'Because when you called earlier you didn't sound so good. People are talking about you.'
'Fuck them.'
'Well, you do sound better. Can you handle an overdose? The ambulances are running late.'
'Where?'
While Arkady listened he executed a satisfying U-turn in the face of oncoming traffic. What tourist maps called Komsomol Square, the people of Moscow called Three Stations for the railway terminals gathered there. Plus the converging forces of two Metro lines and ten lanes of traffic. Passengers pushed their way like badly organized armies through street vendors selling flowers, embroidered shirts, shirts with Putin, shirts with Che, CDs, DVDs, fur hats, posters, nesting dolls, war medals and Soviet kitsch.
During the day Three Stations was in constant motion, a Circus Maximus with cars. At night, however, when the crowds were gone and the square was floodlit and gauzy with insects, Arkady felt that the stations were as exotic as opera sets. Leningrad Station was a Venetian palace, Kazansky Station was an Oriental mosque and Yaroslavl Station wore a clown's face and cap. The night revealed a population that the daytime bustle had obscured: pickpockets, flyboys handing out directions to strip clubs and slot arcades, gangs of street kids looking for the wounded, the slow, the easy mark. Men with vague intentions idled in small groups, beers in hand, watching prostitutes grind by. The women walked with a predatory eye and looked as likely to eat their clients as have sex with them.
Drunks were everywhere, but hard to see because they were as gray as the pavement they sprawled on. They were bandaged or bloody or on crutches like casualties of war. Every doorway had a resident or two; they might be homeless but Three Stations was their roost. A beggar with broad shoulders and withered legs propelled his cart past a Gypsy who absentmindedly pulled out her baby and her breast. At Three Stations the crippled, outcast and usually hidden members of society gathered like the Court of Miracles only without the miracles.
Arkady jumped the curb at Yaroslavl Station and rolled across a small plaza to a workers' trailer that had stood in place so long its tires had deflated.
He asked Victor, 'Do you want to stay in the car? I can cover for you.'
'Duty calls. Someone may be pissing on my crime scene. Piss on a man's crime scene and you piss on the man himself.'
Workers' trailers provided basic on-site accommodations: four bunk beds and a stove, but no toilet, shower or a/c. They baked in the summer and froze in the winter and from the outside the only concessions to human habitation was a sliding window and a door. After all, the workers were generally migrant labor from Central Asia. Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kirks, Kazakhs, although Russians tended to call them all Tajiks.
Russians were the actors, Tajiks the necessary but unseen stagehands who did the work too miserable or too dangerous for any local boy to consider.
Victor and Arkady were admitted by a railway police captain named Kol. The captain was cutting a raw onion and eating the slices against a summer cold. He wiped away tears.
'A lot of fuss for a dead whore.'
The trailer's wiring had been ripped out but an extension cord entered through a window and ran to the ceiling hook, where a bare lightbulb cast a watery glow. The back of the trailer resembled the bottom of a trash barrel: hamburger wrappers, empty soda cans, broken glass and, on a lower bunk, a woman faceup and eyes open on a dirty mattress. Arkady guessed that she was eighteen or nineteen years old, fair-skinned. Soft brown hair and light blue eyes. She wore a cheap quilted jacket trimmed in synthetic 'fur.' One arm was raised as if making a toast. The other was tucked into her waist.
From the waist down, she was nude, legs crossed, and on the inside of her left hip the tattoo of a butterfly, a favorite motif among prostitutes. A half-empty liter of vodka stood on the floor next to a denim skirt, underpants and shiny high-heeled boots. Arkady would have covered her but the rule was no touching until the forensic technicians had finished.
Scattered on the mattress were a black patent-leather handbag, lipstick, rouge, hairbrush, douche, toothpaste and toothbrush, tissue, pepper spray and an open bottle of aspirin. Yellow powder spilled from the bottle. What Arkady did not find was an ID.
Kol took a position inside the trailer door. Hash and heroin flowed through Three Stations and relations between the militia and railway police was a truce between thieves.
Victor asked, 'Who found the body?'
The captain said, 'I don't know. We got a call from someone passing through.'
'How many is that?'
'People passing through Three Stations on an average day? About a million. I don't remember every face.'
'Do you remember her?'
'No, that tattoo I'd remember.' Kol couldn't take his eyes off it.
Arkady asked, 'Who put the trailer here?'
'How should I know?'
'Nice knife.'
'It's sharp enough.'
Apart from the fact that the woman was dead, she seemed in good health. Arkady saw no obvious cuts or bruises. From her temperature, muscle tone and the absence of lividity-the purple stripes of pooled blood-he guessed that she was dead no more than two hours. He played the beam of a penlight on blue irises gone slack. There was no bleeding in the corneas or any other indication of head trauma. No roseate nose, raw cheeks or needle tracks. Her forearms and hands presented no defensive wounds or scraped knuckles and there was grime but no scratched tissue under her fingernails. It was as if she had slept through her death.
Victor came to life; murder always did that for him. The forensics van would generate photographs he could circulate among streetwalkers, kiosk clerks and other nighttime regulars. Arkady took a short stroll around the trailer looking for items of clothing that might have been dropped, but the streetlamps in back of the square were so few and so dim it was like wading through water. The apartment building opposite Yaroslavl Station could have been a distant planet. Even prostitutes hesitated to enter some corners.
Of course, there were prostitutes and prostitutes. Exotic beauties at expensive clubs like Night Flight or the Nijinsky demanded $1,000 a night. At the bar of the Savoy Hotel, $750. Room service at the National Hotel, $300. An all-night Thai masseuse, $150. Oral sex in Lubyanka Square, $10. Three Stations, $5. It was a wonder the captain hadn't scraped her up with a shovel.
Victor took a call on the car phone, saying only, 'Yes… yes… yes' until he clicked off.
'Petrovka demands to know what I've got. Homicide, suicide, accident, overdose or natural causes? If I don't have evidence of deliberate foul play, they want me to move on. The ambulance will come when it comes. Some oligarch lost his little dog in a garage. Petrovka wants me to go there, get on my hands and knees and help find the little puppy. If I find it first I will twist its furry head off.'
'You'd leave before the technicians get here?'
'If she's an accident or natural causes, there won't be any forensic technicians or autopsy. They'll collect her, and if she goes unclaimed for a week, she'll go to the medical school or up in smoke.' Victor squinted to get a thought in focus. 'All I know is that she was dealing with a perverse individual. Nobody leaves half a liter of good vodka with the cap off.'
'Your point being…?'
'He could afford another bottle. He had money.'
'And this wealthy individual chose to have sex on a dirty mattress in a trailer?'
'It wasn't in the street. And then there's the butterfly tattoo. That's an identification plus.'
Captain Kol was slicing the onion with his eyes fixed on the girl when he exploded with 'Fuck!' He had cut himself and blood ran from his onion to his elbow. 'Shit!'
'No bleeding, pissing or picking your nose around my crime scene.' Victor launched the captain out of the trailer. 'Cretin!'
She didn't look like a homicide, suicide or OD to Arkady. No sedatives, no needle tracks or peg teeth of a methadone user.
'What's that?' Victor noticed the open aspirin bottle and yellow powder.
'We'll have to wait for the lab to tell us.'
