Hard Currency

FOUR

The door to Paulinin’s basement laboratory in the Petrovka Police Station was unmarked and unnumbered. Dozens had mistaken it for a rest room. If the odors did not convince them of their error when they opened the door, the sights that greeted them made it instantly clear that they had blundered into madness.

Karpo entered Paulinin’s sanctuary at ten on the night of the murder of Iliana Ivanova, whose name he did not yet know.

Karpo’s distaste for the sprawling room had nothing to do with the odors nor the glass containers filled with greenish liquid and the remnants of body parts. It was the lack of order that displeased him.

In one corner stood a quartet of unpainted plaster statues of religious figures. In another corner, tucked under a table, was a box of empty bottles. The walls were lined with steel-topped tables covered with fragments of clocks, papers, parts of toys, and unnameable machinery.

Three long tables in the center of the room were also covered with stuff.

It was a room totally unlike Karpo’s own small room, which was neat and clean, like the cell of a monk. A bed in one corner. One table with a drawer alongside the bed. An old, large chest of drawers that had belonged to his family and now, along with the narrow wooden closet at its side, held Karpo’s few possessions. A small wooden desk. And ceiling-high bookshelves almost filled with identical black notebooks containing Karpo’s carefully written and cross-referenced files of unsolved Moscow crimes going back thirty years.

Karpo looked across the clutter, past the headless bust of a dressmaker’s dummy, at the man in the dirty blue smock. Paulinin looked back at him.

“I would like more time,” Paulinin said.

He was a bespectacled, nearsighted monkey with an oversize head topped by wild gray-black hair.

“I can return when you wish,” said Karpo.

“I didn’t say I had nothing for you,” said Paulinin. “I was stating a wish. I have things to show you. Come.”

Karpo made his way around the lab tables, avoiding something shapeless and quivering in the shadows. Paulinin had moved to his desk against the wall.

“Sit,” Paulinin ordered, pointing to the metal folding chair next to his desk.

Karpo lifted a pile of books from the chair, searched for someplace to put them, and settled for a spot on the floor between a metal coffeepot and what looked like a pants pressing machine. Then he sat.

Paulinin swept away some frayed notes on his desk, piled a few books onto an already precarious pile, and placed a notebook in front of him.

“I’ll share a secret with you, Karpo,” Paulinin said, pushing his glasses back on his nose with unscrubbed fingers. “I will share a secret and some tea.”

Paulinin reached down to his left, came up with a pot and two clear laboratory measuring cups. As he poured and served, Paulinin rambled.

“They are all butchers,” he said. “Butchers. Only Liebinski has pride. Only Liebinski has the right to call himself a pathologist. And he is not that good. The others are a disaster, a disgrace. And no one cares. No one cares. I get a lung or a brain and it looks as if it has been handled by a street cleaner.”

“There are times when it may have been,” said Karpo.

Paulinin looked over the rim of his cup to see if the gaunt policeman might be making a joke at his expense. But there was no humor in the pale Tatar. It was one of the things Paulinin liked about the forbidding figure who sat across from him.

“Perhaps, but the incompetence of a trio of ill-trained men without pride in their work is not the secret. Your visiting foreign minister from Kazakhstan is the secret.”

Paulinin put down his cup and opened a drawer. From the drawer he pulled a clear glass pot.

“The minister’s liver,” he said triumphantly. “Who do I trust with the minister’s liver? Which fool? Which liar? Which incompetent? Which politician? Who would appreciate what I have discovered? Only you, Emil Karpo.”

Karpo finished his tepid and tasteless tea. Was there an aftertaste of some bitter chemical in the cup?

“I appreciate your confidence.”

“Before I moved down here,” said Paulinin, looking around the lab, “I think I had a sense of humor. But now? I am too much in the company of ruptured spleens and infected brains. One loses one’s sense of humor. I knew that. It is a loss I accept in exchange for the sanity of being left to work. We are considered eccentrics, you and I.”

“It is not a choice I have made,” said Karpo.

