“I don’t know,” Sasha said. “They didn’t tell me.”
Footsteps thundered down the stairwell, echoing voices of girls or young women. Sasha and Elena paused as two young women appeared above them. One of the women was dark-haired with very red lips and a little blue beret. The other was tall, thin, and breastless. The women wore identical dark blue coats. Both carried books and both looked at Sasha with interest.
“Grisha Zalinsky,” Elena asked. “You know where his apartment is?”
The girls stopped. The dark-haired one looked at Sasha. “Zalinsky,” she repeated. “Zalinsky.”
“The Jew on eight,” the tall girl said. “The one who had parties.”
“Which apartment on eight?” Elena asked.
“I don’t-” the dark-haired girl said.
“Eight-ten or eight-twelve,” said me tall girl. “Are you with the police? Are they here because of Zalinsky?”
“Yes,” said Elena, moving past the girls and up the stairs. Sasha moved up behind her.
“What has he done?” the dark-haired girl asked. “Black market? Drugs. I’ll bet it’s drugs. There are drugs in this building.”
Neither Sasha nor Elena answered as they continued up and out of sight of the girls.
“The policeman’s pretty,” one of the girls whispered below them.
“He’s married,” said the other.
“How do you know?”
“He looks married.”
The girls laughed and hurried down the stairwell.
I look married, Sasha thought.
Elena hadn’t thought of Sasha as “pretty,” but now that the girl had said it, she thought the description fit him better than “handsome.”
They had no trouble finding the apartment when they reached the eighth floor. The door was partly open. Elena stepped back to allow Sasha to enter first.
They entered a chilly room where two young uniformed officers sat smoking. The corpse of Grisha Zalinsky lay on the floor in front of them. Books were strewn everywhere.
“What do you want?” one of the officers said. “This is a crime area. Are you friends of the victim?”
“I am Deputy Inspector Tkach and this is Deputy Inspector Timofeyeva, and you are contaminating the scene of a murder.”
The two men stood up, one more slowly than the other.
“Stop smoking,” Sasha said. “Put your butts in your pocket. Did you open the window?”
“Yes,” said one of the two, looking toward the window. “The smell.”
“You don’t open windows. You don’t smoke. You don’t touch anything,” Sasha said.
Elena had moved forward and was kneeling next to the body. The face of the young man was badly mauled and bloody. The nose was a flattened mess. His legs were bent back under him.
The two young policemen said nothing.
“Why isn’t someone from medical here?” Sasha demanded.
“We don’t know,” said one officer sullenly. “We called. They said they’d send someone when they could. We’ve been here an hour. That’s why we opened the window.”
“You called on that phone?” Sasha asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you touched anything else?”
The two young men looked at each other.
“No,” they both said, and Sasha read the lie.
“Who reported the crime?”
“Neighbor,” said one of the men. “Heard noises early this morning, about six, told the building supervisor, who checked the apartment and found him.”
“Go knock on doors,” Sasha said. “Ask if anyone saw or heard anything. See if anyone knows any names or can describe people who visited Zalinsky.”
The two policemen hurried away. Sasha expected nothing from their inquiries. Muscovites were unlikely to volunteer any information that might mean they would have to spend time with the police or, worse, appear in court. But once in a while …
“Have you seen a corpse before?” Sasha asked.
Elena looked up from where she knelt and said, “Cadavers at the institute, an accident victim when I was about twelve, my father. This man was beaten methodically. He was beaten even after he was dead. The bruises on his stomach …Several of his ribs are broken.”
She got up. “I’ll look around.”
The phone was on the table next to the chair in which one of the policemen had been sitting. A phone in a student apartment was unusual. Sasha wondered how Grisha Zalinsky had obtained such a luxury.
Since the two officers had already used the telephone, Sasha didn’t bother going elsewhere to make his call. He dialed the medical investigation office. The dispatcher answered.
“This is Deputy Inspector Tkach. I’m at the apartment of the Zalinsky victim on Lomonosov. When is a doctor coming?”
“Lomonosov? We’ve got no call for Lomonosov,” the woman answered.
It was not uncommon. Out of every five or six calls one got lost. And it was getting worse every day. It was a routine Sasha knew well, but the two young uniformed officers obviously did not. Had Sasha and Elena not arrived, the policemen would probably have been sitting and smoking till their twelve-hour shift ended.
Sasha gave the woman on the phone the address and apartment number and told her how long it had been since the corpse had been discovered. The woman said a medical inspector would be there “soon.”
Sasha hung up the phone and looked around the room. The furniture was all modern, steel and black plastic. He did not care for it. He preferred heavy, brown sofas and chairs. Soft, comfortable furniture.
Along one wall of the one-room apartment were bookcases. A few books still remained on the shelves, but most were on the floor. Two of them rested on the corpse. The titles showed a wide range of interest from history to mathematics. Sasha saw no fiction.
To his right, along the other wall, stood a dresser, also black, with its drawers closed, and a desk, white, from which a single drawer had been removed and turned upside down on the floor. Elena was carefully examining papers, clothes, drawers.
“Anything?” Sasha asked.
“A woman or girl spent time here recently. The drawers smell of perfume. A few pieces of clothing. The woman had expensive clothes. See.”
She held up a pair of black panties. “Paris,” she said. “Not a fake label.”
Elena dropped the panties back into the drawer and moved to the overturned contents of the desk. Sasha looked at the corpse again. He could not have been more than twenty-four or twenty-five.
“Photograph,” Elena said, holding up a square picture that she had extracted from the debris.
Sasha stepped forward to look at it.
“Our princess,” Elena said, holding up the photo of Amira Durahaman and a handsome boy with curly hair. “Zalinsky?”
They both looked at the battered corpse.
“Probably,” Sasha said, tapping the photograph with his finger. “Place look familiar?”
The photograph showed the couple at a table, heads together, smiling, drinks in front of them, people at tables behind them.
“The Nikolai,” she said.
“The Nikolai,” he repeated. “Did the killer find what he was looking for?”
Elena looked at him and smiled. “Yes.”
“And how do you know?”
“The dresser,” she said. “He threw down the books and dumped the desk drawer but didn’t touch the dresser. He found what he was looking for before he got to the dresser.”
