He rang the hotel. The switchboard answered. Kirov checked his watch and asked for the room next to his own. The operator tried the connection and reported that the occupant was out. Twenty seconds. He replaced the receiver and then redialled the call, this time asking for his own room. After forty-five seconds without an answer he left the handset hanging and the line open. He crossed the road and took shelter in the doorway of an apartment block. Five minutes later a black Volga saloon pulled up, two men wearing overcoats and the indifference of professionals got out, checked the call-box and then left in their car.
The rain had stopped but the sky looked unconvinced. Kirov remained in the doorway until a voice reminded him that he was alive and ought to be doing something. It seemed a good idea, he told himself consciously, as if advising a friend. He walked a while, took a bus and a couple of tramcars, and did another stretch on foot through the narrow hilly streets lined by sycamores, and at the end of this, according to his pocket map, was in the Avchala district. He stopped a local and asked for the Hotel Tamara. The man gave him the answer furtively and shook him off.
The hotel was a narrow entrance let into the face of a row of small shops: a place that repaired typewriters, and another with a window of empty bottles and an unhelpful sign in Georgian script. There was an alleyway wide enough for a vehicle and an Aeroflot van was parked there. The street lighting was faint; the lamps in the hotel lobby were bright by comparison; the emptiness and brightness gave it an intimidating air. By now the strange elation that had held Kirov together was entirely gone, leaving only weariness and pain. As for fear, Kirov told himself he could hold off fear by not thinking about it. And here he was not thinking about it; instead he was shivering because the night was cold and his body was mending itself.
He took off his raincoat and reversed it. On this side there were no smoke stains, just dampness and traces of mud around the hem. He checked his appearance again in the window of the typewriter repair shop and his withered face stared back. He pulled the raincoat close and turned up the collar to hide the rest of his dishevelled clothing and pushed his way through the hotel door.
The lobby was bright only by comparison. A clump of lights like a bunch of grapes hung from the ceiling, but only three of the sockets were loaded and two of these were duds. The single uncovered bulb lit up an old babushka who was minding the desk and eating her supper from a battered zinc bowl. Kirov gave her a flash of his KGB badge and demanded the guest registration cards, which she passed over without query. He riffled through them and found a batch with the names of the Aeroflot flight crew. Nadia Mazurova was in room 102.
The keys to the first floor were held by an aged dezhurnaya who sat wrapped in woollens at a rickety table in the corridor at the head of the stairs. She grumbled at the intrusion: the keys were out and she had only the spare; but when Kirov insisted she handed it over and indicated a room at the far end. Kirov said he wouldn’t trouble her to let him into the room; he promised to return the key to her, and she left it at that. He approached the room alert for any discordant sign but detected only the silent shabbiness that went with the hotel. He tapped lightly on the door.
There was no reply, no sound save the hollow rattle of an old woman’s cough from the direction of the dezhurnaya. She was sitting in her faint pool of light, ruminating and paying him no attention. Kirov knocked again and drew the same silence. He tried the handle and as expected found the door locked. He examined the lock itself and saw only old scratch marks made by fumbling guests. He tried the key and it engaged stiffly with the wards then with a click freed the bolt. He pushed the door gently open and turned on the light.
Nadia Mazurova was lying on the bed. She was naked, brutalized and dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
To experience grief requires involvement. Shock demands only surprise. Kirov did not know which it was that he felt: just a numbness on top of the numbness of the night’s other events, scarcely a feeling at all. His reflexes worked so far as to tell him to close the door and then he waited for something to happen, an idea to come to him from the dulled and vacant recesses of his mind. The woman’s body lay unmoving, the face buried in the pillow with the end of a garrotte trailing like a necklace and her buttocks stamped with bloody palm prints.
Her left shoulder bore the dark blemish he had seen in Viktor’s film. Viktor had recognised where things would lead. He had burst into tears in the Aragvi restaurant during dinner with Bakradze, Antipov and his fellow racketeer, Georgi Gvishiani sometimes known as Sergei. Kirov searched for his own tears but there weren’t any. Perhaps they would come later when his capacity for emotion had revived; but he doubted it. Grief required involvement, instead of which he was an observer of strangers, a connoisseur of their abstract fascination. Only occasionally, as with Nadia Mazurova, did they touch him with a secret policeman’s remote idea of love.
As he sat peacefully the room came into his consciousness. The air held a heavy dreamy scent of cloves, trapped between the narrow walls. There were two beds, barely a metre apart, a washstand with a pitcher of water, and a curtained-off space for hanging clothes. Two flight bags stood on the floor, two pairs of briefs and nylon tights hung to dry over the curtain rail. A magazine was unfolded at the head of the bed where the body lay, and an ashtray with the stubs of some unfiltered cigarettes was posed next to the water jug.
Zagranichny — Kirov supposed that Zagranichny was the killer — had not been an angry man. The furniture and effects were undisturbed; the bed itself bore few signs of a struggle; from this angle even the body appeared unmarked save for the bloody palm prints, and they seemed to have been deliberately planted as if in fulfilment of some obscure rite.
Kirov rose from the bed. He began a methodical search of the room. The cigarettes showed no trace of lipstick, but the stubs were speckled with faint grease spots. He picked one of them up and his nose caught a strong whiff of clove oil that had impregnated the tobacco. He turned to the flight bags and found a change of clothing, photographs, make-up and indications of the owners’ identities: Nadezhda Aleksandrovna Mazurova; Vera Sergeievna Kuznova. Kirov went through every detail of the bags and clothing, cut the linings and inserted his fingers to search out coins and hairpins, examined the photographs and tried to identify the people and the backgrounds. And all the while the body said, Search me too!
He turned at last from the bags and clothing and looked at the bed. His eyes led him slowly from the bedclothes to the object lying on them. She was pale and beautiful and the pity of her welled up in him with a force that shocked him as if he himself had been left naked, and he couldn’t look any more — couldn’t look because he was appalled, perhaps as Viktor had been appalled. He rejected the sight and buried his face in his hands. When he drew them away the palms were wet.
Abruptly and coldly he returned to the corpse and flipped the head over so that he could see the face. He recognised it, but it was not that of Nadia Mazurova. Instead it was of a woman he had seen once before, in a vacant snow-covered lot near the women’s hostel at Lyublino when she had fled from him. Bakradze had said that her name was Vera, and so it was. She resembled Nadia Mazurova only in the way of women of the same age and style. And for all that, the sense of grief and pity did not leave him.