Moscow Noir, page 9
“You could have done it earlier, dummy,” Baba Agafia said reproachfully. “He and those downtown characters nearly fell into each others arms out there. Where are your brains?”
“Well, you shouldn’t have told such a massive lie then,” Lana snarled.
“Well, who knew they’d show up so fast, and in this blizzard?”
“Well, you just shouldn’t have. This guy wasn’t going anywhere.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he fell for me, that’s how. I don’t know why. But I can always sense what these lechers are up to. More than likely—it’s not all that complicated—it was my latest sew-up. Even I didn’t expect that this time. There was even a little blood.” Lana paused. “Yeah, by the way, what did you tell them, the ones who came in the Mercedes?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Baba Agafia sniffed. “They didn’t just not have three hundred thousand, they didn’t have a kopek. I said I wouldn’t let them in. Over my dead body. Well, I could see they realized they were barking up the wrong tree. They walked away, whispered their secrets, and drove off. And now, just before you, they called again. They said they’d be right over. With the money. What about yours?”
“Who?”
“Oh, little Farid’s mujahideen.”
“That’s why I’m calling. This guy fixed everything, looks like, finished them off. Amazing.”
“How do you know?”
“None of their cells answer.”
“That means you’re free. And you have the money. You got away from me and little Farid.” Baba Agafia cackled, tickled. “Where are you hightailing it to?”
“Thailand, like I told you. Tomorrow there’ll be last-minute tickets on sale at this office I know. We think we can pull it off. Hey, dead man,” Lana said away from the phone, “what do you think, are we going to get those tickets?” Baba Agafia could hear a muffled male voice. “The dead man says we are.”
“All right, then,” Baba Agafia sighed. “You and I have talked too long. They might still call and the phone will be busy. Are you sure you locked that guy in?”
“You want me to go over and check to see if he’s already broken out?”
“Oh, I’m just afraid of him, the murderer. That look of his … makes my skin crawl.”
“Don’t be afraid,” Lana chuckled. “He’s the one whose soul is hanging by a thread. If he has one, of course.”
“Listen”—Baba Agafia’s voice dropped to a whisper—“what if he’s listening on the extension right now? Ugh, I didn’t think of that.”
“Not likely.” Lana chuckled again. “That’s the least of his problems. And even if he is listening … Hello,” she said in lower voice. “Hell on the line. I’ve got your number. God will call when—”
“Curse that tongue of yours, fool!” Baba Agafia shot back. “Fear God, you shameless girl!” There was a staccato chattering, after which short beeps started leaping in the ether.
As if expecting to hear something more, Veltsev held the receiver to his ear for a while longer, and then, sitting up straight, he lowered it carefully on the hook.
Rattling the chair, which he pushed in front of him like a walker, he headed over to the still smoking bed, took his passport out of his pocket, leafed through it, shook it out upside down, and tossed it aside. The rug seemed to be tilting to the left with the whole bed. It’s going to break where it’s weak, he thought, remembering how yesterday at the registration desk he’d slipped his hotel card between the pages of his passport and how today he’d searched for it in his wallet without knowing what he was looking for. A hot sea seemed to be overflowing its shores inside him. Smiling distractedly, like someone dangling his last cigarette in his fingers, he pictured Lana’s tear-stained face as she sat in front of him, and wondered at this image, at how it already existed on its own, as if it were something outside of him, which meant that the laughing voice he’d just heard in the ether no longer belonged to him. The cuckoo clock on the wall shuddered. A moment later, its chilled steel struck half past 12. The bird’s door didn’t open, it just shook; however, behind the toy mechanism Veltsev heard heavenly thunder. Someone was fiddling with the lock in the front door very carefully. Without looking he picked up his gun, cocked the trigger, and chuckled at the little man on the string: no one had called.
