Daria Desombre: The Sin Collector

Masha went on looking silently at the country road.

“I remembered the day I went to visit Yelnik’s place in the country. He had Andreyka, the village idiot, working for him. The kid hadn’t seen the killer, just his car. But he said something I didn’t pay attention to at first. On the day he disappeared, Yelnik sent Andreyka away, telling him a friend had come to see him, a very important man Yelnik owed his life to. Now, Masha, can you remember who the prosecutor was at Yelnik’s last trial? The prosecutor who allegedly didn’t have enough evidence to convict?”

They pulled up in front of the very last house on the main road, and Andrey switched off the engine. Masha turned to face him, her chin jutting out stubbornly like a child’s.

“I still don’t believe it. Nick-Nick was my father’s best friend, and he loved my mother.” Masha shoved her door open, then looked back at Andrey. “What if it’s really Anyutin?”

Andrey shook his head. “I checked it out, and it couldn’t have been him. An unidentified visitor rang the doorbell at four thirty, when your stepfather was in that rented apartment for his, um, usually scheduled appointment. But Anyutin was at the office until eight—the logs say so. That’s not a guarantee, I know, so I haven’t told him anything about Katyshev.”

The two of them walked along the edge of the forest. The ground was slippery with fallen leaves and springy with moss underfoot. Andrey took Masha’s hand to steady her. It was damp to the touch, but her face looked calm and focused now, and Andrey was relieved. He knew that giving Masha’s brain some hard work to do would help distract her from other more dismal thoughts. Masha suddenly stopped walking. There in front of them was an old wooden fence, strips of ancient paint hanging off it.

“This is it,” Masha whispered. “Nick-Nick’s dacha. I think the gate is over there.”

They circled the cottage warily. Everything was still. It had been cold enough the past few days that vacationers in the neighboring dachas had gone back to the city, and there weren’t many locals around, either. Just smoke rising from a chimney or two at the other end of the village. Andrey tried to ram through the locked gate with his shoulder, but Masha slipped a thin hand between the boards and opened the latch from the inside. She turned to Andrey.

“Remember what he said? ‘Open up. It’s me!’”

“I remember,” said Andrey. “Your stepdad didn’t know Anyutin, but he did know Nick-Nick. The killer came down from one floor up and rang the doorbell. When your stepdad asked who was there, the killer didn’t even need to say his name. He knew he’d be recognized.”

Masha gulped. “They’re not here. I saw Nick-Nick’s wife today at the hospital. She came to check on my mom. She had a bruise on her arm.” Masha shook her head desperately. “I know serial killers often abuse their families, too, but maybe she just hurt herself somehow? Are you sure it’s him and not Anyutin? I mean,” said Masha, looking at him pleadingly, “Nick-Nick has never been religious. I would have known!”

“Do you want to wait outside?”

“We can’t go in without a warrant,” Masha said, but Andrey had already walked up to the door, raised one hand, and magically summoned up a hidden key. In one ordinary twist of the wrist, he unlocked the door. It swung open with a creak, and Masha followed Andrey inside.

The first thing she saw was an icon. It had its own honored place in one corner, as tradition dictated. Masha jumped and exchanged a glance with Andrey, who was nice enough to say nothing. As she looked around, memories crowded in. Memories from her childhood, from the days she hadn’t yet been poisoned by her father’s death.

There, at that table, they had sat together cleaning mushrooms they’d found in the woods. Irina had taught her to string the right kind of mushroom on a thick white thread, which they would hang over the round stove like a Christmas garland to dry. And there on that veranda, Mama had laughed while she and Nick-Nick washed the lunch dishes in a tub. In the old rocking chair, Papa had stretched out his legs and talked with Irina, who was always stitching away at something, mending or knitting, and listening uneasily to Natasha’s laughter pouring in from the veranda, which Fyodor never seemed to notice. The memories were so vivid that Masha almost forgot why they had come. She looked at the row of folded-up cots on the veranda and ran a hand over the worn lacquer of the old buffet. It held ceramic knick-knacks, probably heirlooms from Irina’s parents. A little boy in ice skates. A little girl with skis. She thought she could even remember Irina saying how much she loved those little pieces of bourgeois charm, kitschy as they were. Mama hadn’t understood, of course.

A loud scraping noise shook her out of her reverie. It was Andrey, moving the heavy table aside and lifting the cheerful little striped rug. Underneath was the trap door leading down to the cellar. Masha nodded. She remembered the cellar, too. As a girl, she had helped Irina carry jars of pickled mushrooms and jam down there.

Down they went, into a room that stank of mold and neglect. Masha’s foot knocked against an empty jar, which clattered away in the darkness. Andrey pulled a cord, and a dim, swinging light bulb illuminated the room. The walls were lined with racks of shelves, which in Masha’s childhood had been full of provisions for the winter, sacks of potatoes, and apples. Now all that decorated those shelves were rows of large, empty jars. There were gaps in the rows, like missing teeth.

“I thought—I was sure, actually, that the cellar was bigger than this.” Masha’s voice echoed strangely in the neglected, dusty place.

“Everything looks big when we’re kids,” Andrey answered glumly.

“I wonder why Nick-Nick’s wife quit gardening.” She ran a finger thoughtfully over one of the dusty jars. “She used to get so excited about her jams and pickles! They don’t have kids, you know, and—”

“Shhhhh!”

Andrey was rapping his knuckles on the back of one of the racks of shelves.

“You’re right. This cellar really is a lot bigger than it looks. Come help me.”

Together, the two of them began taking jars off the shelves. When the rack was completely empty, Andrey gave it a tug, first in one direction, then the other. All of a sudden it gave way with a groan and swung slowly away. The sickly light bulb only illuminated a few inches into the space hidden on the other side of that shelf, a room that did not look dusty at all.

Andrey told her to wait, and Masha obeyed. She didn’t want to see what was in there. She yearned for knowledge, as her father used to say, like a sunflower reaching for the sun, but she also realized that she had reached a certain boundary, a limit. And that boundary was drawn right there, where this uncertain light met the deep blackness on the other side of the cellar. Andrey took out a flashlight and walked in, and Masha sat down on an old overturned bucket to wait, struggling to keep her eyes fixed on her dusty fingers.

For a while, the flashlight danced over a hastily whitewashed wall, but then Andrey found another switch, a far brighter light poured down, and a brilliant new world emerged from the darkness, ruled by a remorseless truth. Masha felt left behind in the dark. In that other world, she could see things on the walls. An enormous map of old Moscow hung next to a map of Jerusalem. Next to that was a modern-day map with red flags neatly pinned onto it. Masha gulped. She had one of those, too, and hers had pins in just the same places. She saw the eyepiece of a video camera. Did he observe his victims through that lens? There was a massive professional-grade refrigerator where, apparently, Yelnik had spent half a year. Some carpentry tools. Masha remembered, with a start, how her mother used to urge her father to be more like Nick-Nick, who was a real handyman. But you, Fyodor! You couldn’t hammer a nail into the kitchen wall! Farther back, there was a simple, solid workbench. Masha didn’t need to get any closer to see that it was covered with dark stains.