Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 3

Moscow, March 1996

Katya Sinitsyna was woken up by the long and persistent doorbell. She discovered she was lying on the rug in the living room, wearing a raggedy robe thrown over her naked body.

“Mitya!” she called out loudly. “Have you gone deaf or something? Can’t you open the door?”

She stood up and staggered into the front hall. The bell kept ringing. Without turning on the light or asking who it was, Katya opened the front door wide. It was unlocked.

“Why all the racket? Can’t you see it’s open?” Katya, displeased, asked the man standing on the threshold.

Entering and shutting the door behind him, the man flicked the light switch, took Katya’s face into his hands, and looked carefully into her eyes.

“Katya, child, you shouldn’t be alone right now,” he said gently. “Go get washed and dressed and come to our place.”

Only then did Katya wholly wake up, stare at her unexpected visitor, recognize her father-in-law, Mitya’s father, Mikhail Filippovich Sinitsyn, and burst into tears.

“Yes, child, you cry.” He stroked her cropped reddish hair. “That will help. Olga can’t cry at all, neither can his mama or grandmother, and I still can’t. My insides are burning up, they’re on fire, but the tears just won’t come.”

“Just a minute.” Katya freed herself from his hands, sniffed, and wiped her tears with her fist. “If you’ll wait here, I’ll go get dressed.” She pointed to the low bench in the front hall, slipped into her room, and slammed the door behind her, right under Mikhail Filippovich’s nose.

He wasn’t offended. The front hall was fine with him. How could he expect civility from this poor little girl after what she’d been through? You could see she was in a dreadful state. Everyone was in a dreadful state. Did those niceties amount to anything?

Mikhail Filippovich tried as hard as he could not to think about his son. What had happened seemed like an absurd, impossible nightmare. He still hadn’t seen his son’s body. He drove the image of it from his mind. The brief sentence, “Mitya hanged himself,” seemed like a prank, someone’s evil joke.

He’d gone to get Katya because he didn’t know what to do with himself, didn’t know how to be, how to fill the time until the funeral. More than that, he truly felt very sorry for the girl. She was practically an orphan, a fragile, defenseless creature. There wasn’t anyone to think about her, to care for her. Olga had taken on all the details of the cremation. His wife and mother-in-law were wandering around the house like shadows, cleaning, since they’d decided to hold the wake at their place rather than here, in Vykhino. His grandsons were at school all day.

A cremation, a wake—who was it all for? Not for his Mitya, his handsome, talented, kind little boy. They couldn’t even have a church funeral. No priest would read the service for a suicide.

His Mitya was gone. He’d killed himself. But why? Why had he done this to himself and all of them? How had they wronged him—his parents, his sister, his wife Katya?

Mikhail Filippovich believed he knew his son and had a fairly good sense of him. Since early childhood, Mitya had been an open and sincere boy. He’d had none of those emotional black holes that might help explain this inconceivable act.

Pulling on jeans and a sweater, Katya wondered whether she should shoot up now, beforehand, or if it would be better to bring a few pills to take later. Lately, the pills had had practically no effect. No high, but coming down was easier. On pills she could hold out, make it through to the next needle. At this moment, she didn’t care; she could shoot up there, too, without even hiding in the bathroom. What difference did it make now? Sooner or later, they were going to find out. The cops or someone else would tell them. Not Olga, of course. But what was the point in hiding it now? If Mitya was gone, did it matter that his wife was an addict? Katya didn’t even notice she was thinking about herself in the past tense, as if she too were gone.

She remembered six months ago when her husband’s sister had turned up without warning. Mitya had gone somewhere for a few days. Katya no longer cared where he went. He’d told her, of course, but she forgot instantly. He’s gone. Fine.

Naturally, the apartment was a disaster: dirt, bottles lying on the floor, cigarette butts floating in the sink, music blaring. And Katya staggered around in the same raggedy, soiled robe, high.

There were only two bottles, Privet and Absolut, but both were empty. Katya had decided to have a one-woman party. She hadn’t stepped foot out of the house for three days, shooting up and drinking, drinking and shooting up. When Mitya was around, she wouldn’t let herself unwind like that. It wasn’t until later that she stopped caring altogether, but then she had still kept up appearances around him, trying to let him hold on to the hope that she wasn’t entirely on the needle, just partly so, as if that were even possible. But the minute he left, she was off on a bender.