PART II
DEAD SOULS
FIELD OF A THOUSAND CORPSES
BY ALEXANDER ANUCHKIN
Elk Island
Translated by Marian Schwartz
Bogorodskoe Municipality,
Eastern Administrative District, 1996
When Nikolai Petrovich Voronov is sitting there like that and looking like that, expect trouble. Actually, if he’s looking some other way, you should still expect it. Nikolai Petrovich and trouble are twin brothers. Behind his back they call him Banderas, after the Spanish actor who conquered the world with his incredible muscularity and crazy machismo. When you look at the Hollywood Banderas, you can’t believe he actually exists. No one’s really like that. At least, that’s what they say. Me, I haven’t been to the movies for a long time. It’s expensive and pointless. Especially since a real homegrown Banderas is directly in front of me right now and I’m sitting here looking at him.
I realize that meeting a man like this on one’s life journey is tremendous good fortune. Don’t think I’ve got some alternative orientation or I don’t like women. God forbid. It’s just that Nikolai Petrovich is truly magnificent.
He’s forty or so, his hair’s the color of a crow’s wing (as they write in books), he combs it with a side part, but it’s too long. He’s been on duty for more than twenty-four hours but he’s wearing a snow-white shirt without a single wrinkle in it, and his collar, my god, his collar.
He has piercing eyes. Right now, as I write this, I can come up with only one comparison: a movie about sin city. The movies again, damnit, but that’s how it goes. Agent Voronov is top dog in the district of sin, the region of sin, the administrative division of sin. Strictly speaking, he’s sin and its nemesis all rolled into one.
He also has a mustache that droops down to the middle of his chin, deep wrinkles from his temples to the middle of his cheeks, and few teeth. Just the front ones, and those are smoked out, boozed out, brown. When he smiles—no more questions. A cop but an alcoholic. An alcoholic but he can stop. Can but won’t. He’ll kill. Without a second thought.
He lights up his third cigarette—he chain-smokes—in ten minutes, and through the poisonous haze of his Java Gold looks me right in the eye. His eyes are brown, but his look is icy, colder than the ocean. Our staring match has been going on for more than two months, ever since I came to work for him. That is, became the junior agent in the property crimes department of the Bogorodskoe Internal Affairs Department of the Eastern District Internal Affairs Department of the Moscow Main Internal Affairs Department. It all happened so suddenly, it wasn’t my doing, but that’s beside the point today, the subject of a whole separate novel. I’ve been a bad boy. I’m twenty-four and my very smallest tattoo, a huge kraken devouring the world, starts at my right ankle and ends at my left ear. I spent all the money I made seven years ago—when me and the boys drowned this drug dealer, a guy in our class, holding him by the leg in the Yauza—on this tat. That was when I suddenly developed my acute sense of righteousness: I was able to convince everyone that selling drugs was very bad. We forced that monster to promise not to do it anymore and then took his money before finishing him off. To teach him a lesson. Then there were the ladies. We swept the district clean of pimps, small-time profiteers, and fences, but at some point the guys stopped me. Actually, it was too late. I’d turned myself into one big walking sign, a yakuza out of a Takeshi Kitano nightmare. Twigs, leaves, branches, Celtic knot, and Japanese dragons—all the world’s evil spirits battled it out on my body for the right to a free millimeter of skin. What was going on a little bit deeper inside me—well, best not to even try to understand that.
I had only two options left, and I chose the wrong one. Now I’m an agent, a puny sergeant with a regulation cannon, in puny Bogorodskoe Internal Affairs, where druggies steal drills from construction sites, and druggies rape druggies, sometimes without even being clear about their victim’s gender, and druggies kill druggies to get themselves a little heroin—drugs aren’t just born under tram tracks after all. And tracks are the only thing (if you don’t count druggies, of course) we have an abundance of in our district.
Nikolai Petrovich is sitting in his white shirt across from me smoking his fourth cigarette. Today’s kind of like a holiday for him. After the obligatory five years, they made him a major. He’s on duty, but there hasn’t been anyone at all on Boitsovaya Street, where our department is, for the last few hours. Even the lunatics are lying low. Pretty soon we’ll go out and celebrate his stars. Fuck every living thing.
