“It is not a choice I have made,” said Karpo.
“But it is one you should savor. The minister. One of the butchers in the hospital pathology laboratory who works in a well-lighted surgery with stone drains and equipment that functions said the minister died of complications resulting from liver failure, that the man was an alcoholic, and had been killing himself with drink for decades. Look at this liver. Take it. Hold it. Remove it from the bottle if you like. What do you see?”
Karpo took the bottle. He did not choose to open it or take out the liver.
“Enlarged, discolored. That might be a result of how the liver has been treated and preserved since its removal.”
“Good,” said Paulinin. “More?”
“It is intact,” said Karpo, turning the bottle. “With the exception of one anterior-”
“I removed that,” interjected Paulinin impatiently. “I removed that. But you see the point. Bujanslov, who did the autopsy, based his conclusion on, at best, a small piece of tissue. Any madman can see this is not the liver of an alcoholic.”
“And …?” Karpo resisted the urge to look up at the clock, which he knew hung over the lab table across the room.
“Induced acute hepatitis,” whispered Paulinin. “The minister’s liver is saturated with the enzyme characteristic of the disease.”
In the dim light in the corner, the unblinking Karpo would have been a frightening specter for most people. Paulinin simply smiled.
“So he died after an attack of acute hepatitis.”
“Induced, I said. Induced. He was injected with a massive enzyme-and-alcohol overdose. Injected directly into his liver. His liver was induced to fail. He was murdered. I find no case on record of such a murder.”
Paulinin rocked in his wooden chair, delighted, as Karpo put the jar containing the liver back on the desk. Paulinin looked at it as if it were a witch’s crystal.
“How did the murderer get him to accept an injection?”
Paulinin reluctantly removed his gaze from the liver in the jar, pushed his chair back, and stood up.
“The body is a mess,” he said, clasping his hands. “But I looked at it. Bujanslov is worse than a dolt, worse than an idiot. The minister had been sedated. The contents of his stomach … Botched job. Botched job. I even found the hole where the liver was injected. Spot near the vertebrae where the French and Americans go in for liver biopsies. Bujanslov the Butcher almost destroyed it in his need to make a hole the size of the Mir Hotel just to remove an inflamed liver.”
“And you have a report?”
“No, you have a report,” said Paulinin, placing the rough handwritten sheets in Karpo’s hand.
“I will turn these over to the proper investigative office.”
“I don’t care,” said Paulinin, sitting down again. “I am interested in science, not justice. I don’t believe in justice. I don’t care about it. I am, however, offended by incompetent murderers and pathologists.”
“The victim in the park this morning,” said Karpo.
“I’ve been busy with the minister’s liver,” Paulinin said with a wave of his hand, “but in respect for you I examined the body. It was a pleasure to see a body before the butchers got their rusty hatchets into it.”
Karpo waited, report on the minister in hand. Paulinin looked down at the pile of scrawled notes on his desk and then looked up at Karpo.
“Beaten with a pipe,” Paulinin said. “While she was kneeling. Blows didn’t kill her. Eleven stab wounds did. The knife did not belong to the killer. It belonged to the victim. Traces on the knife of the material in her pocket.”
Paulinin held up a hand and pinched his thumb and one finger together till they turned white.
“Traces so small they would fit between these fingers with a universe of room to spare. Even with these crude instruments I have found it. Even with the crude instruments that are rapidly turning me into a blind man.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not complaining,” said Paulinin. “I’m explaining my frustration with the impossible task I perform while butchers posture and preen in the sunlight.”
“I appreciate your skill and dedication,” said Karpo.
“I measured the wounds. Always difficult. Even. Close together. You want an informed conjecture?”
“Yes.”
“Your killer was frenzied, out of control. He ripped out an eye, possibly while the victim was still alive.”
“And?”
“And,” Paulinin said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his nose, “he is right-handed. He is tall, as tall as you are. He is strong. He is not old but not very young, perhaps forty. He was carrying a briefcase or suitcase. Bits of imitation leather where he dropped it on the ground while he did his work. Had you not brought the grass in … who knows?”
Karpo had seen a slight indentation in the grass near the body.
“The victim?”
“Ah, the victim,” said Paulinin, putting his glasses back on. “At least five years older than she looks. She had a baby within the last year. Pelvic expansion. And she has two tattoos, one of a small yellow angel on her left buttock and one of a gun on the sole of her left foot. I’ve seen that gun tattoo in the same place on four young people in the past two years.”
“Capones,” said Karpo. “A gang. Any more?”
“Much more,” said Paulinin. “But it will take more time. Is it past lunch?”
“It is night,” said Karpo.
“I have a tin of fish and some canned bread. Join me.”
“The Yellow Angel’s dead. Georgi says it was Tahpor.”
Anatoli Xeromen already knew this much.
“How?” he asked.
The gangly young man with the pockmarked face and red Mohawk haircut answered, “Knife. Georgi said he stabbed her twenty times. Something like that. Then …”
“Then …?” Anatoli prodded without looking up.
“He … Georgi says he fucked her, tore out her eye and something in her stomach, and ate …”
Anatoli Xeromen nodded to stop the report and sat upright in his high-backed wooden chair.
The two young men were alone in the Capones’ war room in the Gray Blocks. The red-haired messenger had no choice but to stand patiently and watch as his boss’s eyes moved back and forth as if he were reading an invisible message. The chair in which Anatoli sat was not particularly comfortable, but it was a throne from which Anatoli ruled. His throne room was a muted scream of stolen goods that Anatoli had decided to keep as furnishings. Mismatched, expensive rugs, some Persian and Turkish, several thick pastels from Sweden, and one from the United States, a Disney covered with scenes from Peter Pan.
The walls, painted bright yellow, were covered with perfectly aligned political posters extolling and attacking communism, Lenin, Stalin, and Gorbachev; movie posters of Marilyn Monroe, Harrison, Ford, and Gene Tierney; posters of Renoir people in parks and cafés; posters of Moscow Circus performances. The furniture was every bit as eclectic: an eighteenth-century brocaded pink-and-purple sofa, plush leather armchairs, beanbag chairs in Crayola colors, heavy wooden tables with claw feet, tables with white marble tops, and tables with thick glass tops mounted on gilded legs.
The room, which had once been a Communist party meeting room for tenants, was on the main floor of one of six fat ten-story buildings in the town of Cherboltnik, fifteen miles west of Moscow. The clutch of buildings had begun to crumble and crack within a year after they had been completed in 1951. These six buildings were known officially as Moscow River Gardens, though they were outside of Moscow, nowhere near the river, and boasted only a garden of useless furniture, abandoned rusty car bodies, and debris that not even the resourceful residents could turn into anything useful. There was not a resident of the Moscow River Gardens who called the complex anything other than Gray Blocks.
Several hundred yards away, six identical buildings faced the Moscow River Gardens. These buildings, officially named the Gagarin Communal Residence, were known to everyone as Black Blocks.