table where the reporter and the pimp were sitting. What Sasha could see was that the two of them were getting along very nicely, with smiles, words, and nods of agreement.
Elena wanted to say,
“Jealousy and love are sisters,” Sasha said as if reading her mind.
Elena knew the proverb. It did not impress her. She had experienced jealousy with Iosef, but it had been under her control and did not deter her from the wedding. Was it really only two days away?
Daniel Volkovich leaned across the table and rested his hand over that of Iris Templeton.
The familiar demon within Sasha banged at his chest and in his brain. It took a great effort to control it, to keep from walking over to the table and sitting next to Iris. He had only known the woman for hours, but there were factors that made her difficult to resist. Perhaps the most important factor was that she was definitely interested in him. Next, she was pretty. Next, she was smart. He was not looking for love or even for sex, but when it presented itself so openly he knew resistance was impossible.
Elena saw no waiter moving from table to table, nor did she see anyone behind the bar who might be a waiter.
“You want a drink?” Elena asked, rising.
“Beer. American or German,” he said, his eyes fixed on the couple at the table against the wall.
He willed Iris to pull her hand from under that of the charming seducer. She did not move it.
Elena had no need to tell Sasha to keep a close watch on Iris. She moved through the random harvest of crowded tables to the bar determined not to drink anything that might blur her senses or add unneeded calories. Iosef said that he liked her the way she was. She was sure he would like her even more if there were less of her.
Ten minutes later Daniel Volkovich took a cell phone from a pocket of his leather jacket and punched in a number. He did it all with one hand so he would not have to relinquish Iris’s hand. Daniel spoke briefly and put the cell phone back in his pocket.
During the phone conversation, Volkovich had glanced at Sasha and nodded. Sasha averted his eyes.
Both Sasha’s beer and Elena’s coffee were long finished when there was a noise at the table of the fat man behind them. The fat man shouted. A chair was pushed into Elena, who stood facing the disruptive table. The fat man stood on unsteady feet and toppled against Sasha, who struggled not to be blown from his chair.
Sasha pushed the man away.
“Not your business,” the fat man said, his large red nose inches from Sasha’s face.
Sasha threw an elbow into the man’s face. The fat man tumbled backward into his already-overturned table. A pair of men, one with a bald head and large, bushy mustache, came to calm things down and usher the fat man and his party out the front door.
It was only after some sense of order had been restored that Sasha looked toward the table in the corner. Elena did the same.
Iris Templeton and Daniel Volkovich were gone.
“This is what it comes to,” Paulinin said, changing his gloves.
On the two tables deep below Petrovka lay the bodies of Lena Medivkin and Fedot Babinski.
“Comely in life, serene in death,” Paulinin said, scalpel in hand as he looked down at the naked bodies that lay side by side on their backs only a few feet from each other.
Paulinin had the urge to help them reach out and clasp each other’s hands. They made an interesting couple. She was young, dark, and when the blood was cleansed quite beautiful except for the bruises on her face and the crushed right cheekbone. He was a man of no more than forty-five. His was a muscular body with no chest hair. There were a few scars, one on his stomach, another on his forehead. His face was roughly handsome, with a much-broken nose that made him more interesting than he might otherwise have been. The blood had also been cleansed from his face, but the man’s fists and knuckles were quite bloody. He must, Paulinin tentatively concluded, have fought back and done some damage to whoever had beaten him to death. Paulinin did not clean the knuckles. The blood of the killer might still be on them.
“Do you have secrets, my pair of lovers? Secrets that you will share with me as we talk?”
Paulinin reached for the cup and drank lukewarm coffee. He had been working for more than forty hours straight, taking time off only to eat, shower, change his bloody and fluid-stained whites. He could have taken pills that would guarantee that he would stay awake, but it wasn’t necessary, at least not yet. The sight of this pair in front of him woke him with great interest.
“What shall it be?” he said, addressing the man and woman whose eyes were closed. “What have I not listened to yet in the last days? Ah, Mussogorsky,
Paulinin put down his coffee cup and, scalpel still held up high, moved to the new CD player on the cluttered desk a dozen paces away.
As the first eerie strains of
Paulinin leaned forward under the strong light looking first at the woman and then at the man. He repeated the look at each leaning closer, this time with a magnifying glass. He began to hum along with the music as he leaned ever closer.
He did not know how long he moved from one body to the other, but when he did stand upright his back signaled a familiar ache.
“Thank you,” he said to the pair. “I shall wake the Chief Inspector and Emil Karpo in the morning with the news you have given me. I admit that I am rather given to professional surprises when I am the one presenting them and not the one receiving. I would prefer you not pass on that truth. I am trusting you not to do so.”
He did not remind them that they were dead. It would spoil the mood.
Now, with music around him and the smell of alcohol and blood to give him encouragement, Paulinin began his work.
“The girls are sleeping over tomorrow night,” Sara Rostnikov said as she watched her husband eat the Zharkoe pork she had prepared for him.
The dish was one of Porfiry Petrovich’s favorites, pieces of pork sautéed with onions, mushrooms, potatoes, herbs, and pickles. Tonight it tasted particularly good and the news of the two girls was welcome.
“Galina has the opportunity to work the night shift at the bakery. She will make double her salary.”
Laura, now eleven, and her sister, Nina, now nine, lived in an apartment with their grandmother Galina, one floor below the Rostnikovs. Until a few months ago, the three had lived with Sara and Porfiry Petrovich in their one-bedroom apartment.
The girls’ mother, Marina, had run off with a petty crook after trying to sell them. And then Galina herself had spent time in prison after shooting her abusive boss at another bakery. It had been his gun. She had wrestled it from him. In the struggle, he had been shot. Galina spent almost a year in prison. Without Rostnikov’s intervention, she might yet be working in the bakery of the women’s prison. During her imprisonment, the Rostnikovs had gladly taken in the two girls.
There were days like today that Sara and Porfiry Petrovich missed having the girls from early morning until they fell asleep on makeshift bedding on the floor of the living room only a dozen feet from where Rostnikov now sat.
“Good,” he said.
“The news or the food?”
“Both. How are you feeling?”
He paused in his eating and looked at his wife. It had been the crucial nightly question in their lives for years, particularly since the successful surgery to remove a tumor from her brain three years ago. The wound had healed, but her once vibrant red hair had quickly lost its flare and settled for a more subdued hue. Her face was still round and pretty. Her lips were full and her voice was still as husky as when he had first heard it almost forty
