by William Ryan
After a quick wash with his towel, he began to shave at a porcelain sink that looked big enough to be seaworthy. The water was freezing, so cold he could barely work up a lather, but Korolev had shaved in freezing water before and didn’t mind too much. He just took it slowly.
He wasn’t happy about the situation with Mushkin, if the truth were told – it was as if he’d offended the Chekist in some way. He couldn’t put a finger on what he might have done to provoke the man, but perhaps it wasn’t something he was responsible for as such. After all, it must be difficult for Mushkin to have someone thrust down his neck by Moscow, and a Militiaman at that. And he doubted Colonel Rodinov had made any effort to sweeten the bitter pill. All the same, you’d have expected the Ukrainian to click his heels and get on with the job, a cheerful smile on his face and a Party song on his lips – not that Korolev could imagine Mushkin singing anything with much joy now he thought about it. In fact, the bitter anger the major radiated reminded Korolev of being in a trench with an unexploded shell, and that, as he remembered all too well, was not a pleasant way to spend your time. If this was the Chekist when he was supposed to be relaxing on leave from his duties, Korolev could only imagine what the man was like when he was pursuing enemies of the State.
Korolev rinsed his face – at least he now had some idea as to how to move the investigation forward. If the Odessa forensics team came up with something pointing to the killer’s identity, then all well and good, but it seemed more probable that this was going be a question of gathering information from interviews, analysing it and then exploring the lines of enquiry it suggested. It would be time-consuming, and there would likely be pressure from Moscow, but he had an able assistant in Slivka and with a bit of luck the interviews would continue to throw up revelations like those offered by Sorokina.
His ablutions finished, Korolev examined himself in the mirror, taking his time about it, thinking that there was more grey than there’d been the last time he’d looked. And perhaps more skin showing through the short hair as well. He liked to think he’d few illusions about what he saw: an average man; not ugly, not good-looking; no genius, but no idiot either. But his eyes seemed to want to evade his gaze, and he wondered about that. He hoped he was an honest man, when the circumstances allowed it, but they didn’t always in these times of change. He wondered what the Frenchman made of him. Would he see choices made where all Korolev saw was fate? If Korolev lived in the West, maybe he wouldn’t have to shut his eyes sometimes not to see, or put his hands over his ears so as not to hear. But then again, wherever you were in the world, he suspected, you’d find your hands were a little dirty at the end of the day’s work. Saints lived only in books so far as he knew, and Korolev lived in the real world, where the road ahead, if there was one, was likely as not pot-holed and spattered with excrement. But you still had to walk it and if he’d learnt one thing in the last twenty years, it was to carry on putting one foot in front of the other, and to keep his head down. Which direction he walked in was for the bosses to decide – his duty was just to do as he was told, and to trust that the Party would bring them to a brighter future.
Of course, the Frenchman was a writer, and he knew what writers were like. At least, Babel, to be fair to him, didn’t judge men for what they sometimes had to do. Others of his profession, however, liked to see to the bottom of a man’s soul, to judge you as only God should judge, and then to sit in their comfortable studies, with a fine cigarette from an elegant blue packet clenched between their teeth, and clatter out their findings on shiny typewriters, each letter hitting the blank page like a nail in a coffin. Oh, he knew what they were like, those writers. They should look at themselves sometimes and maybe they’d see they were no better than anyone else. And if Korolev had done bad things, it was because he’d had to. The Frenchman would do well to remember that when he looked at Alexei Dmitriyevich Korolev.
Korolev felt an acid rage coursing through his veins – his hands were trembling again, even as he tried to hold them still. Was it the anger, or was it his nerves again, he wondered.
It wasn’t just him in the firing line, that was the problem. He knew how things worked these days – if he were to be arrested, it would mean Valentina Nikolaevna would almost certainly also end up in the Zone, then Yasimov, whom he’d worked alongside for so long, and probably Zhenia, even though they hadn’t been married for two years now. And what would it mean for young Natasha, if her mother was shipped off to the Zone? Or Yuri for that matter, his own flesh and blood, if Zhenia got ten years? An orphanage, if they were lucky, otherwise the streets. And they probably wouldn’t be as lucky as the dead girl – they’d always be children of Enemies of the People and that would bring difficulties that might never be surmounted.
