Craig Russell - The Carnival Master

‘That was three years ago. He won awards for that float,’ said Rudi unhelpfully.

‘I knew it had won an award,’ said Scholz. ‘But I had no idea it was bloody Hasek who had been the organiser that year.’ His mood darkened even more. Everybody had been so certain that Benni Scholz was the man for the job. Everyone knew him for his sense of fun. His wacky humour. The ideal choice as organiser of this year’s Cologne Police float for Karneval. He would rather have taken on another dozen murder cases.

‘Did you get the dummy heads sorted out?’ he asked Rudi. The services of Commissar Rudi Schaeffer of the city’s traffic division, and an old friend of Scholz’s, had been volunteered as assistant organiser. It had been Scholz who had volunteered them. No point in suffering alone, he had thought.

‘Sure did.’ Rudi smiled good-naturedly. ‘I’ve got the prototype outside…’

Scholz watched, despondently, as Hasek’s perfect, award-winning float continued its flawless progress. Rudi reappeared, his head encased in a mass of painted papier mache.

‘What the fuck…’ said Scholz twisting around in his chair. ‘And allow me to repeat for the sake of clarity… what the fuck is that supposed to be?’

‘It’s a bull…’ said Rudi, plaintively, his voice muffled by the dummy head. ‘Just like you asked for. You know, big joke, we all dress up as Bullen.’ Rudi referred to the derogatory nickname in German for a police officer. The Americans and British called their policemen ‘ pigs ’; the French ‘ les Flics ’; the Germans called them ‘ Bullen ’.

Benni Scholz was considerably shorter than Rudi Schaeffer and had to reach up to put his arm around his colleague’s shoulder. Rudi turned his huge papier-mache head toward him.

‘Rudiger, my dear friend,’ said Scholz, ‘I fully appreciate that you are from Bergisch-Gladbach. And I do make allowances for that… I really do. But I’m pretty sure that even in your formative years, you never saw a bull, cow or any form of cattle that remotely resembled whatever the hell that thing on your head is supposed to be. Unless, that is, Bergisch-Gladbach is twinned with Chernobyl.’

‘It’s only a prototype…’ replied Rudi defensively from within the cavern of the dummy head.

At that point a young detective came into Scholz’s office. He paused for a moment, staring at Scholz with his arm around a uniformed officer wearing a bizarre head. Scholz removed his arm.

‘Can you guess what this is meant to be?’ Scholz asked the young officer.

‘Dunno, Benni… the Elephant Man?’

Rudi slunk out, his massive dummy head bowed.

‘What is it, Kris?’ Scholz asked the young detective.

‘The Biarritz restaurant on Wolfsstrasse. One of the kitchen staff has been turned into mince by some guy with a meat cleaver…’

The Teteriv river was beautiful at this time of year: crusted with ice but still flowing and free of the thick viscous algae that sleeked it in the summer. The lodge was wide and low and had its face to the Teteriv. It was fringed by forest, the trees thickly iced with frozen snow. Along one side of the lodge was a large wooden frame on which hunters would hang and gut their kills.

The others had already been there a day by the time Buslenko arrived. The road from Korostyshev was ancient, probably first forged by ox-driven chumak wagons four hundred years before. The deep snow had made the road all but impassable, but the drivers of each of the three Mercedes four-by-fours had been trained to negotiate every type of condition, from arctic waste to desert. As Buslenko approached the lodge, he was cheerfully greeted by a thickset man in his early forties, a sporting rifle slung over his shoulder. Buslenko smiled to himself at Vorobyeva’s seeming casualness. Vorobyeva was a member of the Titan Spetsnaz and would have had Buslenko’s four-by-four in his sights for the last ten minutes, only lowering his high-powered rifle when he was satisfied that it was Buslenko behind the wheel. And that he was alone. The Titans were specially trained to provide close protection for individuals as well as guarding key Ukrainian government sites. In the spirit of the free enterprise that the government had so enthusiastically embraced, they were even available for hire on a contract basis. If you were rich enough.

