Butterfly Skin (7 page)

“I wonder why everyone likes to say that when the press writes about these things, it provokes the serial killers?” Ksenia asks testily. “Anyone would think Chikatilo was a media star. And anyway, if I remember rightly, there were plenty of psychotic killers in the Soviet Union, and everyone knew about them, even though there was never anything in the papers.”

“Aha,” Alexei says with a nod, “my parents told me about Mosgas.”

“Who?” Ksenia asks, and Alexei is surprised: five years is a big difference. An entirely different generation, they never knew the Soviet regime, they learned about psychotic killers from
The Silence of the Lambs
. He explains:

“Well, he pretended to work for the Moscow gas supply, checking for leaks. He used to ring the doorbell and say ‘Mosgas,’ and when people opened the door, he hacked them to death with an axe. There was even a joke about it. The husband comes to the door: ‘Who’s there?’ – ‘Mosgas.’ – ‘Come in, come in. The axe is in the bathroom, my mother-in-law’s in the kitchen.’”

Ksenia smiles and says:

“But they caught him when he went to a building where they already had electric cookers.”

A strange kind of joke, Alexei thinks and then, seeing his baffled expression, Ksenia explains.

“I’ve never had a gas cooker. Why would I open the door if I heard the word ‘Mosgas’? For me that would be as strange as opening the door to the words ‘Mosmunicanal’ or “Transsib.’”

She puts down her empty cup and reaches for the dessert. Thin, strong hands with the nails bitten down, not so nice, but if she took care of herself, she’d be way sexy. A ring at the door. Mosmunicanal. Ksenia in the doorway, the psycho just outside. Alexei thinks her icy tone and steely composure would probably be of help.

“
…
But to get back to the question of whether the same murderer is responsible for all these crimes
,” she reads aloud, “
then the killer’s ostentatious behavior could be misleading: once the press has written about this, any murderer could fake the psychotic’s signature. I think our press was rather hasty in spreading panic about this.
”

“Interesting logic,” says Ksenia. “We shouldn’t spread panic because there might be several psychos in Moscow and not just one. We certainly have some remarkable people living in this city.”

“Well, a killer doesn’t have to be a psycho,” says Alexei, taking his interviewee’s side, “it could be a domestic killing that the murderer disguises as one of a series.”

“A domestic killing with the sexual organs cut out and signs of torture,” says Ksenia, wiping her fingers with a napkin. “Like I said, we certainly have some remarkable people living in this city.”

Alexei nods, then can’t resist asking:

“But it’s a good interview, isn’t it?”

Just look, he thinks, six months ago I’d never have believed anyone who told me this girl’s opinion would matter to me. Maybe it doesn’t even matter now: all I’m doing is asking the boss’s opinion about new material. That’s perfectly normal.

“Yes, it’s good,” Ksenia replies with a nod, “but this is already the tenth interview on this story. It’s all done right, it’s all good, but what’s going to make the reader, well, I don’t know, remember it, I suppose? Make it different from the other dozen?”

“Of course,” Alexei says, “it would be better if we caught the murderer. But that only happens in Hollywood movies.”

“No,” replies Ksenia, getting up. “It’s not our job to catch the murderer. But the thought nagging away at me is how we can come up with something else, make this a serious subject of discussion.”

Five years’ difference, oh yeah. Make this a serious subject. As if it was still the late eighties and Perestroika, when people really were interested in serious subjects.

“And another thing,” Ksenia says, “There’s something I wanted to ask you, not to do with work. What do you know about this man?” And she mentions the name.

“Why do you want to know?” Alexei asks.

“It’s not for me,” says Ksenia. “It’s for a girlfriend of mine. She’s wondering whether she should go to work for him.”

Ksenia repeats the man’s name again, and Alexei shakes his head and says:

“No, I’ve never heard of him before. But I can take a look on Google.”

“I’ve already looked on Google,” Ksenia replies and hands him the printout of his interview. “You think about how much more you can squeeze out of this psycho.”

Alexei thinks that there was a time when he would have grabbed at this opportunity. A great beginning for a Hollywood movie. An independent journalistic investigation. But it is some years now since he stopped expecting his work to bring him fame or even satisfaction. Maybe he should never have joined the journalism faculty. He ought to have been a computer programmer, or even a lawyer, if it came to the pinch. Normal human professions.

