A Whisper to the Living ir-16

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Iosef, shirtless, wore a pair of gray sweatpants that he had cut off at the knees.

  “We are too old for the nonsense,” she added.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Two days of eating and drinking and warding off drunken people I don’t know.”

  “I agree. So do my mother and father.”

  “And then,” Elena went on, “the ridiculous ritual of my being kidnapped and you having to get past guards to rescue me and find a way out of this apartment. Why can we not just go to our appointment at the marriage office, sign our papers, and have a small party at your parents’ apartment?”

  “I agree with you completely,” he said. “That is what will happen. It will be as you wish. My mother and father and the guests know that.”

  “The point of the wedding is to make us happy, not to make us miserable. And the cost of food and drink. .”

  “Do you hear me doing anything but agree with you?” he asked, reaching over to touch her shoulder and move his hand down to her smooth stomach.

  “No,” she said, moving his hand and turning away.

  “I propose we make love one more time and then get up to greet the sun. I will make breakfast.”

  “I accept that proposal,” she said, turning back to face him as she considered whether it was the right time to tell him.

  Iris Templeton entered the darkened tobacco shop not far from the Kremlin. Daniel Volkovich had opened the door with one of several jangling keys taken from his pocket. He had held it open so she could enter in front of him and have to touch him as she moved.

  “You are not afraid,” he said as he closed and locked the door.

  “Should I be?” Iris asked, turning to him.

  There was a single low-wattage lamp on the counter of the shop.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “You do understand why I could not bring you here with your police escort?”

  “Yes.”

  They had paused in the middle of the shop. Iris smelled an almost dizzying array of tobaccos. She had ceased smoking fourteen years ago while her father was dying from what he called “the last whacks of the Marlboro coffin nails.”

  “Good,” Daniel said, and moved to a door at the rear of the small shop.

  The door wasn’t locked. She followed him through it and into another room not much larger than a closet. Still another door, but when this one opened there was a flow, not a rush, of light and the light was a golden haze. Inside the room, eight girls stood or sat talking and smoking. When the door opened, they looked at Daniel and Iris and stopped talking. It was not the first time Daniel had brought a female client. All the girls welcomed female clients. The risks of disease were diminished, and extra money could be earned from voyeurs at peepholes or watching on television monitors. One wealthy customer had a video hookup to all three rooms in the back. The girls knew that the price of such a selection in one’s own home was enormous.

  None of the girls were scantily clad. Most wore skirts and blouses or sweaters that accented their breasts. Others had the lean, slick, boyish look of models.

  “You may talk to whichever one of the girls you wish,” Daniel said. “But I suggest Svetlana. She is the best educated and probably the smartest.”

  He was looking at one of the svelte boyish girls. Svetlana paused in talking to another girl and looked at Iris openly with a smile.

  Daniel motioned for Svetlana to come closer. When she did, her brown eyes were wide and fixed on Iris.

  “Miss Templeton is not a client,” he said. “She is a reporter from England. You will answer her questions and Miss Templeton will compensate you for your time.”

  Svetlana nodded.

  “Room Two,” he said.

  As Svetlana led her through yet another door, Iris looked back at Daniel, who met her gaze and grinned, a dinosauric grin that Iris definitely did not like. She followed the prostitute to a dark hallway and into an unmarked room. The room had a bed, a comfortable chair, a hat rack, and a small painting of an early-nineteenth-century Russian village street on the wall. The yellowish light in the painting was the same as that in the room from which they had come.

  “You’re sure you don’t. .?” the girl asked, touching her red lips.

  “Certain,” Iris said. “No offense.”

  The girl looked puzzled.

  “It means ‘please do not be offended.’ ”

  “Your Russian is quite good. I wish I could speak English that well. I am learning.”

  She motioned to the chair. Iris sat. The girl moved to the bed and sat facing her.

  Iris looked around the room.

  “Yes,” said the girl. “We are being watched and listened to. What do you want to know?”

  Iris took out a small pad of paper and a click pen.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Are you ever seen by a doctor?”

  “We are all seen every two weeks by a doctor to inspect us for AIDS and other diseases. We urge our clients to wear condoms, and they almost always do if we put it to them correctly. You know, we say, ‘I’m much more stimulated by a man with a condom,’ or some nonsense like that.”

  “Why are you a prostitute?”

  “Money. I am from a very small town where there are few jobs and those that exist pay little and usually require that a girl please a boss or a foreman. I can make in one month here what it would take me a year to make in my town.”

  “Do you plan to stop being a prostitute someday?”

  The girl shrugged.

  “I do not know. I may save enough in three years to go to school here in Moscow and become a hotel manager or a pastry chef.”

  “Do you have any goals while you continue to work as a prostitute?”

  “To move up.”

  The girl lifted her hand gracefully with palm down and wrist bent, reminding Iris of a swan. She made a note of the movement.

  “Up?”

  “We are above the lowest level, the girls who line up in tunnels, maybe twenty of them, in rain, cold, standing all night, hoping to catch the eye of a customer brought by one of the men whose job it is to bring them.”

  “And where. .?” Iris began.

