The Holy Thief

by William Ryan

  “Don’t worry, Schwartz is useful to us. We leave the Americans well alone, particularly those who are, as I said, useful to us.”

  There was something contemplative in the way he said the word “useful,” which made Korolev wonder if Schwartz did more for State Security than just buy a few icons from time to time. He hesitated, pretending to himself for a fleeting moment that he had a choice, and then repeated to Gregorin everything that Schwartz had told him. Maybe Korolev would have withheld something if he’d had an American passport and a return ticket to New York in his pocket. But he didn’t and so discretion was a luxury he couldn’t afford.

  When Korolev had finished, Gregorin reached into the inside pocket of his coat and produced his battered cigarette case, taking one out for himself, and then one each for Korolev and Volodya. Soon the car was a fug of cigarette smoke.

  “Well, you’re right,” Gregrorin said after a while. “Nancy Dolan isn’t Miss Smithson. Lydia Ivanovna Dolina is her name. You remember I thought the dead girl could be one of two possible candidates? Well, Citizeness Dolina was the other candidate. A similar White Guard background.”

  “Not a nun?”

  “We don’t know, but Schwartz’s information seems to indicate she has religious connections at the very least. We have people working on it—I’ll pass this on to them.”

  “Schwartz said she was with an Intourist group.”

  “Yes, it was when she went missing from the group that her cover story began to come apart. No one at Comintern has ever heard of her, although we’re keeping an eye on the Americans there just in case. It’s possible she has ended up the same way as Miss Smithson—if not, we’ll find her sooner or later. Moscow isn’t such an easy place to hide.”

  “You’re looking for her?” Korolev asked through a cough—by this stage there was enough smoke in the car to cure fish.

  “Only as a visa violator. We don’t know how she fits into the picture, so we’re keeping it low-key. I’ll let you have a photograph, in case you come across her.”

  Korolev nodded his thanks.

  “And this icon? Can you tell me anything about it?”

  Gregorin let a small leaf of smoke curl out of his mouth and then exhaled the rest through his nose.

  “There is a particular icon—one that went missing from a Lubianka storeroom two weeks ago. There might be a connection.” His words seemed carefully measured.

  “The Lubianka? Christ,” Korolev said and would have pushed the word back into his mouth if he could, but Gregorin only laughed.

  “No, I don’t think it was him, he hasn’t got the clearance. Other people have, though.”

  “Is there a connection? Between the murders and the icon going missing?” Korolev was surprised his voice sounded relatively calm, given his entire body had broken into an icy sweat. To mention Christ in front of a Chekist staff colonel—he felt his toes curl into a cramp.

  “It seems certain Nancy Dolan knows about the icon, if it was her who opened the door to Schwartz in New York—therefore it seems reasonable to assume she’s here in connection with it. I think your dead nun must have been as well.” Gregorin spoke slowly, seeming to weigh each word. “And if she was, then the Thief also—after all, it seems they were both tortured in the same way.”

  “What icon is this—that people are dying for it?”

  Gregorin shook his head after a long pause. “I’m sorry, Comrade. There’s no need for you to have that information at this stage. You must now concentrate on identifying this fellow Tesak and then any associates of his who might be involved. If you find Nancy Dolan along the way, so much the better. But leave the icon to us.”

  “I see.” Korolev didn’t really, but he saw enough to keep his mouth shut. Gregorin leaned across and opened the door for the detective.

  “You’re expected.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Babel, the writer, your neighbor. He has good connections with the Thieves. He may be able to assist in your inquiries. I’m afraid another matter has come up that Volodya and I have to deal with. But I’ll see you tomorrow evening, if not before.”

  It was only after he entered the building that Korolev remembered he’d no idea which apartment Babel lived in, so he left his food parcel in his room and climbed the stairs to the second landing, hoping that the one-armed BMC chairman, Luborov, would be able to direct him properly. He knocked on his door a little out of breath, and waited, hearing movement and then the hollow sound of footsteps approaching on the wooden floorboards.

  “Who’s there?” Luborov’s voice sounded strained.

  “Korolev. I moved in yesterday.”