And now—holy shit! Olga the businesswoman, as large as life, the Fury in a business suit was in her home. She dragged Katya into the bathroom, put her under the shower, and, sadist that she was, turned on the icy-cold water. Then she forced her to drink two cups of strong coffee.

“How long has this been going on?”

“A year,” Katya admitted.

“What are you shooting up?”

“Whatever I can get.”

“Show me what you have.”

Katya showed her the ampoules, but only the empty, used ones. There wasn’t anything written on them, but Olga wrapped them up neatly in a plastic bag, and then a handkerchief, and put them in her purse.

“You buy it from whoever you can, yes? On the Arbat and in the subway at Pushkin Square? Any debts?”

“No,” Katya said with something like pride.

“Of course.” Olga nodded. “I give Mitya money, and you take it from him. It turns out I’m working for your drugs. Any pills?”

Katya went into the bedroom and returned with an empty Haldol pack. Olga put it straight into her purse.

“Tomorrow I’m taking you to a doctor. You’ll check into the hospital. Don’t be afraid, it’s a good hospital, not like the one before. You’ll stay as long as it takes, until you’re completely well.”

“There’s no such thing as completely well,” Katya noted cautiously. “That doesn’t happen.”

“Yes, it does. So far you’re still doing this alone, you’re not on the streets, you haven’t picked up AIDS. Or have you?”

“Olga, stop it!”

“Well, let’s just say you’ve been going in that direction for a long time. Anyway, this isn’t about you, it’s about Mitya.”

“Olga, I do love him very much.”

“I know you love him. Lord, if I’d found you here with a guy, this would be much easier for me, I can promise you!”

“No, I’m not cheating on him!” Katya was offended. “I don’t need anyone but him. Mitya’s all I think about, all the time. I feel like garbage and I’m so ashamed for you to see me like this. You have to forgive me, Olga!”

“We’ll talk about forgiveness another time. For now, remember this. My parents, to say nothing of my grandmother and my sons, can’t know anything about this. You’re going to the hospital for female troubles.” Olga grinned bitterly. “We’ll tell them this is the last hope for curing your infertility. Don’t worry, I’ll take responsibility for the lying. Right now, you’re going to put this pigpen in order so that you’re ready tomorrow. I’ll come by and take you to the hospital myself. Understand?”

Katya understood everything, and she stayed in the hospital for nearly two months. It really was a nice hospital. She had a private room with a television. The doctors and nurses were polite and attentive. But they were using the same treatment methods Katya had tried so many times before. Just as she’d expected, they were just as torturous and ineffective as she remembered.

Katya fell off the wagon less than two weeks after checking out. It just happened.

For some reason, six months later, she recalled that conversation with Olga more distinctly now than she did the events of last night and early this dark morning.

The day had fallen apart into loose, cloudy pieces that flashed before her eyes like snippets from an old film: Mitya’s bare feet on the kitchen floor, his still-warm, big, heavy but pliable body, the dull scissors that couldn’t cut his thick leather belt. And the cold. The cold was what had woken her. Her blanket had slipped off and the window was wide open. And the night was very cold.

Katya wasn’t the least bit surprised that the latch on the window frame in the bedroom had broken, since it had been hanging by a single screw for a long time. Mitya hadn’t gotten around to fixing it, which wasn’t good when you lived on the first floor and the window didn’t shut properly. Actually, Katya didn’t give a damn. They didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway.

Early in the morning the window thudded and opened wide from a sharp gust of wind. Katya woke up and closed the window. Only when she returned to bed did she discover that Mitya wasn’t next to her. She called out to him. Her teeth chattering from the cold, she went into the front hall and saw in the kitchen doorway… No, better not to remember.

For some reason the phone wasn’t working. Her sleepy, frightened neighbor in curlers and nightgown couldn’t understand right away what was wrong or why Katya was asking permission to use her phone at five in the morning.

Then there were the police, and the doctors, and the questions that were so hard to answer. She was ashamed and frightened. Her thoughts kept getting scrambled and her tongue wouldn’t work. The cops weren’t in the mood to go to much trouble. It was suicide, plain and simple. The ambulance doctor turned back the sleeve of Katya’s robe and snickered. She tried to explain that Mitya had never used drugs, but they wouldn’t listen or understand.

And Mikhail Filippovich was still waiting in the front hall. Why wouldn’t she let him into the room? Her instinct had taken over, her fear of Olga: “My parents can’t know anything.”

Katya came out of the room in relatively decent condition. She hadn’t shot up, but she’d brought her pills and tossed a couple of ampoules and a needle into her purse.

