They entered a chilly room where two young uniformed officers sat smoking. The corpse of Grisha Zalinsky lay on the floor in front of them. Books were strewn everywhere.
“What do you want?” one of the officers said. “This is a crime area. Are you friends of the victim?”
“I am Deputy Inspector Tkach and this is Deputy Inspector Timofeyeva, and you are contaminating the scene of a murder.”
The two men stood up, one more slowly than the other.
“Stop smoking,” Sasha said. “Put your butts in your pocket. Did you open the window?”
“Yes,” said one of the two, looking toward the window. “The smell.”
“You don’t open windows. You don’t smoke. You don’t touch anything,” Sasha said.
Elena had moved forward and was kneeling next to the body. The face of the young man was badly mauled and bloody. The nose was a flattened mess. His legs were bent back under him.
The two young policemen said nothing.
“Why isn’t someone from medical here?” Sasha demanded.
“We don’t know,” said one officer sullenly. “We called. They said they’d send someone when they could. We’ve been here an hour. That’s why we opened the window.”
“You called on that phone?” Sasha asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you touched anything else?”
The two young men looked at each other.
“No,” they both said, and Sasha read the lie.
“Who reported the crime?”
“Neighbor,” said one of the men. “Heard noises early this morning, about six, told the building supervisor, who checked the apartment and found him.”
“Go knock on doors,” Sasha said. “Ask if anyone saw or heard anything. See if anyone knows any names or can describe people who visited Zalinsky.”
The two policemen hurried away. Sasha expected nothing from their inquiries. Muscovites were unlikely to volunteer any information that might mean they would have to spend time with the police or, worse, appear in court. But once in a while …
“Have you seen a corpse before?” Sasha asked.
Elena looked up from where she knelt and said, “Cadavers at the institute, an accident victim when I was about twelve, my father. This man was beaten methodically. He was beaten even after he was dead. The bruises on his stomach …Several of his ribs are broken.”
She got up. “I’ll look around.”
The phone was on the table next to the chair in which one of the policemen had been sitting. A phone in a student apartment was unusual. Sasha wondered how Grisha Zalinsky had obtained such a luxury.
Since the two officers had already used the telephone, Sasha didn’t bother going elsewhere to make his call. He dialed the medical investigation office. The dispatcher answered.
“This is Deputy Inspector Tkach. I’m at the apartment of the Zalinsky victim on Lomonosov. When is a doctor coming?”
“Lomonosov? We’ve got no call for Lomonosov,” the woman answered.
It was not uncommon. Out of every five or six calls one got lost. And it was getting worse every day. It was a routine Sasha knew well, but the two young uniformed officers obviously did not. Had Sasha and Elena not arrived, the policemen would probably have been sitting and smoking till their twelve-hour shift ended.
Sasha gave the woman on the phone the address and apartment number and told her how long it had been since the corpse had been discovered. The woman said a medical inspector would be there “soon.”
Sasha hung up the phone and looked around the room. The furniture was all modern, steel and black plastic. He did not care for it. He preferred heavy, brown sofas and chairs. Soft, comfortable furniture.
Along one wall of the one-room apartment were bookcases. A few books still remained on the shelves, but most were on the floor. Two of them rested on the corpse. The titles showed a wide range of interest from history to mathematics. Sasha saw no fiction.
To his right, along the other wall, stood a dresser, also black, with its drawers closed, and a desk, white, from which a single drawer had been removed and turned upside down on the floor. Elena was carefully examining papers, clothes, drawers.
“Anything?” Sasha asked.
“A woman or girl spent time here recently. The drawers smell of perfume. A few pieces of clothing. The woman had expensive clothes. See.”
She held up a pair of black panties. “Paris,” she said. “Not a fake label.”
Elena dropped the panties back into the drawer and moved to the overturned contents of the desk. Sasha looked at the corpse again. He could not have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five.
“Photograph,” Elena said, holding up a square picture that she had extracted from the debris.
Sasha stepped forward to look at it.
“Our princess,” Elena said, holding up the photo of Amira Durahaman and a handsome boy with curly hair. “Zalinsky?”
They both looked at the battered corpse.
“Probably,” Sasha said, tapping the photograph with his finger. “Place look familiar?”
The photograph showed the couple at a table, heads together, smiling, drinks in front of them, people at tables behind them.
“The Nikolai,” she said.
“The Nikolai,” he repeated. “Did the killer find what he was looking for?”
Elena looked at him and smiled. “Yes.”
“And how do you know?”
“The dresser,” she said. “He threw down the books and dumped the desk drawer but didn’t touch the dresser. He found what he was looking for before he got to the dresser.”
“Or someone wants us to think they were looking for something.”
“Back to the Nikolai?” she asked.
“Tonight,” he said. “Where do you think we should go now?”
“If we can get authorization, to the girl’s father. With the photograph of Zalinsky and his daughter,”
“If we seek authorization to approach a foreign diplomat, we may never get it. I suggest we naively assume the right to approach him in an effort to keep him informed of the progress of our investigation. The possibility exists that someone else may be looking for her, someone who has committed a murder.”
“And in fact?” asked Elena.
“What do you think?” asked Sasha.
“He’s a Syrian,” she said. “An Arab official worried about his daughter who may have run away with a Jew. The Syrian is a murder suspect.”
“And so is the daughter,” Sasha added.
“So is the daughter,” Elena agreed.
She was, Sasha admitted to himself, not at all bad for less than a week on the job.
SEVEN
In his office in Lubyanka Colonel Lunacharski shifted the telephone from his right to his left ear. The right ear was moist. What he really needed was his old phone, on which you could simply talk into the box while sitting back or examining a file. The inconvenience of having to hold a sticky plastic receiver reminded him of the distance he would have to travel to redeem himself.
The first call, from Arkush, came late in the afternoon. The report was complete. Colonel Lunacharski took notes.
“They arrived slightly after two, had tea at the Communist party hall, and prepared a list of those they wished to interview,” Klamkin reported. “Would you like the entire list over the phone?”
“Yes.”
They went through the list, name by name, detail by detail.
“I want backgrounds on all of them,” Lunacharski said.
“How deep?”
“To birth or before, if records permit. What else?”
“Rostnikov is returning to Moscow for the night,” the agent reported. “The other one, Karpo, will remain.”
“Where will Rostnikov’s investigation take place?”
“Party hall.”
“Do you have equipment to monitor?”
“One of the new directionals would be useful.”
“We cannot get one,” the colonel said, hiding his bitterness. In his previous position at the fifth directorate Lunacharski would simply issue an order and any technology would be available instantly. Now … “Use the standard plants. They will be adequate.”