Strolling on Aisle 5 — Biscuits & Cookies, a cigarette cocked by his ear, Leo couldn’t help but look like imminent trouble. He carried a “maybe”; a “maybe” was a mesh bag that everyone used to carry in case they saw anything for sale. Leo had long legs and loved to run. He was eleven.
Lisa was in Frozen Foods. She had bow lips, blue eyes, a halo of golden hair and a blank expression. Her best friend, Milka, was in Produce comparing cantaloupes, giving each the sniff test, the knock test, the squeeze. Milka was as plain as Lisa was beautiful, but she wore braces on her teeth, a sign of relative affluence. The girls were ten.
The supermarket was part of a French chain and there was a special emphasis on dishes with Gallic style like pàté, cheeses and duck à l’orange ready for the microwave. Rabbits fluffy and skinned hung in a meat department designed to look like a true boucherie. A café served cràpes and croque-monsieur.
Behind a one-way mirror over the lamb chops the floor manager flipped through a face book until he found a match with Lisa. Uniformed security guards were stationed at the entrance and emergency exits, wine department and caviar bar. When the chief counted four runaways, he went out on the floor. Although none of the kids had as yet done anything illegal, he wanted them to know he was keeping an eye on them, so he was looking the wrong way when the automatic door opened and a black Alsatian police dog on a loose leash bounded down Aisle 1—Breads & Baked Goods, followed by a girl.
The dog had a deep bark and the impact of a cannonball. In Produce he brushed a table and spilled lemons across the floor. Cans of stewed tomatoes rolled in his wake. A security man attempting to block Aisle 7—Pet Food grasped air as the dog leaped into the meat bin and came out with a filet mignon hanging from his jaws. Two guards who tried to corner the dog between Ice Cream and Frozen Foods were left in a tangle of overturned carts.
For the dog, it was a game. It crouched like a sprinter, barked and allowed the guards to get only so near before it made a feint in one direction and took off in another. When the floor manager approached with a can of pepper spray, the dog instantly retreated. Meanwhile regular customers abandoned their carts and made an exodus to the street. All the runaways vanished and, suddenly, so did the dog.
What confused the floor manager was that after a physical count and an inventory of receipts, nothing had been taken from the floor except the steak. It was hard to bring charges against a dog. A day later, however, the stockroom manager noticed what else was missing.
While his staff had watched the antics taking place on the other side of the one-way mirror, someone had walked in the backdoor of the stockroom and left with six cases of dry baby formula, four jumbo bags of disposable diapers and two cartons of premixed formula in bottles for babies on the move.
Itsy said, “She likes the bottle.”
“I’d rather breast-feed. Yum yum.”
“Shut up.”
“What a dirty mind.”
“Boys are disgusting.”
Leo said, “That was so great when Tito smashed into the lemons.”
“Tito’s a good dog.”
“Tito’s the best.”
The dog raised his massive head at the sound of his name and cast a loving gaze toward Itsy.
Emma, the youngest, looked like a rag doll. She was the most fascinated. “Did she cry much?”
“Not a lot.”
“We should send Tito back for more steaks.”
“They never saw us,” Peter said.
Klim said, “We could have gone back to the storeroom and taken twice as much. We could have cleaned them out.” With their pallor he and Peter looked like junior convicts. Klim was nine and Peter was ten.
“I changed the baby three times. She was kind of runny,” Itsy said.
“She looks tired. Did she sleep?”
“She fussed.”
“Is this her name, Itsy?” Emma held up an embroidered corner of the blanket.
“Read it yourself.” There was a polite silence because everyone knew Itsy couldn’t read.
“Katya,” Emma said in a small voice.
“Can we turn on the radio?”
“Keep it low.”
“How long can we stay here?”
“We’ll see.”
The situation seemed ideal: a workers’ trailer that had suddenly appeared in an unused repair shed in the yard of Kazansky Station. The trailer had bunks, however stained and filthy, and a potbellied stove. The trailer wasn’t going anywhere. Its tires had been flat; now they were shredded.
The shed itself was a steel hangar open at one end to the station’s yard. Rails led to trenches deep enough for a man to stand in for undercarriage repair. Or had at one time. Waist-high grass suggested a long spell of inactivity.
“It’s spooky.”
“Tito will let us know if anyone comes.”
Lisa asked, “What if Yegor comes?”
Milka opened a knife. “If he comes anywhere near you again, I’ll cut his balls off.”
Itsy had no such illusions. She preferred to stay one step ahead of Yegor. Yegor was a grown-up by comparison with anyone in her crew.
“Why would they want a trailer in a train shed?”
“I don’t know, but they did and we’re going to use it. We can take care of ourselves. And we have Tito. And now we have a baby and that makes us a family.”
21
Victor expounded on tattoos in the café at Yaroslavl Station. He touched the screen on Arkady’s phone and enlarged the picture as he went.
“Think of a criminal’s tattoos as a painting by the School of Rubens, a painting done by different hands at different times, with sections or faces added or obscured, some areas left blank in anticipation of notable events or cramped by bad planning.