Of course, she should also have washed up, combed her hair, and brushed her teeth. Never mind. It didn’t matter now.

Interior Ministry Colonel Sergei Krotov’s beige Zhiguli had been stuck in a hopeless traffic jam on the Garden Ring Road for nearly forty minutes. The wet snow that had been falling lazily since early evening had turned into a real blizzard. There weren’t that many cars at that hour, but there’d been an accident somewhere up ahead, near the Mayakovsky subway station, and there was nowhere to turn off anywhere nearby, and now the whole herd of cars was honking impatiently, waiting for the traffic cops to sort out the mess.

The warmth in the car and the rhythmic movement of the wipers across the windshield were lulling. He could barely keep his eyes open. For the past few days, Sergei had gotten very little sleep. In two days he was supposed to go to England. Scotland Yard had invited a group of Interior Ministry associates for a three-week exchange. Before leaving he had to get through a mountain of cases so high it made his head spin.

The morning of the day before yesterday, he’d handed materials in to the Prosecutor’s Office on the preliminary investigation into a shoot-out at the Vityaz restaurant in a Moscow suburb. It was the usual gangland fracas, but of the seven dead, two turned out to have worked for the Interior Ministry. That was why the case had been dumped on domestic counterintelligence and the department Krotov ran.

Ten days ago, there’d been a fancy banquet at the Vityaz. A famous criminal, Pavel Drozdov, otherwise known as Thrush, had been celebrating his forty-fifth birthday. The restaurant had shut down two days before the banquet in honor of the occasion, and Thrush’s men had checked every nook and cranny of the dining and banquet halls, bar, kitchen, sheds, toilets, and director’s office. A security specialist placed men around and inside the building, an over-the-top cottage with gingerbread trim.

The guests assembled, but before they could eat the cold appetizers, thugs armed with submachine guns burst into the banquet hall. The painstakingly and professionally placed guards didn’t help. Not all the guests had time to pull out their guns, and five were taken out right there. First to be killed was Thrush himself, followed by the two men from the Interior Ministry.

What made this so troubling for the authorities was that those Ministry men, a major and first lieutenant, were attending the party as invited guests, and the nature of their friendship with a criminal like Thrush was revealed only after their untimely end.

Another important detail: a witness to the slaughter. He’d been invited to the restaurant to provide entertainment. Friends had once seen Thrush weep as he listened to a recording of one of Azarov’s smash hits, “Farewell, My Faithless Love!” and they’d decided to give him this touching performance as a gift.

At the moment the young thugs burst into the hall with their submachine guns, Yuri Azarov was standing on the small stage with a guitar singing the second verse of Thrush’s favorite ballad:

He managed to jump off the stage and, using his guitar as a shield, roll under a table and lie there, holding his breath through the entire attack.

The pop star had performed for an audience of criminals on more than one occasion, but this was his first time witnessing this kind of slaughter. He considered it a miracle he’d survived. He was trembling from horror, and it was almost impossible to get a coherent statement from him. The audience favorite demanded protection, demanded to be put in a bunker, and insisted that Parliament immediately pass the kind of witness protection laws that all normal countries had.

The case was solved quickly, though, and two days later Krotov handed all his materials to the prosecutor. Three of the five surviving thugs were in jail. When the story of the dead police officers’ involvement was teased out, it turned out to be all too banal. Thrush had kept them loyal to him not through blackmail or fear but simply with money.

This morning it had become clear that the singer’s fears were justified after he was found dead in the apartment of his lover, twenty-year-old model Veronika Rogovets.

At nine in the morning, Veronika went to take her Irish setter, Willy, for a walk. At the time, Azarov was sleeping in Veronika’s bed. The model usually combined the dog’s morning walk with her mandatory half-hour run through Victory Park.

Returning home at 9:35, she found her apartment door unlocked and Yuri lying crosswise on the entry floor with a terry-cloth robe over his naked body. The singer had been shot clean through his skull, and the Walther pistol that produced the deadly shot was lying right next to his corpse. No fingerprints other than Veronika’s and the dead man’s were found anywhere in the apartment. The neighbors had heard a mild thud but thought nothing of it at the time, and couldn’t even say exactly when it happened.

For now just one thing was clear: the murderer had been able to enter Ms. Rogovets’s apartment quietly and unnoticed. It seemed likely that he had keys to the front door and possibly to her door as well. The lock on the door was Italian, the latest model, and virtually impossible to pick. And no pick had touched the lock.

