by James L. May
“Bogomolov,” I said. “Anatoly Bogomolov.”
Petrovich looked unsatisfied, but he shuffled back towards Antonov’s corpse. At its side he bent slowly down on one knee, leaning heavily on his cane and clicking his tongue. “So. Livor mortis present in the hands and face.” He brushed a piece of hair back over Antonov’s ear, breaking ice from it in the process. “He was like this when they pulled him out? Stiff like this? Good.” He muttered, half to the Chekist, half to himself. “A submerged body floats curled up like so, head downward—same as a baby in Mama’s belly, so they tell me. You always find lividity in the hands and face. Cold water keeps the blood pink, you see? Otherwise he’d look bruised.”
He shoved at Antonov’s shoulder for a moment, then got his other hand underneath the knee, but the body’s position gave him trouble. He let it go. “I need him on his back.”
“Help him, Bogomolov,” said the Chekist.
“Me?” I asked. The prospect of touching the corpse worsened the ache in my sternum where he’d hit me. My lungs fluttered.
“Yes.” He’d wedged the stub of his cigarette between two fingers, and without appearing to be actively smoking it, he was holding it up to his lips. The hand in front of his mouth hid his expression.
I looked at Antonov. With the legs bent and stiff as they were, he would not be easy to lay flat.
“Go on,” said the Chekist. “Turn him.”
Antonov’s ankles felt strange through my gloves, but I could at least tell his knees were locked. Holding him that way, it didn’t take much effort to swing the body over onto its back and hold it steady. Some of the hair frozen to the dock ripped with a dry sound.
The grating noise in the old man’s throat was a chuckle. “You look like you are deciding whether to buy a pair of boots from the rack.”
Antonov’s ankles were delicate, but with great bone lumps in them. He had always seemed like a collection of knobs held together by wire. I tried to think of anything he had ever said to me, and couldn’t. Death made him something basic as a line.
“It’s a lever of the second class,” I said.
Petrovich barked—that was his laugh, as I would learn—and looked up at me again. “What was that?”
Those blue eyes. This time I did look away, only to find myself staring into Antonov’s face. Along with turning pink, it had grown bloated, sponge-like, with the eyes flat and dull beneath their half-drawn lids. “I’m sorry. It was nothing.”
“Nonsense,” said Petrovich. “A lever, you said.”
The Chekist’s expression was readable now. He looked pained, I thought, suffering from the ludicrous turn things had taken. I said hurriedly: “It was a pointless remark. I only meant I get leverage by holding the feet this way. Turning him on his back makes the ground a fulcrum. Since his center of gravity stays close to the ground while the feet go in the air … It doesn’t matter.”
Petrovich shook his head, still amused. “Suppose it doesn’t. Now then.”
He pushed at the legs, then pulled on an arm. He tried to turn the head on the neck. “Rigor mortis is pretty well advanced. He would have died at least five or six hours before they fished him out of the water.”
The old man pried open Antonov’s mouth with two gloved fingers and looked in. While I continued to hold the ankles, he got down painfully onto both knees and pumped Antonov’s chest—once, twice, three times—and after that opened the mouth again, still not removing his gloves. This time he nodded slowly.
“You’re wrong,” he said to the Chekist. “He didn’t drown.”
“You’re sure?”
“No foaming at the mouth. A man inhales fluid, his lungs force it out again when they collapse, even if he’s long gone. With the air and slime in him, it comes out a mess of white bubbles.”
“Dead before he went in the water, then,” mused the Chekist.
“So I conclude.”
“What killed him?”
Petrovich bristled his mustache. “Not drowning. I’m not done examining.”
While we watched, he ran his hands over Antonov’s chest, then lifted up the collar of his sweater to peer beneath it. Evidently not finding what he was looking for, he pulled the sweater up, revealing the pale belly and breast. He ran his fingers over a streak of pink, the same color as Antonov’s face and hands, that ran laterally along the dead man’s ribs.
Every time he nudged the body, I felt the vibration through Antonov’s legs.
