Blood and Rubles

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Family?”

  “Wife, mother-in-law, daughter, dachshund.”

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “Sixteen,” he answered with restrained anger.

  Rostnikov rose, finished the Pepsi in his hand, and placed his drink on the table. Hamilton got up. Yevgeniy got up. Anna Porvinovich remained seated.

  “I’ve seen that pose,” Rostnikov said, looking up at the painting.

  “I wish I had lived in the late twenties or early thirties, in France or America, or even England.”

  “I quite agree,” said Rostnikov, moving to the door with Hamilton. Yevgeniy, anticipating the move, had hurried ahead of them to open it.

  “We will send someone back to install the telephone recording device,” said Rostnikov.

  And then the two men were in the hall walking to the elevator.

  “What do you think, Agent Hamilton?” Rostnikov asked in a whisper.

  Hamilton answered in English. “Anna Porvinovich gave me a clear invitation to return for more than talk of her kidnapped husband. I don’t know if she was serious or if she does that in the hope of manipulating all men.”

  “She is a beautiful woman,” said Rostnikov in English. “Do you think she had her husband kidnapped?”

  “Possibly,” Hamilton said. “But if she did, her act is all wrong. She should be playing the distraught wife and she seems too smart not to know it.”

  “I agree,” said Rostnikov. They both entered the elevator, and Hamilton pushed the ground-floor button.

  “With what?” Hamilton asked.

  “That she may have been responsible for her husband’s kidnapping and that she is very smart. Why would we suspect a woman who is not playing the role of the grieving wife? Why would we not assume that she is likely to be innocent of wrongdoing precisely because she is calm and carrying on a possibly innocent flirtation with an FBI agent?”

  “You are too convoluted in your thinking,” Hamilton said.

  The elevator stopped and the two men walked out into the lobby.

  “It is my heritage,” said Rostnikov, limping toward the door beyond which the armed soldier stood. “Over eight hundred years of trying to outwit authorities who can do what they want to you makes a people suspicious of authority and turns many of them into good and devious actors.”

  They were on the street now. The policeman was standing erect instead of slouching.

  “Your name?” Rostnikov asked.

  “Officer Boris Guyon.”

  “Boris Guyon,” he said. “Do you like to dance?”

  “I … do not know how to dance well, but what I can do I like … have liked.”

  “Thank you,” said Rostnikov.

  He and the FBI agent walked to the car, where Hamilton paused and said, “Are we going anywhere else where I have to take off the hood ornament and the windshield wipers?”

  “Yes,” said Rostnikov.

  Hamilton waited till they were both in the car before he said, “Why all these questions about dancing?”

  “It is not dancing that is important,” said Rostnikov. “It is getting to know people. If you talk to them about crime, they have prepared answers, wary answers. If you talk to them about what they read, drink, do, you often discover quite a bit about who you are dealing with. And if you ask them mad questions, they are often caught off guard and reveal something of their true selves.”

  Hamilton pulled into the nearly empty street and said, “Did you find out anything about Yevgeniy and Anna with your questions?”

  “Quite a bit,” said Rostnikov. “Are you aware that we are speaking English?”

  “Yes,” said Hamilton.

  “Do you remember when we began speaking English?”

  “In the corridor outside the apartment,” Hamilton answered in Russian.

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want them to know what we were saying,” said Hamilton, now clearly determined to speak Russian.

  “No,” said Rostnikov. “The door was closed and we were speaking softly.”

  “Your theory?”

  “The woman had made you nervous and you were looking for something that would make you feel more comfortable—your own language,” said Rostnikov. “Turn right at the next corner.”

  “Yes, the woman made me feel nervous, and the fact that Yevgeniy Porvinovich kept touching the gun under his jacket as if he might pull it out and start shooting if someone said a wrong word.”

  “That too,” agreed Rostnikov. “So what would you do next?”

  “Go to the telephone company and see if Anna Porvinovich really received a phone call yesterday,” said Hamilton. “No call and we go back and confront her.”