That is, either Azarov himself opened the door for his killer, or else the killer had a key to the apartment. The former scenario was more likely because at that time of day Azarov was usually sound asleep, and if the killer had opened the door with his own key, Azarov would have been shot in bed. But instead he was lying in the entry by the front door, which evidently meant he’d been woken by the bell, thrown on his robe, and gone to open the door.

Naturally, the sensible and simple thought that came to Krotov’s mind was that Azarov was finished off by friends of the thugs he’d given testimony against. Thus part two began in the successfully completed preliminary investigation into the Vityaz shoot-out. Krotov’s superiors said he needed to look for leads in the banquet slaughter.

Misha Sichkin, the senior investigator, had a different opinion. He and Krotov knew from experience that these kinds of obvious theories led nowhere. The singer’s murder may easily have had nothing at all to do with the Vityaz massacre.

Krotov felt guilty that he was going to be strolling through London while Misha Sichkin had to conduct this complicated and nasty investigation. Their work involved very few simple or pleasant cases.

The traffic jam on the Ring Road gradually eased up, but the blizzard was in full swing. Finally turning on to Krasin Street, it occurred to Sergei that it was probably real spring in London right now. For the first time in his life he was going abroad—and not just anywhere, but to England.

As he drove up to his apartment building and parked his car, he caught himself thinking that he already missed his family, even though he hadn’t left yet.

He’d been married a little more than two years. Sometimes these twenty-five months of family life seemed like one long happy day, and sometimes he felt like he’d known his wife, Lena, a very long time. No one in the world was closer or dearer to him than she was.

Sergei was forty-two now, Lena thirty-six. At their ages it was hard to feel like newlyweds, but they had—for more than two years.

Before they met, they had each had a taste of both family life and of loneliness. Lena had been married twice; Sergei once, for twelve years with his first wife, Larisa.

He had no children from his first marriage, which was probably for the best. His life with Larisa had been so difficult and dreary that even their rare holidays had become like onerous, dismal obligations for Sergei. All those years, the feeling never left him that when he walked across his own threshold and saw Larisa’s face and heard her voice, he instantly detached—on purpose and in advance, so as not to react to his wife’s constant complaints, big and small, and her frequent and long hysterics.

For many years Sergei racked his brain trying to figure out why it was so hard for him with Larisa. After all, she had lots of good qualities. Larisa was an excellent housewife, and their apartment sparkled with an almost sterile cleanliness. Though she kept herself on a strict diet because she was a professional ballerina, if guests came to their house, she went all out and made kulebiaka, julienne salad, suckling pig in sour cream, and sweet yeasted cakes. More than just a great housewife and hostess, she was practical, smart, and attractive.

Sergei convinced himself their problems weren’t about him or Larisa, but about family life as such. By its very nature, he reasoned, a married life couldn’t be a happy life. He sincerely believed that everything would be just the same with any other woman, so he didn’t divorce Larisa until things became utterly intolerable, until the terrible mutual hostility was strangling them both. Sergei decided on divorce. Larisa raised a fuss for a while but eventually agreed.

Only much later did he realize that it wasn’t about family life as such at all, but about the simple fact that he didn’t love Larisa. And she didn’t love him. Each expressed this in a different way. Larisa would become irrationally jealous, aggressive, and confrontational, and Sergei would maintain a gloomy silence and stay late at work even when there was no need to.

A year after the divorce, he met Lena Polyanskaya. He’d thought he’d never remarry and would live the rest of his life a bachelor. Lena had no intention of marrying, either. She’d had plenty of bitter experience from two marriages. She was pregnant by her second husband, whom she’d only recently divorced. She intended to raise the child alone. When Sergei and Lena met, though, all their plans for a future of proud solitude dissipated like smoke. The two mature, sensible, life-battered people fell head over heels in love. They met and married almost immediately, without giving it too much thought or questioning, as if they were trying to make up for the lost time with each other.

No one but the two of them knew that two-year-old Elizaveta Sergeyevna Krotova was not Sergei’s biological daughter. But that didn’t matter to either of them. Neither Lena nor Sergei was surprised that the child resembled her father much more than her mother. Not the father who sired her, but her real father, Sergei Krotov.

