The Sin Collector

MASHA

As she drove, Masha tried to shake the nasty feeling that plagued her. It made her furious that Yakovlev had already connected her with Katyshev on her very first day, when she hadn’t even had time to show him what she was capable of. Masha was sure her association with the wise old prosecutor would do nothing to improve her reputation with the denim-clad Yakovlev. On the other hand, she thought, braking smoothly near the gates of the old electric station, maybe she didn’t have to prove anything to anyone.

It was late, and the tram station was empty. Nobody was there but a lone security guard, a big burly guy paging through a magazine. When he saw Masha looking he put the magazine down. SuperAuto, she read.

“Who you here for?” This one obviously wasn’t the type for good manners.

“I need to speak with Ignatiyev,” said Masha in a perfectly professional tone. So it was a rude surprise when the guy gave her a sassy grin.

“You a reporter?”

Masha nodded warily.

“Not much use coming around now. It’s been two years since Ignatiyev got fired! Couldn’t keep up.” The guard looked pleased with the fate his colleague had suffered, then revealed why. “Five hundred rubles gets you inside. And I can tell the story as well as he could.”

“Just a second.” Masha rummaged around in her purse and pulled out a wad of cash. She figured she could eat apples for lunch the rest of the week.

The guard ushered her in and led her down long, narrow corridors. They finally emerged at a staircase, at the end of which loomed an iron door.

“They put this in after the murders,” he explained, unlocking the door with a key he kept on a bulky chain he fished out of his pocket. The guard hit a switch, and the basement glowed with the type of blue halogen light you would expect in an office.

The basement was empty, and it looked just like the basement of any other government building. Masha asked herself why on earth she had come here, and spent her lunch money, too. But the guard was warming up now to his side job as a teller of sad tales, and he pointed out the place in the center of the room where the three chairs had been. Everything in his story matched the description in the files Masha had read. She had a copy in her bag right now.

“And so,” the guard was saying dramatically, “all the victims had their tongues cut. But not in the same way, you know? For one it was just the tip. The woman’s was half cut out, and the other guy’s was sliced off at the root. The cops said that they might have been able to untie each other, and save themselves, if they had been able to talk. It was some sort of fancy knot, like a sailor’s knot. But obviously those three weren’t talking. There was a whole ocean of blood in here.”

“What about the numbers?” asked Masha. “The numbers on their shirts.”

“Nah.” The guard shrugged. “I don’t remember any numbers.”

Masha went to bed early in the morning. Her head hurt, and a blurry negative of the scene in the basement, with the three victims, swam before her eyes. She could see their chins, dripping with blood, and the single rope that tied them all together, hands behind their backs.

Half-asleep, she heard her mother come in quietly. Masha guessed, from what she heard, that she was hanging up the sweater Masha had tossed on the ground. Then there was another rustling noise. That must be her mother picking up the photograph off the floor, the one from the file Masha had put together for the next day. She was annoyed. There was no way Natasha would be happy about a picture of three dead people.

Masha knew her mother was worried about her. She wished her daughter would do something else, follow in her own footsteps rather than Papa’s, study medicine rather than law. The legal field, family experience had shown, contained more blood, more death, and less hope for a healthy recovery. Masha’s father had thought that Moscow’s best high school for math and physics, where Masha had started to go after she won a couple of city-wide math contests, would help his daughter learn to think logically. But in the end, her brain had become home to both the orderly logic of mathematical thinking and the chaos of a still-unsolved murder. The murder of the person who, for Masha, had been the measure of all things until she turned twelve. The person who was the only solid ground she knew, the reassurance that this whole miraculous world around her was not also just an endless putrid swamp. But then, suddenly, that ground sank beneath her feet like some sort of Atlantis, and nothing could replace it.

Masha’s mother had never managed to step into that role for her young daughter. She might as well have been Papa’s daughter, too, even though she was only a year younger. In her youth, Natasha had begun a residency under the famous Dr. Ryabtsev, who had expected great things from her—until Fyodor asked Natasha to have a baby. When Natasha reported her pregnancy to Ryabtsev, he shrugged and told her she’d need to find a new job, since pregnant women and young mothers couldn’t do science. Their minds, he said, were elsewhere by definition. She tried to convince the professor that wasn’t true, that she was different, but Ryabtsev had only smirked, patted her on the shoulder, and told her, absentmindedly, to take good care of herself.