  “I think you will find that the call was made,” said Rostnikov. “I could be wrong, but Anna Porvinovich is, as we said, very smart. I’m hungry. You?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Then park right over there, near where those two people are talking. The building behind them is where I live.”

  “The photographs,” said the man in the blue smock. He was looking at Karpo over his glasses and holding out a set of full-color photographs. “They’re all of the man with the tattoos. The other victims are nowhere near as interesting.”

  Emil Karpo took the photographs and looked at each one slowly.

  One of the “not so interesting” dead was Mathilde Verson.

  The man in the blue smock was Paulinin, who presided over a morbid flea market in his laboratory two floors below street level in Petrovka Headquarters. Paulinin had a mass of wild gray-black hair on an oversized head. He watched Karpo’s face as the policeman went through each photograph of the naked body of the man whom Rostnikov had found sprawled on the hood of a car twenty feet from where Mathilde Verson had been shot while drinking tea. Karpo had already seen photographs of Mathilde and had looked at her body. He had resisted the urge to touch her flowing red hair and had tried instead to create a mental picture of her that would stay with him till he died.

  For more than four years Mathilde Verson, who had made her primary living as a prostitute, met Karpo in her room each week for an hour, for which he dutifully paid in clean bills laid neatly on her dresser. But gradually, somehow, the relationship changed. The ghost of a man who showed no emotion had been a challenge to her. She had tried to bring him out, had started to understand him. They had become friends and then real lovers, and no more money was exchanged. Mathilde had been the more present of the two, for Karpo had spent a lifetime withholding himself.

  It was three bullets from the weapon near the tattooed man that had killed Mathilde.

  Karpo’s hands moved slowly, his eyes stayed fixed. He had lost all meaning in his life. He had devoted himself to Communism and its eventual triumph. Karpo knew that there were corrupt leaders, that some, such as Brezhnev, might even have been both corrupt and stupid, but since the day he had been taken by his father to a party rally as a small boy, he had been won over to the cause. So, with the help of his steelworker father’s connections, he joined the police force as soon as he was old enough. Karpo’s mission was to let no crime against the state or its members go unpunished. He had put in sixteen-hour days and rarely took a day off. He lived alone in a small room, no larger than a monk’s chambers, where he slept on a bed in the corner. The rest of his meager furnishings consisted of two straight-backed wooden chairs, a desk, and a bookcase, which ran along one wall up to the ceiling. The only author represented in the several hundred identical black books was Emil Karpo. These books held his notes on all of his cases, with a special section for those that had not yet been solved. It was the unsolved cases that had occupied Karpo’s attention most of the time he spent in the apartment.

  All of his clothing, and there wasn’t much of it, had been black until Mathilde had bought him a tie, a blue French tie with a small flower in the middle. Karpo had worn the tie twice before. He was wearing it today.

  The Soviet Union had collapsed. Communism had almost
disappeared. Crime, which once could be contained within the pages of his neatly kept notes, was now overwhelming. He would need a library the size of a football field to keep track of the anarchy that had clutched Moscow. Karpo had lost his mother when he was born. He had no sisters or brothers, aunts or uncles. His father had died four years ago, and now Mathilde. What had attracted her, she who was so full of life, so willing to laugh, so beautiful, to the dour, pale, humorless man Karpo saw in the mirror? That was the question he had asked both her and himself ever since they had been drawn together. And now she was gone.

  “Well?” Paulinin prompted after a fruitless search for something among the mountain of piled-up books and the jars containing specimens of human organs, appendages, and even a man’s head. There were items of clothing on a rack in a corner, arranged in no particular way. Knives, wrenches, a hammer, saws, a pair of false teeth, plaster casts of footprints and handprints littered a table that ran the length of one wall. The other tables were similarly cluttered with boxes, large and small, and various objects including the metal handrail from a Moscow city bus stained with blood.

  “Well?” Paulinin repeated, folding his hands for an instant on a mass of reports and papers on his desk and then rubbing his palms together.