They themselves didn’t notice the resemblance right away, though those close to them did. In the maternity home, when Krotov came to take Lena and his daughter home, the nurse who handed him the baby said, “A chip off the old block!” Later their friends and neighbors would repeat the same thing, and so would the mamas who took their children for walks at Patriarch Ponds, and the doctors at the pediatric clinic. Sometimes some well-wisher might start playing with Liza and say, “Why do you have blond hair, little girl, when your mother’s hair is so dark? Why, you don’t look at all like Mama.”

Lena had dark brown, almost chestnut hair and dark, smoky-gray eyes with dark eyebrows and lashes. But Liza had come out blond and blue-eyed, the spitting image of Krotov, only without his trademark mustache.

Now, nearly two, it was clear that her personality, even her facial expressions, were like Krotov’s.

“When I met you I didn’t immediately see where it was going,” Lena once admitted. “I was still overthinking, doubting. But Liza was sitting in my belly, and it was all perfectly clear to her about you and me. I worried, why hadn’t I met you sooner? But Liza just went and got born looking like you. We got a little Krotov.”

“Curious.” Sergei shrugged. “Who else is our child supposed to look like?”

“At least a little like me,” Lena sighed.

“That’s all right, our next child will look like you,” Sergei consoled her.

As soon as it became clear that Sergei was going to London, Lena forced him to study English every day for at least half an hour. At one time Sergei had known English at a high school level, but by age forty-two he’d managed to forget it all. Lena knew the language perfectly. She made flash cards for him, put them in all his pockets, and demanded that he practice them every free minute he had. But he had way too few free minutes, and his head was filled with very different things.

Only now, walking into his building, did Sergei remember that he hadn’t so much as looked at a single card all day and hadn’t memorized his ten assigned words. He was already preparing himself to go to bed an hour later. Lena worked like a dog all day, too, but she forced herself to memorize her daily quota—ten new words—by midnight.

“You can’t imagine how awful it is to be in a foreign country without the language,” she said. “The interpreter won’t be leading you by the hand from morning till night. He’s there for the whole group, after all. What if you just feel like walking around the city, stopping at a café or a store, and you can’t say anything besides ‘how do you do’? No one expects Oxford pronunciation, and you don’t have to know a gerund from a modal verb. But you have to have the conversational minimum.”

In the mailbox, besides a couple of ads for rowing machines and cosmetics, Sergei found a thick, long envelope addressed to Mrs. Elena Polyanskaya, Russia, Moscow… with a New York return address.

Lena got letters from America fairly often. In the past six years she’d gone there four times to give lectures at Columbia, or Brooklyn College, or the Kennan Institute. She had friends and business acquaintances in New York, Washington, and Boston.

When Sergei gave Lena the letter, she tossed it on the refrigerator distractedly without even opening it. And she didn’t ask to quiz him on his English. She was pale, very tired, and untalkative. Sergei immediately sensed that something was wrong.

What he feared most was Liza getting sick. That was the only thing he truly feared.

“Lena, darling, did something happen?” he asked, putting his arms around his wife.

“Not to us,” she answered quietly. “Liza’s healthy and so am I. Don’t worry. Have something to eat and relax. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

While Lena was heating up his supper, Sergei tiptoed into the nursery. Liza was asleep, curled up cozily. He kissed the warm brow under the blond bangs oh so lightly and straightened her blanket.

“Papa’s here…” Liza said loudly in her sleep, and she sighed and turned over.

There was a meal of steaming cabbage soup, sauerkraut, and pickles on the kitchen table—everything he loved.

Lena was reading, perched on the little kitchen sofa. Sergei was surprised to discover that a forensic medicine textbook lay open on the table in front of her. He knew she was translating some article about serial killers for Smart, but he was still surprised.

“Lena, darling, why are you working so late?”

“Please, help me,” she asked, preoccupied. “Can you tell for certain from the strangulation mark whether it was made when the victim was alive or if the person was first killed and then hanged? They list lots of signs here, but it doesn’t say how accurate they are.”

“At first glance, of course, no,” Sergei replied, starting in on the soup. “But if you’re looking for it, you can tell. You need a specific analysis of the skin in the area of the mark.”

“Do suicides ever get investigated for possibly being staged?” was Lena’s next question.

“Maybe you can tell me what happened so I can better help you?”

“All right.” Lena slammed the textbook shut. “Remember about a month ago when Olga Sinitsyna’s brother Mitya came to see us? You came home from work early and he was sitting here in the kitchen.”

“Yes.” Sergei nodded. “A real deadbeat. He talked so long I lost my pulse. He even left a cassette of his songs.”

