The Sin Collector (Masha Karavai Detective Series)

by Daria Desombre

  “I’m doing my best,” lamented Tanya. “But will it work? Do you watch TV? They’re talking about polygamy! Those politicians think that if every man has three wives, we’ll start breeding like rabbits. Are you kidding? We’d be nervous wrecks is all. If you want people to have more kids, you need society to tell men not to have affairs, that you’re a shitty man and a shitty father if you cheat on your wife.”

  “Would they stop?”

  “Probably not,” Tanya said, tiredly. “But they might do it less. Nationwide, a good policy like that would make thousands of women decide to get pregnant. You can’t tell right now, but I spent five years making ads at a consulting company. Believe me, if we had every television, every movie screen, every online think piece talking about protecting families, about respecting them no matter what, we’d see results within a year or two. Not to mention five years, or ten! Russian men are lazy. Half of them have mistresses just for the prestige of it, or because they’re used to getting everything they want. And the female body is within their reach. Society says it’s cheap. Nobody’s going to judge you if you satisfy your physical needs. Our society is rotten. Right now, everyone’s writing about that oligarch who dumped his wife for some young girl. But what are they talking about? About what restaurants he takes her to! What kind of yachts and airplanes he gives her! Not one of those bastards ever bothers to write that he ditched his wife and their five children. Five! Sure, he’ll leave them some money. But kids need more than money.”

  Tanya stopped suddenly. “I’m sorry to dump all that on you. You’re young, you probably don’t have kids yet. But the thing is, the most defenseless people are the old folks, children, and the mothers stuck at home with them all day. I really don’t care anymore what my husband is getting up to at eleven o’clock at night. I just want him to take over with these guys once a week, you know? It’s been three months since I’ve had time to go to the beauty salon across the street. It takes forty minutes to get my hair cut. I don’t have forty minutes!”

  Tanya smiled at Masha morosely. “Sorry,” she continued. “You don’t want to hear all this. You came to hear about Julia, right? Actually, it’s connected with what I was just telling you. You said on the phone you wanted to understand what kind of person she was. She was perfectly ordinary. We worked together. I got married early, and then I could focus on my career. But Julia was trying to find herself a husband, so she was on the secretarial track. Looking for Mr. Right is a lot of work, and it goes badly most of the time! I mention that because Julia slept at my place pretty often. She’d show up crying with a bottle of martini mix, and I couldn’t let her go home alone drunk, so I let her sleep on the couch. My husband hated it.

  “She went through some bouts of depression. No energy, something always ached, and she was always running into my office to whine, like a little kid. I actually talked her into taking meds for a while, an antidepressant called Smilify. Isn’t that silly? She made up other names for it. Spoilify. Shittify. So there wasn’t anything wrong with her sense of humor. I don’t know whether the drugs made much difference, though.

  “The problem, basically, is that Julia really wanted to fall in love. Her life was boring. There was nothing keeping her mind busy. So, eventually, she did fall in love. With a married man. It didn’t bother her that he was married with kids. All these jerks have mistresses, so why shouldn’t Julia be one of them? He worked for our company, too, but he was the head of the northwest regional office. He traveled down here from St. Petersburg pretty regularly for business. A friendly guy, a little over forty. He took Julia on vacations, always brought her presents.

  “Julia was insanely happy. Once I even heard her singing a love song in the ladies’ room. You know how it is those first months, when you get totally carried away. She kept coming to me for advice. Wore me out. She showed me all the lingerie she bought to wear for him, the new perfume, new stilettos with heels so high they’re only good for the bedroom. I couldn’t help being happy for her. The situation wasn’t so great, but Julia wasn’t depressed anymore, and I was grateful, just for that, to this Good Samaritan from St. Pete. So.”

  Tanya fell quiet for a few moments. One of the twins squawked faintly and went back to sleep.

