Daria Desombre - The Sin Collector

“I’m Andreyka,” his new friend said. “Got a smoke?”

“Sure, buddy. That’s my name, too.” Andrey handed him his pack of cigarettes.

Andreyka took a few and tucked them behind one ear. They sat there smoking quietly for a couple of minutes.

“Igor’s not coming back,” Andreyka said suddenly, in a funny, high voice like an old woman. “No, not coming back!”

“Why do you say that?” Andrey asked, unnerved by this verbal contortionism.

“He went away! His friend came for him. He’s a nice man. In a blue car.”

“Oh yeah?” Andrey felt his body tense, as if getting ready to pounce. “What kind of car?”

“A blue one.” Andreyka looked at Andrey like he must be stupid. “He said, ‘Go on, Andreyka, I don’t need your help anymore.’ ’Cause I shoveled his snow in the winter. He said, ‘My friend is here, he’s an important man, I owe him my life. It’s time to pay my debts.’”

“What did that man look like?”

“A man. You know. Important.”

“What about his eyes, or his hair? Do you remember?”

“Dark. And he had a black coat. And a blue car.”

Andrey could tell that was all he was going to get. He knocked at a few little houses, but none of the old women had seen a dark-eyed stranger, and they didn’t remember any blue cars. Andrey circled the house and garden again, this time under the friendly blinking gaze of the other Andrey. Then he headed home, planning to send a few forensic techs out to search Yelnik’s place. But he strongly suspected he’d already found out all they could about the man in the car, Yelnik’s mysterious savior.

They wouldn’t find anything more interesting, or more substantive, than that.

Innokenty sat looking idly at Masha’s map and the series of crosses she had marked. Thank God Masha was tactful enough not to tell him all the details, over lunch, of what had happened at each of those places. As it was, his appetite hadn’t suffered, but his curiosity—the most treacherous of sins, and the driving force of any historian—had definitely been aroused. Innokenty remembered seeing a map with crosses like these once before. Given the sort of things he worked on, the map must have been an old one. Sixteenth or seventeenth century, probably.

He dutifully reached for an atlas. Where was it? Ah, there it was. Innokenty looked thoughtfully at the book’s cover. For him, old maps, just like old sepia photos—and the Dutch masters, really—held an extraordinary charm. The tiny horses racing far off in the background in a Bruegel, a slice of a street scene in a De Hooch, the costumes and facial expressions of a merchant family on a late-nineteenth-century postcard, and the Streletsky Settlement gardens here on the page he turned to first—they all had a particular quality in common, which was that their greatness was in the details.

And these details were powerful enough to make them real. If you followed those details, like Ariadne’s string, through the dark labyrinth of time, they might lead you to a different reality. Wasn’t that, in the end, why Innokenty had become a historian? Because it was a way of dipping into other worlds? Of distancing himself from this one, the world where fate had dropped him? He couldn’t resist running his eyes over the commentary accompanying Herberstein’s map of Moscow one more time. Full of small mistakes, it reflected an outsider’s view. Innokenty smiled ironically. Who were modern Muscovites, if not outsiders observing the sixteenth-century city? They didn’t even know that Moscow, which now ranked somewhere between Delhi and Seoul worldwide, used to be the fourth biggest city in Europe, after Constantinople, Paris, and Lisbon.

And where was that Constantinople? Kenty wondered abstractedly. Where was that Lisbon, all weighed down by New World gold? Where was old Paris, robbed by revolutions? In the Middle Ages, it took a man on horseback three full hours to ride all the way around the walled fortress here—the same amount of time his modern-day descendent spends in traffic every day.

Innokenty licked his lips over the text he already knew almost by heart. Cathedrals in the city are sometimes constructed of brick, though most are wooden, and all the houses are made of wood. None are permitted to build from stone or rock save certain members of the nobility, and the most successful merchants may build vaults on their property, small and narrow, where they secret away their most valuable possessions in times of fire. The English and the Dutch, and the Hanseatic merchants, primarily store their wares here, selling fabrics, silks, and perfumes …

He smiled again when he read the next sentence. The local merchants are quite adept and inclined to make deals, and while they are extremely untrustworthy, they are markedly more pleasant and civilized than other residents of this land.

Masha sat in the hallway outside the prosecutor’s office and waited obediently. Anna Yevgenyevna, a formidable woman who had been the lead investigator on the Bagrat Gebelai case, was giving someone a thorough hiding over the phone. Finally she let Masha into her office, and offered her a narrow chair upholstered in fake leather on the other side of her massive desk.

The desk was neat and clean, something that could not be said of Anna Yevgenyevna: her black sweater, stretched over her massive bosom, was littered with what must have been cat hair; her own hair, hastily swept back into a bun, was badly dyed and coming loose; and the manicure on the almond-shaped nails of her unexpectedly elegant fingers was flaking.

“So. Gebelai?” she said, tapping her nails on the surface of her desk. Then she shoved back, rolled her chair over to a cabinet, and skillfully pulled out the file she needed before scooting back to the desk. She opened the file, glanced at the papers there, and then turned her gaze back to Masha. “And why are you so interested, Miss Intern?”

Masha decided to tell her half the truth: she was writing a thesis on strange deaths passed off as accidents—

“Right,” Anna Yevgenyevna grunted, then reached for a cigarette and took a drag. “It was a strange death, I’ll give you that. Gebelai was an architect, a builder. He drew up the plans for some new metro stations, the kind with canopies. One day two years ago, it was pouring rain at rush hour, and people were huddled under one of those canopies to stay dry, a huge crowd, and the canopy collapsed. Hundreds of people died.” The detective sighed and tapped the ash off her cigarette, half into an ashtray, half onto her sweater. “It was a terrible thing. Women, children. You probably remember.”

Masha nodded silently.

“Gebelai and his subcontractors were found liable. The metro stations were falling over due to structural errors in the plans. They used the wrong materials, they calculated the loads wrong. But then there was a presidential pardon and Gebelai got out of jail. So. A couple of months later they found him dead in an apartment on Lenivka, all covered in dirt, black under his nails, too, naked, skin and bones… The doctors said his heart gave out due to some sort of major physical exertion. But what kind of extreme exertion makes any sense? The man was a decorated architect; he used to win medals. They found one of them pinned right to his skin, in fact.”

Anna Yevgenyevna handed Masha two photos. One view, a little from above, was of an apartment that was striking for its ostentatious luxury. The other was a picture of Bagrat Gebelai himself, curled up in fetal position on the floor, a medal stuck into the dark thatch of hair on his chest.

“What is that?” asked Masha.

“That’s an Akhdzapsh medal, third degree,” the senior investigator answered wearily. “They give it to citizens of the Republic of Abkhazia for service to science, culture, and art. Our hero got his a few years before the station collapsed.”