Sasha shaved.
“I have decided,” she shouted. “I am going to Kiev to convince Maya to come back to Moscow.”
“Good luck,” he shouted.
A visit from their grandmother, who frightened them, would add their voices to a
“Do not use language like that in front of your mother,” she cried out.
Sasha had no idea what distortion of language she had created, and he thought the less he considered it, the better off he would be.
“Soup,” she shouted when he stepped out of the shower and began to dry himself with the blue beach towel he and Maya had bought shortly after they were married. The towel was still soft against his skin.
“Yes,” he said, moving past Lydia and beginning to dress.
“Soup is on the table,” she said.
He nodded, unwilling to engage in conversation that would certainly and creatively be distorted. When he had fully dressed, he moved back into the living room and to the round wooden dinner table near the wall by the kitchen area. On the table was a large bright green cup of soup filled with vegetables and beef and a piece of dark bread next to it on a small plate. The cup was one of five Maya had bought for almost nothing at a stall on the Arbat shortly after Pulcharia was born. Everything, everything in the apartment, was a reminder of his wife and children. She had taken nothing but her clothes and those of the children when she had left.
He sat and drank the warm soup with his mother sitting across from him.
“Good,” he said.
“You are my burden, Sasha,” she said with a shake of her head. “You are my only son, my only child. You should be a comfort and a joy as I grow older. Instead you are out all night with sweet-smelling Polish women and you are killing people with a gun.”
Sasha considered correcting her, but the effort would certainly be doomed to failure.
“I should have named you Konstantin,” she said. “That means ‘constant,’ ‘reliable.’ I could have called you Kolya. Instead I named you Sasha. Do you know what your name means?”
“ ‘Defender of men,’ ” he said. “You have told me this hundreds of times. ‘Defender of men.’ ”
“ ‘Defender of hens’?” she said.
“Where are your hearing aids?” he asked, pointing to both of his ears.
“Too loud,” she said. “I hear well enough. You are changing the subject. Like your father. You are changing the subject. Is it any wonder poor Maya left you?”
“None,” he said. “None at all. Have a good trip to Kiev.”
“You are missing two bodies, maybe more,” Paulinin said to Emil Karpo, who sat across from him under the bright lights of the laboratory.
They sat at the scientist’s desk, space on which had been cleared to hold the two mugs of almost black, almost boiling tea in front of them. The laboratory smelled of fetid decay from the two bodies on the table about a dozen feet behind Emil Karpo.
“I have looked at all you have brought me so far,” Paulinin said, taking a sip of tea.
His glasses steamed. He removed them and placed them carefully on the desk.
“And you have discovered?” Karpo prodded.
“Bodies in a state of unseemly deterioration. The homeless are treated with as little respect when they die as when they lived. However, I did learn some things.”
Paulinin drank some more tea. This time Karpo waited patiently.
“Two of the dead were not the victims of your Maniac. Copycat. Buried hastily in the park, heads crushed from behind, but not by a hammer, by a metal pipe or rod. The killer of those two, killed within a few days of each other, was taller, heavier, than your Maniac. When those murders were taking place, your Maniac was hitting harder and with greater efficiency, but the leap in murderous quality is too abrupt. It should be more gradual, which leads me to believe-”
“That there are some bodies we have not yet discovered,” said Karpo, looking over the mug in his hand.
“The dolts who were in charge of the case before you took over missed this and, I am certain, missed much more.”
“Can you tell what time of day each victim was killed?”
“Ah, good question. Stomach contents. Most of these victims lived on vodka or cheap wine, but the contents of the stomachs with food suggest they were killed at night. But you knew that. Our Maniac would be unlikely to strike in the gray light of day.”
That was Karpo’s theory. More than fifty people, all killed at night. What if the Maniac could only kill at night because he worked during the day? Karpo had already told this to Porfiry Petrovich, who had not been the least bit surprised.
Paulinin had supplied Rostnikov and Karpo with information about how tall the Maniac was and that he was right-handed and urged his victims to drink Nitin wine while he indulged in guava juice. More would come.
“Where is Porfiry Petrovich?” asked Paulinin, putting his glasses back on.
“In Bitsevsky Park.”
“Searching for more bodies?”
“I believe he is walking the pathways, sitting on the benches, and watching the chess players.”
“In other words, he is working,” said Paulinin.
“Yes,” said Karpo.
“You are going to look for the copycats?”
“Of course.”
“Becker at Moscow University has run their DNA. They do not appear in the files and I doubt if they themselves were homeless.”
Karpo knew the dead men as Numbers 30 and 31. There had been several differences from the other victims of the Maniac and these two. Numbers 30 and 31 had been buried more deeply than the others. While a number of the victims had little or no identification, none appeared to have been robbed and all had something in their pockets, slip of paper, an appointment card, something. These two had been stripped of everything. This had been attributed to nothing more than a slight deviation in pattern for the Maniac. After all, he was mad.
“And?” asked Karpo, sensing that Paulinin had something more to tell.
“Fingerprint,” he said. “In spite of decomposition. In spite of pitiful irreverence for the dead, I managed to retrieve a fingerprint from the jacket of one of the two victims.”
Paulinin reached over on his desk to pick up a thin, square white envelope. He handed it to Karpo, who put it in his jacket pocket.
Before the end of the day, Emil Karpo would identify both of the copycat victims, discover that they had disappeared leaving everything behind, which included not very much, for their niece, the daughter of their long dead sister. The niece, who believed herself very clever, broke down after being interrogated by Karpo in a room at Petrovka.
Thus, two of the murders attributed to the Maniac were solved, leaving only approximately fifty more that were the work of the still-unidentified Maniac.
7
Pavel Petrov met Iris Templeton in the lobby of the office building not far from Red Square. He was a bit heavier than when last she had seen him, but he was still handsome and smiling. His suit, Iris could tell, was Italian and almost certainly custom-made.
