After Yekaterina

by K. L. Abrahamson

  “What? Where is she?”

  Frau Zelinka raised her hands. “Who am I to say? I am not her keeper. A girl decides to leave. She is gone. Prae went to get her, and her room was empty.” She nodded at the Thai girl who must be called Prae.

  “Have you checked the house?”

  She nodded.

  “How could she have left?”

  “This house is not a prison, Detektiv.”

  He could not quite believe her even if Maria had seemed to have accepted her life. When he’d talked to her, she’s seemed settled, resigned. He scratched his head. “I want to see her room.”

  “Fine. Do what you want. Just stay away from the patrons and me. I shall be busy.” Frau Zelinka waved him away and disappeared down her darkened hallway.

  Prae led him back up the stairs where the hallway was filled with the bustle of women and the battle of competing perfumes. The subtle silk wallpaper held graceful images of Chinese courtesans, or perhaps they were houri—the not so virginal companions of dead Islamic warriors. The women he saw emulated that look: beautiful, demure, lush as any man could desire. But there was no Maria with her dark horn-rimmed glasses. He opened the door to her room and turned back to the hallway of women.

  “Has anybody seen Maria?” he asked no one in particular. No one did more than shake their head and turn away.

  But one girl held his gaze for the barest of moments before turning to another doorway.

  She was young—barely sixteen by the look of her milky, perfect skin, but he suspected she was at least two years older. She had straight, pale hair that hung in a heavy silken curtain around bare shoulders and deep blue eyes rimmed with thick blonde lashes. A simple blue sheath dress ended just above her slim knees and he was reminded of an image in a magazine he had seen when he was a boy. It was of a young woman picking sunflowers in the paradise of green fields that once was Fergana. As an adult, he had seen the iconic image again only to realize that it was an advertisement for cheek-by-jowl houses in subdivisions that had plowed under the very fields the young beauty had walked in.

  He shook his head and fought back the sense of déjà vu.

  “You,” he said and motioned her closer.

  She looked away as if to leave, but he abandoned Prae and went to her. “What do you know of Maria?”

  “N-nothing.” She shook her head. “She is gone.”

  “When did she leave?”

  The girl shook her head again. “I-I don’t know. I saw her this afternoon. She took a call.”

  “When was this?”

  “Perhaps one o’clock?”

  “Did she say who it was who called? Did she seem upset?”

  “I—I don’t know. I hardly knew her. She kept to herself.” The girl backed up a step and he realized he was looming over her.

  He pulled back and considered. The girl looked almost shaken. “Where did she take this call?”

  “She—she was in the washroom. We both were. We each have a mobile phone so that our patrons may call us and tell us about their fantasies so that we can prepare.”

  “So Maria had a mobile phone.”

  A nod.

  “Where would she keep this phone?”

  “The rules are that the phone is to be with you always when the Red Veil is not open,” the little blonde told him.

  He thanked her and was about to turn away, then stopped and pulled out Khan’s envelope. He pulled out the photo of the dead man’s face. “Do you recognize this man?”

  The girl’s blue gaze widened and she looked up at him. “Is it important?”

  “Do you recognize him or not?”

  She looked back at the photo and swallowed, apparently not liking what she saw. “I’m not sure. There was a patron. An Anglo. I don’t remember his name.”

  Kazakov pondered her. She was at least trying.

  “Could the name have been Collin?” he asked, taking a stab in the dark.

  “That’s it! Collin. How did you know?” And she smiled with such pure pleasure he wanted to keep making her smile. He imagined any man would.

  “A guess,” he said. “May I have your name?”

  “Katya. Katya Faber, but here they call me Yekaterina. Now may I go? I have a patron coming in less than an hour.”

  He let her go and stood motionless in the flow of women in the hallway. Prae tapped a toe by Maria di Maria’s door. Yekaterina. The name kept following him like a flock of crows. A murder, to be exact. This girl even looked something like Yekaterina Weber.

  A shiver ran up his back as he turned back to Maria’s room and followed Prae inside.