  “Then one day, the worst happened. She came to see me with this twinkle in her eye and made this big production of showing me a pregnancy test. Positive. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked her. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘I’m going to tell him! Sometimes they just need a little push to, you know—’ ‘Julia,’ I told her, ‘he has his own kids back home.’ I did my best, but it was too late. She insisted everything was fine. He could transfer to Moscow, they could sell her apartment and buy a bigger one, near the park . . . Basically, she had these huge plans, and I figured I should mind my own business. Maybe they talked about him moving to Moscow all the time, and I just didn’t know about it. So I nodded, and she told me her boyfriend was coming in a week, and she would have time to put together some sexy romantic evening and share the happy news.

  “I won’t bore you with the details: the beauty spa, the manicures, more new underwear. Vanilla candles. Bubble bath. Roses. Some special recipe for ham. Sometimes I blame myself, you know? I think that if I had been able to bring her back down to earth, even just a little, everything would have turned out differently. But they say that when you tell the truth, you lose a friend. And since I wasn’t even sure that I knew the truth, I kept quiet, I kept nodding, I gave her my approval, I even gave her the ham recipe.

  “Finally it was D-Day. I ran into Julia’s boyfriend in the hall a few times that afternoon, and at meetings, and I kept trying to read, from the look on his face, how he would take the news he was about to receive that night. He seemed like a serious kind of guy to me, and I thought, well, you never know, and we’ve needed a new director for a while . . .”

  Without changing her rhythm, Tanya rocked the pink barge back and forth, and straightened the little bonnets (those, at least, were blue) on the boys’ heads. She sighed, then turned to look at Masha.

  “I’m an idiot,” she said, shrugging. “I had a feeling it wouldn’t end as well as Julia imagined. But I never thought it would be quite that bad. Apparently, after she delivered her news, Julia’s knight in shining armor froze for a couple of seconds, then started racing to get dressed. He must have felt too vulnerable to stay naked just then. He told her something like: (a) he never loved her, (b) he had only been using her for sex, (c) he loved his wife and children very much, and he didn’t need or want anyone else. Then he grabbed his coat, and that was it.

  “Can you imagine how Julia must have looked? All her fancy makeup, not totally smeared away yet, her lacy lingerie. Her perfume all over the sheets. She lunged out of bed and starting breaking things. She said she went on a total rampage. Then she got dressed, tore her stockings, and went to the police station. She filed a rape complaint! I was terrified when she told me. I told her everyone knew they’d been sleeping together for months, and what about the baby? But she just turned away from me and said that the baby was gone.

  “I tried to talk her into dropping the charges and forgetting all about that asshole. But honestly, I was pretty sure she was just trying to scare him. It’s one thing to freak out and make threats, but who would actually accuse someone of rape? That only happens in bad movies. And, honestly, I had my own stuff to deal with. I was house-hunting, trying to get a mortgage. But I saw Julia sliding back into depression. A couple of times I tried to recommend a good psychiatrist, but she said if she got revenge on that piece of shit, her depression would take care of itself.

  “So she went for it, all in. She even testified in court. But the trial didn’t go well. It was as if she was the one on trial. They found people to testify about the affair. The guy testified about Julia telling him she was pregnant, and his lawyer demanded a pregnancy test. But Julia was the one who really ruined it. She described the whole sordid affair in such gory detail that she ended up going int
o hysterics right there on the stand. It was too over the top to be believable. And right in the middle, the guy’s wife jumped up from her seat and started shouting, damning her to hell and so on, like she was actually putting a curse on her!

  “After Julia died, I found out the guy had left our firm, but some people from the St. Pete office told me he was just fine. His kids were growing up, his wife pampered him—she was probably afraid he’d cheat again. But I think he’s probably been scared straight. As for Julia . . . Julia quit, too, and went to work as a secretary at some little warehouse. I called her a few times, tried to get together, but it was like talking to a wall.”

  Tanya laughed mirthlessly. “We’re all so alike, when it comes down to it. We all want love. Julia just ended up in a dark place. Somewhere you’re not supposed to go, even if you’ve really been hurt, even if you really want revenge.” Tanya mechanically brushed an unruly lock of hair away. “God, I really need that haircut.”

  “If you want,” Masha said quietly, “I can walk the twins around while you go and get one right now.”