And so he had to remain vigilant, and that meant living on the edge of a blade, and knowing it, and trusting in the good Lord to preserve him and his. Of course, people might tell him the Lord was a superstitious fiction of his imagination, unsuited to the scientific and logical reality of Soviet Power. Well, he’d bet his good boots that half of those same people were praying just as hard as he was to be guided through this valley of shadows. In fact he was sure of it. They might talk like Bolsheviks, but in their hearts Russians would always be Believers. It was just the way they were.
He splashed his face with water cold enough to stop him thinking of anything very much for a moment or two and reminded himself that solving the case was what mattered now and everything else was a distraction.
Five minutes later he was dressed and standing in the dining room where the girl had been found. He considered the height again. Could someone have lifted her on their own if they’d used a table to stand on? Peskov would weigh the girl as part of his autopsy – that might tell them something.
And what about the murder weapon? Some sort of cord, Peskov had said. If the doctor could extract some more evidence from the corpse, that might give him something to follow up. He reached his hand up towards the cast-iron bracket. He’d have to get it measured properly.
‘How did the killer do it, do you think?’
The voice came from behind him. He turned to find Slivka, legs apart, standing square, her leather jacket open at the neck. An unlit papirosa hung from the corner of her mouth and she was raising her hands to light it, again cupping them round the cigarette to shield it from a wind that wasn’t there.
‘Got one of those for me?’
‘I forgot. Compliments of Comrade Shymko.’ She pulled an unopened packet of Our Brand from her pocket and handed it to him.
‘Bless the man,’ Korolev said, opening the packet. He looked back up at the bracket, thinking about her question. ‘The table perhaps. Did Andreychuk tell you anything interesting last night?’
‘Nothing. Denied the conversation had ever taken place.’
‘And?’
‘He’s cooling his heels at the Militia station.’
‘Good. Let’s have another go at him when we get back. Whoever cleaned the place after the crime did a thorough job. They must know something about police investigations – and I’m not sure Andreychuk fits the bill.’
‘I can’t decide whether it was planned or not,’ Slivka said. ‘Do you know what I mean? Whether whoever did it decided to cover it up before or after the killing. Either way he didn’t make too many mistakes. He was calm enough to clean her office of prints, and in here as well. And if you hadn’t been sent down here, I doubt a pathologist would have looked too carefully – if one would have even looked at her at all.’
There was an implicit question lurking in her words that Korolev decided to ignore.
‘You’re presuming it’s a man,’ he said after a moment.
‘A strong woman – to have got her up there.’
‘True,’ he said, turning away. ‘Come on, let’s get to Odessa and see what the sawbones has discovered for us.’
Chapter Ten
The dawn light was flat across the even flatter steppe as Slivka mano
euvred the car, doing her best to avoid the various ridges and trenches that criss-crossed what passed for the road. She didn’t drive as fast as Mushkin, or with such disregard for the car’s suspension, but she maintained a constant speed and drove with a good deal of skill. Spring might well be on its way, but it was still cold enough to have Korolev burrowing inside his winter coat.
‘Have you been to Odessa before?’ Slivka asked, her voice rising to compete with the engine.
‘Apart from the airport yesterday, no.’
‘Did the plane fly in over the town?’
‘I think so. I wasn’t looking.’
‘Of course,’ Slivka said, nodding. ‘You were reading the case material. Admirable.’
‘There was a lot of it to read,’ Korolev said, even if what he’d actually been doing was keeping his eyes tight shut and praying to the Virgin.
‘A shame, you would have been impressed. From the air you can see what a well-planned city Odessa is.’
‘Our Soviet planners are the envy of the world,’ Korolev said automatically.
