Senior Militia investigator Colonel Olga Ivanova Melnik was an attractive, even beautiful woman and knew it. What she knew even better was how to use it, in every way. She invariably wore civilian clothes instead of uniform, because dresses and skirts and blouses showed off her full-busted, narrow-waisted figure to her best advantage and always allowed distracting cleavage interrogating male suspects. She also adjusted her demeanor to every encounter, bullying when necessary, awkwardly stumbling sometimes to give her interviewees the dangerously misleading impression of their superiorintelligence. It was an attitude strictly reserved for interview rooms. Outside she was a determined, supremely confident woman with an IQ of 175 that had academically taken her up the promotional ladder in balanced proportion to the occasions she’d climbed bedroom stairs with partners carefully selected more for her career advancement than their sexual prowess. Since attaining her detective seniority by the age of thirty-five prowess had taken precedence over influence among those invited to follow her up any stairs.
Olga Ivanova was politically as well as professionally adept and was more aware than anyone caught up in the immediate, twenty-four-hour aftermath of the shooting how totally successful she could emerge from the inquiry. How could she fail to get a conviction when the crime had been committed in front of a world-wide television jury?
It remained essential, of course, for Olga to be the hands-on focus of every facet of the investigation and that initially had obviously been for her to sit-fitfully sleeping in her chair when it was no longer possible to remain awake-just one whisper-hearing meter from George Bendall since his return from the operating theater.
But there hadn’t been a whisper. Anything except the jagged peaks of the heart monitor and the in-out hiss of the ventilator and the silent blood and saline drip and increasingly dark brown filling of the catheter bag. While all the boring, unproductive time, in walking distance away in Lefortovo prison, Vera Bendall, alias Vera Gugin, had sat for virtually the same period unsuspectingly waiting to be broken.
Olga, a strongly featured, prominently-lipped woman, eased out of the no longer comfortable chair and stretched stiffly around the room, as she had several times before. She’d completed her first circuit and was about to begin her easier, cramp-eased second when the chief physician-administrator, Nicholai Badim, thrust into the room, for the first time in many visits uncaring of the noise. With him was an equally attentive pale-skinned, white- blond-haired psychiatrist, Guerguen Semenovich Agayan.
“We’ve got the brain scans,” Agayan announced. “Look.”
Olga did so, although she was unsure what she was supposed to be seeing.
“There!” demanded the surgeon. “At the base there. It’s a hairline linear fracture. And here …” the finger went to a patch darker than the rest of the illustrated brain. “We did a spinal tap as part of the initial exploratory surgery. There’s no blood in the fluid. So that darkening is suberachnoid bruising.”
“What are you telling me?” demanded Olga.
“That he badly hit his head in the fall, in addition to all the other injuries,” said Agayan.
“Is he brain damaged!”
“I won’t know that until he recovers consciousness,” said the psychiatrist.
“But I’m going to sedate him more deeply, to counteract any possibility of epilepsy,” said Badim. “At the moment his medical condition is more important.”
“When’s he likely to recover sufficiently for any sort of interrogation?”
“I’m not going to allow him to open his eyes for at least another twenty-four hours and only then when I see some lessening in the bruising area. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” said Olga. “That’s fine.”
5
Lefortovo is the embodiment of terror-
The
There is an irony that in this glowering, barred-windowed mausoleum for a million-tens of millions-ghosts, such uncertified maniacs could unintentionally have left a psychological legacy making unnecessary their truncheons and electrodes and scalpels and syringes.
Fear is sufficient: fear of those truncheons and electrodes and scalpels and syringes and of the age-blackened gouts on the walls of bare cells without a bed or a lavatory hole or a bucket.
Olga Ivanova Melnik had learned to use that psychology of fear as successfully as she adopted-and adapted- her different questioning techniques. There were no bars at the sun-filled windows of the room into which Vera Bendall was escorted. There wasn’t a desk, either. Easy chairs were arranged around a low table dominated by a display of bright yellow daffodils that had been moved slightly to one side for the tea thermos and cups. A cherry topped the sugar icing of each of the six cupcakes. The tape recorder was very small, unobtrusive.
Olga dismissed the escorts with a jerk of her head and gestured the other woman to a chair directly opposite. Vera Bendall remained just inside the door, terrified eyes flickering around the room. She was a gaunt woman, her uncombed gray hair straggled around a pinched, lined face. There had been no make-up to start with and her eyes were red, from recent crying. Her shoulders briefly heaved, with the closeness of more tears, but she managed to hold back. Although thin she was heavy-breasted and her unsupported bosoms sagged.
“Come in. Sit down,” beckoned Olga, soft-voiced. This wassomeone of the old Soviet, crushed, susceptible, malleable: a show trial puppet. From the preliminary interrogation Olga knew the woman was sixty-one years old.
Vera obediently did as she was told, although hesitantly, scuffing in pressed cardboard shoes from which the laces had been removed. There was a button missing from the badly knitted cardigan and the crumpled black skirt was stained and shiny from wear. The blouse was stained, too.
“They didn’t hurt you?”
Vera shook her head.
“That’s good. Most of them here only know one way of behaving.” On Olga’s instructions the initial arrest interrogator, in a windowless basement cell, had been a towering, brutish-featured militia sergeant in uniform. Olga unscrewed the thermos cap and poured. “Do you have milk?”
“No … thank you, no. Black.” Vera needed two hands to pick up the cup but it still rattled in the saucer, spilling. “I’m sorry … so sorry …” She made a noisy slurping sound in her urgent need to drink.
“Have some cake.” There’d only been one square of bread that morning and a small pitcher of water for the fifteen hours she’d been in custody.
The woman used two hands again, nibbling mouse-like. Her fingertips were puffed and swollen, from constant nail biting.
“You’re here in Moscow-Russia-because of what your husband did. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’re allowed the apartment for the same reason.”
“I know.”
“I want you to tell me all about it. You’ll do that, won’t you?”
“Yes … please … I mean of course.” The voice was frail, like the woman herself. The Russian was heavily accented.