“But it is one you should savor. The minister. One of the butchers in the hospital pathology laboratory who works in a well-lighted surgery with stone drains and equipment that functions said the minister died of complications resulting from liver failure, that the man was an alcoholic, and had been killing himself with drink for decades. Look at this liver. Take it. Hold it. Remove it from the bottle if you like. What do you see?”

Karpo took the bottle. He did not choose to open it or take out the liver.

“Enlarged, discolored. That might be a result of how the liver has been treated and preserved since its removal.”

“Good,” said Paulinin. “More?”

“It is intact,” said Karpo, turning the bottle. “With the exception of one anterior-”

“I removed that,” interjected Paulinin impatiently. “I removed that. But you see the point. Bujanslov, who did the autopsy, based his conclusion on, at best, a small piece of tissue. Any madman can see this is not the liver of an alcoholic.”

“And …?” Karpo resisted the urge to look up at the clock, which he knew hung over the lab table across the room.

“Induced acute hepatitis,” whispered Paulinin. “The minister’s liver is saturated with the enzyme characteristic of the disease.”

In the dim light in the corner, the unblinking Karpo would have been a frightening specter for most people. Paulinin simply smiled.

“So he died after an attack of acute hepatitis.”

“Induced, I said. Induced. He was injected with a massive enzyme-and-alcohol overdose. Injected directly into his liver. His liver was induced to fail. He was murdered. I find no case on record of such a murder.”

Paulinin rocked in his wooden chair, delighted, as Karpo put the jar containing the liver back on the desk. Paulinin looked at it as if it were a witch’s crystal.

“How did the murderer get him to accept an injection?”

Paulinin reluctantly removed his gaze from the liver in the jar, pushed his chair back, and stood up.

“The body is a mess,” he said, clasping his hands. “But I looked at it. Bujanslov is worse than a dolt, worse than an idiot. The minister had been sedated. The contents of his stomach … Botched job. Botched job. I even found the hole where the liver was injected. Spot near the vertebrae where the French and Americans go in for liver biopsies. Bujanslov the Butcher almost destroyed it in his need to make a hole the size of the Mir Hotel just to remove an inflamed liver.”

“And you have a report?”

“No, you have a report,” said Paulinin, placing the rough handwritten sheets in Karpo’s hand.

“I will turn these over to the proper investigative office.”

“I don’t care,” said Paulinin, sitting down again. “I am interested in science, not justice. I don’t believe in justice. I don’t care about it. I am, however, offended by incompetent murderers and pathologists.”

“The victim in the park this morning,” said Karpo.

“I’ve been busy with the minister’s liver,” Paulinin said with a wave of his hand, “but in respect for you I examined the body. It was a pleasure to see a body before the butchers got their rusty hatchets into it.”

Karpo waited, report on the minister in hand. Paulinin looked down at the pile of scrawled notes on his desk and then looked up at Karpo.

“Beaten with a pipe,” Paulinin said. “While she was kneeling. Blows didn’t kill her. Eleven stab wounds did. The knife did not belong to the killer. It belonged to the victim. Traces on the knife of the material in her pocket.”

Paulinin held up a hand and pinched his thumb and one finger together till they turned white.

“Traces so small they would fit between these fingers with a universe of room to spare. Even with these crude instruments I have found it. Even with the crude instruments that are rapidly turning me into a blind man.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not complaining,” said Paulinin. “I’m explaining my frustration with the impossible task I perform while butchers posture and preen in the sunlight.”

“I appreciate your skill and dedication,” said Karpo.

“I measured the wounds. Always difficult. Even. Close together. You want an informed conjecture?”

“Yes.”

“Your killer was frenzied, out of control. He ripped out an eye, possibly while the victim was still alive.”

“And?”

“And,” Paulinin said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his nose, “he is right-handed. He is tall, as tall as you are. He is strong. He is not old but not very young, perhaps forty. He was carrying a briefcase or suitcase. Bits of imitation leather where he dropped it on the ground while he did his work. Had you not brought the grass in … who knows?”

Karpo had seen a slight indentation in the grass near the body.

“The victim?”

