Punishment of a hunter, p.19
Punishment of a Hunter, page 19
“OK, bye,” he said, hanging up.
And he nodded to Nefyodov. “Sit down. Sit down,” he repeated, almost as a question.
Nefyodov didn’t sit down. But he didn’t leave either. The tiered, twisted mountain of yellowing paper gave off that familiar bitter smell of decay. One of them had to be the first to speak. To break cover.
Nefyodov was clearly waiting for an explanation. He couldn’t just turn him round and send him away.
“I don’t remember if you had already started with us or not,” Zaitsev began, launching straight into a lie. He remembered everything perfectly well. He immediately felt annoyed. Thoroughly sick of this whole quadrille. Of needing to dodge. Opening up another front of lies. And Alla on top of it all… Reality was doubled, tripled, swimming about before his eyes.
“Comrade Zaitsev,” Nefyodov called out.
“What?”
“When? You weren’t sure if I had already started with you or not. When?”
Zaitsev stepped into the conversation as if onto ice.
“So anyway, it was a call-out. A murder. On the corner of Nevsky and Sadovaya.”
He even forgot to refer to these two old city streets by their Soviet names, 3rd July and 25th October. To hell with that! he told himself.
“The victim was Faina Baranova.”
Nefyodov nodded. The sleepy owl’s face grew brighter.
Zaitsev pulled out the Baranova case file from a drawer of his desk. He found a photograph of the corpse: in the black-and-white picture, the scarlet curtain looked grey and the figure in black was no longer quite so theatrical. She didn’t even particularly look like she was dead, sitting in her chair with the feather duster in her hand.
He turned over a photo to show Nefyodov. “So Nefyodov, what the hell is a single, middle-aged Soviet worker doing dressing up like this?”
“A roommate? A lover?” Nefyodov quickly batted back.
Zaitsev shrugged. He didn’t mention Yelagin Island—it wasn’t safe.
“We talked with the neighbours in the kommunalka. No one mentioned a roommate or a feller.”
“I know,” Nefyodov answered, in a way that was almost brash. “I spoke to them.”
“Ah, right. So, you were already with us,” Zaitsev pretended. “It’s strange.”
“I wrote the report.”
“Did you?”
Zaitsev flicked through the Baranova case file for show.
“It doesn’t look like your report is here, for some reason. Never mind, it doesn’t matter, not to worry. You spoke with the neighbours, and the others also had some conversations. At the end of the day, it’s clear there wasn’t a feller or a roommate in the picture.”
Nefyodov looked at him somewhat sceptically.
He seemed reluctant to emerge from his hideout. But Zaitsev could see he had that impatient instinct which meant he couldn’t sit still. The same instinct that drove Zaitsev on. That instinct that made you throw caution to the wind. That made you forget about everything that wasn’t connected to the matter in hand. That instinct that shouted: here’s a lead!
“In general, Nefyodov, it’s very odd. Her entire get-up. And all this stuff in her hands. It’s all very skilful. The neighbours didn’t see or hear a thing…”
“Or they’re lying,” Nefyodov said quietly.
“Or they’re lying,” agreed Zaitsev. “But there’s no fingerprints or any other clues. He’s a crafty one, it seems, very skilful. The bastard. Or bastards. Such skill only comes with experience. Don’t you think?”
Nefyodov nodded.
For a moment he seemed to be weighing something up. Then, without saying a word, he got up and went over to the pile of folders. And he quickly began to sift through, casting a quick glance at the cover of each case file, immediately dropping them onto the floor one by one.
Apparently, he had decided to reconsider his selection.
He threw a file onto the moleskin settee. Again he slapped some of the files onto the floor. The smell of dust and ageing paper was unbearable. Zaitsev could feel it in his nostrils, and for a moment he even sympathized with Nefyodov. What must it be like to sit like this for days on end in the archives?
Another folder flew onto the sofa. Nefyodov’s hands flickered back and forth, pale and flabby. Did he make up the story about being an acrobat? It somehow seemed implausible that these little white cuttlefish could hold, pull, throw and twist an entire body on the trapeze. Zaitsev remembered how deftly Nefyodov had stopped the thief on Sennaya Square.
