woman had not ordered for herself.
“I have no idea,” she said with a casual wave of her hand. “He will turn up again. Maybe tonight. Maybe weeks from now. I have no idea.”
They drank. Iosef questioned and Zelach watched and listened.
Yulia Yalutshkin revealed nothing more.
“Well,” said Iosef with a sigh as he finished his beer and stood,
“I would suggest that you call me if he turns up. It could mean his career. Our job is to help him.”
“To help him get sober and go home?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And if he does not wish to get sober and go home?”
“Then he may become a very minor footnote in Russian history when he could be a significant figure,” said Iosef.
“You sound like an amateur playwright,” Yulia said.
“Very insightful. But I was a poor one. That is why I’m a policeman. Here is a card. Call our office, ask for me.”
“It wasn’t insight,” she said. “Half the young men who approach me have written a play. The older ones claim to be wealthy or powerful. I can tell which ones are.”
Iosef wrote his name on the back of the card and handed it to the woman, who placed it on the table without looking at it. Then he and Zelach left.
Outside the Metropole, rain was still threatening. A warm breeze blew and the two detectives walked.
“She was lying,” Iosef said. “She knows where Pleshkov is.”
Zelach grunted. He had no idea the woman might have been lying. “She bears watching?”
“And looking at,” said Iosef with a smile.
Zelach blushed. He had done his best at the table not to reveal that he could not keep his eyes from Yulia Yalutshkin. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever been this close to. Zelach hoped that Iosef would assign him to be not only one who looks but one who watches.
Chapter Six
The room off the entrance to the health club was small, a cubby-hole passing as an office. On the walls were signed black-and-white photographs of athletes. Emil Karpo stood behind the desk, hands together in front of him. He was almost at attention, a fact which disconcerted the night health club clerk, Sergei Boxinov.
Sergei, at Karpo’s insistence, had sat in the chair on the other side of the desk. Sergei was a former Mr. Universe contender. He had never finished among the top five, but once, in Helsinki, he had finished sixth. That was where a Danish businessman had seen him and offered him the job he now held, night manager of the hotel health club. The Danish businessman had been gay, but not obviously so. He had let Sergei know his preference for men during their conversation. Sergei was not gay, but Sergei had a family and needed a good job. The experience with the Danish man had not been at all as unpleasant as Sergei had expected. Now, all that Sergei wanted to do was cooperate with the pale unsmiling policeman in black and get back home for a few hours’ sleep.
“What happened last night?” asked Karpo.
“Happened? Nothing unusual. I left about one in the morning.
Mr. Lashkovich was here. And the other man.”
“Other man?”
“He came in when I was adjusting the weight machines. I check them every night before I leave. I heard the door open and heard Lashkovich’s voice. He was not a quiet man. I never really got a good look at the other man. But Raisa did.”
“The cleaning woman,” said Karpo.
“Yes, she got a good look, I think.”
“You left at one.”
“About one,” Sergei said. “Lashkovich and the man were still here. It wasn’t unusual for him to be here alone and lock the door when he left. He was a very influential man and I was told to do what he wanted done.”
“So Raisa and the two men were here alone for a while?”
“Yes, but Raisa was almost finished and probably left shortly after I did. Am I going to lose my job?”
“No,” said Karpo. “Unless you have done something wrong.
Have you done something wrong?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“In that case, you may leave. Send in Raisa.”
Sergei rose quickly, almost tipping the wooden chair over. He was out of the office in seconds.
The door opened again but it wasn’t the cleaning woman. It was Paulinin, distraught, his hair Einsteinian wild, his glasses slipping dangerously. He had come to the hotel at Karpo’s request to examine the pool and the shower and anyplace else where he might find even a trace of evidence.
Though he far preferred to work in his subbasement in Petrovka, the challenge of a crime scene intrigued him almost as much as the viscera of a corpse.
“I just called Petrovka,” Paulinin said, breathing quickly.
“They’ve taken the body, Lashkovich, turned it over to the. . the Tatar gang. I wasn’t finished with it. They’re going to bury him tomorrow. How can I check the evidence I gather here against the corpse if I have no corpse?”
“Who ordered the release of the corpse?” asked Karpo.
“Rostnikov, Porfiry Petrovich himself,” said Paulinin. “Is he mad? How can he take my corpse before I’m finished with it? There was so much more to learn. I was just getting to know him. He was just really beginning to speak to me.”
“Learn what you can here,” said Karpo. “Then we will take time for tea and biscuits. If Chief Inspector Rostnikov gave them the body, I am sure he had good reason.”
Paulinin calmed a bit, brushed back his hair, and adjusted his glasses. Tea and biscuits with the man he considered his only friend was calming, but not quite enough. “Porfiry Petrovich has gone mad,” Paulinin said, leaving the room with a shake of his head.
“That is the only explanation.”
There were many other explanations, as Karpo well knew. Rostnikov could have been threatened, bribed, ordered by a superior.
None of these possibilities was the least bit likely except the last.
Emil Karpo had no time for further speculation. Raisa Munyakinova had entered the small office and said, “Should I close the door?”
“Yes,” said Karpo, pointing to the chair from which Sergei had fled.
The woman closed the door and sat, looking up at the ghostly policeman, who now stood looking down at her from the other side of the desk she had dusted the night before.
Raisa Munyakinova could have been any age from forty to sixty.
She had the stoop-shouldered stance, the haggard and weathered face of the women who cleaned, baked, swept the streets, controlled crowds at theaters. They appeared interchangeable. Raisa was built like a block of concrete, generations of peasant stock, solid, reliable but eroding.
“Tell me about last night,” said Karpo.
“Mr. Lashkovich was killed,” she said softly, avoiding the policeman’s dark eyes.
“You saw him killed?”
“No. I was told this morning by Mr. Swartz, the hotel manager, who told me to come right away. I was asleep. I don’t get much sleep. I have many jobs.”
“You don’t work here full time?”
“No, I wish they would hire me. It would be so much easier than. .”
She trailed off and felt compelled to look at the somber white face above her.