Natasha had rushed home in tears and unleashed her hysteria on her husband. What would become of her now? Was she going to be one of those old hens who only ever talked about diapers? No, it was unthinkable, impossible, she wouldn’t do it! It wasn’t too late to go to the clinic and—

Fyodor slapped her then, the only time ever. Then he hugged her and promised, in a soothing whisper, that she’d still be the most amazing woman scientist since Marie Curie, and that Ryabtsev was an idiot, bringing women as beautiful as Natasha into his lab and expecting them not to have families! And they would have an amazing daughter, he said, just as gorgeous as her mama…

“It’s a boy,” she had corrected him, sniffling. “We’re having a boy.”

Both parents turned out to be wrong. Masha was a girl, and she did not inherit her mother’s good looks. Actually, she hardly took after her mother at all. But Fyodor Karavay didn’t care. As soon as he came home from work every day, he rushed to the cradle, and stood enchanted with little Masha in his arms, just smiling happily as his wife scolded him, “Did you even wash your hands before you picked up the baby?”

Natasha complained to her friends, too. “He goes right to the baby! No thought for hygiene!”

But they just told her how lucky she was to have such a doting husband and such a sweet little bundle of a baby.

Masha knew from early on, however, that her birth had made her mother unhappy. Natasha’s figure suffered: the tiny waist expanded, her breasts hung lower after nursing, her stomach grew folds. Natasha resented the fact that her backside had grown as wide as a truck driver’s, and she hated that her feet grew a whole size and she had to give away her impressive collection of shoes. She looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize herself, and she cried often. Giving birth coincided, in her, with the first symptoms of getting older, making it doubly hard. Nothing helped dispel her persistent melancholy—not her husband’s reassurances or presents, not even their date nights when they left little Masha with her grandparents. Natasha sank deeper into depression.

Masha’s father was the one to stop by the supermarket after work and cook dinner for the family. He read Masha bedtime stories, and then, after midnight, sat down to get back to work. Papa’s head never hurt, unlike Mama’s. He never brushed Masha aside when she started asking the thousands of questions that children ask. Natasha, on the other hand, would rant and rave, right in front of her daughter, about how having a child had wrecked her career. Fyodor would whisk Masha off to her room, but Masha still heard her mother’s resentment, and also sensed that this wasn’t the whole truth. Deep inside, Masha suspected that Mama had gotten that residency with Ryabtsev due to her youth and beauty, not because she was really a gifted scientist. But she needed to play on her husband’s sense of guilt constantly, as sure as his beard grew every night. It was Fyodor’s fault that she was no longer beautiful and would never get her doctorate.

It was around this time that Nick-Nick started turning up regularly at their apartment. His friendship with Papa had cooled for a long while, all because of their choice of profession. One was a prosecutor, the other a defense attorney. Even ten years later, the two friends were prone to long arguments in the kitchen. Katyshev, outraged, would go on about how everything was rotten, how the whole legal system was hopelessly out of date, how every investigative agency was corrupt but all the bad guys still needed to be proven guilty. To which her father would respond calmly that, here in Russia, they’d never had any problem finding somebody to put in jail. The more interesting question, he thought, was whether or not there would be anyone to defend them.

Then Mama would stride into the kitchen, sit down on Papa’s lap, wrap her arms around his neck flirtatiously, and ask them to talk about something else, anything but work. And Katyshev would obediently settle down and change the subject.

It was only when she was much older that Masha realized that Nick-Nick had always been in love with her mother, and probably still was.

He came to see them frequently, even when her father wouldn’t be home. He played with Masha (having no children of his own), and he tried to help Mama in the kitchen. She would always laugh at him, but she never chased him out. Masha wondered, sometimes, whether Papa had known. She thought he must have. They were playing an ancient game, with rules even the village idiot could understand. And whatever else he was, Fyodor Karavay was no idiot. But Mama came back to life in the glow of Nick-Nick’s unspoken adoration. She started wearing her pretty dresses again, putting on makeup, and smiling. She even became a better mother. She cooked, she hauled Masha to gymnastics and ceramics classes (though Masha didn’t excel at either), she took her to museums and historical palaces. Natasha was an extremely well-educated woman, and she began talking to Masha, teaching her all kinds of interesting things. But Masha still missed her papa, and in what would turn out to be the last years of his life, Papa was always working, and finding less and less time to spend with her.