“He hanged himself last night,” Lena said softly. “The police and the ambulance doctor say it’s a clear suicide, but Olga doesn’t believe it. There really is something very odd about it.”

“Well, suicide is always a very odd thing. And relatives always want to think the person didn’t do it himself. It used to be the prosecutor came out for each and every body, but now there aren’t enough of them. But if there were something to it…”

“Seryozha, I’m not attacking the honor of the uniform or saying your colleagues are hacks, but I would like you to hear me out.”

“Fine. I’m listening.” Sergei finished his soup and lit a cigarette.

“First of all, for some reason Mitya’s telephone was out for days. Olga had been calling him since yesterday morning and put her phone on auto redial. Then she clarified that there was nothing wrong with the line; something had happened to the phone itself. His neighbor fixed it in five minutes and said that some contact had been broken. This hadn’t happened in three years, and then it did, at just this time.”

Lena recounted every detail of what she’d learned from Olga.

“Lena, darling, I understand,” Sergei said gently after hearing her out. “Sinitsyna is your good friend, and it’s very hard for her right now, and you’re worried about her. But believe me, in five cases out of ten, suicide comes as a total surprise, especially for the relatives. He might have been shooting up, like his wife, only no one knew it, or he might just have gotten drunk out of grief.”

“What grief?” Lena grinned sadly. “That his wife was an addict? That grief was a year and a half old. And people don’t hang themselves over that. And he was not shooting up, that’s for sure. He loved Katya very much. He worshipped her. They were a terrific couple. They’d been together five years, though they couldn’t have kids because Katya had some medical problem. And then the drugs started. He fought for her the best he could. His parents didn’t know anything, only Olga. She put Katya in the hospital, but it didn’t work. But Mitya wouldn’t give in. He was constantly looking for addiction specialists, hypnotists, psychotherapists. He was proactive, he had no intention of giving up. Suicide would be admitting defeat, it would be giving up. No, he couldn’t have hanged himself over Katya being an addict. And there was no other reason, either.”

“Lena, how would you know why a person would hang himself? Sometimes someone loses everything in life, loses himself. One outcast exiled to Siberia who doesn’t even have the right to touch a doorknob gets kicked every day, fucked in every orifice, and forced to lick spit, yet he lives, he clings to life with every fiber of his being. Another is doing just fine—great family, job, friends, respect, money coming in—and bam! He kills himself. You know yourself that the countries with the highest standard of living have the highest suicide rates: Sweden, Denmark, Holland. But where there’s famine, war, and real hardships, people rarely kill themselves. Well-fed Roman patricians slit their veins. Here in Russia, at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, suicide was positively a fad. Putting a bullet in your head was considered a handsome, noble deed. You think they were all idiots, madmen? That some tragedy had befallen them?”

Lena shook her head. “No, I don’t. Although… there’s a certain inner pathology to it. And Mitya had no pathology. He was a healthy young guy. Talented and loved by all as well.”

“Fine.” Sergei sighed. “Let’s say he didn’t do it. Let’s say someone even had a motive to kill him. Think about it, though. Big bankers, political party leaders, and other powerful men of this world are being shot out in the open these days, without a second thought, shot on the streets and in the lobbies of big hotels. And who was Mitya Sinitsyn? Who would go to those lengths to kill him? Do you know how much a hitman costs? And afterward a professional would have finished off the wife, too. What did they need a witness for?”

“What if that’s exactly why they didn’t finish her off? Maybe that’s just what the killer was thinking. After all, he had to be very smart to set it all up so well. If she was an addict, then she didn’t see or hear anything. I understand it’s a dead end. I understand that intellectually, but I can’t believe it. Something’s off.”

“Lena, when a healthy young man kills himself, something’s always off. It’s fundamentally wrong. I’ll gladly believe he wasn’t drinking or shooting up, wasn’t on the books at the psych clinic, and was an altogether remarkable person. And I’m very sorry for your Olga. If she wants, she can write a statement to the Prosecutor’s Office.”

“She will.” Lena nodded. “But what’s the point? They already gave her the predictable explanation for it. They can’t even hold his funeral in a church. There are his parents, and his old grandmother, and each of them is wondering why he did it. Each is trying to find a reason and are blaming themselves. Mitya was the youngest, the baby. They loved him and spoiled him. Can you imagine what they’re all going through right now? Olga’s not about to look for the murderer, of course, but still, she needs to know for certain whether he did it or not.”

“She can hire a private detective. She can afford it, after all.”

“She might,” Lena said pensively.