“I’d like to have my husband’s things,” she said when Rostnikov finished questioning her. “He didn’t have much with him.”
“When we have looked through them, I will suggest that they be returned to you,” he said. “You will be staying here?”
“Intourist has me at the Rossyia,” she said, not looking at the table where her husband’s body had been. “I don’t…”
Rostnikov touched her shoulder. She didn’t shrug his hand away.
“You are strong,” he said. “Call upon that strength while we discover what has here taken place.”
The line had come from some American novel he had read years before. He had always wanted to use it, but now that the time had come it felt awkward. Above all, he did not want this woman to laugh at him.
“The Rossyia is a marvelous hotel,” he said.
“It is a massive joke,” she replied. “My God, I can’t believe I’ll never talk to him again. It’s like seeing a movie and having the film tear.”
The analogy made no sense at all to Rostnikov but he nodded knowingly nonetheless.
Miraculously, perfectly, the Intourist woman Olga Kuznetsov reappeared and guided Mrs. Aubrey out the door. She had recovered her composure and turned to remind Rostnikov that she wanted her husband’s things. He repeated that he would do his best to get them for her. Then she was gone.
A search of the rooms of the four dead men revealed little. The Japanese had more than a dozen rolls of exposed film in one of his suitcases. He also had a number of pamphlets in Japanese with what appeared to be 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.