  Emil Karpo’s opinion of him was the only one Paulinin valued. This little man saw no one socially, lived alone, and slept at his desk as often as he went back to his apartment, which was in as much disarray as his office. He cared little who ran the government. Paulinin cared nothing about politics, which was one of the reasons he worked alone in a converted storeroom and was given almost no funding.

  No one, however, ever considered getting rid of the nearly mad man in the blue smock, for it was generally acknowledged that Paulinin was an encyclopedia and a near-genius at examining forensic evidence.

  “I have a surprise,” Paulinin said, trying to pry his visitor’s eyes from the photographs. Karpo was always quiet and correct, always spoke little, but today was different—today he was nearly a robot.

  The police inspector continued to look at the photographs slowly, carefully. Finally he looked up, and Paulinin handed him a two-cup beaker of tea. Karpo took it and drank some of the brown, tepid fluid. It tasted of something sharp and bitter, the residue of some experiment that Paulinin had failed to remove completely from the beaker before brewing his tea.

  “What do you make of it?” Paulinin asked, taking a sip of his own tea from a black cup on which was written in English PENSACOLA EYE AND EAR CLINIC.

  Karpo looked down again at the photographs of the man who had killed Mathilde. The man was literally covered with tattoos—head, neck, arms, fingers, back, front, legs and toes, even his penis. The tattoos were colorful, vivid, and extremely well done. The subjects seemed random. On his right forearm a series of church domes, on his chest just below the collarbone a fiery eight-pointed star. The tattoo on his back depicted a rearing horse mounted by a man with a death’s-head, who in turn held a bearded man by the hair and appeared to be about to behead him.

  Karpo turned to the photos of the nude body of the man who had died in the street. He, too, was covered in tattoos.

  “Prison tattoos,” said Karpo.

  “And?” Paulinin prompted.

  Karpo knew a little about prison tattoos. He knew that professional criminals spent much of their time inflicting themselves with the tattoos when they were in prison, giving themselves some distinction from the other prisoners.

  “Your tattooed men carried no wallets, no identification. There was a rubber band in the pocket of the bald one, a thick one. I would guess he was carrying a great deal of money and that it was taken from him before the police arrived. More likely, it was taken by the first officer at the scene.”

  Karpo said nothing. He took out his notebook and began to write.

  “All but one of your dead men’s tattoos are in code. This corpse,” he said, pointing to the bald man, “had been a pakhan, a prison boss, a member of the vory v zakone. The eight-pointed star makes that clear.”

  “The eight church domes?” Paulinin asked.

  “Each dome represents a completed sentence.”

  “Good, good,” said Paulinin, gulping down his tea. “You paused at the death’s-head. A creature from medieval folk tales told by the Bogatyrs, a violent, crusading breed. It indicates that our corpse was a murderer. No drug tattoos. None that look forced on him by other inmates to mark him for crimes such as heroin addiction, crimes against children, submission. Your man has no facial tattoos and no sign that he ever had one and had it removed. In fact, he had no tattoos removed and has continued to shave his head prison-style. He was proud of his record.”

  “And?”

  Paulinin put his cup down. “His name is Mikhail Sivak. He was last imprisoned in Correctional Labor Colony Nineteen, maximum security, just outside of Perm. Your people will discover all this through his fingerprints perhaps, but it will take them days, perhaps a week or more if they even bother.”

  Paulinin shook his head fiercely. His hair bounced.

  “The newest tattoos on Mikhail Sivak are definitely in the style of Correctional Labor Colony Nineteen. I have seen them before. As for knowing his name, did you notice that his eyes are open in all the photographs?”

  Karpo nodded.

  “Those dolts at the hospital couldn’t tell you his name, though it was written right on him.”

  “In prison code?” Karpo guessed.

  “No,” said Paulinin. “I looked at the corpse when they were done with him. I closed his eyes. On one lid was written ‘Do not wake me.’ On the other was his name, Mikhail Sivak. The other one had no name tattooed on his body.”

  “This eagle on his right buttock, the one carrying the bomb?” Karpo asked.

