The Sin Collector (Masha Karavai Detective Series)

by Daria Desombre

  “Anyone home?”

  But all the house offered up in response was complete silence and impenetrable darkness.

  He felt for a light switch. With a soft click, an enormous chandelier lit up, completely out of step with the rundown village.

  Andrey whistled. Nothing inside this place matched Tochinovka. The chandelier, all bright-orange Murano glass, hung high above him, and it took a moment for Andrey to realize there was no second floor. His eyes took in a surprisingly large space, bounded only by wooden beams painted a dark chocolate hue.

  The room was square, with a noble-looking oak parquet floor near the entryway and a sprawling Turkish rug farther in. Arranged on the rug were a white leather sofa, a pair of futuristic-looking armchairs, and a narrow coffee table. Deeper inside, the light flashed off a kitchen outfitted in chrome, the kind you see in glossy magazines. Heavy velvet curtains covered the windows.

  Andrey made himself look outside. Sure enough, Tochinovka was still out there, poor and gray. Surreal, he thought, shaking his head as he explored. First a bedroom, white and minimalist, with a massive closet full of expensive clothing—Italian jeans and English suits. Then a guest bedroom in the same style. Plus a big bathroom, with an elegant shower made of a porous beige stone, and a modern flush toilet. Andrey turned the shower tap mistrustfully. The water responded immediately—hot with amazingly high pressure. Yelnik had enjoyed all the blessings of civilization, not in some ritzy suburb, but right here in run-down Tochinovka. Was he trying to hide among the drunk old men and half-blind old women? If the former killer wasn’t killing anymore, he must have been making money—and judging from this house, more than a little of it—some other way. Not by growing potatoes, that was for sure.

  Back in the living room, Andrey looked at the fireplace with envy. It was sleek, modern, and set a couple of feet off the floor. Yelnik the hitman had taste. Maybe he’d hired a designer, a good one. How would he have described the job? Make me a palace inside a wretched little shack? But why? And if there were a designer and Andrey could find him, would he have any idea where his nutso client’s money came from?

  Andrey walked outside, sat on the porch, and lit a cigarette. He was completely confused. Getting ready to come here, he had been nearly convinced that Yelnik, tied up as he was in the murder business, had been caught on the wrong side of some old deal. But this house stank of new money, new trends, if you could put it like that.

  The phone in his jacket pocket chirped. A text. Yelnik’s cellmate was Zitman. Goes by the Doctor. Trusty Arkhip! The Doctor, covert soldiers, new business, murder by drowning, half a year in a freezer, and a body without its guts, finally tossed back in the Moskva River—

  “Hello!”

  Andrey jerked his head up.

  A short man with Down syndrome, maybe twenty years old, stood in front of him. The man grinned shyly, his small eyes trusting and kind.

  “Hi,” said Andrey.

  “Are you the new owner?” The man had started sidling over to the porch.

  “No,” Andrey answered honestly, shifting over to make room.

  “I’m Andreyka,” his new friend said. “Got a smoke?”

  “Sure, buddy. That’s my name, too.” Andrey handed him his pack of cigarettes.

  Andreyka took a few and tucked them behind one ear. They sat there smoking quietly for a couple of minutes.

  “Igor’s not coming back,” Andreyka said suddenly, in a funny, high voice like an old woman. “No, not coming back!”

  “Why do you say that?” Andrey asked, unnerved by this verbal contortionism.

  “He went away! His friend came for him. He’s a nice man. In a blue car.”

  “Oh yeah?” Andrey felt his body tense, as if getting ready to pounce. “What kind of car?”

  “A blue one.” Andreyka looked at Andrey like he must be stupid. “He said, ‘Go on, Andreyka, I don’t need your help anymore.’ ’Cause I shoveled his snow in the winter. He said, ‘My friend is here, he’s an important man, I owe him my life. It’s time to pay my debts.’”

  “What did that man look like?”

  “A man. You know. Important.”

  “What about his eyes, or his hair? Do you remember?”

  “Dark. And he had a black coat. And a blue car.”