“Ah, the victim,” said Paulinin, putting his glasses back on. “At least five years older than she looks. She had a baby within the last year. Pelvic expansion. And she has two tattoos, one of a small yellow angel on her left buttock and one of a gun on the sole of her left foot. I’ve seen that gun tattoo in the same place on four young people in the past two years.”

“Capones,” said Karpo. “A gang. Any more?”

“Much more,” said Paulinin. “But it will take more time. Is it past lunch?”

“It is night,” said Karpo.

“I have a tin of fish and some canned bread. Join me.”

“The Yellow Angel’s dead. Georgi says it was Tahpor.”

Anatoli Xeromen already knew this much.

“How?” he asked.

The gangly young man with the pockmarked face and red Mohawk haircut answered, “Knife. Georgi said he stabbed her twenty times. Something like that. Then …”

“Then …?” Anatoli prodded without looking up.

“He … Georgi says he fucked her, tore out her eye and something in her stomach, and ate …”

Anatoli Xeromen nodded to stop the report and sat upright in his high-backed wooden chair.

The two young men were alone in the Capones’ war room in the Gray Blocks. The red-haired messenger had no choice but to stand patiently and watch as his boss’s eyes moved back and forth as if he were reading an invisible message. The chair in which Anatoli sat was not particularly comfortable, but it was a throne from which Anatoli ruled. His throne room was a muted scream of stolen goods that Anatoli had decided to keep as furnishings. Mismatched, expensive rugs, some Persian and Turkish, several thick pastels from Sweden, and one from the United States, a Disney covered with scenes from Peter Pan.

The walls, painted bright yellow, were covered with perfectly aligned political posters extolling and attacking communism, Lenin, Stalin, and Gorbachev; movie posters of Marilyn Monroe, Harrison, Ford, and Gene Tierney; posters of Renoir people in parks and cafés; posters of Moscow Circus performances. The furniture was every bit as eclectic: an eighteenth-century brocaded pink-and-purple sofa, plush leather armchairs, beanbag chairs in Crayola colors, heavy wooden tables with claw feet, tables with white marble tops, and tables with thick glass tops mounted on gilded legs.

The room, which had once been a Communist party meeting room for tenants, was on the main floor of one of six fat ten-story buildings in the town of Cherboltnik, fifteen miles west of Moscow. The clutch of buildings had begun to crumble and crack within a year after they had been completed in 1951. These six buildings were known officially as Moscow River Gardens, though they were outside of Moscow, nowhere near the river, and boasted only a garden of useless furniture, abandoned rusty car bodies, and debris that not even the resourceful residents could turn into anything useful. There was not a resident of the Moscow River Gardens who called the complex anything other than Gray Blocks.

Several hundred yards away, six identical buildings faced the Moscow River Gardens. These buildings, officially named the Gagarin Communal Residence, were known to everyone as Black Blocks.

Gray Blocks and Black Blocks had long been enemy kingdoms for the young who lived in them. Each kingdom had its own army of the nearly illiterate, who battled each other, stole from each other, and even, on rare occasions, maimed and murdered each other. There was more fulfillment in that than there was in the world beyond the Outer Ring Highway.

Then, five years ago, a leader emerged from Gray Blocks, an unlikely leader, Anatoli Xeromen, who lived with his mother in one of the dark boxes within the concrete block. Anatoli was short and thin, his nose sharp and Romanian, his hair straight and of no distinct color, a situation he had remedied by dyeing it purple. Anatoli feared nothing and no one. Anatoli did not care whether he lived or died. And Anatoli was smart.

He had risen to leadership in Gray Blocks by his fearlessness and the fear of others, who wanted no block of concrete to fall on them when they least expected it. He had then united the two crumbling, dirty kingdoms with promises of revenge against the city of Moscow, promises of plunder and power.

The Capones had ridden into Moscow to terrorize Metro passengers, pedestrians, and storekeepers. Their numbers increased, and Anatoli became a force in stolen goods and intimidation throughout the city. He had his own car, his own bodyguards, and the respect of petty criminals who wanted nothing to do with the Capones and their crazed leader who insisted that every member have a weapon of his or her choice tattooed on the sole of his or her foot. Betrayal of Anatoli or the Capones by any member was punishable by forfeiture of the leg on which the tattoo appeared.