  Though it looked much as he recalled, the lavender scent he remembered was faint as praise in his job. The same bed and heaped pillows were somehow lurid without playing off of Maria’s olive coloring, the curtain hanging limp over the window somehow more muffling without Maria’s honest liveliness twitching it aside. That was it. In this house of veils, she was the one person who had seemed to show herself. A woman with olive skin and horn-rimmed glasses. A woman who set aside the game of her employment in her off-hours. Someone who looked outward instead of in and who had the bravery to say something.

  He crossed to the bed. The red spread had been straightened so it no longer showed the imprint of her lounging body. No sign of the book or the ashtray on the bedside table, either. Or the tatty woolen robe. He pulled open the top drawer of the two-drawer bedside table and found the tools of her trade: condoms of all types and sizes, heated oils, dildos, anal beads, handcuffs, alkyl nitrite and other things he didn’t recognize. On the top of the sexual aids lay the ashtray—cleaned and washed, likely ready for her customers. No sign of the book or the glasses.

  He pulled open the lower drawer and found soft ropes and silken scarves suitable for restraints that would not leave a mark. Nothing more.

  Against one wall stood a carved, Persian armoire with an intricate, inlaid wood design of a couple copulating in a verdant green pleasure garden. He pulled the doors open revealing straps and harness he hadn’t expected from a woman like Maria even if she was a working girl.

  A single drawer lay at the armoire’s base.

  He pulled it open, releasing a whiff of Maria’s lavender and the scent of tobacco. The old robe was stuffed inside unfolded—something his brief meeting with Maria left him unable to imagine her doing. The book he found stuffed underneath along with a pair of plain white underwear, threadbare jeans, and a well-worn, blue t-shirt—the latter two like favorite old friends.

  He stood up, his knees creaking, and considered what he’d found and more importantly what was missing.

  “Bring Katya Faber here,” he said.

  Prae hesitated.

  “Now.”

  She went, apparently well trained in taking orders, and soon returned with a protesting Katya in tow.

  “My patron is downstairs waiting,” Katya said and yanked away from Prae. “He does not like to wait.”

  “I am sure he will wait a little longer for the likes of you,” Kazakov said. His comment seemed to mollify her.

  “When Maria was discovered missing, you came into her room, didn’t you?” he asked and held her with his gaze.

  Her gaze darted to Prae, to the open armoire, and then the closed hall doorway. Finally, she nodded. “I did not believe she was gone.”

  “And when you entered, what did you see?”

  “Her bed was a mess. Her things on the floor.”

  He nodded. “Did you clean up her things?”

  She shook her fine blonde head. “I looked around and left.”

  He studied her lean lines, the lovely face, so much like Yekaterina Weber except for the hunger in this woman’s eyes. “What did you take,” he asked softly.

  Her eyes grew round as if shocked, but her mouth had tightened. “I took nothing. I am not a thief.”

  “But why would you be a thief? Maria was gone, her things left behind. What did you take from her abandoned belongings?”

  Sighi
ng, her shoulders slumped. “It was not so much. I was her friend. The others would have taken far more. I will show you.”

  She led him out into the hallway with Prae trailing behind, suddenly gone quiet, the globe wall sconces had dimmed to amber that placed a misty light on the wallpaper as if they walked through a mystical land. From downstairs the volume of music had increased and there was the low rumble of male voices and bursts of women’s forced laughter.

  Katya’s door led to a room much like Maria’s—a broad bed, an armoire, a bedside table, a chair—but there the similarity ended, for the room was decorated in misty blues and turquoises that brought out the color of Katya’s dress and eyes so she seemed to be a creature moving under water. On the wall was a tapestry of a white castle on a hilltop and a man riding toward it on a white charger right out of a fairy tale. The original decoration of the room or her own addition?

  She pulled open the armoire and pulled open the drawer. “Here.”

  She handed him a carton of cigarettes, not the usual kind one found in local stores. No, these were a brand imported from, of all places, America, and expensive enough that only the wealthiest could afford them.

  “An expensive habit. How could she afford them?” he asked.

