The Sin Collector

MASHA

Masha sat in the hallway outside the prosecutor’s office and waited obediently. Anna Yevgenyevna, a formidable woman who had been the lead investigator on the Bagrat Gebelai case, was giving someone a thorough hiding over the phone. Finally she let Masha into her office, and offered her a narrow chair upholstered in fake leather on the other side of her massive desk.

The desk was neat and clean, something that could not be said of Anna Yevgenyevna: her black sweater, stretched over her massive bosom, was littered with what must have been cat hair; her own hair, hastily swept back into a bun, was badly dyed and coming loose; and the manicure on the almond-shaped nails of her unexpectedly elegant fingers was flaking.

“So. Gebelai?” she said, tapping her nails on the surface of her desk. Then she shoved back, rolled her chair over to a cabinet, and skillfully pulled out the file she needed before scooting back to the desk. She opened the file, glanced at the papers there, and then turned her gaze back to Masha. “And why are you so interested, Miss Intern?”

Masha decided to tell her half the truth: she was writing a thesis on strange deaths passed off as accidents—

“Right,” Anna Yevgenyevna grunted, then reached for a cigarette and took a drag. “It was a strange death, I’ll give you that. Gebelai was an architect, a builder. He drew up the plans for some new metro stations, the kind with canopies. One day two years ago, it was pouring rain at rush hour, and people were huddled under one of those canopies to stay dry, a huge crowd, and the canopy collapsed. Hundreds of people died.” The detective sighed and tapped the ash off her cigarette, half into an ashtray, half onto her sweater. “It was a terrible thing. Women, children. You probably remember.”

Masha nodded silently.

“Gebelai and his subcontractors were found liable. The metro stations were falling over due to structural errors in the plans. They used the wrong materials, they calculated the loads wrong. But then there was a presidential pardon and Gebelai got out of jail. So. A couple of months later they found him dead in an apartment on Lenivka, all covered in dirt, black under his nails, too, naked, skin and bones… The doctors said his heart gave out due to some sort of major physical exertion. But what kind of extreme exertion makes any sense? The man was a decorated architect; he used to win medals. They found one of them pinned right to his skin, in fact.”

Anna Yevgenyevna handed Masha two photos. One view, a little from above, was of an apartment that was striking for its ostentatious luxury. The other was a picture of Bagrat Gebelai himself, curled up in fetal position on the floor, a medal stuck into the dark thatch of hair on his chest.

“What is that?” asked Masha.

“That’s an Akhdzapsh medal, third degree,” the senior investigator answered wearily. “They give it to citizens of the Republic of Abkhazia for service to science, culture, and art. Our hero got his a few years before the station collapsed.”

“But this wasn’t his only award, was it?”

“No, he had plenty. Medals for honorable service in this and that, Honored Architect of the Russian Federation, Distinguished Artist, and so on. He built a bunch of churches in new neighborhoods, for one thing. So far those are still standing, thank God.”

Masha lifted the photograph to get a closer look. The medal was shaped like a circle, with rays radiating out from it. Masha asked if she could make copies of several of the photographs from the file, and Anna Yevgenyevna graciously agreed.

Masha smiled and stood up. “Thank you very much for your time.”

“Of course, of course, go write that paper, grind it out, let me know if you think of any questions.” The detective stood up noisily at her desk and walked off farther into her office. She switched on an electric tea kettle as Masha left.

On her way out, Masha thought unhappily that the well-meaning investigator hadn’t actually shed much light on the case. Just that medal. There hadn’t been anything about it in the case file. Masha imagined the sharp tip of the pin poking through the blue-tinged skin. Her stomach turned.

I should be exercising more, Masha decided, shaking her head to chase away the horrifying image. I’ll make Mama happy and go to the gym.

Natasha had bought her a gym membership six months ago, in an attempt to get her to stand up a little straighter, get some muscle tone, and forget about serial killers once and for all. She was willing to give it a shot. After that story of architectural negligence in the metro, though, she was done with public transportation for the day. She’d go home to get the car first.