I light up my second and look at Voronov. He’s relaxing. A meter and a half from us, behind the door, the perps and vics—all jumbled together—await their fate on the sagging vinyl bench in the corridor. Soon Nikolai Petrovich, a king in his white shirt, with two nonregulation guns in his tan underarm holster, will start seeing them. He’ll punish and pardon.
But for now he’s sprinkling some nasty Nescafé some broken Hindu brought him from the market early this morning into his cup. Voronov sprinkles in one spoonful. Two. Three. He pauses for a moment over the fourth and then throws that in too, with the decisiveness of Alexander the Great. Oh, and seven lumps of sugar. A stream of boiling water, a dirty spoon, the first noisy swallow. The agent lights up again and leans back in his chair, which is worn down to the veneer. He closes his eyes, takes a drag, and releases the smoke. Then—with just his eyelids—he gives me the order: Go. I open the door for the first time that night.
I cautiously slap the first petitioner on the cheeks. He’s been sitting there for a long time. Neighbors relieved him of the nice new TV in his room in a communal apartment on Otkrytoe Highway. Voronov has already warned me we’d be rejecting his appeal. This vic will never see a criminal case. He was born to suffer, to be a vic. I’m learning to be like Nikolai Petrovich. Why do you think the street our department’s located on is called Boitsovaya—Fight Street? Pretty strong people live and work here on Boitsovaya. To be blunt, they don’t have much choice.
Here’s another. They just brought her out of a jail cell. She threw her newborn in the garbage. She reeks of sweet cheap alcohol that makes me sick. In the time we spend questioning her I run out four times to our filthy two-holer—one for the cops and one for the crooks—and puke. I must be puking my stomach out. Voronov’s as calm as a sphinx. His ironed white shirt gets whiter and stiffer all the time. He says, “You’ll be going to that garbage heap soon. Believe me. There, in the garbage, you’re going to find the corpse of another newborn infant who had a couple of gulps of air and then got stupidly fucked up. You’re going to feel awful. You’re going to search for his damned mama furiously, you’ll find her, you’ll put her in that chair where you’re sitting now. You’ll sit where I am and look into her eyes in hopes of seeing hell. But what you’ll see is emptiness. Emptiness, my young friend. Emptiness is hell. And vice versa. I want you to lose your illusions as fast as you can and understand all about where, how, and why we are the way we are. Believe me. I’m one of the better ones.”
I get queasy again and dash off. Voronov waits patiently; today he has no intention of stopping.
“By the way, they’re going to give this mama two years’ probation. You’ll be very lucky if this story doesn’t repeat itself on your watch. But if it does, that’s bad. It could break you, even though by then you’ll be pretty tough.”
He hands me a vile cigarette. I try to strike a match and on the fifth try manage to light it. I see the various back alleys through the window. Every day I walk these alleys, but I don’t remember exactly what the streets are called. I’ll admit, I don’t want to either. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just endless emptiness. The whole Eastern District. Not too far from here you get to the school I went to. A little farther and there it is, the tram stop where, in a frenzy, I battered the painted iron kiosk with my fist, trying to take away the pain of love. And there’s the courtyard where I had my first dead body, a dead body whose name and murderer I found. I found him quickly, in the next entryway. At the time I was given a commendation—as the youngest detective. Only Voronov didn’t join in the general rejoicing at my success. He said, “One day everyone’s going to die. Absolutely. Then other people will come, either cops or doctors. They’ll come and tell you the cause of death. You just have to understand, student, that no one in my memory has ever been resurrected by that. Don’t take pride in it or you’ll start wanting to be a little like God.”
Later I cursed him all night long and couldn’t sleep. I think I cried. But in the morning he was standing on Boitsovaya, just like a monument to a poet. Smoking, blowing off the ashes. Waiting for me. He was always waiting for me. He liked working with kids like me.
“Life is a lot of things. And it takes crazy shapes. You don’t mind that I’m like a biology teacher, do you? Love your neighbors and your family. Everyone else deserves death. You think I’m wrong?”
