The Twelfth Department (3 page)

“Papa, wake up.”

And it was gone. Such a dream, as well. He opened his eyes to find his son looking down at him, frowning.

“Yuri?” he said, rubbing his fingers over his eyes. “What time is it?”

Early, to judge by the flat sunlight coming through the curtains. He’d half-hoped to lounge in his bed for a change, but it seemed that wasn’t to be.

“You were groaning.”

“Was I?” Korolev said, feeling his cheeks redden.

“I thought you might be ill.”

“No, just a dream.”

“You were talking to yourself.”

Damn, he’d been talking to himself. What had he said?

“What did I say?” Korolev asked, deciding it was best he knew.

“I couldn’t make it out. You sounded in pain, though.”

“Probably just a bad dream.” Or a good one, of course. “How did you find the couch?”

“Good, I think.” Yuri looked unsure. “How did I end up in here?”

“You fell asleep while you were eating so I brought you in.”

Yuri considered this.

“I was tired from the journey.”

“You were,” Korolev said, pushing down the sheet and sitting up. He thought about that niggling worry of his and whether he should bring it up—and decided not to. There was time enough. He yawned and stretched his arms above his head. He should be fully awake for such a subject.

“Let’s get some breakfast then, and plan our day.”

“Mother said you might have to work.” Yuri’s eyes slid sideways. “She said I shouldn’t expect to see much of you.”

Korolev sat on the side of the bed and regarded his son, smiling as he did so.

“As it happens, I’ve the whole of the time off. I need to go in to Petrovka and sign some papers this morning but that won’t take more than a few minutes. And I happen to know there’s a jazz band playing in Hermitage Park, which is just across the street—we can kill two birds with one stone.”

*   *   *

By the time Korolev had done his morning exercises and they’d dressed, Valentina and Natasha were also up and about in the bedroom they occupied on the other side of the shared sitting room.

“Good morning,” Korolev said, the memory of his dream making him feel more than a little shifty in Valentina Nikolayevna’s presence.

“Yurochka,” Valentina said, embracing his son—the diminutive of Yuri’s name sounding surprisingly natural to Korolev, even though they’d only met the night before. “You’re awake. We were worried about you last night. You just fell forward—you’d have had a bruise if your father hadn’t caught you.”

Yuri gave her a shy smile.

“I thought it might have been the apricot cake,” Natasha said, gravely, coming into the room. “I thought Mother might have poisoned you.”

Valentina reached out a swift hand as though to cuff her only child, who giggled as she danced away.

“I’ll poison
you
, one of these days.”

“I thought the cake was very good,” Yuri said. “I liked it very much.”

“At last, a polite child in the house.”

“Have you been to the zoo, Yuri?” Natasha asked, clambering onto the heavy wooden table in the shared room and sitting there in the morning light, her legs swinging. She was ten—a couple of years younger than Yuri—but if he hadn’t known this to be the case, Korolev would have guessed she was the older of the two.

“Never.”

“You see, Mama. I told you. We have to take him. You must call your friend. If Yuri went back to Zagorsk without going to the greatest zoo in the world—well.”

It was clear that, in Natasha’s opinion, this would be a source of bitter shame for everyone involved

“Can I come?” Korolev asked.

“If you’re not working, of course you can,” Natasha said. “But you work all the time. Which is good, of course. The State needs hard workers.”

“I have the next six days off.”

“Six days?” Valentina said, raising her eyebrows. “Six days with no work at all?”

“I’ve got to sign some paperwork this morning—on the Gray Fox investigation. But apart from that—I’m free as a bird.”

Yuri’s eyes widened.

“The Gray Fox investigation?”

“A serious business—we captured the leader yesterday.”

“He was a murderer,” Natasha told Yuri, lowering her voice. “And a bank robber. They called him ‘Needle’ because he killed seven men with an ice pick.”

“A bank robber?” Yuri asked, looking to Korolev for confirmation.

“Only one bank. Mostly post offices and factory safes. A tough customer—we were glad to catch up with him. I’ll tell you about it on the way to Petrovka, don’t you worry.”

“You’re taking Yuri to Petrovka?” Natasha asked. “To Militia headquarters?”

“I wasn’t going to,” Korolev said. “But I could do that. Shura said she might come up with us—there’s a concert in Hermitage Park. A jazz concert. I was going to drop Yuri and Shura off there, do my business, and join them later.”

Shura was maid to their famous neighbor, Babel the writer, and a maternal figure to many of the children in the building, as well as, strangely, Korolev. Natasha’s face was a picture of longing and Korolev was detective enough to know it wasn’t the concert she was interested in.

“Would you like to come as well?”

