Black Knight in Red Square (5 page)

Now he sat at his desk, a metro map in front of him with the list of locations of the muggings. It was true. Each mugging and rape had taken place within walking distance of a stop on the green line. No two had taken place near the same station.

He marked them off with a pencil by date. The first attack had been a month ago near the Volkovskaya station. The next was a short walk from the Sokol station. The pattern was clear. The muggers were using this line and moving closer to central Moscow. If the pattern held, the next attack would take place near Pushkin Square.

But there was something wrong. There was no mugging near the Byelorusskaya station. Why would they skip that station, if indeed they were working along the line and using it to escape? The most obvious answer was that Byelorusskaya was their home station, where they worked from and where they might be recognized. It made sense. So, what was next? Why did these muggings take place early in the evening? Wouldn't it be better for the criminals to wait till total darkness? The answer was almost laughable. They committed these crimes after work; they left their jobs, went out and beat and raped women, and then promptly went home.

Tkach could wait at the Pushkin Square metro station shortly before dark in the hope of seeing a gang of young men who fit the description of the criminals, but miss them in the crowds. Or they might change their pattern.

No, it would be better to watch the Byelorusskaya station and painstakingly follow any suspicious group. But that, too, might take days, weeks, months. The great open square near the station was especially crowded in the evening.

At that moment he put it together. One of the victims had told him that she thought she'd recognized one of the muggers. He was a dark young man who had sold her a drink near the statue in Gorky Square.

Twenty minutes after the idea came to him, Sasha Tkach was standing in Gorky Square, eating his lunch and pretending to admire the statue of Maxim Gorky erected in 1951. Chewing thoughtfully, Tkach pushed his blond hair from his forehead, skipped out of the way of two little boys who were playing a game, and pretended to admire the old Byelorussian railway station, one of the few structures that remain from Moscow's past. The station is over a hundred years old with trains leaving daily for Paris, Vienna, London, Oslo, and Stockholm.

Tkach had seen it all before, had been in the garden, heard his mother's tale of welcoming home the war heroes, in the square in 1945, but today his thoughts were elsewhere. Several young men wandered by selling drinks, but all were blond. Then, after about an hour, Tkach saw what he was looking for. A young man with straight dark hair, looking very much like a French or American rocker of the 1950s, strode down from Leningrad Prospekt carrying a basketful of bottled drinks. Tkach began following him at a discreet distance. It might be the wrong youth, but Tkach had a hunch. The man was easy to follow. He moved slowly through the crowd and did not seem particularly concerned with selling his wares. Then a second young man joined him. A few minutes later, a third joined them and then a fourth. They laughed, pushed one another, looked at the passing women. Then they checked their watches and headed for the metro station. They took the underground walkway across the street, and Tkach almost lost them in the crowd, but they were in no hurry, and he found them well before they entered the station.

Tkach got on the same car with them and his heart started pounding when, two stops later at Pushkin Square, they began pushing their way off the train. The pattern fit.

Out on the street they hesitated, discussing whether they should move across the square toward the Rossyia Cinema or down Gorky Street. They opted for Gorky Street, and Tkach followed. They turned off at the Stanislavsky Theater, made another turn a block farther on, and stopped. The street was narrow and almost deserted. Tkach kept walking and went right past them as if he were in a hurry to get home. They watched him, he was sure, as he turned a corner. Darkness was coming now, and Tkach started looking for a public building, an open door. It was time to get help. He was confident that he had found the attackers, even though he had no evidence. The victims could identify them. That would be proof enough. He found a small gift shop and ducked inside, watching the window for the approaching muggers.

“Yes?” said the woman behind the counter without enthusiasm, recognizing Tkach for what he was, a Russian and not a foreign tourist.

“Your phone,” he said, looking back. The young men had turned the corner and were walking toward the entrance to a building Tkach did not recognize. It was a large new office building.

“We have no phone,” the dark-haired shop owner said.

