Death of a Nightingale

The walls were a calming dove blue; the chairs and tables of light wood and lacquered steel all looked like something you might find at a high school from the ’70s. But the fact that the tall patrician windows were covered with bulletproof glass cooled the atmosphere a bit, Søren noticed, and made it impossible to characterize the police headquarters’s combined coffee-and-lineup room as cozy.

“He speaks almost no English,” said the detective inspector, discreetly flipping his thumb in the direction of a young man who sat drumming his fingers impatiently on his jean-clad thigh. “And the other one, the one we could at least speak to, seems to have vanished into thin air.”

“The other one?” asked Søren. Until now he had heard only about one man.

“Yes, there were two of them. They came to speak with the fugitive—well, at that point she wasn’t a fugitive yet, but …”

“So you’ve lost both an inmate and a foreign police officer?” Søren spoke with a certain coolness. He knew that the safety involving the transport of inmates wasn’t ironclad, at least not unless the so-called “negatively strong” inmates were involved. If one of the more peaceful ones got away, it was usually pretty anticlimactic. They often turned up on their own when they had taken care of whatever it was that was so important to them, or if not, you could collect them undramatically a little later in the day at the home of a much-missed girlfriend or at the birthday celebration of some family member. The system responded with an extra thirty days and the revoking of a few privileges, and that was that.

But this was different. Natasha Dmytrenko didn’t miss her fiancé—she had done her best to kill him once before, and now he was dead. It also worried Søren considerably that a member of the not ill-reputed Ukrainian militia appeared to have given his hosts the slip.

The DI grew defensive. “We can’t just lock our foreign colleagues in a cage,” he said. “He got pretty upset when he heard that she had escaped, and suddenly he was gone as well.”

Søren regarded the one Ukrainian policeman they still had under control. The man had short brown hair and a face broader than the average Scandinavian ones Søren was used to seeing. There was a restless, coiled energy in the drumming fingers and the tapping heel. A dark tie and a white shirt lent a bit of formality to the jeans getup and the ’70s hippie suede jacket that hung over the chair back behind him. He must be around thirty, Søren estimated, young but no kid.

“What’s his name?”

“Symon Babko, police lieutenant in some subdivision of the criminal police.”

Søren just nodded and elected not to tell the young assistant criminal policeman that this “subdivision” could swallow the entire Danish police force more than once without even noticing.

Even though it wasn’t said very loudly, the Ukrainian policeman must nonetheless have picked out his name through the ambient noise of chair scraping and cafeteria talk. He raised his head—what a chin, Søren thought; there was a warrior-like determination to that chin—and looked directly at Søren.

“Dobry den,” said Søren, holding out his hand and presenting himself. “Søren Kirkegard, PET.”

“Hello,” said Babko.

He had unusually large hands, Søren noticed. They looked out of proportion to his thin, knobby wrists. As if someone had attached an inadequately thin handle to a spade.

“I’m sorry. I speak only Russian, not Ukrainian,” said Søren.

Babko laughed. It was an amazing volcano eruption of a laugh that started far down in his skinny middle, moved up through his entire body and made his shoulders shake before finally rolling out across the cafeteria landscape with such power that conversations around them ceased.

“My friend,” he said, with laughter still in his voice, “when you have sat in a chair for almost twenty-four hours without being able to say anything but ‘Hello,’ ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Where is the toilet?’ there suddenly is not as much difference between Ukrainian and Russian as there usually is. We will no doubt understand each other.”

THEY BORROWED AN office on the second floor with a view of the parking lot.

“It was down there,” Symon Babko said, pointing. “Down there she got away.”

“Natasha Dmytrenko?”

“Who is really called Natasha Doroshenko,” said Babko. He pushed a worn file folder toward Søren. “She was questioned in two thousand and seven in connection with the killing of her husband, Pavel Doroshenko. Immediately afterward, she disappeared. There is, therefore, a request for detention.”

Søren opened the folder. Natasha Doroshenko looked like a frightened teenager in the photo that was glued to the first page of the detention order, but that was the way she looked, he remembered, in most of the photos that accompanied the Danish case files he had had the chance to skim. He attempted to speed-read to get an overview but had to accept that his linguistic proficiency wasn’t quite sufficient. The Ukrainian differences from the Russian he was used to teased his eyes, similar to the way Norwegian or Swedish forced him to read more slowly. It would take a while to digest the material, and right now it was more important to engage with the man who sat across from him.

“Tell me,” he said instead.

“In Ukraine, she is still wanted in that connection. She hasn’t been found guilty. Not yet. But she’s wanted. So when we learned that she had been recognized in Denmark, we were naturally interested.”

Søren nodded. “Are murder cases normally handled by GUBOZ?” he asked neutrally.

“At first it was a simple murder case under the jurisdiction of the criminal police. I wasn’t attached until a week ago when the extradition case started.” Babko looked closely at Søren. There was a subtext here, Søren sensed, but he wasn’t sure that he could read it.

“So you have formally requested her extradition?” he asked.

“Yes. But even before the extradition got properly underway, Colonel Savchuk had successfully requested an interview. The Danish officials were apparently very forthcoming.”

That searching gaze again. Søren was annoyed that he was clearly missing something, but he sensed that a direct question would be a mistake.

“I assume Savchuk is your English-speaking colleague?”

“That is correct. Colonel Jurij Savchuk.”

Finally Søren understood. With his slight emphasis, Babko was making it clear that Savchuk had a higher rank than he did and that he therefore was in a pinch right now. He couldn’t officially criticize a superior, though Savchuk had apparently left without being polite enough to tell his hosts where he was going or why.

