Stuart Kaminsky - Hard Currency

Karpo made his way around the lab tables, avoiding something shapeless and quivering in the shadows. Paulinin had moved to his desk against the wall.

“Sit,” Paulinin ordered, pointing to the metal folding chair next to his desk.

Karpo lifted a pile of books from the chair, searched for someplace to put them, and settled for a spot on the floor between a metal coffeepot and what looked like a pants pressing machine. Then he sat.

Paulinin swept away some frayed notes on his desk, piled a few books onto an already precarious pile, and placed a notebook in front of him.

“I’ll share a secret with you, Karpo,” Paulinin said, pushing his glasses back on his nose with unscrubbed fingers. “I will share a secret and some tea.”

Paulinin reached down to his left, came up with a pot and two clear laboratory measuring cups. As he poured and served, Paulinin rambled.

“They are all butchers,” he said. “Butchers. Only Liebinski has pride. Only Liebinski has the right to call himself a pathologist. And he is not that good. The others are a disaster, a disgrace. And no one cares. No one cares. I get a lung or a brain and it looks as if it has been handled by a street cleaner.”

“There are times when it may have been,” said Karpo.

Paulinin looked over the rim of his cup to see if the gaunt policeman might be making a joke at his expense. But there was no humor in the pale Tatar. It was one of the things Paulinin liked about the forbidding figure who sat across from him.

“Perhaps, but the incompetence of a trio of ill-trained men without pride in their work is not the secret. Your visiting foreign minister from Kazakhstan is the secret.”

Paulinin put down his cup and opened a drawer. From the drawer he pulled a clear glass pot.

“The minister’s liver,” he said triumphantly. “Who do I trust with the minister’s liver? Which fool? Which liar? Which incompetent? Which politician? Who would appreciate what I have discovered? Only you, Emil Karpo.”

Karpo finished his tepid and tasteless tea. Was there an aftertaste of some bitter chemical in the cup?

“I appreciate your confidence.”

“Before I moved down here,” said Paulinin, looking around the lab, “I think I had a sense of humor. But now? I am too much in the company of ruptured spleens and infected brains. One loses one’s sense of humor. I knew that. It is a loss I accept in exchange for the sanity of being left to work. We are considered eccentrics, you and I.”

“It is not a choice I have made,” said Karpo.

“But it is one you should savor. The minister. One of the butchers in the hospital pathology laboratory who works in a well-lighted surgery with stone drains and equipment that functions said the minister died of complications resulting from liver failure, that the man was an alcoholic, and had been killing himself with drink for decades. Look at this liver. Take it. Hold it. Remove it from the bottle if you like. What do you see?”

Karpo took the bottle. He did not choose to open it or take out the liver.

“Enlarged, discolored. That might be a result of how the liver has been treated and preserved since its removal.”

“Good,” said Paulinin. “More?”

“It is intact,” said Karpo, turning the bottle. “With the exception of one anterior-”

“I removed that,” interjected Paulinin impatiently. “I removed that. But you see the point. Bujanslov, who did the autopsy, based his conclusion on, at best, a small piece of tissue. Any madman can see this is not the liver of an alcoholic.”

“And …?” Karpo resisted the urge to look up at the clock, which he knew hung over the lab table across the room.

“Induced acute hepatitis,” whispered Paulinin. “The minister’s liver is saturated with the enzyme characteristic of the disease.”

In the dim light in the corner, the unblinking Karpo would have been a frightening specter for most people. Paulinin simply smiled.

“So he died after an attack of acute hepatitis.”

“Induced, I said. Induced. He was injected with a massive enzyme-and-alcohol overdose. Injected directly into his liver. His liver was induced to fail. He was murdered. I find no case on record of such a murder.”

Paulinin rocked in his wooden chair, delighted, as Karpo put the jar containing the liver back on the desk. Paulinin looked at it as if it were a witch’s crystal.

“How did the murderer get him to accept an injection?”

Paulinin reluctantly removed his gaze from the liver in the jar, pushed his chair back, and stood up.

“The body is a mess,” he said, clasping his hands. “But I looked at it. Bujanslov is worse than a dolt, worse than an idiot. The minister had been sedated. The contents of his stomach … Botched job. Botched job. I even found the hole where the liver was injected. Spot near the vertebrae where the French and Americans go in for liver biopsies. Bujanslov the Butcher almost destroyed it in his need to make a hole the size of the Mir Hotel just to remove an inflamed liver.”

“And you have a report?”

“No, you have a report,” said Paulinin, placing the rough handwritten sheets in Karpo’s hand.

“I will turn these over to the proper investigative office.”

“I don’t care,” said Paulinin, sitting down again. “I am interested in science, not justice. I don’t believe in justice. I don’t care about it. I am, however, offended by incompetent murderers and pathologists.”

“The victim in the park this morning,” said Karpo.

“I’ve been busy with the minister’s liver,” Paulinin said with a wave of his hand, “but in respect for you I examined the body. It was a pleasure to see a body before the butchers got their rusty hatchets into it.”

Karpo waited, report on the minister in hand. Paulinin looked down at the pile of scrawled notes on his desk and then looked up at Karpo.

“Beaten with a pipe,” Paulinin said. “While she was kneeling. Blows didn’t kill her. Eleven stab wounds did. The knife did not belong to the killer. It belonged to the victim. Traces on the knife of the material in her pocket.”

Paulinin held up a hand and pinched his thumb and one finger together till they turned white.

“Traces so small they would fit between these fingers with a universe of room to spare. Even with these crude instruments I have found it. Even with the crude instruments that are rapidly turning me into a blind man.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not complaining,” said Paulinin. “I’m explaining my frustration with the impossible task I perform while butchers posture and preen in the sunlight.”

“I appreciate your skill and dedication,” said Karpo.

“I measured the wounds. Always difficult. Even. Close together. You want an informed conjecture?”

“Yes.”

“Your killer was frenzied, out of control. He ripped out an eye, possibly while the victim was still alive.”

“And?”

“And,” Paulinin said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his nose, “he is right-handed. He is tall, as tall as you are. He is strong. He is not old but not very young, perhaps forty. He was carrying a briefcase or suitcase. Bits of imitation leather where he dropped it on the ground while he did his work. Had you not brought the grass in … who knows?”

Karpo had seen a slight indentation in the grass near the body.

“The victim?”

“Ah, the victim,” said Paulinin, putting his glasses back on. “At least five years older than she looks. She had a baby within the last year. Pelvic expansion. And she has two tattoos, one of a small yellow angel on her left buttock and one of a gun on the sole of her left foot. I’ve seen that gun tattoo in the same place on four young people in the past two years.”