Stuart Kaminsky - People Who Walk In Darkness

Considering the size of the cave and the quality of what he had in his hand, Luc concluded that someone had removed millions of rubles worth of uncut jewelry-quality diamonds from the-

Someone was singing.

Luc, still holding the rock sample, crawled back out of the small cave and took out his gun. He sat with his back against the tunnel wall and listened.

It sounded like the voice of a child, a child singing in Russian in a beautiful, clear voice that echoed sweetly through the tunnel, a funereal cathedral echo.

The voice was coming closer.

Luc got to his feet, dropped the rock into his case, and ripped the filter mask from his face.

The tunnel lights went out.

Luc was not a whimpering baby. He had served in the army, saw combat in Bosnia, had his share and more of barroom fights. Someone was playing games in the darkness. Fine, he would play too.

Luc turned on his flashlight and aimed it down the tunnel. The child’s voice came closer and Luc could see a flickering light heading toward him, casting shadows on the tunnel walls.

He waited, cursing his heavy breathing.

It was definitely the voice of a child, singing a Russian song he thought he had heard before.

“Who are you?” he called out, his voice determined, strong, echoing.

The child kept singing.

Then she appeared. Alone. Small. Hair brushed down, dark, streaming over her shoulders and down the front of her white, white dress. In her left hand was a lamp, an old oil mining lamp, a kind that, Luc was certain, had never been used down here.

The child stopped. She was no longer singing.

Luc could see no one behind her.

The diamond thieves probably thought he wouldn’t shoot a child. Maybe they were right. But there had to be adults not far behind her. He could simply walk past her, gun in hand, at the ready, and make his way back down the tunnel.

Did they know he had a gun?

Did they know he had found the small cave?

And where the hell was Boris?

The child smiled at him showing unexpectedly clean and even small white teeth. Russians did not have clean, even white teeth, not even the children.

Luc inched his way along the wall looking for trouble, ready for trouble, deciding not to send a warning shot into the darkness, deciding not to let them know he had a gun.

He was even with the child now. She had watched him move along the wall, scraping his head on the jagged rocky surface. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old. The light from the lamp in her hand cast shadows on her face, her eyes showing clear and blue.

She looked at his gun and kept smiling.

A sound down the shaft. Luc turned his flashlight toward it. There was nothing there. He sensed a scuffling, turned the light back to where the girl had been standing. She was gone. He aimed the beam toward the cave he had uncovered. The girl was standing before it, her lamp now held low. The shadows had turned her face hooded and skull-like.

Luc was afraid, undecided. Should he leave her and run? Should he shoot her? Should he take her hand and lead her out of the darkness?

No. He couldn’t bring himself to touch her.

The hell with it. He hoped he had enough bullets for whoever was waiting in the black oblivion. He turned his back on the girl, aimed his flashlight toward wherever disaster was lurking, and took a step.

Behind him the girl started to sing again.

It struck him in the dark of a diamond mine in Siberia that he had never heard his five-year-old son sing. Luc wondered if he ever would.

“What doyou know of diamonds, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov?”

They were seated in the office of Igor “the Yak” Yaklovev, Director of the Office of Special Investigations. Compared to the offices of other departments and bureaus in the central police headquarters on Petrovka Street, the Yak’s was modest. It had a small conference table with eight chairs near the door, and a desk rumored to have belonged to Lavretiy Pavlovich Beria, chief of the Soviet police under Stalin. When Stalin died, his successors executed Beria, and his office furniture, like that of many of his colleagues, was divided by the grabbing hands of middle-level apparatchiks .

“They are mostly white when cut. They are valuable as jewels and for industrial use. We have diamond mines in Siberia,” Rostnikov answered.

“That’s all?”

Rostnikov shrugged. The two men looked at each other over the desk. The Yak was lean, fit, and reported to occasionally engage in martial arts exercises with Vladimir Putin, with whom he had served in the old KGB in St. Petersburg. He was well aware that he was called “the Yak” behind his back. He did not mind. The wild yak can weigh more than 2,000 pounds and survive in extreme cold. It is wary and fast.

Behind the Yak, and on the wall just above his head, was a modest black-and-white photograph of Putin almost smiling. When the Yak had been appointed to head the Office of Special Investigations, it had not been considered a prize for an ambitious man. The Office was part of the 15th investigative division of the Investigative Directorate. The Directorate was itself a unit of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Division. The Office of Special Investigations was at the very bottom of the Moscow police force. The Office had been created solely as a receptacle in which to dump unsolvable and politically sensitive cases filled with a high likelihood of failure. The Office’s first director, Colonel Ivan Snitkonoy, whom the Yak considered a pompous, uniformed ass, had seemed blissfully unaware that he had been dumped into a job whose present and future promised only oblivion. But something had changed. And the change had come with the man who sat across the desk, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov.

Rostnikov had been demoted from the procurator’s office to life under Snitkonoy, the Gray Wolfhound. Rostnikov had brought his own team, all of whom, like Rostnikov, had left after Procurator Anna Timofeyeva had her second heart attack and was forced to retire-along with the protective cloak, which she had provided the far too inquisitive Rostnikov.

Like Yaklovev, Rostnikov had a nickname: the Washtub. He was squat, compact, and heavy, with a dour Russian peasant face. He seldom smiled broadly. His voice was a soft, bearlike growl, but not a frightening one.

At the moment, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was not thinking of diamonds, but of his left leg, which was made not of flesh, blood, and bone, but of metal, plastic, and wood. His other left leg, the one that had been replaced, the shriveled one he had dragged behind him since his childhood, was floating in a very large jar in the second level below the ground floor of Petrovka, in Paulinin’s laboratory. Paulinin, agreed by the detectives of Petrovka to be a forensic genius and a lunatic, who talked to the corpses he worked on and far preferred their company to that of the living.

As the Yak continued to talk of diamonds, slowly coming to the point where Rostnikov would have to pay attention, the Chief Inspector was trying to decide on an issue of great importance. Should he take the shoe off of his left foot before climbing into bed each night, or simply leave it on when he removed the leg? Since getting the leg, he had been taking the shoe off, but what was the point? His wife Sarah told him simply to be comfortable. The bed was large. It made no difference to her.

Rostnikov considered bringing up the question to the Yak, but knew he would not. The Yak’s mind was on diamonds, and he had no sense of humor or irony and little curiosity. All of these attributes contributed to Rostnikov’s appreciation of the man. Anything the Yak said converted to how his words might be exchanged for political, economic, or social advantage. Rostnikov, however, always considered the irony of human existence, engaged in uncertain acts of humor, and was eternally curious about everything from whether a man should take the shoe off of his artificial leg when he went to sleep to who might kill a drunken policeman in an alleyway, not that anyone had recently killed a drunken policeman in an alleyway.