Stuart Kaminsky: Blood and Rubles

“In rubles,” Karpo said, examining the portrait of a beautiful and quite regal woman, “billions upon billions.”

“American dollars?” she asked.

Karpo looked around. “Beyond price. Billions.”

“But who …?” Elena asked, just as a frail old woman in a badly worn dress stepped out from behind a set of shelves and said, “Get out.”

“We are the police,” said Elena.

The woman advanced on them. She was carrying what looked like a silver scepter embedded with red and green jewels.

“Out,” she cried.

“Is all this yours?” asked Karpo.

“My brother’s and before him my father’s,” the little woman said, holding up her scepter as if to strike. “All purchased honestly, piece by piece, from before the Revolution, until Pavel died.”

“Your father died?” asked Elena.

“My brother, Pavel,” the woman said. “Just last week. So now it is mine. All those … those parasites in the street who knew that my family collected, one of them went to the tax police.” The woman spat dryly in the general direction of the front door. “Pavel never bothered anyone. He was a poor electrician for government cafeterias. We didn’t live fancy. He loved … this.”

The woman stood in front of Karpo, who did not blink, though the heavy scepter was waving before his eyes.

“There were people-speculators in homes, weapons, rare goods,” said Karpo. “When the Revolution began, they bought these things for a few rubles from the members of the czar’s court and from rich merchants fleeing the Soviet Union who couldn’t carry everything they had stolen from the people. I have heard of such collections smuggled out of the country and sold to dealers, collectors, museums. I have never heard of one this size.”

Unable to intimidate the pale man, the frail woman looked at Elena, who forced herself to wear a mask of determination. Defeated, the woman put the scepter on a nearby shelf.

“What were you going to do with all this?” Elena asked as the woman leaned back against a bookcase. Then, suddenly, the woman pushed away from the books and ran down an aisle screaming, “They are mine.”

Elena started after the woman, but Karpo held out his hand to stop her.

“It is not the woman we want,” he said, looking around the room.

Elena, too, looked around at the roomful of treasures. “This is wonderful,” she said.

Karpo did not answer. The tax police were outside and would make their claims in the name of the new state. Karpo was certain that whoever controlled this cavern of riches would have enormous political power.

Karpo picked up a small icon. The dead Jesus, wearing a blanket that covered his head, was surrounded by his disciples, all of whom were wreathed, like Jesus, and clothed in what appeared to be ancient gold.

Valarov strode back into the huge room, his confidence returned, and announced to Elena and Karpo, “Experts will come in the morning to begin cataloging everything in this room. Meanwhile the old woman will be confined here with guards posted at the doors. I have been instructed to tell the press this much.”

Karpo, now holding an ancient leather-bound book in his hands, nodded without looking at the captain. Valarov departed quickly, wondering if he might be entitled to a small percentage of what looked like the biggest tax recovery in the history of the tax police. Karpo closed the book gently and placed it back on the shelf, intending to return the next day.

But the next morning, when the three antique dealers and four professors from Moscow State University entered the room accompanied by Valarov and his men, they found it quite empty.

The man lay sprawled on his back over the front hood of the blue Lada, his arms extended out wide as if he had been frozen in the middle of a rather intricate Olympic high dive. At least that was Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov’s first impression, an impression dispelled by the fact that the man was fully clothed, certainly dead, and staring wide-eyed, open-mouthed, and upside down at him. The body on the car fascinated Rostnikov. The man’s head was bald and covered with a minutely perfect tattoo of a flying eagle carrying something in its talons.

From the position of the body, the line of bloody holes in the man’s black shirt, and the Kalashnikov automatic weapon lying on the ground a few feet away, Rostnikov concluded that he had probably been shot at close range on the sidewalk and blown backward over the hood of the Lada.

The Lada was the only car parked on the block. Other cars had certainly been there, but in the four or five minutes it took for the police to arrive, their owners had hurried to move them before they could be impounded as evidence.

The body of another man, clothed in a leather jacket identical to that of the bald man, lay in the street on his face. There was no weapon near him.

The glass of a telephone kiosk on the sidewalk not far from the Lada was shattered, as were the windows of two small shops, a pharmacy and a café, on this side of the street, a few feet from the dead man on the car. Inside the pharmacy a woman was being treated for a gunshot wound to her right shoulder. She whimpered and looked around for a friend or relative. Her eyes met those of Rostnikov.

In the café there were three dead people: a foreign-looking little round man and a woman, who had been seated at the same table, and their waiter. In his right hand the dead man at the table clutched a Freedom Arms Casull.454, capable of bringing down an elk at one hundred yards.

Uniformed police had roped off the street for twenty yards in both directions, stopping afternoon traffic. Cars were backed up for half a block; their drivers, unaware of the slaughter in front of them, were angrily and uselessly honking their horns. Two men, one thin and marked by a large mole on his face and one quite old and marked by an apoplectic anger that might threaten his life, were being held back by two policemen across the street from Rostnikov and the man with the tattooed head.

“Who is that crippled lunatic staring at the dead man?” asked Irina Smetenova of no one in particular.

Irina, who had been standing in a long line waiting for bread at what might be a nearly sane price, had been present just after the shooting and well before the police drove up and began sending would-be looters scurrying away. Now she was surrounded by others, men in jackets and open collars, babushkas and businessmen, smartly dressed women carrying boxes of certainly expensive things, which they tried to hide in plain plastic bags marked PEPSI–COLA or ORANGINA.

No one answered Irina’s question, though others had noticed the boxy man in a dark jacket, his weight decidedly on his right leg as he moved. Now the man was standing still, hands in pockets, while police hurried to cover bodies, find witnesses, seek evidence, and make phone calls. Irina shifted her heavy shopping bag from her right hand to her left and her little white dog from her left to her right.

Rostnikov, the crippled lunatic, had been a boy soldier who got his leg run over by a tank in 1941. The fool of a boy, whom the adult Rostnikov could not clearly remember, had stepped into a street in Rostov not much different from the one in which he stood now. The boy had stepped out of a doorway and, with a lucky grenade and a hail of bullets from the machine pistol he had taken from a dead German, had destroyed the tank. The cost had been a nearly destroyed left leg, which he would have to drag slowly and often painfully behind him throughout the rest of his life.

But that was not the event that caused the boy to become the man who now somewhat resembled the German tank he had destroyed. When he was a young policeman, he had caught a drunken thief named Gremko assaulting a young woman outside the Kursk railway terminal. The drunk had nearly killed Rostnikov with his bare hands, but a well-placed knee to the groin had turned the tables.