Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 26

Pavel Sevastyanov, or Pasha, a twenty-two-year-old gunman from the Yasenevo gang, was in jail for the first time in his life. They’d put him right next to the latrine bucket in a jam-packed cell. The stink and stuffiness kept him from sleeping. Then there was the itching.

Lying on his bunk at night, staring into the cell’s putrid murk, Pavel scratched until he bled and thought how much better it would be if they’d arrested him right away, with everyone else, and not a few days later.

He was the only one who managed to escape and hole up after the shoot-out with Thrush’s crew at the Vityaz. He was more surprised than anyone to have gotten away, and he thought he’d keep on being lucky, the fool. But someone in his crew squealed. Only they knew he might be hiding out with Natasha’s granny in Koptevo, an old abandoned village outside Tula. Only his own guys. The cops wouldn’t have found out about Natasha, let alone her grandmother. Nobody knew about their friendship, or romance, or whatever it was, not even her parents.

Now he saw it would have been better to be picked up right away, with everyone else. The police thought that it was a survivor of the shoot-out who had offed Azarov—which made him, Pasha Sevastyanov, the prime suspect. Azarov was killed in the morning, and Pasha was picked up late that night. He could easily have made it from Koptevo to Moscow and back in time. He had both motive and opportunity. And the fact that Natasha’s grandmother honestly told the police that Pasha hadn’t gone anywhere that day, that he’d been there all day fixing her roof, that didn’t count. She was the only one to have seen him on the roof. And she was blind, deaf, and ninety years old. She could confuse the day and time and even Pasha himself. That kind of witness didn’t count for much.

In that crowded cell, as his neighbors snored, moaned, and muttered away in their sleep, Pasha Sevastyanov thought about how happy the cops would be to pin Azarov’s murder on him. He didn’t have the slightest chance of beating the rap. Which meant the gallows.

Sevastyanov wasn’t able to fall asleep until almost dawn, and it was a lousy, unhealthy sleep. He was awakened what felt like minutes later by a wave of familiar sounds: coughs, groans, and the doleful cursing of his neighbors. Someone was pissing at the bucket so that the spray flew straight at Pasha. Metal clanged and mugs of their morning gruel rattled. Pasha rubbed his cloudy eyes with his fists and tried to shake off the remnants of his nightmarish sleep.

“Sevastyanov! To questioning!” he heard through the ringing in his ears and noise in the cell.

They took him to an empty cell. Investigator Sichkin was sitting at a table. Pasha was surprised and pleased. He thought he was going to be questioned by the officer who usually came to see him, an old goat with icy, cutting little eyes. But this investigator was a completely different deal.

“I’d like some tea,” Pasha mumbled, casting hunted looks to either side. “And a smoke!”

Sichkin called the duty officer, and they brought tea, hot, sweet, and strong. Pasha’s eyes danced with pleasure. The good investigator also put two sausage-and-cheese sandwiches in front of him. Then offered him cigarettes.

“You’ve got yourself in quite a mess, Pasha.” The investigator sighed, lighting a cigarette. “A stinking mess. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Sevastyanov said, picking at the loose corner of the table and not looking the investigator in the eye. “When there was the shitshow with Thrush’s men, I fired like everyone. That’s the truth. But I didn’t kill the singer.”

“Pasha, you’re a smart man. You understand that your only chance of not getting the noose is if we find the real killer. Understand?”

Sevastyanov nodded, greedily smoked the cigarette down to the filter, and immediately lit another.

“Why are you digging around like this when you’ve already got me set for the gallows? You’ve done your job.”

“If I’d done it, I wouldn’t be talking to you. Pasha, understand that you’ve got a lot riding on this conversation of ours. If you help me, you’re helping yourself. You don’t have a choice. Your pals already turned you in and they’ll do it again, which is why you and I should be talking freely and openly.”

“I already told you everything. You and the officer.”

“How far did you get in school, Pasha?” Sichkin asked, squinting a clever eye.

“High school.”