THE DARKNESS OF THE MOSCOW WINTER EVENINGS. A
bright-colored kilim on the floor. A one-room flat for two hundred and fifty dollars a month. A matte laptop screen. A black TV screen. Ksenia, sitting in the only armchair with her legs pulled up, chewing on her nails. Stay home alone, don’t think about Sasha, watch TV, read books, surf the web. Nothing feels right, she’s all fingers and thumbs, everything’s wrong: the cheap pirate DVDs she bought at the underground station get stuck, the movies are boring and affected, like some kind of
Ripley’s Game
, tell me, who on Earth watches this stuff, the latest Murakami that came out last week has already been read and brings no more pleasure. Stay home alone, remember Sasha, stand pensively gazing into an open drawer, masturbate, stretching your breasts so far by hanging weights on the nipples that they leave bruises. Come quickly, but still feel the same emptiness inside. Stay home alone, don’t think about Sasha, remember Sasha, stand there holding a long sewing needle, figuring out the best place to jab it in. It’s a bad sign, you know it is, bad: in a little while now you’ll start cutting yourself.

Put the needle away: remember instead how it all started. You had just finished tenth grade, and Mom was just about to go on vacation to Greece, supposedly with aunty Mila, but actually with aunty Mila’s current husband. She’d been complaining for a long time that they didn’t have any money, Ksenia’s father didn’t really pay the alimony properly, she’d have to borrow, and then work for six months without any weekends off – stupid contracts, legal documents, forced labor for a translator.

“Then stay at home,” Ksenia said in a fit of teenage fury and in reply was accused of being heartless, egotistic and callous.

“I’ve no place to lay my head in my own house!” Mom shouted. “When I’m dying, no one will give me a glass of water. I do everything for you, and you don’t want to let me go away for two weeks’ holiday! Lena’s daughter’s already earning money, you’re the only millstone, still left hanging round my neck.”

Lena’s daughter was three years older than Ksenia, but that wasn’t important. Ksenia bit her lip and said she would get a summer job, and Mom wouldn’t have to work all fall without any weekends off. When Ksenia told her father, he tried to protest, and even phoned her mother, but she snapped back: “This is a very good thing, let the girl get used to financial independence. Or she’ll grow up a loser like you.”

That was the final argument in every row, and it successfully blocked all her dad’s attempts to interfere in his daughter’s upbringing. Ksenia remembered that when she was in fifth grade, just after they got divorced, her mom said she had to work harder at her studies so there was no point in her going to the dance studio three times a week. Ksenia liked dancing; when she danced she felt like she grew up and became as beautiful as her mom – in high-heeled shoes, enveloped in a cloud of perfume and wine – and her dad always came to the performances and admired her and told her “you’re my little beauty,” but in fifth grade it all came to an end. Ksenia sat in her room and did her lessons in order not to cry and in the kitchen Dad, who had come for the weekend to see his daughter, tried to explain something to Mom, but she just kept repeating: “If the girl wastes her time on nonsense like that, she’ll end up a loser, like you.”

And this time too, her mother said to her father: “It’s a good thing, let her get used to being independent,” but she told Ksenia that she was a fine girl, of course, but really there wasn’t any need, the family had money anyway, “if you’re doing it for me, there’s no need.”

“Oh no, Mom,” said Ksenia, “it’s just that I think it’s time I started earning some money.”

During the holidays Ksenia and Marinka found jobs as couriers from an advertisement. There wasn’t a lot to the job: collect correspondence from several firms and deliver it to the addresses shown. True, it took almost all day, but they promised to pay them a hundred dollars a month. Over the summer that would mount up to three hundred, not really a lot, but a decent sum, enough to stop her feeling like a sponger.

Mom left on June 25, and the next day Marinka phoned and said she wasn’t going to work because she was ill. Ksenia asked what was wrong with her, she said she’d caught a cold and Ksenia started getting ready, although she hadn’t liked the sound of Marinka’s voice. She was already half way out the door when the phone rang again: through her tears Marinka confessed that the evening before the man she handed in her list of jobs to had raped her.

