The Holy Thief

by William Ryan

  “I’m not that type of investigator. And if he does what you say, I can see his importance to the State.”

  Colonel Gregorin tapped the folder. “Good. Keep the reports coming and I’ll be in touch. Be careful, Captain. You’re dealing with people who’ll kill to protect themselves—because if they’re caught . . .” Gregorin left the sentence unfinished and rose to his feet.

  Korolev stood up as well. “Tell me, Comrade Colonel, why, again, are the NKVD not investigating the case directly?”

  Gregorin pointed toward the door. “I’ll walk you out.”

  He said nothing more.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Back at Petrovka Street, Korolev climbed the stairs to General Popov’s office with the intention of passing on Gregorin’s information and to ask for instructions on how to approach it. When he reached the second-floor landing, however, he saw Yasimov reading the Wall Paper. Every Soviet workplace had a Wall Paper, written by its Party activists to educate the workers politically and to publicize the Party line. Even from the staircase Korolev had no trouble making out the headline—the words were in lettering three inches high:

  “COMRADE POPOV’S FAILURE TO SUPPRESS WRECKERS AND TRAITORS!”

  Korolev looked at Yasimov, opening his mouth to speak, but his friend gave a tiny shake of his head. He then began to read a different article with almost exaggerated attention while Korolev, taking the hint, turned back to the editorial. To his surprise, there was no mention of anyone else having failed in their duty to detect wreckers and traitors, which group must include his former colleague Knuckles Mendeleyev. Korolev guessed that it wasn’t just sympathy for the general that was making Yasimov look grim—they’d both worked closely with Knuckles, after all, sharing a room with him for years, and if Knuckles had been a traitor to the State then surely they should have spotted him long before Larinin’s denunciation. He scanned the Wall Paper, but could see neither Yasimov’s nor his own name mentioned—they were in the clear, for the moment anyway.

  Yasimov finished the article he was reading, patted Korolev’s shoulder and walked over to Room 2F’s battered door—there was nothing that could be said out on the landing. Korolev stayed for a little longer, then continued up the stairs to the general’s office, unable to shake the feeling that Yasimov’s pat on the shoulder hadn’t been meant to be reassuring, but rather was a warning.

  Inside his office the general sat smoking his pipe and looking off into space. There was a glass of water on the table in front of him and two white pills beside it. The general followed Korolev’s glance.

  “Stomach ulcer. I can barely look at decent food these days, let alone alcohol. It’s a hard life. I can still smoke though. Just about.” He puffed at the pipe and examined Korolev. “You saw the Wall Paper, I take it?”

  “Yes. What are they going to do, Comrade General?”

  “As if they’d tell me. There’ll be a disciplinary meeting in due course, no doubt, and then I’ll be guided by my Comrades. If the Party believes I wasn’t sufficiently active in my duties, then I’ll accept that—it’s my duty to accept it. But I’d never have thought it of Mendeleyev, and I can’t help thinking . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. Instead he sucked at the pipe and then focused his full attention on the glowing bowl that resulted. He seemed to have forgotten Korolev was there. When Korolev coughed into his fist, the general looked up, bemused.

  “Alexei. What was it you wanted, anyway?”

  “I’ll speak at the meeting, Comrade General. I worked closest of all with Mendeleyev. If there was something wrong, I should have seen it before anyone else.”

  Popov’s brow creased, creating a series of deep Vs in his forehead.

  “Don’t even think of it. I’m grateful, believe me, but please stay out of this—you’re not a Party member. Please, don’t become involved.”

  “But, General, no one’s contributed more to our efforts than you have. Everyone knows it. Allow me to speak.”

  Popov blew a gust of smoke out as he laughed. “But I haven’t done enough, Alexei Dmitriyevich, not nearly enough. They keep coming, the Thieves and the hooligans, the rapists, the murderers, the speculators, the whores and the bandits. According to theory, they should have been subsumed into the greater working class by now. And if they haven’t been, then it must be someone’s fault. Of course, you’d think my job would have become easier if the theory was . . .” He paused for a moment before continuing. “I’m sorry. Let’s stop talking about this—otherwise I’ll say something stupid and we’ll both be in the soup.”

