Vodka (29 page)

“Take the blindfold off,” Karkadann said.

The room was small and damp. Wallpaper was peeling off in strips; there was a plastic table, metal chairs, a samovar. They could have been anywhere in Moscow, which Irk guessed was precisely the point. Karkadann was sitting opposite Irk, his chair turned around so he could lean his arms on the backrest. Zhorzh hovered like a vampire at Karkadann’s shoulder.

“If Yerofeyev wants to talk to me, he can come here himself,” Karkadann said.

“Then tell me something that lets me pass my case on to him.”

“I’ve absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Vladimir Kullam. Raisa Rustanova.”

Karkadann’s face was unreadable. “Never heard of them.”

“Vladimir worked at a kiosk on Novokuznetskaya.” Irk looked at Zhorzh; Zhorzh looked steadily back. “One of those you firebombed today, in case you forgot. Vladimir attended the Red October school on Prospekt Mira. Raisa Rustanova was at the orphanage on the same site.”

“‘Attended’? ‘Was’? You use the past tense, Investigator. These young people are dead?”

“And now another one’s missing. You had nothing to do with this?”

“You think I did?”

“You want the Red October distillery.”

“There are many ways pressure can be applied. We’re bandits, Investigator. A bandit never pays out, only collects. Businessmen owe bandits, not vice versa. No one collects from me,
no one.”

“I know what happened at the florist’s too.”

Karkadann turned his head slightly, acknowledging Irk’s line of thought. If a man could shoot his own child in cold blood, what was to stop him killing others? Whether by accident or design, the light caught the trenches in Karkadann’s face and painted them in deep shadows. He looked suddenly haggard, spectral; a man struggling to keep his dignity as he lost his humanity.

Irk understood. No more Valentina and no more Aslan, because Karkadann had murdered them himself; no more mansion in Kolomenskoe, because killing Ozers and the oath he’d taken had meant war on the Slavs, so he couldn’t afford to stay in the same place all the time, no matter how well defended it was. He was a guerrilla leader now, hiding out and always on the move; all he needed was military fatigues, and the look would have been complete. Karkadann had brought all this on himself, but he still thought life had screwed him. He was a shell.

Irk felt a sudden urge to place his hand on Karkadann’s shoulder and say that he knew; that bad things had happened to him too, things that had made him feel less a man than a husk, and there was no manual for learning to live with it. “I’m sorry about your family,” he said.

“People will think it’s us anyway, regardless of the truth.” Karkadann’s voice was shot through with bitterness. “Bloodshed’s in our blood, isn’t it? It’s our nature;
like vampires,
isn’t it?
The wicked Chechens—that’s what you Russians think.”

“I’m no more Russian than you are.”

“A fair chance, is that too much to ask? Clearly so, because it’s something we’ve never had. My parents were born in Kazakstan.” Irk knew instantly what he meant. Stalin had deported the Chechens to Kazakstan en masse in 1944; they’d been allowed to return only after his death nine years later, and every Chechen carried the shame and anger of that exile like a dagger. “For those denied a Soviet legacy—no money, no power, no connections—violence is the only way to make money. Do you know why so many Chechen towns are named Martan? It’s the Chechen word for battlefield. Urus-Martan, Achoj-Martan—they’re all scenes of great Chechen battles against the Russians. Let me tell you this, Investigator: it won’t be long before my people start referring to this place as Moscow-Martan. This is our battlefield. This is where we will win.”

Saturday, January 18, 1992

N
o matter how cold it was outside—up above, rather—it was warm down here in the sewers, and Irk’s skin had turned into a giant sprinkler; sweat gushed from every pore, slicking the inside of his rubber suit and stinging eyes already squinting in the dim
light. The policemen alongside him walked with exaggerated caution, arms held away from their bodies and legs spread wide; this was a strange new world, one in which they were cosmonauts. Irk himself could have been at a market or on a picnic for all that the conditions seemed to bother him; he’d been a veteran of the sewers ever since a metro driver who owed him a few favors had taken him for a ride in the cabin of his train. The gang of orange-suited women nearby were somber and quiet, for sure, but that wasn’t because of the damp or the fetid air; it was on account of the body they’d found earlier, the body over which Irk now stood as though he were a mother bear protecting her cub.