When he did find an hour or two, though, that time was for them alone. He and Masha wandered the boulevards of Moscow and went fishing, swimming, and skating. He knew that sometimes, when they were out, Nick-Nick would visit Mama. But he trusted them both, and even felt sorry for them. Sorry for Nick-Nick because he had chosen the wrong career and the wrong wife, and had no children, which meant he didn’t have the kind of happiness Fyodor did. As for Natasha… Well, why shouldn’t she flirt a little? He thought he could trust them, and he was right.

After Papa died, Masha was terrified, and she secretly, fervently wished that Nick-Nick would marry her mother. The darkness around her was so thick that she craved the sight of a familiar face. But oddly enough, Nick-Nick’s visits became increasingly rare, and finally dwindled to nothing.

There was something else, too. It seemed to Masha that Fyodor Karavay’s last cases had dug deep, not just into personal injustice, but societal injustice, injustice mixed up with the more villainous aspects of human existence. She knew it was slowly wearing him down, although they never discussed it. But a couple of times Masha walked into the apartment and caught her father loitering in the dark hallway, staring into the brightly lit kitchen, where Mama, sitting across from Nick-Nick, tilted her head and giggled, as carefree as a little girl. In her father’s face, Masha saw exhaustion rather than love. Having a charming, girlish wife was all well and good, up to a point. After that, a man wants a wife who is his peer, someone he can really talk to after the bedtime stories have been read and the door to the child’s bedroom has been shut tight.

But there was no way to transform a charming pixie into a sober confidant. And in the end, Fyodor himself had shaped a world around Natasha in which she could remain his beloved little pet and never grow up. So it was his own fault. If her father had lived, maybe Masha would have grown into the role of intellectual partner, leaving Natasha free to live out her life as the spoiled little girl.

But Papa had died, their paradise had disappeared, and Mama did her best to make the leap out of the persona she had grown so used to. Because even if they were like sisters, Natasha was, nevertheless, supposed to be the responsible one.

Masha woke up a few short hours later to the optimistic swing tune blaring from her alarm clock. She listened for a second, just in case there were any suspicious sounds coming from the other side of the wall, and then jumped out of bed and headed for the shower, taking her work clothes with her. She didn’t like walking around in a bathrobe in front of her stepfather, and so twenty minutes later she emerged from the bathroom in her usual uniform: black pants, a clean black T-shirt, and a dark-blue, high-necked sweater. Her hair was pulled back into a smooth ponytail.

“I’ve always hated that notebook,” Masha heard her mother say from the kitchen, and she froze in her tracks. “No child should have murder on her mind, constantly, from the age of twelve! Crimes! Serial killers! I don’t want that to be her career, her life!”

“Natashenka,” came Belov’s voice, calm and composed as ever. “I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do about that. Masha has made her choice, and—”

“I know, I know, I’m the one who let her go to law school! I thought that she’d find something else to be interested in, something other than psychopaths! I thought she could have her own law office, maybe. But instead she’s still obsessing about dead bodies—in Petrovka now, no less! I’m going to call Katyshev and tell him to find her a different internship.”

“Look at it from another point of view,” Masha’s stepfather said. “She’s doing something she’s crazy about, and there’s a good chance she’ll be very successful.”

“But I don’t want—”

Masha pushed through the kitchen door. “Good morning!”

“Good morning.” Only one of them returned her greeting, choking a little on his coffee. Natasha just nodded, standing there with her back to her daughter. When she did turn around, Masha saw that her eyes were red.

Embarrassed, Masha spoke up cheerfully. “What’s for breakfast?”

Her mother handed her a plate of pancakes and, probably also wanting to change the subject, asked, “All black again?”

Masha’s wardrobe was one of their most frequent topics of breakfast conversation. It came up as regularly as the weather. She had her usual retorts ready. When her mother asked whether any other colors existed in nature, Masha said they did, but you had to work hard to match them up. Black eliminated all the problems of good taste and wasted time. Black made her look too serious and washed her out? Sure, but she had this post-adolescent syndrome, see, and she wore black because it matched her mood. And on and on. In her head, Masha’s responses were different. No, Mama, these aren’t mourning clothes, more than ten years later! No, Mama, this isn’t a symptom of depression. No, I’m not trying to push people away.