Anatoli’s mother, a firm believer in God, told all who would listen that she had been blessed with a son whom God had anointed for greatness. No one dared to contradict her.

Anatoli and the Capones did not hide. Visibility and fear were their commodities. Everyone knew the mark of the Capones, their punk English look, their hair. But now there was one who did not respect the Capones-Tahpor, the Ax, who had mutilated Yellow Angel and now spread fear among them. Anatoli already sensed a threat to his dynasty-that there might be an individual even more daring and dangerous than Anatoli Xeromen.

And then, too, he had liked Yellow Angel.

“You and Gino,” he said to the young man with the red Mohawk, “go to the police. Ask for her. Say we want the body.”

“What if they …?” the young man said.

“They know she was one of us,” said Anatoli. “The tattoo. Unless Tahpor … just do it. Ask for the one they call the Washtub.”

The young man with the red hair could think of many reasons why he should not go to the police, but he voiced none of them. Anatoli had given him the name Speechkee, “Matches.” His real name was Lev Zelinsky. He was seventeen years old and a Jew. Anatoli cared nothing about the backgrounds of the Capones. All he asked was loyalty, and in return for this he shared what they all extorted, bartered, and stole.

So instead of coming up with a reason to stay away from the police, Speechkee said, “In the morning.”

Anatoli nodded and the young man with the red Mohawk hurried away.

Anatoli rose and looked at the poster of Gene Tierney. The poster was black-and-white, a reprint. He was sure that the eyes must really be gray. He was fascinated by this woman with the hint of a knowing smile. She must surely be dead by now, as dead as Yellow Angel. Gene Tierney smiled at him and kept her secret.

Tomorrow Anatoli would tell the Capones that they would have to find and punish Tahpor. There was no choice. Unless they found the killer of Yellow Angel, Anatoli’s power over the gang would be undermined. Besides, he truly wanted to kill whoever had done this to Yellow Angel. He wanted to batter the killer’s face with the heel of his boots.

Anatoli looked once more at Gene Tierney. It was late, and he had promised his mother he would come up to the apartment by midnight and have a hot chocolate with her. Anatoli left the war room.

Sasha Tkach carefully opened the door to his apartment. Since there were two locks now, entering quietly had become a feat that defied success, but he tried his best.

Sasha, shoes in hand, had a series of hopes. He hoped his wife and children were asleep in the bedroom. He hoped his mother was asleep in the living room, which he had to cross to get to the kitchen alcove where there might be something he could eat without waking anyone. Then, if he got that far, he hoped he could undress, put on clean shorts and an undershirt, and watch something on the little television in the corner, preferably a soccer match since he would not be able to turn on the sound.

These, he believed, were not unreasonable hopes for a policeman who had just put in a fourteen-hour shift dealing with murder and bureaucracy. Murder had been far easier to cope with.

Sasha missed his former partner, Zelach, who had recently returned to limited desk work after almost being killed as a result of Sasha’s negligence. Karpo was reliable and professional, and he expected Tkach to be the same. Zelach was, putting it kindly, slow-witted, but with Zelach, there was no doubt that Sasha was in charge. His more recent partner, Elena Timofeyeva, was smart, efficient, ambitious, and, though he had more experience than she did, she was older than he and maddeningly confident.

When Elena was selected to accompany Porfiry Petrovich to Cuba, Sasha had been jealous. The prospect of private nights away from his family in a place where he heard there was still a reasonable supply of food was something to fight for, but the crucial issue had been a simple one. His French was nearly perfect, but Sasha spoke no Spanish.

So, at the moment, he was asking very little, as he closed the door to the living room, turned the locks without letting them click noisily, and made his way carefully across the room.

Before he had taken five steps he knew something was wrong. When he took the sixth, he knew what it was. His mother was not snoring. Her snoring had necessitated moving himself, Maya, and the children into the bedroom. Perhaps, he thought hopefully, she is dead, if she is, I’ll simply let her he there and discover the body in the morning.