  Katya shook her head.

  He gave her a hard look from the tops of his eyes. “Come, Katya. She told you they came from a patron, didn’t she? She shared them with you. That was why you went into her room—to retrieve them. They were almost the only thing of value.”

  Her shoulders slumped and she hung her head. “How do you know these things? Yes, she showed me her treasure. She was so pleased. Why would she leave them behind? Why would she leave this?” She turned back to the drawer and produced a phone, much like Kazakov’s, six inches long, two inches thick, and broad enough to fill his palm.

  The phone each girl was to carry at all times.

  “Why would she not take it with her?” she asked, her voice almost plaintive.

  “A very good question,” he said softly. He pulled plastic bags from his pocket and bagged the phone and the cigarettes, Katkya watching his movements closely. “This is evidence, but when we find Maria, I’ll see about returning the cigarettes to you.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want them. They’re Maria’s. I’d rather have her back, instead.”

  He nodded as he wrote the date, time, and provenance on each bag. “Thank you for your help. I suggest that you tell no one what you’ve told me.” He turned to Prae. “That goes for you, too.”

  He led Prae back to Maria’s room. “Someone searched this room before me. Who was it?”

  “I do not know.” She shook her head but he wasn’t having her denial.

  “Yes, you do. You are the hands of Frau Zelinka. You do her bidding. If you didn’t search the room yourself, you escorted them here.”

  The Thai girl kept her gaze averted as if looking away would make his question disappear. When she looked back at him he caught the flash of anger, so she was not the meek little thing he had thought. Frau Zelinka’s tool was what she was, not some poor girl traded into servitude.

  “So it was you.” He looked down at the phone and the cigarettes. “What were you looking for?”

  “I say nothing to you.” Emotion flared in her eyes and was swiftly smoothed away. “You should leave. You cause only trouble.”

  “If that’s how you want to play it, fine. I want the doorman next. I’ll interview him right here.” He pulled the chair from Maria’s wall and settled himself to wait, knowing that having a police officer on the same floor as the pleasure rooms was bad enough. Interviewing the staff in the middle of the busiest time of the day on that floor was absolutely something to be avoided at all costs.

  He leaned back in the chair. “I’m waiting.”

  “Bastard!” she swore, and in a shimmer of red silk she stormed out of the room. Either she was bringing back the doorman or something would happen. Presumably Rostoff would be called. The Detektiv Chief would not be happy and shit had a bad habit of running downhill straight into Kazakov’s lap. He was going to pay, but there was no help for it.

  While he waited, he pulled out the bagged items he’d collected. A phone that should not have been left behind. The question was whether she left it behind on her own, or she was taken. The bag of cigarettes he opened and tore open one pack to tap out a single cigarette. The filter was uncommon, a light tan with fine brown lines running up toward the end.

  He picked up the other baggie of the filter collected from Yekaterina Park. It, too, was tan and had fine brown lines running its length. He recalled another case where similar filters were evidence and they came from an Ottoman brand that cost at least twice what most Ferganese smokers paid for their habit. Oddly, there was no sign of lipstick on the filter and he could not imagine any woman of the Red Veil stepping out of the house without lipstick on.

  He went to the window to peer down into the street. Darkness had fallen and the unseasonable snow was thickly falling, misting everything caught in the yellow glow of the streetlights. Across Yekaterina Park and the river, and beyond the concrete three-story apartment buildings on the other side, in the distance glowed the tragic beauty of the concrete replica of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The original, in what had once been Moscow, had been turned into a mosque that had burned down fifty years ago. It proved that nothing was eternal. In the darkness of Yekaterina Park, he sought the spot where a body had been found that might be a Chinese spy named Collin. By the shadows of the trees he thought it might be—there. A greater darkness detached itself from a tree and stepped out of the shadow.

  Kazakov froze where he was and allowed the curtain to droop to mask his presence, but still allow him to peer out.

