by Neil Plakcy
Something nagged at him. There was something else he had missed, wasn’t there? His brain was like a video camera; it recorded everything he experienced, and stored the details away, allowing him to return to any point in his history and reexamine it. Only his recent history; even his brain didn’t have enough bandwidth to store away everything he’d ever experienced in his centuries of existence.
By opening his third eye and focusing it inward, he was able to replay everything, from the moment the gunshots shocked him from his complacency. He knocked over his ergonomic chair as he jumped up, then felt again the rough pavement under his slippers as he ran and the energy boost as he jumped over the woman in the wheelchair.
He heard the guitar, drums and synthesizer of Haitian compas music as he passed the café, the sound of traffic passing on Ives Dairy Road, a door slamming somewhere. The maintenance man had hosed down the glass storefronts earlier that morning and he smelled the tang of the cleaning fluid.
He experienced again the brief buzz he always got from the brief transition to a puff of smoke that let him slip into the studio. It was quiet and dark in there; Sveta hadn’t turned the fluorescents on and opened for business yet. That didn’t matter to Biff; he could see in the dark as well as any cat.
The door to the workroom was half-open, and the lights were on in there. He moved carefully through the door. His eyes adjusted to the light immediately, and he spotted Sveta’s body sprawled on the floor. He forced himself to observe what he’d been too quick to run from. He smelled the coppery tang of the spilled blood, felt the anger, fear and violence in the displaced air molecules, heard the sound of a car with a German-made 6-cylinder engine accelerating past the open back door of the workroom.
Then he realized. It wasn’t something he had missed; it was something missing. He had sensed Farishta’s energy signature in the studio after the files had been stolen. And he had sensed it on Ovetschkin’s boat. But there had been no trace of her around the two bodies in Sveta’s studio.
Had she been there, and he’d missed the traces of her energy signature because he’d been preoccupied with Sveta’s death? What was her connection to all this?
“I need to check something out,” he said, standing up.
Jimmy was still on the phone. “Don’t go far. I still want to talk to you.”
“I won’t.”
Biff stepped outside into the heat and humidity, realizing as he did that Jimmy was going to have to pay for those two coffees. That was new and different.
The squirrel was across from him, sitting in the dirt around a scrawny bougainvillea. Biff walked down the sidewalk, all his senses on alert. It was almost overwhelming to open himself up that way in a public space; he took in reverberations of everything around him, from the frizzy-haired woman who was worried about an argument with her husband that morning, to the slim young black woman whose dog was sick, to the older man who had been unemployed for over a year and despaired of ever working again.
Shaking them all off, he focused on any energy remaining from what had happened in Sveta’s studio. He stopped in front of the glass storefront, closed his eyes, and opened his third eye. Had Farishta been here?
He extended his senses to the glass, the overhanging roof, the sidewalk and then the parking lot. There was no sign of her at all.
“Are you waiting for the photographer?”
He turned around and opened his eyes. The Russian-accented voice belonged to a young woman with a baby boy in a stroller. “We have an appointment at twelve.”
“The studio’s closed,” Biff said. “You’re going to have to find someone else.”
“That is not possible. I spoke to her just this morning.”
Jimmy appeared behind the woman. “Miss Pshkov’s studio is closed,” he said, showing her his badge.
The little boy spotted the squirrel and started giggling and pointing.
“This is unacceptable business practice,” the woman said. “I will make sure all my friends know.”
“You do that.” Jimmy turned to Biff. “I’ve got to talk to Loi. I’ll catch up with you later.”
The woman made a disgusted sound and turned her stroller around. Biff followed her slowly down the concourse until he came to his own office. When he looked around the squirrel was behind him.
“You might as well come in,” he said, touching the eye, then opening the door and motioning the squirrel forward. “You like halvah?”
Biff had loved the sesame-seed based treat since his days in Constantinople, but he had to admit he preferred the kind now made in Brooklyn, packaged in chocolate-covered rectangular logs.
He led the squirrel through to the back office, where he opened a package of halvah and broke off a piece. “Sorry, don’t have any nuts on hand.”
The squirrel took the chunk of halvah and sat on his haunches with it clasped between his paws. His dark, beady eyes were bright with curiosity. He sniffed it carefully, then clawed the chocolate covering off and nibbled at the sesame.
“The chocolate’s the best part, you dumb rodent,” Biff said.
The squirrel looked up at him and chittered.
Biff sat down on his chaise longue and popped a piece of halvah in his mouth, then pulled the lamp close to him, holding it in one hand.
Who had killed Sveta and Ovetschkin? And why?
Until he heard those two shots, he had believed this case was all about the files. But had he been looking at things wrong? He had known from the start that Ovetschkin was a member of the Russian Organizatsiya. Had Ovetschkin been the intended victim, and Sveta just collateral damage? Suppose one of his rivals had followed him to the studio, catching him off guard while he was threatening Sveta.
But who? He hadn’t paid enough attention to the evidence left behind by the killer. His senses had been distracted by the blood and death, but he was better than that. He should be able to go back there and identify the killer by his – or her – body cells.