The body of Emma Kurvyakova, in fact.

At first glance, Emma had the pose of someone sleeping off a vodka hangover; flat on her back, right leg drawn up to her chest and left hand clasping the opposite shoulder, the kind of contortion that only the seriously drunk can maintain without discomfort. She even wore the grin of the stupefied, though the smile was plastered on her neck rather than her mouth—a slash across the jugular. The accretion of gas had made her eyes bulge but hadn’t yet appreciably distended the abdomen, and her skin was unblistered.

The sewer water lapped at his ankles and sighed in eddies around Emma’s head. Irk choked on his own rancor. He should have thought about investigating the sewers before. He’d spent enough time down there, after all; but with everything else that had been going on, it hadn’t occurred to him until then, too late for Emma Kurvyakova. He felt nauseous.

Emma’s body had been caught against a mesh screen gate at the point where the main sewer, which
runs perpendicular to the Moscow River, meets the intercepting sewer, traveling parallel with the river. The sewage workers had found her on a trip to clean away the debris backed up against the filter: paper, rags, corks, sticks, leaves, vodka bottles, disposable diapers (which only the wealthy could afford), and ripped panty hose, all washed down drains or flushed down toilets—all, that was, apart from a girl’s body.

There’s an old Russian superstition that a murderer’s image remains on the eyes of his victim. Irk aimed the beam of his flashlight at Emma’s face, and instantly cursed his own stupidity. He was an Estonian, the most Western of all former Soviet peoples; he should have known better than to entertain that sort of peasant mumbo-jumbo.

“You went to see Karkadann?” Denisov said. “Then this case should go to Yerofeyev.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no? I thought that’s what you wanted.”

“I do.” Well, he had, until it had become clear that the Khruminsches, and particularly Svetlana, were relying on him to solve the case. He didn’t mention this. A personal motivation? Denisov would no more understand that of Irk than he’d understand nuclear physics. “But what can you do? Three deaths, and already we’ve had three separate suspects. German Kullam was innocent, that’s for sure. Sabirzhan was still in custody when Emma Kurvyakova went missing. And Karkadann wouldn’t give me a straight answer.”

“So give it to Yerofeyev, let him deal with it.”

“Deal with it? Forget about it, more like. Look at
the facts, Denis Denisovich. Vladimir Kullam and Raisa Rustanova were two of Sabirzhan’s favorites. How likely is it that the Chechens would choose them? One’s coincidence; two is deliberate.”

“Maybe they wanted to frame him.”

“They’d need to know an awful lot about his habits to do that. Perhaps they have someone on the inside; but if so, why would they have bothered threatening the Khruminsches the other day? Everything about the Chechens is circumstantial. So I’ve been thinking. If we let the facts lead us to a theory”—
as proper police departments do
, ran the unspoken subtext—“what do we have? A repeat offender—a serial killer.”

“Highly disorderly,” Denisov said. He was, as usual, wearing hideous gray plastic Soviet shoes. Irk was almost tempted to buy the man a pair of decent shoes out of his own pocket, until he remembered all the kickbacks Denisov must be getting.

He told Denisov what he’d managed to ascertain. The filter screen, three-millimeter mesh, had been erected on Wednesday to stop solids clogging the duplicate inverted siphons that ran under the river. The body had been discovered during a routine check—miraculously performed on time—to ensure that the gate had been properly installed and the mesh was intact. Maintenance of the Moscow sewers is a perpetual job: debris must be jetted, flushed, blow-boarded or rodded away, and there’s a running battle with the highway authorities about excessive road grit dropping into the sewers.

It seemed that the killer had disposed of the previous bodies by bringing them into the sewers and letting the flow take them out into the river. The water
was moving under the ice, of course. It had just been the killer’s dumb luck that he’d jettisoned the corpses near the outflow from Red October: warm water brought things to the surface. If the killer had continued right up to the sewer junction, he would have seen the new screen. That he appeared not to have known of its existence implied he’d been leaving the bodies farther up the tunnels, where access was easier, and letting the stream of sewer water do the rest.

