“You are a difficult man to say no to, Detektiv Kazakov. Did you know that? I do not let just any man into my bath. Only the attractive ones.”
He had no illusions about his attractiveness. He was a middle-aged man who, regardless of his recent weight loss, was slowly losing his shape; so what the hell did she want?
The vapors parted to reveal a large, deep copper tub filled to the brim and Frau Zelinka floating there, her face and breasts three perfect mounds in the scented water. Then she sank to the bottom and came up headfirst, sending a tidal wave of water across the floor to slop onto his shoes.
“I need to speak to Maria and any other girl with a room on the park side of the house,” he said.
She waved him closer with an arm gone rosy with dewy warmth. “Are you suggesting that my girls had something to do with this horrible event?”
She peered up at him with wide dark eyes, the length and curve of her body too lush and on display in the magnifying water.
Was this a new attempt to control him through this woman?
“If I thought that, I would interview all your girls. At the moment, I simply want to know what they saw. And your doorman. You have one in the evening, I presume. I need his name to speak to him, as well.”
In one perfect move, Frau Zelinka came up out of the water, liquid sheeting off her body in a shimmering spray. He took in her attractions and then looked away, committing them to memory.
“A towel,” she commanded and gestured at a wooden spindle-back chair set to one side against the white tiled wall.
He complied and she wrapped the towel around her hair, then stepped out of the tub to stand naked beside him. “A hot bath is such a luxurious way to start a day.”
He wouldn’t know. His days started far earlier than this and at his dacha baths were a matter of heating water on the stove to pour into an aluminum wash tub.
She reached past him for an additional towel and began to pat herself dry.
“You haven’t answered my question.” Kazakov stood where he was, the warm scent of damp woman caught up his nose. The steam and water droplets placed a pearly glow on her skin and he was sorely tempted to touch her, but temptation was clearly what Rostoff wanted. He was less sure whether the lady actually wanted the touching. “I came to you as a courtesy. I can interview your girls whether you give permission or not.”
She stopped patting herself dry to cock her head up at him from under the folds of the towel on her hair.
“You are a very attractive man, Detektiv Kazakov. I think, beyond the dark hair and square jaw, it is the intensity of your eyes—they speak of your passion, but unfortunately it is passion for your job.” She tsk-tsked and wrapped the towel around her torso, once more transforming from the temptress to the business woman. “Fine. Go have your interviews, but you will regret rejecting me. Beyond the pleasures I could bring you, there is much a woman like me could do to help you at a time like this. And there is the payment I must give you.”
It was as if this woman tried to swallow him down on Rostoff’s behalf. Just what was Rostoff so worried about? Kazakov had, to all outward appearances, ceased his investigation into the two young people’s murders. Had his surreptitious enquiries come to Rostoff’s attention? After Rostoff called him on the carpet the first time, Kazakov had been very careful who he talked to and where. He had gone so far as to drink tea in the restaurant that was the favorite haunt of Yekaterina’s schoolmates where he had sought information about Yekaterina, Semetai, and their families. All to no avail.
From a hook on the wall, Frau Zelinka retrieved her silken kimono and strode from the room. “Do what he asks,” she commanded the waiting Thai girl before disappearing down the hall toward the rear of the house. Her apartments, Kazakov supposed. Probably as lush as the woman they housed.
He felt like an insect breaking loose of a spider’s lair as he followed the Thai girl up the long flight of stairs that led to the second floor. The stairs were thickly carpeted to muffle men’s heavy footfalls. The Thai girl’s tread he couldn’t hear at all, as if she was cast of dreams and air. That probably went for all the girls—part of the illusion Frau Zelinka spun in her house.
The stairs ended in another open lounge with couches and ottomans and more silken curtains that hid walls and ceiling. The carpet was thicker here so he could barely feel the floor, as if he’d been transported to another place, another self where clouds supported him. He could imagine the effect on a man drunk on good Fergana vodka and desire. He would be young again, virile, his tread no longer weighted down with years and unrequited longing.
Beyond the lounge another hall separated rooms at the front and rear of the house. It had pale pink wallpaper and globe wall sconce lights that burned like misty moonlight. At the third door facing the park, the Thai girl stopped. “This is Maria’s room.”
“Thank you. You can go now.”
She shook her head no.
Fine. He knocked on the door and heard a soft, “Enter.”
He pushed inside, the Thai girl coming in behind him and closing the door. A gentle scent of lavender filled the room. It reminded him of morning gardens, more soothing than the brassy spice of the brothel’s madam.
The woman, Maria, lounged on a large, soft-looking bed replete with too many pillows in all shades of red and lurid purple. The colors emphasized her black hair and olive skin. She still wore the thick, multicolored robe that made him think of the biblical Joseph, but this time square, black-framed glasses perched on her nose and, along with a cigarette, she held a thick tome that she quickly slammed shut and stuffed behind her. The glasses she stripped off her nose as she sat up and swung her legs off the bed to sit elegantly with one long leg crossing the other at the knee. She waved her cigarette at him.
“You. You found the body. Who was it? Who killed him?” Her rapid, accented Russian was, for a moment, almost unintelligible.
