Martin Smith - Three Stations

Except the dacha.

The dacha passed to him from his father was no more than two hours from the city. It was a ramshackle cabin overgrown with lilacs and brambles but it had springwater and a path through a stand of black pines to a lake not much larger than a pond. An elderly neighbor looked in from time to time to check the house for leaks or hornet nests. Boris had to be almost ninety now. Whenever he discovered that Arkady had arrived, he would show up at the door as busy as a badger in a long scarf carrying a tray of pickles and bread and a jar of samogon. Moonshine. Arkady always invited him in for a glass. Eyes shining, Boris would pour samogon until it quivered with surface tension above the brim of the glass.

"Such a small glass," he said every time. Later they would walk to the church and visit his wife's grave. The cemetery was a maze of white crosses and black wrought iron fences, some grave sites so "landlocked" that they were beyond reach.

Boris would set a jar of pansies or daisies at his wife's cross. He changed the flowers every day in summer. There was a bench at the grave site so a person could really visit. Nothing had to be said aloud. In the winter Arkady thought of it as ice fishing with God. There were times, however, when he felt one with the world, when his breath was a cloud and the birches brushed one against the other like a line of dancers curtsying in turn.

Instead, he drove to a towed-vehicle yard on the Ring Road, where there were no trees, only lamps and rain and a system designed to create the greatest possible inconvenience for anyone retrieving a towed car. The master of the yard negotiated fines and bribes at the window of a caravan while car owners stood in the rain. Cars held as evidence in criminal cases were in a separate, abutting lot that was as still as a graveyard because there was no ransom to be made from cars going nowhere.

The guard recognized Arkady and waved him through. "Remember, anything you find has to be reported to me."

"Absolutely."

"She's all yours," the guard said, and trotted back to his post.

Sasha Vaksberg's Mercedes seemed to be sinking into the mire like an abandoned warhorse. Arkady counted five holes in the right rear fender and door. Otherwise, the car was practically new and likely to disappear if Vaksberg didn't claim it. A billionaire could just buy a new Mercedes like disposable tissue; use it once and throw it away.

There was nothing in the car's cabin, although Arkady went through the glove compartment, side and seat pockets, under the floor pads.

He opened the trunk. In the spare-tire well was his small reward, a ticket printed on paper so cheap it almost disintegrated in his hand. It was torn on the diagonal and said Central Mosc-ticket #15-100 ru- Ticket to what? A movie? The symphony? The circus? Belonging to Dopey or Vaksberg or his dead driver or bodyguard? Or the last person to change a tire? Arkady had no idea. The tease was worse than finding nothing. This was what he had come down to, a wet stub.

It began to rain heavily. Arkady waved as he passed through the gate. The guard waved back, thankful that he had not been beckoned from his miserable shelter.

Rain fell in sheets. Where water pooled, trucks pounded through and cars rooster-tailed. At the height of the downpour, the wiper came half off on Arkady's side of the windshield. Somehow the clip that attached the rubber blade to the wiper itself had come off. He turned off to the side of the road to reconnect it. What next? Arkady wondered. Snow? Frogs? Snow and frogs? He had only himself to blame. Once Victor mentioned the Mercedes, Arkady was compelled to examine it.

It wasn't a totally empty road. The blurred lights of an industrial park lurked a few kilometers ahead. There was plenty of room on the shoulder and Arkady worked by the light of the Lada's open door. The wiper clip was bent. The trick was to bend it back without snapping it off. He remembered the days when rain would cause general confusion as cars pulled off to put on their precious windshield wipers. In those days, a driver carried a whole toolbox.

Arkady needed a pair of needle-nose pliers he did not have. He felt that no one should attempt to drive Victor's Lada unless he was completely outfitted. Say a needle-nose pliers and an inflatable raft. That was what made life an adventure. He worked by the light of the open door and squinted at the oncoming high beams of a truck that straddled the shoulder of the road. He shielded his eyes. Someone's idea of a joke, Arkady told himself. He felt his whole body light up. Beyond shielding his eyes, he couldn't move. They would turn any second. Any second.

Arkady dove into the Lada. With a crack the door of the Lada went sailing. By the time he pulled himself up, all Arkady saw were taillights dissolving in the dark.

"Have you ever tried to carry a car door in the rain?" Arkady asked.

Victor said nothing, only circled his car in disbelief. It was parked outside in the morning sun at the upscale Patriarch's Pond militia station, virtually a "No Lada Zone."

Arkady said, "We're lucky the hinges were a clean break. The man at the body shop never saw one so… immaculate."

Victor said, "It's not my door. This door is held on by wires."

"It will need some work. The main thing is, it opens. Shuts, pretty much. They tried to match the color."

"A black door on a white car? Next time, why don't you just drive it off a cliff?"

"I was on the shoulder of the highway. Someone tried to run me over."

Arkady resisted the temptation to point out that Victor owned a car that already looked as though it had been driven over a cliff.

"I found this." He opened an envelope and shook out the half ticket from the trunk of Vaksberg's Mercedes.

Victor stared. "You got this? What is it?"

"A ticket of some kind."

"Is it?"

Arkady tried to think of something that would cheer Victor.

"The wiper works."

Victor led Arkady to the squad room even as he shot Arkady a sharp glance. "You know kids race on that highway all the time. It could have been one of them getting out of control. Did you see them?"

"No."

"Did you report them?"

"No."

"Did you shoot at them at least?"

Victor had set up laptops and old-fashioned paper dossiers to search among the dead. Each disc held a thousand dossiers and each dossier held a detective's account, interviews, forensic photos and autopsies of women who died of unnatural and unsolved causes in and around Moscow over the last five years. Arkady eliminated domestic squabbles, which still left a crowd since more than twelve thousand Muscovites died of unnatural causes in a year.

Arkady drew a clumsy version of ballet positions.

Victor said, "I didn't know you were such a scholar of the dance."

"It's as if Vera wore a sign saying 'Victim Number Four.'"

"Or her limbs happened to lie in a way that you and you alone construe to be a ballet position. What any normal person would notice was her bare ass."

Victor took a halfhearted swat at a fly that was making a tour of the room's fly strips, plastic spoons and take-out cartons.

"You know this would make some sense if it would do anything for Vera. Her case is closed. There is no corpus and the chances of gaining a conviction without a body don't exist."

"Unless somebody confesses."

"No body, no show. All they have to do is outwait us."

"For a moment, assume I'm right, far-fetched as that may be. If you have a killer who is counting up to five bodies and he's reached five in his mind, he's going to disappear on us. He could go to ground for a year or two and then start all over again with a new set of dance partners."

"We're missing number three."

"That's right. So let's narrow the search to women eighteen to twenty-two, student, dancer, sexually molested, murdered, OD'd, unknown causes. Make it within the last two years before Vera."