The Black Marble (42 page)

“The Russian language?”

“The
only
language as far as our mothers were concerned. They were monarchists, you see. They truly believed they were going back one day. Every single one of them dreamed of at least having their bones sent back someday when the Bolsheviks were overthrown. Do you have any idea how impractical they were, those immigrants? How thev dreamed? How mystical they were?”

“But you kids were happy?”

“Of course we were happy. It got a little tough
after
World War Two when it wasn't fashionable to be a Russian anymore. In fact, when I graduated from high school it was very unfashionable. We were in the Korean War, and kids used to call us Communists and Rods. The new immigrants from the second immigration had it worse. They actually
were
Soviets and got it from all sides. If you didn't go to church even the old Russian people called you a Bolshevik. The American kids didn't know the difference. We were
all
Bolsheviks, even though every single house of the first immigration had a picture of Nicholas Romanov displayed as reverently as an ikon. You could depend on it. Nicholas, then the Virgin, then
Khristos
.”

“Did you think in Russian?”

“Only until the fifth grade or so. Then I started to think in English. My Russian got terrible. But my mother lived long enough to hear Khrushchev on television and she said her Andrushka would always speak Russian better than that ignorant Ukrainian. She used to say that when that peasant farted you could hear it from Moscow to Malibu.” Valnikov stopped to laugh and wipe his eyes at the memory.

Natalie Zimmerman got up suddenly and walked naked to the kitchen and he heard her pouring something. He thought it was water but she returned with a tumbler full of vodka.

“Here,” she said.

“I don't want any more.”

“Please have some more. I'd like to talk.”

“But I don't need vodka to talk.”

“You might.”

“But I'm trying to cut down on my drinking.”

“Do it tomorrow. Tonight drink for me. I'll help you.”

Valnikov pulled himself up on the daybed and let her prop a pillow behind him. Then Natalie slipped under the sheet again next to him.

“Drink,” she said. And he drank.

“I want to hear more about your old partner.”

“Charlie Lightfoot?”

“Yes. Why was he such a good homicide detective?”

Valnikov drank now without prompting. “Good? He was good. He could cut through it all.”

“Yes?”

“Like the old black woman they found decomposing in her bed. The neighbors called to complain about the bad smell coming from her little cottage.” Valnikov stopped to drink again. “And the officer that got there discovered the glass was smashed out of a side window. And then he discovered a pane broken out of the back door. And then he discovered a burnt match on the back porch. And another in the kitchen. And another in the hall. And another …” He drank more vodka. Ah, what does Natalie call it? Mellow. Yes. “And another and another. Burnt matches leading all over the house and finally into her bedroom, where the trail stopped. And there she was. Charlie used to keep the crime lab photo. You see, the patrol officers had called the crime lab and latent prints and photo lab and their watch commander. Her hair was white and electric. It fanned out electric around her skull. She was so decomposed her eyes were silver sockets and her lips were mostly gone showing all her teeth clear up past where they should have been tissue and wasn't. Charlie took one look and said, No murder. No murder! they yelled. No murder? The house has been broken into. A burglar broke in and murdered her in her bed! I'll bet they'll find a knife wound! the patrol officers yelled. Maybe she was strangled. Oh, everyone was raising hell over this one.”

“And
was
it murder?” Natalie asked while Valnikov sipped at the glass.

“No murder,” Valnikov said. “Charlie got all the bluesuits together and showed them how it happened. The burglar came to the house at night. He broke out the pane in the back door. The glass is on the floor inside. He starts lighting matches, going around the house, pleased as punch, wondering how he's going to cart all this stuff away. Maybe there's a bad smell coming from the bedroom. Maybe he's got a cold and doesn't smell it. Anyway, the trail of matches tells us that he goes in there last. He's maybe singing to himself. She's got a TV set, a nice transistor radio, some money in a kitchen jar. He's going to make enough to buy some dope. He lights the very last match at the foot of the bed. Then he sees the corpse I described to you. The bedroom window is busted from the inside out. He yells and goes through the glass head first. He's still running …” Valnikov was shaking the daybed with his laughter. “She was ninety years old and died a natural death, the autopsy showed. He's still running …”

Valnikov, incredibly enough, almost had the tumbler emptied.
He
wouldn't the a natural death, she thought. Not if he continued to drink like that. Which of course she wasn't helping.

