The Twelfth Department Read online

  They’d reached the third landing now, two floors below the Azarovs’ apartment, and, as if to confirm Korolev’s suspicions about Priudski, one of the doors was sealed with string and red wax. Korolev walked over to it, peering closer to read the stamp that had been applied to the seal. “By Order of the Ministry of State Security.”

  He sighed. Another arrest—the inhabitants carted away in a black van, no doubt, and the apartment closed up until the Chekists had finished searching it for evidence.

  Korolev looked over to Priudski and the doorman looked away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Found anything yet?” Korolev said, nodding to Ushakov’s colleague, Levschinsky. The forensics man was on one knee in the internal hallway, dusting the handle of the door to the apartment.

  “No signed confession, if that’s what you mean. We haven’t been here long though.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Just don’t touch anything.”

  Korolev put his hands in his pockets to keep them out of temptation’s way. Many a mysterious fingerprint had turned out to belong to a Militiaman who’d wandered into a crime scene with his mind on other matters.

  “We found the body though.” Levschinsky pointed over his shoulder to an open doorway.

  “That’s something then.”

  “All right, someone else found it.” Levschinsky looked up from the doorknob and smiled. “This doorknob is a waste of time, by the way. But we’re thorough, if nothing else.”

  Korolev nodded his appreciation and decided to take a quick look around before he introduced himself to the corpse. The place was a palace by modern Moscow standards—a dining room, two bedrooms, a small kitchen—they even had their own private bathroom. Korolev stepped into the professor’s sitting room and could only imagine the satisfaction the dead man must have taken from the view—the Kremlin, the river and most of central Moscow was visible from the windows. You could leave aside Lenin Prizes, appointments to the Academy of Red Professors and any other accolade the State might throw in the direction of a deserving scientific fellow—this view and the size and number of the rooms told anyone who needed to know that Professor Azarov had been at the pinnacle of his profession. Korolev thought he was lucky having a room all to himself in Kitai Gorod—but this was something else again.

  “Anything for me, old friend?” Korolev said, entering the study with reluctance. The truth was, having to deal with dead bodies was the thing he enjoyed least about the job. If murders could be committed without producing corpses then he’d be a happier detective.

  The burly, silver-haired Ushakov looked up from his examination of the windowsill and nodded toward the corpse.

  “A bullet to the back of the head—a big caliber, by the look of it. Possibly a nervous shooter.”

  “Why do you say that?” Korolev said, forcing himself to step closer to the body. The dead man was slumped forward onto the papers that covered the desk, white hair spilling over his bent arms, his forehead pushed up against his right hand—the fingers of which still held a pen.

  “Well they missed him once. There’s a spare bullet hole in the desktop.”

  Korolev walked around the table to look at the professor’s face—bearded, a high forehead, a long nose, and a square jaw. Someone had thought to close Azarov’s eyes but there was a silky fineness to the hair that wasn’t stiff with blood that suggested to him the professor had been blond in his youth—so they’d probably be blue or gray. It looked as if he’d been working on a document of some sort when he’d been shot, but now its pages were caked with blood. A photographer’s lamp had been raised above the corpse and a camera and tripod stood beside it—artificial white light making the motionless body look as though it existed in a different time to the rest of the room, which was true in some ways. He found the gouge in the desk just beside the large black telephone. Another sign of Azarov’s importance—very few people had their own telephone.

  “You’re sure it was a miss?” Korolev said, knowing that bullets could take strange meandering routes through a body.

  “Seems so.”

  “And we’re sure a bullet was the cause of death?” he asked—questions with obvious answers being something Korolev had never shied away from.

  “Well, I don’t think it was poison,” Ushakov said, “but Chestnova will tell you for sure.”

  “Yes, she’s on her way I’m told.”

  Korolev looked at the hole in the back of the professor’s head and cursed under his breath. If it wasn’t the wife or the maid, and Belinsky thought it wasn’t, then this could be a long investigation. And important people getting themselves murdered in important places was never good news for detectives. He’d be working and sleeping and not doing much else until this matter was tidied up. Poor Yuri.

  “Captain Korolev?”

  He turned to see Belinsky standing in the doorway.

  “The maid, Matkina, is waiting in the kitchen.”

  “Thanks, Comrade Sergeant. I’ll talk to her straightaway—but if you see Sergeant Slivka, send her up please.”

  * * *

  Galina Matkina, the Azarovs’ maid, was wide-shouldered and round-waisted, and might have spent the morning driving a tractor on a kolkhoz farm, if her sun-reddened face and the white kerchief over her blond hair were anything to go by. She sat on a chair in the kitchen while Korolev leaned against a small table. He was tempted to turn on the light—the moody sky was darkening by the minute—but secrets were sometimes easier told in the shadows.

  “Are you the policeman?” she asked in a quiet voice, before he could open his mouth. She seemed to be struggling to regulate her breathing. More nervous than he would have expected.

  “I am.”

  “I should wait until Comrade Madame Azarova is here. She won’t like that I’m speaking to you without her.”

  “Comrade Madame?”

  A strange combination of the bourgeois and the Bolshevik. Bourgevik, perhaps.