Her stepfather wisely maintained neutrality through these debates.

Once today’s was finished, Mama sighed and offered Masha the car keys.

“That’s okay,” said Masha, giving her mother a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll take the metro today. It’s faster.”

On her way out, Masha caught a glimpse of her mother straightening her stepfather’s tie in a very maternal gesture, and she smiled sadly. There were so many ways a man could change a woman, inside and out. It occurred to Masha that her mother could have become a pixie again, with Nick-Nick. But she hadn’t wanted to play that game with anyone except Papa.

Masha was lucky. She got a seat on the train, so she pulled her notebook out and started to sketch. Seeing things drawn out always helped her think more clearly.

So. Three of them. Masha methodically drew the semicircle of chairs and the three figures, two male, one female.

The young man next to her shot Masha a curious glance. He seemed to be the rare artistic type who found beauty in Masha’s profile, Masha’s thin fingers, Masha’s bare lips.

1. Special knots, wrote Masha next to her picture.

2. Numbers.

3. Why were their tongues cut differently?

The artistic type, reading over her shoulder and probably hoping to find some interesting way to start a conversation, recoiled at that last sentence.

Masha smirked at the man (nothing to see here!), calmly slipped the notebook back into her bag, and headed for the door.

She’d already been at her desk for at least an hour when Captain Yakovlev walked in. She couldn’t help but notice, with a twinge of pity, that he was dressed the same as yesterday. The same jeans, the same ripped denim jacket. And unless her revulsion at his personality was making her imagine things, he smelled faintly of dog. He said hello to the room without meeting anyone’s eye, especially not Masha’s. Better that way, Masha thought. She had been worried he’d have something snarky to say about her encounter with Nick-Nick the night before. But Yakovlev just shrugged off his jacket and tossed it over the back of his chair as he reached for the phone.

“Shagin? Hi. It’s Andrey Yakovlev. Listen, I have a question for your underworld expert. Which of the lowlifes out there have started shaving the backs of their necks in fancy ways? You know, fancy, like, creative, shaving out numbers, for instance.”

Masha suddenly focused on his voice. Numbers?

“Oh yeah? Well, it’s a new trend. Okay. Write it down for your book on criminal folklore. Guy I saw had a fourteen. Seven plus seven? Double the symbol for good luck? Huh, never would have thought of that. Thanks. Talk to you later.” Yakovlev hung up the phone, meeting Masha’s eye without meaning to.

Numerology! Masha’s heart sped up. The symbolism in numbers! She shuffled through the files on her desk again. One, two, and three were the first victims, at the Bersenevskaya waterfront. There had been a number four on the arm of the drunk they had found dead a year ago at Kutafya Tower. Then a six, on the dismembered arm on Red Square almost six months ago. Now there was a fourteen. Could they all be victims of the same perpetrator? Or was Masha’s mania for maniacs driving her insane? She looked over at Yakovlev again and decided to take a risk.

“Excuse me?”

The captain unhappily lifted his eyes from his papers.

“Do you happen to have the coroner’s report from yesterday’s death on the riverbank?”

Yakovlev lifted his eyebrows, obviously annoyed at Intern Karavay meddling in his case.

“I mean,” Masha hurried to add, blushing, “was there anything strange about it?”

Now his eyebrows reached a nearly unnatural height. “What do you mean by strange?” he asked coldly.

Masha shrugged her shoulders, feeling helpless, and tried to think. Yakovlev took the opportunity to turn back to the papers he was studying.

What a jerk. Masha was furious. Fine, she told herself, arranging her own eyebrows in a way that would make her mother say she scowled just like her father. Fine. Screw him, and the numbers, too. Let’s try a different angle. There was the weird way the tongues were cut. And there was that other case, a bizarre one, with the drunk who had come to Kutafya to die with his throat all swollen. There was the severed arm and hand with the Chagall painting. What else? Masha went on reading old files, finding more and more strange things. How could she have forgotten? There was the terrible case all the papers had covered, not long after the severed arm, about the wife of the governor from Tyumen Province. She was one of the ten richest women on the planet, wealthier than the Italian boss of the Benetton Group and J. K. Rowling. They found her body, hacked into four pieces then neatly wrapped in old newspapers, at a gift shop at the Kolomenskoye estate.

