Special Assignments (32 page)

I am disappearing for a while. I shall try to come at this business from the other side. In the meantime, you work with Izhitsin. I am afraid he might botch things up with his excessive zeal. On the other hand, he may not be a very pleasant character, but he is tenacious, and he could just dig something up.

EF

Well, did you ever? And just what 'other side' could that be?

The pompous investigator was not easy to find. Anisii phoned the Public Prosecutor's office and they told him: 'He was called out by the Department of Gendarmes.' He called the Department of Gendarmes and they replied: 'He went out on urgent business that can't be discussed over the telephone.' The duty officer's voice sounded so excited that Tulipov guessed it had to be another murder. And a quarter of an hour later a messenger arrived from Izhitsin - it was the constable, Linkov. He had called at the Collegiate Counsellor's and not found him in, so he'd come round to Tulipov on Granatny Lane.

Linkov was terribly agitated. 'It's an absolute nightmare, Your Honour,' he told Anisii. 'The brutal murder of a juvenile. It's terrible, terrible ...' He sniffed and blushed, evidently embarrassed by his own sensitivity.

Anisii looked at the ungainly, scrawny-necked policeman and saw straight through him: literate, sentimental, and no doubt he liked reading books; joined the police out of poverty, only this rough work wasn't for him, the poor lamb. Tulipov would have been the same if not for his fortunate encounter with Erast Petrovich.

'Come on, Linkov,' said Anisii, deliberately addressing the constable in a formal, polite tone. 'Let's go straight to the morgue; that's where they'll take her anyway'

Deduction is a great thing. His calculation proved to be correct. Anisii had been sitting talking to Pakhomenko in his watchman's hut for no more than half an hour, enjoying a chat about life with the agreeable fellow, when three droshkies drove up to the gates, followed by a blind carriage with no windows, the so-called 'corpse-wagon'.

Izhitsin and Zakharov got out of the first droshky a photographer and his assistant got out of the second, two gendarmes and a senior constable got out of the third. No one got out of the carriage. The gendarmes opened its shabby doors with the peeling paint and carried out something short on a stretcher, covered with a tarpaulin.

The medical expert was dour, chewing on his eternal pipe with exceptional bitterness, but the investigator seemed to be in lively spirits, almost even glad about something.

When he caught sight of Anisii, his face dropped: 'A-ah, there you are. So you already got wind of this? Is your chief here too?'

But when it turned out that Fandorin was not there and would not be coming, and so far his assistant did not really know anything, Izhitsin's spirits rose again. 'Well, now things will really start moving,' he told Tulipov, rubbing his hands energetically. 'So, it's like this. At dawn today the railway line patrolmen on the Moscow-Brest transfer line discovered the body of a juvenile female vagrant in the bushes close to the Novotikhvinsk level crossing. Zakharov has determined that death occurred no later than midnight. It's not very pretty, I warn you, Tulipov, it was an incredible sight!' Izhitsin gave a brief laugh. 'Just imagine it: the belly, naturally, had been completely gutted and the entrails hung all around on the branches, and as for the face ...'

'What, another bloody kiss?' Anisii exclaimed excitedly.

The investigator burst out laughing and couldn't stop, he was helpless with laughter - obviously it was nerves.

'Oh, you'll be the death of me,' he said eventually, wiping away his tears. 'Fandorin and you and that kiss of yours. Please forgive my inappropriate merriment. When I show you, you'll understand. Hey, Silakov! Stop! Show him her face!'

The gendarmes put the stretcher down on the ground and turned back the edge of the tarpaulin. Anisii was expecting to see something particularly unpleasant: glassy eyes, a nightmarish grimace, the tongue lolling out of the mouth, but there was none of that. Under the tarpaulin there was some kind of black-and-red baked pudding with two round blobs: white, with a small dark circle in the centre.

What is it?' Tulipov asked in surprise, feeling his teeth starting to chatter of their own accord.

'Seems like our joker left her without any face at all,' Izhitsin explained with morose humour. 'Zakharov says the skin was slit along the hair line and then torn off, like the peel off an orange. There's a kiss for you. And, best of all, now she can't be identified.'

Everything was still swimming and swaying in front of Anisii's eyes. The investigator's voice seemed to be coming from somewhere far in the distance.

