‘Big deal…!’
Levin lashed out, stopping the renewed, Americanized sneer. It was an unthinking action, fury moving him, shuddering both at what he’d done and at the physical pain as the flat of his hand slapped against the side of Petr’s face, which whitened and then almost at once reddened, at the force of the blow. The boy’s eyes flooded at the pain and he clamped his lips between his teeth, literally biting against a breakdown. Just one tear escaped, meandering lonely down his cheek, and Petr ignored it, pretending it wasn’t there.
It was Galina who was openly crying, the sobs groaning throughout the room and careless of the FBI- approved staff who remained quiet and apparently embarrassed near the stove area. Galina rocked back and forth, physically holding herself, saying ‘No, oh no!’ over and over again.
‘Don’t question me!’ hissed Levin to the boy, inwardly conscious of the danger of an anger he’d been trained always to subdue. ‘Don’t question me or treat me with contempt or doubt it when I say that a way will be found for Natalia to come here, to us!’
For several moments Petr remained staring at his father, arms tight to his sides against the impulse to reach up to the sting in his flushed face.
‘Fuck you!’ he said at last. And he intended to, thought the boy: he intended to fuck his father completely for what he’d done to wreck the family as he had.
21
By the time Alexandr Bogaty arrived at the scene the street was sealed, with closed-sided trucks drawn across either end and the technicians of death, the forensic experts and photographers and a pathologist, busy around the body, scraping and measuring and picturing and examining. There were two uniformed militia men at either end of the street, reinforcing its closure, and four more by the body. Accustomed to unexpected and violent death, they were uninterested in the mechanics of its cause: two were smoking cardboard-tubed Prima cigarettes and the other two huddled close together, stamping their feet against the cold, breath puffing whitely from them as if they were smoking, too.
The captain, one of the two who was not smoking, saw Bogaty’s approach and broke away from the group to meet him.
‘Thought you should see this from the beginning, Comrade investigator,’ he said.
The man’s name was Aliev, Bogaty remembered: a good policeman but nervous of responsibility and so inclined to summon superior officers when something appeared difficult. Bogaty said: ‘If it’s important, I’m glad you did.’
‘It’s important,’ insisted Aliev.
Bogaty moved past him, towards Vasili Malik’s body. Arc lamps flooded everything in harsh white light and Bogaty saw from the chalked outline how the man had lain when he had been found: the body was shifted on its side now for some pathological probe. There had been a lot of bleeding. Bogaty said: ‘What’s it look like?’
‘Struck from behind,’ recounted Aliev. He gestured to a bloodstain that Bogaty had missed. ‘Thrown against the wall, hard, then fell where the outline is…’ As the man spoke the pathologist returned the body to its original position and Aliev said: ‘It was the tyre marks… see?’
‘Yes,’ said Bogaty, ‘I see.’ Aliev had been right: it was important. Not that he would have been irritated if it hadn’t been: given the opportunity to work meant he did not have to go home to Lydia and a diatribe of complaints about the conditions of the apartment and what she could afford or not afford upon an MVD investigator’s salary and when was he going to be promoted to a senior investigator of the homicide division to get the salary increase they need just to exist, let alone live. Without the summons here he would have been drinking in some cafe and lied about a fictitious assignment when he got home.
‘It could have been a panicked reverse to get away, of course,’ suggested Aliev, guarding himself against a mistaken summons.
‘Why reverse?’ said Bogaty. He was a fat but tidy man who cared about his appearance. He’d been oversized since he was a child and long ago abandoned diets: Lydia complained about what he spent on clothes, as well. Once the complaint had been about how heavy he was when they made love. They didn’t any more, which was a small relief.
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Aliev, relieved.
‘Who was he?’ said Bogaty.
‘Important: the reason for calling you,’ said Aliev, offering the investigator the identification documents which had been taken from Malik’s body.
‘Shit!’ said Bogaty. He supposed the KGB caused him more annoyance than Lydia did, if that were possible. There were frequent occasions when investigations in which he had been involved overlapped on to what they regarded their territory – which was everything – and Bogaty resented their arrogance and despised their supposed ability as competent investigators. He said: ‘Have you told them?’
‘I waited until you arrived,’ dodged Aliev.
‘Witnesses?’
‘None.’
‘Who found the body?’
‘A motorist.’
‘What’s he say?’
‘He turned off Oktyabrya and his lights picked up someone lying on the pavement. He was going to drive by, thinking it was a drunk, but then he saw blood. So he stopped.’
‘And?’
‘He halted with his lights on the body, checked that the man was dead and called emergency.’
‘Where is he now?’
Aliev jerked his head in the direction of one of the obstructing trucks. ‘Making a fuller statement.’
‘Could he have done it?’
‘No,’ said Aliev positively. ‘He’s not showing the sort of panic there would be, if he’d done it. His car is not marked…’ The man nodded towards the tyre tracks. ‘… And his tyres are different from those.’
Bogaty sighed, slump shouldered, and said: ‘I suppose it’s time we alerted Dzerzhinsky Square: saw how the big boys operate.’
As Aliev moved away, the pathologist straightened from the body, nodding to Bogaty. ‘Crushed,’ the man announced unnecessarily. ‘Dead almost at once. Back was broken, too. Looks like the poor sod had already suffered enough as it was, before this.’
‘Couldn’t have felt much, then?’ said Bogaty.
‘He felt a lot,’ insisted the pathologist.
The doctor’s departure signalled the end of the technical examination. The photographer started packing up his equipment and the forensic expert tidied small, see-through envelopes into a special wide-bodied briefcase.
‘Anything?’ Bogaty asked the man.
‘Glass fragments,’ reported the forensic examiner. ‘Some paint, too…’ He gestured towards the bloodstained wall. ‘I think the car scraped it.’
‘What about those tyre marks?’ asked Bogaty.
‘Definitely a reverse,’ judged the man. ‘Bloodstained from the initial impact, which registered when it came back.’
‘Could the car had been jammed against the wall so that the driver needed to reverse?’
‘Possibly,’ said the man. ‘But if it had jammed I would have expected more evidence of damage… more glass, more paint. Maybe some broken-off metal.’
‘But there was some damage to the vehicle?’
‘Certainly a broken light and a scraped wing.’
With Bogaty’s arrival, the uniformed men had stubbed out their cigarettes. To one Bogaty said: ‘Get the trucks moved to let the mortuary ambulance in.’