  “Do they take the customers? To reserved rooms in nearby hotels.”

  “So what is ‘up’ for you?”

  “To be one of the women with their own hotel room or one who goes to hotel rooms of visiting businessmen from all over the world. We get double what the tunnel girls get, but the hotel room girls get more than double what we get.”

  “How would you get to be a hotel girl?”

  “By being selected for looks and a certain sophistication and acting ability. Much of what we do is acting.”

  “I would guess that you have a very good chance at going up. Who do you work for?”

  “Daniel.”

  “No, I mean who else? What is this operation called? Who runs it?”

  “That I do not know,” said the girl with an apologetic smile.

  “You are acting now?”

  “Perhaps. I do not know anyone involved but Daniel and the other girls. I do not wish to know. If you talk to any of the other girls, you will get less from them than you have gotten from me.”

  “Do you have regular customers?”

  “A few.”

  “Do you know their names?”

  “Only first names. Never last names. Just Sergei, Boris, Igor, never a Pavel Petrov or-”

  “Pavel Petrov?” Iris jumped in.

  “Random example of the anonymous names of my clients,” Svetlana said, nervously glancing up at an air vent on the wall.

  “I see,” said Iris, displaying nothing and not writing the name in her notebook.

  Pavel Petrov, unless this was a different Pavel Petrov, was a deputy director of Gasprom. Government-owned Gasprom was the largest provider of natural gas in the world, and possibly the largest corporation in the world. It was the economic razor that could be and had been h
eld to the neck of Ukraine and Western Europe, and Pavel Petrov was one of Gasprom’s principal spokesmen, a family man with a loving wife and three beautiful children. Iris knew this because she had interviewed Pavel Petrov the last time she had come to Russia for a story.

  The dropping of Petrov’s name was news on which Iris Templeton might be able to hang a scandal.

  She wanted to place the name into the conversation, though she really had no more questions.

  “Are you fed well?”

  “We are not prisoners,” Svetlana said. “We go out. We pay for our own food.”

  “You have friends among the other girls?”

  “Not really. It does not pay. They move up or down or out quickly. It does not pay to have friends.”

  The door opened and Daniel Volkovich came in smiling.

  “Time is up,” he said. “You have one last question?”

  “No,” said Iris, rising but keeping her eyes on Svetlana, who was looking at Daniel with apprehension.

  “Then we will thank our little Svetlana,” he said. “And perhaps reward her for her valuable time.”

  “How much of a reward?” Iris asked.

  “I would say two hundred euros would be sufficient. You agree, Svetlana?”

  The girl said, “Yes,” and tried to hide the quiver in her voice.

  “If you don’t have-” Daniel began.

  “I have it,” Iris said, opening her purse, putting the notebook inside, and removing her wallet.

  When she finished handing the girl the money, Iris followed Daniel Volkovich toward the door. Daniel paused in the corridor just outside Svetlana’s room.

  “So,” he said. “You have what you need?”

  “I have what you want me to have,” she said.

  “I do not understand.”

  “Svetlana’s a fine actress,” Iris said, facing him.

  “Yes, but I do not understand.”

  “Pavel Petrov,” she said.

  His grin turned into a nervous laugh.

  “How did you know?”

  “She’s too smart to make a mistake like dropping the name of a powerful client. You want me to have Pavel Petrov’s name. Why?”

  The man looked at the painting on the wall for about fifteen seconds and then made a decision and spoke after a sigh.

  “You will write your story and expose Petrov. I will be left out of your story and emerge as the logical choice as his successor.”

  “We use each other,” she said.

  “Precisely, and if you want to seal the enterprise in Room Four just down the hall I will be happy to help you do so.”

  “A tempting offer,” she said, “but I don’t want to be on tape and get blackmailed as we are trying to do to Pavel Petrov.”

  “As you please,” he said, opening the door to where the other prostitutes in the glow of a lamp were looking toward Iris. “I’ll take you to your hotel.”

  “Thank you,” she said as he went from the yellow room filled with the smell of women and perfume through a door into darkness and the pungent smell of tobacco.

  On the drive to her hotel, Daniel did all of the talking. She absorbed little of it. There had been times in her career when she had been awake for three days and there had been others when she had grown tired and in need of sleep after a few hours. She had anticipated a three-day buzz. It had turned into an eight-hour day that rested heavy within her. But still, she had something she wanted to do.

  “Do you still want to pretend to be a prostitute?” he asked as he pulled into the small driveway in front of the Zaray Hotel.

  “No,” she said, reaching for the door handle.

  As pretty as her face was and well tended as her body was, she was no match for any of the girls in that yellow room. The only men who would select her instead of one of them would be either blind or in search of something Iris did not want to consider.

  “Would you like company for a while?” he said.

  “You are persistent,” she said.

  “And charming?”

  “Not really.”

  His grin almost faded, but he held fast to his image.

  “Good night,” he said.

  “Good night,” Iris replied, standing at the open door.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I’ll see,” she said.

  “You would like Pavel Petrov’s phone number?”

  “I have it,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Be careful,” he said.

