Three Stations ar-7 Page 4

  "Beck in the Yuuessessaarr…"

  The drunk had a task enough in staying upright. Blood matted his hair and dripped strawberry-colored stains on his polo shirt. When he saw the security guards he shouted over and over that he was registered at the Canadian embassy, as if that made a difference.

  "Oww luggee yuuaarr…"

  The guards were paid to protect one stall, nothing else, and the Canadian swept by in the grip of a boy old enough to cultivate a wispy mustache and the air of authority. A white scarf was around his neck and he carried the butt end of a billiard cue as a club. Maya kept walking as the procession approached; animals-dogs or boys-were more likely to chase anything that ran.

  The Canadian tripped and fell. At once the boys swarmed over him, removing his watch and stripping him of his visa, passport, credit cards and money. Maya seemed to get no more than a glance. She made it almost to the bottom of the stairs before the boy with the scarf slipped in front of her.

  "Terrific hair."

  Now she wished she had never dyed it.

  He said, "I'm Yegor. What's your name?"

  She didn't answer.

  Yegor wasn't insulted. He was sixteen at least, a combination of baby fat and muscle, the proper build for a bully, and when she tried to step around him, he held the pool cue in her way.

  "Where are you going?"

  "Home."

  "Where's home? I can take you."

  She said, "My brother is meeting me."

  "I'd like to meet him." Yegor pantomimed looking around.

  "You won't like him."

  "What's the matter with him? Too big? Too little? Maybe he's a fag?"

  "He's waiting."

  "I don't think so. What do you think, Boots?"

  The girl with dreadlocks said, "I don't think there's a brother."

  "I agree with Boots. I don't think there's a brother and I don't think you're catching a train either. I think you're here to make money, in which case you need a friend. Wouldn't you like a friend?" He enveloped Maya in his arms and ground his hips against her so that she would know he had something in his pants. Boots's smile faded. The other boys were still, jaws dropped. The security guards leaned forward on their chairs.

  Maya tried to duck Yegor's mouth.

  The baby had been a brief respite, a period of normality that ended as her witless contribution to the misery of the world. Who was she to struggle? Whatever shit happened now she deserved.

  Zhenya said, "She's with me."

  No one had noticed his approach. Yegor let Maya settle on her feet.

  "She should've said so. All she had to say was 'I'm with Genius.' What's her name?"

  Zhenya told Maya, "Go up to the street."

  Yegor asked, "What's the problem? I just asked for her fucking name."

  "I'll let you know when she has a name."

  "You like her? Does she like you? How much does she like you? Say a hand job is 'like' and anal is 'love.' On that scale where is she? Boots would do anything for me."

  "You're a lucky guy."

  "You have such a straight face I can never tell when you're agreeing with me and when you're putting a poker up my ass. We're like brothers. The fucking world is falling apart. See how many Tajiks are in Moscow now? Just wait ten years. There'll be a mosque on every corner. Heads cut off, all kinds of stuff. You and I ought to stick together."

  "Keep your hands off her."

  "Okay. But if you want to be a hero, that will cost you," Yegor shouted as Zhenya started up the stairs. "It will cost you. And a piece of advice. You may have brains but you're not big where it counts. She's going to want a dick. A dick with hair."

  Zhenya told Yegor, "Your scarf is wet."

  Wet through and through with milk, Yegor discovered.

  "What the fuck?"

  Attention swung the other way as the Canadian revived and put on a burst of speed toward the far exit. The boys ran after because that was their nature, like puppies chasing a ball, and repeated, "Be-be-be-be-beck in the Yuuessessaarr!"

  Zhenya led Maya through a courtyard of rubbish bins and cats to a shuttered truck bay and a back door with the bright brass of a new touch pad. He tapped in the combination and, as soon as the door opened, pulled her inside to a freight elevator that carried them up two floors in utter blackness. She clung to his sleeve as he dragged her through a swinging door and the folds of a velvet curtain to a space that, bit by bit, grew into a landscape of drop cloths and cardboard boxes guarded by a giant pulling back his cape to draw his saber.