Either way, he must at some stage have been in the sewers with the bodies. Every sewage worker in the capital was therefore a suspect. Getting beyond that was the hard part. Sidorouk couldn’t establish a specific time of death for any of the victims, so there was no mileage in checking work schedules and duty rosters; and even if there was, what good would it do when people were marked down as turning up for work when they hadn’t and vice versa?

Public works departments were just about the worst offenders in the culture of slack second-ratedness that the reformers were trying to beat out of Russia, and berating them about their ways was futile; you might as well tell them they couldn’t drink vodka. Most of the sewer workers would be doing two or three jobs just to survive, like everyone else Irk knew. It was a wonder that anyone had time to eat or drink, let alone go around murdering children.

Except gangsters, of course. Gangsters always seemed to have time.

So Irk would check out the sewer workers. He would also need to go back over the lists the police had made of the hundreds who had access to Prospekt Mira: parents, suppliers, staff. An insider would have known
who Sabirzhan’s favorites were. But Vladimir Kullam hadn’t been at school when he’d been killed; both Raisa Rustanova and Emma Kurvyakova could have left the orphanage before being taken. Sabirzhan had been in custody when Emma had disappeared, but not when she’d been found. He was still a suspect, that was for sure. Or maybe it was something totally unconnected, and the connection with Vladimir Kullam and Raisa Rustanova
was
just coincidental. The moment Irk thought of a solution, his mind sprouted a hydra of objections.

Irk had bribed the press officer Kovalenko to keep Vladimir’s death quiet. Now that there were more bodies, he wondered whether he’d been too hasty.

“Perhaps we should welcome publicity, Denis Denisovich, not hide from it.”

“Absolutely not,” Denisov said. “You know my views on this.”

“People can’t help if they don’t know there’s something wrong. If we release the news, maybe it’ll jog someone’s memory. They’ll remember their neighbor behaving weirdly, or something.”

“Everybody’s neighbor behaves weirdly, Juku. No. I forbid it. The disadvantages of going public far outweigh the advantages.”

That was reasonable, Irk conceded; what wasn’t reasonable was that Denisov was still stuck in the Soviet mind-set, which refused to acknowledge that such crimes could occur in the workers’ paradise. There’d been no serial killers in the Soviet Union, not officially; serial killers were an abomination found only in the West, as were racists, gangs, whores and the unemployed. Criminals were a priori déclassé elements—Marxist for
life’s flotsam. These déclassé elements even had their own categories: Easy Morals, Drifters, Adolescents, Retards.

And yet, and yet … down in Rostov, Andrei Chikatilo was due to go on trial in the spring, and if anybody could shatter the myth that communist Russia had been quiet, predictable and law-abiding, it was surely Chikatilo. He was charged with fifty-two murders—fifty-two!—beginning in Brezhnev’s day, and a grayer, more apparently normal man would have been hard to find. Chikatilo had children, grandchildren. He was a teacher, the quintessence of the man next door, and children had gone with him to the woods around Rostov again and again because in Soviet society children had been taught to obey adults without question. None of the adolescents Chikatilo had picked had been sufficiently independent to challenge or doubt him. Why should they? He was a kindly old uncle, wasn’t he?

Chikatilo called himself a “mistake of nature,” but Irk didn’t buy this. Like every Russian, Chikatilo’s past dipped into darkness, and some of those shadows were now being illuminated. His brother had supposedly been eaten by starving peasants during the Ukrainian famine of the thirties, his father had been captured by the Nazis during the war and imprisoned as a traitor when he returned home, making Chikatilo the son of an enemy of the people—a terrible cross for a child to bear in Soviet Russia. Chikatilo wasn’t nature’s mistake, Irk thought; he had motivations, threads that patchworked together, just as the killer whom Irk sought would have, and Irk would need to unpick these strands before he could understand the man who left dead children in the sewers, and he’d need to understand the man before he
could catch him. Chikatilo had eaten parts of his victims, but he was not an exception; he was an exemplar. As far as Irk could see, every Russian crime was cannibalistic to some extent; no people feed on and off each other more than the Russians.