  Andrey could tell that was all he was going to get. He knocked at a few little houses, but none of the old women had seen a dark-eyed stranger, and they didn’t remember any blue cars. Andrey circled the house and garden again, this time under the friendly blinking gaze of the other Andrey. Then he headed home, planning to send a few forensic techs out to search Yelnik’s place. But he strongly suspected he’d already found out all they could about the man in the car, Yelnik’s mysterious savior.

  They wouldn’t find anything more interesting, or more substantive, than that.

  INNOKENTY

  Innokenty sat looking idly at Masha’s map and the series of crosses she had marked. Thank God Masha was tactful enough not to tell him all the details, over lunch, of what had happened at each of those places. As it was, his appetite hadn’t suffered, but his curiosity—the most treacherous of sins, and the driving force of any historian—had definitely been aroused. Innokenty remembered seeing a map with crosses like these once before. Given the sort of things he worked on, the map must have been an old one. Sixteenth or seventeenth century, probably.

  He dutifully reached for an atlas. Where was it? Ah, there it was. Innokenty looked thoughtfully at the book’s cover. For him, old maps, just like old sepia photos—and the Dutch masters, really—held an extraordinary charm. The tiny horses racing far off in the background in a Bruegel, a slice of a street scene in a De Hooch, the costumes and facial expressions of a merchant family on a late-nineteenth-century postcard, and the Streletsky Settlement gardens here on the page he turned to first—they all had a particular quality in common, which was that their greatness was in the details.

  And these details were powerful enough to make them real. If you followed those details, like Ariadne’s string, through the dark labyrinth of time, they might lead you to a different reality. Wasn’t that, in the end, why Innokenty had become a historian? Because it was a way of dipping into other worlds? Of distancing himself from this one, the world where fate had dropped him? He couldn’t resist running his eyes over the commentary accompanying Herberstein’s map of Moscow one more time. Full of small mistakes, it reflected an outsider’s view. Innokenty smiled ironically. Who were modern Muscovites, if not outsiders observing the sixteenth-century city? They didn’t even know that Moscow, which now ranked somewhere between Delhi and Seoul worldwide, used to be the fourth biggest city in Europe, after Constantinople, Paris, and Lisbon.

  And where was that Constantinople? Kenty wondered abstractedly. Where was that Lisbon, all weighed down by New World gold? Where was old Paris, robbed by revolutions? In the Middle Ages, it took a man on horseback three full hours to ride all the way around the walled fortress here—the same amount of time his modern-day descendent spends in traffic every day.

  Innokenty licked his lips over the text he already knew almost by heart. Cathedrals in the city are sometimes constructed of brick, though most are wooden, and all the houses are made of wood. None are permitted to build from stone or rock save certain members of the nobility, and the most successful merchants may build vaults on their property, small and narrow, where they secret away their most valuable possessions in times of fire. The English and the Dutch, and the Hanseatic merchants, primarily store their wares here, selling fabrics, silks, and perfumes . . .

  He smiled again when he read the next sentence. The local merchants are quite adept and inclined to make deals, and while they are extremely untrustworthy, they are markedly more pleasant and civilized than other residents of this land.

  MASHA

  Masha sat in the hallway outside the prosecutor’s office and waited obediently. Anna Yevgenyevna, a formidable woman who had been the lead investigator on the Bagrat Gebela
i case, was giving someone a thorough hiding over the phone. Finally she let Masha into her office, and offered her a narrow chair upholstered in fake leather on the other side of her massive desk.

  The desk was neat and clean, something that could not be said of Anna Yevgenyevna: her black sweater, stretched over her massive bosom, was littered with what must have been cat hair; her own hair, hastily swept back into a bun, was badly dyed and coming loose; and the manicure on the almond-shaped nails of her unexpectedly elegant fingers was flaking.

  “So. Gebelai?” she said, tapping her nails on the surface of her desk. Then she shoved back, rolled her chair over to a cabinet, and skillfully pulled out the file she needed before scooting back to the desk. She opened the file, glanced at the papers there, and then turned her gaze back to Masha. “And why are you so interested, Miss Intern?”