“Plus two years at the Transportation Engineering Institute, which you didn’t finish. Not because you didn’t want to, you were just greedy. You wanted easy money. You wanted to have all the things other people had. Fine, I don’t intend to lecture you. I say this because you do have those two years, after all. And the army. You did a decent stint there. That comes to fourteen years. So, for the fourteen years of your adult life and the childhood before you went to school, you, Pasha Sevastyanov, were a regular guy. Your mother was a nice, educated woman. You know how to talk like a regular human being, not just hurl obscenities and prison slang. You haven’t been part of this crew all that long, just half a year. You haven’t even had the time to enjoy the money or the good life, and you’re already looking at the noose. But it wasn’t your pals who set you up. They don’t give a shit about you one way or the other. You were set up by different people, serious, powerful people. I want to find them, those people. And you’re going to help me. Pasha, you have to remember how your crew came up with the idea of starting a shoot-out at Thrush’s party. Who specifically pointed you to the Vityaz?”

“Well, I can help you there,” Sevastyanov was happy to say. “The three of us, Shovel, Claw, and I, we were at the Europa Casino on Voikovskaya. Shovel saw a dame he knew there. She and Shovel had a long conversation, but I wasn’t paying attention. I did realize she was setting him up, though. Afterward Shovel says, ‘Tomorrow we’re going to crush Thrush and his men. No more delays. I’ve had it with Thrush horning in on our territory.’”

“Had you ever seen that girl before?”

“Don’t think so. I don’t remember.”

“What did she look like?”

“Oh, elegant, about forty, maybe less. Tall and her hair was kind of light, but not blond.”

“Eyes?”

“I didn’t get a good look. I just remember she was beautiful and elegant, nice clothes, everything just right.”

“Did Azarov come up in the conversation?” Sichkin asked quietly.

Pasha thought about that and started digging his nail into the corner of the table.

“I can’t remember.” He shook his head sadly. “I’m not going to lie. I really don’t remember.”

“Fine.” The investigator nodded. “Let’s try this. Was the fact that Azarov was singing at the Vityaz news for you, or did you know about it beforehand? What do you think, did Shovel know?”

“Shovel definitely knew.” Pasha nodded. “It was like that dame was asking Shovel about Azarov personally, for us to… well, we could deal with Thrush and Azarov, at one go.”

“You mean she ordered it?”

“Well, I guess. Afterward I heard Shovel and Claw get into it a little when we were leaving the casino. Claw says, ‘Hey, she should pay like for a regular hit,’ but Shovel laughed and said, ‘What, saving on bullets?’ At the time I thought she’d probably either paid Shovel or promised to. And he wasn’t cool about sharing. But Claw shut up right away. He knows Shovel. Look at him cross-eyed, and he wouldn’t hesitate. That’s why he’s lasted so long.”

Before pulling out the envelope of photos, Misha finished his cooled tea, lit a cigarette, and then fanned out a few color photos of women’s faces in front of Pasha.

Pasha recognized the woman Shovel had been talking to immediately. Of the six snapshots, he picked two. Both were of Regina Valentinovna Gradskaya.

Volkov did not have a breakdown on air. He was charming, witty, and self-assured. Not even a hint of nervousness. Regina thought she could smell the very faint smell of another woman’s perfume on her husband’s jacket through the television screen.

She knew he’d canceled all his meetings and appointments today. He’d taken the old black Mercedes out of the garage again and left the house at eleven in the morning without a word to her. People called him all day, and she didn’t know what to tell them. For the first time in all the years they’d been together, she didn’t know where her husband was. Naturally, she lied. She covered for him automatically. Not for his sake, but for the sake of their business. Regina could decide certain questions herself, and she did. But there was a lot, an awful lot, that couldn’t be decided without Volkov. He needed to be present, in the flesh—not for Regina but for the business. And there was nothing in the world more important than the business.

The broadcast had been over for a while, and the nine o’clock news was on ORT. Right then Regina noticed she’d been fiddling the whole time with the black leather glove she’d found in the Mercedes. That was where that smell came from, so familiar and alien.