  "Welcome to the Peter the Great Casino," said Zhenya. If he expected thanks he didn't get it. He played the beam of his penlight over the figure's glass eyes and three-corner hat. "It's a good likeness, don't you think?"

  She wasn't looking at all. Zhenya couldn't tell whether she was laughing or crying or controlling her rage until in a voice heavy with defeat she asked, "Can you get me a towel? My top is soaked."

  He waited outside the ladies' restroom while she washed. Remembering that she had a razor blade, he kept up an aimless chatter through the restroom door.

  She wasn't listening. After washing herself and rinsing her shirt, she turned off the lights and sat on a padded stool and rocked. Slowly, as if she were on a moving train.

  6

  Immense and unshaven, Willi Pazenko shuffled around the morgue like a woolly mammoth in an operating gown. A cigarette hung from his lips, a glass of antiseptic alcohol from his hand. At school he had been called Belmondo after the French actor for his style with a cigarette. Arkady had been his classmate but now Willi looked twenty years older.

  "I can't do it. I'm not up to it. Doctor's orders."

  "You could do it with your eyes closed," Arkady said.

  Willi waved a glass at the cadavers. "Don't you think I would like to dive in?"

  "I know you do."

  "Some of the work that comes out of this place you wouldn't believe. Butcher's work at a butcher's pace. A real abattoir. They dig out the heart and lungs, slit the throat and pull out the esophagus. No finesse. No analysis. Run a saw around the skull. Pop the brain. Dig out the organs. Bag them, weigh them, dump them 'tween the knees and finish in less time than it takes to dress a rabbit."

  "They must miss things."

  "Do they ever! But I'm retired. On the sideline."

  Arkady declined a friendly glass of vodka rather than blunt his insomnia. The time was 3 a.m. Insomnia was all he was running on.

  Willi said, "I've survived two massive heart attacks. I have angina. Blood pressure that could lift a manhole cover. I could keel over from blowing my nose. So I do not rush."

  "What do the doctors say?"

  "To lose weight. No smoking or drinking. And avoid excitement. Sex? I haven't seen my dick in years. Some days I can't even find it. Maybe you'd prefer a sparkling wine? I have some cooling in a drawer."

  "No, thanks. So you really have moved in? You squared this with the director?"

  "The director is a pompous ass but not a bad guy at heart. He found me a spare utility room with a sofa. I'm not supposed to operate anymore because if I expired in the middle of an autopsy, that might lend the impression that the director was not running a tight ship. You not only want me to perform an autopsy, you want it right away." Willi wiped his chin. "My doctors wanted to restrict me to my apartment. Why? To lead the life of a vegetable? Sit alone and watch idiots on television until I expire? No, this is a better solution. Here I still help out with odds and ends. Stay in the social mix. Friends come by, some of them alive, some of them dead, and when I drop there will be no need for an ambulance because I'll be right here."

  "That should be appreciated."

  "They tore down my building to make room for a spa. They think they're going to live forever. Are they in for a surprise."

  There was a queue of sorts. Other tables held a young male so drained of blood he was white as a marble statue, a barbecued torso of undetermined sex and a bloated body with the last laugh, farts that
topped off a general atmosphere of spoiled meat and formaldehyde. Arkady lit a cigarette and drew hard enough that the tobacco sparked and still he tasted bile in his throat.

  "Listen to him." Willi indicated the flatulent corpse. "He sounds like he's learning the clarinet."

  "What are you now, a music critic?"

  "If I was caught performing an autopsy-"

  "What could they do to you? They've already got you living in a closet. Are they going to give you a dog bowl next? Whatever happened to Dr. Willi Pazenko? Whatever happened to Belmondo?"

  "Belmondo," Willi recollected. "You don't know how lucky you are." Willi handed Arkady a rubber apron and surgical gloves. "Our assistants are Tajiks or Uzbeks, and when they take the day off for a wedding, everyone else uses it as an excuse to come to work late. Usually this place is humming. Someday the Tajiks are going to take over. They do all that high steel work. Nimble people. But how would you like to fall a hundred stories? All that time to think on the way down."