  Masha decided to tell her half the truth: she was writing a thesis on strange deaths passed off as accidents—

  “Right,” Anna Yevgenyevna grunted, then reached for a cigarette and took a drag. “It was a strange death, I’ll give you that. Gebelai was an architect, a builder. He drew up the plans for some new metro stations, the kind with canopies. One day two years ago, it was pouring rain at rush hour, and people were huddled under one of those canopies to stay dry, a huge crowd, and the canopy collapsed. Hundreds of people died.” The detective sighed and tapped the ash off her cigarette, half into an ashtray, half onto her sweater. “It was a terrible thing. Women, children. You probably remember.”

  Masha nodded silently.

  “Gebelai and his subcontractors were found liable. The metro stations were falling over due to structural errors in the plans. They used the wrong materials, they calculated the loads wrong. But then there was a presidential pardon and Gebelai got out of jail. So. A couple of months later they found him dead in an apartment on Lenivka, all covered in dirt, black under his nails, too, naked, skin and bones . . . The doctors said his heart gave out due to some sort of major physical exertion. But what kind of extreme exertion makes any sense? The man was a decorated architect; he used to win medals. They found one of them pinned right to his skin, in fact.”

  Anna Yevgenyevna handed Masha two photos. One view, a little from above, was of an apartment that was striking for its ostentatious luxury. The other was a picture of Bagrat Gebelai himself, curled up in fetal position on the floor, a medal stuck into the dark thatch of hair on his chest.

  “What is that?” asked Masha.

  “That’s an Akhdzapsh medal, third degree,” the senior investigator answered wearily. “They give it to citizens of the Republic of Abkhazia for service to science, culture, and art. Our hero got his a few years before the station collapsed.”

  “But this wasn’t his only award, was it?”

  “No, he had plenty. Medals for honorable service in this and that, Honored Architect of the Russian Federation, Distinguished Artist, and so on. He built a bunch of churches in new neighborhoods, for one thing. So far those are still standing, thank God.”

  Masha lifted the photograph to get a closer look. The medal was shaped like a circle, with rays radiating out from it. Masha asked if she could make copies of several of the photographs from the file, and Anna Yevgenyevna graciously agreed.

  Masha smiled and stood up. “Thank you very much for your time.”

  “Of course, of course, go write that paper, grind it out, let me know if you think of any questions.” The detective stood up noisily at her desk and walked off farther into her office. She switched on an electric tea kettle as Masha left.

  On her way out, Masha thought unhappily that the well-meaning investigator hadn’t actually shed much light on the case. Just that medal. There hadn’t been anything about it in the case file. Masha imagined the sharp tip of the pin poking through the blue-tinged skin. Her stomach turned.

  I should be exercising more, Masha decided, shaking her head to chase away the horrifying image. I’ll make Mama happy and go to the gym.

  Natasha had bought her a gym membership six months ago, in an attempt to get her to stand up a little straighter, get some muscle tone, and forget about serial killers once and for all. She was willing to give it a shot. After that story of architectural negligence in the metro, though, she was done with public transportation for the day. She’d go home to get the car first.

  Masha hated working out, and she trudged into the ritzy health club on Novoslobodsky like other people dragged themselves into the dentist’s office. She’d been going nowhere on a treadmill, to a soundtrack of cloying pop music, for at least half an hour, when suddenly her rhythm faltered. Masha stumbled, then jabbed at the red button. Stop! The medal! There was something about that damn medal! Masha grabbed her towel and ran to the locker room. Still panting, she opened her locker, took out the file full of documents, and plopped down on the wooden bench.

  A bead of sweat dropped onto the picture in her hands of the medal, close up, on Gebelai’s hairy chest. Masha swallowed hard and lifted her head. Other young women were going about their business all around her, some in swimsuits, some in track suits, some wrapped in towels, rosy-cheeked and relaxed after their showers. Masha, sitting there with a murder file on her lap and staring fixedly straight ahead, was an unusual sight for these gym rats, and probably a disturbing one.