Regina had a good nose for perfume. The perfume a woman uses says a lot about her. Warm, cold, sweet, bitter—perfume smells differently on different skin and can be in-your-face saccharine or create an aura of mystery and inaccessibility. Perfume tells you who a woman wants to be, how she sees herself, how much she loves herself, whether she has complexes about her looks or is confident that she’s irresistible.

She knew now that for the rest of her life she’d have an aversion to Miss Dior. A warm, unobtrusive scent with a hint of sandalwood. That’s what the glove she was fiddling with smelled like. That scent hovered in the black Mercedes. There was nothing provocative or brazen about it. Today, when her husband came back—if he did come back—his jacket would give off this exact same gentle, unobtrusive fragrance.

“What does that mean, ‘if he did’?” she said, loud and clear. “What’s become of him? He’s gone off the rails, certainly, but not to that extent!”

She turned out to be right—as usual. He came back at ten thirty. She offered him her cheek for a kiss, which he gave indifferently and, refusing dinner, he went directly to his study. His jacket, which he had shed on a chair in the living room, really did smell of Miss Dior.

She waited ten minutes or so and cautiously cracked the door of his study. He was lying on the sofa in his trousers and unbuttoned shirt, looking at the ceiling.

“Tired?” she asked, approaching and perching next to him on the sofa.

“Yes, a little,” he said, not looking at her.

“You know, there were lots of calls while you were out.” She started telling him about the calls, about business matters, about the problems she’d resolved for and without him.

He replied in monosyllables: “Yes, no, right, I’ll have to think about it.” And kept looking at the ceiling.

“I saw you on television. That all went excellently. You really are in great form right now. What do you think that has to do with?”

“Why does it have to do with anything?” he asked calmly. “Am I still desperately ill and in need of constant medical intervention to be in good form?”

“No, Venya. You’re healthy.” She laughed gaily and stroked his bristly cheek. “You’re amazing. Lately we’ve been working so much, you haven’t been able to go a day without a session. I get awfully worn out when we work like this, too. That’s why I’m so glad I can relax now and not worry so much about you.”

“Yes, Regina. You can relax and stop worrying. The furor over the Vityaz scandal is over. I’m totally fine now. You know, I think I’ll have some tea.”

He got up abruptly from the sofa and headed for the kitchen, followed by Regina.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you.” She turned on the electric kettle and put two cups on the table. “Someone left a glove in the Mercedes. It should probably be returned. It’s on the magazine table in the living room, black, leather, a small size. Do you remember who you gave a ride to yesterday?”

“Yes, I do. I’ll return the glove.”

“Polyanskaya has very slender hands,” she said.

His light, almost translucent eyes gave her a sudden look, and after a moment’s silence he said quietly, “Regina, if so much as a hair falls from that woman’s head, I will kill you.”

“Oh ho!” she laughed gaily in reply. “Has it come to that?”

“Consider yourself warned.” He stood up from the table, got the box of Lipton tea bags from the shelf, opened it without hurrying, put a bag in each cup, and added boiling water.

Regina observed his hands carefully. They weren’t shaking. They were calm. She caught herself thinking that she wished his hands would shake so the boiling water would splash on his skin and he would cry out in pain.

“Venya, Venya.” She shook her head. “Do you really believe that that cop’s wife shares your feelings? She’s just afraid of you. I’ll bet nothing’s happened yet and nothing will. She’s leading you on. She has no intention of cheating on her husband. Believe me, I’m speaking now not as your wife but as a psychiatrist with twenty-five years’ experience.”

He sat there, staring silently into his cup.