‘They are, although in this case the planning was done long before the Revolution.’
‘Tsarist planners?’
‘A Frenchman.’ She shrugged. ‘Wait till you see it – it looks like Paris, they say. Maybe the Frenchman was homesick.’
Slivka’s smile faded.
‘Of course,’ she added, her words coming out faster than previously, ‘Soviet Power has transformed the city for the better. In every way.’
‘I knew what you meant, Slivka,’ Korolev said. ‘There’s no need to concern yourself.’
It was the first time he’d seen her confidence slip, and it saddened him that she should be concerned about such an innocuous comment. Even if, of course, she was right to be.
Maybe Odessa did look like Paris – Korolev had never been there. He’d seen pictures of the place in newspapers, of course, and it seemed to him that, despite the peeling paint, Odessa had a certain fin de siecle elegance which might well be similar to that of the French capital. The cold sun twinkled on tram tracks and polished the cobblestones golden as the car roared happily along wide boulevards, scattering the odd pigeon and drawing the occasional glance from pedestrians huddled against the frosty morning chill. Maybe it was also a bit like Petersburg, it occurred to him, before he reminded himself that it had been Leningrad since Lenin’s death in 1924 and it was about time he remembered.
‘It’s a fine town,’ Korolev said, in response to Slivka’s enquiring glance and wondered if he was the only person who regretted Petersburg’s change of name. He was as keen on the Soviet State’s forward development as anyone, but Petersburg still conjured up images from before the Revolution, and not all were negative. The old imperial capital might have been built on the bones of serfs, but still it was a city to make a man proud to be Russian. And that was something, even now – when imperial Russia had become the Soviet Union, and was ruled by workers rather than tsars.
‘This is Pasteur Street,’ Slivka said, interrupting Korolev’s thoughts. ‘Just before eight, not bad.’
She brought the car to a halt and nodded towards a large building in front of which students in white laboratory coats and round cotton surgical caps stood smoking. This, Korolev presumed, was the university. Like all students the smokers looked hungry, and like all Soviet citizens they looked away when a Black Crow, as police vehicles were known, pulled up beside them.
‘This is it? The university?’ Korolev asked Slivka as they stepped out of the car.
‘Founded in 1865.’
Korolev leant backwards to look up at the building.
‘In 1865, you say.’
‘1865,’ she confirmed, making no effort to keep the pride out of her voice.
Korolev nodded with what he hoped was suitably impressed gravity, then began to walk towards the entrance. Before he’d taken two steps, the nervous white coats had hurriedly stubbed cigarettes against their heels, slipped the butts into their pockets and scurried in through the massive wooden doors like a flock of startled geese pursued by a fox.
‘You should visit more often,’ said Dr Peskov, appearing at Korolev’s shoulder. ‘I can’t remember the last time the lecture hall was full at the start of the eight o’clock lecture.’
Korolev shook the man’s outstretched hand – it wasn’t as if he’d meant to frighten the students.
‘Good morning, Doctor.’
‘Good morning to you – although I haven’t had much of a night. We finished your autopsy, though. Follow me, the School of Anatomy is around the corner.’
They followed Peskov further along the street and then, when he turned down some steps, into a wide courtyard where Korolev began to realize that the university was made up of a large number of buildings, and not only the one in front of which they’d parked. Peskov indicated an L-shaped edifice built from grey stone with large windows, which looked very academically inclined.
‘The School of Anatomy,’ the doctor said, and led them to a door at the side. In the corridor beyond it an elderly man, with the straight back and curled moustache of a former soldier, rose from a chair he’d placed in front of a set of double doors. Seeing Peskov, he unlocked the doors and stood to the side, inclining his head to the pathologist.
‘Please,’ Peskov said, waving them through. ‘Wait in here and I’ll be with you in a moment. As you can see, your instructions as to confidentiality have been followed to the letter.’