“Yes, there was a body, but you watched from your window and saw us remove it. I would like to know what else you saw. How did you happen to see him?” He motioned to a claw-foot chair in the corner of the room. “Do you mind if I sit?”
“Sit. Sit, please.” She stood up and strode to the window, tugged the curtain aside to peer out into the street, and released a stream of blue cigarette smoke that swirled around her face and shoulders.
“May I have your full name?” he asked.
“Maria. Maria di Maria.” The name flowed like water from her tongue, carrying vestiges of her home language. She shook her head. “Frau Zelinka prefers us to sleep in in the morning and she does not like us to have the curtains open. It gives the idea to passersby that they can know our secrets. It suggests to patrons that secrets will escape. So we are trapped behind these curtains and blinds, but every morning I start my day by looking outside at the park and the sky.” Another nervous puff of her cigarette. “The girls across the hall claim that they have the best view because they see the mountains, but I know better. I look over New Moscow and Fergana and it is a grand place. My chosen homeland.”
She was trying too hard, as if to convince herself as well as him.
“How long have you been here?” he asked. Get her talking and feeling comfortable, then turn her mind to the body.
The curtain fell back over the window and she drew deeply on her cigarette. “Since I was fifteen. My family was very poor. We lived in a tiny village in Abruzza in Italia. When I was seven, there was a terrible earthquake and everyone in my family was killed. A man offered to help me and three other village girls. Eventually he brought me here, but I still remember the scent of the olive groves and the sound of my mother’s voice and the way the almond trees shivered in the wind.” She sighed. “Looking at the park reminds me of my childhood.”
And by her tone, her freedom. Frau Zelinka’s girls did not have that luxury.
“What happened this morning?”
Her robe stirred around her as she shrugged. “I woke—as always. I got up. I took my prophylac
tics.”
Said as if her life was an endless string of such days.
She lifted the edge of her curtain again and inhaled from her cigarette, her neck gently arching like a deer’s. “I came to the window, sipping tea as I usually do—I am a morning person. The other girls sleep in and are so noisy when they rise. Always laughing and telling jokes about their clients from the night before, though Frau Zelinka does not like it. I prefer the quiet of the early morning and to hold my tongue, for who is to say what would happen if something I said got back to my client.” She shook her head. “I looked out and there he was—lying there.”
“Describe what you saw.” He sat still, with notebook out, taking down what she said.
“It was cold outside, I could tell by the frost on the window. It was a lovely lace that caught the sunlight like prisms. That meant it was harder to see the park for the glare, but I had hoped for new snow. It makes the park so clean and white. My wish had been granted, but somehow the snow was still gray, not like now with the new snow falling. There was a dark blot on the snow that I had not seen before. I looked more closely and, at first, I thought it was someone who had tripped and fallen, but he did not get up. Then I thought it might be Collin, a new client. And when he did not move after five minutes, I realized something was wrong. That was when I came to Frau Zelinka and met you.”
She let the curtain fall again and turned back to him, then sought an ashtray on the bedside table and crushed her stub of cigarette. “That was what I saw.”
Making a note of “Collin” to pursue, he nodded at the window. “When you looked outside, was there anyone on the street or in the park?”
She thought a moment, but then shook her head. “There rarely is in the early morning. Ordinary people don’t live around here. The people who do, travel by car. There are few people from around here that travel through Yekaterina Park.”
Frowning, he looked up at her. “Are you saying that the man was not from here?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, do I? I have not seen him up close.”
And he would have to bring a photo of the dead man back here. “Who is Collin?” he asked.
Pulling her robe tighter around her neck, she returned to the bed and sat on the edge. “A client. A businessman with the Anglo-German embassy, I think. Leastwise he is Anglo. He boasted that his ancestors helped finance the creation of the Anglo-German Empire and the assassination of Napoleon.” She shook her head. “As if the business dealings of his forefathers made him a better man.”
A better-connected man, at least.
“You are well read,” he said, studying her.
“For a whore, you mean?” She reached across the bed and picked up what she’d been reading. “I happen to enjoy world history. Frau Zelinka expects her girls to be educated enough to hold conversations. We are not just pretty faces and warm body parts, Detektiv.”
It had not been what he meant. In Fergana’s schools, there was an emphasis on his people’s history—to the lack of everything else. As he’d aged and the role of Fergana as a buffer between the Chinese Kingdom of Heaven and the might of the Ottoman Empire had become more and more evident, understanding what it meant for his country required the people to better understand the world around them. Unfortunately, the education system did not agree and the children grew from the ignorance of childhood into the blindness of adulthood. He’d often wondered whether it was a conscious government decision. In response, he had become a voracious reader.
Of course, Maria di Maria was not a girl from Fergana.
“So what have you learned?” he asked.
She shot him a glance, and by the way she tipped her head, he knew she wanted another cigarette but held herself back. She must limit her smoking because she had no stains on her fingers. An interesting bundle of contradictions and strengths, this woman.
“I think that we live in difficult times, but I suppose each generation says the same.”
A philosopher, then.
“I would like to bring you a photo of the dead man to look at. Perhaps you may know him.”
She shrugged. “Do what you want. I will be here. Reading.”