“Then find one.” He pulled out his wallet and held his identification in front of the woman's face. “Find one and call Petrovka nine-one-one. Ask for Chief Inspector Rostnikov.” The young men had now disappeared into the building across the street. “If he's not there, ask for Inspector Karpo. Or ask for anyone and tell them Inspector Tkach needs help in that building.”

He pointed to the building, stuffed his wallet in his pocket and turned to leave. But the woman looked unimpressed, and Tkach said angrily, “I vow to you, woman, if you do not find a phone and make the call, and do it quickly, you will be answering questions tonight instead of going home.”

He dashed out of the store and ran across the street.

He was panting lightly when he entered the building. He loosened his tie and looked around the lobby. It was the headquarters of some branch of the railway and transportation system. A guard should have been in the lobby to take names. Even though it was a bit late, some people were still leaving the building. Now, he thought, where are they? Did they spot me? Do they know of some other way out? Or have they already found a victim and pulled her into a stairwell, or…One of them was standing around a corner near an elevator door. Where were the others?

The young man pressed the button impatiently, glanced over his shoulder at Tkach, who was walking toward him, and showed no sign of recognition. Tkach waited with him at the elevator. Without looking at the man, Tkach could see that he was about twenty. He outweighed Tkach by twenty pounds, and was a few inches taller. As Tkach recalled, this was one of the smaller members of the group.

Tkach didn't have his gun with him. He had not expected to need it. In truth, he had carried it as seldom as possible since he shot the young robber this past winter. But Tkach knew that he could subdue this one young man.

Looking at Tkach's loosened tie, the young man smiled and said, “I think it will be a warm summer.”

“Perhaps,” said Tkach indifferently.

“You work here?” the young man asked casually.

“Sometimes,” Tkach replied, giving the man an imperious look to indicate that such a question was far too familiar for his taste.

The elevator arrived, and the two men stepped inside. The operator was a woman about fifty. Tkach didn't want to seem reluctant to give his floor number, so he said, “Twelve.” The young man said, “Seven.”

The elevator rose slowly. The woman adjusted her glasses, and Tkach pretended to ignore the young man. When the doors opened at seven, the young man turned to Tkach and smiled slightly before getting off.

As soon as the doors closed Tkach said, “Comrade, let me off at the next floor. Then take the elevator down to the lobby and wait there for the police, who will arrive soon. Take them up to the seventh floor and tell them to be careful.”

The elevator operator looked over her shoulder at him as if he were mad and went past the eighth floor. Tkach, sweating now, whipped out his wallet and showed his identification. “MVD,” he said. “There is a gang of rapists in this building. You just let one of them out on the seventh floor. The others are probably there now looking for a victim.” They were passing the ninth floor, and she was looking at him stupidly with her mouth open. He went on. “You might be that victim. Let me out. Then go right back down without stopping and do what I said. Do you understand?”

She nodded as they passed the tenth floor. He reached over and pushed the button for eleven. She pressed herself against the wall. The door opened, and Tkach said, “Now go down. Quick.”

As soon as he was out of the car, she pushed the doors closed and was gone.

The dark hallway was quiet and deserted. Then Tkach saw a woman of about sixty with a bucket in her hand.

The cleaning women, he thought. They're after a cleaning woman. He dashed past the woman. He ran down the narrow concrete stairs two at a time, almost stumbling.

On the seventh floor the corridor was also dark and deserted. Staying in the shadows, he moved along slowly, listening, and then he heard something, a ticking perhaps, metal hitting metal. He followed the sound, carefully listening for voices, hearing none, trying to keep his footsteps as soundless as possible. It took him a few minutes to determine that the tapping was coming from a room at the far end of the corridor. Perhaps it was a cleaning woman.

He stopped at the door, listening for a moment to the soft clanking, then pushed it open. The office was dark, but the sound was quite clear. And then the lights went on.

One of the men was tapping a knife against a metal desk. There was a man on each side of the door. The one who had been on the elevator stood in the corner, his arms folded, a smile on his face.