A third folder fell onto the settee.
Nefyodov nodded at the desolate remains on the table and on the floor. “Not those.”
Zaitsev was amazed. By his reckoning, there were dozens of files. And Nefyodov seemed to know their contents so well that he could sift through them with nothing more than a glance at their covers.
“Nefyodov, were mind tricks your speciality in the circus?” Zaitsev couldn’t resist asking.
A frown was his reply.
Oh yeah, we’re not into jokes, are we? thought Zaitsev.
Zaitsev picked up the three folders tossed onto the sofa.
“Go on, sit down,” he said. “We’ve got a way to go yet.”
Neither noticed that this was their first conversation where they had slipped into using “we”.
II
Three cases lay before him.
Zaitsev pulled out the crime-scene photographs and laid them out along with the dates.
14th April 1929.
Murder victim: Olga Karpova, b.1912, student at the Technological Institute.
Murder victim: Peter Nedremov, b.1912, student at the Technological Institute.
Bodies found in a room of a communal apartment on International Prospekt. The room belonged to Nedremov. The lack of evidence of the lock being picked and the fact that both were students on the same course led to the conclusion that Nedremov and Karpova were in a relationship. An empty bottle of sleeping pills was found. The case was categorized as double suicide and closed.
1st January 1930.
Murder victim: Leonid Fokin, b.1899, musician in a folk ensemble.
Body found on a bench in the Summer Garden. The high blood alcohol concentration and the date (Soviet citizens still clung to the vestiges of pre-revolutionary traditions and liked to celebrate the New Year in style) both pointed to an accidental death. In essence, a very ordinary Russian story. Citizen Fokin had enthusiastically seen off the old year and welcomed in the new. He had set off for home drunk, sat down on the bench, fallen asleep and frozen to death.
30th August 1930.
Murder victim: Natalia Sirotenko, b.1894, worker.
Murder victim: Tarja Rohkimainen, b.1910, worker in an artel collective, part-time job as a nanny.
Bodies found inside a disused church. The case couldn’t be solved from the evidence found. The investigation didn’t result in any specific conclusions. And then, as Zaitsev understood it, there was the murder on Yelagin Island, and the case was dropped in priority; they’d had to strip back their caseload, and to clear the decks this one was quickly closed and archived (Zaitsev recognized Samoilov’s flamboyant signature dashed off in a hurry).
Zaitsev remembered the two students. Definitely. Even then, at the call-out, at the first inspection of the crime scene, something seemed odd about it. For a moment, but then it was forgotten. You saw a lot of strange things in Leningrad, after all. “I’m strange; but who isn’t strange?” Who said that? Griboyedov? Or was it Hamlet? The Danish prince didn’t know about the Revolution, the civil war, military Communism and the New Economic Policy—when each and every time the contours of life changed beyond recognition, when “norms” became a word with little relation to real life; and now the NEP had been cancelled, and in its place was something else new, something unprecedented.
Zaitsev didn’t remember the third case at all. He looked again at the date. True, how could he? That was when he was in the OGPU cell.
Between the second and third pictures, Zaitsev placed the photograph from the case of Faina Baranova, May 1930.
The last to fall on the table was the picture of the murder victim, Elena Karaseva, February 1931.
Five in total.
No, six, if the murder on Yelagin, October 1930, was also somehow related. But what evidence did he have? A pair of porcelain figurines from Faina Baranova’s room and a vague whisper of intuition. Let’s leave that one aside for now, he decided, and perhaps come back to it.
Five murders, seven victims. The dead: men and women, some single, some married with a family, some young and some not so, white-collar and blue-collar workers, educated and illiterate, party members and not, Russian, Finnish, Jewish. Nevertheless, they were all somehow connected, and the thread that linked them all could lead to the culprit. Or culprits.
“Nefyodov,” he called, “have a look. What do you see?”