“I got back in the evening,” Marinka sobbed, “and there was no one in the place apart from him. I followed him into the office, as usual, and he asked if I’d like some tea. And I said yes, because I’d got caught in the rain and I was frozen. He put in a little splash of cognac, and then started making passes at me and, well…”

“So did you let him, or did he rape you?” Ksenia asked.

“I don’t know,” Marinka answered, “I kept saying ‘I don’t want to.’ In America it would be rape.”

“And what are you going to do?” Ksenia asked. “Will you go to the police?”

“No, of course not! I just won’t go back there anymore, that’s all.”

“But what about the money? They still haven’t paid you anything. Don’t be stupid, Marinka!”

“Well, that means there won’t be any money,” Marinka sobbed, “I won’t go back there again. Why don’t you just stop hassling me?” she said and added after a pause: “He said I could call him Dimochka.”

And for some reason, that was the moment when Ksenia’s fury turned everything black in front of her eyes. That “Dimochka” stung her far more than the rape, more than the fact that Marinka was willing to forego the money as long as she never had to go there again. Ksenia knew these fits of fury – because of them the kids in her class thought she was crazy and were afraid to tease her even in elementary school. But just then Ksenia recalled what Lyova’s
sensei
used to say: you mustn’t allow your negative emotions to take complete control of you, you must direct them, put all their energy into the blow. And so she carried her fury with her all the way, like a glass of water, trying not to spill a drop. She had a picture in front of her eyes all the time: the villainous Dimochka tearing Marinka’s clothes off, her matte skin gleaming dully in the semi-darkness of the office with its cheap “European-style” refurbishment, her light hair billowing out in a halo round her head. The picture was blurred, not because Ksenia couldn’t remember Dimochka’s face properly, but because the mist of her fury prevented her from seeing any details.

In the office Ksenia took the list of jobs and the correspondence as usual, and only then asked in an icy voice if the managing director was in. Dimochka, a tall, balding middle-aged man, gave her a surprised look through his spectacles and asked why she needed to see the manager. I just do, Ksenia said in a voice that immediately made him take her right across the office to reception.

“Galochka,” he said to the secretary, “this courier girl here wants to have a word with Arkadii Pavlovich, I don’t know what about.”

“Arkadii Pavlovich is busy,” said Galochka, without looking up from her computer monitor.

“I’ll only be a moment,” said Ksenia, opening the door of the manager’s office.

Five minutes later Dimochka, blushing bright red, was standing in front of the manager. His lips were trembling and the eyes behind his spectacles were swollen with tears.

“She wanted to…” he babbled.

“You stupid prick,” Arkadii Pavlovich hissed, “she’s under age! It’s a criminal offence! Even if she did want to!”

Ksenia had calculated correctly: people of the older generation didn’t know what the age of consent was.

“We’re prepared to pay compensation,” said Arkadii Pavlovich, “I’ll deduct whatever you think appropriate from his salary.”

“I’m not sure I want to talk about compensation,” said Ksenia. “When a girl takes money for a man having sex with her, it looks more like prostitution than compensation. I’d just like my colleague to be given what she’s already earned. If possible without coming into the office.”

Ten minutes later Ksenia left the office with Marinka’s hundred dollars.

“There, you see,” she told her friend, “you even earned it for three days less than me.”

But the following day turned out to be Ksenia’s last day at work too. The first client she came to noticed that the package had been opened. There was nothing in it but a letter, and he was supposed to have received a small sum of money as well. Three hundred and fifty dollars, nothing to worry about, we’ll sort it out in a moment, he told the hysterical Ksenia, and dialed the number of the office. Of course, Dimochka swore that when he gave Ksenia the envelope it was sealed and the money was inside. He took his revenge on Ksenia in the manager’s office.

“They start with blackmail and move on to theft,” he said.

Even if Arkadii Pavlovich understood what was going on, he didn’t see fit to do anything. They agreed on a compromise: they considered that Ksenia had lost the money, and so they wouldn’t go to the police either (Dimochka couldn’t hold back his smile at that word “either”), and they wouldn’t ask Ksenia to make good the loss, because they realized she was just a girl and she didn’t have any real money – we’re not some kind of vicious brutes, are we, Ksyusha? But, naturally, it was out of the question for her to carry on working or to be paid for June.