Stuart Kaminsky: A Whisper to the Living

“I needed the distraction. Work is the best mask for a broken heart.”

“You read poetry?” asked Iosef.

“No, but I’m of a poetic bent. All I have remaining is that talented but stupid lightweight out there. He has heart. His only problems are he drops his hands and won’t let his jab lash out.”

“He lets his right hand go off the wrong foot,” said Zelach.

Agrinkov looked at the policeman, who adjusted his glasses yet again.

“No,” said Agrinkov. “He never. .”

“Slight shuffle just before he jabs when he is punching for power,” said Zelach.

Agrinkov looked at Iosef, who held up his hands and said, “If Inspector Zelach says he punches off the wrong foot, you can be sure he does. My partner never fails to amaze me with his talents.”

Agrinkov said nothing but nodded to show that he was taking the assessment of his boxer seriously.

“What do you think happened?” asked Iosef.

“The same question reporters from all over the world have been asking on the phone for the last day. I unplugged the phone. The ones who come here are turned away. I’ll probably have to sleep here tonight. What do I think happened? I think Ivan married a very beautiful woman with not enough meat on her bones. I think I made a mistake in hiring a sparring partner for him who was good-looking and had a reputation for bedding down ladies young and old, married and single, willing and coaxable. I think Ivan, who is a trusting fool, found them in the hotel room, lost his temper, and. .”

He let the sentence trail off.

“How did he know they were at the hotel?” asked Iosef.

“I don’t know.”

“Where do you think he might be?”

“Where do you hide a famous ugly giant? I don’t know.”

The three-roomapartment on Leninsky Prospekt had two great virtues and many drawbacks for Ivan Medivkin.

The three rooms on the fourth floor of the Stalin-era building were all small. He had nowhere to pace. The ceilings were all so low that he had to bend forward slightly when he walked. Vera Korstov had given her bed and bedroom to him while she slept on the small sofa in the minute living room. The problem was that Vera’s bed in the narrow cell-sized bedroom was not long enough for him. Add to this the thin walls that required him to speak softly and the need to stay away from the windows.

The two great merits of the apartment were that he was relatively safe and Vera was completely trustworthy and willing to help.

On this morning following the death of his wife, Lena, and his sparring partner Fedot Babinski, Ivan sat in his undershorts and a red sweatshirt that he had left in this same apartment when he first came to Moscow four years ago and he and Vera had been lovers.

He had not seen her in more than three years. She had not changed. She was a tall woman of thirty-one with short black hair and a pleasant face. She was firmly built, with breasts that Ivan had always thought adequate, though nothing like those of his wife, Lena, Lena who was beautiful, tall, twenty-five, with long, always-shining straight hair that touched her creamy shoulders.

Four years ago Vera had taken him in when he knew no one in Moscow but his manager and was considered an ugly curiosity by those who passed him on the street. When he began to box in Moscow, that changed. He no longer looked ugly to the fans, nor, apparently, to Lena Golumbievski, who asked him for his autograph following his sixth knockout.

Now she was dead and he had sought refuge with Vera, who snuck him into her apartment when he called her at two o’clock in the morning.

The day was overcast. Vera had not turned on the lights. She poured him more coffee.

“I did not kill them,” Ivan said, holding the bloodstained towel to his nose.

The towel was wrapped around ice, and the pack seemed to have stopped the bleeding.

“I know,” she said.

It was at least the tenth time he and she had said this.

“Your clothes will be dry in a few more hours,” Vera said, getting up to retrieve the bread from the toaster.

Ivan looked up at the clothes on hangers over the door to the kitchen. Vera had to duck to get under them.

“No blood?” he asked as she returned and placed a plate of six pieces of toast and a jar of English lemon curd in front of him.

“Clean,” she said. “It is easy to get blood out of clothing.”

“No,” he said, reaching for toast and a knife. “I do not think it is.”

She took the wet blood-soaked towel from him. Ivan’s nose was still red and bruised, but the bleeding had stopped. He had explained that he had tripped and fallen when he left the hotel room.

“I’m sorry for your trouble,” she said.

He nodded and said, “ Da .”

They were silent for almost a minute while they ate and drank their coffee.

“I called in,” she said. “Sick. Lots of people have the flu. I’m never sick. I won’t have to go to work for at least a few days. They can shoot around me.”

Vera had been a talented high jumper who had made it to the Olympics in 1996. She had not won a medal though she leaped a personal best of six-foot-four. Then, in need of an athletic type, a producer cast her in a movie, and she proved to be a consummate actor, moving on to a series of movie roles, generally playing the strong-willed and supportive best friend of the female star.

And now she was ready to support her downcast former lover.

“What will you do?” she asked.

“Think,” he said.

“About?”

“Killing the person who murdered my wife and my friend.”

“The police think you did it. Maybe you should just tell them what-”

“I ran away. I hit a policeman. They wouldn’t believe me.”

“You have a plan?” she asked.

He shook his head and said, “No.”

“I have,” she said.

Ivan looked up, coffee in one hand, toast in the other.

“What?”

“You tell me all the people in Moscow who your wife knew and all the people your sparring partner. .”

“Fedot, Fedot Babinski.”

“. . knew. And I’ll question them.”

“Why should they tell you anything? What if you question the killer?”

“I can be very persuasive,” she said.

“I’ve lost everything,” he said.

“Not quite,” said Vera. “Not quite.”

She smiled and reached out to touch his massive hands on the table.

“After we’ve made the list, I have a question for you?”

“Ask it now.”

“Why did you go to the hotel room?”

“I got a call. A man at the hotel said I should come right away, that he was calling me because he was a fan, that he thought I should know what was going on in the room, that Lena was there.”

“And when you got there. .?”

“The door was unlocked. I went in. They were dead. I went to Lena, picked her up. Her face. . She was covered with blood.”

“And the police came through the door how long after?”

“A few minutes. Before I could call them or the hotel desk.”

“I think your fan called them,” said Vera. “I think your fan wanted the police to find you in that room with your dead wife and sparring partner.”

“Why?”

“Let’s make that list.”

The ZarayHotel on Gostinichnaya Street was Iris Templeton’s favorite hotel in Moscow. It was a short walk to both the Main Botanical Garden of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Vladykino Metro station. Iris knew her way around Moscow.

The last time she had been here Iris had done a freelance story for The Globe on Putin’s tightening of the flow of gas through the Ukraine. She had interviewed the managing director of Gasprom, the largest natural gas company in the world and possibly the largest corporation in the world. The story had earned her two prizes, one in England and one in Denmark. It had also earned her several enemies in Moscow.