“Okay, let me give it to you straight,” I said woodenly. “If you’re not careful what you tell your mother, she’ll end up in the funny farm, not you.”
“Good riddance,” replied the young creature in a sweet voice, and stared with disgust at my untrimmed beard and my baggy turtleneck sweater.
“Hold on a second. That means that I end up without a client, which isn’t good for my business. Your mother needs professional help, not you; she’s the one who called me, crying frantically and saying, ‘Can you take a look at my girl? She tells me horrible stories. Is she crazy?’ We need to calm your mother down or she’ll be off her rocker in no time. Not you—her. Get the picture? So here’s the deaclass="underline" you made the whole thing up. I’ll think of something to say to your mother. I’ll say that you’re fine for now, though you need to be under observation. And you keep your mouth shut about sex in coats. And at the same time you’ll tell me about this guy—dude, that is—who goes around dressed like that in the summer. To tell you the truth, I’m more interested in him than you. Because who needs maniacs wandering around the streets of Peschanaya?”
“Mister, you’re a maniac yourself,” said my client’s daughter, clearly enjoying herself. “He was a big, tall, funny guy, nice, with kinda faded hair. Still pretty young. Tan, like a construction worker or something. Maybe he’d just gotten out of the hospital and that’s why he was wearing a coat. A weird coat.”
“Oh, so now it’s a weird coat, eh? Well, tell me more about the coat.”
“The material… I’ve never felt anything like it before. It wasn’t synthetic. Gabardine, or twill, or something else great-grandmotherish. A long coat down to his ankles. Big buttons. You know, like from a museum. Yellowish edges. And it smelled like it’d been buried underground for a hundred years. But the dude wasn’t a bum. He was clean. I wouldn’t do it with a bum, no way! You kidding? The dude himself smelled really nice, actually.”
“Girl, just listen to yourself. You walk down an alley, see a man sitting on a bench wearing an overcoat… Okay, you think he’s been in the hospital, but still… And so what do you do next, tell me again?”
I paid great attention to the pupils of her eyes, her body language, the movements of her head and shoulders.
“Nothing. I saw the coat, saw the dude. I wanted to get some action, so I batted my eyes at him and blushed like a schoolgirl.”
“You are a schoolgirl.”
“Well, I’m overdeveloped. So the rest is history.”
I sighed and made a mental diagnosis. Teenage hypersexuality and an underdeveloped personality, with no pathology in my area—psychiatric, that is. I also realized that the girl’s desire to torture her mother was spent for the day.
“Okay, to sum it up: you made the whole thing up and you’re not talking about it anymore. Mom gets some peace of mind, and you, young lady—if you start seeing weird things, or if life starts to suck real bad all of a sudden, give me a call. I’ll fix it all up for you. I mean it. We’ll deal with the money thing later, a little bit at a time. And weird things need to be sorted out quickly.”
“Dr. Weird,” she said, and cast a sad glance at my sink filled with dirty dishes.
I walked to Birch Grove Park to get some fresh air and hide from the heat. And just to think a little.
After sunset, the squirrels went quiet in the branches of elm trees. Disappointed spaniels and dobermans hauled their owners back home; but pensioners remained seated in their usual spots, finishing their games of dominoes.
I peered across the park that was slowly succumbing to darkness. The girl hooked up with that dude somewhere not too far from here, and they went to most remote spot in the grove, which still hadn’t been cleared of fallen trees after the disastrous storms of 1998. A person with an underdeveloped personality simply has no clue what a stranger wearing a long overcoat in hot weather can do to her.
Uh, wait a second—according to her, he hung the coat over his arm while they were walking, but put it on again before he laid her down on a concrete slab, took the condom out of her fingers, and rolled up her miniskirt.
She didn’t make that up—that much was certain. So if this was the case, it was the guy who worried me. It seemed like more than just ordinary fetishism.
The local police station was located on 3rd Peschanaya Street, on the other side of Birch Grove Park. The precinct was a hole in a wall, splotched with shiny brown paint. The hole opened onto a short corridor that led down to a semibasement room, decorated in the best traditions of Brezhnev office style: cheap wall panels of faux wood, wrinkled linoleum imitating mahogany flooring, and painted white bars on the windows.
“Sexual predators? No, haven’t had any of them in here in a long time,” said the inspector with the fitting last name of Bullet. “It’s good you stopped in, but I don’t see a crime here. Okay, she’s underage. She was hitting on him. No law against wearing an overcoat in the summer. Got anything else on him? No? Okay, I guess I could ask around. At least I’ll be able to get off my butt, get some exercise. Come back in a week. You’re a private doctor, I guess you know what you’re talking about,” he concluded skeptically.
And only three days later…
The flashing lights of the police car cast an unnatural blue pall on the gray stump of a body covered with a blanket. The figure lay on a stretcher that floated slowly into the yawning mouth of the ambulance. But I caught a glimpse of tangled hair and a wet forehead amidst the absurdly blue uniforms of the orderlies. Her face was uncovered, so she was alive. Inspector Bullet gave me a dark look and said, “The reason I asked you to come right away was that if she dies, I’m gonna have to interrogate your underage client. There’s an overcoat here too. Looks like it’s all true.”
“I’d rather tell you her story myself,” I said, thinking hard. “It would make more sense.”
“Well?”
“Nice guy, funny, youngish, sun-bleached hair, tan, tall?” I asked.
“Far from it. Not very tall. The overcoat he wore dragged along on the ground behind him. The victim says the coat was strange, like something from the Stalin era. Other than that—well, maybe he was tan, maybe funny. Why shouldn’t he be funny? So much fun to bash in a girl’s head. They’re probably gonna have to drill a hole in her skull. They say it’s that serious. She went with him on her own at first, and then later she suspected something wasn’t quite right… Yep. That’s about it.”
The investigation reached a dead end very quickly. Two construction workers, migrants, one tall and one short, who had been painting the building on the corner of 2nd and 3rd Peshchanaya Streets, vanished into a thin air. This greatly surprised their foreman, who couldn’t locate his countrymen after returning from Moldavia. To find their whereabouts or prove anything was virtually impossible, since the photographs of the suspects that were soon faxed from their hometown, a place called Yassy, were only suitable for a trash can. So the building with the unfinished paint job returned to its peaceful slumber among the sticky lime trees and sounds of car alarms.
“We can’t issue ‘wanted’ posters or arrest an overcoat without its owner,” said the inspector. “But you know what I think? I think this is your department. After you stopped in the other day, I called all the old geezers from our precinct. They’re better than any archive. Thought maybe there had been something like what you described two years ago, before I began working here. Turned out there was a case in 1973. Right here in Birch Grove Park. Then again, where else would someone work the walls with a girl? So there was this sex maniac who wore a wide-brim hat and an old-fashioned overcoat, who was always on the lookout for schoolgirls. Funny thing was that the girls didn’t even hesitate. He took them to some broken-down barracks near Khodynka and made them wear white socks and a school uniform with a white apron. When he got busted, he threatened that the entire police force would have hell to pay when they found out who he really was. He hinted that he was some big shot in the Communist Party, or even one of the higher-ups in the government. To make a long story short, instead of going to jail, he ended up in a funny farm—your department, in other words. Never came back from there. He’d be in his nineties by now, I’d say. And he was a local, not a construction worker from Moldavia. Period. Case closed… What do you say to that?”