Three Stations

by Martin Cruz Smith

  When evening came they found themselves still in Yaroslavl Station, wading through row after row of sleeping figures. Carefully. Families could misinterpret the intent of a stranger hovering over their babies. The upstairs waiting room had a piano behind a velvet rope; Zhenya had never heard anyone play it. A peek into the luxury lounge found only Americans and potted plants.

  When Maya began to stagger Zhenya led her outside for fresh air. At this hour Three Stations had the stillness of a circus when the show was over and tents were struck. Zhenya bought an apple at a twenty-four-hour kiosk and sliced it for Maya with a folding knife. Maya ate listlessly, mainly at his urging.

  The kiosk was a vodka stop for prostitutes. Zhenya regarded them out of the corner of his eye and all he saw was an impression of lipstick smears, bruised flesh and net stockings. When pimps began to gravitate in Maya’s direction, Zhenya led her toward the relative safety of a taxi rank.

  Traffic in the square was five lanes each direction and the night resounded with the boom of foreign cars that seemed to rise out of the ground at full speed.

  Maya pointed across the square to a giant Oriental gate, dark arches and a floodlit clock tower.

  “Is that a station too?”

  “Kazansky Station. I think we should call my friend.”

  “The policeman?”

  “A prosecutor’s investigator.”

  “No difference.”

  “He’s been around a long time. He might have some ideas.”

  “Just tell me how to get across.”

  So much for Arkady, Zhenya thought.

  He steered Maya to a pedestrian underpass that was a hundred meters of flickering lights and shuttered stalls. During the day the passage was an arcade of small shops that traded in phone cards, flowers, women’s hose. The single stall without shutters was protected by two uniformed security guards dozing in their chairs.

  Zhenya said, “We can come back when there are more people.”

  “I’m looking for my baby now. I didn’t ask for help, you volunteered.”

  “Only a suggestion.”

  “What’s the matter? Do you have enemies down here?”

  Worse, Zhenya thought. Friends.

  The waiting hall at Kazansky Station put Zhenya in mind of the nocturnal habitat at the zoo, a place where things stirred indistinctly and species were difficult to identify. Were these silhouettes hunchbacks or hikers with their packs? Was that ominous hulk a suitcase or a bear? Zhenya held his breath while Maya stumbled over the mega-luggage of vendors and the bare legs of slumbering tourists.

  This was worse than insane, Zhenya decided, it was futile. He slipped behind a photo booth and tried to call Arkady at home. He waited ten rings before giving up because Arkady sometimes ignored the phone and message machine. Next, Zhenya tried Arkady’s cell phone, which only rang twice before Maya snatched the phone away.

  “I said no police.”

  “You’ll never find the baby this way.”

  “Your first chance, you snuck away and called them.”

  “Just talk to him.”

  “No police, we agreed.”

  “He’s not police.”

  “Police enough.”

  “Okay, it’s your move.”

  “I’m going back to the other station. Anyway, it’s not your problem.” She unzipped Zhenya’s sweatshirt and returned it to him. “Why do I trust strangers? I’m so stupid.”

  “How are you going to get by?”

  “I’ll get by. I know how to do that.”

  “You don’t know Three Stations.”

  “I just took the tour.”

  “And you don’t know your way around Moscow. It’s twenty-four hours since you saw your baby. You don’t need a search party, you need a time machine.”

  “That’s not your problem, is it?”

  She headed for the street, and when Zhenya tried to walk with her, she shook him off. His sense of honor demanded that he keep her in sight even if it meant tagging a humiliating distance behind her.

  Maya took the pedestrian underpass. Harsh lights were welcome after the murk of the stations and she was reassured by the sight of a group of boys coming from the far end. She was surprised to see them out so late, but the fact that they were singing made her feel safe and she shot Zhenya a look that warned him off.