He let go of the lamp, feeling moderately refreshed, then pulled off one of his pointy-toed slippers. The sole was scarred, and he rubbed his right foot absently. Was it too late already? Loi was there with his evidence kits, his Luminol and disinfectants. It would be a lot harder to pick out who had been there when he had to remove him and everyone else who had tramped through the area.
He wouldn’t be able to get back into the studio until all the police were gone. What else could he do? He dialed Jimmy. “Loi finished yet?”
“Almost. The ME’s office just took away the victims. Loi is cleaning up now.”
“You need anything more from me?”
“Not right now. But stay in touch, all right?”
“You got it,” Biff said.
He picked up the brass lamp again and held it in his hands, feeling its warmth and power surge through him. His plan was to get back into the workroom as soon as he could, and see what kind of information it could reveal. Sveta had been his client, and he felt responsible for her. If avenging her meant finding out who had killed a lowlife like Kiril Ovetschkin, too, then that would be a freebie for the Miami-Dade police.
He smiled and handed another piece of halvah to the squirrel.
12 – Wolves
The squirrel, dozy from the halvah, rested on a small pillow beside the cabinet that held the samovar. Biff focused on sounds from Sveta’s studio, and when he was satisfied that Loi had packed up all his gear and left, he stood up.
“Come on, let’s go,” he said to the squirrel.
It rolled on its back and waved all four paws in the air, then flopped to one side and looked at Biff through its small dark eyes. “This is my office, not your bathroom, all right?” Biff said.
The squirrel yawned.
“Seriously. If I have to clean anything up when I come back, your ass is out of here. I killed you once and I can kill you again.”
The squirrel chittered something, then closed its eyes. Biff shook his head and walked outside.
Loi had taped
up the studio’s front and back doors, but that didn’t matter to Biff. He slipped inside and stood in the darkened studio. He had no need of light to examine the portraits of smiling babies and children, the matte backdrop or the carpeted posing platforms. It still struck him as strange that Sveta had two such different sides to her business—the kids, and the boudoir shots.
He opened his third eye and began a painstaking survey of the room, looking for any evidence that might pertain to Sveta’s murder. There was no trace of Ovetschkin; he must have come in the back door, before Sveta had opened the studio for business.
Biff gave up on the studio and stepped through the beaded curtain into the workroom. The power and range of the scents there was so strong that he had to stop and steady himself. He was glad he had rubbed the brass lamp; he needed the extra energy.
The room was roughly square in shape, with no windows, just the single metal door that led to the back service drive. Biff didn’t turn on the overhead lights; he could see well enough to make out the shelves of cameras and other supplies, the light table, and the desk where Sveta sat at her laptop computer, now gone.
A portable clothes rack held a range of nightgowns, feather boas and towels. It seemed that the customers brought their own underwear, for which Biff was grateful. Beyond the clothes rack was a small sewing machine on an old kitchen table.
Slowly and painstakingly, he sifted through the range of smells and sensations in the room. Loi had changed to a coconut shampoo, and had a new piercing, with a bacterial infection. He recognized the scents and signatures of the two techs from the medical examiner’s office, a man and a woman, who had come to pick up the bodies. Both of them smelled of sweat and antibacterial wipes, and neither wore cologne or perfume.
Jimmy Stein had been in and out of the room. His energy signature was so strong and so familiar to Biff, a combination of determination, respect and kindness, accompanied by the smells of a human male body in its mid-fifties.
By the time he had categorized each of the scents related to the police, and isolated them, he was tired. But he continued. There had to be a clue under everything, something that the human techs could not have found. Something that only he could discover, with his range of super-human senses.
Sifting farther below the surface, he identified Sveta’s signature, and that of Ovetschkin. Igor Laskin’s scent was still there, too. Was that a residue of his visit to steal the files? Or had he been with Ovetschkin?
The air still reverberated with fear and anger, the kind of emotions that took a long time to dissipate. Biff had been to battlefields that still resonated with the sensations of the wounded and dying decades, even centuries later. It was sad to him that positive emotions like love and desire faded so quickly, when the negative ones lingered.
There was no one else. No one beyond those he had identified had been in the workroom within the past twenty-four hours. By process of elimination, that pointed to Igor Laskin as the killer. Biff knew, however, that his evidence would hardly hold up in a court of law. He could barely explain to himself how he was able to recognize so many different smells and emotions and apply them to individuals. He certainly couldn’t communicate that process to a judge or jury—not even to Jimmy Stein.
He slipped out the back door of the studio. As he walked to his car, he called Jimmy. “You find Laskin?”
“Not yet. Got the super to open his apartment and it looks like he took off quickly. I put out an APB for his car, and we’re checking his known associates now. I don’t think we’ll come up with anything. I don’t have enough yet for a warrant, but he’s definitely someone I want to talk to.”
Biff hung up and drove down to Laskin’s apartment. It was getting to be such a familiar drive he could almost go there on autopilot. He parked behind the Epicure gourmet grocery again, next to a pickup painted hot pink, with a bumper sticker that read Grow Your Own Dope: Plant a Man. He walked down the street to Laskin’s building, with all senses on alert for traces of the bodybuilder or his expensive cologne.