  The door opened and Luborov looked out at him.

  “It’s nearly nine o’clock, Comrade. Do you need me as a witness?” Luborov was referring to the practice of having two independent witnesses present for arrests, particularly when it was a political matter.

  “No, I just need you to tell me where the writer Babel’s apartment is.”

  Korolev knew some people made a living from being witnesses, but it was generally night work and often meant going without sleep if you worked in a factory or on a building site. He supposed Luborov’s condition and his position on the BMC made it easier for him than for most people, but it wasn’t a pleasant way to pass your time.

  “Babel? He has rooms in the Austrian’s apartment. I’m glad you weren’t calling me out, I could do with a good night’s sleep. It’s become busy all of a sudden—it hasn’t been like this for a while. Anyway, big black door to the left on the next landing up. Comrade Babel entertaining, is he?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve an appointment.”

  “I thought I saw some people go up earlier—he likes to entertain. He never asks me, of course. Well, remember me to him. Goodnight, Comrade.” Luborov shut the door.

  Korolev stood for a moment, considering what Luborov had said, and then turned to climb the stairs. So the witnesses were busy again. No one had thought things would change completely, of course, Muscovites knew better than that, but it seemed the quiet optimism of the last few months had been misplaced. He shrugged—it wasn’t as if he could do anything about it, after all. It was like poor Andropov’s accident: you just had to accept that these things happened and then forget about them.

  He knocked on Babel’s black door, which was indeed a fair size, and heard laughter and music inside. It sounded like Melkhov’s band performing “Girls, Tell Your Friends!” He knocked again in case they couldn’t hear him and the door opened. A small woman in a black dress with a white handkerchief over her gray hair looked up at him, her sagging sallow face speaking of troubles endured, as much as age. Two sad brown eyes started at his waist and worked their way up. He took off his hat—there was something about the old woman that made him feel like a small boy.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” the woman said; her voice rumbling with quite astonishing depth for such a small frame. The jazz record came to a bumping stop in the background.

  “I’m Captain Korolev, Criminal Investigation Division. I believe I’m expected.”

  “A Ment? I suppose I shouldn’t ask.” She stood aside with an expression of distaste. “Come in, come in. You’re letting the warmth out. You think we can afford to heat the stairwell, do you?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Give me your hat and your coat, come on. Don’t worry, I won’t sell them to a passing speculator. I wouldn’t get much anyway, they’ve seen better days. There.” She took the coat and hat and dropped them in a heap on a nearby chair. ‘You can leave your briefcase as well. Have you eaten?”

  Korolev hadn’t had anything since the blinchiki on the way out to the stadium, but it wasn’t polite to eat other people’s food. Not with queues for bread the way they were since the poor harvest.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said, hoping his stomach wouldn’t betray him.

  “Of course you’re not. I made some cheese dumplings this morning. Will I bring you a plate?”


  He shook his head, but his eyes must have betrayed him and she squeezed his arm.

  “Of course I will,” she said.

  In the sitting room five people sat around a low table on which glasses, a full ashtray and bottles stood. Five pairs of eyes looked up at him through the layers of smoke.

  “Who’s this?” A short, balding, heavy-set man was sitting cross-legged on the daybed, squinting at them from behind a pair of round, gold-framed glasses. He wore a collarless shirt with open cuffs and a pair of old trousers held up with braces. The shirt was starched a dazzling white and all the light in the room seemed to be focused on it. He smiled at Korolev, his brown eyes mischievous. “Some boyfriend of yours, is it, Shura?”

  “Ah, Isaac Emmanuilovich, you do like your little jokes. I can’t grudge you them, I suppose, you poor thing you.” The old woman’s deep voice rumbled out from the kitchen she’d stepped into.

  “It’s Captain Korolev, our new neighbor. I was just telling you about him.” Valentina Nikolaevna rose from the soft chair in which she’d been sitting. She was wearing a cocktail dress with a neckline that plunged low enough to reveal chiseled clavicles and swan-white skin. She smiled at him; not exactly a friendly smile, but not unfriendly either. Babel uncrossed his legs and rose to his feet, as did the others, and his smile was, in contrast, as warm as the sun. He waved Korolev to an empty chair.