“Where is Colonel Savchuk?” asked Søren.

“He is presumably investigating Natasha Doroshenko’s disappearance,” said Babko carefully.

“On Danish soil?”

“I assume he is doing so by agreement with the proper authorities.” It was clear that if this was not the case, Babko wasn’t at fault.

As far as Søren knew, there was no such agreement, and he strongly doubted that the “proper authorities” would take kindly to an unauthorized freelance effort from the Ukrainian police. But he let it pass. “The killing of Pavel Doroshenko,” he said instead.

“Yes. On September twenty-third, two thousand and seven, Doroshenko was found in his car near Lake Didorovka. At that point he had been dead for a few days. It was at first assumed that he had been murdered, since he had some obvious lesions, mostly on the hands, but it later turned out that the cause of death was heart failure, presumably caused by pain and shock.”

“He was beaten to death?”

“Yes and no. Four of the fingers on his left hand had been crushed—extremely painful, but under normal circumstances not lethal.”

“Crushed how?”

“In the car door.”

“And I assume it couldn’t have been an accident?”

“Unlikely. The door was slammed shut across his fingers several times. Normally you put a cable or thin rope around the victim’s wrist, and the hand is pulled toward the door while the victim sits bound in the car and already trapped by the seat belt. It’s said that the best tactic is to stick your hand as far out of the car as possible, so that the door slams closed on the wrist instead of the fingers, but it is very difficult not to attempt to pull your hand toward you. That’s the most natural reaction.”

Søren listened to the cool and almost routine description of the torture. “In other words, that happens regularly? This type of violence?”

“Yes. It’s a fairly common way of punishing people who, in one way or another, have had their fingers in the wrong pies.”

Søren’s eyes fell on the teenage-slim Natasha Doroshenko. “It doesn’t seem likely that this is a … punishment … that his wife could administer.”

“Not on her own, no. A petty criminal called Bohdan Pahlaniuk later took credit for providing the muscle. But he claimed to have been paid by the wife because she was upset that Doroshenko couldn’t keep his hands off other ladies. Pahlaniuk said that the intention wasn’t to kill him.” Babko tapped the case file with a square index finger. “Page two.”

Søren turned the page. Yes—page two was a confession signed by Bohdan Pahlaniuk and dated November 16, 2007.

“How was he caught?” he asked.

“Pahlaniuk was arrested and held for another assault a month or so after Pavel Doroshenko’s death. The Doroshenko confession surfaced in connection with that. But a warrant was out for her just a few days after the killing.”

“Why?”

“The most obvious reason, of course, was that she took off and left the country with her daughter a few hours after she had been questioned. But there were some other suspicious circumstances as well. Even though her husband had disappeared four days before he was found, she hadn’t reported him missing.”

“How long had they been married? How was their relationship?”

“They were married in two thousand. She was only seventeen. He was quite a bit older, in his mid-thirties.”

“Twice her age?”

“Yes, it’s not that uncommon. She’s from a small town near Kurakhovo in Donetsk Oblast. It’s not the greatest place in the world to live when you are a young girl wanting a bit of fun in life. Since the coal mine began shutting down production, everything has ground to a halt. There are whole neighborhoods that are practically ghost towns. He was a journalist, lived in Kiev in a fancy apartment—her ticket to the city and a completely different lifestyle.”

“Do you know whether there were, in fact, ‘other ladies’?”

“He had the reputation at least for being a bit of a babolyub before he married. Maybe the leopard hadn’t changed his spots just because he signed a wedding license.”

Søren considered the possibilities. There was apparently a certain amount of substance to the case against Nina’s young widow, and yet … certain peculiarities jumped out.

“Am I correct in assuming that Colonel Savchuk is a man of a certain position?” he asked.

For the first time in the course of the conversation, Babko sat totally still. The bouncing heel stopped bouncing; the fingers ceased drumming against the coffee mug.

“That’s correct,” he said. “In SBU.”

SBU was the Ukrainian secret police. Not exactly an organization with a spotless reputation.

“Not GUBOZ, then.”

“No.”

“What is his interest in this case?” asked Søren. “Wouldn’t it normally be handled by someone at a lower level?”

Babko looked at him for a few seconds with a poker face. “Correct again,” he said finally.

His replies became more and more minimal, Søren observed, the closer you got to Savchuk.

“Is he carrying his cell phone?”

“Presumably.”

Now we’re down to one word, thought Søren dryly. What would be next? Syllables?

“Do you have a number?” He deliberately shifted from the formal to the informal address to reduce the distance between them. We are colleagues, he tried to say. Help me out here.

Babko shook his head—a single abrupt gesture.

Silence filled the office. You could hear the traffic outside in Hambrosgade accompanied by the hissing of radial tires through slush.

“So you have no way of contacting him?”

“No.”

Not only was Babko a man playing away from home, but his only teammate was apparently more of an opponent than a fellow player. Søren could almost pity him, but only almost. Because one thing was clear: Babko was by no means telling Søren everything that he knew.

The Ukrainian militia was no knitting circle. Every year Amnesty International registered countless instances of torture, misuse of power and corruption, and the country’s own ombudsman in this area had had to note that up to three-quarters of those arrested were subjected to some form of abuse. In many instances the interrogation methods appeared not to have changed significantly since Soviet times when quick confessions were necessary if you were to solve the required 80 percent of your cases. Whether you had the correct guilty party was less important. It was all about closing the case in a hurry.

Was Babko one of the bully boys who routinely beat detainees with water-filled plastic bottles or kept them handcuffed for days? He didn’t look like the type, but then, not many torturers did.