  “I’m sure the Party will come to the correct conclusion, Comrade General.”

  The general shook his head as if to put the whole mess behind him. He looked round for inspiration and found it when his eyes met Korolev’s report. He picked it up from the desk with one hand and put the pipe back into his mouth with the other.

  “You’re making some progress, Alexei Dmitriyevich. What did Staff Colonel Gregorin make of it?”

  His voice was muffled by the presence of the pipe, but he was clearly more cheerful discussing the case than the Party meeting, so Korolev, after a brief hesitation, filled him in on Gregorin’s information, leaving nothing out. The general’s reaction was to give a long low whistle.

  “The Devil—this on top of everything else? It’s got trouble written all over it, but you don’t need to be told that.”

  “No,” Korolev said dryly.

  “What I don’t understand is why they’re leaving it with us.” The general considered the question, running the pipe’s mouthpiece along his jaw. “Let’s see—Gregorin must think the killing is to do with the conspiracy behind the missing artworks, right? So he must think that if you poke around looking for your murderer, you’ll distract the criminals from the investigation Gregorin’s boys are carrying out. Yes. Not a bad plan.” The general nodded in approval.

  Then he looked up. “But what if they decide to knock you off as well? If there are Chekists involved, as Gregorin seems to think, you could be in an unmarked grave out at Butyrka before morning. They’ve killed an American and clearly didn’t turn a hair, so why wouldn’t they do the same to you? It’d be no problem for them to slip one more onto the production line; the investigations they’re doing now are speedy, to say the least. Which makes me wonder why they didn’t just do the same with the girl. Ah. American. Yes. Maybe they mutilated her to stop her being recognized.”

  He flicked back the autopsy photographs and then shook his head.

  “No. If they were worried about that, they’d have chopped off her face and hands. Old Thief trick. They get rid of the tattoos as well, if there are any. Perhaps they were disturbed?”

  The general’s rambling series of deductions were making Korolev uncomfortable, particularly the part about him ending up in an unmarked Butyrka grave.

  “All very interesting,” the general continued. “Not least because there was another murder last night, out at Tomsky stadium. A Thief, it’s true, but there might be a connection. It certainly sounds like it. The body was nicely sliced up, like your one. But what do a Thief and a nun have in common?” He stopped and half-smiled at the thought. “It sounds like the beginning of a joke.”

  “Tomsky?” Korolev said, trying to refocus the general on the matter at hand rather than suggest a punchline.

  “Yes, Tomsky. They found the body there this morning. Larinin’s taking it over to the Institute. Go and have a look—ask the good doctor for her opinion. Maybe it’s our killer, maybe not. Maybe the conspirators are falling out. Mind you, it was found in Spartak’s stadium—anything could happen there.”

  The general smiled, almost hopefully, looking for a reaction from Korolev, who, in his youth had played central defender for the Presnaya football team, the factory area he grew up in. The same team, led by the four Starostin brothers, had become the nucleus of the now famous Spartak.

  “You know I’m too old to play for Dinamo,” Korolev said, preempti
ng the general’s usual teasing on the subject. Korolev, despite having been a useful defender in his time, had never joined Dinamo, Spartak’s great rival, whose players largely came from the Militia, NKVD and other arms of State Security. The general found it amusing that he had a Spartak old boy in his command. “Anyway,” Korolev continued, “Presnaya boys stand together, thick and thin, and we wouldn’t do in one of our own.”

  Popov nodded, but the smile slowly faded.

  “You know, Alexei,” he said in a quiet voice, “you’re a good man and people see that. But, for your own sake, be careful on this one. Promise me? And let’s hope the Chekists take it off us. A good honest axe murder or something, that’s what we need.”

  The two men held each other’s eyes for longer than would have been polite in other circumstances, then the general stood up from his chair and extended his hand across the table. Korolev took it and felt the general’s grip hot and hard around his own.