Anyway, the secret's out now. Those rogues of patrolmen have blabbed to everyone they could. One of them was taken away in a faint. The rumours were already spreading round Moscow in any case. The Department of Gendarmes is flooded with reports of a killer who's decided to wipe out women completely. This morning they reported everything to St Petersburg, the whole truth, nothing kept back. The minister himself, Count Tolstoy is coming. So there you have it. Looks like heads are going to roll. I don't know about you, but I'm quite fond of mine. Your chief can go on playing his game of deduction as long as he likes; he's safe enough, he has protection in high places. But I'll crack this one without deduction, by sheer determination and energy. This is no time for snivelling, I reckon.'

Tulipov turned away from the stretcher, gulped to dispel the murky veil that was clouding his eyes, and filled his lungs as full of air as he could. That was better.

Izhitsin couldn't be allowed to get away with that 'snivelling', and Anisii said in a flat, expressionless voice: 'My chief says determination and energy are good for chopping firewood and digging vegetable patches.'

'Exactly my dear sir.' The investigator waved to the gendarmes to carry the body into the morgue. 'I'll damn well dig up the whole of blasted Moscow, and if it gets a bit messy, the result will justify it. If I don't get a result, my head's going to roll anyway. Have you been detailed to keep an eye on me, Tulipov? Do that then, but keep your comments to yourself. And if you feel like submitting a complaint, be my guest. I know Count Tolstoy; he appreciates determination and turns a blind eye to minor points of legality if liberties are taken in the interests of the case.'

'I have had occasion to hear that sort of thing from policemen, but such views sound rather strange coming from an official of the Public Prosecutor's Office,' said Anisii, thinking that was exactly what Erast Petrovich would have told Izhitsin if he had been in Anisii's place.

However, when the investigator simply shrugged off this dignified and restrained reprimand with a gesture of annoyance, Tulipov changed to an official tone of voice: 'Would you please stick closer to the point, Mr Court Counsellor. What is your plan?'

They went into the forensic medical expert's office and sat down at the desk, since Zakharov himself was working on the body in the autopsy theatre.

'Well, all right then,' said Izhitsin, giving this man he outranked a superior glance. 'So let's put our thinking caps on. Who does our belly-slasher kill? Streetwalkers, vagrants, beggars - that is, women from the lower depths of the city, society's discarded garbage. So now, let's remember where the killings have taken place. Well, there's no way to tell where the nameless bodies in the ditches were brought from. We know well enough that in such cases our Moscow police don't take too much trouble over the paperwork. But on the other hand, we do know where the bodies we dug out of the named graves came from.'

Izhitsin opened an exercise book with an oilcloth cover.

'Aha, look! The beggar Marya Kosaya was killed on the eleventh of February on Maly Tryokhsvyatsky Lane, at Sychugin's dosshouse. Her throat was cut, her belly was slit open, her liver is missing. The prostitute Alexandra Zotova was found on the fifth of February in Svininsky Lane, lying in the road. Again with her throat cut and her womb missing. These two are obvious clients.'

The investigator walked across to the police map of the city that was hanging on the wall and began jabbing at it with a long, pointed finger: 'So, let's take a look. Tuesday's Andreichkina was found just here, on Seleznyovskaya Street. Today's little girl was found by the Novotikhvinsk level crossing, right here. From one crime scene to the other it's no more than a
verst.
And it's the same distance to the Vypolzovo Tatar suburb as well.'

'What has the Tatar suburb got to do with anything?' Tulipov asked.

'Later, later,' said Izhitsin, with another impatient gesture. 'Just hold your horses... Now the two old bodies. Maly Tryokhsvyatsky Lane - that's there. And there's Svininsky Lane. All in the same patch. Three hundred, maybe five hundred steps from the synagogue in Spasoglinishchevsky Lane.'

'But even closer to Khitrovka,' Anisii objected. 'Someone gets killed there every day of the week. That's no surprise: it
^?
s a hotbed of crime.'

'They get killed all right, but not like this! No, Tulipov, this smacks of something more than plain Christian villainy. I can sense a fanatical spirit at work in all these paunchings. An alien spirit. Orthodox folks get up to lots of beastly things, but nothing like this. And don't start with all that nonsense about the London Ripper being Russian and now he's come back for some fun and games in the land of his birth. That's rubbish! If a Russian can travel round cities like London, it means he comes from the cultured classes. And why would an educated man go rummaging in the stinking guts of some Manka Kosaya? Can you picture it?'

