Moscow Noir, page 20
“Okay, to sum it up: you made the whole thing up and you’re not talking about it anymore. Mom gets some peace of mind, and you, young lady—if you start seeing weird things, or if life starts to suck real bad all of a sudden, give me a call. I’ll fix it all up for you. I mean it. We’ll deal with the money thing later, a little bit at a time. And weird things need to be sorted out quickly.”
“Dr. Weird,” she said, and cast a sad glance at my sink filled with dirty dishes.
I walked to Birch Grove Park to get some fresh air and hide from the heat. And just to think a little.
After sunset, the squirrels went quiet in the branches of elm trees. Disappointed spaniels and dobermans hauled their owners back home; but pensioners remained seated in their usual spots, finishing their games of dominoes.
I peered across the park that was slowly succumbing to darkness. The girl hooked up with that dude somewhere not too far from here, and they went to most remote spot in the grove, which still hadn’t been cleared of fallen trees after the disastrous storms of 1998. A person with an underdeveloped personality simply has no clue what a stranger wearing a long overcoat in hot weather can do to her.
Uh, wait a second—according to her, he hung the coat over his arm while they were walking, but put it on again before he laid her down on a concrete slab, took the condom out of her fingers, and rolled up her miniskirt.
She didn’t make that up—that much was certain. So if this was the case, it was the guy who worried me. It seemed like more than just ordinary fetishism.
The local police station was located on 3rd Peschanaya Street, on the other side of Birch Grove Park. The precinct was a hole in a wall, splotched with shiny brown paint. The hole opened onto a short corridor that led down to a semibasement room, decorated in the best traditions of Brezhnev office style: cheap wall panels of faux wood, wrinkled linoleum imitating mahogany flooring, and painted white bars on the windows.
“Sexual predators? No, haven’t had any of them in here in a long time,” said the inspector with the fitting last name of Bullet. “It’s good you stopped in, but I don’t see a crime here. Okay, she’s underage. She was hitting on him. No law against wearing an overcoat in the summer. Got anything else on him? No? Okay, I guess I could ask around. At least I’ll be able to get off my butt, get some exercise. Come back in a week. You’re a private doctor, I guess you know what you’re talking about,” he concluded skeptically.
And only three days later …
The flashing lights of the police car cast an unnatural blue pall on the gray stump of a body covered with a blanket. The figure lay on a stretcher that floated slowly into the yawning mouth of the ambulance. But I caught a glimpse of tangled hair and a wet forehead amidst the absurdly blue uniforms of the orderlies. Her face was uncovered, so she was alive. Inspector Bullet gave me a dark look and said, “The reason I asked you to come right away was that if she dies, I’m gonna have to interrogate your underage client. There’s an overcoat here too. Looks like it’s all true.”
“I’d rather tell you her story myself,” I said, thinking hard. “It would make more sense.”
“Well?”
“Nice guy, funny, youngish, sun-bleached hair, tan, tall?” I asked.
“Far from it. Not very tall. The overcoat he wore dragged along on the ground behind him. The victim says the coat was strange, like something from the Stalin era. Other than that—well, maybe he was tan, maybe funny. Why shouldn’t he be funny? So much fun to bash in a girl’s head. They’re probably gonna have to drill a hole in her skull. They say it’s that serious. She went with him on her own at first, and then later she suspected something wasn’t quite right … Yep. That’s about it.”
The investigation reached a dead end very quickly. Two construction workers, migrants, one tall and one short, who had been painting the building on the corner of 2nd and 3rd Peshchanaya Streets, vanished into a thin air. This greatly surprised their foreman, who couldn’t locate his countrymen after returning from Moldavia. To find their whereabouts or prove anything was virtually impossible, since the photographs of the suspects that were soon faxed from their hometown, a place called Yassy, were only suitable for a trash can. So the building with the unfinished paint job returned to its peaceful slumber among the sticky lime trees and sounds of car alarms.