  The lone figure appeared to study the front entrance of the Red Veil. Then, through the snow, the figure’s head tilted upward and the pale oval of a face was revealed and steadied as if it not only sought and found Maria’s window, but the figure went still as if it knew he was here.

  Through the snow, he recognized the movement.

  Maria.

  Chapter 5

  By the time he thundered down the stairs two at a time, shoved past Prae and the once missing and now apparently found doorman, and ran out the front entrance, the figure in Yekaterina Park was gone—if it had ever been there at all. He ran down the front stairs and into the street, wading through the new snow and into the park toward the place he’d thought he’d last seen her.

  No one was there.

  Deflated, he turned back to the Red Veil and felt the exhaustion of defeat. The door was firmly closed and he could imagine that it would not open for him again. At least not tonight. So much for the interviews he’s planned. The figure could almost have been planned as a means to interrupt his investigation. As he searched the snow for footprints, a sleek limousine purred up to the curb in front of the Red Veil. He stopped what he was doing long enough to watch the passengers disembark. Two large, swarthy men climbed out swathed in thicker furs than any respectable Fergenese would wear in this weather. After all, New Moscow’s winters were never as cold or snow-filled as those in the old cities of holy Russia he’d read about. Surviving the usually much milder and drier Ferganese winters was a matter of pride, but these men—they clearly came from a warmer climate.

  The third man wore a wool coat similar to Kazakov’s, but it had a more expensive cut given the way it hung perfectly from the man’s broad shoulders. The man stepped up on the Red Veil’s first stair and turned back to his companions. The streetlight caught in his white hair and he grinned at the other men, exposing a set of large, overly-white teeth.

  Kazakov slunk back into the shadows, his heart suddenly pounding. He knew the man had pale blue eyes and an assertive air that verged on rudeness. Boris Bure stopped whatever he was saying and peered across the street almost as if he sensed Kazakov’s gaze. Could he see Kazakov in the shadows? Would he think Kazakov was here on the matter of Bure’s dead daughter? The
n Bure turned and led the two men inside as if whatever Kazakov saw didn’t matter.

  The falling snow stung Kazakov’s cheeks and nose. Pings of energy surged through his limbs. Flakes froze in his lashes and the tangle of brown hair on his head before he remembered to move. Yekaterina Weber’s stepfather was here and it was as if all of Kazakov’s synapses fired at once. He closed his eyes. It suggested that Bure’s marriage to Yekaterina’s mother was not the happy protective one they had tried to convey. What did that mean for the daughter before she died?

  He shook his head. The fact that Boris Bure was a patron of the Red Veil didn’t mean anything, even though a tightness in his gut suggested that it did. The task was to determine what.

  He wiped the snow off his brow and let the electric charge fill him. The weight he’d been carrying suddenly lifted as he headed for his car. Had Bure noticed it? Had he just not cared, or did he think that most police were on the take?

  Boris Bure. If he was a patron of the Red Veil, Kazakov would bet his pension that Maria knew him. He wondered what she knew, what she could tell him that might help him in the Yekaterina case.

  When he climbed inside the First Auto sedan, thesnow-covered windows were frosted golden by the streetlights. He turned the engine on and the wipers parted the snow layer so that he could see his way ahead. He guided the car toward home even though he wanted to slam the car through the snow and set out on the search for Maria.

  But there was too much going on here. Too much he didn’t understand. He needed to spend this gift of energy wisely—assessing what he had and then planning, rather than plunging into dangerous waters.

  Then he would find out where a woman named Maria would be hiding.

  §

  He lived in a small dacha his father had left him that sat outside the city limits, though the city was now stretching in his direction. The house was small—a summer cottage, really, built of low walls of rough logs and stone that had been pulled from the land the house had been built on. The result was a low, stone-walled and slate-roofed building that looked part of the landscape. When Kazakov was a child, his father had brought the family here often and a young Alexander had walked the hills and fished in the clear stream out of the mountains. In those days the tribal Kyrgyz had still occasionally camped by the stream that ran through one end of the property and Alexander had come to know them and marvel at their horsemanship and how they lived with their herds just as they had done for a thousand years.