“You’re silent because you have nothing to counter that with. You know I’m right. You never had a real first love. You and I know why. And now, at forty, you’ve suddenly remembered that and you’ve decided life is passing you by. Right now it’s as if the whole world’s been turned upside down. You’ve met a woman you were powerfully attracted to once, fourteen years ago. It wasn’t your hunger or your illness but a healthy, normal male emotion. Polyanskaya hasn’t changed in all these years. She’s young and good-looking. Yes, Venya, even I can admit that Polyanskaya is a very beautiful woman. There’s something about her that I don’t have and neither do all the women we meet in our work. Breeding and nobility. Right now you think that real human warmth can come from this woman and this woman alone. Notice how calmly I’m talking about this. I love you too much to be jealous. I’m not making a scene and I’m not disparaging her. I’m not against your affair. Ultimately, there is no such thing as a faithful husband. But partners should protect each other’s monastic faithfulness. Otherwise business suffers. There’s not going to be an affair, Venya. Polyanskaya doesn’t love you. She’s lying to you.”

Regina’s voice dropped deeper and deeper and she didn’t take her eyes off her husband. Her monologue transitioned smoothly into a powerful hypnosis session.

“Polyanskaya is lying. She doesn’t care for you. She’s laughing at you. You’re going to calm down and realize that there’s only me. No other woman exists for you. I’m the only one you can trust. She’s a stranger to you. She’s your enemy. There’s only my voice; it is a bridge over the abyss. It is a bright, moonlit road you are walking down, calmly and confidently. I’m the only person you do not have to be afraid with.”

He had already closed his eyes. He was rocking slowly in rhythm to her smooth voice. She had time to think that she should carefully move him to the floor; otherwise he’d fall off the chair when he came out of the trance. She took a step toward him—and the phone rang loudly.

Venya shuddered, opened his eyes, and shouted harshly, “Stop it! I didn’t ask you to!”

It was Regina’s cell. She picked up the phone, said, “I’m listening”—and walked out of the kitchen.

Left alone, Venya took a few swallows of tea and lit a cigarette.

“Venya, do you have cash? I need four hundred dollars,” Regina asked when she appeared in the doorway a minute later. “I am going to meet an informant. I’ve got six hundred but I have to give him a thousand. And the bank’s closed.”

“I can probably find four hundred. But why the urgency? Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

“No, it can’t, Venya. You only think it’s all over. In fact, it’s only just begun.”

“Regina, can you explain to me what this is about?” He stood up and went to the living room. His wallet was in his inside jacket pocket. He found four hundred dollars there.

“I’ll be back in an hour and I’ll explain then,” she promised. “Don’t worry, this has nothing to do with your Polyanskaya.”

Pretty soon, nothing will have anything to do with Polyanskaya, she thought as she got into her dark blue Volvo and drove through the blackness of the March night. I’m not jealous at all. It’s ridiculous to be jealous of a dead woman whose days are numbered.

Parking the car not far from near the Pushkin Museum, Regina proceeded on foot to Gogol Boulevard. The street was deserted. The loose springtime slush gleamed in the streetlamps’ shaky, trembling light. Stepping carefully, trying not to soil her light-colored suede boots, Regina headed down the boulevard. She saw a man’s dark silhouette on one of the benches. The bright light of his cigarette blazed up in the darkness.

Regina sat down beside him silently and lit up. Heavy shuffling could be heard in the darkness. A drunken bum was stumbling down the boulevard. Lurching toward the bench, he rasped, “Treat me to a little cigarette?” Regina silently tapped a cigarette out of her pack and held it out disdainfully, with two fingers.

“Thank you kindly,” he rasped. “And a light, too, if it’s not a bother.”

The man sitting next to Regina flicked his lighter. Lighting up, the bum glanced for a second at their faces, which were illuminated by the flame.

“Thank you kindly again.”

He staggered away, muttering under his breath, and disappeared into the boulevard’s darkness.

The man waited a minute more and quickly slipped a small, flat package into Regina’s hand. A minute later there were ten hundred-dollar bills in his jacket pocket.

“I’ll wait for your call at exactly two in the morning,” the man said.

Regina nodded, tossed her unfinished cigarette into the puddle under the bench, and, stepping cautiously, returned to her car. Before starting the engine, she pulled out and unwrapped the small package. It was an ordinary cassette tape. Regina immediately slid it into the player and listened to it.

She got home at half past one. Venya was sleeping peacefully, like a child, one hand under his cheek. Regina took off her clothes and stood under a hot shower.