  She closed the car door and he drove away. In the lobby sat Sasha Tkach. Iris smiled. She had been about to call him on her cell phone.

  “Do not come on the desk,” Emil Karpo commanded gently.

  As soon as he said it, he realized that he had just spoken to a cat and had some expectation that the animal would understand. Karpo had never addressed an animal before, not that he remembered, and his memory was nearly perfect. He had no pet as a child and none as an adult. He neither liked nor disliked dogs, cats, and domesticated birds. They were simply there.

  The black cat had wandered in through the open window of his one-room apartment on a warm night four months earlier. She, for it was definitely female, had reappeared every week or so for a month and then once every nine or ten days and now almost nightly. In spite of a slightly lame right front leg, the black cat somehow made her way over roofs and down a treacherously steep slate roof to the open window.

  She never made a sound. She simply wandered around the room and came to a halt next to the chair Karpo sat in at his desk. The cat remained there silently, curled up, sometimes looking up at him, sometimes appearing to be asleep. If he approached the cat, her large green eyes would open wide and she would then say something that sounded like nyet. She would also lift her lame leg and paw as if offering it to be shaken.

  There were few places for a cat to go in the room. A bed stood in one corner near the open window. A dresser of unknown antiquity rested against the wall that held the door to the hallway. A wood and wicker wardrobe stood next to the dresser, and on the floor there stood a two-foot-high refrigerator. In the dresser were three pair of slacks, all black, two dress jackets, also black, two pair of black shoes, three white and two black long-sleeve pullover shirts, and a black zipper jacket.

  His clothes, Karpo thought, were as black as the cat that had entered through the window.

  The desk upon which Karpo did not want the cat to tread was one he had built himself. Its two-foot-wide polished wooden top extended from wall to wall, and behind the desk where he could reach over and remove a book was a four-tiered shelf filled with neatly arranged pages. Karpo had notes on every investigation he had been a part of, and each night after finishing whatever work he had for that day he took down his notes and revisited unresolved cases, some fifteen years old. The only things directly on the desk were a computer, a paperweight, a can filled with pens and pencils, and a pile of lined paper, some blank, some with the detective’s current notes.

  The pencils in black, red, and blue were always freshly sharpened; the paperweight was a half sphere in which there was imbedded a deep red beetle.

  “Are you hungry?” Karpo asked the cat, telling himself he was not talking to the cat but to himself.

  Karpo rose and moved to the refrigerator.

  Karpo had stopped on his way home, telling himself he was purchasing the three cans of sardines in water for a lunch meal.

  Emil Karpo took out a can, opened it, and tapped the sardines out onto a white saucer with a soft tap-tap. Then he moved back to his desk and pressed the button that brought the computer back to life. When the machine was purring, not unlike the cat, he punched in his access code and watched the screen fill with folders.

  He worked till the clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen told him it was two in the morning. He was no more tired than he had been when he first sat down, but he put his notebooks back on the shelves and turned off the computer.

  When he turned, the cat was curled atop his dresse
r asleep. Karpo took his toothbrush, tooth powder, and plastic container with his soap inside, plus a towel, opened his door, and closed it tightly behind him, after which he plucked a single hair from his head and placed it against a small invisible gummy dot on the door. If someone was to enter the room, the movement of the hair would betray them. It was a ritual Karpo followed whenever he left the room for whatever reason.

  He walked with even paces to the washroom at the end of the corridor. There was no one inside. He washed, brushed his teeth, and shaved.

  When he returned to his room, the cat was still sleeping on the dresser. Karpo stripped and put on a solid black T-shirt and boxer shorts. In the morning, when he rose, he would take a shower and shave again. He would do this in four hours, before anyone else on the floor was awake except for Adamski, who worked in the fish market. When Adamski had moved into the building almost eight years ago, he had run into the detective in the washroom well before the sun rose. Adamski had gone back to his room. He had never made the same mistake again.

  A breeze kicked the shade. Karpo lifted the shade. He would be up while darkness still reigned. Karpo turned off the light next to his bed and lay atop the neatly tucked-in blanket.

  Seconds after he lay down with his eyes open, the insight had come. The Maniac had made a mistake. Most humans would need to rise and make a note of their discovery or run the risk of losing it. Karpo had no such worry. The morning was soon enough to check his finding and to tell Rostnikov.

  “Spakoynay nochi, good night,” he said aloud, realizing less than a second later that he had actually spoken to the cat.

  The cat did not reply. Seconds later Emil Karpo was asleep.

  “It is almost midnight,” Ivan Medivkin said when Vera Korstov entered her apartment.

  “Yes,” she said, placing her red mesh grocery bag on the table. “I have been talking to people, searching for whoever killed your wife and Fedot Babinski.”

  She took off her coat, hung it on the hook on the wall between the kitchen area and the front door. She had been gone for eleven hours, yet to Ivan she looked as if she had just arisen. He knew the look, the flow of adrenaline when he met people in the ring who thought they could get past the giant’s paws. Surely the huge man must be slow, easy to hit. Surely they were wrong and paid for it, as they would with Vera.