After all, why did Nefyodov instantly fish out precisely these files from the pile? Nefyodov leant his flat face over the table with expressionless eyes.
The phone trilled.
“Zaitsev speaking.”
“Your carriage awaits,” said the duty officer. “It’s by the entrance.”
Another trip squelching through the wet snow and cold, damp streets in unfriendly silence. Again, someone had been deprived of their life, their difficult, grubby, not particularly joyful and not at all sober life—just like those of most Leningrad residents.
Zaitsev grabbed his cap.
“Nefyodov,” he asked. “Fancy going to the movies tonight?”
Nefyodov’s face flashed with something that might be described as surprise.
“No,” he answered.
“Excellent. Come round to mine after work. What? I can offer you a first-class spread: black bread, yellow butter, brown tea. Moika, eighty-four.”
Unless Nefyodov had family and a hot dinner waiting for him at home—who knows? It was difficult to imagine him as a family man. However, picturing him as a circus acrobat wasn’t much easier.
Down on the street outside, the engine growled and coughed impatiently as though hurrying the operatives along.
Zaitsev scooped up the files, heaped them into a pile and straightened out the edges. He handed them to Nefyodov.
“Bring these with you. But discreetly. Some extracurricular reading in a small friendly circle.”
He saw Nefyodov out, locking the door after them. Out of habit. Not that he was trusted with any official secrets these days.
“At home you mean?” It seemed Nefyodov couldn’t quite take it in.
“No, Nefyodov, at the Astoria Hotel restaurant.”
Their police salary would hardly have stretched to dinner for one. And even if it were enough, the burly doorman would never let them past the thick velvet rope barrier in their shabby suits. Unless you waved a warrant under the bastard’s nose.
“Oh, and bring some grub,” shouted Zaitsev, already on the stairs. “If bread and butter doesn’t sound like enough.”
III
Nefyodov came. And it was only at that moment that Zaitsev realized he hadn’t at all expected him to accept the invitation.
Nefyodov stood in the middle of his room like a penguin on an ice floe.
Zaitsev took out the cups. A knife, some spoons. And he stealthily watched his guest. Nefyodov looked around. Zaitsev knew this professional gaze, quickly and tenaciously taking it all in, drawing up a plan of action in case of a future arrest and search: entry point, exit point, layout, possible leads, hiding places. At the same time, Nefyodov looked just as he always did: as though someone had lifted him out of his bed but forgotten to wake him up. Having completed his inspection, the guest dropped his battered canvas rucksack from his shoulders, untied his scarf from his throat and, as if keen to pay his way, handed Zaitsev a half-circle of dark sausage.
Zaitsev wasn’t going to stand on ceremony: he’d had nothing since lunch, and lunch had been pasta with meatballs, where the meat content was restricted mainly to the name.
“Ooh, proper fancy,” he teased amiably, breaking the sausage into two. “How do you find the time to run around shopping? Or is it your wife?”
“Tatar rag-and-bone man. Khalat,” Nefyodov answered, stirring the tea with a serious look, as though he feared there was hydrochloric acid in the teapot.
Khalat was the nickname since pre-revolutionary times for the Tatar rag-and-bone men who did the rounds of the backyards buying old trash for a pittance. And stolen goods.
Zaitsev stopped. The aroma of sausage was no longer quite so appealing.
“Horsemeat, then? If it’s Tatar.”
Nefyodov shrugged. “Protein and calories—it’s all there.”
“True.”
The sausage disappeared in a matter of minutes; the tea didn’t even have time to cool. Zaitsev moved the empty but still warm teapot onto the floor. He laid the files out on the table.
“Come on then, Nefyodov. I’ll all ears. I won’t interrupt.”
Nefyodov laid out the photographs in the same order that Zaitsev had put them in earlier, in the office. Good memory, then.
“First of all, the clothes,” he said. “Very odd outfits. And who knows what that is on her head.”
“I’m with you there.”
He started with the students. They didn’t look in the slightest bit like would-be Soviet engineers, never mind that they were students at the Tech Institute.