  “Welcome, Comrade. Valentina you know, and Shura it seems. This is my wife Antonina Nikolaevna—Tonya—and this is Avram Emilievich Ginzburg, the poet, and his wife, Lena Yakovlevna. Shura, bring Comrade Korolev a glass. Would you like wine or vodka, Comrade? We’ve both, you see.” He laughed, revealing even, white teeth.

  “I’d drink a glass of wine, if I might,” Korolev said.

  “Let me guess, Captain. You’re late home after a long day wrestling with evil, heard our little party and thought you’d introduce yourself. Thank God you did—poor Ginzburg was getting bored.”

  The small man with wary eyes and a gray beard waved the suggestion away with a half-irritated smile, not shifting his gaze from Korolev’s. He looked ready to run, but that was a reaction you became accustomed to as an investigator. It used to mean people had something to hide, but that wasn’t necessarily the case any more; although, on second thought, there was something about the man’s pallor and frailty that suggested Ginzburg was no stranger to the Zone.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, Comrade, but I’d hoped you were expecting me. Staff Colonel Gregorin suggested I come by.”

  “Gregorin, ah yes,” Babel said.

  “He thought you might be able to assist me with a case I’m working on. A murder.”

  “A murder,” Babel said, his eyebrows lifting. “Did you hear that, Shura? I know you’re listening. Shura loves a good murder—the more horrific the better. And my beautiful Tonya isn’t averse to homicide either.” Babel placed a proprietary hand on the knee of the pretty, long-necked brunette, who shook her head in shy disagreement.

  “Have you eaten?” Babel continued.

  “I have cheese dumplings for him, haven’t I?” a grumpy Shura said, coming from the kitchen with a plate and an empty glass.

  “I told you she was listening,” whispered Babel, and Shura leaned over and slapped his arm.

  “Don’t be like that, Shura. Sit down now, and we’ll see what kind of a story Captain Korolev has for us.”

  Babel poured wine into Korolev’s glass before crossing his legs beneath him.

  “I’m afraid I can’t talk about this particular case,” Korolev said, feeling awkward.

  “Don’t worry, Captain, I was only teasing. Have some wine and food and when you feel refreshed we’ll talk. Avram is telling us about Armenia.”

  Korolev lifted the glass of red wine and enjoyed the warm taste of it, beginning to relax as the bird-like man began to speak. Korolev looked over at Valentina Nikolaevna and was struck by the sharpness of her profile and the way she listened to Ginzburg. Her look was benevolent, even motherly, as though she wanted to shield him from the times they lived in. His wife, Lena, regarded him with the same affectionate gaze, although when she looked up at Korolev her face became closed and careful.

  When Ginzburg finished his tales of the sun-baked Armenian hills, the conversation wandered from talk of Paris, where Babel had spent part of that summer representing Soviet literature at a writer’s conference, to the construction of the Metro, on which Babel’s wife Tonya worked as an engineer. Without being aware quite how it had come about, Korolev found himself telling the story of the rapist, Voroshilov—the trail of clues, the relief on the young man’s face when he was caught. Although Shura, leaning against the kitchen door, maintained her stony face, he couldn’t help notice the way she stared at him. Not at his eyes, he thought, but at his mouth, so that she didn’t miss a word he said. It was Babel, however, who asked what clothes the rapist had worn, how he’d managed to obtain such a fine pair of boots, which lectures had been on the list that led to his undoing, and so on.

  “What happened to him, the dog?” Shura asked when he finished.

  “He’ll get eight or ten years I should think, depends on what the court decides. It doesn’t matter.”

  “How so?” Ginzburg asked, but Korolev was sure he already knew the answer. He’d been in the Zone, or close to it—Korolev was sure of that now. He had the prison pallor of a Zek. Babel coughed, then picked up a bottle of wine.

  “Come, friends, let’s finish this off and we’ll open another.”