“Why did Charlie Lightfoot shoot himself?” she said suddenly.

Valnikov drained the glass. “They said it was a hunting accident.”

“Charlie Lightfoot was no hunter,” she reminded him.

Valnikov said, “He never should have retired. He had his work, at least.”

“Did he like his work?”

“He was old. He was very old for his age. He thought the world was draining into a sump hole. The Big Sewer is how he referred to everything. Gone down the Big Sewer, Charlie would say about a dead body. He was an atheist, Charlie was. And human beings were nothing more than … than something to rush down the Big Sewer.”

“He was your friend. He liked you, didn't he?”

“He did,” Valnikov nodded. “Except toward the end. He didn't care about anyone, especially not himself. I think I started drinking on duty then. I'd been a policeman twenty-one years, and even as a detective I never drank on duty. When all the other dicks had martinis and bourbon for lunch, I never drank on duty. We both started drinking a lot then. On duty, off duty.” Valnikov sighed. “When Charlie pulled the pin and went to be a mountain man I knew it wouldn't work out. We were both in the habit of daytime drinking then. We'd had the worst time either of us ever had then.”

“The worst time?”

“
Five
child murders in a month! Nobody ever had to handle that many so quickly. And we were only supposed to assist divisional detectives on their unsolved murders, on their whodunits.”

“Did you get the killer?”

“Killers!” Valnikov cried suddenly. “That's just it. They were unrelated killings. Five in a row, all under ten years old. Three by their mothers, one by a father, one by a mother
with
a father. They weren't whodunits. The divisional detectives should have been able to see the marks of old torture. Five in a row we had. That was too
many
.”

He dropped the water tumbler. It didn't spill. It was empty. “Here, let me get you some more,” Natalie Zimmerman said. And she was up and hurrying to the kitchen again. Let old Natalie help you. Sure. Let Natalie do the torturing. God, Valnikov could make you hate yourself. He had that way about him. She poured the glass half full of Russian vodka. Have a shot of oblivion, Valnikov. Kiss your liver good-bye. Compliments of your good old partner, Natalie Zimmerman. Let your partner turn your head into
piroshki
.

When she handed him the vodka his hands were shaking. He drank with both hands. He was perspiring and his teeth were chattering. She pulled a blanket up over them and got under the covers.

“What made you get in the fight with the doctor?”

“Doctor?”

“They kicked you out of homicide. They transferred you to Hollywood Detectives, didn't they? Was it drinking? There was some problem. At an autopsy.”

“Doctor,” he mumbled. And there it was! The sparkly dots beginning to shape into … a doctor! There was an Asian doctor. No, a Caucasian doctor.
Two
doctors.

“What is it, Valnikov?” she demanded.

He drank vodka. It spilled down his chin onto the curly cinnamon hair on his chest. “Sometimes I get a picture,” he said, staring off in the darkness at the picture forming. Siberia. Snow again. “The picture just gets … away.”

“Does it come every day?” Natalie Zimmerman was sitting up in the daybed, white flesh in the darkness.

“Every day,” Valnikov said. “If I could just get it once. It's like … déjà vu.”

“Déjà vu,” she said.

“It's déjà vu. But the most … intense kind of déjà vu. I … I know that if I could just get it clear and see it …”

“Does it come at night? In a dream?”

There it went. The sparkling dots were swimming and losing form.

“Do you dream about a rabbit?” she pressed.

Now it was coming back. Now, by God! The rabbit was hopping through the snow.

“The rabbit!”

“Do you dream about a rabbit?”

“Yes!” he cried.