  A tourist approached with the teenage boys. He was drunk and out of shape and he ran in slow motion, arms flailing like a marathoner down to his last gasp. Designer eyeglasses bounced on his nose. Tassels bounced on his shoes. The boys trotted alongside in dirty sneakers and salvaged clothes. Older boys tucked a cigarette behind an ear. One was actually a girl with fuzzy dreadlocks that swung from her cap. As they sang, the acoustics of the tunnel made sound seem as visible as rings of smoke.

  “Beck in the Yuuessessaarr…”

  The drunk had a task enough in staying upright. Blood matted his hair and dripped strawberry-colored stains on his polo shirt. When he saw the security guards he shouted over and over that he was registered at the Canadian embassy, as if that made a difference.

  “Oww luggee yuuaarr…”

  The guards were paid to protect one stall, nothing else, and the Canadian swept by in the grip of a boy old enough to cultivate a wispy mustache and the air of authority. A white scarf was around his neck and he carried the butt end of a billiard cue as a club. Maya kept walking as the procession approached; animals—dogs or boys—were more likely to chase anything that ran.

  The Canadian tripped and fell. At once the boys swarmed over him, removing his watch and stripping him of his visa, passport, credit cards and money. Maya seemed to get no more than a glance. She made it almost to the bottom of the stairs before the boy with the scarf slipped in front of her.

  “Terrific hair.”

  Now she wished she had never dyed it.

  He said, “I’m Yegor. What’s your name?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Yegor wasn’t insulted. He was sixteen at least, a combination of baby fat and muscle, the proper build for a bully, and when she tried to step around him, he held the pool cue in her way.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “Where’s home? I can take you.”

  She said, “My brother is meeting me.”

  “I’d like to meet him.” Yegor pantomimed looking around.

  “You won’t like him.”

  “What’s the matter with him? Too big? Too little? Maybe he’s a fag?”

  “He’s waiting.”

  “I don’t think so. What do you think, Boots?”

  The girl with dreadlocks said, “I don’t think there’s a brother.”

  “I agree with Boots. I don’t think there’s a brother and I don’t think you’re catching a train either. I think you’re here to make money, in which case you need a friend. Wouldn’t you like a friend?” He enveloped Maya in his arms and ground his hips against her so that she would know he had something in his pants. Boots’s smile faded. The other boys were still, jaws dropped. The security guards leaned forward on their chairs.

  Maya tried to duck Yegor’s mouth.

  The baby had been a brief respite, a period of normality that ended as her witless contribution to the misery of the world. Who was she to struggle? Whatever shit happened now she deserved.

  Zhenya said, “She’s with me.”

  No one had noticed his approach. Yegor let Maya settle on her feet.

  “She should’ve said so. All she had to say was ‘I’m with Genius.’ What’s her name?”

  Zhenya told Maya, “Go up to the street.”

  Yegor asked, “What’s the problem? I just asked for her fucking name.”

  “I’ll let you know when she has a name.”

  “You like her? Does she like you? How much does she like you? Say a hand job is ‘like’ and anal is ‘love.’ On that scale where is she? Boots would do anything for me.”

  “You’re a lucky guy.”

 
; “You have such a straight face I can never tell when you’re agreeing with me and when you’re putting a poker up my ass. We’re like brothers. The fucking world is falling apart. See how many Tajiks are in Moscow now? Just wait ten years. There’ll be a mosque on every corner. Heads cut off, all kinds of stuff. You and I ought to stick together.”

  “Keep your hands off her.”

  “Okay. But if you want to be a hero, that will cost you,” Yegor shouted as Zhenya started up the stairs. “It will cost you. And a piece of advice. You may have brains but you’re not big where it counts. She’s going to want a dick. A dick with hair.”

  Zhenya told Yegor, “Your scarf is wet.”

  Wet through and through with milk, Yegor discovered.

  “What the fuck?”

  Attention swung the other way as the Canadian revived and put on a burst of speed toward the far exit. The boys ran after because that was their nature, like puppies chasing a ball, and repeated, “Be-be-be-be-beck in the Yuuessessaarr!”