  Paulinin was up now, lifting bottles, opening boxes—searching for something.

  “The bomb and eagle is recent,” Paulinin said. “It suggests that he now deals in powerful weapons. The artist who did this tattoo was especially precise, definitely an artist. The bomb is an exact replica of a hydrogen bomb. I expect I’ll be seeing more of these in the future.”

  “You said you had a surprise for me,” said Karpo. “Was that it, the trade in nuclear weapons?”

  “No … here,” said Paulinin, finding what he was looking for. “I knew it couldn’t be far.”

  He held up something that looked like a small painting, a replica of the eagle and bomb that was tattooed on the head of Mikhail Sivak. The painting was sandwiched inside two sheets of glass. Paulinin handed the treasure to Karpo.

  “I took it from his body,” said Paulinin. “Scalped him like one of those American Indians. Such art deserves to be preserved.”

  “May I keep this?” Karpo asked.

  “A gift from me,” said Paulinin with some pride.

  The pressed, colorful skin of Mikhail Sivak fit tightly into Karpo’s jacket pocket.

  “Questions,” said Karpo.

  Paulinin waved an arm to show that he was prepared.

  “What can you tell me about the dead man at the table with the woman?”

  Paulinin paused in his fussing over the box from which he had taken the patch of Mikhail Sivak’s skin. “The bullets from his weapon killed the two tattooed men in the street. He must have been a good shot to use a handgun against people who knew how to use automatic weapons. Our man with the four-fifty-four Casull was, as you know from looking at his wallet, a German. Heinz Dieter Kirst. He and the woman were both killed by the same weapon, instantly. The bald man must have been firing after he died. The man and woman were killed by a dead man.”

  Paulinin pointed to a spot on his right temple to indicate where the bullet had entered and exited the German.

  “The dead waiter was named Waclaw Wypich,” Paulinin said. “A Pole who—”

  “I know,” said Karpo.

  The other two, the ones without identification, wore blue Adidas sweat suits and leather jackets. Both had light-colored, recentl
y barbered hair. Both appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties.

  “Can you tell me anything about the German?”

  “Interesting question,” said Paulinin, holding up half a cookie he had unearthed from his boxes. It was wrapped in a see-through bag. Karpo showed no interest in the cookie, so Paulinin opened the bag and began eating it as he continued. “Judging from the fact that he was carrying a gun and knew how to use it, I would say that the tattoos had come to kill him, and he half expected it. My guess is that the woman, whom I examined, was a prostitute, and the German was negotiating with her.”

  Karpo had already come to this conclusion. What he hadn’t been prepared for was Paulinin’s simple statement that he had examined Mathilde’s dead body.

  “Treachery,” said Paulinin, taking a bite of his cookie after dipping it into his tea. He did not notice that Karpo had closed his eyes. “Who knows? German promises something and then fails to deliver. Our tattooed mafia think the German has betrayed them or made a deal for whatever he is selling or buying with someone else. Who knows? That’s your job.”

  Karpo opened his eyes.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What am I?” asked Paulinin, wiping the crumbs off his hands on his smock. “A grub of a scientist with almost no budget and certainly no bloated reputation like Rostov or Kelenin or … or any of them. They fired their automatic weapons at Kirst, not concerned about who else might get shot. Kirst fired back, killing them. A pair of innocent bystanders got in the way. Someone was waiting for our killers to do the job. When they were both killed, whoever was waiting saw no reason to stay, and off he went.”

  To illustrate the car’s driving away, Paulinin rolled what was left of his cookie across the papers on his desk.

  Karpo looked down at the rolling cookie. Paulinin was simply talking now, presenting nothing Karpo himself hadn’t immediately determined at the crime scene. He willed himself to see Mathilde’s face, but he could not.

  Paulinin sat down at his desk and popped the rest of the cookie into his mouth. “And now?” he said.

  “We are most likely dealing with a mafia of ex-prisoners who are dealing in the sale of nuclear weapons to foreigners. I will find the leader of this mafia. I will find whoever ordered these murders.”