  “The medal,” Masha whispered. She counted the rays on it. “One, two, three, four, five. Five.” She repeated the last number quietly, while around her women passed each other lotion, curled their eyelashes, fussed with hair dryers. No, it doesn’t make sense! Masha thought, but she couldn’t stop now. She shuffled through the file and found the business card with Anna Yevgenyevna’s number.

  “Yes?” came the low voice of the lady detective.

  “Hello. It’s me again, Masha Karavay.”

  “Ah, the intern. Hi there.” The woman’s tired voice slipped down another full octave. Masha could hear her working on another cigarette. “Did you come up with some questions, then?”

  “Yes,” said Masha, embarrassed. “You know, I was looking at these photos, and it seems to me that there used to be more little rays on that medal. It’s probably not important,” she rushed to add, suddenly ashamed to have bothered the detective.

  “Good work, Miss Intern.” Masha felt, rather than heard, Yevgenyevna blowing out smoke happily. “Being meticulous like that is crucial in this cruddy profession of ours. There should have been eight of them.”

  “But there were five,” said Masha. “Could they have broken off, just like that?”

  “Just like that!” snorted the detective. “Nothing happens just like that. They were sawn off, honey, and that’s all there is to it. But why? What for? No idea. And I wracked my brains over that for a long time.”

  “Thank you,” Masha said slowly. She said good-bye and hung up.

  “Five,” she repeated to herself, worrying that she might be going crazy. Did everything actually fit into this bloody puzzle, or was her subconscious just serving up pieces that matched the pattern? A pattern that began with the numbers one, two, and three on the shirts of the unfortunate people at the Bersenevskaya waterfront and then led to a distinguished architect in a luxury apartment on Lenivka Street? Masha jumped when the phone rang again. It was Innokenty.

  “Masha!” he said. “I think I have something for you, but I’m not sure. There’s somebody I want you to meet. Today, if possible.” And he gave her an address.

  It was getting dark by the time Masha picked up Innokenty at the park outside the hospital. The security guards made her wait at the front gate while they called the front desk. Then they drove slowly down a narrow road lined with old maple trees. The noise of the city gradually died away, and when Innokenty gallantly helped Masha out of the car, she heard birds singing their evening song, and it felt like they’d left the city altogether. They climbed the gently sloping stairs to a Palladian-style front porch with its semicircle of white columns, and Innokenty pushed open the heavy door, polished smooth
by thousands of visitors’ hands. Masha read the sign: “Pavlov Psychiatric Clinic.”

  Inside they came first to a much more modern-looking door of thick glass. The woman at the desk saw them and nodded, and the door buzzed open.

  “Good evening,” said Innokenty. “We’re here to see Professor Gluzman.”

  Masha had assumed Gluzman was one of the doctors here, but the nurse’s gentle smile and the way she said the professor was feeling well and could receive them today made her wonder.

  “What does that mean, feeling well?” Masha whispered as they followed a carpeted corridor deep into the hospital.

  “Ilya Gluzman was my favorite professor in college,” Kenty replied, giving Masha’s suddenly clammy hand a squeeze. “I must have told you about him. He’s an expert in Russian medieval history. Don’t let the hospital scare you. Dr. Gluzman is in good shape right now. He’s writing books, and he just got back from an international lecture tour.”

  Masha still felt uneasy. No sound came from behind the doors along both sides of the hall. All she could hear was soft, almost inaudible, classical music, apparently meant to calm the nerves. Whose nerves? she wondered. Was the music for the guests, the patients, or the staff? Meanwhile, the nurse had stopped before one of the identical doors and knocked quietly. The door opened and another nurse appeared, so similar to the first that they might have been twins. She had the same warm smile and pleasant face.

  “So it is Inno-centi himself!” came a rumbling voice from inside the room. The nurse nodded and stepped aside. The sixty-year-old man who greeted them had a gentle face covered with fashionable graying stubble, and a similar bristle covered his egg-shaped head. He was dressed more like an Oxford don than a mental patient, in a dark-green jacket with leather elbow patches, a wool turtleneck sweater, and corduroy trousers. He rolled his motorized wheelchair closer and shook Innokenty’s hand. Then he grinned slyly at Masha.