LIEUTENANT OPERATIVNIK (Detective) Pavel Rosikhina pulled back the sheet-a tablecloth, really-that some kind soul had draped over the body and stared into the wide-eyed face of what he’d assumed was yet another Mafia execution. Maybe not. Despite the man’s pallor, it was clear he wasn’t Chechnyan or an ethnic Russian, which surprised him, given their location. A Caucasian Russian. Interesting.
The single bullet had entered the man’s skull just above and an inch forward of his left ear and exited… Rosikhina leaned over the table, careful to touch nothing but the tablecloth, and peered at the right side of the man’s head, which lay resting on the booth’s cushioned upper edge. There. An egg-sized exit hole behind the man’s right ear. The blood and brain matter splattered on the wall behind the booth fit with the bullet’s trajectory, which meant the killer would have been standing… here. Right in front of the kitchen door. How close would be a matter for the coroner to decide, but looking at the entry wound, Rosikhina knew it wasn’t done at close-contact range. There were no powder-burn marks on the skin around the wound, nor any stippling. The wound itself was perfectly round, which further ruled out a contact shot, which usually left behind a distinctive star-shaped rip in the skin. Rosikhina covered his nose against the fecal stink. As did many victims of sudden death, the man’s bowels and bladder had relaxed. He carefully pulled back the man’s sport coat, first the left side, then the right, patting the pockets for a wallet. There was nothing but a silver ballpoint pen, a white handkerchief, and an extra button for the man’s suit coat.
“How close, you think?” he heard, and turned around.
His sometimes partner, Gennady Oleksei, stood a few feet away, cigarette dangling from his half-smiling lips and hands shoved into the pockets of his leather coat.
Over Oleksei’s shoulder Rosikhina could see that the uniformed militia officers had finished herding the restaurant’s customers out the front door, where they stood milling around, waiting to be questioned. The restaurant’s staff-four waiters, a cashier, and three cooks-were seated at the now-empty tables, giving their names to another officer.
Oleksei and Rosikhina worked in the Saint Petersburg militia’s Main Office for Combating Financial Crimes, a subdivision of the Criminal Investigations Department. Unlike most Western police agencies, Russian operativniks were not assigned permanent partners. Why this was no one had ever explained to Rosikhina, but he assumed it had something to do with funding. Everything had to do with funding, from whether they got their own cars from week to week to whether they worked alone or with partners.
“You’re assigned?” Rosikhina asked.
“Called me at home. How close?” Oleksei repeated.
“Two to six feet. Easy shot.” He noticed something lying on the seat behind the victim’s buttocks. He leaned over for a closer look. “Got a gun,” he told Oleksei. “Semiautomatic. Looks like a Makarov. He was trying, at least. A second faster on the draw and maybe…”
“Now, there’s a question for you,” Oleksei said. “Would you rather go like our friend here, knowing it was coming, or would you rather just… poof. Be gone. Nothing.”
“Good Christ, Gennady…”
“Come on, play along.”
Rosikhina sighed. “I guess I’d rather go in my sleep-a hundred years old and lying next to Natalia.”
“Pavel, Pavel… You never humor me.”
“Sorry. I don’t like this. Something’s off. It feels like and looks like your standard Mafia hit, but this sure isn’t your standard victim-not sitting in a place like this, at least.”
“He was either very brave or very stupid,” Oleksei said.
“Or desperate.” To come into a place like this, their Caucasian Russian victim had to be in search of something more than a good bowl of djepelgesh and some of that god-awful pondur music-music that sounded to Pavel like cats in heat.
“Or really hungry,” Oleksei added. “Another boss, maybe? He doesn’t look familiar, but he could be on the books.”
“I doubt it. They never travel without their own little army. Even if somebody had managed to get to him here and put a bullet into his head at this range, his bodyguards would have started a god-awful firefight. There’d be holes everywhere, and a lot more bodies. No, we’ve got one bullet and one dead man. Very deliberate. An ambush, professionally done. The question is, who is he and why was he important enough to kill?”
“Well, we’re not going to get any answers out of this bunch.”
Rosikhina knew his partner was right. Fear of, or loyalty to, the Obshina tended to silence even the most helpful of souls. The witness reports would invariably fall into one of three general categories: I saw nothing; someone in a mask ran in, shot the man, and ran out, it all happened so fast; and Rosikhina’s favorite, Ya ne govo’ryu po russki. I don’t speak Russian.