“Let’s begin with the Madonna and Child. This domestic scene tells us that Dopey was not born to a family of the bourgeoisie but to a family of honest criminals. The tattooing is primitive, although the faces were retouched later. The cat tattoos celebrate an early career as a burglar, and you can imagine from the spryness of these cats how a dwarf can get into all sorts of spaces.
“As he gets older and heavier, he graduates to murder. Three tears for three victims, as if he gave a fuck. He’s been imprisoned four times. The barbs on barbed wire tell you how many years. The spiderweb on his shoulder means he’s addicted, probably to heroin, because there is a surreal quality to the web reminiscent of Dalí.”
There was a new vigor to Victor, Arkady thought. For a man who should be struggling with the DTs, he looked surprisingly hale.
“You can trust a criminal’s hide more than a banker’s business card. The card says he has offices in Moscow, London and Hong Kong even though he’s never been further than Minsk. But when a convict wears a tattoo for a crime he hasn’t honestly committed, other cons will tattoo ‘Liar’ right across his face.”
“It’s good to know there is integrity somewhere in the world.”
“The old cachet isn’t there. Now every housewife has a tattoo on her ass. Nobody behind bars is satisfied with homemade ink when their girlfriends are trotting around on the outside with their pants half off and a tat that glows in the dark.” He broke off to ask, “Worried?”
“They have to send me a letter of suspension and a letter of dismissal. Zurin only sent one.”
“You’re sure? Anyway, I can’t believe that I’m with the man who killed Dopey the Dwarf. Does a curse come with that?”
“Probably,” Arkady agreed.
“Don’t worry about it. You are so fucked a curse would be superfluous.”
Victor ducked out before the bill came. Arkady asked the waiter if he had ever noticed a boy hustle chess in the station.
The waiter leaned in thought.
“A thin boy?”
“Yes. Named Zhenya.”
“I don’t know about any Zhenya. This one’s called ‘Genius.’”
“That’s close enough.”
“He’s in and out of th
e station all the time.”
“Has he been in today?”
“No. He might be taking a day off. He had a big bust-up with his girlfriend last night. Right here.”
Arkady wasn’t sure he heard right. “A girlfriend?”
“A beauty queen.”
“He has a beautiful girlfriend?”
“With a shaved head.”
“With a shaved head, no less?” The Zhenya that Arkady knew did not hang out with such a trendy crowd. In fact, he hung out with no one at all. “I think we’re talking about two different people.”
The waiter shrugged.
“A shame. She was special but, like I say, a bitch.”
22
Four men gathered at a round table: Senior Investigator Renko, District Prosecutor Zurin, Assistant Deputy Prosecutor General Gendler and a ministry elder called Father Iosif, who was as silent and motionless as a stuffed owl. He had long since passed the mandatory retirement age of sixty and, presumably, rolled on with year-to-year contracts. No one knew exactly what Father Iosif’s status was. No one ever heard him speak.
Zurin had never looked better; fit and eager for the fray. Under Yeltsin, he had been round and apoplectic; in Putin’s regime, Zurin ate sensibly, exercised and lost weight. A stack of dossiers tied with self-important red ribbons stood by him.
Gendler had placed Arkady’s ID and pistol, a nine-millimeter Makarov, in the middle of the table and noted what an ideal setting for Russian roulette it was.
“Except, you need a revolver,” Arkady said. “A cylinder to spin. Otherwise you’ve pretty much eliminated the element of chance.”
“Who needs chance?” Gendler placed a tape recorder on the table. He pressed Record and identified site, date, time and persons present for a hearing on dismissal.
It took Arkady a moment to realize what was transpiring. “Wait, this is a hearing on suspension.”
“No, this is a hearing on dismissal.”
“I received the letter for suspension late last night. I have it.” He passed the letter to the assistant deputy, who laid it aside without reading it.
“Duly noted, a typographical error. However, this is the second hearing. For whatever reason, you did not attend the first.”
“I’d like to change the date.”
“Out of the question. The panel is assembled. We have a quorum and we have the supporting dossiers and material that Prosecutor Zurin has brought. We can’t ask him to cart those back and forth at your convenience.”
“I need time to prepare materials.”
“It’s your second letter. The first letter went out a month ago. Your time for preparation ran out yesterday.”
“I received no first letter.”
“I received mine,” said Zurin.
“Then I would have been suspended.”
“You were.”
Which explained the lack of caseload coming from the prosecutor. Nothing could hide the triumph in Zurin’s face. He had played his part perfectly and so, in his ignorance, had Arkady.
“I was in the office every day.”
“Preparing for this dismissal hearing, I assumed,” Zurin said. “I didn’t get in your way.”
Gendler said, “Renko, you brought nothing else to substantiate your defense?”
“No.”
“But you have been active. According to Prosecutor Zurin, two nights ago you were seen leaving a sobriety station. Yesterday you altered autopsy reports in an effort to fake a murder.”
“The autopsy was not faked. I was assisting on a murder case. We may have a serial killer.”
“Today you claim to have discovered a serial killer. Every detective’s wet dream. I’m sorry, but in a contest of claim and counterclaim, I have to go with hard evidence, and you don’t have any.”
Arkady said, “I suggest that we go over the prosecutor’s evidence to see how hard it really is.”
