Stuart Kaminsky: Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

“You are being too sensitive,” he tried.

“That is what generic men say when they wish to avoid responsibility. The woman is being too sensitive. Perhaps the man is being too insensitive. Do you wish to marry me?”

“Yes,” he said. “Definitely. Without question. As soon as possible.”

“Good,” Elena said.

A door opened behind her. She could hear the tapping of shoes behind her.

“Let’s talk to Paulinin,” Iosef said as a slight older woman in a dark suit walked past them quickly, a pile of files cradled in her arms like a baby.

“Iosef, I am what I am destined to be.”

“And that is what I want,” he said. “I-”

“Later,” she said as he advanced and stood in front of her. She touched his right hand with her left and his cheek, with her right hand and then turned to continue down the corridor.

A few dozen steps farther and they were before a heavy metal door. The door was unnumbered and there was no plate on it indicating what lay behind. Elena knocked.

Paulinin did not look pleased when he answered the door to his laboratory. Elena and Iosef were no happier to be here.

“The dead man on the subway,” Elena said.

“Your case?” asked Paulinin, adjusting his glasses with the back of his hand.

The scientist was of average height, a bit on the thin side, with wild white hair that was beginning to show definite signs of thinning. He wore a less-than-clean lab coat that had once been white but was now tinged with hues whose source neither of the detectives wished to consider.

“Our case,” said Elena. “May we? …”

“Come in,” Paulinin said, throwing open the heavy metal door and turning his back on his guests.

They stepped in, and Paulinin pushed the door shut behind them. A fluorescent bulb dying slowly tinkled deep inside the vast room which had once been used for file storage. It had been a haven for Paulinin for at least two decades.

The man was, at best, eccentric. More likely he was a bit mad.

Paulinin was twenty paces ahead of them, maneuvering around familiar objects that formed the maze of his sanctuary-laboratory tables covered with metallic and glass contrivances, most of which were his own peculiar invention and which no one else would know how to use, stacks of books and scientific journals on the floor and on lower tables and two desks, one of which was missing several drawers. Along the walls were shelves up to the top of the ten-foot ceiling. On the shelves were cardboard and wooden boxes, each with a large number in black on its sides. There were also jars ranging in size from a gallon to five gallons or more. Something floated in each of the jars. A brain, a kidney, a small animal, and, somewhere, the left leg of Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov; and, according to Petrovka lore, the brain of Josef Stalin.

Elena and Iosef wended their way toward Paulinin, who now stood behind a table on which lay the naked body of a man who appeared to be about fifty. The corpse was neither fat nor thin, tall nor short. He was not particularly handsome; neither was he ugly. Stripped of his suit, the dead colonel was simply a corpse with seven deep, long, clotted knife wounds on his neck, arms, and stomach.

Paulinin’s arms were out and resting next to the body. When he leaned forward, the strong overhead light cast a shadow in the sockets of his eyes. The visitors to Paulinin’s lair had a wide variety of options with which to respond, ranging from amusement to discomfort and fear.

Iosef thought Paulinin would have been a particularly sad and isolated creature were he not sustained by his own paranoia, delusions, and self-confidence.

“This should be Emil Karpo’s case,” Paulinin said.

The closest thing the scientist had to a friend was the silent pale detective. At least once a week they lunched together. Karpo was a good listener. Paulinin was a talker.

“We take the cases we are assigned,” Elena said.

“I didn’t suggest otherwise,” Paulinin said with irritation. “I made an observation. It is bad enough that those bunglers up there”-he looked up toward the ceiling-“treat the dead with ignorance and no respect,” he went on. “Do you know what Bolgakov did?”

Neither Elena nor Iosef knew who Bolgakov was.

“Woman, dead inside the Kremlin gift shop,” Paulinin said. “Greek. Just fell. Boom. Like that. No one saw. She was in a corner, supposedly alone. And Bolgakov, that oaf who could not see an elephant without an electron microscope, looks at the body, declares she had a heart attack. Case closed. The great Bolgakov has spoken. I get the body after they have pawed it with no sense of respect or dignity. I read the report. Broken nose. Bolgakov says she fell on her nose when she had her attack. Cheek bones are intact. Bone in the nose is thin. The nose had been broken before, twice. One rib had been broken before. Simple X rays showed that. Given her weight, even if she didn’t fall flat, the nose should have been flattened, pulp. You understand?”

“Perfectly,” said Iosef patiently.

“Heart attack,” Paulinin went on. “Pills in her purse for angina. Bolgakov, the language expert, can read the pill bottle in Greek but just enough to make out the medication. I get the bottle. Can I read Greek?”

“I do not know,” said Elena.

“I cannot,” Paulinin said with a smile. “But I do not pretend to. I find a Greek. There’s one at the newsstand on Kolpolski Square. I give him the bottle. The pills belong to the woman’s husband. She was carrying them for him. I go back to the body, look at the heart, the arteries. Bolgakov had not bothered to open her. There was nothing wrong with her heart till it stopped. She died of a stroke brought on by a blow to her head. Something hit her in the face. She fell back and struck her head. Hematoma under the hair. Any idiot could see it if he looked, but not the great Bolgakov, chief medical examiner for the Homicide Division.”

“So what did happen?” asked Iosef, knowing that they would not get to the dead man before them till Paulinin’s story was over.

“I asked to see the husband of the dead woman. He was leaving with the body that very day. They had waited two days to get the dead woman to me. I talked to Karpo. He stopped the man at the airport and brought him here. You know what I found?”

“What?” asked Elena, resisting the urge to look at her watch.

“Signs of broken capillaries in the knuckles of his right hand. That is what I found. They had fought. He had punched her. She had fallen and the fools upstairs had missed it.”

“He confessed?” asked Elena.

“Of course,” said Paulinin. “I laid out the evidence. One, two, three, four, five. Built a tower of steel truth. He was a wife beater. Greece has as many as we do in Russia, but possibly Russian women have thicker skulls.”

He looked directly at Elena, who met his eyes.

“Interesting,” she said. “The man on the table.”

“You want some coffee? Tea?”

“No, thank you,” said Elena.

Both she and Iosef had made the mistake in the past of accepting Paulinin’s offer of coffee or tea. They had suffered for their attempt to get on his good side, not knowing at the time that he had no good side. The coffee had come in small glass jars with hints of white powder and something that did not look like coffee grounds floating in the tan liquid. They had drunk the vile brew, trying to avoid the floating dots.

“Business, then,” said Paulinin. “My friend here,” he said, touching the hairy chest of the corpse, “and I have had a long talk. He told me all about his attacker.”

With this Paulinin looked down at the face of the dead man, whose eyes were closed.

“And he told you?” Iosef prompted.