  “It’s what she likes to be called. By me, anyway. She’ll be unhappy if I talk to you when she isn’t here.”

  Korolev didn’t have time to argue.

  “Let’s start by having a look at your papers, Citizeness Matkina—and your residency permit, while we’re at it. You know residency permits can be revoked by the Militia. Just like that.”

  Korolev clicked his fingers. It wasn’t a threat he’d ever carry out, of course, and Korolev felt guilt as the girl’s face lost all its color. He was about to reassure her, when the kopeck dropped and he realized she probably didn’t have a residency permit to be revoked. Not that this was unusual—although he’d have thought the Azarovs would have been able to fix the problem if they’d wanted to.

  “Residency permit?” the girl said eventually, and Korolev held up his hand.

  “Provided you’re straight with me, we can forget I asked that question. I don’t have time to be chasing round after pretty young girls who don’t have their Moscow papers. Not today anyway.”

  Matkina nodded, attempting to smile. Korolev’s hopes for a quick resolution were receding however. A girl like this, with no residency permit, wouldn’t want trouble with the law.

  “We’d best start at the beginning—surname, name, patronymic.”

  “Matkina, Galina Andreyevna, Comrade Captain.”

  She straightened herself as she spoke, as if making an oath.

  “There’s no need to be too formal, Galina Andreyevna. You certainly don’t have to stand to attention—next thing you’ll be saluting me or something. That wouldn’t do at all.”

  She smiled, a little bit more confident now—there was a flash of white teeth in the gloom.

  “Where do you sleep?”

  “In here—I’ve a mattress I roll out. It’s comfortable enough.”

  “Good for you. How long have you worked here?”

  “Here? Since last summer, Comrade Captain. They only moved in then, before that they were in a smaller apartment upstairs—I was with the
m there as well, but not for long.”

  “When did you come to Moscow?”

  “November of thirty-five, Comrade Captain. There wasn’t much of a choice, where I was.”

  The worst of the famines in the countryside had been in thirty-two and thirty-three, when the push toward collectivization had been at its height, but everyone knew that peasants were still heading for the cities if they could—it was one of the reasons you had to have a residency permit to live in Moscow these days.

  “Enough of the ‘Comrade Captain,’” Korolev said. “You can call me Alexei Dmitriyevich; it’s less of a mouthful. Do you smoke?” He took one for himself and extended the packet to the girl, who looked at the door with a hunted expression.

  “Have one—my sergeant tells me your mistress is sleeping. Some doctor gave her a sedative. And don’t worry about her smelling anything—there’ll be half a dozen of us puffing away in here by the time we’re done—one more won’t make any difference.”

  With a nod of gratitude, the girl helped herself.

  “Good girl. So tell me everything that happened in this apartment from, say, six o’clock last night. I mean everything. How many spoons you washed, what you served for supper, how many glasses of tea were drunk and by who. Everything.”

  And she did. The professor, it turned out, didn’t like tea—but then Korolev already knew that. He liked coffee himself, but he’d need a few promotions before he could afford to drink as much as the professor had. By the time Matkina had finished, Korolev had a pretty good insight into the domestic life of the Azarovs. The professor, it would seem, worked, ate, slept, and did nothing much else. And his wife wasn’t much different. She was also a doctor, it seemed, but not a surgical one. More of a psychiatrist. Not bad people, it seemed, they treated the maid well enough and better than many others would. They got on well, the Azarovs, in her opinion, although they’d had few social friends—not enough time, it seemed. Interestingly she thought the professor wasn’t much liked in the building.

  “Why not?” Korolev asked, giving her another cigarette and lighting it for her.

  “The other residents were nervous of him. He was, well, political.”

  “Political?” Korolev asked, considering the slight emphasis she’d placed on the word. “Do you mean he denounced people?”

  She nodded, looking to the door once again.

  “Did he have anything to do with that sealed apartment on the third floor?”

  “They say he did. The other girls in the building. I’ve heard him on the telephone asking for people to be investigated, arrested, that kind of thing.”

  The girl exhaled a perfect smoke ring. Not a casual smoker then, for all her initial nervousness.

  “But I don’t know about the Golovkins. You’d better ask the doorman about that kind of thing.”

  “The Golovkins?”

  “That’s the couple who lived on the third floor.”

  “I see—and why should I ask the doorman?”

  “They call him up when they need a witness—State Security—even for the other buildings in the block. He knows all about that kind of thing.” There was an edge to her voice that confirmed Korolev’s own suspicions about Comrade Priudski. A willing ear for the Chekists, at the very least. Maybe more.

  “When were they arrested?”

  “Last week, Monday, I think. There were three arrests last week.”

  “In this part of the building alone?”

  “In the whole building.”

  Korolev thought it through, three arrests out of five hundred apartments—quite a high number all the same.

  “Is that unusual?”

  “No,” she said. “Ever since I came here there have been arrests. But it’s not people like me—it’s people like the Golovkins. Girls like me just go and work for someone else. Unless they get caught without a residency permit.”

  She gave him a look that said, I’m being honest with you, Ment, you’d better be honest with me.

