Natalia Smirnova - Moscow Noir

I put on my gloves and pick the TT up by the barrel. I painstakingly wipe the whole gun with my handkerchief and walk over to the corpse. I try desperately to remember whether our colonel was a lefty or not. No, I don’t think so. His fingers have already started to stiffen, but all is not lost. I put the gun in his right hand and carefully survey the field. Yes, all’s well. The apple is lying a meter from the corpse—yellow with a red blush. I pick it up and take a big bite. I like slightly frozen apples. What can I say?

There’s nothing more to do here. Crunching on the apple, I quickly take the path toward Rostokinsky Road. I still have some money. I have to grab a passing car and make my way home. And be at work at 8 a.m. tomorrow.

I know what’ll happen in the morning. Banderas will look me in the eye and I’ll nod silently. He’ll nod in reply and shake my hand. Just like that. Two men shaking hands. He won’t ask questions, since he never asked me to do anything the day before. Everything I did, I did myself, of my own free will. Any one of us in the smoke-filled two-by-three offices at 12 Boitsovaya Street would have done the same.

The months and years will pass, and Nikolai Petrovich and I will share the same two-man office.

We’ll catch, solve, and punish or tell the pesky vics to fuck off.

Old man, you shouldn’t have put your valuable property where everyone could see it. Even on the surveillance cameras in stores they write: The management is not responsible for your valuables . What the hell are we supposed to do?

As it is, we have a heightened sense of fairness, and the next Internal Affairs office over, by the way, has an excellent deputy chief detective now. A young muzhik, smart. A recovering alcoholic, they say; doesn’t drink at all. I should stop by and say hello someday. First we’ll repair the Moskvich since it’s not respectable to go to a first meeting with a colleague with these rusty fins.

I remember everything and know everything, and everyone else knows it too. And I have absolutely nothing to fear. For the last five months I’ve either been staying home or going to the prosecutor’s office. I’m lucky they kept me under house arrest and didn’t send me to Lefortovo because it’s close. Such a stupid thing, you know? It was really dark there, and scary, I admit it. None of us knew what would be there behind the door, and I was standing in front. I haven’t been junior or a student or a probationer for a long time, but I was in front again. My whole life I’ve been in front. When the muscle took out the door and jumped aside, I went in and fired at the sound. Now in my statements—however many there’ve been—I write: She thrust something out toward me . It was a syringe, just a syringe. But at the time I nearly shat myself, word of honor, and fired four times. I shoot well, though not as well as Voronov. When they take us out to the range once a year, he still hits ten out of ten, and my best record is eight. The officer there says that’s actually pretty good. But this time I was like a different person: all four bullets went in side by side, and after that the girl had no chest left.

She was nineteen or so, I don’t remember anymore. My investigator is a good guy, my age. I know before any arrest he’ll let me go home. I call Nikolai Petrovich, we go to our field, and I suggest a game. He can’t refuse me. But he shoots better. This is how it has to be. They can’t put me in prison. I’ll die there. Cops don’t go to prison. They stop being cops there or they die. And it doesn’t make a rat’s ass bit of difference which.

As usual, Maxim walked at full speed coming out of the Pure Ponds metro station, throwing his muscular legs out in front of him as though they were the cranks of an engine. Actually, an engine—lacking vision, hearing, and a sense of smell—would have had a much easier time in this “heavenly” corner of Moscow. Maxim had to squeeze through two chains of sweaty people, human sandwiches who were handing out poorly printed leaflets with the addresses of a translation agency. Past the piss-stinking bums draped nonchalantly all over the Griboedov Memorial. Past the crazy, long-haired old man with a loud amp who sang psalms accompanied by Arabic music. Past a dozen dogs that took turns drilling the same lascivious bitch. Past the foul creek that our shortsighted forefathers had, for some reason, chosen to call Pure .

Maxim recalled a song that Igor Talkov had sung in his time. Sung until he caught a bullet at a showman’s showdown. A bullet straight out of a handgun that sent him to his final resting place. The mawkish lyrics were a parody of the present situation: Pure Ponds and shy willow trees/Resemble maidens who’ve fallen silent at the water’s edge/Pure Ponds, timeless dream of green/My childhood shore, where the accordion sounds.

Willows? What willows? More like disgusting benches with morons lounging around on them. What accordion? Only the monotonous thumping of electronic music blaring from the windows of cars stuck in a traffic jam.

And maidens? Sluts, all of them!

Maxim hated places like this, places that were once steeped in an aura of history or cultural tradition. Now that Moscow had stuffed itself with oil dollars to the point that it was about to explode and send pus flying in all directions, places like this were identified in his mind with unwashed, stinky socks.

Of course, he could have pretended to be a machine and slipped off to his base, which long ago had been the Jatarang Indian restaurant. He might have moved on by, blind, deaf, and paying no attention to anything. But he was another type of machine entirely. And his capabilities and functions were very different. He had survived to the age of forty thanks only to his capacity to observe the details of his surroundings, any of which might prove a lethal threat to him.

Before, in the mountains of Afghanistan, death could lurk in the swaying movement of a twig, or the suspiciously smooth (not by the hand of the wind, but the hand of a minelayer) dust on the road.

Later, after he’d finished his service and killing became both his trade and his boss, with a big fat wallet, a lawyer, and a manager, the bony face of death could be hiding behind the dark tinted windows of a jeep, in a crowd, around the corner… anywhere. There was no front line anymore, no rear guard, no fortified base. The front line was wherever Max happened to be.

Now that he had chosen to play big time—which he did not so much for the money (he had enough already), but rather to prove to himself and to others that at the age of forty he could still be a match for any little twenty-year-old chump—he was surrounded by death on all sides. Theoretically, guns with silencers could be aimed at his forehead, and at the back of his skull, at his temples, right side, and left, simultaneously. It couldn’t be ruled out that at that very moment someone was aiming an infrared beam at the top of his head. Despite the enviable virtuosity of his five human senses, honed to perfection, he remained vulnerable. He needed his animal instinct. And it had not once betrayed him. Although just once would be enough.

Three weeks ago, Maxim had accepted an invitation to play an amusing game. The jackpot was ten million. The last player (out of twelve) left alive would be declared the winner. The rules were simple. The game board was the Moscow area, within the limits of the beltway. Each player chose his own weapon. You could hook a howitzer to the back of your jeep and drive around town with it, or carrry a sharpened nail file in your pocket. Players were to kill competitors in any way possible, filming the process on a webcam that was connected to an online server. The game’s powerful organizers refused assistance to contestants taken into police custody during play. Such individuals would be put on trial, hence disqualified from the game. They were allotted one month. If there was more than one player left alive when the time was up, the referee would draw lots and the unfortunates would be shot in the head.