The one with the knife stopped tapping.

“You followed like a fish,” he said, showing a very poor set of teeth. He was the biggest of the group, quite big and clearly the leader.

“I am a police inspector,” Tkach said, trying not to show fear. “There are police downstairs by now. You don't want trouble with the police. Just come with me and answer a few questions.”

“About what?” asked the leader, closing his knife and putting it in his pocket.

“Routine,” said Tkach, cursing himself for sweating.

“Ah,” said the leader, suddenly understanding. “You mean about my selling drinks in the square without a license.”

“Yes,” said Tkach. “That is it.”

“And you followed me all the way here for that great crime?”

“And to see if you were involved in any other criminal activity,” Tkach said. “I don't like your looks, but I can see you're not up to anything more than mild hooliganism.”

“Do any of you believe this baby face?” the leader asked.

There was no answer. The leader came around the desk and moved in front of Tkach.

“Those women,” he said. “That's why you followed us. We want to know how you got on to us. You tell us. Then we push you around a little, tie you up, and run. We've got places in the North we can go.”

It was a lie, a poor lie, a game to give Tkach hope and then take it away. The image of the battered women came back to Tkach and he said, “There is no place you can hide in the Soviet Union. You know that. You might as well give up and hope that you get labor in a detention camp.”

“I don't like this,” came a voice from behind Tkach. It was one of the men at the door, the one who looked like the youngest. “If the police are coming, we have to get out of here. Let's just kill him and go.”

The leader shook his head sadly at the ignorance of his underling.

“There are no police coming. He's the only one. He hasn't had time to call for help. He's alone. We saw he was alone.”

Tkach now understood the situation. The leader enjoyed making the victim suffer; they had probably never worked on a man before, and he was trying to decide how to handle it.

He looked at Tkach and suddenly threw a punch into the policeman's stomach. Tkach doubled over, and the man grabbed his hair and pulled him up straight.

“To the elevator,” the leader said. “We'll make it a double. Our brave policeman can watch while we show him first hand how we do our work on the elevator operator. Misha, when we get on, you close the elevator doors. Boris, you grab the woman and throw her on the floor. Alexi and I will watch our inspector.”

When they turned Tkach around, he was still trying to catch his breath. Breathe slowly, he told himself as they walked to the elevator. As soon as the door opened, he would make his move, try to fight them off and get the door closed. It wasn't much of a plan, but it was the best he could do. At the very least, he would smash the face of the leader before they got their knives into him. May the first punch be wonderful. May it break him, kill him.

He dragged his feet and doubled over, trying to slow them down, but it didn't do much good. He had told the elevator operator not to come up here, to wait for the police, but he had little hope that she would obey. And he couldn't be sure the woman in the gift shop had called. Even if she had, he didn't know how long it would take for help to come. It would almost certainly be too late.

The men surrounded him at the elevator door and pushed the button. Tkach hoped fervently that the elevator would not come but slowly, steadily, it was coming. He looked up at the inscription embossed on the panel above the elevator door: The Revolution Continues. Transportation Forward.

With that, the door of the elevator groaned open, and two of the muggers stepped forward to grab the operator, but the woman was not there. Instead, a stubby washtub of a man with a dark scowl and muscular, hairy arms seized the two men. Both came skittering out almost instantly, one thrown across the corridor against the wall, the other sliding back on his rear.

Tkach straightened up and slammed the heel of his hand into the nose of the leader. The man screamed, and stumbled back, holding his face in his hands.

The other mugger, the one who had ridden up in the elevator with Tkach, had his knife out and was advancing on Rostnikov, who stepped out slowly, staring at him. There was no time for Tkach to move, but neither was there need. Rostnikov ducked low as the man with the knife lunged, then grabbed the man's arm with one hand and his belt with the other. He lifted him and hurled him against the wall, where he sagged to the floor next to the man with the broken nose.