  “Would you really?” asked Tanya, looking at her with a new spark in her eyes. But it quickly went out. “No, you can’t be serious. You’re a busy woman, you’re working. I’ll figure it out somehow.”

  “I’m off for the day,” Masha said, smiling. “If you’d feel comfortable leaving them with me . . .”

  Tanya shook her head. “No, thank you so much, but I’d worry about you. They’ll wake up any minute now. But thank you so much for offering, really! I’m very grateful.”

  And they headed slowly down the path out of the park. Both women were thinking about Julia. Tanya was pondering women’s lack of power, how it could mutate into rage and villainy. Masha was thinking about what Tanya had said about the dark place. Julia had crossed over, blinded by the hatred that had grown out of love. And the door had shut silently after her.

  She hadn’t even noticed the murderer standing there behind her.

  INNOKENTY

  Innokenty sat on the stool and thought, gloomily, that he was going to have to get his suit dry-cleaned after this. Kolyan’s friend’s place was incredibly dirty. It wasn’t just dirt; it was filth elevated to a philosophical principle. And for the past half hour, Kenty had been talking with a philosopher, and suffering terribly because of it. Kolyan’s friend was not the simple kind of drunk, the conceptual kind. Instead, he was a drunk with principles.

  The ordinary conceptual drunks limited their belief system to the dictate that a bottle should be split between three people, with some food to chase it down, if possible. But for the principled ones, drinking had a higher purpose, and it was a thinking man’s most worthy endeavor.

  Leonid, a young man with a weak chin and thin hands, was pontificating. “We don’t bother anyone,” he said. “We don’t get involved in these managerial games of yours, sitting in an office, all these cheap attempts to justify our existence. We make no justification! In vino veritas!” he declared, jabbing one finger toward the peeling paint on the ceiling.

  “I think you may be misunderstanding the meaning of that expression,” Innokenty noted, trying to find a position that minimized the contact between the fine flannel on his rump and the sticky stool.

  “The truth is in the wine!” the other man translated for him, offended.

  “No, that’s not quite it,” said Innokenty, flashing a quick grin. “Or rather, when they said that, the Romans didn’t mean that getting drunk put you in touch with the secrets of creation. They were only pointing out that someone who is drunk tells the truth, just like what we Russians mean when we say, ‘Drunkenness reveals what sobriety conceals.’”

  “Oh yeah?” Leonid looked puzzled. Apparently, Kenty’s analysis had rocked the foundations of his philosophy.

  “If you have no objection, let’s move on to Nikolai Sorygin,” suggested Innokenty.

  “Kolyan? He was a good man. But he was a flower, you know?”

  “A flower?”

  “Yeah. I have this theory, see.” Leonid wiped his bony nose, which was covered in tiny black spots.

  Innokenty raised one eyebrow in a polite expression of surprise.

  “Some drinkers are the tragics. They drink because life is hard. Their wife left them, you know, or they got fired, or they got fired and then the wife left. Then there’s the Stakhanovites, the good Soviet workhorses. That kind has a wife, a girlfriend, all sorts of jobs and needy relatives, and nobody ever leaves him alone. Those guys do it just to relieve the stress, poor things. Next we have the black marketeers,” continued Leonid, speaking more majestically now. “They drink for the company. And the spleenists. That comes from the English word spleen.”

  Innokenty nodded seriously to indicate he had heard of such a word.

  “The spleenists have too much free time. Bored housewives, for instance. Or coddled little mama’s boys. Then there are the machos. They drink for the same reason some people get laid, to prove their worth as men.”

  “Sorry—which group do you belong to?” By now Innokenty was desperate to get away from this disgusting place and its self-important drunkard. But the antiques business had helped him hone his conversational skills, and he knew that the only place to hook the golden fish that no investigators had caught would be in the stream of this speech. So he directed an attentive gaze into the man’s watery eyes.

  “Oh,” said Leonid, languidly waving one hand. “I’m a philosopher. An observer of souls. For me, alcohol is a tool for learning about the world. But like I said, Kolyan was a flower. That’s when you drink the same way that you breathe. For him, vodka was sort of like the sun, or water, or the soil where he put down his roots. No family, no work, no extra ideas. Life carried him along in its current, free and floating.”