Masha hated working out, and she trudged into the ritzy health club on Novoslobodsky like other people dragged themselves into the dentist’s office. She’d been going nowhere on a treadmill, to a soundtrack of cloying pop music, for at least half an hour, when suddenly her rhythm faltered. Masha stumbled, then jabbed at the red button. Stop! The medal! There was something about that damn medal! Masha grabbed her towel and ran to the locker room. Still panting, she opened her locker, took out the file full of documents, and plopped down on the wooden bench.

A bead of sweat dropped onto the picture in her hands of the medal, close up, on Gebelai’s hairy chest. Masha swallowed hard and lifted her head. Other young women were going about their business all around her, some in swimsuits, some in track suits, some wrapped in towels, rosy-cheeked and relaxed after their showers. Masha, sitting there with a murder file on her lap and staring fixedly straight ahead, was an unusual sight for these gym rats, and probably a disturbing one.

“The medal,” Masha whispered. She counted the rays on it. “One, two, three, four, five. Five.” She repeated the last number quietly, while around her women passed each other lotion, curled their eyelashes, fussed with hair dryers. No, it doesn’t make sense! Masha thought, but she couldn’t stop now. She shuffled through the file and found the business card with Anna Yevgenyevna’s number.

“Yes?” came the low voice of the lady detective.

“Hello. It’s me again, Masha Karavay.”

“Ah, the intern. Hi there.” The woman’s tired voice slipped down another full octave. Masha could hear her working on another cigarette. “Did you come up with some questions, then?”

“Yes,” said Masha, embarrassed. “You know, I was looking at these photos, and it seems to me that there used to be more little rays on that medal. It’s probably not important,” she rushed to add, suddenly ashamed to have bothered the detective.

“Good work, Miss Intern.” Masha felt, rather than heard, Yevgenyevna blowing out smoke happily. “Being meticulous like that is crucial in this cruddy profession of ours. There should have been eight of them.”

“But there were five,” said Masha. “Could they have broken off, just like that?”

“Just like that!” snorted the detective. “Nothing happens just like that. They were sawn off, honey, and that’s all there is to it. But why? What for? No idea. And I wracked my brains over that for a long time.”

“Thank you,” Masha said slowly. She said good-bye and hung up.

“Five,” she repeated to herself, worrying that she might be going crazy. Did everything actually fit into this bloody puzzle, or was her subconscious just serving up pieces that matched the pattern? A pattern that began with the numbers one, two, and three on the shirts of the unfortunate people at the Bersenevskaya waterfront and then led to a distinguished architect in a luxury apartment on Lenivka Street? Masha jumped when the phone rang again. It was Innokenty.

“Masha!” he said. “I think I have something for you, but I’m not sure. There’s somebody I want you to meet. Today, if possible.” And he gave her an address.

It was getting dark by the time Masha picked up Innokenty at the park outside the hospital. The security guards made her wait at the front gate while they called the front desk. Then they drove slowly down a narrow road lined with old maple trees. The noise of the city gradually died away, and when Innokenty gallantly helped Masha out of the car, she heard birds singing their evening song, and it felt like they’d left the city altogether. They climbed the gently sloping stairs to a Palladian-style front porch with its semicircle of white columns, and Innokenty pushed open the heavy door, polished smooth by thousands of visitors’ hands. Masha read the sign: “Pavlov Psychiatric Clinic.”

Inside they came first to a much more modern-looking door of thick glass. The woman at the desk saw them and nodded, and the door buzzed open.

“Good evening,” said Innokenty. “We’re here to see Professor Gluzman.”

Masha had assumed Gluzman was one of the doctors here, but the nurse’s gentle smile and the way she said the professor was feeling well and could receive them today made her wonder.

“What does that mean, feeling well?” Masha whispered as they followed a carpeted corridor deep into the hospital.

“Ilya Gluzman was my favorite professor in college,” Kenty replied, giving Masha’s suddenly clammy hand a squeeze. “I must have told you about him. He’s an expert in Russian medieval history. Don’t let the hospital scare you. Dr. Gluzman is in good shape right now. He’s writing books, and he just got back from an international lecture tour.”