“We can’t issue ‘wanted’ posters or arrest an overcoat without its owner,” said the inspector. “But you know what I think? I think this is your department. After you stopped in the other day, I called all the old geezers from our precinct. They’re better than any archive. Thought maybe there had been something like what you described two years ago, before I began working here. Turned out there was a case in 1973. Right here in Birch Grove Park. Then again, where else would someone work the walls with a girl? So there was this sex maniac who wore a wide-brim hat and an old-fashioned overcoat, who was always on the lookout for schoolgirls. Funny thing was that the girls didn’t even hesitate. He took them to some broken-down barracks near Khodynka and made them wear white socks and a school uniform with a white apron. When he got busted, he threatened that the entire police force would have hell to pay when they found out who he really was. He hinted that he was some big shot in the Communist Party, or even one of the higher-ups in the government. To make a long story short, instead of going to jail, he ended up in a funny farm—your department, in other words. Never came back from there. He’d be in his nineties by now, I’d say. And he was a local, not a construction worker from Moldavia. Period. Case closed … What do you say to that?”
Quite frankly, I couldn’t say anything at all, except a few standard comments about fetishism.
But fetishism isn’t contagious. Especially when there’s no direct contact. And fetishists rarely choose the same location twice.
Lighting up a cigarette, I sat down on a chair on the balcony and put my bare feet up on the railing. I had thought that I lived in one of the best neighborhoods in Moscow. Right next to the Sokol subway station and the large triangle of Bratsky Park, with its stately old lime trees. The park ends right at a lane of chestnuts, straight as an arrow, bordering an elegant square. That lane runs up to the famous Birch Grove Park, as big as a small forest. To live in a place surrounded by trees and green parks—what more could you wish for? Well, for one thing, that there weren’t sexual predators roaming around in them.
But what could I do? I had (along with Inspector Bullet) very odd facts at my disposal. There was not one, but three maniacs, all strangely attractive to underage girls. The girls followed them willingly; my young patient even seduced him herself. Only one of them put up any resistance; but even she followed him voluntarily at first—a man she’d never seen before wearing an overcoat. She went with him to a remote, deserted corner of the park. And it was only when they got there that something happened she didn’t like.
So, three maniacs. The second was short, since the coat dragged on the ground. The first one was taller; the coat only came down to his knees. And the third maniac was already history—also featuring an overcoat, however.
If there’s only one overcoat, then two different people would have had to wear it. As for the two builders from Moldavia, one of them could have just borrowed it from the other, and … and interesting things began happening to them.
But what about the 1973 maniac, who also wore an “old-fashioned overcoat,” for god’s sake? Old-fashioned even in 1973? When was it in style, then? The ’50s? ’40s?
The cigarette smoke drifted over the tops of the poplar trees, behind which stood gray brick buildings that looked like gingerbread houses. The clicking of a woman’s high heels, fast and nervous, resounded on the concrete somewhere below.
The next day I went to visit the inspector with a silly question: had they found any link between the 1973 case and today’s pedophiles from Moldavia? But, of course, there was no link. And, of course, no one wondered back in 1973 what had happened to the gray overcoat that the sex maniac wore to go skirt-chasing. Inspector Bullet had read in the 1973 file that the maniac had had a whole underground bunker, like an abandoned bomb shelter, right on the edge of Birch Grove Park. The police might have kept the white socks or the coat; but only the socks would probably have made good material evidence.
“What about the bunker?” I asked. “What happened to it? Where is it?”
“Who cares about the bunker, doc? When we come across a place like that, you know, a basement or an attic, we just seal it up and check the locks from time to time. So that winos or bums can’t live there. I’m sure that was what happened to the bunker. Sealed up and forgotten. Come on, let’s go. I’ll show you why we have Comrade Stalin and his minister of internal affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, to thank for a good cop shop.”
“Why Beria?” I asked absently, lost in my own thoughts.
Inspector Bullet didn’t answer. Instead, he proudly motioned me to follow him down the corridor, where it ended at a plywood door. He opened it, revealing another door behind it. This one was made of heavy, rough cast iron, painted blood-brown. It had something like a ship’s steering wheel, two feet in diameter, attached to it. No, it wasn’t a ship’s wheel—it looked more like the lock on a bank safe. I was standing in front of the door to a huge safe, the height of a grown man, covered in a slapdash way with multiple layers of paint. Numerous iron levers and knobs stuck out of the door—all parts of the locking mechanism.