  “I won’t be bothering you about your permit, I’ve said as much already. Now, what about this morning?”

  The professor, it seemed, had left the house at 7:30, as Belinsky had told him, to go to his institute—a short walk away on Yakimanka—then he’d returned at about nine. He’d had some meeting, she thought, but about what she didn’t know, and when he came back he’d seemed distracted, maybe even worried. Again, consistent with what she’d told Belinsky. He’d made a phone call—but to who, she couldn’t say. She’d brought him a pot of coffee at 9:30, as usual—just before she’d left to do the shopping. The only strange thing was that the professor had complained about rats, or mice perhaps. In the walls. He told her he’d been hearing them all morning.

  “Rats?”

  “I didn’t hear them,” the girl said, helping herself to another cigarette. “But he could be a bit like that. He liked everything just so. You couldn’t have a dog in the building, in case it might bark and the professor be disturbed. Then you’d be in trouble. Big trouble.”

  The professor had drunk most of the coffee she’d brought him by the time she returned, and left the pot and the dirty cup in the kitchen.

  “What size pot?”

  She pointed at a coffee pot drying beside the sink—it wasn’t small.

  “So a few cups?”

  “He finished most of it, so I’d say yes.”

  If she’d left just after she’d brought him the pot of coffee it would have taken the professor some time to drink so much—at least fifteen minutes, would be Korolev’s guess. Which narrowed the period in which the death must have occurred, he supposed.

  “So you washed the cup and the coffee pot?”

  “And I began to make their lunch.” She pointed to a pile of chopped vegetables. “And then. Well, Comrade Captain, then I found him.”

  And she looked away from him, chewing on her lip—her eyes wet.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Korolev and Slivka stood on the landing one flight up from the dead man’s apartment, looking out the open window down onto the street far below, watching the traffic pass over the soon-to-be-destroyed Bolshoi Kamenny Bridge and sucking the smoke out of a pair of Belomorkanals. Korolev could see lightning flicker over the northern suburbs and the shadow of rain underneath the low clouds as they approached. He hoped Yuri wouldn’t be caught outside when the bad weather came.

  “What we need is a motive, Slivka,” he said, flicking the papirosa tube out the window and resisting the temptation to light up another. “If we can find one, then like as not we’ll find a murderer attached to it. But the only thing we’ve got to go on so far is that the sealed apartment on the third floor might have been the victim’s doing. It seems he liked to tell tales.”

  “I see.” Slivka didn’t seem keen on it as a motive—but, then again, nor was he.

  “I know. We’ll have to look into it all the same—I’ll ask Popov for the best way to go about it. What did this doctor say about Comrade Madame Azarova?”

  “He said she should be awake soon. We can speak to her about half an hour after that, he thinks.”

  “Good, we talk to her as soon as we can. What else?”

  Slivka looked down at her notebook.

  “The doorman has gone through the list of residents—who was here this morning and what their movements were. Belinsky’s men are going door to door through this part of the building—so we’ll soon add detail to that. No one we’ve questioned so far has heard or seen anything directly related to the murder, but we have two people who say they saw the professor leaving the building early in the morning, which confirms what the maid told you. We’ve also got a list of people who were visiting the building—Belinsky’s men are working their way through them. And they’re also trying to make contact with residents who left for work earlier in the day, in case they might have seen anything.”

  Korolev considered this, and found that somehow another Belomorkanal had ended up in his mouth. He lit it.

  “T
alk to the widow when she surfaces—I’m going to take the car and drive to this institute of his and find out what he was up to there this morning and why it might have upset him. Oh, and I got one more thing out of Matkina—she could smell gunpowder when she went into the study. That—and all the coffee he drank after nine-thirty—suggests he wasn’t shot long before she found the body. Something to bear in mind.”

  He turned to lead the way down the staircase and found Priudski, the doorman, standing on the landing below—his ears no doubt having been tuned in to their conversation like a radio receiver.

  “Comrade,” Korolev said dryly. Priudski returned the greeting without the slightest trace of embarrassment. Well, Korolev thought, the fellow’s probably just doing his job—the same as he was. Not that this made him any happier.

  * * *

  Inside the Azarovs’ apartment the forensics men were standing back, watching the burly figure of Zinaida Chestnova carefully lift the dead man’s head in her small plump hands. Gouts of semi-coagulated blood were providing some resistance and her assistant was holding down the paperwork on which the head had rested while Chestnova moved it from side to side. She was careful, almost gentle, but Korolev knew she’d be less gentle when the autopsy proper began. She was looking for hypostasis on the dead man’s face, unless Korolev was mistaken—one of the indicators that might tell her when he’d died.

  “Let me guess, Korolev,” Chestnova said, without looking up. “You want me to tell you to the minute, as usual.”

  Despite the fug of cigarette smoke, he could smell the corpse’s sweet stench now. The summer heat was having its effect.

  “I wouldn’t be so unreasonable. We’ve some ideas, but if you tell us something different then we’ll have to think again.”

  “I see,” Chestnova said, pressing a thumb to the dead man’s eye. The elasticity would give her another clue as to the time of death.