He stopped at Laskin’s parking space, recognizable by the profusion of skin cells around the area where the driver’s door would be. But the latest traces were hours old.
The neighbors down the hall from Laskin’s apartment were still arguing, most likely just another skirmish in a long war. He stood in front of Laskin’s door for a moment, his hand poised as if to knock, and made sure there was no one inside the apartment. Then he slipped through the narrow space between the door and the jamb.
The first thing that struck him was the absence of the Matryoshka dolls. The atmosphere in the apartment was so benign, so different from what it had been the last two times he was in that living room. He stepped over to the shelf where they had rested, and sure enough, there were six circles in the dust, of decreasing size.
What was in those dolls? Something evil, for sure. Was the demon inside the dolls controlling Laskin in some way? Or were Laskin’s motives only human—greed, jealousy, envy—all those sins that religious people had been warning against for centuries?
He did another complete survey of the apartment, quickly eliminating the energy signatures of the cops and the landlord. He noted that the clothes in the closet no longer hung in perfect symmetry. Many of the shirts and suits were missing, and a pair of pants had fallen to the floor. Jimmy was right; Laskin had left the apartment in a hurry.
The door to the safe under the tie rack hung open, and the gun, cocaine and cash that had been inside were gone.
He walked back to the living room and stood next to the shelf where the dolls had sat. Either something was inside one or more of them, or they had been imbued with some kind of energy by a master like the one who had enchanted his lamp.
The police who had gone through Laskin’s apartment wouldn’t have noticed that the dolls were missing, and it struck him as very strange that a man on the run would pick up a cluster of knickknacks to take with him. So that meant the dolls were important, and Biff was the only one who could figure out why, because humans could only be influenced by the power; they couldn’t understand it.
He drove back to his office, following a minivan plastered with the bumper stickers distributed to elementary school students as a kind of praise. He had no idea what you had to do to be named student of the month; probably just show up without any weapons.
The squirrel jumped up and chittered at him as he walked in, dashing outside between Biff’s legs. As Biff watched, it scurried across the pavement to the base of the palm tree, then scampered up it. He darted halfway out one frond and squatted.
“At least you’re housebroken,” Biff said, as he watched a rain of tiny pellets sift through the palm’s fronds. The squirrel leapt back to the tree trunk, scrabbled down, and then rushed across the sidewalk again and right back into Biff’s outer office.
Biff shook his head and closed the door. The squirrel darted into Biff’s office and clambered up the side of the bookcase, his tiny claws making scratching noises as he climbed. When he got to the top of the case he raced across and then took a daring leap to Biff’s desk, skidding across the polished surface until Biff was sure he was going to fly off the far edge.
He sailed off and landed with a soft plop on his cushion, where he immediately curled his tail around him and went back to sleep.
Biff laughed as he walked to the bookcase. Many of his reference books were centuries old, written in forgotten languages on sheepskin and parchment, then bound with leather and sealed with magic. He opened his third eye and let it roam through the books, searching for an energy signature that matched the dolls.
His hand came to rest on a relatively new book, from the early twentieth century, about folk arts and crafts. He pulled it off the shelf and flipped to the section on figurines. It was written in Russian, and it took him a moment to adjust to the Cyrillic characters. The first set of Matryoshka dolls to be shown publicly was carved in 1890, but there had been a folk art tradition of nesting doll collections long before
that.
The Slavic people had no written language before the advent of Christianity, so their religious beliefs had been passed down orally and in art. One of the earliest examples of a nesting doll was in the shape of an egg, with a chicken painted on it. When the egg was opened, another egg was found inside, this one painted with the image of a baby chick. Inside that was a third egg, which came apart to reveal a yolk and white.
This nesting egg was used in ancient fertility rituals. With the advent of Christianity, the egg had evolved into a round doll painted as an ikon of the Virgin Mother, with a baby Jesus inside. But there were other, darker manifestations of the nesting doll, and the pre-Christians had used them to contain evil spirits. When a sorcerer summoned a spirit, it could be tricked into climbing into the doll—and then the doll would be sealed shut.
That had happened to Biff himself, a few hundred years before. The grand vizier of Constantinople had attempted to contain the jinns and enslave their power, and Biff had been caught trying to save Farishta. It took a decade before the vizier died and Farishta tricked his successor into smashing the dolls that bound Biff and many others.
Just the memory of his confinement and release shook him, and reflexively he reached out to the lamp for a boost of reassurance.
He closed his eyes and recalled the dolls in Laskin’s apartment. He had not looked directly at them, because of the aura they emitted, but if he concentrated and focused he could recall the details of his walk around the living room.
He opened his eyes as the memory swept into him. Wolves. The dolls had painted with wolves. He closed his eyes again and forced himself to step closer to the row of dolls. The first and largest doll was covered with an exquisitely detailed painting of a mature gray wolf. It had clearly been done by a master; Biff could see each of the animal’s hairs, and the strong musculature under the skin. The wolf’s head was tilted back, and bright red blood dripped from its open jaws.
The wolf was a powerful symbol in that pre-Christian world. Some scholars took the prevalence of lupine iconography to mean that the Slavs believed in werewolves, while others said that the wolf represented all that was wild and frightening in the world.