“We don’t have time. We’re overwhelmed. So, do you expect to contest your dismissal or not? I should warn you—”
“No.”
“You are not contesting your dismissal?”
“I am not.”
“He’s folding,” Gendler told Zurin, half in surprise.
“I heard. So he won’t be needing these.” Zurin gathered Arkady’s ID and gun from the table.
“Not the gun.” Arkady clamped Zurin’s wrist.
“It’s property of the state.”
“Please, gentlemen.” The assistant deputy tried to separate them.
Arkady bent Zurin’s fingers back. The prosecutor let go and said, “See, he’s crazy. He attacked me right in front of witnesses.”
“Read it.” Arkady passed the gun to Gendler.
“Read what?”
“On the slide.”
The engraving on the gun was as fine as calligraphy.
“‘This firearm and a lifetime license are awarded to Honored Investigator A. K. Renko in gratitude from the Russian people.’”
“It’s mine,” Arkady said.
“I’ll take that under consideration.” Gendler kept the pistol.
“Renko,” Father Iosif said. “Now there was a son of a bitch.”
Everyone froze. Gendler was dumbfounded. No one had ever heard Father Iosif utter a word before.
“He keeps the gun,” Father Iosif said, and the decision was made.
Each desk in the squad room was a stage with a different drama. A murderer handcuffed to his chair. A profusely sweating tourist who kept feeling his pockets in case his passport materialized. An old lady whose cat was missing. She had brought pictures. Besides mug shots of professional criminals, a bulletin board carried photos of soldiers gone AWOL, a new handful every day. A goldfish nibbled on a companion.
Arkady arrived with a bag of cold sodas. Day three was the day the snakes of alcohol usually came out, but Victor was bright as a robin.
“You got here without incident? You didn’t roll the car? None of the doors blew off?”
“It’s in mint condition.”
“How did the meeting go?”
“It was for dismissal, not suspension.”
Victor sat up. “You’re not serious.”
“They seemed to be. They have no sense of humor.”
“You’re out?”
“A mere citizen.”
“That’s as ‘mere’ as it gets. Do you want me to kill Zurin? I will. I’d be happy to.”
“No, but I appreciate the offer.”
“You can’t win in this fucking world. Let’s get drunk tonight. Let’s get drunk until our eyes swim. What do you say?”
Arkady sat at Victor’s computer. On its screen a beautiful model with voluminous blond hair and Nordic-blue eyes was wrapped in a wolf jacket and matching cap. In the background the onion domes of St. Basil’s glowed in golden sunlight.
“You’re making progress,” Arkady said.
“Suspended, dismissed, you don’t let go.”
“Not yet.”
A label on the photograph said, Oksana Petrovna is represented by Venus International.
At the tap of a key the scene changed to a studio apartment. Oksana Petrovna lay on her back in the middle of the floor with her head resting in a pool of blood, hands on her hips. Her leather trousers and underpants were pulled down to her ankles. Possibly the first position of ballet. Hard to say. The date of the photo was two years ago. According to the notes, a homeless man confessed and then recanted.
Arkady said, “It looks like she was hit from behind.”
“Yeah, then they beat some poor bastard until he would confess to buggering the czar. After that, the case went cold.”
Arkady punched up the next screen. Inna Ustinova looked younger than her thirty-two years. A yoga instructor, she had been married twice, once to an American who had promised her Malibu, California, and delivered Columbus, Ohio. According to her entry in Facebook, she had resolved to date only Russians. Her ambition? To dance at the Club Nijinsky. Her body was discovered s
ix months before in a culvert at a dog show in Ismailova Park. She was naked from the waist down, with no signs of violence, an apparent overdose. Her feet were apart and her arms stretched like wings, as in the second position.
“That’s it?” Arkady asked.
“That’s it.”
“No third position?”
“Yeah. It’s called pissing into the wind.”
“Venus International. Is that a well-known modeling agency?”
“I called a friend. She says it’s so-so.”
“The name is not quite right,” Arkady said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s not quite right, is it? ‘Venus’ suggests a little more.”
“You mean…”
“Exactly.”
“More…”
“Yes.”
“Well, they used to present what they called ‘private modeling’ of lingerie and the like but they’ve been on the up-and-up for years.”
“Was Venus at any time also a matchmaking agency? Beautiful Russian brides for lonely American men?”
“When Venus started out, it tried to be any number of things. I know what you’re after. Did the paths of these two women ever cross?”
“Did they?”
“Ustinova was in Facebook. She had a million ‘friends’ but Oksana Petrovna was not one of them. These women lived in Moscow but in two different worlds.”
“Did they club?”
“Yes. A pretty girl can always get in a club. Models like Ustinova are regulars at the Nijinsky and at a dozen other clubs. Now, if Petrovna had been a Nijinsky dancer like Vera, there might be a tidy little connection, only she wasn’t. So that’s that.”
“Did she try?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did Petrovna audition to be a dancer at the Club Nijinsky?”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Someone said yes or no. There’s always a gatekeeper.”
“That’s it?” Victor took on the gravity of a physician delivering a grim prognosis. “You’re fucked.”