“No obvious wounds,” he muttered. “Use that leverage of yours to lay him on his side, Bogomolov. No, the other way, with his back to me.”
Petrovich removed his gloves now and ran his fingers through Antonov’s icy hair, pressing it apart and spreading it out while he looked closely at the back of the neck. “There. That bruising, you see?” he said. “Spinal cord enters his brain just there. Skull and vertebrae crushed with minimal fuss. Very economical use of blunt trauma, done by someone who knew the best way to crack heads. Afterward they let him lie somewhere for an hour or two. Face down, I think. Long enough for the blood to start pooling there at the side of the chest.”
The Chekist was quiet. “He was certainly killed, then?” he said finally. “No chance of an accident?”
“Put whatever you like in your file,” said Petrovich. “I won’t argue.”
“That’s not why I brought you here.”
Petrovich planted his cane on the snowy stone and began pushing himself up. When he’d finally struggled to his feet, he took a moment to catch his breath. “In that case, it’s no accident,” he said. “It’s murder.”
Razdolski chose that moment to clear his throat and spit, then lapsed back into his natural silence. For a long time, no one said anything. The Chekist had taken off his cap and was tapping it against his thigh again, looking out at the water. I began to feel hopeful I’d be allowed to return to the platoon in time for our meal.
“You want to find out who did this,” said Petrovich at last.
“Yes,” said the Chekist.
“You’ll need someone who knows how to do real detective work, then.”
The Chekist’s lip twitched. “You might be surprised, Yakov Petrovich, how effective our techniques can be.”
Petrovich shrugged. “Your way is good when you already know what you’re after. When you’re nosing after clues, not so much.”
“Why offer me this?”
“I get bored sitting behind a desk with those eggheads at KrimKab. And I wouldn’t mind being owed a favor.” He smoothed his mustache. “Besides, Gennady Mikhailovich was my cellmate. I liked him.”
“I would have to write you an authorization under my stamp. A free-movement permit as well.”
“Little enough to ask for, isn’t it, if I’m doing your job for you?” The old man straightened his back and grimaced. “I’d need a helper. There are things I can’t do anymore.”
The Chekist’s eyes narrowed. “Who do you have in mind?”
“What about Bogomolov here? He held Antonov’s boots admirably just now. Seems to have a brain in his head.”
“Out of the question,” said the Chekist quickly.
“Wasn’t me that brought him,” said Petrovich. “Now that you have, he might as well make himself useful. What do you think, Bogomolov?”
The idea was baffling. Two hours before, the Chekist had been treating me like a suspect.
I stammered. “What would I—? That is to say, I doubt I could be useful. I really know nothing about—about any of this.”
“You don’t need to know anything. Someone needs to help me move around. Maybe lift the odd rock so I can look under. And if you know more than you realize, so much the better. I’ll get it out of you.”
The Chekist started to say something, then stopped. He looked at me, then at the old man. “There are matters you might be able to help with,
Yakov Petrovich. We’ll need to discuss it. For now, come with me. You too, Bogomolov. Razdolski, stay with the body.”
The ear-like shape Antonov had made when we arrived had been unsettled: the hair deranged, the limbs disturbed, the face turned away. He looked like nothing but a dead body now. We left him on the quay and walked back in the direction of the kremlin’s stone walls.
3
The face of the detective, his dramatic appearance onto the scene of murder: these are elements of the genre almost as crucial as the body, so critical that they give the detektiv its name. Petrovich, the old man with the mustache and the striking eyes, the strange name—he answers the demand, surely?
It was when I was a boy in Saint Petersburg that I read mystery stories. Obsessively I read them, passionately. For a few kopeks begged from my mother I could get a new one at the newsstand on the corner. The adventures of the famous detectives were sold then in installments. Nick Carter, Sherlock Holmes, Nat Pinkerton. My school friends and I traded the back issues between us as well. There was always another detektiv to read, and if the quality varied wildly, at that time my taste was not particularly discriminating.