  Zhenya led Maya through a courtyard of rubbish bins and cats to a shuttered truck bay and a back door with the bright brass of a new touch pad. He tapped in the combination and, as soon as the door opened, pulled her inside to a freight elevator that carried them up two floors in utter blackness. She clung to his sleeve as he dragged her through a swinging door and the folds of a velvet curtain to a space that, bit by bit, grew into a landscape of drop cloths and cardboard boxes guarded by a giant pulling back his cape to draw his saber.

  “Welcome to the Peter the Great Casino,” said Zhenya. If he expected thanks he didn’t get it. He played the beam of his penlight over the figure’s glass eyes and three-corner hat. “It’s a good likeness, don’t you think?”

  She wasn’t looking at all. Zhenya couldn’t tell whether she was laughing or crying or controlling her rage until in a voice heavy with defeat she asked, “Can you get me a towel? My top is soaked.”

  He waited outside the ladies’ restroom while she washed. Remembering that she had a razor blade, he kept up an aimless chatter through the restroom door.

  She wasn’t listening. After washing herself and rinsing her shirt, she turned off the lights and sat on a padded stool and rocked. Slowly, as if she were on a moving train.

  6

  Immense and unshaven, Willi Pazenko shuffled around the morgue like a woolly mammoth in an operating gown. A cigarette hung from his lips, a glass of antiseptic alcohol from his hand. At school he had been called Belmondo after the French actor for his style with a cigarette. Arkady had been his classmate but now Willi looked twenty years older.

  “I can’t do it. I’m not up to it. Doctor’s orders.”

  “You could do it with your eyes closed,” Arkady said.

  Willi waved a glass at the cadavers. “Don’t you think I would like to dive in?”

  “I know you do.”

  “Some of the work that comes out of this place you wouldn’t believe. Butcher’s work at a butcher’s pace. A real abattoir. They dig out the heart and lungs, slit the throat and pull out the esophagus. No finesse. No analysis. Run a saw around the skull. Pop the brain. Dig out the organs. Bag them, weigh them, dump them ’tween the knees and finish in less time than it takes to dress a rabbit.”

  “They must miss things.”

  “Do they ever! But I’m retired. On the sideline.”

  Arkady declined a friendly glass of vodka rather than blunt his insomnia. The time was 3 a.m. Insomnia was all he was running on.

  Willi said, “I’ve survived two massive heart attacks. I have angina. Blood pressure that could lift a manhole cover. I could keel over from blowing my nose. So I do not rush.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “To lose weight. No smoking or drinking. And avoid excitement. Sex? I haven’t seen my dick in years. Some days I can’t even find it. Maybe you’d prefer a sparkling wine? I have some cooling in a drawer.”

  “No, thanks. So you really have moved in? You squared this with the director?”

  “The director is a pompous ass but not a bad guy at heart. He found me a spare utility room with a sofa. I’m not supposed to operate anymore because if I expired in the middle of an autopsy, that might lend the impression that the director was not running a tight ship. You not only want me to perform an autopsy, you want it right away.” Willi wiped his chin. “My doctors wanted to restrict me to my apartment. Why? To lead the life of a vegetable? Sit alone and watch idiots on television until I expire? No, this is a better solution. Here I still help out with odds and ends. Stay in the social mix. Friends come by, some of them alive, some of them dead, and when I drop there will be no need for an ambulance because I’ll be right here.”

  “That should be appreciated.”

  “They tore down my building to make room for a spa. They think they’re going to live forever. Are they in for a surprise.”

  There was a queue of sorts. Other tables held a young male so drained of blood he was white as a marble statue, a barbecued torso of undetermined sex and a bloated body with the last laugh, farts that topped off a general atmosphere of spoiled meat and formaldehyde. Arkady lit a cigarette and drew hard enough that the tobacco sparked and still he tasted bile in his throat.

  “Listen to him.” Willi indicated the flatulent corpse. “He sounds like he’s learning the clarinet.”

  “What are you now, a music critic?”

  “If I was caught performing an autopsy—”

  “What could they do to you? They’ve already got you living in a closet. Are they going to give you a dog bowl next? Whatever happened to Dr. Willi Pazenko? Whatever happened to Belmondo?”