First, it wasn’t immediately clear which was him and which was her. Both had long hair, parted in the middle. Similar faces. Second, the clothes. Both were wearing some kind of long, baggy shirt, all floppy folds of fabric.
“Why would ordinary Soviet people wear this bizarre get-up?”
“Poverty,” suggested Nefyodov. “They find it, they wear it.”
“Students, maybe. But Faina Baranova had a job. And Elena Karaseva. Might not have been much. But Baranova had a fairly ordinary ladies’ wardrobe: light blouses, dark skirts, knitted cardigans.”
“Maybe it’s a sect,” suggested Nefyodov.
“Worshipping what, do you think?”
“People get all kinds of things into their heads.”
“True enough. And on their heads, too, by the looks of it.”
They couldn’t help noticing the corpses’ intricate hairstyles.
“Nefyodov, no one has long hair these days, even the Chinese. And look at this.”
Zaitsev picked up the photograph of the murdered balalaika player.
Froze to death while drunk. It seemed logical. His striped suit with short breeches and flamboyant white collar could be explained as a costume for a New Year’s Eve party. And the guitar, it seemed, had stayed in his hands even after he had fallen into a drunken slumber, which would prove lethal. But what was that on his head? It was as if he were pulling off a sweater, had twisted it and got his head stuck in the neck, and left it like that—except he had tossed the sleeves back so they didn’t get in the way of his eyes.
“Unless we assume that someone dressed them once they were dead.”
“And did their hair?”
He took a photograph of the most bizarrely dressed of them all: the two women found in the locked church.
“By the way, Nefyodov. What did it say in the scene report? Was the church locked from the inside or outside?”
Nefyodov rifled through the case notes.
The Finnish woman was wearing a jagged crown and her shoulders were covered with a colourful rug. Sirotenko, the office clerk, was dressed in an opulent garment, like a robe but not a robe. The only bit that made sense was the thin waistband; everything else looked like a mound of curtains. Two braids fell to the sides of her face, and a third snaked about her forehead.
Next to these two, Faina Baranova, and even Karaseva with her pearls, looked austere and sensibly dressed.
“From the outside,” Nefyodov finally answered.
Someone had locked them in.
Rohkimainen’s lifeless fingers were wrapped around what looked like either a wand or a carved chair leg, as if she were about to write something on the floor with the tip. Spread out before Sirotenko was an open book. Zaitsev brought the photograph up to his eyes: what was the book? he wondered. But however hard he looked, he couldn’t make out any text. But he saw something else. The horsemeat sausage suddenly resurfaced; Zaitsev swallowed down the bitter taste. His face contorted.
“What?” Nefyodov edged in.
“Take a look.”
“Fuck me. What is that?”
Six taut strings stretched up from Sirotenko’s head: the ends were fixed to her complicatedly braided hair, which explained the tight intricacy of the hairstyle. They converged above—where they were attached to the frame of the high church window. The dim Petersburg daylight flowed in from the window, casting a beam that highlighted the full length of the strings.
Someone had put the corpse in a kneeling position. And fixed it in place.
“He’s really made an effort here, the bastard.”
Zaitsev turned his attention to the photograph of the murdered students. Now he had no doubt: this was no suicide. He compared it with the picture of Faina Baranova. He showed it to Nefyodov.
Two red curtains.
He well remembered the scarlet curtain in Baranova’s room, like some kind of evil red grin overlooking the sitting corpse. In the photograph, they looked grey. The same shade as a piece of cloth on the wall in the room with the students, and even a pillow. It was definitely the same fabric. The rest of the students’ room was spartan and bare.
“Faina wasn’t one for anything flashy,” Zaitsev remembered her neighbour saying.
In both cases, someone had brought in the fabric and hung it up.
The killer. Or killers.
“And look at how they’re sitting.”
“This one’s sitting quite naturally,” Nefyodov disagreed. “He flopped down on a bench, fell asleep and froze to death.”
“Yes, but look at the women especially.”
The victims were all in peculiarly mannered poses.
They were all either sitting or kneeling.