  “Tell us, Captain, why doesn’t it matter?” Ginzburg’s wife asked now and there was accusation in her tone. Perhaps she didn’t understand. He looked at Babel, who shrugged his shoulders and poured out the wine, his eyes on the stream of red. Korolev sighed. Well, if they wanted to know, why shouldn’t they? There were no children present.

  “There’s a hierarchy in a prison, even in a police cell. At the top sits the ranking Thief, the ‘Authority,’ then his lieutenants, then down through the Thieves to the lowest apprentice. Then beneath the Thieves are the other prisoners and then the politicals. At the bottom, beneath everyone, are the untouchables. No Thief, nor any other prisoner, will touch them except to commit violence upon them, sometimes sexual violence. They sleep underneath the bunks in case they contaminate a bed. They have their own cutlery, as a fork used by an untouchable would contaminate anyone who used it after them and bring them down to the untouchable’s level. They are given the filthiest jobs. And they don’t last long. Voroshilov will end up like that, as a rapist, unless he’s very lucky. It’s the Thieves’ morality.”

  Shura nodded her head, a short jab downward with a hard mouth. It was peasant justice also. Harsh, even brutal, but just in a peasant’s eyes, and she approved. Babel gave a half-smile.

  “They have their own rules. It’s difficult for cultured people to understand.”

  Valentina Nikolaevna looked at him in confusion. “How could this be allowed to happen? The Thieves are not the law.”

  “They are in the camps and the guards allow it,” Ginzburg said and his eyes burned. “The Thieves are the guards’ dogs, and the rest are the sheep. That’s what the Thieves call us—the politicals and the rest—sheep. And they can shear us whenever and however they want. The untouchables are there to tell us that, no matter how bad it gets, it can get worse. And to make us complicit because we all conspire against the untouchables. After all, if we helped them, we would become one of them. It’s a little microcosm of Soviet society, wouldn’t you agree, Captain?”

  Korolev looked at Ginzburg in the silence that followed and saw how his chin was lifted, as though expecting a blow. Korolev sighed and shook his head.

  “I’m a criminal investigator, Citizen. I find bad people who have done bad things and I put them in a bad place. What of it? As for Soviet society, it’s getting better. We know it isn’t perfect. Comrade Stalin tells us as much. It’s in the nature of Bolshevik self-criticism to recognize its current flaws. It’s where w
e’re going, not where we are.”

  “We know where we’re going, Captain. We’re going to . . .” Ginzburg stopped and turned to his wife, who’d taken his arm and now shook her head. Babel passed a glass of wine to him and another to Korolev. He seemed comfortable with the break in the conversation, and when everyone had a glass in their hand he raised his own.

  “A toast, friends. To our beautiful future.” He held the glass for a moment as though to contemplate the prospect in the color of the wine. Each of them seemed lost in thought and Korolev wondered if they, like him, were imagining what such a beautiful future might be like.

  “You’ve won Shura’s heart, you know,” Babel said, when the other guests had left and his wife had gone to bed. “She loves a man with a healthy appetite and a good atrocity up his sleeve. You’ll have to come again—she’ll want to feed you now. If you don’t watch out she’ll make you fat. Look at me. I was a stick when she took me on.”

  “A fat stick,” Shura said, from the kitchen. Babel laughed and stood up awkwardly from the daybed.

  “Now, Captain, come into my study—we can talk privately there.” Babel led him along the corridor to a room with a desk and a typewriter, a chaise longue and a great many books that were shelved and stacked on or against every available surface. He shut the door behind them.

  “It’s not really mine, this room,” Babel said. “I share the flat with an Austrian engineer, but he’s in Salzburg and we don’t know when he’s coming back. It’s been eight months, so I’m gradually taking it over. I don’t think he’s coming back, if the truth be told—but I tell the BMC his arrival is imminent. Of course.”

  “An Austrian?” Korolev couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice.

  “Yes, an engineer. I think he decided he couldn’t face another of our winters, so he’s staying at home in the Alps, listening to Mozart and drinking hot chocolate instead. They probably have a different type of snow, a polite kind, very gentle.”

  “I would have thought . . .”

  “Yes. It is dangerous, but I need the space to write. I assure you I’m not an Austrian spy, by the way.”