanenko had made many profitable trips to the West selling sable skins, caviar, even heavy artillery, but Vystovsky didn’t know of Comrade Romanenko’s recently acquired addiction to cocaine. It was an unfortunate craving that obliged him, from time to time, to visit a man named Fyodor Kapitsa.

  “Anyway, Romanenko was about to leave for the West with certain goods in his possession, and he stopped at Kapitsa’s place of business for travelling supplies. Romanenko didn’t like to fly, so Kapitsa gave him something that was supposed to make his journey more bearable. Instead, it knocked him unconscious.” She laughed, shook her head at the ridiculousness of the situation. “Kapista got worried. He had to carry Romanenko to bed. And while that was going on, an opportunistic little addict named Andrei Kolmogorov made off with Romanenko’s suitcase.”

  “With the ruby inside.” Orwell butted the cigarette. He had smoked it down to the end.

  “Of course, Kolmogorov did not know that. He was in a hurry to convert the suitcase into cash. All he saw inside were silk shirts and high-class toiletries, and he knew someone who liked silk shirts and was willing to receive stolen goods. Viktor Nimchuk.” She drank some vodka. Her eyes were drifting away from Orwell, looking into the past. She was about to go on tour. “Viktor was to leave the Soviet Union, too, the next morning, along with the Volga ballet company.” She bobbed her head as if accepting a prison sentence. “And that is where I come into the story.”

  The Volga company. Castoffs, also-rans, close-but-no-cigars, the nearly great and the merely good. But they had one thing in common: they were all trustworthy, loyal and untainted by ‘decadent influence.’ Which meant that they were allowed to travel outside the country. There were no Nureyevs, no Baryshnikovs, no incandescent stars who would fly into the welcoming arms of the West. Good solid performers capable of dancing on any stage, under the baton of any conductor. Adaptable, presentable and cheap. They toured places the Kirov did not deign to visit, tolerated marginal accommodations, second-rate orchestras, erratic tempi, borderline lighting and bad floors. And to supplement their negligible remuneration, some of them did a little smuggling on the side.

  “We were already in the U.S. when Viktor found the secret compartment. By then it was too late. He had something too big to sell, too big to give back. And who could he give it back to? By then, the others were probably all dead. By then, they would know where the thing had gone. By then, they would already be after Viktor.” She got off the couch. Her glass was empty. She was out of cigarettes.

  They went out to buy cigarettes. The liquor store was closed, it was after one in the morning. Orwell could see Stacy’s unmarked car following a discreet distance behind as they walked to the 7-Eleven on Vankleek Street. It had stopped raining. The streets glistened and the stars were out. Anya went into the store, Orwell went around the car to Stacy’s window.

  “How you holding up, Chief?” she asked.

  “Woman tells a good story,” he said. “You?”

  “Dr. Ruth’s had a concussion. They won’t know how bad it is until they get some specialist up here to have a look. She probably won’t be answering questions for a while.”

  “But she’s going to live?”

  “Hard to get a straight yes or no out of her doctor,” Stacy said. “She’s in a coma. Don’t know how deep or when she’ll wake up. She’s alive, for the moment.”

  “Goddammit!” said Orwell, who rarely cussed. “Goddammit all!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about her office?”

  “Hard to tell what’s gone until she’s awake enough to tell us what was in there. Place was trashed worse than that apartment.”

  “Two break-ins on the same night? We’re way past coincidence now, Detective.”

  “How did Ms. Daniel react when you told her about her doctor?”

  “Haven’t mentioned it yet. She’s nervous enough. Besides, I’m enjoying the tale too much.”

  “The Staff Sergeant has assigned Constable Maitland to keep an eye on her tonight. He’s parked across the street.”

  “Good.”

  “Want a breath mint, Chief?”

  “Give me a couple,” Orwell said. “I’m probably going to have another smoke.”

  “You’re just going to hell in a handbasket, ain’tcha?” said Stacy.

  Orwell walked Anya across the street and into the park.

  “You are very married, are you not?” she
said.

  “Yes I am,” he said.

  “You make her feel safe? Your wife?”

  “I suppose. She’s the kind of person who’s always preparing for emergencies.”

  “Ha! Good luck to her on that.”

  They stopped beside a big maple. Anya ran her hand lovingly across the wet bark.

  “How did Nimchuk get the necklace into Canada?”

  “That was the easiest part. It was so absurd it looked right at home in a basket full of costume jewels, paste and pewter, glass beads and feathers. Once we were across the border, I defected. I had no choice.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Nimchuk took the gems with him and he ran. He sold a few of the diamonds, the smaller ones, and he got enough money to hide for a while. But I could not hide so easily. I was a dancer, if I did not dance, I did not eat.”

  She tore open the fresh package of Players, offered him one. He lit hers, and then his.

  “I changed my name. I became Anna Vaganova for a while. I was engaged as a guest artist by the Winnipeg Ballet. And for a few years I was okay.”

  “And then?”

  “And then Chernenko died. Gorbachev took over in the Soviet Union, Glasnost, Perestroika, a new age. I got ambitious again. I wanted recognition. I thought it would be safe. The National invited me to be a guest artist in Toronto. Be careful what you wish for, they say. I got my recognition. Someone saw me and told someone, who told someone, and one night they followed me home to my apartment and they broke in. They were going to kill me.”

  “Who?”

  “What does it matter? They were hired killers working for another faceless killer. I told them, I do not have what you want, I just do not have it, Nimchuk has it, he took it all, he is selling it, in pieces, I do not know where he is, I do not know where he hid the pieces.” She laughed. “So they threw me off the balcony. They killed me. Or they thought they did. From the fifth floor. They did not know I could fly.”