Father was driven crazy by the lurid covers, with their revolvers and Chinamen in bright colors. “Trash!” he would cry, seizing them from me. “Rot!” The weekly magazine we took was Niva, that bastion of the middlebrow and virtuous, and he was convinced I could find all I needed of reading material in the children’s supplement (for which we paid a ruble per year in addition to the normal subscription price). But the incidence of millionaires killed by poisonous snakes in those pages was too low for me. I acquired new mysteries as fast as Father could throw them away.
Knowing what was to come—that was part of the appeal. The best editions came with a red band along the top of the cover, with a sort of medallion embedded in it showing the face of the detective. If you saw Sherlock Holmes’s pipe and long nose, you knew the story would be cerebral, a head-scratcher. Nat Pinkerton, King of Detectives, had a lower brow and a squarer jaw. He was American, and his cases always included good doses of fistfighting and gunplay. Naturally we liked him best.
But there was more to knowing-what-was-to-come than knowing what to expect from the heroes. You knew there would be a puzzle—a murder. You knew that it would be solved. In some cases this happened via deduction, in others through chases and conveniently timed confessions, but either way the effect was the same. Crime and its sources would be hidden, then brought to light.
You do know what is to come, don’t you? My story ends, like all mysteries, with the crime solved, the guilty punished. Only the details are to be determined. Maybe all writing is like that now. We have censors and a writer’s union to make sure that the outcome of all stories in the Soviet Union lead to the same approved ends.
At least with mysteries, the outcome has always been determined in advance.
Last night, Vasily-the-tank-commander appeared in my basement with a bottle of vodka and a jar of pickles, as he sometimes condescends to do. He saw I had been writing before I was able to cover the papers on the table.
I explained that I was writing a mystery story, not the memoir he’d wanted. No, I told him, he could not read it.
How satisfying, that disappointed look of his.
The road was icy.
“Give me your arm, will you?” Petrovich said as we negotiated a slippery spot. The hand on my elbow was surprisingly light.
Viewed on a map, or from the vantage point of an angel sitting in the low gray clouds that so often hang over it, Solovetsky’s kremlin is bordered to the west by the bay, and to the east by a body of water the monks called the Holy Lake. In between, its walls define an elongated pentagon, three hundred yards north to south, a hundred east to west. A tower rises at each vertex, with a sixth in the middle of the long western wall. The monks gave these towers names as well, but I find I can barely recall them. Which was White, which Spinning Mill? At the northeast corner, Nikolski Tower shared its name with Nikolski Gate. Of that I’m certain.
Centuries of abbots had filled the body of the pentagon with all the dormitories, chapels, refectories, brewhouses, and basilicas that had seemed needful to them, but from where we walked in the cold shadow of the western wall, all you saw were the towers, a few spires, and the huge stones that made up the sloped walls. The chill wind still blew in from off the bay. As we passed the Holy Gates, with the museum above, I looked up. Up close, you noticed how the portico’s bulbous pillars were splintered, their paint peeling.
At the southwest corner, the road continued on, while the complex angled east, off towards the pentagon’s point. Here the Chekist stopped. “Wait here,” he said to me. “Petrovich, you come.”
A rough wooden structure stood a short distance away, up against the kremlin’s stones. A chimney pipe gave out wisps of smoke. It was with vague envy of the heat they represented that I watched them enter—first the Chekist, then the old man.
The wind pierced my coat. All I could calculate about being singled out the way I had been was that its effect on my food prospects was equivocal at best. In just a few hours I’d gone from standing to be counted with a thousand others to blinking like a stunned horse by the side of the road, alone. This was change, a delta—though in which direction or along what axes was hard to tell.
On the one hand, working with Petrovich could have its rewards. It would at least mean a short reprieve from work in the Quarantine Company—maybe more, if my work impressed the right parties. And I knew the zeks in Ten received a dry ration, two weeks’ worth of food all at once. But could the old man be relied on to share? Exchanging today’s certain lunch for the unreliable yield on his future generosity sounded like a bad deal.
