The young man who wanted to be called Bottle Kaps had moved to the chair to sit. Karpo motioned to him to remain on his feet. The detective also remained standing on the opposite side of the table with the sheet of paper before him.
“You are nineteen years old,” Karpo went on. “Your mother is dead. Your father lost his job two years ago as a janitor in a plastic factory.”
“He is a drunk,” the young man said. “A parasite.”
“In contrast to you,” said Karpo.
“I work.”
“At what?”
“Things,” the young man said. “I know cars. I can fix things. But only for the right people.”
The young man rubbed the top of his head. He hadn’t shaved in about a day. Prickly small hairs were starting to grow.
“You are going back in the obyezannik, the monkey cage with the drunks and thieves,” said Karpo. “With Sergei.”
“Sergei?”
“Sergei Topoy, Heinrich,” said Karpo.
“Sergei Topoy,” the young man repeated with a smile.
“You will remain in the cage until you answer my questions and I believe your answers, Anatoly,” said Karpo.
Anatoly cocked his head to one side, spread his legs slightly, and clasped his wrist behind his back, a posture meant to show that he had no intention of cooperating.
“What happened to Misha Lovski?”
“I told you. We went out into the street. He just went his way.”
“You are lying,” Karpo said calmly.
“You may think what you like,” said Anatoly.
“A boy was murdered near the Mahezh Shopping Center yesterday, a rapper,” said Karoo.
The Mahezh was an underground mall off of Red Square where Russian rappers in loose-fitting parkas and baggy pants gathered.
“So?”
“You killed him,” said Karpo.
“I … I was nowhere near there yesterday. I have never killed anyone. I was with Heinrich and friends all day. We …”
“But you killed the boy,” said Karpo.
“No.”
“I have a policeman who will testify that he saw you do it,” said Karpo.
“I did not kill anyone,” Anatoly said. “Ask Heinrich. Ask …”
Karpo moved to the door and opened it. A young uniformed policeman stepped inside. Karpo nodded toward Bottle Kaps and said, “Is that him?”
The young policeman looked at Anatoly and said, “Yes.”
“You are certain?” asked Karpo.
“Certain,” said the policeman, who turned to leave.
“Wait,” cried Anatoly. “You … it must have been someone else. We look alike.”
The policeman was gone. Karpo had asked him to step in and identify the young man Karpo had brought into the precinct two hours earlier. Karpo had said nothing about a murder and, as far as Karpo knew, there had been no murder.
“I did not kill anyone,” Anatoly insisted, his arms now in front of him. “That cop is … I understand.”
Karpo said nothing.
“You are bluffing just to get me to tell you what happened to the Naked Cossack.”
“One minute,” said Karpo. “I give you one minute. Tell me what happened or you go back in the cage and I give Sergei the opportunity to tell me and walk out the door while you remain to be tried for murder.”
“You are bluffing,” said Anatoly with mock confidence.
“You are running out of seconds,” said Karpo.
The young man looked at the pale unsmiling figure in black. He knew the police had taken others off the streets, put them in jail for crimes they had not committed, found witnesses, usually the police themselves, to testify to their guilt. Anatoly had heard such stories. Such arrests accomplished two things. They officially solved a crime and they put someone in jail the police wanted off the streets.
“Your time is up,” Karpo said, gathering his papers.
“No, wait.”
“Your time is up,” Karpo repeated, turning toward the door.
“I will tell you, but you do not let Sergei or anyone else know I told you,” the young man said in near panic.
Karpo started to open the door.
“Please,” called Anatoly. “It was the girl, the red-haired girl, the crazy one who calls herself Anarchista. The one in Naked Cossack’s band. She paid us. Told us the Naked Cossack was a Jew. She gave him something in his drink at Loni’s and we put him in a car. He was unconscious. She drove away. That is all I know.”
“She paid you?” Karpo said, looking back.
“Cash and … and a quick fuck for both of us behind Loni’s.”
Karpo closed the door and turned to face the young man, who was bouncing on his heels nervously.
“What did she say she was going to do with him?”
“I do not know.”
“Kill him?”
“She did not say. She was high on something. Happy. It was a game. The sex, everything. A game. I do not know where she took him.”
It was getting worse all the time. No foundation. Creatures like this roamed the streets and alleys. Democracy had not brought democracy. It had brought chaos and anarchy. The girl had aptly named herself. There was no dignity, no sense of mission in catching her, in freeing Misha Lovski if he was still alive. There was only the task.
“If he dies or is dead, you are an accomplice to murder.”
“But I told you what happened,” Anatoly whined. “You owe me for that.”
“And for many things,” said Karpo. “Many things.”
The open-air stalls in Gorbushka market were closed. Snow was more than a foot deep and the temperature was below freezing with an occasional sweep of cold wind bending the branches of the surrounding trees. The only real activity was in the dingy concrete building at the edge of the market.
The interior of the building was packed with people, almost all younger than thirty, laughing, haggling, swearing. Music screamed, a hundred different sounds, voices in a dozen languages, instruments knifing through the bodies.
Karpo and Zelach walked through the crowd, drawing stares, glares, and occasional comments, though no one was quite up to facing the pale man in black.
“Vampire in the daytime,” said one boy, head shaven, teeth bad.
Some assumed the two men were older sympathizers, last-generation pavers of the way. There were a few holdovers. Maybe these two were here to buy or sell. Maybe.
The huge open space was warm with bodies and rank with sweat and the oil on leather jackets decorated with skulls, swastikas, church towers, bottles marked poison, daggers, guns. A fat man in a black sweat shirt stood behind a table covered with German World War II medals, all imitation. He held up a watch and shouted, “The real thing. The real thing. Look at it.”
At another table were books and pamphlets with titles like Defending Russian Purity and International Skinhead Bulletin.
Karpo and Zelach moved on, scanning the crowd, looking for the girl. There were many girls with bright-red hair, most of them blocked by larger young men and boys.
Another table was doing a brisk business in Confederate flags and hats, white hoods advertised as genuine Ku Klux Klan antiques.
More tables. Boots, boots, boots, German army T-shirts and uniforms.
Noise. Stares.
Earlier, Karpo and Zelach had gone back to the apartment of Misha Lovski. The door they had broken had been repaired. They knocked and a voice had answered, “What?”
“Police,” Karpo had said.
“Shit, not again. Do not break the door. I am coming.”
A few seconds later the door had opened to reveal Valery Postnov, the frail blond boy who called himself Pure Knuckles. There seemed nothing pure about him, and his knuckles, both detectives knew, were bony and thin. One good punch and the boy’s hand would be broken.
“What?” he asked dreamily, wearing only soiled white briefs, scratching his hairless chest. “You find the Cossack?”