“Sasha,” came his mother’s familiar loud voice.

Lydia was nearly deaf and far too proud to admit it.

In the bedroom beyond the door, Maya or one of the children stirred.

Sasha stood still.

“I see you there,” Lydia said. “What are you doing?”

Useless though it was, Sasha whispered loudly, “Shh, Mother. You’ll wake-”

“Turn on the light,” she ordered. As he obeyed he stepped on something hard.

Lydia was sitting up in bed ready for combat, her gray-black hair a wild nest, her small face pinched in the glare of sudden light.

“Are you hurt?” she asked.

Another sound from the bedroom.

“No, Mother. Maya and the children are-”

“Then why are you limping?”

“I just stepped on-”

“There’s no point in lying. You’re working with that Karpo. He is mad.”

Lydia was convinced that each of her son’s colleagues had some dangerous deficiency that would result in the maiming or death of her only child. The result of this conviction was that she was almost always angry with her son. The irony of this was that Sasha was convinced that he was a constant danger to those who worked with him. It was Sasha whose passions had betrayed him and almost gotten Zelach killed. It was Sasha whose depression had gotten him into a terrible and unnecessary fight in a bar while he and Elena Timofeyeva were conducting an investigation. Elena had not been hurt, but Sasha had suffered both broken ribs and painful bruises.

“I’m well, Mother,” he said. “I just want to eat something and go to sleep. Let me turn out the light and-”

“What are you hiding?” Lydia asked suspiciously as the bedroom door opened. Sasha suddenly felt massively sorry for himself.

“Hiding? Nothing.”

Maya stepped into the room wearing a giant T-shirt with the words “Comic Relief” printed on it in red letters. With her fingers she was brushing her long auburn hair away from her sleepy face.

Sasha shrugged as Maya reached back to close the bedroom door.

“He’s been hurt,” Lydia insisted.

“No,” said Sasha.

“Come,” called Maya, motioning to her husband.

Sasha dutifully took the five steps to the door. Maya turned to Lydia and said, “I’ll deal with him.”

Lydia was on her way to turn off the light when Sasha and Maya closed the door behind them.

“Hungry?”

“Ya galohdyen. Ya oostahl,” he whispered back. “I am hungry. I am tired.”

“Tense?”

“Tense,” he agreed.

She rubbed his cheek and chest while she unbuttoned his shirt.

“Let’s go in the bathroom,” she said.

They had been reduced to making infrequent love in the small bathroom. Sasha was excited, but the thought of the rusting toilet bolts and ceaseless dripping in the sink depressed him.

“Lydia is moving back to her apartment next week,” Maya whispered so softly that he wasn’t sure he had heard her correctly.

“Moving?” he repeated.

“Definitely,” she said. “I am well enough to take care of the baby. She can come over after work a few hours and help with Pulcharia.”

“She agreed to this?”

“She agreed.”

“That is a miracle. Miracles should be celebrated,” Sasha said. “Let’s go in the bathroom.”

At that moment Pulcharia said, “I want a drink.” Ilya awoke and began crying, and Lydia rushed into the bedroom without knocking.

Much to his wife’s relief, Sasha Tkach laughed.

After he had pulled the curtain on the single window in his one-room apartment, it took Yevgeny Odom twenty minutes to convert the space from a drab jumble of third-hand furniture into a war room that he was confident would earn the admiration and respect of Marshal Tutianovich himself had he been alive to see it.

On one wall of the small room hung the large chart that he had pulled from beneath his bed and carefully put in place. He had searched the Lucite surface carefully, as he always did, for signs of cracking or wear. There had been none, though a small patch in the lower right-hand corner would bear watching. He had checked his markers-red, black, and green with backups-and, satisfied, hung the black-and-white street map of Moscow on the opposite wall. It too was covered with Lucite and he checked it as carefully as he had the chart.

Was that a tiny crease, a shadow? He checked it again. It seemed to be all right.

He removed the ugly blue vase and the tablecloth from the metal tabletop and rolled the table from its place in the corner to the center of the room.