Masha still felt uneasy. No sound came from behind the doors along both sides of the hall. All she could hear was soft, almost inaudible, classical music, apparently meant to calm the nerves. Whose nerves? she wondered. Was the music for the guests, the patients, or the staff? Meanwhile, the nurse had stopped before one of the identical doors and knocked quietly. The door opened and another nurse appeared, so similar to the first that they might have been twins. She had the same warm smile and pleasant face.

“So it is Inno-centi himself!” came a rumbling voice from inside the room. The nurse nodded and stepped aside. The sixty-year-old man who greeted them had a gentle face covered with fashionable graying stubble, and a similar bristle covered his egg-shaped head. He was dressed more like an Oxford don than a mental patient, in a dark-green jacket with leather elbow patches, a wool turtleneck sweater, and corduroy trousers. He rolled his motorized wheelchair closer and shook Innokenty’s hand. Then he grinned slyly at Masha.

“Ilya Gluzman, at your service.” He lifted Masha’s hand to his lips, not so much to kiss it as to express his gentlemanly intentions.

“Masha,” she introduced herself, a little taken aback.

“Innokenty, thank you for bringing such a beauty to visit a lonely old man!” Dr. Gluzman looked at her like a curious bird, tilting his head to one side. “If only I could still fall in love at my age!”

Then he rolled back into the room and gestured to the nurse to put the teapot on a low table. The table was already set with a ceramic bowl of chocolates and a crystal dish overflowing with an artistic mess of dark, nearly black cherries and small, pungent strawberries. After her long workday and visit to the gym, Masha felt her mouth water.

“Please have a seat, mademoiselle!” Their host nudged a teacup in her direction and half filled it with strong amber-colored tea, then added hot water to top it off. Gluzman slid an almost-transparent slice of lemon onto a tiny dish for her, then graciously offered the silver sugar bowl. “Young ladies don’t take sugar these days, do they?”

“You fool!” a creaky old voice suddenly rang out just behind Masha.

Masha jumped in surprise and turned around. Behind her hung an enormous cage, and inside it, an enormous parrot.

“You fool!” the parrot repeated.

“No need to tell me, I know!” Gluzman retorted cheerfully.

Masha laughed. The tension that had accumulated in her body during their long walk to the room was falling away now. Though Gluzman was eccentric, he didn’t show any signs of insanity, as far as she could tell. His dark eyes seemed to take everything in hungrily, and his large mouth was twisted into a wry smile.

“My parrot very much resembles me, don’t you think, my dear? Two silly old good-for-nothings!”

Masha smiled and took a sip from her delicate ceramic cup. The tea was excellent.

“I don’t believe in the green teas and red teas they have these days, with their flowers and buds and petals and little pieces of straw, smelling like anything at all other than tea. I don’t need my tea to be diaphoretic or calmative or anything else. My nerves, honestly, require a stronger medicine.” Gluzman’s fluttering hand performed its ritual over Innokenty’s cup next, and then he sat back in his chair, clearly pleased with himself. “Well then, my young friends! What brings you to my humble abode?”

Innokenty bent down and pulled Masha’s map from his briefcase.

“Dr. Gluzman,” he said, “we need a consultation. Or, actually, a confirmation of my theory.”

Gluzman took a pair of glasses with round, thick lenses from his breast pocket and perched them atop his fleshy nose. The expression on his face remained unchanged, but he tilted his head first to one side, then to the other as he looked the page over carefully.

“I believe there’s a certain pattern to the points marked on the map, Professor. Do you see it?” Innokenty looked nervous, ready to spring up from his chair.

“It might just be a coincidence, but—” Gluzman turned to Masha, removed his glasses, and smiled. The old man’s teeth were blindingly white. “Inno-centi must have seen just what I see here. He’s a wonderful boy, mademoiselle. Don’t you let him get away.”

“I won’t,” Masha said, smiling. “I’ve been holding on to him since we were eight years old.”

Gluzman nodded and turned to the blushing Kenty.

“Never be afraid of your own conclusions, young man! You must trust that whisper inside you! It is formed of knowledge, first and foremost, and of deep intuition. It comes with experience.”

“Heavenly Jerusalem,” Kenty said quietly.

