stills from movies that bordered on the pornographic. Rostnikov wondered if there was a market in Russia for such films. Where would they be shown? Among private collectors?
Investigation of the rooms of the two Russians revealed that one of the men had a small supply of English pounds hidden in his jacket and the other had several boxes of chocolate candy.
The two Russians and the Japanese had been in Moscow alone, no family, no traveling companions.
Aubrey’s room revealed little more. There was, however, a notebook in the pocket of Aubrey’s jacket with names and comments. It took Rostnikov a few minutes sitting on the bed to decipher Aubrey’s scrawl and to discover that in the past two days he had interviewed various people connected with the film festival. The list included James Willery, whose name sounded English or American, possibly Canadian; Wolfgang Bintz, clearly a German; and Monique Freneau, almost certainly French. Rostnikov recognized none of the names, but the notebook gave him an idea. He made a thorough but fruitless search for Aubrey’s notes or tape recordings of the interviews. Then he made a note to ask Mrs. Aubrey how her husband took his notes.
The chief inspector placed himself so that he could watch the hotel desk and the people crossing the vast carpeted lobby while he listened to Karpo’s report. He did not expect to witness anything directly related to the case, but he was beginning to feel that if he was going to solve this case, he would have to cultivate a more specific understanding of foreigners. As he sat listening and watching, Rostnikov decided that East Germans looked the most like Americans. Several registered and let their accents give them away even across the expanse of the lobby.
He learned in the course of the next twenty minutes that the four dead men had indeed shared a bottle of vodka in the Metropole restaurant the previous night. In fact, they had shared two bottles of pepper vodka, a number of dark beers, a very large order of smoked salmon, and some caviar. The empty bottles and remains of the food were nowhere to be found.
Apparently Warren Aubrey had absented himself from the party for about an hour. A waiter had heard him say something about finding a woman. Under pressure from Karpo, the waiter had explained that it was his impression that the American was going to seek a prostitute.
“And next?” asked Karpo, closing his notebook which, after he copied his comments for official use, would go into the extensive library of black notebooks in his small apartment, notebooks containing every detail of every investigation he had been involved in for the past twenty years. He would index and cross-categorize the notes, and he would later return to the notebooks if more information turned up.
“Next,” sighed Rostnikov, “we get something to eat. Then you make yourself ominous at the police laboratory until they give you a report on what killed those men.”
Rostnikov also gave him the task of tracking down the prostitute Aubrey might have been with, then added, “Oh, yes. I have some names from a notebook, people who must be interviewed. Foreigners who are here for the film festival. Do you speak German?”
“No.” Karpo shook his head.
“Then I’ll talk to the German one,” Rostnikov said, leading the way to the Metropole dining room. He would personally interrogate the kitchen staff.
“Do we have anyone who speaks French?” he asked.
“Tkach,” answered Karpo, staring down a hotel guest who gave them an angry look when the two detectives pushed past him into the dining room.
“Good. Tkach gets the Frenchwoman. I’ll find him after we investigate the kitchen.”
THREE
The beatings had been particularly brutal but none of the seven victims had died. Sasha Tkach, though only twenty-eight years old, had seen a great deal in his three years as a police detective. He had seen decayed corpses, old men so frightened that they had messed their pants while being robbed, and even the body of a very young boy whom Tkach had been forced to shoot. But these rape victims were the worst he’d ever seen-their faces swollen, bones broken, teeth punched out, hearing destroyed, ribs cracked. The victims were all women of about fifty.
All-at least those who could speak-told the same story. As they were walking home from a store or from work at dusk, four or five young men had appeared from nowhere and dragged them behind a nearby building or into a hallway. First they beat the women. Then they raped them, robbed them, and left them to be discovered, their clothes ripped, their bodies torn.
Tkach felt sick with rage, especially after talking to the third victim, who reminded him of his wife Maya. Tkach and Maya had been married less than a year, and he worried about her. Moscow was not plagued by gangs and random violence, but such things happened. As a policeman he knew this far better than the citizens, who were given the impression that crime was almost nonexistent in the Soviet Union.
This victim even had Maya’s Ukrainian accent. Tkach nervously ran his hand through his blond hair throughout the interview, and by the end of it, he had abandoned all professional detachment. It had happened to him before. Maya had warned him not to become personally involved in a case. So had Chief Inspector Rostnikov. But it was not something Tkach could control.
He had prepared maps of the area where the muggings occurred, charted the times of day, pieced together descriptions of the assailants. He kept all this in a file in the desk he shared with a hulking police officer named Zelach. Though he had other cases, the muggings occupied Sasha’s mind. His great fear was that he would be placed on a new case and told to forget this one for a while. He would not forget.
It was only this morning that he began to see a possible pattern. Yes, the time of day was about the same, but the locations were strange-not in a cluster but back and forth along a line, an almost straight line but on different streets. It had struck him in the morning as he rode the metro. Yes, the metro was a series of straight intersecting lines except for the Koltsevaya Line, which circled the inner city.
Now he sat at his desk, a metro map in front of him with the list of locations of the muggings. It was true. Each mugging and rape had taken place within walking distance of a stop on the green line. No two had taken place near the same station.
He marked them off with a pencil by date. The first attack had been a month ago near the Volkovskaya station. The next was a short walk from the Sokol station. The pattern was clear. The muggers were using this line and moving closer to central Moscow. If the pattern held, the next attack would take place near Pushkin Square.
But there was something wrong. There was no mugging near the Byelorusskaya station. Why would they skip that station, if indeed they were working along the line and using it to escape? The most obvious answer was that Byelorusskaya was their home station, where they worked from and where they might be recognized. It made sense. So, what was next? Why did these muggings take place early in the evening? Wouldn’t it be better for the criminals to wait till total darkness? The answer was almost laughable. They committed these crimes after work; they left their jobs, went out and beat and raped women, and then promptly went home.
Tkach could wait at the Pushkin Square metro station shortly before dark in the hope of seeing a gang of young men who fit the description of the criminals, but miss them in the crowds. Or they might change their pattern.
No, it would be better to watch the Byelorusskaya station and painstakingly follow any suspicious group. But that, too, might take days, weeks, months. The great open square near the station was especially crowded in the evening.
At that moment he put it together. One of the victims had told him that she thought she’d recognized one of the muggers. He was a dark young man who had sold her a drink near the statue in Gorky Square.
Twenty minutes after the idea came to him, Sasha Tkach was standing in Gorky Square, eating his lunch and pretending to admire the statue of Maxim Gorky erected in 1951. Chewing thoughtfully, Tkach pushed his blond hair from his forehead, skipped out of the way of two little boys who were playing a game, and pretended to admire the old Byelorussian railway station, one of the few structures that remain from Moscow’s past. The station is over a hundred years old with trains leaving daily for Paris, Vienna, London, Oslo, and Stockholm.
Tkach had seen it all before, had been in the garden, heard his mother’s tale of welcoming home the war
