her husband’s death before I could.”
“Someone?” asked the chief. “Meaning us?.”
“The district police, I imagine.”
“Go on.”
Terzian did not shift his gaze from the curtains.
“I have the murder weapon.”
The chief squinted. “The wrench?”
“It’s being traced.”
“Any fingerprints?”
He shook his head. “Gloves.”
Terzian glanced at him, and Emil wished he could read something, anything, in his tanned, hungry face.
“Other interviews?” asked Moska.
“Neighbors on the same floor, Poles. They couldn’t tell me much. And the apartment supervisor. I was planning to see the coroner this afternoon.”
Terzian looked away from the curtains. He laid his eyes on Emil and said in a quiet voice: “The supervisor’s name?”
“Aleksander Tudor.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Yesterday,” said Emil firmly, wanting no indecision to get in his way. “Three in the afternoon.”
Chief Moska raised his eyebrows, and Terzian’s head swiveled slowly back to the window, his face a passive mask. The chief said, “Tell him, Leon.”
Terzian’s head shook incrementally, and he spoke without looking at Emil. “This morning a citizen found Aleksander Tudor floating in the Tisa with two bullet holes in the back of his head.” He placed two fingers on the back of his scalp to demonstrate. “His face had been struck struck repeatedly so that identification had to be made by fingerprints.”
“Like-” Emil began, but stopped himself from stating the obvious.
“Exactly, Comrade Brod,” Terzian murmured.
The chief had another pencil point in his mouth that he pulled out. Again, there was a mark of lead on his lips, and he pursed them before speaking. “My personal inclinations take a backseat to protocol. We understand?”
No one made a move to suggest they didn’t.
“There are two bodies,” he said. “In the interests of the state, both of you will take the case. The interests of the state. Right, Brod?”
They were both staring at Emil, their faces expectant, as if waiting for an answer. But Emil didn’t understand the question.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Leonek Terzian was plainly uncomfortable with Emil driving, so Emil drove recklessly. He swerved around wagons loaded with sweaty farmers sleeping off their predawn chores and made sudden hard stops at intersections. Terzian s face was awash in shades of red.
The Unity Medical Complex-a fresh, concrete model of modern uniformity, built on the foundations of a bombed-out, fourteenth-century church-lay where the First District sank to meet the Second. Terzian led the way inside, through institutional glass doors and gray corridors with moaning peasants covering the dirty floors beside gaunt chain-smokers in robes and slippers. They stepped around a dry pool of brown blood. There were no doctors in sight.
On the far side of the empty nurse’s station, they went through another door and down a stairwell to the medical examiner’s floor. He was a short Uzbek who smoked in the corner of his examining room, ashing in the sink, while around him four low steel tables with wheels held bodies covered by white sheets. “Leon,” he said. The coroner’s shoulders, Emil noticed, were misaligned, so that in all his movements he looked ready to sit down. He turned on the faucet to extinguish his cigarette and wiped his hands on his soiled smock. “You’re the new one?”
Emil stuck out a hand and the Uzbek shook it. Cool and dry. The nails had been pared meticulously, and the room stank of medicinal alcohol. “Emil Brod.”
The coroner rubbed his hands together in mock appetite. “Let s take a look, shall we? The freshest first.”
They followed him to the mound on a table beside three iceboxes, and Emil noticed how the absence of windows, more than the medical equipment scattered around, gave this concrete room an antiseptic feel.
The Uzbek drew back the sheet. Aleksander Tudor lay puffed up like an overfed seal. His wide, naked girth was colorless, his genitals sucked inside his groin. His toes and neck were blue, and across his marbled, egglike chest and stomach was a wide, Y- shaped autopsy slice that had been roughly sutured shut.
Again, the face that was no longer a face. But this one had been washed clean by the Tisa, the red remnants drained to a white pulp.
This was yet another kind of corpse-different than a body in a home, or on a boat. The antiseptic smells, the Uzbek casually pressing a finger into the half-mouth to see inside, the postmortem stitches-he again felt the instinct to vomit, but brought it under control when he heard Terzian choking down his own convulsions near the door.
“The bullet holes?” Emil managed.
The Uzbek lifted the head, his clean fingers holding the back of the skull, where there was still some structure. He nodded at two black-and-blue holes on the round, hairless scalp. “Shots one and two.” He let the head drop. A soft thud. He pointed to where a chin had once been. “Exit here. The second got stuck in his jaw.
In the far corner, Terzian breathed loudly through his mouth, echoing glassily.
“Make?” asked Emil.
The coroner picked up a typewritten ballistics report from the counter. “PPK, Walther. German officer s gun. The continent s littered with them these days.”
Emil had owned one also. Briefly, in Ruscova. They were cheap and efficient, like most things German. Small and light, easy to conceal. But he’d never shot one-he’d hidden his, and finally bartered it for train fare to Helsinki. “What was he wearing when he came in?”
The little man crossed his arms, which was a peculiar look at his slant, like a poorly constructed building on the verge of collapse. “Low-quality fabrics, worker materials. Empty pockets. No money, ID, nothing. Leon,” he said, cracking a smile at the other side of the room. “You ever going to find a better line of work?”
Terzian looked up suddenly, pale, his bloodshot eyes glistening, and stumbled out of the room.
The Uzbek’s laugh was high and thin, and as he wiped the faint sweat from his cheek Emil made a connection. “What about Janos Crowder’s body? Slugs?”
The Uzbek’s smile held as the amusement turned into pride. He tapped his skull. “Didn’t see any the first time around, but we weren’t looking, were we? Saw no need for an autopsy. One finely obliterated head. But after this one, I went back.” He held up an index finger. “One slug, same direction. Slanting down from the rear of the cranium. No word yet, but I’ll bet my bone saw it’s a PPK.”
The bloated navel bulged out, a knot of blue flesh. Emil stared at it, then the battered head. There was still half a face to it. “Somebody wanted to hide the gunshot.”
“But ran out of time,” said the Uzbek, finishing his thought.
“Or someone interrupted.”
He looked at the Uzbek’s bright eyes. This was a smart man who had chosen to hole himself up in a gray bunker where he talked only to dead men and militiamen. It was a strange, incomprehensible choice, but maybe no stranger than his own decisions. The little man covered the body and loped back toward the door. “Tell that Armenian slob to quit eating before he comes here. He’s a good guy, Leon, but a little stupid.” He tapped his forehead again, and the movement that once signified his own powers of perception now stood for another’s ignorance.