  Arkady declined a surgical mask; masks got clammy and didn't block the smell. Besides, Willi didn't use one. Back in harness, he was thoroughly in command.

  "Are you a virgin?" he asked Arkady.

  "I've attended."

  "But never got your hands dirty, so to speak?"

  "No."

  "Always a first time."

  The external half of the examination of Olga was a search for identifiable features and signs of trauma: birthmarks, moles, scars, needle tracks, bruises, abrasions, tattoos. Willi filled out a chart and body map as he went.

  Arkady's job was simple. He lifted Olga as Willi directed. Shifted, posed, positioned her body while Willi snipped an eyelash and a lock of her hair, dug under her fingernails, swabbed and studied every orifice under a UV lamp. Arkady felt like Quasimodo pawing a sleeping Venus.

  When the external part of the examination was over, they broke for a cigarette. Fumo ergo sum, Arkady thought.

  Willi said, "Not a bruise or a scratch. You know that we aren't supposed to open them up unless there are signs of violence or strange circumstances."

  "Isn't it strange when a young woman is found half naked and dead?"

  "Not when she's a prostitute."

  "And the clonidine?"

  "This is where your theory falls apart. Clonidine makes a good knockout pill, but it's a messy poison; essentially you throw up and choke on your vomit. I examined her windpipe. It was clean. All you need do is look at her face. She didn't die gasping for air; she just closed her eyes and died."

  No one just dies, Arkady thought. You can be killed by a bullet or a skip in your heartbeat or a vine that starts winding around you on the day you are born, but no one just dies.

  Willi was warming to the subject. "Any way you look at it, death comes down to oxygen or the lack thereof. Sometimes accomplished with an ax, sometimes with a pillow and almost always leaving evidence. Manual strangulation, for example, is so personal, so over-the-top. Lots of anger and bruising and not only of the neck. I mean, murder is murder, but manual strangulation brings out the worst in people."

  "Do you think she removed her panties before or after she died?"

  "The panties again?"

  "They caught Victor's eye too."

  "The last time I saw Detective Orlov he was asleep on a bench on the Boulevard Ring in the middle of the day."

  "He's dry tonight."

  "So he'll screw up tomorrow and take you down with him, as if you needed any help."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Tell me, since when does a senior investigator back up a detective sergeant? Does Prosecutor Zurin know what you're up to?"

  "It's Victor's case. I'm just along for the ride."

  "If Zurin hears about this you've cut your own throat. Well, you can always be my personal assistant."

  "Doing what?"

  "In case I drop and anyone tries to resuscitate me, shoot him."

  Willi started at Olga's left shoulder, drawing the scalpel under the breast and up to the sternum. He shuffled around the table and made a similar cut from the right shoulder. In one masterly stroke, Willi sliced her from the sternum down, opening her all the way to the tattoo.

  She looked aside, deaf to the rattle of hardware on the instrument tray: knives and scalpels of different lengths, forceps, UV flashlight and rotary saw. Willi spread open the soft tissue of her chest and selected a garden pruner with curved blades.

  "Maybe I should do this," Arkady said.

  "When I want an amateur to touch my work, I'll let you know."

  Taking that for a no, Arkady reviewed the chart. Sex: female Name: unknown Residence: unknown Height: 82 cm. Weight: 49 kg. Hair: brown Eyes: blue Estimated Time of Death: by core temperature and start of rigor approximately 2 to 3 hours previous

  Her ribs snapped with the sound of green wood cracking Arkady read on. Observations: The deceased was delivered at 0216 dressed in a blue jacket of synthetic material and a white cotton bustier. Two plastic bags arrived with the body. Bag A contained items found on site: a blue denim skirt with decorative stitching and knee-high red boots of faux leather. Underpants were retrieved from an upper bunk in the trailer. Bag B held personal effects that included cosmetics, pepper spray, diaphragm, douche and an aspirin bottle that contained a yellow powder that preliminary toxicological examination has tentatively identified as clonidine, a blood pressure medication sometimes abused as a "knockout" pill.