Next Yevgeny rolled a chair next to the table. The chair with its black metal arms and its woven green seat and back was his prize possession. He had spent a month’s wages and part of his savings on the chair four years earlier.

Then Yevgeny sat in his chair and checked the books he had placed on the metal table to be sure they were lined up and ready for use.

Then, as he always did, he swiveled first to the chart and then to the map to be sure that they needed no adjustment. His perspective seated in the center of the planning room was different from his perspective standing.

The chart, in neatly ruled columns, listed each of Yevgeny’s victims, along with age, approximate height, weight (again approximate), color of hair and eyes, description of clothing, place of birth, address (if known), place where he had killed them, details of the killing (weapon, number of wounds, etc.), date and time of killing, phase of the moon, the weather. Some of the information was missing, but not much. He had made it a matter of great importance to collect details from investigation of the victims’ possessions. There had been several times when he had been forced to travel as far as Kiev to get information and one time when he had to pose as a policeman to get data from the neighbor of a young woman Kola had killed not far from the Slavyansky Bazaar on … what was the new name of the street? Yes, Nikolskaya. Madness. It had been Twenty-fifth of October Street all his life, and now they had changed all the street names. As if changing a name changed history.

Yevgeny checked his markers again to be sure they were moist and sharp. Then he looked at the charts.

The information was color coded. Personal information about each victim was in red. Information about the location of the attack was in green. Data about the weather, phases of the moon, the time and day in general, were in black. He could have coded further, but Yevgeny did not want the chart to look like some festive game.

The map was stark. He had drawn it himself from a street map he purchased at a tourist bookshop. He had done it first in pencil. He had read a book on scale drawing and another on charting before he had begun. When he had been satisfied with the map, he had painstakingly gone over every line with carefully applied India ink and he had changed the names of streets as anti-Communist fervor erupted.

The Moscow map carried small red circles at the precise location of each murder. Next to each circle was the date of the killing and the name of the victim.

Yevgeny had shaved, cold showered, and changed into his hand-washed slacks and drip-dry white shirt.

He was ready.

The room existed, as all war rooms do, to plan the defeat of the enemy. In Yevgeny’s case, the enemy was any agency of the law that had been searching for him and for Kola.

The task was to provide his pursuers with no trail to follow. He was the lone submarine being pursued by a massive armada, but through wit and cunning he would elude them all.

To confuse them, Yevgeny would make them think there was a pattern. He would commit three consecutive attacks on the same day of the week, two or three exactly ten days apart, two in a row during full moons, every other attack in a park.

It was essential to keep checking, to be sure he had not accidentally or unconsciously fallen into a real pattern. Another concern was that some policeman would see a pattern where none existed and blunder onto his next attack by mistake.

He lacked one thing-someone with whom he could share his victories. He wasn’t sure when this need … no, he was not prepared to call it a need … this wish to tell someone had begun. Some time after the African boy on … He looked up at his chart. The girl this morning had been young and pale. There had been a tattoo of a yellow angel on one of her buttocks. Kola had removed her liver and taken two or three bites. And the eye … This was the kind of young girl who might carry the virus, but Kola was not afraid of such things.

Yevgeny put his hands behind his head, examined the chart and then the map, considered, and then made a decision.

He had never committed an attack in a Metro station. There was a very good reason why he had not done so, but a Metro station would be perfect. In fact, he suddenly understood, a Metro station was essential if the police were not to wonder at some point why he had avoided such an obvious place.

He would have to ride the lines and look at the stations that he already knew down to the last detail of each mural.

He would have to look with a fresh professional eye, considering the best place and time. It would have to be done soon. He knew that. Kola wanted to get out. There had even been times, like this morning, when Kola had almost burst out before it was safe.

A thought rose in the mind of Yevgeny Odom, the thought that he might be going mad. Perhaps that was another reason to make contact with someone who might understand, someone who could confirm that he was not insane. It was a powerful thought, but he pushed it away. His mind filled instead with visions of Metro stations buried deep below the ground, the massive escalator system, so deep, the deepest of the stations such as Revolution Square and Mayavovsky Square.

He would get little sleep this night, but it would be a night worth living.