  “Don’t come to the meeting. It won’t do any good and if the bastards want my head, well, I won’t drag a good man down with me. Anyway, nothing may come of it. It’s only the Wall Paper, after all. Nothing official as yet.”

  Popov stood back a pace and regarded Korolev for a moment, then nodded, as if to agree with his private assessment of the detective. Korolev also took a step backward and, because the moment seemed to require the gesture, he brought his heels together and came to attention. The general’s smile turned downward into a scowl, but he didn’t look particularly displeased for all that, and he waved his pipe at Korolev to dismiss him.

  Korolev left the general at the window, looking down at the pedestrians, cyclists, horses, carts and occasional car that struggled along Petrovka in the slush and ice left by the snowfall. Perhaps the general was considering how so many people, moving in so many different directions and at such different speeds, managed to avoid collision. It could put years on you, trying to work out the answer to a question like that.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Korolev was still considering the significance of the Wall Paper’s attack on Popov as he descended the stairs to Room 2F. Perhaps, after all, it was nothing to be worried about. Maybe it would be enough if the general was open and frank with the Party meeting and admitted to a lapse in the constant vigilance which Party members were required to exercise. Perhaps it was an offense that could be forgiven if Popov cleansed his character through public self-criticism. Or perhaps not. There seemed to be something in the air these last few weeks that didn’t bode well. Nobody knew much about Ezhov, the new Commissar for State Security, except that he had to be better than Yagoda. After all, even Stalin had seemed to suggest, in the months before Yagoda’s replacement, that the endless self-evisceration might have gone too far. But now, more recently still, Yagoda seemed to be in disgrace for not having gone far enough. If this was the case, then the public criticism of Popov, who’d discreetly, but firmly, prevented a wholesale purge of the Criminal Investigation Division, could signal the commencement of something far worse than had gone before. Gregorin’s talk that morning of Ezhov wanting to hit back hard against the Party’s enemies was alarming, after all it seemed to confirm the rumors that Yagoda had in some way been soft. Korolev cursed under his breath as he caught sight of the Wall Paper and the clutch of tight-faced detectives gathered around it. He hoped his instincts were failing him, but judging from his colleagues’ expressions and the bubbles of silence surrounding each of them, he suspected he wasn’t the only one who had a bad feeling about where things were heading.

  Semionov was waiting in Room 2F and, unlike Korolev, seemed positively enthusiastic at the prospect of an autopsy, as well as apparently being the only person in the building oblivious to the portent of the Wall Paper. It took Korolev a moment to outline the events at Tomsky stadium and by then Semionov had gathered his flat cap and mackintosh from behind the door, and they were on their way down to the courtyard to pick up a car. As they walked, the younger man filled Korolev in on the details of the forensic investigation and the house-to-house interviews that the local Militia were undertaking. As far as Semionov could tell, the power cut had indeed been an accident—he’d spoken to the foreman on the building site and the worker who had cut into the cable was seriously ill in hospital. That seemed to suggest that the location of the crime had been opportunistic—which was interesting. Otherwise there had been no substantive steps forward as yet, but at least the process was starting and with a bit of luck it might soon begin to produce scraps of information that could lead to the killer. Semionov was excited at the scale of the investigation and the mysterious nature of the crime.

  “This is just like Sherlock Holmes, Alexei Dmitriyevich. Really it is. Logical deduction, that’s what we need here. ‘Logic, my dear Watson’—that’s what will unmask the fellow.”

  Korolev looked at his colleague with some amusement, although he was careful not to show it. He pointed at the mackintosh.

  “That won’t be much good when the cold weather comes,” he said.

  Semionov took the hem of his coat between his finger and thumb and squeezed it, showing how thin the rubberized cotton was.

  “Maybe not. But I’ve three vests on underneath my shirt. I have an old winter coat, from before. When it gets really cold, I’ll wear that.”

  “At least it looks as though it’s waterproof,” Korolev said.