How odd, she thought. I spent so many years forcing him and myself to live balanced on the brink of serious psychosis. His illness didn’t prevent him from doing some excellent thinking and work. On the contrary, he was strong and cautious. He had a keen nose for danger and knew how to avoid it easily. That was what I based all my calculations on at the time. His illness was like a protective capsule, a second skin. He had no doubts or regrets and didn’t reflect. The energy of his illness pushed him forward and made him invincible. I didn’t think he would ever get well. Yet it was all so simple. Terribly simple. He fell in love. Now he’s like a little boy discovering the world all over again. And that’s keeping him from thinking clearly and reacting appropriately to what’s happening. It’s much harder with him healthy than it was with him sick. I’m losing control of him. He relaxed only when I started singing Polyanskaya’s praises. I always knew he was crazy, but I never thought he was a fool.

Half an hour later, sitting in the kitchen in her robe, she dialed a number on her cell phone and said just three words: “Shovel. Claw. Five.”

“Apiece?” the unseen person clarified.

“Fine. Eight for both. But it’s urgent.”

“If it’s urgent, then ten.”

“Can you do it in the next twenty-four hours?”

“We’ll do our best.” The unknown man responded and then hung up.

She had to go to bed. Tomorrow morning she’d have to go to the bank and take ten thousand dollars out of the account. “No, better fifteen. Just in case. And not tomorrow. It’s already today.”

Listening to the recorded conversations that had taken place in the black Mercedes, Major Ievlev thought about how you can’t trust women. They’d been able to plant an eavesdropping device while the threesome had been strolling around Poklonnaya Hill. Naturally, the main conversations didn’t occur in the car but outside and in the private K Club, where his surveillance team didn’t even attempt to go.

Nonetheless, he understood exactly what was going on. The famous producer was wooing the police colonel’s wife. And she was open to his advances. That explained why she hadn’t phoned her husband in London and asked him to come home. What did she need her husband for when she had a millionaire as a lover? And it was Volkov’s wife who’d put the explosive in the stroller. Who else? What normal woman is going to stand idly by while her husband woos another woman? In Polyanskaya, Mrs. Gradskaya detected a serious threat to her familial and financial well-being.

Life is full of surprises, Ievlev thought to himself. When jealous, a woman can be motivated to commit all kinds of abominations. So can a man, of course. But right now he was thinking about one particular woman. Regina Gradskaya. She’d been seen in the courtyard where the stroller blew up. She’d tried to get into Polyanskaya’s apartment.

Regina Gradskaya’s resources were not inconsiderable. But she probably wanted to solve her personal problems herself without resorting to a contract killer. She was an experienced and intelligent woman, and she had an insider’s knowledge of the criminal world. It’s only the naive who watch Highway Patrol and movies who think you can solve any problem with a hitman without complications. She and her husband probably did have ties to organized crime. What if one of their mutual acquaintances found out about her plans and ratted her out to Veniamin Borisovich?

Not expecting success, the major decided to tail Gradskaya himself and see what she would do next. Sitting in his nondescript car near the elegant nine-story building on Meshchanskaya Street where Volkov and Gradskaya had an apartment, the major was about to doze off when he saw Regina Valentinovna’s dark blue Volvo come rolling out of the underground garage. Ievlev woke up, shook himself, and started following her.

In the darkness of Gogol Boulevard, it wasn’t at all hard for the major in his tattered jeans and old ski jacket to play the part of an inebriated bum.

Regina Valentinovna was not out for a tryst on Gogol Boulevard. She was there on business. In order to figure out what kind of business, Ievlev focused his attention on the man she was meeting, whose face in the flickering flame of his lighter seemed vaguely familiar. But the man covered his tracks well. When the meeting was over, he dashed down the Arbat side streets and dodged quickly through entryways and connecting courtyards until he arrived at the Arbat Metro station. Ievlev got there in time to see the last train carry a thirtysomething man of average height wearing a brown leather jacket and a military-style crew cut off into the night.

Major Ievlev returned to his car to rack his brain over where he’d seen the guy before.