  “Where did it carry him?” Innokenty asked, eager not to lose this gleaming fish in the murky water.

  “Where do you think?” asked the increasingly unsober philosopher, surprised. “Same place it carries everyone. To death! He could never do anything to hurt anyone, see? Kolyan only wanted to drink and enjoy himself.” Leonid looked at Kenty over the vodka bottle and concluded his story almost biblically. “Like a bird, he came by his nourishment easily.”

  He made a gesture, offering to split the rest of the bottle of Stolichnaya that Kenty had brought as an offering. Kenty shook his head, and the liquid flowed with a gentle gurgle into Leonid’s glass.

  “Kolyan was a flower,” he said, drifting off now, “and they crushed him. Or they fed him the wrong kind of fertilizer.” His head fell to the table. Almost immediately Kenty heard a plaintive, whistling snore.

  Innokenty took a deep breath and stood up. He tried to wipe off the seat of his pants, and sighed sadly. All that time down the drain, and dry-cleaning costs, too, with zero results. Could a fish even survive in such poisonous waters?

  A flower, he repeated to himself, jogging down the dingy stairs. Before his eyes, an incongruous image flashed: blooming chrysanthemums, inked in fine lines like a Japanese print. Words of poetry raced around his head. Chrysanthemum buds, released by the rain again, rise from the soil. A haiku by Matsuo Basho, composed around the same time that Moscow was being built in the image of Heavenly Jerusalem.

  Not that poor Kolyan will rise ever again, thought Kenty as he finally surfaced outside. What a relief to expel the apartment’s nauseating air from his lungs.

  But Kenty was not pleased with himself. He hadn’t found out anything for Masha, hadn’t helped her at all. He got in his car and switched on the radio. Someone was singing a syrupy song about chrysanthemums blooming in the garden.

  “Oh God,” moaned Kenty, feeling even guiltier.

  It was time to go and admit to Masha how worthless he was.

  ANDREY

  Andrey had put the fear of God into that reporter. He got everything he needed, including Alma Kutiyeva’s address. Now he was pushing his way through another Moscow traffic jam. The drive wasn’t just torturous because it was slo
w. He knew that his meeting with Alma Kutiyeva, the mother of a soldier whose body had been sent home hollowed out, would not be an easy one. Andrey was one of the many people in the world who didn’t know how to express his sympathy. He stuttered, he blushed, and he felt terrible, he had tears in his eyes and a lump in his throat, but he could never find the right words. What could you say to a mother who’s lost her son? That he was killed by a professional, so it probably didn’t hurt? Would it help to tell her that her boy had been avenged, that the hitman appeared to have been executed by a homicidal maniac, drowned under the ice on the Moskva in accordance with some medieval Russian custom?

  Andrey returned over and over again to his conversation with Karavay and her dapper boyfriend, and he tried to find some discrepancy that would prove all of this had nothing to do with creepy stories out of medieval mysticism. Maybe it was just dirty money, dirty politics, dirty passion, the three pillars that normally supported the logic of murder. But those banalities didn’t line up with the ice, the freezer, the cut-out tongues at the electric station, the cut-off arm at St. Basil’s, the quartered governor’s wife at Kolomenskoye. On the other hand, John the Prophet with his Revelations? Ivan the Terrible? They fit just right. He wanted nothing to do with this mess. But Masha had already plunged him through a hole in the ice, into a place where there were neither fish nor plants, just the thick, sluggish water, filled with insanity. He would have to face it head-on if he wanted to stop these crimes.

  A murderer’s logic is really killer, thought Andrey, punning badly in his head, and finally he turned his car off the crowded ring road.

  Alma Kutiyeva’s place was on the outskirts of the city. The apartment looked like a Gypsy camp, full of people all bustling around at top speed in the small space, talking at top volume. Alma locked herself and Andrey in the bathroom so they could talk. The room was full of damp laundry, and there were red rags floating in a tub of pink foam. Andrey was repulsed, at first, until he realized it was just cheap dye.