  “Indeed it is, and all the Arbat crowd are wearing them.”

  Korolev could think of several responses to that, but he decided to restrain himself. In his opinion, the trend-setting youngsters who paraded up and down Arbat Street could jump into the Moskva River en masse and the city wouldn’t be the poorer.

  When they arrived at the small wooden hut that stood in the center of the cobbled courtyard, the elderly Morozov, a bearded ex-soldier who’d lost an eye in 1914 came out to greet them. Morozov supervised the twenty or so cars that constituted the Criminal Investigation Division’s transport pool from behind his pirate’s patch, and was renowned for his grouchy demeanor.

  “Let me handle him,” whispered Semionov.

  “Greetings, Comrades,” Morozov said, as he slapped his gloved hands together and stamped his feet. “Winter’s early this year. Looking for a car, are we, Alexei Dmitriyevich? Taking young Semionov for a spin?” His good eye gleamed from under his fur hat. Despite his reputation, he had a soft spot for Korolev.

  “Do you have something good for us, Comrade Morozov?” Semionov said, before Korolev could respond, “I see a new Emka over there. Fine cars, I hear.”

  Morozov looked Semionov up and down, turned to Korolev, and put a glove up to his face, adjusting his eye patch.

  “You’ll be driving, won’t you, Alexei Dmitriyevich?”

  Korolev looked at Semionov’s hopeful eyes and relented. “I might let the youngster drive, Pavel Timofeevich. Under my direction, of course.”

  Morozov looked back at Semionov, grunted, re-entered the hut, and emerged with a set of car keys.

  “The Ford,” he said and tossed the keys to Semionov, who caught them with a smile. “A car’s a means of transportation, young lad, not entertainment. It’ll do the job. The Emka’s not for the likes of you.”

  “I’ll look after it as if it were my own, Pavel Timofeevich.”

  “Your own, is it? Look after it better than that, it belongs to the Soviet People, that car. It’s no speedster, but it’s reliable.” Morozov pointed the young man toward the end of the line of cars.

  Semionov already had the engine started by the time Korolev squeezed himself into the passenger seat.

  “Now, let’s get this clear. I’m allowing you to drive, it’s true, but take it slowly. The roads are icy and I’d like to make it home in one piece.”

  “Of course, Alexei Dmitriyevich,” Semionov answered, with a look too innocent to be trusted. “The Institute?”

  “The Institute,” Korolev agreed, without enthusiasm.

  “Excellent. And afterward?”

  �
�We’ll see,” Korolev answered, having to shout the words because Semionov had inadvertently revved the engine as high as it would go, causing a flock of screeching black birds to fly up from the overhanging trees. Morozov emerged from his hut to give the younger man a one-eyed look that immediately reduced the engine’s scream to a rattling growl. An abashed Semionov let off the handbrake and directed the car away from its fellows, while Korolev turned up the collar of his overcoat against the chill draft from the windscreen, and avoided Morozov’s aggrieved gaze.

  Semionov drove out through the front gate, saluting the wet-looking sentry and turning left into a stream of carts, cyclists and slow-moving trucks, before maneuvering to the middle of the street, where he had a clearer run. It was strange, Korolev thought, how they never showed the carts and horses in the newsreels. It was almost as though they didn’t exist in black and white; slowly fading from the picture and leaving only the speeding trucks and cars of the future. They weren’t the only things that were being replaced, of course, and, as they drove along Gorky Street, Korolev found himself marveling, not for the first time, at the extent of the reconstruction taking place in the city. Tverskaya Street had been a narrower, more intimate thoroughfare before it had been renamed in honor of the great Soviet writer, and now it was being turned into a fine wide strip of asphalt with pedestrian walkways along both sides, as well as giant new buildings, solid and practical, as you’d expect from Soviet architects. The car ran along the street’s new surface as smoothly as its aged engine and bone-jangling suspension would permit, passing work parties who were clearing the remaining slush from the road and piling it up in banks that ran along the pavements’ edges.