that scale where is she? Boots would do anything for me.'
'You're a lucky guy.'
'You have such a straight face I can never tell when you're agreeing with me and when you're putting a poker up my ass. We're like brothers. The fucking world is falling apart. See how many Tajiks are in Moscow now? Just wait ten years. There'll be a mosque on every corner. Heads cut off, all kinds of stuff. You and I ought to stick together.'
'Keep your hands off her.'
'Okay. But if you want to be a hero, that will cost you,' Yegor shouted as Zhenya started up the stairs. 'It will cost you. And a piece of advice. You may have brains but you're not big where it counts. She's going to want a dick. A dick with hair.'
Zhenya told Yegor, 'Your scarf is wet.'
Wet through and through with milk, Yegor discovered.
'What the fuck?'
Attention swung the other way as the Canadian revived and put on a burst of speed toward the far exit. The boys ran after because that was their nature, like puppies chasing a ball, and repeated, 'Be-be-be-be-beck in the Yuuessessaarr!'
Zhenya led Maya through a courtyard of rubbish bins and cats to a shuttered truck bay and a back door with the bright brass of a new touch pad. He tapped in the combination and, as soon as the door opened, pulled her inside to a freight elevator that carried them up two floors in utter blackness. She clung to his sleeve as he dragged her through a swinging door and the folds of a velvet curtain to a space that, bit by bit, grew into a landscape of drop cloths and cardboard boxes guarded by a giant pulling back his cape to draw his saber.
'Welcome to the Peter the Great Casino,' said Zhenya. If he expected thanks he didn't get it. He played the beam of his penlight over the figure's glass eyes and three-corner hat. 'It's a good likeness, don't you think?'
She wasn't looking at all. Zhenya couldn't tell whether she was laughing or crying or controlling her rage until in a voice heavy with defeat she asked, 'Can you get me a towel? My top is soaked.'
He waited outside the ladies' restroom while she washed. Remembering that she had a razor blade, he kept up an aimless chatter through the restroom door.
She wasn't listening. After washing herself and rinsing her shirt, she turned off the lights and sat on a padded stool and rocked. Slowly, as if she were on a moving train.
6
Immense and unshaven, Willi Pazenko shuffled around the morgue like a woolly mammoth in an operating gown. A cigarette hung from his lips, a glass of antiseptic alcohol from his hand. At school he had been called Belmondo after the French actor for his style with a cigarette. Arkady had been his classmate but now Willi looked twenty years older.
'I can't do it. I'm not up to it. Doctor's orders.'
'You could do it with your eyes closed,' Arkady said.
Willi waved a glass at the cadavers. 'Don't you think I would like to dive in?'
'I know you do.'
'Some of the work that comes out of this place you wouldn't believe. Butcher's work at a butcher's pace. A real abattoir. They dig out the heart and lungs, slit the throat and pull out the esophagus. No finesse. No analysis. Run a saw around the skull. Pop the brain. Dig out the organs. Bag them, weigh them, dump them 'tween the knees and finish in less time than it takes to dress a rabbit.'
'They must miss things.'
'Do they ever! But I'm retired. On the sideline.'
Arkady declined a friendly glass of vodka rather than blunt his insomnia. The time was 3 a.m. Insomnia was all he was running on.
Willi said, 'I've survived two massive heart attacks. I have angina. Blood pressure that could lift a manhole cover. I could keel over from blowing my nose. So I do not rush.'
'What do the doctors say?'
'To lose weight. No smoking or drinking. And avoid excitement. Sex? I haven't seen my dick in years. Some days I can't even find it. Maybe you'd prefer a sparkling wine? I have some cooling in a drawer.'
'No, thanks. So you really have moved in? You squared this with the director?'
'The director is a pompous ass but not a bad guy at heart. He found me a spare utility room with a sofa. I'm not supposed to operate anymore because if I expired in the middle of an autopsy, that might lend the impression that the director was not running a tight ship. You not only want me to perform an autopsy, you want it right away.' Willi wiped his chin. 'My doctors wanted to restrict me to my apartment. Why? To lead the life of a vegetable? Sit alone and watch idiots on television until I expire? No, this is a better solution. Here I still help out with odds and ends. Stay in the social mix. Friends come by, some of them alive, some of them dead, and when I drop there will be no need for an ambulance because I'll be right here.'
'That should be appreciated.'
'They tore down my building to make room for a spa. They think they're going to live forever. Are they in for a surprise.'
There was a queue of sorts. Other tables held a young male so drained of blood he was white as a marble statue, a barbecued torso of undetermined sex and a bloated body with the last laugh, farts that topped off a general atmosphere of spoiled meat and formaldehyde. Arkady lit a cigarette and drew hard enough that the tobacco sparked and still he tasted bile in his throat.
'Listen to him.' Willi indicated the flatulent corpse. 'He sounds like he's learning the clarinet.'
'What are you now, a music critic?'
'If I was caught performing an autopsy-'
'What could they do to you? They've already got you living in a closet. Are they going to give you a dog bowl next? Whatever happened to Dr. Willi Pazenko? Whatever happened to Belmondo?'
'Belmondo,' Willi recollected. 'You don't know how lucky you are.' Willi handed Arkady a rubber apron and surgical gloves. 'Our assistants are Tajiks or Uzbeks, and when they take the day off for a wedding, everyone else uses it as an excuse to come to work late. Usually this place is humming. Someday the Tajiks are going to take over. They do all that high steel work. Nimble people. But how would you like to fall a hundred stories? All that time to think on the way down.'
Arkady declined a surgical mask; masks got clammy and didn't block the smell. Besides, Willi didn't use one. Back in harness, he was thoroughly in command.
'Are you a virgin?' he asked Arkady.
'I've attended.'
'But never got your hands dirty, so to speak?'
'No.'
'Always a first time.'
The external half of the examination of Olga was a search for identifiable features and signs of trauma: birthmarks, moles, scars, needle tracks, bruises, abrasions, tattoos. Willi filled out a chart and body map as he went.
Arkady's job was simple. He lifted Olga as Willi directed. Shifted, posed, positioned her body while Willi snipped an eyelash and a lock of her hair, dug under her fingernails, swabbed and studied every orifice under a UV lamp. Arkady felt like Quasimodo pawing a sleeping Venus.
When the external part of the examination was over, they broke for a cigarette. Fumo ergo sum, Arkady thought.
Willi said, 'Not a bruise or a scratch. You know that we aren't supposed to open them up unless there are signs of violence or strange circumstances.'
'Isn't it strange when a young woman is found half naked and dead?'