“Heavenly Jerusalem,” repeated Gluzman. “Precisely.”

Masha looked impatiently from one man to the other.

“Masha, dear, judging from the discouraged look in your lovely eyes, you must be unfamiliar with the concept?” Gluzman chuckled and rolled his wheelchair over to the bookshelf that lined one wall of the room. “Here you are, for a start,” he said, pulling out a leather-bound volume. “The Holy Scriptures. Have you read them?”

Masha felt her cheeks going red.

“Surely you have,” said Gluzman, not waiting for her to respond. “But who remembers books like these? Only old dotards like me. Now, let me just find the place…” He thumbed through the pages. “Here we are. Listen. From the Book of Revelation: ‘And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’” Gluzman removed his glasses again, and looked up at Masha. “You see, Mashenka, my dear—may I call you Mashenka?—in the religious tradition, the city of Jerusalem was considered the navel of the earth, because it was meant to be a prototype of the Heavenly City. And that Heavenly Jerusalem, in turn, is the kingdom of the saints in heaven.” Gluzman smiled. “If you believe John, it is a city of uncommon beauty, built of materials that shine and reflect the light. Gates made of pearls, walls made of precious stones—jasper, sapphire, chalcedony, topaz, chrysolite, amethyst—and streets made of gold. And this description was not just something the storyteller dreamed up, his own fantasy. No!”

Gluzman looked to Innokenty, and his former student took up the tale.

“In those times, gemstones represented sources of sacred energy. They are eternal, and like eternity, they are perfect, unlike the mortal world of humans, plants, and animals.”

Masha felt lost, which did not escape Gluzman’s attention.

“It’s rather a lot, isn’t it? Here is the important thing. Symbolism aside, written descriptions of the City of Heaven are so precise, so suggestive, that they have allowed human beings, time and time again, to create their own models of that city, in essence transporting it from the heavens down to this earthly realm. Every description is architecturally detailed, and every detail carries symbolic value. For instance, all the descriptions agree that Heavenly Jerusalem is laid out as a square. Its walls face the four cardinal directions, and each wall has three gates, conveying the image of the Creator in all directions.”

Masha cast a helpless glance at Innokenty, who winked back.

“Close your eyes and imagine this city, Masha!” Gluzman went on, reading from the Bible now in a singsong voice. “‘Twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels—’”

Masha had been following his description, her head tilted in concentration, but she stumbled at the angels.

“Dr. Gluzman, I really don’t understand what all this has to do with—”

“Patience, my child. I know haste is the burden of the novice, and you are both still so young. Try to resist your urge to absorb knowledge on the run. Now, where were we? Oh yes. In the Middle Ages, the Gospels were often interpreted as instructions for action. Medieval architects had two models to work from: Heavenly Jerusalem and the earthly Jerusalem. The real Jerusalem influenced the cities people built to evoke the celestial one. Think of the Golden Gate in Kiev, or in Vladimir here in Russia. Those were intended to copy the Golden Gate in Jerusalem, and later in Constantinople.”

Masha nodded uncertainly.

“Mainly capital cities tried to imitate the earthly Jerusalem,” Innokenty added. “But plenty of smaller Russian cities were designed based on the descriptions of Heavenly Jerusalem. Kiev, as Dr. Gluzman said, but also Pskov, Kashin, Kaluga, and, of course, Moscow.”

“Interesting,” Masha ventured. “I always thought medieval architecture was completely chaotic. Narrow streets leading nowhere, improvised rebuilding every time a city burned down again…”

“That is a common theory, but absolutely unfounded,” Gluzman answered heatedly. “As is this idea of the Dark Ages in general. Nonsense! It was a difficult but wonderful epoch, one which gave the world genius works of architecture, art, and literature. What have people ever made that is more wonderful than the spires of Gothic cathedrals, reaching for heaven? Or more noble than the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl? You might argue that by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Moscow had fewer poor, fewer orphans, fewer cripples. Less filth, and not nearly as many brothels and saloons per capita. But the idea, the supreme religious idea that governed and inspired life in those earlier times, even for the lowliest pauper—that idea was gone.”

Gluzman rolled back to the bookshelves and took down two more tattered volumes.

