Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 18

Regina tried not to run. That courtyard was far behind her. She walked quickly without looking around. The police siren’s insistent monotone seemed to follow her. She knew no one was chasing her, but that awful wail still drilled into the back of her head.

Everyone should mind their own business, Regina kept repeating to herself dully as she walked through the first spring rain. Everyone should…

She came across a trolleybus stop as a half-empty trolleybus was pulling up. Without looking at the number, Regina hopped on and dropped into an empty seat. The doors closed, but the police siren kept after her. Regina realized no one else could hear it; it was all in her head.

The back of her head and her neck hurt badly. When that huge SUV rammed into her pathetic tin can, Regina’s head whipped back and the finger she had on the remote’s button jerked. And set it off. That it happened a few moments too soon was no one’s fault.

She should be glad she hadn’t broken her back; even her Swiss doctors couldn’t replace vertebrae. Her muscles hurt, but that was nothing. Most important, she hadn’t lost consciousness and was able to jump out and run away in time. It might have been much worse. She should be glad.

“Lady, have you gone deaf or something? Show me your ticket!”

Regina had sunk deep into her thoughts and didn’t understand immediately what was happening. Looking up, she discovered a young man peering down at her. He was holding a metal badge and poking Regina in the nose with it. That was when she remembered she hadn’t taken public transport for at least ten years.

“Pay the fine or we’re going to the station!” the inspector threatened.

That’s crazy! Regina thought. The station is all I need now!

“How much?” she asked the fellow quietly.

“Ten thousand,” he told her angrily. “Look, it’s all written here in big letters. Come on, lady, shake a leg!”

You animal. You bastard! Regina shouted to herself, but she made a heroic effort and said politely out loud, “I’m sorry, young man. I’ll pay the fine right away.”

She started rummaging around in the pockets of her Afghan jacket, which was just as disposable as that pathetic Moskvich. But all she had in her pockets was a fake driver’s license made out to Galina Vladimirovna Tikhova, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and the tiny remote that had set off the bomb.

“Hey, what’s going on?” The inspector’s coworker came up, a guy a little older but with the same crude face.

“The woman doesn’t want to pay the fine,” the fellow told him venomously.

“I feel very unwell,” Regina said.

“Let’s go to the station.” The older one tried to pull Regina up by the elbow.

All the passengers’ heads turned in their direction.

“Shameless!” An old woman intervened. “Don’t you have anything better to do than to hound a person! Can’t you see the woman doesn’t feel well?”

Regina really did not look her best. That morning she’d been painstaking about her makeup: gray shadows under her eyes, exaggerated folds around her nose and mouth, thin pale lips. She wore a black knit cap, old and falling apart, which gave her face a pitiful, even funereal look. It was exactly how she thought an elderly, well-educated woman driving an old used car ought to look.

In creating this image, Regina had pictured a vocational school teacher or a senior researcher at some lab. Everything good in life was behind her. Today she lived off a miserable check every month, subsisted on bread and potatoes, wore crummy twenty-year-old clothes, and bore her poverty with quiet dignity.

What could a poor, sweet, educated Moscow lady have to do with a bomb in a baby stroller?

Regina had anticipated everything, down to the tiniest detail. Except for this one. She wasn’t carrying cash. Not a kopek. She’d forgotten it. In Regina’s day-to-day existence, Russian cash was virtually useless. She was used to paying with a credit card, since she only shopped at the best and most expensive stores. Whenever she got stopped by a traffic cop, she gave him a US fifty-dollar bill.

But she wasn’t carrying US currency, either. Regina swore at herself. She actually wept from fury. The two inspectors were shouting obscenities and trying to raise her up by the elbow.

“I’m sorry,” she said through her tears. “I’m coming back from a funeral. I don’t have any money. I don’t feel well. I’m sorry.”

The situation was getting dangerous. Any minute they would lift her from her seat, drag her off at the next stop, and take her to the police station. She wouldn’t even have a chance to toss out the remote. They were holding her by the arms, and very tightly.

“Stop shouting,” came a young woman’s voice nearby. “Leave her alone. I’ll pay the fine.”

Sitting across the aisle was a pretty young woman with a boy of about four in her lap. She held out a ten-thousand ruble bill to the inspectors, who fell silent and exchanged stunned looks.

“Really? You’re going to pay for her?” the older one asked, incredulous.

“Take the money and write out a receipt,” the woman replied calmly.

“Okay, we’ve got ourselves a good Samaritan,” muttered the young one, snatching the tenner and slipping it into his pocket.

“Don’t forget the receipt,” the woman reminded him.

“Yeah, yeah.” The younger one reached into his pocket.

“Thank you so much,” Regina murmured, distraught. “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“My pleasure.” The young woman smiled, stood, and picked up her child. “Anyone could find herself in your situation.”

What a strange town, Regina thought. On the one hand, those louts, and on the other hand, good souls like this woman. For someone who takes public transportation, ten thousand is serious money. Why did that young mother waste that money on a woman she doesn’t know? Out of compassion? It really is funny.

The trolleybus pulled up to its next stop and the doors opened. First to hop out were the inspectors. Then the young woman, carrying the child carefully down the steps. Followed by Regina.

