Stuart Kaminsky: Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

“Favorite fem?”

“Diana Mangano,” Zelach said softly, cleaning his glasses.

“Total Chaos?” the blond kid tested, showing teeth in need of serious dental work. “Latest album.”

“In God We Kill” said Zelach, putting his glasses back on and glancing at Karpo in apology.

“Amazing,” said the girl. “Old bastard like you.”

Zelach was not yet forty.

The toilet flushed. The door had not been closed. There was no sound of running water. Acid had not washed his hands.

“This cop is plugged in,” said the girl, bubbling out from under the blanket now, sitting cross-legged, totally and un-self-consciously revealing herself. “Try him.”

Mitsin stopped and said, “Best Latvian group.”

“I think Skyforger,” said Zelach.

The blond boy clapped and the girl laughed. Mitsin grinned.

“We’ll talk to you,” Mitsin said. “Not the slant.”

Karpo considered. His primary nickname, never spoken to his face, was the Vampire. He was well aware of the appellation and did not consider it unflattering. He was also known as the Tatar because of his Asian eyes, earned through Tatar blood. His options were simple. He needed information. He had an assignment. Emil Karpo had no family, no religion-aside from his almost-forgotten mother, the only woman who had meant anything to him was dead, and the religion of Communism in which he had fully believed and to which he had dedicated his existence was gone. There was only his duty, the universal hope of the policeman to keep the animals from taking over the jungle, the personal commitment to social order.

Karpo considered firing his weapon or breaking the arm of the strutting, chicken-breasted young man, not out of anger but because he knew the effort would be rewarded. Death, which Emil Karpo did not fear, turned young posturers and old criminals into cooperative babblers. These three held no beliefs or loyalties for which they would risk their lives. But instead of speaking he turned to Zelach and nodded.

Zelach did not want to speak. He did not want to look at the girl, who could have been no more than seventeen or eighteen. He wanted to leave but he had trapped himself into being the interpreter of a language that Emil Karpo did not understand.

“Loni’s,” Zelach said. “Where else? Politik, Ruint?”

“Bloody,” the girl said. “Cross Ruint. Alloys now. Aluminum. Naked Cossack’s pure iron. You know his grunt?”

“‘Clear the streets with my grandfathers scythe,’” said Zelach. “‘Cut the weeds that hide in the folds of slants and midnight faces taking root in dark places, breaking through the cracks and spaces we’ll take back from spades with aces.’”

“Fucking amazing,” said the girl. “Come back alone later and get skinny.”

Zelach blushed and tried to catch his breath. He wanted to run from the room. “A name?” he asked.

“Time is it?”

“Early, early,” said the blond boy.

“Boris 666 at Politik,” the girl said.

“And?”

“No and,” Mitsin said, getting back in bed.

Zelach looked at Karpo, who nodded. Zelach suppressed a sigh of relief.

“The Cossack is just playing games,” the girl said. “He will turn up.

Karpo walked to the open broken door of the apartment with Zelach behind him.

“Name the cop in black,” the girl said.

“Pure Death,” said Mitsin.

“And specs,” she added. “He’s mine. Nine Millimeter.”

Zelach couldn’t help glancing back at the girl, who smiled at him as he followed Karpo into the hall. Zelach knew his nickname in the department as surely as Karpo knew his and Porfiry Petrovich knew he was the Washtub. Zelach was the Slouch. He far preferred Nine Millimeter.

On the street, Karpo turned to Zelach, who tried to suppress a twitch and meet the Tatar’s eyes.

“You are an enigma, Zelach.”

“I’m sorry.

“It was not a criticism. It was an observation. The music?”

“I … when, it was a year ago-no, it was two years ago. Sasha and I, a crime scene. The boy who killed his mother. I don’t remember his name.”

“Konstantin Perkovov,” Karpo supplied.

“Yes, Perkovov. He had boxes of heavy-metal compact disks. He killed himself. No relatives. They would just be taken by neighbors, uniformed officers.”

“You stole them,” Karpo said.

Only to Karpo would it be considered stealing, Zelach thought. The police helped themselves in cases like the Perkovov killing. The police were barely paid a living existence. There were few advantages to the job. Minor pillage was an accepted perk. Zelach almost never took advantage of such opportunities, but when there was something for his mother, something small, a table lamp, a painting of flowers, a good cooking pot, he would tuck it under his arm, not trying to hide his small booty. The CDs had been a mistake. He had hoped they would be popular songs or classical music for his mother. He had not looked at the covers. The CDs had been crammed into a cardboard box and he had seen only their plastic edges.

When he got home and saw what he had taken, he considered selling them to his neighbor Tatoloy, who had a stall near Pushkin Square. But he had played one of the CDs, something by a group called Deep. The song, booming, beating, had moved through him like a jolt of straight caffeine. “The end is now,” a raspy voice had croaked, and Zelach was fascinated.

Even his mother had listened, though she had told him to keep the volume low. She did not like the music but she saw what it did to her son. She sensed him vibrating with emotions he certainly did not understand. She did not discourage him.

None of this Zelach could explain to Karpo.

“I stole them,” Zelach said simply.

Karpo nodded and moved toward the nearest metro station. Zelach knew they were going to search for someone named Boris 666 at Politik. He Walked next to the Vampire quietly, trying not to think of the naked girl, saying to himself “Nine Millimeter,” trying to hear her voice as she had said it, trying not to see her smile.

"The subway attacks,” said the Yak, opening the top file in front of him.

It was his first statement of the meeting, the first thing he had said since the detectives had filed into his office and taken their usual seats at the rectangular wooden conference table. Rostnikov, sitting across from Igor Yaklovev, did not look up from the open notebook in front of him. Pencil in hand, moving on the page, he nodded in acceptance. The reason the subway attacks had been moved to the top of the agenda was the fact that the latest victim was an army colonel who had died on a busy train platform the night before.

The newspapers carried photographs of the dead man on the platform, wearing a black suit and tie. Television commentators spoke hurriedly while the screen showed photographs of the dead man in full uniform with a chest full of medals and a solemn look on his face befitting a veteran of both the Afghan and Chechin wars.

The clock on the wall, round, with a dark wooden frame, ticked softly.

The office was large, larger than Yaklovev would have wanted, but he had inherited it. To have asked for a smaller one would have been seen as a calculated move to appear humble. The Yak was not humble but he was cautious. He had changed little in the office when he moved in. The large desk with the Gray Wolfhound’s high-backed chair behind it stood behind the conference table. Where a painting of Lenin had once hung over the high-backed chair there now hung a full-color photograph of the gate to the Kremlin. A large window, now behind the Yak’s back as he sat, faced into the same courtyard Rostnikov could see from his own small office. The day was sunny. The parted curtains let in the light.