A single Polaroid snapshot exists of him from this period. Alexei is standing naked and grinning like the devil in the big room of his apartment on Sudokhodny Street. His pale skin makes a stark contrast with the dark black scrawl of his tattoos; his penis, semierect, nuzzles his thigh like a grazing animal. On the wall behind him is a large velvet painting of a woman making love to a black panther. The beast’s claws are dug into the flesh of the woman’s breasts, but the expression on her face is sheer ecstasy. The whore who took the snapshot, a sixteen-year-old Korean girl named Kim Sung Kim, was found with her throat cut by police two weeks later in a pile of restaurant rubbish.
Directly following this grisly discovery, for reasons unknown, Alexei Smerdnakov left everything behind in Vladivostok and emigrated illegally to the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. There he eventually claimed political asylum and became a citizen of the United States.
The central cell block had its own peculiar smell, which Martin hated — a stale, vaguely urinous odor, but urine mixed with booze and unwashed flesh and antiseptic fumes and laced with other less palpable odors: fear, cruelty, ignorance, despair. At one time or another over 50 percent of the black male residents of the District age seventeen to thirty-five passed through its scarred metal doors, sat on the plastic benches in the limbo of the holding cells, cigaretteless, pants drooping, no laces in their shoes, waiting for lawyers or bail bondsmen or a friend with cash, or waiting for no one at all.
At 7:30 A.M. on Tuesday Martin showed his badge and driver’s license to the guard at the front entrance, passed through the metal detector, signed in, and turned left into the long corridor that led to the consultation rooms. Halfway down, he passed a burly Hispanic man coming in the opposite direction. Martin was always oblivious at that hour of the morning, his higher brain functions still muzzy with sleep, and he brushed against the man’s shoulder without noticing. The man instantly spun around and caught him from behind with an arm around the throat. Martin squawked, helpless; it was a choke hold, illegal in many jurisdictions across the country. He couldn’t cry out because he couldn’t take a breath. For a moment panic blurred his vision.
“Federal marshal!” the man shouted in his ear. “You under arrest!” Then, just as Martin realized who it was, the arm fell away and the hallway filled with booming laughter.
“God damn it, Caesar!” Martin turned around, rubbing his throat. “That’s not funny!”
But it was funny, and Caesar Martinez couldn’t stop laughing. “You should see your face, you poor SOB.” He doubled over and slapped his thigh, and at last Martin joined him for a reluctant chuckle.
A few years ago, when Caesar was an investigator with PDS, the two men had worked together on a scandalous case involving a prostitution outcall service staffed with Georgetown University coeds. Martin’s client at the time had been a pretty young senior from a solid middle-class Boston Irish family, who in her spare time specialized in bondage and rough sex for three hundred dollars an hour. A powerful member of the United States Senate had been one of her regular clients. Caesar uncovered this tasty bit of information during a series of exhaustive interrogations of the other young call girl/coeds — all of whom at one time or another had tied the senator spread-eagled to a bed frame in the rumpus room of his Capitol Hill town house and penetrated him anally with a black dildo he kept in a velvet box for that purpose. In light of this information, the case against Martin’s coed was quickly plea-bargained down to a misdemeanor, and she was able to graduate on time and with honors.
Caesar finally stopped laughing and squeezed Martin’s hand in a firm grip.
“How the fuck you doing, Wex?” he said.
“Busy,” Martin said. “How are the feds treating you?”
“Got a health plan, good benefits,” Caesar said. “I get my teeth fixed for free plus I get Columbus Day off. Better than that old freelance shit with the PDS.”
The two of them talked for a few minutes about their lives. Caesar had come over from Cuba in the Mariel boatlift of ’81 with nothing, unable to speak a word of English. Now he had eight years on his pension, a town house in Alexandria, a modest cabin cruiser docked on the Anacostia, and an attractive twenty-four-year-old wife expecting their first child. He was doing better than Martin these days.
“What about you?” Caesar said. “You still seeing that Dahlia chick?”
Martin shrugged. “Off and on,” he said. “No commitments, nothing like that.”
“Hey, man, keep it up!” Caesar said. “Once you walk up that aisle, they got you by the cojones!” The two men laughed. Martin shifted his briefcase from one hand to the other; he was on his way to see a client in the lockup, he said.
“Anything interesting?” Caesar asked.
Martin hesitated. “Yeah,” he said, lowering his voice. “It’s a homicide.”
Caesar whistled. “That’s not your thing at all,” he said.
Martin nodded. “You’re right about that,” he said, and he leaned close. “Tell me something. Who do you recommend in the office now? I have a feeling I’m going to need a really good investigator.”
Caesar thought for a moment. “Gotta be McGuin,” he said. “He’s great, the best. Don’t matter how strange he looks. The man’s always busy, booked up months in advance, but for you I’ll put in a good word.”
“Thanks a lot,” Marlin said, and the two shook hands again and parted.
Martin took his place on the hard plastic chair in the soundproof booth and opened his briefcase on the counter. The door was ajar in the corresponding booth on the other side of the thick Plexiglas, and he saw wavy shapes moving around in the big room over there like fish in a fishbowl. Finally a darkness blotted out the light. A huge man wearing the rough overalls of the D.C. Department of Corrections squeezed into the booth and with difficulty reached behind himself to close the door. Childishly drawn tattoos scrawled down the man’s arms to his wrists and up his neck to his chin.
For half a second Martin stared. The man filled the booth almost completely. He could have been a professional athlete except for his disturbing black eyes, which looked at once too intelligent and completely devoid of human sentiment, and his hands, which looked clumsy, pig-knuckled. His black hair, streaked with white, was cut close to his head; his thick sideburns were neatly trimmed into sharp points.
Martin heard the big man’s chair creak. He crossed his arms and sat back, waiting for Martin to say something. This behavior was surprising. Usually prisoners couldn’t wait to talk, to rush out with their story before he’d even introduced himself. Martin tapped his pencil nervously on the counter and glanced down at his yellow pad, the first page half covered with doodles. He never wrote anything important on the thing; it was a prop, an aide-memoire. Doodling was something like a vocation to him, one of his few genuine talents.
“You Alexei Sergeyevich Smerdnakov?” Martin asked finally.
The man nodded, expressionless.
“I don’t know if you realize it, but you’ve been charged with first-degree murder in the death of” — he checked his page of doodles — “Katerina Volovnaya. Since it has been determined that you are unable to provide representation, the District of Columbia has—”
“You going to get me out of here, asshole?” Smerdnakov smashed his fist down on his half of the counter, and Martin felt the vibration through the glass. “This place stinks like horse-shit!” Smerdnakov spoke English with a Russian accent tinged with Brooklyn. His eyebrows moved dramatically when he spoke.