When Buslenko opened the door of the lodge the warm, rich odour of varenyky being cooked on the wood-burning stove embraced him.

‘Smells good…’ he said.

‘You’re just in time, major.’ The man stirring the varenyky was Stoyan, the Crimean Tatar, whose dark good looks spoke of the blending of Mongol and Turk a thousand years before. ‘Want some?’

‘You bet. You’d better take some out to Vorobyeva too.’ Buslenko took off his outer wear and greeted the group that sat at the heavy rough-hewn wooden table playing Preferens. Buslenko joined them and they joked and laughed their way through the meal, complimenting Stoyan on his cooking skills. They could have been any group of people in thick knitwear and hiking boots, gathered around a hunting lodge’s hot stove, eating dumplings and drinking vodka and taking a break from their dull jobs to gather for a weekend’s fishing or hunting in the wilds. But they weren’t.

As soon as the meal was over, the dishes were cleared away and everyone’s attention was sombrely fixed on Buslenko. He took his laptop and several document folders and laid them on the table.

‘This is a “Greater Good” operation,’ he began without preamble. ‘As such, we are being asked to carry out a mission that is illegal, under both Ukrainian and international law. But it is an operation that is fully in the interests of justice, internal order and the external reputation of Ukraine. Some of you may feel that the illegality of this operation is incompatible with your roles as law-enforcement officers. I also have to tell you that there is a considerable chance that we may not all come out of this alive. And if any of us are caught, we will go to prison abroad and without the recognition or intervention of the Ukrainian government. So if any of you feel that you don’t want to take part in the operation, now’s the time to say. You can leave now and no one will think any the less of you for it.’

Buslenko paused. ‘I also have to tell you this mission isn’t just black, it’s wet.’ A ‘wet’ Spetsnaz mission was one where blood was spilt; where people died. Buslenko’s audience remained silent, their attention fixed on him and waiting for him to continue. He grinned and carried on.

‘Okay, now that that crap’s out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks.’ He turned the screen of his laptop in their direction. He used a wireless mouse and the handsome face of a middle-aged Ukrainian officer appeared on the screen.

‘This is our target. I know you all have heard of him. Colonel Vasyl Vitrenko, formerly of the Berkut counter-terrorist unit.’ Buslenko nodded an acknowledgement to Belotserkovsky, the Berkut member of the team. ‘I want you all to take a moment to think of the most dangerous person you have ever come across in your career.’ Buslenko paused. ‘Now imagine someone twenty times more dangerous and you’re beginning to understand Vitrenko. He was nearly caught in Hamburg, Germany two years ago. He was being tracked by his own father, also a former Spetsnaz officer, as well as the Hamburg police. Vitrenko arranged a little spectacle for the Hamburg cops. He wired his own father up to an anti-tank mine and put it on a timer so that the investigating cop could bear witness to Dad being splattered across half the city. When it comes to killing, Vitrenko sees himself as a poet. An artist. He has a taste for the symbolic and the ritualistic. Before he took up his command post in the Berkut in nineteen-ninety, he’d already had a distinguished Soviet career in Afghanistan and had then volunteered to help our Russian cousins in Chechnya. The story is that he went renegade, converting the loyalty of his men from the “Motherland” to personal loyalty to him. This group forms the basis of the criminal organisation he has built. Vasyl Vitrenko is as skilled a killer and torturer as you are ever likely to experience. Like I said, he sees himself as an artist…’ Buslenko clicked the mouse and another image filled the screen. It took a moment for the explosion of blood and meat to be recognisable as the remains of a human being. ‘He believes that Ukrainians are descended from Vikings, which is partly true, so one of his specialities is to copy the Viking Blood Eagle ritual. He tears the lungs from victims while they are still alive and throws them over their shoulders as the wings of the eagle.’