you know. This was my last autopsy.'
'Too bad it was a failure,' Arkady said.
Willi reacted as if slapped. 'What do you mean by that?'
'An autopsy is supposed to determine the cause of death. You failed.'
'Arkady, I found what was there. I can't manufacture evidence.'
'You missed it.'
They were interrupted by the arrival of the morgue director and a woman in a black shawl. The director was surprised by the sight of Willi and Arkady but regained enough poise to lead her around the autopsy tables with the smoothness of a maitre d'. She strode. She was one of those women who seemed to have been bronzed at her peak, forty going on thirty, in dark glasses and shadowy silk. She gave Willi and Arkady no more than a glance.
The director led her to the table of the suicide and after a sympathetic cough asked if she could identify the body.
The woman said, 'This is Sergei Petrovich Borodin. My son.'
Even drained of color, Sergei Borodin was handsome, with longish hair that still seemed damp from the bath. He was about twenty years old, lean through the chest and muscular from the waist down. His mother's emotion was hidden by her dark glasses but Arkady assumed grief was involved. She took her dead boy's hand and turned his wrist to a decisive slash.
Meanwhile the director explained the cost of generating a death certificate for a bathroom fall. The paramedics who found the body would have to change their reports. They would expect to be rewarded. In the meantime the morgue was willing to store the body for a fee.
'To rent a drawer?'
'A refrigerated drawer that size…'
'Of course. Go on.'
'In these circumstances I would suggest a generous donation to the church for a service in his name and a Christian burial.'
'Is that it?'
'And your son's certificate of residence.'
'He had no certificate of residence. He was a dancer. He stayed with friends and other artists.'
'Even artists must obey the law. I'm sorry, there will be a fine.'
She turned her son's wrist to the director. 'I won't make a fuss if you sew this.'
He was eager to redeem himself. 'It's no problem. Is there anything else we can do?'
'Burn him.'
The director paused. 'Cremate him? We don't do that here.'
'Then arrange it.'
Like a thunderclap, Willi sneezed. The woman's attention snapped to him and then to Arkady. She removed her dark glasses to see better and her dry eyes were more naked than anything else in the room. Then at full speed she was gone, the director at her heels.
'I'm sorry,' Arkady said. 'I'm afraid I put you in a bad spot.'
'The hell with it. I hate sleeping on a sofa.' Willi was in surprisingly high spirits.
'And, besides your heart problems, now you have a cold?'
'No. Something tickled my nose. Something penetrated this atmosphere of putrefaction and formaldehyde. A trained nose is important. Every schoolboy should recognize the smell of garlic for arsenic and almonds for cyanide. Hand me the lungs. Let's discover what your lady friend last breathed.'
Arkady transferred from pail to tray the girl's heart and lungs still attached, a fist of muscle between two spongy loaves. He smelled nothing that penetrated the usual miasma until Willi sliced the left lung and released a sweet whiff.
'Ether.'
'Ether exactly,' Willi agreed. 'It's taking a while to dissipate because she didn't breathe again. So it was in two stages: clonidine to knock her out and ether to anesthetize and kill her, all without a struggle. Congratulations, you have a murder.'
Arkady's cell phone chimed twice only, and by the time he freed himself from the autopsy apron and dug the phone out of a pocket, he had missed a call from Zhenya, the first communication from the boy in a week. Arkady immediately returned the call but Zhenya didn't answer, which struck Arkady as a fair example of their relationship.
Or that whatever Zhenya had called about was fleeting and unimportant.
7
Maya sat at the vanity in a Peter the Great restroom with a towel over her shoulders while Zhenya shaved her head. She had cut off her red hair with office scissors but there were places she couldn't see or reach with a razor, and although she resented the forced intimacy of the situation, she bowed her head while Zhenya scraped away with a razor from the dealers' lounge. Cutting her hair was his idea; her red hair as good as pointed her out to the militia. Now she was as bald as a chick.
'Did you ever shave anyone's head before?'
'No.'
'Have you ever shaved yourself?'
'No.'
'That's what I thought.'
They had barely slept because she wanted to meet the six-thirty train at Yaroslavl Station, the same train that she had been on, hopefully with the same crew. Auntie Lena had claimed she was such a regular passenger that people knew her up and down the line. Maybe someone did.
The mirror doubled her misery. She imagined the kind of women usually reflected in such looking glasses as tall and sophisticated, drinking champagne as they gambled, laughing lightly whether they won or lost. Why not? They had better odds at roulette than she had of finding her baby.
She asked, 'Why isn't anyone here?'
'The Peter the Great Casino has been closed for weeks. A lot of casinos are closed.'
'Why?'
'Arkady says Moscow wants to project a dignified image like other world capitals. He says someone in the Kremlin noticed that there aren't any slot machines on the steps of the White House or Buckingham Palace.'
She wondered why anyone would steal a baby. What did they do with babies? How could she have gone to sleep and let her baby be stolen? She didn't ask for these questions, they came unbidden ten times a second. Which reminded her how her breasts ached; she would have to milk herself like a cow before she left for the station. She had made up her mind that Zhenya was staying behind. He meant well but it was like having a squirrel on her shoulder, and, although it was irrational to blame Zhenya, the sight of her hair falling into a wastebasket was as depressing as losing her name.
She asked, 'You and Yegor are friends?'
'We have a business arrangement.'
'What does that mean?'
'I play chess for money. It's a business that's easily disrupted. I pay Yegor for protection.'
'From who?'
'From Yegor, basically.'
'You punk out to him? You don't defend yourself?'
'It's a business expense. It's hard to play chess when four guys jump you and another kicks the board. If more people learned how to play without a board, there wouldn't be a problem. I could teach you.'
'To punk out? No, thanks. Maybe I should ask Yegor for help.'
'I wouldn't advise it.'
'Why?'