“It’s only now, in the twenty-first century with all its blessings, that man has started building things any which way. But in those days, not a single stone was placed without a reason. It took years and years to build a church—three, five generations sometimes. Nothing like these Gebelai projects.”

Masha gave a start at the murdered architect’s name.

“Just think, Masha! People, their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, were born, got married, grew old, and died alongside a cathedral that grew higher and higher. Such a project could never be undertaken without a profound foundational idea around which life could take shape like flesh on a bone.”

Innokenty and Masha exchanged looks. The improvised lecture was impressive. Innokenty was clearly enjoying himself.

“Now let’s take a look at Moscow.” Gluzman took on a calmer tone, and with the practiced gesture of an experienced speaker, adjusted the glasses on his bulbous nose. “You see, Mashenka, people often speak of Moscow as the Third Rome. But that idea is more secular or political—imperial, if you will. The idea of Moscow as a second Jerusalem is much older, and it has deep roots in Russian Orthodoxy. Moscow, as you no doubt learned in school, is the heir to Byzantium. On May 29, 1453, the Ottomans sacked Byzantine Constantinople, renamed it Istanbul, and made it the capital of their empire. With Constantinople gone, the political and spiritual leaders here shifted their focus to building a New Jerusalem where Moscow stood.

“With all our little daily worries, we cannot begin to imagine the power this idea of transforming Moscow into the City of Heaven wielded, in a young nation with no television, no radio, scarcely any literacy. Every single person, from the great tsars to the lowliest serfs, worked to make this city into the New Jerusalem. Just imagine if today the bums on the street and the oligarchs in their mansions joined forces. Our medieval forebears believed that if Moscow were to become the New Jerusalem, all the Christians residing here would be first in line to enter heaven itself. That’s why they started hauling in holy relics from all over the world. The more sacred items Moscow could collect, the more sacred the city would be!”

Gluzman moved the sugar bowl carefully to one side to make more room for an aging tome. He leafed through the yellow pages until he found the one he needed.

“This is the famous map from Sigismund von Herberstein’s Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii. His contemporaries called him the Columbus of Russia. Herberstein visited Moscow in 1517 and 1526, and his map dates to 1549. Here is another map, from the Blaeu atlas, dated 1613.”

Innokenty and Masha bent over the map.

“Look. Old Moscow is arranged in a circle, symbolizing eternity—the eternal Kingdom of Heaven, more precisely. Now compare that to the Book of Revelation: ‘The City of Heavenly Jerusalem is new… and had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates… On the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.’ Moscow’s old defensive walls, the Skorodom, perfectly match this description. An even earlier iteration of the city had the same arrangement of gates, three facing in each of the four directions.” Gluzman looked up at Masha. “So what does this mean, mademoiselle? It means that Moscow was twice encircled by the twelve-gated walls of the City of Heaven, first in stone, then in wood. Now, moving on.

“‘And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth.’ The length of the Skorodom fortress, north to south, was just under three miles, and almost the same east to west. You will agree, I think, that this cannot be a coincidence. And the height of the walls? In Heavenly Jerusalem, they are ‘a hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel.’ If we assume a cubit is more or less one and a half feet, and multiply that by one hundred forty, we have two hundred ten feet—too high for a medieval wall. But the Spasskaya Tower was intended to be exactly one hundred forty-four cubits tall!

“Next, the color. Heavenly Jerusalem was decorated with green jasper, symbolizing the eternal lives of the saints, blue sapphires for the sky, and gold for righteousness. Moscow’s cupolas could be only those three colors.”

Now Innokenty joined in. “And in the seventeenth century, all the churches were covered in specific patterns, not just the carved stone and colored tiles we still have today, but also engravings of flowers and plants. You can see evidence of those in fragments remaining from the tile walls of the Cathedral of the Dormition on Goncharnaya, in places where they’ve stripped off the layers of plaster that got added on later. And—”

“Kenty,” said Masha, quiet but determined. “Can you get to the point?”

“Mashenka!” said Gluzman, grinning victoriously. “The marks you made on your map? There is an explanation for every one of them. A very specific explanation.”