Glancing through the window, he saw the two dead men, Zubov now on the bed and his apparent murderer on the floor near him, were decently covered by a couple of pieces of canvas, perhaps the remains of the Circus Chinggis’s missing Big Top.
“Ah, Cheslav, I wish you could speak,” muttered Dorj. Then he recalled what Batu had said about calling back the souls of the dead, and hurried away from the caravan.
“Everyone hated Zubov,” Dima stated, confirming what Larisa had told Dorj. The midget, wiping dry, cracked make-up from his chin, was seated on a crate near the hangar door.
The inspector inquired why Zubov had been so hated.
“You saw the way he treated me! Do you doubt it?”
“He treated everyone the same, then?”
“Of course he did. Isn’t that always the way with people like him?” Dima climbed off the crate. He barely came up to Dorj’s waist. “He used to constantly criticize me for not being short enough,” he continued. “Can you imagine that? He’d laugh and shout at me that I couldn’t even manage to be small enough to be a proper midget.”
“He kept you on, though,” the inspector reminded him.
“He had no choice.”
Dorj asked him what he thought would happen to the little circus once the investigation was closed.
“I won’t be running it, that’s for certain!” Dima replied. “But as to that, Zubov didn’t confide in anyone. Who knows what his arrangements were?”
As patches of Dima’s make-up were removed, wrinkles were revealed at the corners of his mouth. Dorj realized that the man was middle-aged. It was difficult not to think of him as a child.
“Why was it that the others hated him?”
“You mentioned Larisa’s story, how the beast turned her into a cripple, but all the women had reason to hate him, the old lecher.”
“What about Ivana, Cheslav’s wife?”
Dima nodded. “They all did, as I said. And then there’s Fabayan Viktorovich, our aerial artist. He was angry that Zubov refused to take the circus to Moscow to perform. And he – Fabayan, that is – thought he should be the headline act. Zubov did not agree. Now, if you don’t mind, there’s work to be done, whatever our future might be. If I were you, Inspector, I would look no further. A corpse can’t be punished and Zubov’s murderer deserves no punishment. So perhaps there’s justice for the downtrodden, after all.”
“I’m glad you found me, Inspector,” Ivana said as she opened the door to let Dorj into the trailer. “For I have a confession to make. I’m afraid I am a murderer.”
Dorj had had opportunity to keep his Russian polished, but still he was not certain he had understood her words correctly.
“Yes, that’s right, Inspector. I’m a murderer,” she repeated calmly. She had changed from her bloodied clothing into a tight pink leotard. It did not conceal her body as had the diaphanous robes; it was hardly mourning apparel, Dorj thought.
Dima had told Dorj that he would find the others in what he called “the back yard”, the area where the rest of the circus lorries, animal trailers and caravans were parked. Their age and condition caused the back yard to resemble a junk yard.
Dorj had noticed a light on in a long trailer, and knocked on its door. Ivana had answered his summons.
Illuminated by a single bare bulb, the trailer was a dim confusion of shadows. It had an exotic smell, a mixture of animal dung and something worse. Evidently it was used to haul circus animals around from place to place.
“Take care you don’t step in that pile of marmots,” Ivana warned him after her astonishing confession. “They’ve been dead for quite some time.” Then she began to sob.
Dorj had never cared much for Russian literature of the more melodramatic kind, and was beginning to think that it perhaps reflected national characteristics more accurately than he had hitherto imagined.
Amid the stark shadows striping the trailer, he could distinguish a few empty cages and pens. The faded paintings on the trailer’s outside walls depicted lions and tigers, trained poodles, alligators and snakes and a trumpeting elephant. A quick look around the interior showed a ragged cockatoo perched sleepily in a bird cage. One of several aquariums held an iguana. A rumble from the darkness at the back of the trailer reminded him that there was, at least, a lion.
“You’re understandably upset,” Dorj assured the woman softly.
Under normal circumstances he would have dismissed Ivana as a suspect, simply because a normal woman could not have inflicted with her bare hands the damage he’d seen on Zubov’s neck. But, he had to keep reminding himself, circus people could not necessarily be judged by what some might call normal standards. After all, so far he had spoken to a man the size of a child and a woman with a beard. Nevertheless, it still seemed impossible that anyone except Cheslav and Zubov could had been locked inside the caravan.
Ivana, who appeared to be unusually normal by circus standards, retreated toward the back of the trailer and Dorj followed her. In the deeper shadows at the far end, the lion’s holding cage was bolted securely to the floor. The lion, which looked scrawny and mangy when viewed at close hand, was asleep. Dorj hoped it would not have to be euthanized.
“We don’t suspect you of anything. You surely could not have strangled Zubov,” Dorj reassured Ivana.
“I’m not speaking of Zubov. It was my husband I murdered.” She quickly shoved something small between the bars of the lion’s cage – a marmot – and wiped her hands on her pink leotards before rummaging in a small cabinet near the cage. “Look here.”
Dorj glanced over her shoulder and saw several glass bottles and a frighteningly large hypodermic on the shelf above them. He began to point out that in fact a dreadful injury had caused her husband’s death. Then another thought occurred to him.
“Are you saying you drugged your husband before he went in the ring with his lion taming act?”
“Not Cheslav. No, I drugged Raisa – the lion. Cheslav could never be a real lion-tamer. A timid man, he was. Raisa is not that fierce, but we always drugged her, for safety reasons, you know? We even drugged her for Alexi, to make her more manageable, or rather Alexi did that himself.
“Since he left, I’ve taken over looking after the animals. Not that I can do much for them. We’re beginning to run out of tranquilizer, as well as their food. It is so sad. Perhaps hunger is what made Raisa so fierce.”
She slammed the cabinet door shut and Raisa, disturbed by the noise, rumbled in her sleep. Dorj felt the raw power of the deep sound vibrating in his chest and through the thin soles of his shoes.
“So Zubov ordered me to cut down on the dosage to make what we had last longer,” the woman continued. “I should have known better. But I was afraid of him, so I did what he said. And now my poor husband is dead. So you see, as I said, I’m guilty.”
“If what you say is true, it was not murder, it was a terrible accident. But in any event, it is Zubov’s murderer I’m interested in finding.” He did not add that the more he found out about the man the less interested he was in the task. Yet, one did one’s duty.
Ivana’s eyes glinted as they reflected the light of the bare bulb. “But the evidence is clear. Surely it shows that my husband got up off his death bed to take his revenge on the man who turned me into a murderer?”
As he walked away from the trailer Dorj found himself looking for Larisa. There were things he had forgotten to ask her about, he told himself. Instead he ran into the young man in spangled tights whom he had seen earlier talking to Zubov.
“I’m Fabayan Viktorovich, the aerialist,” the young man said, after Dorj had introduced himself. “In fact, I’m the Fabulous Flying Fabayan, as the posters say. Or would have said, if Zubov had ever got them printed.”
Dorj, shivering in his thin coat as the wind picked up, suggested they talk somewhere more sheltered. Fabayan led the way back to the hangar, where the fluttering circus posters Zubov had handprinted in bold red letters, and that long ago from the crumpled looks of them, still promised a brave show with jugglers and clowns, fortune-tellers and snake-charmers, acrobats and contortionists, and of course, the mighty lion-taming Hercules.