It occurred to me that my friend Foma, at the work site with our platoon, might think to claim my kasha for himself, on the understanding he would pay me back for it in bread later in the evening. It was the kind of thing we did for each other, when we could.
Foma and I had met on the prison-train from Moscow. “Hey, schoolboy,” were his first words to me. He’d recognized my cap, or more likely had it pointed out to him. “I want something to pass the time. Tell us a story, why don’t you?”
I had just woken from one of the cramped periods of dozing that were all that was possible during that ride. It was late afternoon. Somewhere up the tracks, the slow-moving engine that dragged our car could be heard puffing away. Forty-five men, even fifty, were in that car. Foma and I had been packed next to each other on a narrow bunk that ran around its perimeter. These were the first words we’d spoken to each other. We had been traveling for three days.
“What makes you think I know any good stories?”
“The times I was sent to school, they always tried to get us to read out stories from the books.”
I explained that I studied mathematics, not literature, but Foma said that he didn’t mind what kind of story I told, as long as it didn’t have trains in it. As I would learn, Foma was from Ukrainian peasant stock; all academic fields were much the same to him.
All I could think of was “The Animals in the Pit,” a tale I used to read to my sister Dinka, from a big gilt-edged volume called Stories for Children. It was one of her favorites. A fox tricked a hare, a wolf, and a bear, ate them, then ended by being devoured by dogs himself. She always liked the violent ones.
My neighbor on the other side, an old man with a walleye, propped himself up on his elbow to listen. Foma stared at me skeptically throughout the telling. “That’s a story for kids,” he said after I’d finished and he’d thought about it for a minute. “That’s not so good, for someone who’s been to school in the city.”
“Well, all the stories I know for adults have trains in them. Anna Karenina throws herself in front of a train.”
We rode for ten more days before we reached Kem, where the prisoner-transport ferry embarked for Solovetsky. The wall
eyed old man died on the way, and the train guards took him out and dumped him in the woods when we stopped to take on water. At a different stop, when they let us out to empty the piss bucket, I was able to buy three hard-boiled eggs from a farmer by the side of the tracks, using the last of the money from a package my parents had managed to get to me while I was in Kresty. I shared the eggs with Foma—by then we were friends.
“Better for us, probably,” he’d said to me around a mouthful of egg, “not to get split up when we get there. I’ll keep an eye out for you. You can do the same for me.”
We’d done it, so far, as much as we had been able. Claiming my kasha and giving me credit for it in bread—that would be in the spirit of the arrangement. It was possible. As I dwelt on it, it even came to seem likely, though whether it was reasoning or simple hunger that made me think so would have been hard to say.
At last the old man emerged from the wooden building, alone. In his hands he held several loose papers.
“That’s settled, then,” he said, coming over. “You’re going to assist me while I find out who’s killed Gennady Mikhailovich.”
Hardly looking at me, he set off down the path, jabbing with his cane.“But what does it involve?” I said, catching up. “I told you, I don’t know anything about it.”
“You don’t have to know anything about it. Just do as I say.” He lowered his brows. Stray hairs shot off from his mustache in every direction. “You’re a little cold-blooded. You’ll do fine. ‘Lever of the second class.’ Ha!”
His laugh was a bark again, abrupt and harsh. I hadn’t thought I was being cold-blooded. “Is that why you wanted me?”
“Why do you care?” He looked at me shrewdly. An odd look—since what did he have to be shrewd with me about? It shifted the balance of his face back from his mustache to the rheumy blue spike of his eyes. When I didn’t say anything, he shrugged. “Well, it was that, and that Razdolski, whom I’d have gotten otherwise, is a block of wood. Working with stupid people makes me stupid, too. You, at least, look at what’s in front of you. You use your brain in the presence of a dead body. If you can do that, and you don’t have to walk with a cane, we’ll get along.” He thrust the bundle of papers he’d emerged from the cabin with at me. “I do have to walk with a cane. You carry these.”