Masha felt sick. The governor’s wife had not been well liked—too many people depended on her business dealings. Everyone had to bribe her, grovel at her feet, and do their best to cater to the whims of this all-powerful woman. And Liudmila Turina had ruled with an iron fist. Her businesses grew, and money flowed into her Swiss bank accounts. The papers loved to describe her mansion outside London, wondering when she’d show some shame. But she never did, and anyone who dared to scold her for it was punished. Liudmila squeezed them dry.

Who could have done such a thing to a governor’s wife, someone who was always surrounded by bodyguards? And who could have done it and not gotten caught? That’s the real question, Masha thought. Would they let her take a look at the full case file, or at least the initial evidence they had collected? There had been a time when Petrovka’s best resources had been directed at solving that murder, but Turina’s widower had fled, one fine day, to the foggy shores of England, and after that, things had quieted down.

Masha sketched out a table (every line perfectly straight, though she hadn’t used a ruler). In it, she wrote, Liudmila Turina. She entered the date of death, and the place: Kolomenskoye.

Then she dove back into her files. Yesterday she had spotted something else strange, but let it go, because she hadn’t known yet what she was looking for. Half an hour later Masha stopped cold. There it was! Architect and builder Bagrat Gebelai had died in an exquisite apartment on Lenivka Street from severe enervation and physical exhaustion. The contrast between the words exquisite and enervation jumped out at her. And Masha thought she’d heard the name Gebelai in the news, too. Masha filled in the next line in her table: Bagrat Gebelai, eight months ago, Lenivka. She leaned back in her chair. Most of the strange cases were connected by one thing: the places where the bodies were found. Aside from Liudmila Turina at Kolomenskoye, on the outskirts of Moscow, all the rest had shown up right in the city center.

The detective sitting next to her announced that it was time for a smoke break, and Masha asked if she could use his computer. He told her to go ahead, then walked out, the rest of the office trailing after him.

First Masha pulled up a detailed map of Moscow. She fed some A3 paper into the printer in the hallway and printed out a full-color map of downtown. Down the hall she caught a glimpse of Captain Yakovlev, cigarette in hand, listening with an ironic gleam in his eye to the detective whose computer she was borrowing.

She went back to the computer and risked searching for a few numbers and the word numerology. Google didn’t let her down. The number one, Masha read, was a symbol of glory and power, action and ambition. Someone born on the first day of the month was supposed to pursue those things, never wavering from his course, but never trying to make a big jump too early, either. Then there was two, which symbolized balance in a person’s mood and actions, a personality that was gentle and tactful. Four meant an even-natured, hardworking disposition. Six predicted success in business, as long as the person could win the trust of those around him, attracting not just customers, but followers.

Masha closed the browser window and sat down again in her own seat, irritated. So the man who had the tip of his tongue cut off was ambitious, and the woman labeled 2 was supposed to maintain balance, despite the blood rushing from her mouth. Not to mention the alcoholic whose number indicated his hardworking personality. She had no idea how numbers had predicted destiny for the owner of the arm found on Red Square; nevertheless, Masha was sure the numerology idea was too simplistic to be useful. She didn’t even know whether the numbers meant something, or if it was only her imagination.

“Captain Yakovlev!” Masha stood up and set a sheet of paper down before her supervisor, who’d just returned.

He gave a start at being addressed so directly, but his face stayed impassive as he picked up the paper.

“What’s this?”

“These are deaths I picked out that seemed strange to me.”

“Strange again?”

“Yes. Again.”

“You know, I asked you to look at murders passed off as accidents.”

Masha said nothing.

Andrey sighed. “I’m listening, Intern Karavay.”

“You don’t actually care what I work on,” Masha said quietly. “Right? But without anything to work on, I’m still going to be here. You can’t get rid of me.”

“That sure seems to be the case.” He smirked. “Fine. Go ahead and investigate your strange things.”

Masha nodded quickly and almost ran out of the room.

“Why are you so pissy with her?” she heard someone ask as the door closed behind her.

Masha didn’t wait around to hear the answer.