Stuart Kaminsky: Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

Karpo glanced at his fellow officer. Zelach was a constant enigma, overweight, nearsighted, less than bright. He lived with his mother and blessed his luck at having been assigned to the Office of Special Investigation. He knew he was slow, but Zelach the Slouch was loyal and reliable. He was also a constant surprise to his fellow investigators in moments such as this.

“You’ve got it,” said the literally nude young man, pointing a finger at Zelach, who was doing his best not to look at the full breasts of the girl in the middle of the two young men. “The Cossacks name is not Lovski. Lovski’s a Jew name.”

“What is his last name?” Karpo asked.

The three looked at each other for an answer. None came.

“We never asked. He never mentioned.”

“And you two?” asked Karpo. “Your names?”

“Valéry Postnov,” said the other young man, the youngest of the group, frail, blond hair cropped bristle-close, blue-eyed.

“Pure Knuckles,” said Zelach.

“Pure Knuckles,” the young man confirmed.

The girl reached past Pure Knuckles, her breasts brushing against his chest. Her right hand grabbed a package of cigarettes and a matchbook. She jiggled as she sat upright, lit one of the cigarettes, and lay back. Her hair, cut short in a neat bob, was a flaming and artificial neon red.

“And you?” asked Karpo.

“Nina Aronskaya,” she said.

Karpo hesitated for an instant, waiting for Zelach to reveal her colorful identity. Zelach said nothing. This one he did not know.

“Anarchista,” she said, looking at Zelach and smiling.’

“Steel Ladies,” Zelach said.

“You know your metal,” the girl said with a smile, pointing her cigarette at the bespectacled, rumpled detective who managed not to blush. “Now I’m with Naked Cossack.”

“So,” said Yakov Mitsin, who got out of the bed, revealing his full nakedness. “I will guess. Somebody doesn’t like our music. You’re going to haul us in for treason or drugs or something. Okay. Then we get our lawyer. The newspapers, television, foreign journalists come. We get big coverage, free publicity. I’ll get my pants on and be ready in a minute.”

He moved across the room.

“Stop,” said Karpo.

The young man halted, shook his head, and turned toward the pale figure in black. He met the man’s eyes with an air of practiced indifference, but he saw something there that he had not seen before.

The pale detective did not blink. He neither smiled nor frowned.

“Turn around, sit down,” said Karpo.

The young man considered a smirk but thought better of it. He sat on the edge of the bed and took an offered cigarette from the girl.

“What do you want?”

“We’re looking for Misha,” said, Karpo.

“Naked Cossack,” Zelach reminded him.

“What’s he done?” asked the thin blond boy, looking at the girl for guidance.

“Nothing,” said Karpo. “He is missing.”

The nude Mitsin laughed and looked at the equally unclothed girl, who smiled.

“When he’s gone for a month, we can worry,” Mitsin said. “He could be …”

“He made a call to the police,” said Karpo. “Said he was being held by someone. He sounded frightened.”

“Bullshit,” said the girl.

“The call is recorded,” said Karpo. “It is his voice. He sounds genuinely frightened.”

“Genuinely frightened,” Mitsin mimicked.

“I am familiar with genuine fear,” said Karpo.

And the three in the bed knew instantly that he was.

“We do not know where he is,” said the blond boy. “Why come to us? Hell, what are we going to do? He’s got a concert on. Saturday. You think he is? …”

“I will ask questions,” Karpo said. “You will answer them. If I am satisfied with your answers, we will leave. If I am not, you will come with us to Petrovka.”

“Shit,” said Mitsin. “Ask.”

“What are you doing here in Misha Lovski’s apartment?”

“We crash and burn here sometimes. Sometimes other places. Sometimes here. Places,” said the girl, looking at Zelach and smiling. “And his name is not Lovski.”

“When did you last see him?”

“Cossack? Yesterday maybe,” Mitsin said.

“Day before,” the girl corrected.

“Day before,” the blond boy confirmed.

“Where did he go?”

“Go?” Mitsin shrugged. “I got to piss.”

He got up and moved slowly, sleepily, toward the open door of the bathroom a few feet away. Zelach could see a melange of towels and a dented bar of soap on the floor.

“Could have gone lots of places,” the girl took up, playing with her cigarette. “He hangs with the skiny, sometimes in Gorbushka. Sometimes at Loni’s. Sometimes who knows where?”

Skiny, Karpo knew, were the young skinheads, not an organized gang but a teeming youth culture with no core but a shared belief in hatred of foreigners and nonwhite races, clad in neo-Nazi chic, leather jackets decorated with swastikas and wearing highly polished black boots. Groups of skinheads routinely beat up blacks, Vietnamese, and Chechins and sprayed anti-Semitic graffiti on the walls of public buildings and in the dark underpasses beneath broad and crowded Moscow streets.

Their enemies were the rappery, with baggy pants, baseball caps worn backwards, puffy parka jackets, spiked hair, addicted to American rap and hip-hop and trying to sound African-American, which was particularly bizarre in street Russian.

Rappery and skiny clashed, often violently, the skiny going for bright, Phat Pharm rip-off clothing, and the rappery tearing off the treasured boots of a skiny caught alone and kicked to the ground.

Karpo had seen both groups, sometimes in the same obyezannik, the police-precinct cages designed for drunks and petty criminals, sitting in clusters across from each other, neither group moving, too weak from the beatings they had been given by each other and the police who picked them up.

Gorbushka was the open-air market in a wooded park at the northwest edge of the city. Not unlike the Paris flea market, Gorbushka was where ordinary citizens flocked to buy pirated videotapes, computer software, compact disks ranging from country-and western to Frank Sinatra. But lately the market had become a mecca for skinys, and foreign visitors, particularly those who were not white, had been issued unofficial warnings to avoid the market. An African-American marine guard at the US Embassy had recently ignored the warning and wound up badly beaten. When one of his attackers was caught, he proudly told the television camera in his face, “Black people seem to be attracted to my fists like metal to a magnet. Everywhere I go they bite me on the fists.”

In the market stands a low gray granite building where only the skiny dare enter. Heavy-metal music promising death and celebrating hate booms while bald young patrons laugh and buy boots, CDs, American Confederate flags, leather jackets, Nazi flags and copies of Nazi medals, and pick up pamphlets preaching racism and rabid nationalism.

“Where is Loni’s?” Karpo asked.

“Kropotkin Street,” said Zelach.

The girl looked at Zelach with amusement and said, “You retro?”

Zelach looked at Karpo, who looked back and said nothing.

“Jefferson Starship, Aerosmith, Black Sabbath,” Zelach muttered.

“Favorites?”

“Ozzy Osborne’s ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ and ‘Psycho, Man.’ Ted Nugent’s ‘Cat Scratch Fever.’”

“No,” the blond kid said incredulously. “Heavy, really heavy. Russian?”

“Kruiz, ‘Mental Home,’” Zelach said, taking off his glasses so he would not see the bare-breasted girl clearly.