With that she returned to her window and once more peered out. What she must have seen all the years she had been here. As the Thai girl let him out of the room, he wondered what Maria di Maria chose to remember and what she chose to forget.
He interviewed five other girls who had rooms overlooking the park. None had seen anything. None were interested in what happened in the broader world. There was clothing to mend, legs and armpits to wax, hair to be upswept perfectly, and scent to choose for tonight’s patrons. They were not interested in him or his questions and shortly he found himself ejected onto the Red Veil’s front stairs.
A light snow swirled around him and kissed his face. He thought of Frau Zelinka’s pearled flesh, but that melted into Maria’s face. She’d been angry at him for putting her down as nothing but a whore, but truly his assumption made sense given the other women he’d spoken to. She was the anomaly, as much as he was for doing his job as a detective. Sighing, he went down the stairs.
He needed the photo of the dead man. Then he could interview the others that worked in the house to see if the man was known. There were the houses that surrounded the Red Veil, too. In the past, he would have had uniformed officers canvass those residents, but now if he wanted to investigate, he would have to do it himself. It would be a lot of work and difficult to hide from Rostoff, but the questioning would bring him back here.
Back to speak to Maria di Maria again.
In his car, he turned the key in the ignition and the engine sputtered to life, a mechanical effigy of his detective career. Oddly, he found himself whistling.
Chapter 4
The old brown All Auto sedan clunked and fumed down the broad avenue that ran beside Yekaterina Park, trailing a plume of exhaust behind it like ahorse’s tail. Kazakov turned off at the corner onto the eastern end of Suvarov Way and joined the flow of noontime traffic until its broad four lanes shrank to two. There he turned off toward Our Lady Yekaterina Hospital. The four-story building hunkered down against the snow. Some administrator had decided that preserving parking spots was more important than the park at the hospital entrance.
Chemicals had been spread to keep the paved lot clean and the runoff had flowed over the earth around the shapely, naked maple trees and fountain at the front. Next spring the chemicals would kill the grass, and the small, graceful eden across from the hospital would join the fading glory of the rest of Fergana. He looked away, up to Yekaterina’s Mountain looming over the hospital and the city. Today the swirling flakes erased both the distant mountains and the Yekaterina’s five peaks that the Muslim Kyrgyz said Mohammed had prayed upon. Fergana existed in a place between—not quite safety, not quite at the heart of everything.
He sighed and inhaled the winter cold. At least ten below freezing, the way the wind stung his cheeks. Much colder than the last time he’d stood here contemplating how conflict and war crept into everything. The young Yekaterina’s and Semetai Manas’s mysterious deaths. Both of them murdered—executed—though why he thought in those terms he could not say. He shivered and looked again at the mountain that loomed over the city. It was not weather to be out in, even drunkards knew that.
Unless they weren’t from around here. That had been Maria’s suggestion. His hand went to the coat pocket that once held his smokes, but he pulled it out again. There was an autopsy report to read and a photo to obtain. Perhaps Khan would even offer him a decent cup of tea.
He went down the stairs to the morgue in the bowels of the hospital.
Inside the windowless bunker, the stink of death, decay, and air freshener seemed solidified in the faded-green walls that echoed the rapid clatter of typing. He signed himself in at the reception counter where a young woman hunched over the keys.
“Where’s Darya?” he asked, nodding at the new receptionist. She was a sharp-eyed
young thing with henna-dyed hair in a bob. A green sweater was buttoned over her breasts and too many bracelets jangled on her wrists.
Darya was the usual receptionist, a matronly woman of forty who had four children, an out-of-work husband and, apparently, a single florid floral dress that she had worn every time Kazakov had ever seen her.
“She quit,” the girl said.
“Did she find a better job?” Because Darya had been the queen of the reception desk for far longer than Kazakov had been a police officer.
The girl shrugged. “I never met her. Now what do you want?”
He frowned. “Dr. Khan, please. About the male body brought in this morning.”
The girl’s lips narrowed slightly. Then she nodded. “I believe he is in his office.”
She turned back to her typewriter and Kazakov pushed through the gate into the M.E.’s domain and strode down the poorly lit hall with its old wooden doors and high transoms, waiting for the typing to start behind him. It didn’t until he was shutting Kamil Khan’s windowed office door behind him.
Khan was seated at his desk and he looked up when Kazakov entered. The air smelled of chai spices and for a moment Kazakov was hopeful that the M.E.’s excellent tea would be forthcoming.
“You have a new receptionist, I see,” he said as he slumped into the chair across the battered wooden desk from Khan. Stacks of well-worn books looked about to tumble off the shelves behind the M.E. Khan looked resigned—and exhausted—in his favorite old wood swivel chair. A half-finished cup of cardamom chai sat cooling on the desk before him.
“I tried to get Darya back. She needed this job. Why do this to her? She is at home—and devastated.” He rested his fists on his desk. “They said it was time she retired.”
Kazakov sighed at the news. It was not uncommon for the son or daughter of a politico to be offered a job that was taken away from a longtime employee, but Khan was clearly upset. The tea would not be offered. “Who is ‘they’?”
After Yekaterina Page 5