Anisii couldn't picture it and he shook his head honestly.

"Well then, you see. It's so obvious. You have to be a crackpot theoretician like your chief to abandon common sense for abstract intellectual postulates. But I, Tulipov, am a practical man.'

'But what about the knowledge of anatomy?' Anisii asked, dashing to his chief's defence. And the professional use of a surgical instrument? Only a doctor could have committed all these outrages!'

Izhitsin smiled triumphantly. 'That's where Fandorin is wrong! That hypothesis of his stuck in my throat from the very start. It doesn't hap-pen,' he said, hammering home every syllable. 'It simply doesn't happen, and that's all there is to it. If a man from respectable society is a pervert, then he'll think up something a bit more subtle than these abominations.' The investigator nodded in the direction of the autopsy room. 'Remember the Marquis de Sade. Or take that business last year with the notary Shiller - remember that? He got this bint blind drunk, stuck a stick of dynamite up her, you know where, and lit the fuse. An educated man - you can see that straight away; but a monster, of course. But only some low scum is capable of the loathsome abominations we're dealing with here. And as for the knowledge of anatomy and the surgical skill, you'll see that's all very easily explained, you know-alls.'

The investigator paused, raised one finger for dramatic effect and whispered: A butcher! There's someone who knows anatomy as well as any surgeon. Every day of the week he's separating out livers and stomachs and kidneys as neat and tidy as you like, every bit as precise as the late surgeon Pirogov. And a good butcher's knives are as sharp as any scalpel'

Tulipov said nothing. He was shaken. The obnoxious Izhitsin was right! How could they have forgotten about butchers?

Izhitsin was pleased by Anisii's reaction. And now, about my plan.' He went up to the map again. 'Seems we have two focal points. The first two bodies were found over here, the last two - over here. What reason the criminal had for changing his area of activity we don't know. Perhaps he decided it was more convenient to commit murder in the north of Moscow than in the central district: waste lots, shrubs and bushes, not so many houses. To be on the safe side, I'm regarding all the butchers who live in either of the regions that interest us as possible suspects. I already have a list.' The investigator took out a sheet of paper and put it on the desk in front of Anisii. 'Only seventeen names in all. Note the ones that are marked with a six-pointed star or a crescent moon. This is the Tatar suburb, here in Vypolzovo. The Tatars have their own butchers, and real bandits they are. Let me remind you that it's less than a
verst
from the suburb to the shed where Andreichkina was found. It's the same distance to the railway crossing where the little girl's body was found. And here' - the long finger shifted across the map - 'in the immediate proximity of Tryokhsvyatsky and Svininsky Lanes, is the synagogue. That's where the kosher meat-carvers are, the filthy Yid butchers who kill the cattle in that barbarous fashion of theirs. Have you ever seen how it's done? Very much like the work of our good friend. Now do you get a whiff of where the case is heading?'

To judge from the pompous investigator's flaring nostrils, it was heading for a sensational trial, serious honours and breath-takingly rapid promotion.

'You're a young man, Tulipov. Your future's in your own hands. You can cling to Fandorin and end up looking stupid. Or you can work for the good of the cause and then I won't forget you. You're a smart lad, an efficient worker. I need helpers like you.'

Anisii was about to open his mouth to put the insolent fellow in his place, but Izhitsin was already carrying on with what he was saying: 'Of the seven butchers who interest us, four are Tatars and three are Yids. They're at the top of the list of suspects. But to avoid any reproaches of prejudice, I'm arresting the lot. And I'll give them a thorough working over. I have the experience for it, thank God.' He smiled rapaciously and rubbed his hands together. 'So right then. First of all I'll start by feeding the heathen scum salt beef, because they don't observe the Orthodox fast. They won't eat pork, so I'll order them to be given beef: we respect other people's customs. I'll give the Orthodox butchers a bit of salted herring. I won't give them anything to drink. Or let them sleep either. After they've been in for a night, they'll start howling, and in the morning, to make sure they don't get too bored, I'll call them out by turn and my lads will teach them a lesson with their "sticks of salami". Do you know what a "stick of salami" is?'