And of those accounts, the only true statement they’d get was likely the last one: It all happened so fast. Not that he blamed any of them. The Krasnaya Mafiya, or Bratva (brotherhood), or Obshina-whatever the name or denomination-was ruthless beyond compare. Witnesses and their entire families were often targeted for death simply because some boss in some dark basement somewhere had decided the person might have information they might disclose to authorities. And it wasn’t merely a matter of dying, Rosikhina reminded himself. The Mafia was often ingenious and unhurried in its execution methods. What, he wondered, would he do in similar circumstances? Though the Mafia generally refrained from killing militia officers-it was bad for business-it had happened in the past. Armed and trained as they were, cops could protect themselves, but the average citizen, the teacher or factory worker or accountant, what chance did they have? None, really. The militia had neither the money nor the manpower to protect every witness, and the average citizen knew it, so they kept their mouths shut and kept their heads down. Even now, some of the restaurant’s patrons were terrified for their lives, having simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a wonder places like this managed to stay open at all.
It was that kind of fear, Rosikhina thought, that made people wish for the old days, the return of Stalinesque control of the country, and in many ways Putin was doing just that with his “reform programs.” There was no middle ground with that, though. As long as there were political freedoms, personal rights, and an open market in Russia, there would be crime, both large and small-and there was in Stalin’s time, too, but not nearly as much. But that argument was something of a straw man, wasn’t it? Something that old communist hard-liners and ultranationalists used to decry democracy and capitalism, all the while forgetting or ignoring that the iron-fisted control of Soviet Russia had come at a high price indeed. What was that old saying? Hardship truncates memory? Rosikhina’s father, a Yakut fisherman by birth, had his own take on the concept: “When you’ve got a shrew for a wife, even the ugliest ex-girlfriend looks enticing.” And that, he knew, was what Soviet Russia really was, an ugly ex-girlfriend. Certainly she had her positive traits, but nothing you’d like to be reunited with. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an opinion many of his fellow citizens-some forty percent of them, according to the latest polls, suspect as they may be-shared. Or maybe it was what Oleksei had once accused him of being, a cockeyed optimist. Or was it “blind optimist”?
Now he gazed out the front windows of the restaurant, watching the grim-faced customers standing in tight clusters, their breath steaming in the cold night air, and wondered if his optimism was in fact unwarranted. A restaurant of thirty or so people who’d just twenty minutes earlier watched a man’s brains get blown out the side of his skull, and not a one would probably lift a finger to help them catch the killer.
“True, but you never know,” Rosikhina replied. “Better to ask and be surprised than the converse, don’t you think?”
Oleksei shrugged and smiled as only a Russian fatalist can. What can you do? Not much excited Oleksei; his composure was as permanent as the cigarette he seemed to always be smoking.
Then again, on rare occasions a few useful witness details would inadvertently slip through and give them something to pick at. More often, though, the statements were vague or contradictory, or both, leaving investigators with nothing but what they could glean from the body or bodies left behind.
“Besides,” Rosikhina said, “without all those useless witness statements to process, we won’t have four glorious hours of paperwork and bad coffee ahead of us.”
“Four hours? If we’re lucky.”
“Damn it, where’s the coroner?”
Until the victim was officially pronounced dead, the body would remain where it was, dead and glazed eyes staring at the ceiling.
“He’s on his way,” Oleksei said. “I checked before I came. Busy night, I guess.”
Rosikhina leaned over and snagged the gun’s trigger guard with his index finger and lifted it from the seat. “Nine millimeter.” He ejected the magazine and cycled back the slide. A bullet tumbled out of the chamber and clinked onto the floor.
“Well, he was ready for something. Any missing?”
Rosikhina shook his head and sniffed the barrel. “Happened too fast, I suspect. Recently cleaned. Well, I’ll be damned… Look, of all things, Gennady, the serial number’s been erased.”
“Will miracles never cease?”
Bad guys often acid-erased the serial numbers on murder weapons but rarely re-inscribed them. If that was the case here, the Makarov’s number might actually lead somewhere. Cockeyed optimism.
And probably misplaced, Rosikhina reminded himself.
As often happened in homicide cases, whether in the West or in Moscow, Lieutenant Rosikhina and Oleksei would learn little either from those present in the restaurant at the time of the murder or from the canvass of the surrounding neighborhood. The Chechnyan community was tight-knit, distrusting of the police, and deeply afraid of the Obshina. And with good reason. Its brutality knew few bounds. A witness would pay not only with his own life but with those of his family as well, a spectacle which he’d likely be forced to watch before he, too, was killed. The prospect of seeing one’s children carved up with a hacksaw tended to close loose lips. Even so, Rosikhina had little choice but to go through the motions of taking statements, however unproductive, and tracking down leads, however insubstantial.
They would diligently work the murder, but in the end what few small leads they had would evaporate and they’d be forced to set the case aside. With this thought, Rosikhina looked sadly at the victim. “Sorry, my friend.”