  “Belmondo,” Willi recollected.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are.” Willi handed Arkady a rubber apron and surgical gloves. “Our assistants are Tajiks or Uzbeks, and when they take the day off for a wedding, everyone else uses it as an excuse to come to work late. Usually this place is humming. Someday the Tajiks are going to take over. They do all that high steel work. Nimble people. But how would you like to fall a hundred stories? All that time to think on the way down.”

  Arkady declined a surgical mask; masks got clammy and didn’t block the smell. Besides, Willi didn’t use one. Back in harness, he was thoroughly in command.

  “Are you a virgin?” he asked Arkady.

  “I’ve attended.”

  “But never got your hands dirty, so to speak?”

  “No.”

  “Always a first time.”

  The external half of the examination of Olga was a search for identifiable features and signs of trauma: birthmarks, moles, scars, needle tracks, bruises, abrasions, tattoos. Willi filled out a chart and body map as he went.

  Arkady’s job was simple. He lifted Olga as Willi directed. Shifted, posed, positioned her body while Willi snipped an eyelash and a lock of her hair, dug under her fingernails, swabbed and studied every orifice under a UV lamp. Arkady felt like Quasimodo pawing a sleeping Venus.

  When the external part of the examination was over, they broke for a cigarette. Fumo ergo sum, Arkady thought.

  Willi said, “Not a bruise or a scratch. You know that we aren’t supposed to open them up unless there are signs of violence or strange circumstances.”

  “Isn’t it strange when a young woman is found half naked and dead?”

  “Not when she’s a prostitute.”

  “And the clonidine?”

  “This is where your theory falls apart. Clonidine makes a good knockout pill, but it’s a messy poison; essentially you throw up and choke on your vomit. I examined her windpipe. It was clean. All you need do is look at her face. She didn’t die gasping for air; she just closed her eyes and died.”

  No one just dies, Arkady thought. You can be killed by a bullet or a skip in your heartbeat or a vine that starts winding around you on the day you are born, but no one just dies.

  Willi was warming to the subject. “Any way you look at it, death comes down to oxygen or the lack thereof
. Sometimes accomplished with an ax, sometimes with a pillow and almost always leaving evidence. Manual strangulation, for example, is so personal, so over-the-top. Lots of anger and bruising and not only of the neck. I mean, murder is murder, but manual strangulation brings out the worst in people.”

  “Do you think she removed her panties before or after she died?”

  “The panties again?”

  “They caught Victor’s eye too.”

  “The last time I saw Detective Orlov he was asleep on a bench on the Boulevard Ring in the middle of the day.”

  “He’s dry tonight.”

  “So he’ll screw up tomorrow and take you down with him, as if you needed any help.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tell me, since when does a senior investigator back up a detective sergeant? Does Prosecutor Zurin know what you’re up to?”

  “It’s Victor’s case. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “If Zurin hears about this you’ve cut your own throat. Well, you can always be my personal assistant.”

  “Doing what?”

  “In case I drop and anyone tries to resuscitate me, shoot him.”

  Willi started at Olga’s left shoulder, drawing the scalpel under the breast and up to the sternum. He shuffled around the table and made a similar cut from the right shoulder. In one masterly stroke, Willi sliced her from the sternum down, opening her all the way to the tattoo.

  She looked aside, deaf to the rattle of hardware on the instrument tray: knives and scalpels of different lengths, forceps, UV flashlight and rotary saw. Willi spread open the soft tissue of her chest and selected a garden pruner with curved blades.

  “Maybe I should do this,” Arkady said.

  “When I want an amateur to touch my work, I’ll let you know.”

  Taking that for a no, Arkady reviewed the chart.

  Sex: female

  Name: unknown

  Residence: unknown

  Height: 82 cm.

  Weight: 49 kg.

  Hair: brown

  Eyes: blue

  Estimated Time of Death: by core temperature and start of rigor approximately 2 to 3 hours previous