He found a way of instilling all this wisdom of the ages in my head in the three minutes it took us to walk back to the department. I couldn’t remember school or the institute anymore. It was stupid, in fact, to remember those chalk-stained wusses. I had a real man walking on my left. Someone who had known life and then fucked it doggy-style. He always liked to be on top and couldn’t stand lying down. Or sitting down facing you. Or standing. Impressive.
His shift’s over and it’s time for us to go. We leave the department, slipping on the chipped steps, which are coated with a thick layer of ice. Today there hasn’t been a short-timer or drunk in jail—no one to hack the ice off—and the fat guard would never get off his fat ass. All he does is dream of somebody installing a bedpan in his chair so he’ll never have to get up again. We slip and curse and light up. Voronov starts the engine of his Moskvich, which he bought with his fifth wife’s money. His spouse never seemed to begrudge him anything. The most powerful mass-produced engine with the most affordable afterburner. On the highway this battered heap hits as high as 250 kilometers an hour. When they hear that sound, the sound of the engine on Voronov’s heap, young skinheads move to the shoulder out of respect. Right now we’re driving to the Field of a Thousand Corpses. It’s a special kind of place.
I have a little time now, while the car is warming up, while we’re driving. The whole trip takes about fifteen minutes. Let me tell you about this field.
Once, a very long time ago, after God created the earth and people divided it up into pieces, one particular town chopped up its own territory. Each ragged piece was attached to a specific district. Only somewhere, in the very rear end of the Eastern District where several boundaries come together, in Elk Island National Park, the police chiefs messed something up. They ended up with an odd piece of land that wasn’t anyone’s at all. A kilometer by a kilometer. No one lost any sleep over this. What kind of crimes could you commit on that pathetic patch of ground? But those who thought like that were wrong. When all the cops in the vicinity realized exactly what their lands bordered on, that patch of ground turned into a living hell. Unidentified corpses were ferried here, and here they rotted away. Local thugs and uniformed officers both came to settle their disputes. They set up meets here, and once, before my very eyes, there was a very real duel. Two young lieutenants fired at each other over a female expert from the district CSI. I was the second for one of them, and I had to stuff my new jacket into the gaping hole in the wounded guy’s belly. He turned white, then gray, and honestly, never before or after have I seen someone’s face change color that fast.
For those who know anything about life and death, the field is a cult location. That’s where we’re going. Actually, we’re nearly there. Coming toward us through the night, through the black branches, reflecting off the thin crust of ice, are the headlights of someone’s car zapping us in the eyes. They’re waiting for us. Voronov has a lot of friends.
“A guy died here once,” Voronov says, addressing no one in particular, and he kills the engine. But I know—he’s continuing my education. He’s teaching me how to live. We get out of the car and look both ways. A junior agent, Khmarin, takes the alcohol and snacks out of the trunk. “It probably took a few days,” Banderas continues. “His car broke down on the parkway and he crawled here. He lay here, rasping, calling for help. All kinds of vermin ate him up.”
“What kind of vermin?”
“All kinds. It’s a national park. They have wild animals here.” He spits a yellow gob long into the snow.
The oncoming car switches its beams to low. Men get out, shivering in their summerweight leather jackets. I know them only vaguely. District criminal investigations. All friends of my new boss. They’re scary, but I’m getting used to them. For them the field is a known quantity. For me it’s still wild and exotic. We shake hands. The men break up into groups while Khmarin and I serve up an improvised meal on the hood of a long American automobile. There are lots of cars, ten or so. They pull up one after the other, forming a lopsided circle. Each on his own side of the field. I’m cutting sausage with fingers stiff from the cold, and I realize that here today they’re going to solve a dozen crimes ranging from serious to very, just like that, easily, plastic cup in hand. One pours for another, the other for a third. They’re cutting deals, and first thing tomorrow morning they’ll start writing reports.
“Does everyone have some?” Voronov asks, lifting a ribbed white cup.
