Natalia Smirnova - Moscow Noir

Nikolai Petrovich is sitting in his white shirt across from me smoking his fourth cigarette. Today’s kind of like a holiday for him. After the obligatory five years, they made him a major. He’s on duty, but there hasn’t been anyone at all on Boitsovaya Street, where our department is, for the last few hours. Even the lunatics are lying low. Pretty soon we’ll go out and celebrate his stars. Fuck every living thing.

I light up my second and look at Voronov. He’s relaxing. A meter and a half from us, behind the door, the perps and vics—all jumbled together—await their fate on the sagging vinyl bench in the corridor. Soon Nikolai Petrovich, a king in his white shirt, with two nonregulation guns in his tan underarm holster, will start seeing them. He’ll punish and pardon.

But for now he’s sprinkling some nasty Nescafé some broken Hindu brought him from the market early this morning into his cup. Voronov sprinkles in one spoonful. Two. Three. He pauses for a moment over the fourth and then throws that in too, with the decisiveness of Alexander the Great. Oh, and seven lumps of sugar. A stream of boiling water, a dirty spoon, the first noisy swallow. The agent lights up again and leans back in his chair, which is worn down to the veneer. He closes his eyes, takes a drag, and releases the smoke. Then—with just his eyelids—he gives me the order: Go. I open the door for the first time that night.

I cautiously slap the first petitioner on the cheeks. He’s been sitting there for a long time. Neighbors relieved him of the nice new TV in his room in a communal apartment on Otkrytoe Highway. Voronov has already warned me we’d be rejecting his appeal. This vic will never see a criminal case. He was born to suffer, to be a vic. I’m learning to be like Nikolai Petrovich. Why do you think the street our department’s located on is called Boitsovaya—Fight Street? Pretty strong people live and work here on Boitsovaya. To be blunt, they don’t have much choice.

Here’s another. They just brought her out of a jail cell. She threw her newborn in the garbage. She reeks of sweet cheap alcohol that makes me sick. In the time we spend questioning her I run out four times to our filthy two-holer—one for the cops and one for the crooks—and puke. I must be puking my stomach out. Voronov’s as calm as a sphinx. His ironed white shirt gets whiter and stiffer all the time. He says, “You’ll be going to that garbage heap soon. Believe me. There, in the garbage, you’re going to find the corpse of another newborn infant who had a couple of gulps of air and then got stupidly fucked up. You’re going to feel awful. You’re going to search for his damned mama furiously, you’ll find her, you’ll put her in that chair where you’re sitting now. You’ll sit where I am and look into her eyes in hopes of seeing hell. But what you’ll see is emptiness. Emptiness, my young friend. Emptiness is hell. And vice versa. I want you to lose your illusions as fast as you can and understand all about where, how, and why we are the way we are. Believe me. I’m one of the better ones.”

I get queasy again and dash off. Voronov waits patiently; today he has no intention of stopping.

“By the way, they’re going to give this mama two years’ probation. You’ll be very lucky if this story doesn’t repeat itself on your watch. But if it does, that’s bad. It could break you, even though by then you’ll be pretty tough.”

He hands me a vile cigarette. I try to strike a match and on the fifth try manage to light it. I see the various back alleys through the window. Every day I walk these alleys, but I don’t remember exactly what the streets are called. I’ll admit, I don’t want to either. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just endless emptiness. The whole Eastern District. Not too far from here you get to the school I went to. A little farther and there it is, the tram stop where, in a frenzy, I battered the painted iron kiosk with my fist, trying to take away the pain of love. And there’s the courtyard where I had my first dead body, a dead body whose name and murderer I found. I found him quickly, in the next entryway. At the time I was given a commendation—as the youngest detective. Only Voronov didn’t join in the general rejoicing at my success. He said, “One day everyone’s going to die. Absolutely. Then other people will come, either cops or doctors. They’ll come and tell you the cause of death. You just have to understand, student, that no one in my memory has ever been resurrected by that. Don’t take pride in it or you’ll start wanting to be a little like God.”

Later I cursed him all night long and couldn’t sleep. I think I cried. But in the morning he was standing on Boitsovaya, just like a monument to a poet. Smoking, blowing off the ashes. Waiting for me. He was always waiting for me. He liked working with kids like me.

“Life is a lot of things. And it takes crazy shapes. You don’t mind that I’m like a biology teacher, do you? Love your neighbors and your family. Everyone else deserves death. You think I’m wrong?”

He found a way of instilling all this wisdom of the ages in my head in the three minutes it took us to walk back to the department. I couldn’t remember school or the institute anymore. It was stupid, in fact, to remember those chalk-stained wusses. I had a real man walking on my left. Someone who had known life and then fucked it doggy-style. He always liked to be on top and couldn’t stand lying down. Or sitting down facing you. Or standing. Impressive.

His shift’s over and it’s time for us to go. We leave the department, slipping on the chipped steps, which are coated with a thick layer of ice. Today there hasn’t been a short-timer or drunk in jail—no one to hack the ice off—and the fat guard would never get off his fat ass. All he does is dream of somebody installing a bedpan in his chair so he’ll never have to get up again. We slip and curse and light up. Voronov starts the engine of his Moskvich, which he bought with his fifth wife’s money. His spouse never seemed to begrudge him anything. The most powerful mass-produced engine with the most affordable afterburner. On the highway this battered heap hits as high as 250 kilometers an hour. When they hear that sound, the sound of the engine on Voronov’s heap, young skinheads move to the shoulder out of respect. Right now we’re driving to the Field of a Thousand Corpses. It’s a special kind of place.

I have a little time now, while the car is warming up, while we’re driving. The whole trip takes about fifteen minutes. Let me tell you about this field.

Once, a very long time ago, after God created the earth and people divided it up into pieces, one particular town chopped up its own territory. Each ragged piece was attached to a specific district. Only somewhere, in the very rear end of the Eastern District where several boundaries come together, in Elk Island National Park, the police chiefs messed something up. They ended up with an odd piece of land that wasn’t anyone’s at all. A kilometer by a kilometer. No one lost any sleep over this. What kind of crimes could you commit on that pathetic patch of ground? But those who thought like that were wrong. When all the cops in the vicinity realized exactly what their lands bordered on, that patch of ground turned into a living hell. Unidentified corpses were ferried here, and here they rotted away. Local thugs and uniformed officers both came to settle their disputes. They set up meets here, and once, before my very eyes, there was a very real duel. Two young lieutenants fired at each other over a female expert from the district CSI. I was the second for one of them, and I had to stuff my new jacket into the gaping hole in the wounded guy’s belly. He turned white, then gray, and honestly, never before or after have I seen someone’s face change color that fast.