Polina Dashkova: Madness Treads Lightly

Katya understood everything, and she stayed in the hospital for nearly two months. It really was a nice hospital. She had a private room with a television. The doctors and nurses were polite and attentive. But they were using the same treatment methods Katya had tried so many times before. Just as she’d expected, they were just as torturous and ineffective as she remembered.

Katya fell off the wagon less than two weeks after checking out. It just happened.

For some reason, six months later, she recalled that conversation with Olga more distinctly now than she did the events of last night and early this dark morning.

The day had fallen apart into loose, cloudy pieces that flashed before her eyes like snippets from an old film: Mitya’s bare feet on the kitchen floor, his still-warm, big, heavy but pliable body, the dull scissors that couldn’t cut his thick leather belt. And the cold. The cold was what had woken her. Her blanket had slipped off and the window was wide open. And the night was very cold.

Katya wasn’t the least bit surprised that the latch on the window frame in the bedroom had broken, since it had been hanging by a single screw for a long time. Mitya hadn’t gotten around to fixing it, which wasn’t good when you lived on the first floor and the window didn’t shut properly. Actually, Katya didn’t give a damn. They didn’t have anything worth stealing anyway.

Early in the morning the window thudded and opened wide from a sharp gust of wind. Katya woke up and closed the window. Only when she returned to bed did she discover that Mitya wasn’t next to her. She called out to him. Her teeth chattering from the cold, she went into the front hall and saw in the kitchen doorway… No, better not to remember.

For some reason the phone wasn’t working. Her sleepy, frightened neighbor in curlers and nightgown couldn’t understand right away what was wrong or why Katya was asking permission to use her phone at five in the morning.

Then there were the police, and the doctors, and the questions that were so hard to answer. She was ashamed and frightened. Her thoughts kept getting scrambled and her tongue wouldn’t work. The cops weren’t in the mood to go to much trouble. It was suicide, plain and simple. The ambulance doctor turned back the sleeve of Katya’s robe and snickered. She tried to explain that Mitya had never used drugs, but they wouldn’t listen or understand.

And Mikhail Filippovich was still waiting in the front hall. Why wouldn’t she let him into the room? Her instinct had taken over, her fear of Olga: “My parents can’t know anything.”

Katya came out of the room in relatively decent condition. She hadn’t shot up, but she’d brought her pills and tossed a couple of ampoules and a needle into her purse.

Of course, she should also have washed up, combed her hair, and brushed her teeth. Never mind. It didn’t matter now.

Interior Ministry Colonel Sergei Krotov’s beige Zhiguli had been stuck in a hopeless traffic jam on the Garden Ring Road for nearly forty minutes. The wet snow that had been falling lazily since early evening had turned into a real blizzard. There weren’t that many cars at that hour, but there’d been an accident somewhere up ahead, near the Mayakovsky subway station, and there was nowhere to turn off anywhere nearby, and now the whole herd of cars was honking impatiently, waiting for the traffic cops to sort out the mess.

The warmth in the car and the rhythmic movement of the wipers across the windshield were lulling. He could barely keep his eyes open. For the past few days, Sergei had gotten very little sleep. In two days he was supposed to go to England. Scotland Yard had invited a group of Interior Ministry associates for a three-week exchange. Before leaving he had to get through a mountain of cases so high it made his head spin.

The morning of the day before yesterday, he’d handed materials in to the Prosecutor’s Office on the preliminary investigation into a shoot-out at the Vityaz restaurant in a Moscow suburb. It was the usual gangland fracas, but of the seven dead, two turned out to have worked for the Interior Ministry. That was why the case had been dumped on domestic counterintelligence and the department Krotov ran.

Ten days ago, there’d been a fancy banquet at the Vityaz. A famous criminal, Pavel Drozdov, otherwise known as Thrush, had been celebrating his forty-fifth birthday. The restaurant had shut down two days before the banquet in honor of the occasion, and Thrush’s men had checked every nook and cranny of the dining and banquet halls, bar, kitchen, sheds, toilets, and director’s office. A security specialist placed men around and inside the building, an over-the-top cottage with gingerbread trim.

The guests assembled, but before they could eat the cold appetizers, thugs armed with submachine guns burst into the banquet hall. The painstakingly and professionally placed guards didn’t help. Not all the guests had time to pull out their guns, and five were taken out right there. First to be killed was Thrush himself, followed by the two men from the Interior Ministry.

What made this so troubling for the authorities was that those Ministry men, a major and first lieutenant, were attending the party as invited guests, and the nature of their friendship with a criminal like Thrush was revealed only after their untimely end.

Another important detail: a witness to the slaughter. He’d been invited to the restaurant to provide entertainment. Friends had once seen Thrush weep as he listened to a recording of one of Azarov’s smash hits, “Farewell, My Faithless Love!” and they’d decided to give him this touching performance as a gift.

At the moment the young thugs burst into the hall with their submachine guns, Yuri Azarov was standing on the small stage with a guitar singing the second verse of Thrush’s favorite ballad:

He managed to jump off the stage and, using his guitar as a shield, roll under a table and lie there, holding his breath through the entire attack.

The pop star had performed for an audience of criminals on more than one occasion, but this was his first time witnessing this kind of slaughter. He considered it a miracle he’d survived. He was trembling from horror, and it was almost impossible to get a coherent statement from him. The audience favorite demanded protection, demanded to be put in a bunker, and insisted that Parliament immediately pass the kind of witness protection laws that all normal countries had.

The case was solved quickly, though, and two days later Krotov handed all his materials to the prosecutor. Three of the five surviving thugs were in jail. When the story of the dead police officers’ involvement was teased out, it turned out to be all too banal. Thrush had kept them loyal to him not through blackmail or fear but simply with money.

This morning it had become clear that the singer’s fears were justified after he was found dead in the apartment of his lover, twenty-year-old model Veronika Rogovets.

At nine in the morning, Veronika went to take her Irish setter, Willy, for a walk. At the time, Azarov was sleeping in Veronika’s bed. The model usually combined the dog’s morning walk with her mandatory half-hour run through Victory Park.

Returning home at 9:35, she found her apartment door unlocked and Yuri lying crosswise on the entry floor with a terry-cloth robe over his naked body. The singer had been shot clean through his skull, and the Walther pistol that produced the deadly shot was lying right next to his corpse. No fingerprints other than Veronika’s and the dead man’s were found anywhere in the apartment. The neighbors had heard a mild thud but thought nothing of it at the time, and couldn’t even say exactly when it happened.