“Does it work?” I asked in a grim voice, staring at the magnificent contraption.
“You bet,” said Inspector Bullet. “We have the key, it weighs almost a pound. But frankly, none of us has ever felt like going behind the door.”
He paused significantly, enjoying my confusion.
“No mutant rats or skeletons in rotten trench coats there, though,” he added shortly, and wiped his large face with his hand. “But I suggest you don’t go in there, either. Because … well, doc, I guess you’ve figured out this is an entrance to a bomb shelter. And our station is like the front lobby of the shelter. We’re on the corner of Peshchanaya Square and 3rd Peshchanaya Street, right? We go into the bomb shelter from here, and using underground passages we can walk all the way over to the lane of chestnuts on your 2nd Peshchanaya. Think there’s not a bomb shelter in your basement? It’s just locked. But if you go down into the basement, sooner or later you’ll end up in front of a metal door just like this one here. And behind it you’ll find a passageway all the way to the Sokol subway station, or even the airport station, where the old airport use to be, on the former Khodynka Field. There was a secret subway line that went all the way there from the Kremlin. So, you go for a stroll underground, and when you figure you’re lost, you start banging on this two-foot-thick door from the inside. But no one’s going to open it, because even if someone’s there, they won’t hear you. It could get lonely, don’t you think? Especially when it’s pitch-black in there.”
“You think Comrade Stalin and Comrade Beria wandered around in these bomb shelters?”
“Well, maybe they didn’t. But all the gray brick houses on all the Peshchanaya streets have these bomb shelters. They were built by German prisoners of war. You know, ‘You bombed ’em, you rebuild ’em.’ They say that in the ’50s, when Khrushchev set them free, they thanked everyone here for giving them the chance to return home with a clean conscience. And Comrade Beria, in addition to being the minister of national security, and then the minister of internal affairs, was also head of the prisoner camps. So it was all under his jurisdiction. The best buildings in Moscow are called Stalin buildings, but they should be called Beria buildings.”
“That’s all well and good,” I said. “Beria and company—very interesting. But are you going to catch the maniac?”
Inspector Bullet sighed and looked at me unsympathetically. “At least the girl is alive. She says when he laid her down on some mossy hill, she changed her mind. And then he asked her to put on white socks, like a schoolgirl. Just like the other maniac. She didn’t like the socks—too dirty. She began to fight him off. That’s it. The case is basically closed. Not gonna dig up anything more on him.”
“A hill … on the edge of Birch Grove Park, right by the concrete fence at Khodynka Field,” I said with sudden clarity. “And who took her there? It was probably him. That’s his place. Or their place? The same place as in 1973? And at first she followed him, as if … as if she were hypnotized. Right. See you, inspector; I’ll be back.”
“Hey, come work in the police force, why don’t you? We really need a shrink in the department,” replied Inspector Bullet.
The girl, Julia, gave me a much warmer welcome than her mother. The mother probably wasn’t too keen on paying me for another session. She just sadly gestured with her hand toward the girl’s room, saying, “Don’t be shocked. Her majesty’s wearing new clothes.”
The red-haired Julia had dyed her hair jet-black and put on black and red lipstick. Metal trinkets of all shapes and sizes dangled from her wrists. A metal cross hung between her large breasts, which were virtually spilling out of her T-shirt, and were spotted with pimples.
“Come to lock me up in the funny farm?” she asked.
“They don’t put goths and heavy metal fans away in mental institutions,” I said. “Now listen carefully, sweetie. Two days ago, a man in an overcoat stinking of dirt cracked open the head of a young woman. The police are looking for him. Do you catch my drift? You have the ass of a grown-up woman and the head of a teenager. And when someone lowers a rock onto a head like that, and the brains begin to—Did you say something?”
In one quick, nervous motion, the gothic Julia lit a cigarette and stuck it to her mouth. Then she took it out, smeared with lipstick, and stared at me silently.