Leaping lightly over a black, hardened snowdrift, she scrambled into the street and hailed a ride.

“Volokovsky Lane,” she told the driver as she sat in the front seat of the first car to stop.

The young woman with the child looked on in astonishment at the green Opel spiriting away the impoverished old woman who hadn’t had the money for a ticket.

“I saw it! I saw it all!” a skinny, energetic old lady who’d dashed out of the front door in her robe and slippers jabbered. “I was looking out the window. My cat ran away. He needs a kitty in the spring and he goes missing for days. I get so, so worried, I look for him out my window. I can’t call out because my window doesn’t open. I puttied all the cracks in the fall. You know how drafty it gets here. And they’re always turning off the heat. I used to go to the building office and complain! The kind of money we pay for our apartments.”

“Hold on. Let’s take this slowly.” The investigator stopped her. “What floor do you live on?”

“The second. There it is, that’s my window.”

The officer looked where the old woman was pointing. Indeed, from her window she should have an excellent view of the playground and parking lot.

“At what time did you start looking out the window?”

“Oh, I don’t remember.” The old woman was huddling from the cold.

“Maybe we can go to your apartment?” the officer suggested.

“I haven’t tidied up,” she said, embarrassed.

“That’s all right, it doesn’t matter.”

The small apartment smelled strongly of cat. The radio was turned up loud. With a glance at her unmade bed, the embarrassed old woman shut the door to the bedroom and took the officer into the kitchen, where she busied herself clearing crackers off the table.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” the investigator said when his host had finally calmed down and taken a seat across from him. “Your full name.”

“Klavdia Semyonovna Kolesnikova, born 1925.”

Despite her advanced years, Klavdia Semyonovna had remarkably sharp vision. She described in detail the young woman who’d come into the courtyard with the stroller and how the child was dressed.

The officer himself had seen that woman and child half an hour before, so he knew that the old woman hadn’t missed a single detail.

“Well now,” Klavdia Semyonovna continued. “She left the stroller by the bench and went over to the swings. She was carrying the child. The child’s big enough to walk, but the puddles are something! And there were two bags hanging off the stroller. I even thought, ‘What are you doing, dearie, leaving your bags like that without anyone watching them?’ And it’s a fine stroller. Imported. Then I see a woman come out from that car over there.”

She and the officer went over to the window and she pointed to the small, light green Moskvich.

“See? She got out, that woman. She walked over to the stroller and then straight back to the car, quickly. She got in and sat there.”

“Did you notice what she was doing by the stroller?”

“No, I didn’t. I couldn’t see. It all happened so fast. Now I think the woman dropped a bomb into one of the bags. But at the time I didn’t think anything of the kind. She walked up and walked away. Who knows why? Maybe she wanted to take a seat on the bench. But she saw it was wet and changed her mind. And then this one drives in in one of those, oh, I don’t know what you call it. A hefty kind of car, black. Mainly black, but with colorful doodles on the sides. I’ve seen it a lot lately. I don’t know if he lives here or he’s visiting someone. It’s across the way, not our building. I know all of ours. So this black behemoth rams into the green car from behind. I can’t tell what’s going on. The woman with the child has fallen to the ground, like this, you know, on her elbows. And the little girl’s underneath her. She was shielding the child with her body, and then something went off with a bang. My first thought was little boys up to mischief. Lately we’ve had them misbehaving here a lot, setting off those… what do you call them… firebangers.”

“Firecrackers,” the officer corrected her.

“It’s all the same. It makes a big bang and the windows rattle. And you, the police, how is it you let this disgrace continue?”

The officer smiled. “Continue, please, Klavdia Semyonovna.”

“What’s there to continue?” The old woman sighed. “I look and the stroller’s flying. Flying through the air. And on fire.”

“And the cars?”

“I wasn’t looking at the cars. My heart just sank. That’s all we need, I thought. How terrible! If it had happened just a little later, that woman would have put her child in that stroller. That’s where they were headed, toward the bench. What kind of beast do you have to be to put a bomb in a stroller!”

“Klavdia Semyonovna, please describe in as much detail as you can the woman who got out of the green car.”

“Well, she wasn’t young.” The old woman furrowed her brow in concentration. “But not old, either. Middle-aged. Fifty maybe, or a little less. Tall, but not very.”

“Approximately how tall?”

“Stand up, young man,” the old woman ordered him.

The officer stood up straight in front of her. He was tall, well over six feet six. The witness eyed him critically.

“Compared with you she was short, of course,” she concluded. “But basically tall.”

The officer sighed and sat back on the stool. “Taller or shorter than the one with the stroller?”

“A little taller, I’d guess. Or maybe the same.” The old woman shrugged.

“Okay. What was she wearing?”

“A jacket, a short brown jacket. With a fur collar. Tanned leather. A shaggy black collar. She had a black knit cap and her hair was tucked under it. A dark skirt. Brown, I think. A simple kind of skirt, not full or narrow. Long, but not very. Boots… that I can’t remember exactly. Black, I think.”

“Was she carrying anything?”

“No. She had her hands in her pockets. She didn’t have anything. No purse or bags.”

