Natalia Smirnova - St. Petersburg Noir

After crossing myself once more, I froze. My right hand moved automatically to my holster, though I knew from watching those zombie movies that you can’t kill them. Farid staggered into the farthest dark corner of the freezer and waited, muttering something about Allah. Now the fiend will look around and notice us, raise his stiff arms up in front of him, groan, and start moving toward us for fresh blood, I thought. And then we’ll turn into zombies too, and go back to Evseyev. Boy, will he be happy. Why am I even thinking about that? What’s the point in thinking at all?

I raised my gun, because I didn’t know what else to do at such a tragic moment in my life. What would you have done if you were in my place? Picture this: a corpse has come back to life in the city morgue. Hello, I’m back!

The dead man dangled his legs over the edge of the table and turned toward me… My finger rested on the trigger.

An avalanche of life-affirming curses coming from the watchman saved me from a fatal mistake. I won’t quote him here. I’ll just say that at that moment they worked better than any magic spell of Harry Potter. I realized that the watchman no longer feared for life and limb. Literally or figuratively. He recognized the corpse.

A second later I recognized him too. Or, rather, I recognized his canvas jacket. And when he raised his red calf-eyes to me, I knew it was him. Scarecrow. One of the orderlies. The junior partner.

“Dudes, what are you doing here?”

I put my gun away without answering. Farid seemed to come to life again too.

The watchman just kept up the barrage of curses. “How did you get in here, you son of a bitch?” He dragged the orderly off the table and shoved him up against a cooling pipe. “Are you trying to get me sent up, you miserable pig?”

“Where’s Lenka?”

“Who the hell is Lenka?” the watchman roared.

“My wife. Is she here too?”

“We’re all going to end up here someday,” Farid said prophetically, shaking the blood off his jacket, which had rubbed up against some gangster with a shotgun wound.

The watchman dragged the orderly out of the freezer into the warm corridor. We were right behind them, in case someone else decided to come back to life.

The watchman sat the zombie-wannabe down on a wooden bench in the hallway and subjected him to an emergency purification ritual, threatening him with the gas pistol. We didn’t interfere. Judging by the turns of phrase, Mister Watchman had clocked in a few hours in a KGB basement.

“Why are you going off on me?” the orderly said in his own defense. “Just give me a beer. Our shift was over, and I asked Valek to drop me off at home. Ask him yourself… Hey, guys, where have I seen you before?”

The former KGB officer didn’t give us time to answer. “I’m the one asking the questions around here! How did you end up in the freezer, you enemy of the people?”

“How should I know?” Scarecrow coughed loudly, putting his hand to his heart.

“What do you remember? Tell me now or I’ll lock you up in the freezer again!”

“Wait a second. Let me think. So, we picked up the lady from Kupchino to bring her over here… I got into the back of the van. Thought I’d lie down for a while to take a snooze. I was dead beat, hadn’t eaten anything all day. Valek said he’d wake me up when we got here, and then take me home. He had to drive the van to the garage… But where is he now?”

I turned to Watchman. “Did you see them unload the van?”

“No. I only get here at eleven.”

“Is there someone who helps them carry in the bodies? From the van to the freezer?”

“No, there’s not enough help here. They do it themselves. That’s what they’re paid for. And they don’t have to carry the corpses far when they go through the back. Before he had a partner, Valek did it all by himself. He slung the corpse over his shoulder—and into the freezer he went. He’s a strong fellow, for someone who drinks.”

Suddenly it all made sense to me. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this one out. Tin Man tried to wake up his partner, but it was the wrong guy. He kept poking and tugging at someone wearing the same kind of jacket—the builder. In the end, he couldn’t wake him up, and he unloaded the van himself; but he unloaded it after he dropped off his partner at home. Understandably, he didn’t even wake up. He was dead to the world. But no big deal, Tin Man just slung him over his shoulder and took him up to the apartment. The door wasn’t locked; it was held shut by only a sash. He opened it and dumped Scarecrow (who was actually the builder) in the hallway, propping him up against the wall. Then he said goodbye and left. The wife was too drunk to realize the corpse wasn’t her husband. She called the police and had her private memorial service right away.

“Where do you live?” I asked Scarecrow, just to make sure. “In number eight?”

“Yep… How did you know?”

“We stopped by today. Your wife invited us in.”

There was still one thing I didn’t understand. Wouldn’t Valek have noticed that the body of his partner was pretty cold and stiff when he dropped him off? But then it depended on how many “memorial services” they’d had that day, and there seemed to have been plenty.

Farid seemed to have figured it all out too. But there was something else bothering him.

“How does Valek drive the van in that condition?”

“Oh, that’s no problem at all,” said the watchman. “Valek can be falling-down drunk when he tries to walk, but as soon as he gets behind the wheel he sobers up fast. Experience.”

Evseyev’s hoarse voice could now be heard barking out of the jalopy. Duty officer demanded we contact him.

“Let’s go, we’ve done our part,” Farid said, motioning to me.

“Dudes, can you give me a lift?” Scarecrow asked, his eyes still closed. “If I go on foot I won’t get there until morning. My wife must be worried.”

“Nah, she took a sedative,” Farid said by way of comfort. “And don’t forget your curtain in the freezer.”

When he was showing us out, Watchman nodded to Scarecrow, still standing in the corridor, and said softly, “Valek doesn’t have any luck with partners. They’re all saboteurs. Do you know what the last one did? He took the van at night, covered the yellow stripe over with black electrician’s tape, and made money picking up people at the train station. Turned it into a jitney. They fired him. People like that should be summarily executed… That would get the country back on its feet.”

I couldn’t get to sleep that night. If you spend the whole day picking mushrooms, you’ll start seeing enormous milk mushrooms and orange caps as soon as you go to bed. If you sit in one place with a fishing rod for five hours, you’ll have visions of a float bobbing up and down. That’s just how the brain works. I had hardly closed my eyes when I started seeing gloomy corpses. Of course, I jumped up from the makeshift bed (chairs pushed together) and looked around the room in terror. I couldn’t see anyone except for the peacefully sleeping Farid, so I tried once again to fall asleep.

At around six in the morning the indefatigable Evseyev came into our room. He still hadn’t won his computer game.

“Alex, you’ve got to make a run over to number eight again. To that orderly from the morgue. The paramedics called about some nonsense going on over there. His wife jumped out the window. From the third floor. She fractured almost every bone in her body, but she’s still alive. He came home drunk half an hour ago, apparently, wrapped up in a curtain. She saw him and started shouting, Get thee gone, Satan! Then out the window she went. I don’t like the looks of it. I’m afraid he might have chucked her out himself, and he’s trying to pin the blame on Satan. Swing by the place, in any case, and see what you can find out. If it’s something serious, I’ll call the operative…”