“Take it easy,” Natalie said. “Drink a little vodka.”

Valnikov drained the water tumbler. She didn't know anyone could drink that much and stay conscious.

“What's the last autopsy you remember? It must have been the one where you got in trouble.”

“Last autopsy?” he said, watching the dots lose their shimmer. Watching the phantoms retreat in the darkness.

“How many autopsies have you attended?”

He looked at her and said, “Hundreds, I guess. I don't know.”

“And the
last
one. Who was dead?”

“The last one,” he muttered.

Was that the one with the pretty teenager who had died of a barbiturate overdose? Yes. No.

How about this one, Valnikov? This little chippy and her boyfriends, they have a pill-popping party and she … get this … she dies of an overdose. Look
.

The man plunges the turkey skewer into her flawless young belly. The steel dart squeaks when it goes in
.

Get this: The liver temperature says she was dead all the time the boys were gangfucking her last night. Imagine that? They banged a corpse! Know what one doper says when they told him that? He says, well, she always was a dead piece a ass. I didn't notice no difference. Isn't that a scream?

A scream
.

The little boy used to scream, Sergeant
.

Then why didn't you call the police, damn you!

But I didn't want to get involved
.

Involved! How long did you hear these screams in the night? How long?

Three weeks, the neighbor answers fearfully
.

Three weeks! Three weeks! If there's a hell, lady, you'll burn there! If there's a hell!

There is no hell, Charlie Lightfoot says. There's no heaven either. There's just the Big Sewer
.

Tutu was there. Charlie Lightfoot was there. The rabbit was there
.

“The rabbit!” Valnikov cried out. He had been drifting asleep and Natalie Zimmerman, who by now decided that it was very dangerous playing Dr. Jung, decided to let him.

He sat up straight in bed, dripping sweat and cried: “The rabbit!”

“What's the rabbit doing, Valnikov?”

“The hunter's gutting him,” Valnikov cried. “With a big knife. A butcher knife with a white handle like bone!”

“Try to remember, what did the hunter do then?”

And it came. For the first time in the months that it had been tormenting him it started to come. The picture was forming on the ceiling, among the sparks and motes and shimmering dots. “He's gutting it like a fish! He's reaching inside the throat that he's slashed open. It's like holding a fish by the gills. He just reaches clear inside and the little fish body jerks upward. He jerks the little body up with his strong hands.”

“The fish? The fish?” Natalie demanded.

“The rabbit!” Valnikov cried. “The neck is limp and the little head is thrown back because he's got it under the throat.
In
the throat. He's got the jaws. His big hand is clear inside. The little head is thrown back on the …”

“On what?”

“On the wooden pedestal. The light …”

“What kind of light?”

“Sunlight!” he cried. “And snow. The doctor must have caught the rabbit in the snow!”

“And then what?”

“It changes,” Valnikov said. “The picture changes but I still see it. I … I had to keep looking at the little arms and hands to remember it's still a rabbit. Because the face was all swollen and deformed from the beatings …”

“Yes? Yes?”

“He starts skinning it then. He tears the face right back over the skull. The face is pulled inside out, the little swollen deformed face. The hair is fine because it's so young. The hair goes inside out too!” Valnikov sobbed.

“Yes,” Natalie said. “What then?”

“I have to keep looking at the arms and hands to … to remember it's a rabbit! I think its a
fish
he treats it so brutally.”

“The hunter?”

“Yes. He says the anus is still open. After death!” Valnikov was crying now.

“Yes. Go on.”

“I know what that means. I've investigated hundreds,
hundreds
. I just had four others. This is too
many!
”

“What does it mean? The anus being open?”

“Sodomy after death,” Valnikov cried. “I thought it was
only
the mother! I
believed
the father because he seemed so pathetic. He said he'd been away. He cried so much I believed him. But there was semen in the anus. The neighbors didn't want to get involved. He screamed in the night. Five in a row. That's too
many!
”

“Was Charlie Lightfoot there?”