“What about her face? I realize it’s hard to make things out from your window, but still…”

“It was like she didn’t have a face.” The witness shrugged.

“What do you mean by that?” The investigator was surprised.

“Well, it was unremarkable. The most ordinary face there could be. Like she didn’t have one.”

The officer stood up, went to the window, and asked the old woman to come over. Below, in the parking area, the crime scene unit from the Federal Security Service was hard at work. The officer pointed to one of them whose face could be seen.

“How would you describe that face?”

“Round, snub-nosed,” she answered without hesitation. “A peasant face. Simple. Fat lips. He looks like some actor. There was this wonderful film, about the war. The Dawns Here Are Quiet. They showed it again on channel six a little while ago. I always watch our Soviet films. There’s an elder in it, such a sincere, simple man. This one here looks like that elder in the face. I mean the actor who played him… I’m sorry, I can’t remember his name. He’s a fine actor, only he wasn’t in a lot of films.”

The fat-lipped, simple-looking crime scene investigator really did look like Vaskov, the elder from The Dawns Here Are Quiet. The officer himself had enjoyed watching it on channel six.

“You should come work for us.” The officer smiled. “What about that woman? Maybe she resembled some actress or news announcer, too? After all, when she was walking from her car to the bench, she was facing your window.”

“No.” The old woman shook her head. “She doesn’t look like anyone.”

“But if you came across her, could you recognize her?”

Klavdia Semyonovna thought about that and then said slowly, “Depending on what she was wearing.”

“Do you think she was dressed richly or poorly?”

“In between… Maybe more not rich. So-so.”

The officer was very sorry. Old lady pensioners like this one often came forward as witnesses. They look out the window during the light of day and sit on benches by front doors. They notice all kinds of things. Their testimony is usually inconsistent and muddled. The old women don’t see or hear well and they love to chatter on about irrelevant topics. It’s hard and exhausting to work with witnesses like that. But here he’d struck gold. He envied her vision and powers of observation. But almost nothing substantive had come of it.

He was, however, able to establish fairly quickly that the hefty black car with the “doodles” on the sides was a Jeep Cherokee. The neighbors from the building across the way informed him and his colleagues that about three months ago, a single woman had moved into apartment 170. It was this young and beautiful woman that the owner of the Jeep visited a few times a week.

The woman was home. Natalia Kosenko, born near Moscow, in Podolsk, in 1975, had rented this two-room apartment in November of last year. She was calm and indifferent to the police’s arrival.

“Did you hear the explosion in the courtyard?” they asked her.

“I thought I heard a bang about forty minutes ago, but I was in the kitchen, and the window there looks out on the street, not the courtyard. And I had music playing. I didn’t pay any attention. We have kids setting off firecrackers here all the time.”

“Does anyone you know have a black Jeep Cherokee with colored designs on the doors?”

“Vovka the Dove,” she blurted out and immediately clarified that. “Vladimir Bogatykh. Why?”

“Do you know his license plate number, home address, and telephone number?”

“I don’t remember the license plate number. It’s a new car. I don’t know his address, either. He’s the one who visits me. He’s never once taken me to his place, and I’ve never written him any letters.” She grinned. “But his phone number—that I have.”

The Jeep driver’s identity was established quickly and easily. By the time he was twenty-eight, Vladimir Bogatykh had managed to be convicted twice, the first time as a minor, getting probation for armed assault. And at eighteen for real, five years, for car theft.

According to police files, for the last six months he’d been a member of the Lyublin criminal organization, which controlled a major goods market and a chain of stores in the Lyublin district. It was a small gang of about twenty that operated under the wing of Garik the Orange, an ethnic Georgian.

To think that this low-level thug would place a homemade bomb, the equivalent of fifty grams of TNT, in a stroller in the courtyard of his lover’s building, and use his own car to do so, was the height of idiocy. Moreover, Bogatykh had never had anything to do with hits before. And if he’d been told to off someone, he’d have gone about it completely differently. He certainly wouldn’t have arranged to do the hit in the courtyard of his girlfriend’s apartment building.

It became obvious to the investigator that the person who’d contracted Lena Polyanskaya’s murder had to have followed her first. It was just chance that Polyanskaya had turned into this courtyard on her way home. If that monster of an SUV had been following her, she would have been sure to notice it.

As convenient as it would be to pin the blame for the bombing on Vladimir Bogatykh, who was a known criminal, after all, the case fell apart under even the most cursory examination.

Consequently, when they tracked down Bogatykh and questioned him, he honestly told them everything he could remember: about the crappy tin car and the lady in the short jacket and black cap he noticed as he drove out of the courtyard. The fact that he had cleared out as fast as he could was understandable. Why should they lay eyes on him if they didn’t have to?

Meanwhile, the crime scene unit, after painstakingly examining the abandoned Moskvich with the crumpled rear, had come up with nothing of use to the investigation. Not even fingerprints. The woman behind the wheel must have been wearing gloves the whole time. The only trace of the woman who had occupied the vehicle was the faint, barely detectable fragrance of expensive French perfume.

According to the traffic police, the green Moskvich had been reported stolen three years ago. The license plate was fake.