The room Korolev entered was longer than it was wide with a ceiling that must have been a good twenty feet high. The gaps between the drawn curtains on three tall windows provided streams of light that broke apart the prevailing darkness, and underneath the smell of formaldehyde and the Lord knew what other chemicals, Korolev detected the scent of corruption – of death itself. It was strange: Korolev had the clear sensation that the room was full of people, or their spirits at least. As his vision adjusted to the half light, he had the feeling that eyes were watching him from the glass-fronted cabinet that ran along one entire wall. Confused, he walked closer.
‘The Virgin preserve us,’ he whispered as the contents became apparent.
‘What was that?’ Slivka said from the window through which she was peering, the sliver of weak sunshine turning her hair golden in the gloom.
‘Nothing,’ Korolev said. ‘No, not nothing. Have you seen these? It’s barbaric. Look what they’ve done to them, these doctors.’
It was true – the cabinet was full of scraps of human beings, skin and muscle stripped back to the bone, fixed forever in some kind of preserving liquid. Here there was a hand, the tendons dyed bright green and numbered, there a foot paused in mid-step, the skin pulled back to display the bones and muscles. There were hearts, and stomachs, arms, legs, heads, jaws, ribcages, spines and parts of the body that Korolev had never seen before, and hoped he’d never see again. It was as if half a dozen men and women had been torn to shreds by some infernal machine, and then the pieces picked up and carefully placed in clear glass jars for reasons that no ordinary man could begin to imagine.
Korolev’s attention was caught by a pale face, bleached white as though drowned, with sightless eyes that seemed to be focused forever on the moment of death. It was curious how white the dead man’s hair was, and how frail he seemed – although he must have been a young man when he died. And then his lips – they were strange as well, unnaturally thick, as though they’d been stuck on after death like a comic moustache. Korolev had seen corpses before, more than his fair share, but this poor fellow’s suffering hadn’t ended with his death. Instead his head now floated in a thick round jar, snarling in despair, half of his face peeled back to display its inner workings, his jaw, his teeth and a naked eyeball.
‘These doctors are worse than wolves, Slivka, I swear it to you.’
Slivka said nothing, just shook her head sadly. There was one thing that interested Korolev about the body parts, though – a large number of them had the tattoos
that marked them out as belonging to the tribe of Thieves. He pointed to a blue-inked monastery that graced a deformed knuckle.
‘A few blue fingers, I see.’
Slivka shrugged. ‘They have a habit of dying unexpectedly and unclaimed.’
‘True,’ Korolev said, looking at the floating head again and wondering who had decided this fellow’s life had gone on long enough. He turned back to the room. Eight stainless-steel dissecting tables, in two rows of four, were visible and on one of them a sheet covered most of a human body, except for the blanched feet pointing up at the ceiling.
Despite the weak light, he could see Slivka’s cheeks rounding in amusement, and was that a flash of teeth? Was she laughing at him, the scamp? It was all well and good for the likes of her – she probably ticked off the days till the next autopsy she could attend, ghoul that she was. He, on the other hand, hated every aspect of the clinical process that the examination of the dead called for. And he could smell the dead girl, that unforgettable undercurrent of decay in the still air of the room. A place like this was too close to the next world for Korolev. He knew that if he listened hard enough he’d hear voices from the cabinet, begging him to rescue the poor unfortunates imprisoned there and bury them, deep beneath the ground, the way a human being should be buried, in the shadow of an Orthodox cross to mark their passing.
‘You may laugh, Sergeant Slivka,’ he said, ‘but by the time you get to my age you’ll have seen enough death to know it should be treated with respect. It’s a precious thing, a life.’
If the truth were told half the reason he’d become a homicide detective, and a good one, was to try to make some sense of death.
The door swung open, and Peskov came in, his midriff swathed in a leather apron and his bald head invisible under a surgical cap. He flicked a switch and the room was flooded with a burst of electric light. Korolev turned, his eyes squinting against the glare, and saw that the doctor had been followed into the room by a younger female assistant carrying an enamelled tray, on which a number of glass jars were arranged.