  UV radiation was used to examine the body, jacket and bustier for fingerprints, semen or blood. The result was negative. No bruising, stains or signs of forcible sexual entry. No signs of strangulation either manual or ligature. Bands of pale skin indicated the recent removal of rings from the 3rd, 4th and 5th fingers of the left hand and the 3rd and 4th fingers of the right. The deceased exhibited superficial dirt on her hands and face.

  Body in excellent physical condition. Distinguishing marks: tattoo on cusp of left hip. No scars or birthmarks or occupational calluses. No evident lacerations or contusions. No signs of struggle or defensive wounds. No hypodermic needle tracks. No body piercing except earlobes. Material under fingernails was unremarkable.

  Willi paused to ask Arkady, "You okay?"

  "I'm fine."

  Arkady was eight years old on his first visit to a morgue. His father took him to toughen him up. Arkady remembered the general slapping a dead man on the ass and declaring, "He served under me in Kursk!" Some men could saunter into a morgue and browse autopsy tables like a garden show. Arkady had never attained such sangfroid. After twenty years as an investigator he was still as embarrassed by an eviscerated body as if he had caught someone undressed.

  With the ribs out of the way Willi detached the girl's heart and lungs and put them together, en bloc, into a pail held by Arkady. In other pails went other organs, wet and glistening as strange sea creatures.

  Next, up or down? Up it was.

  Olga's hair was thick and vigorous, but with a hairbrush and comb Willi created a part from ear to ear, retraced the part with a scalpel and peeled the top half of the face down to the chin from a red skull and startled eyes.

  While Willi sawed, Arkady's mind wandered. He thought about vodka, about Victor's limitless thirst and the half-empty bottle found with Olga. A dirty mattress in a workers' wagon didn't seem appealing even for a prostitute. Yet they hadn't run in and out. Olga and her friend had opened a bottle and stayed long enough for one to dope the other. A toast! How do you toast without glasses? Arkady thought about the tattoo's deep colors and distinct lines, the work of a professional, not a prison camp lifer working with an unsterilized needle and paid for in cigarettes. What species was Olga's butterfly? The writer Nabokov had always been enchanted by "blues," a category of butterflies that were small and drab until they flew and then their wings were iridescent.

  Willi repaired the damage. He sewed the body together with twine and the scalp together with black sutures although the girl was largely a hollow, her organs set aside in buckets and bowls
and her brain deposited in a jar of formalin to harden enough to slice, which would take at least a week. Quite a night for Olga, Arkady thought. First she is killed and then she is rearranged. Maybe cannibals lurked around the corner.

  Soaked with perspiration, Willi dropped onto a stool next to the table, two fingers monitoring the pulse in his neck, giving Arkady a few seconds to worry about Zhenya. Was he running with a street gang? Arrested for hustling? Beaten to death by a sore loser? With Zhenya, anxiety was on tap twenty-four hours a day.

  Willi shook his head. "Steady as a Swiss watch."

  "Do you really want to die in the middle of an autopsy? Why don't you just run around the block?"

  "I hate exercise."

  Willi poured more alcohol and this time Arkady joined him. It went down smoothly and then set his throat on fire.

  "Needs lemon."

  Voices came from the hall of body drawers and Willi straightened up. When the sound subsided he asked Arkady, "Is there anything you want to add to the chart? Anything I missed?"

  Since pathologists were used to having the final say, Arkady chose his words carefully.

  "You mention the dirt under her fingernails but you don't mention that her nails are manicured. Same with her toenails."

  "Women paint their nails. Since when is that worth mentioning?"

  "Her clothes."

  "She dressed like a slut."

  "Her outfit was shabby but it was new. The boots were poor quality but they were also new."

  "You're thinking far too much about this girl."

  "Then there's the lack of bruises and scratches, the wear and tear that a person accumulates from having sex with nasty customers in alleyways and trailers."

  Willi blew a smoke ring in Arkady's direction. "Old friend, take it from a man with one foot in the grave, everything is contradictory. Stalin was good then bad then good again. Once I was thin as a reed and now I'm a human globe with a belt as my equator. In any case, don't be distressed over a dead prostitute. There's a new one every day. If she isn't claimed she will make some medical student very happy, and if someone claims her, I'll let you know. This was my last autopsy."