“So I need you to fill me in on some details, here,” I said hastily, before she had quite recovered from the shock. “First, who was leading who? He you, or you him?”
“Him,” she replied immediately. “He took me to the cement fence.”
“You said there was a concrete slab. Was it hard?”
“Don’t worry, it was soft enough for my butt.” She was herself again, the first wave of shock already past. “It was covered with moss or something. It wasn’t concrete, I mean … it was really old, more like a tuft of something in the ground. To the left of the path leading to a hole in the cement fence by Khodynka, the field. So it was real soft. Try it yourself. If you need company, I’ll come with you. Doctors get a discount.”
“One last thing. When you were going there with him, what were you thinking about? What did you feel?”
“What do you think I was thinking about? I was thinking about that,” said Julia. “I felt a little high. I was like, you know, a little girl. Real curious. Like it was the first time. A big guy with a big thingy.”
“Did you think those thoughts before?”
“I used to do a lot of things before. And now—hello, grown-up world.”
I headed to the concrete fence, behind which the white towers of a whole new residential district, constructed on Khodynka Field in just under a year, soar up to the skies. The tops of the buildings bask in the sunset, and the fresh new walls glow pink, like the Cadillac Hotel. To the left stands the spire of Triumph Palace, the tallest residential building in Europe.
But all that is on the other side of the concrete fence. There, in a forgotten area of the old park, which is essentially a forest, twilight was thickening. An empty bench stood askew (what was it doing there—did someone drag it all the way over from the lane?), and weeds and burdocks grew on the tufty ground. Like gray mushroom caps covered with green mold, and slightly protruding from the ground at about knee height, there were two concrete slabs disappearing into the ground at a slant. A little farther on was another slab, level with the earth around it.
I thought I could make out something resembling small orifices, half covered in earth, by each slab. Passageways that once led down?
The slabs were covered with shards of broken bottles, sausage wrappers, and … a torn piece of foil—a condom wrapper.
So this was the place.
I had nothing more to do there.
Gray haze and a soft path silenced my footsteps. A shaggy dog emerged quietly from the bushes and stared at me with an unblinking, almost human stare, keeping a safe distance. Then it took two steps toward me. My heart fluttered in fear, but the the dog didn’t come any closer.
For two hours I listened to a plump editor from Sokol, the local newspaper. She had suggested I do an interview on the topic of psychiatry, because “we do this with all the prominent people in the district.” Then she talked about those who had died on Khodynka during the coronation of the last czar, when many people were crushed and their bodies were hauled away on carts. About Peshchanaya Square, which was built on a large graveyard for Napoleon’s soldiers. The remains of the French soldiers were taken away, nobody knows where. A similar story about the dead in Bratskoye Cemetery: they were buried during World War I, and their remains were exhumed under Beria and Khrushchev, when the remote suburb of Moscow was turning into a beautiful new residential district. The bunkers on the edge of Khodynka? Those were located in a special area that belonged to the Moscow Military District—part of the defense line at the farthest end of the airbase. Airplanes took off over the heads of soldiers, their propellers droning heavily, and flew further west, to the railroad. Nothing interesting, apart from that. Stories about the living dead from the past? No, no; nothing of that nature. I would have heard. I left the editor and walked home through the empty treelined streets in complete silence, greedily breathing in the fresh air.
Parks built on human bones. Graveyards that no longer exist. An ominous name—Khodynka. More parks, couples with baby carriages, cyclists, poplars, lime trees. Graveyard shadows sleep peacefully among bushes and alleys. Sleep, O souls of long forgotten soldiers. Sleep in the best neighborhood in Moscow. You are welcome here, because all cities stand on the bones of the past. Carts, then hearses, rolled down these streets. These days, from the open balcony doors, you could hear women’s laughter and music, and from the sidewalk you could see the tops of bookshelves and white ceilings with circles of honey-colored lights cast by chandeliers. A cat sat in the window and stared gloomily at the gray concrete below. The cat’s name was Grymzik. He belonged to my neighbor, and I was almost home. And I needed to make an urgent phone call.