“To Petrovka? To visit the Moscow Criminal Investigation Division?” Natasha asked, doing her best to sound offhand—and failing. “Yes, that could be interesting. Very interesting. Will there be criminals?”

“Probably, but I’ll steer you clear of them,” Korolev said, looking to Valentina Nikolayevna—who looked amused.

“And afterward, seeing as it’s such hot weather, we could go swimming.”

“Swimming?” two young voices said in unison.

“All Pioneers have to be able to swim long and fast. I wouldn’t want you falling behind in such a thing.”

Yuri and Natasha agreed that this was something that should be avoided.

“How about tomorrow morning for the zoo?” Valentina asked, making her way toward the small kitchen. “I’ll call Vera. First thing?”

“Vera works at the zoo,” Natasha explained. “No one else is there in the morning, Yuri. We’ll see things no one else has ever seen. Animals eating other animals. That sort of thing.”

Yuri looked impressed and Korolev felt relief—the children would get on, Yuri’s visit would be a great success. “Tomorrow sounds good,” he said. “First thing.”

CHAPTER THREE

“I’m sorry, Korolev, I heard you were in the building and I’m afraid I need you. Urgently. Bring Slivka with you.”

Korolev placed the receiver back in its cradle, raised his eyes to the ceiling and considered asking it, or the Lord that resided some way above it, why he hadn’t cut his visit shorter. That was the thing about places of work—if you spent too long hanging about them there was always the chance someone would ask you to do something. His sigh drew Slivka’s attention. Even his old friend Yasimov looked up from the report he was working on.

“The boss wants us,” Korolev said in answer to Slivka’s quizzical look. He attempted a smile—a poor attempt, he didn’t doubt. “Something’s come up. Something urgent, it seems.”

His mood wasn’t improved by Slivka’s evident sympathy—or Yasimov’s, for that matter. The worst thing was it had been his own fault—he’d spent too long introducing Yuri and Natasha to his colleagues, taking them around the small internal museum, telling them about famous cases that Moscow CID had solved. He’d even shown them the cells and one of the interrogation rooms. By the time he’d sent them off to Hermitage Park with Shura, the best part of an hour had passed. Too long for papers that had only needed a signature.

He reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and retrieved the Walther he’d just placed there, pulling the leather strap of the holster over his shoulder and fitting the gun snugly under his armpit. He patted the gun for luck and prayed it wasn’t a murder Popov wanted to talk about. If it was, that would be the week gone. He’d be lucky if he saw Yuri at all. Still, there wasn’t any use complaining about such things. And with a bit of luck, Popov just wanted to ask them about the Gray Fox business. With a lot of luck.

“Mitya?” Korolev asked Yasimov, standing, “Can you spare five minutes to go up to the park and tell the little ones the good news?” He handed him a five-rouble note. “Give this to Shura in case she needs it and tell her I’ll call her when I know what’s what. And kiss Yuri for me.”

“Of course, brother. Consider him kissed.”

“Thank you.”

Korolev’s face must have still been showing his disappointment when, two minutes later, he and Slivka entered Popov’s office, because the first inspector looked at him kindly as he waved them toward the empty chairs in front of his desk.

“Sit down, sit down—it mightn’t be as bad as all that.”

“At your orders, Comrade First Inspector,” Korolev said. The seat he chose gave out a creak that was close enough to an animal’s squeal of pain to leave a moment’s awkward silence behind it.

“Well,” Popov said and reached for his pipe, filling it with tobacco as he considered his detectives. He took his time and Korolev and Slivka, used to Popov’s ways, waited patiently. They knew he liked to think things through before he opened his mouth, and then he liked to think them through once again. And he never much liked talking unless his pipe was lit. Sure enough, once the tobacco was glowing orange and Popov’s head was surrounded with an aromatic cloud of smoke, the first inspector tapped the notepad in front of him.

“There’s a man sitting in his apartment over in Bersenevka with a bullet in his head. It seems he didn’t put it there himself.”

“I see,” Korolev said, concerned. Bersenevka was just across the river from the Kremlin and Popov hadn’t said the body was in a
kommunalka
: the shared housing that most citizens had to put up with. No, he’d said “his apartment,” and anyone who lived in that part of Moscow and had their own apartment was fortunate indeed. Fortunate and important.

“You know the place—that new building across the river from the Kremlin. What’s it called again?”

“You mean Leadership House,” Korolev said, fearing it could be no other. He caught Slivka looking across at him. She was fresh from the wilds of the Ukraine—well, Odessa—and new to Moscow, so Slivka probably hadn’t heard of the building before—but she was a smart girl and, to judge from her expression, was putting two and two together. She was right—Leadership House, as its name and location implied, was home to generals, important officials, senior Party members, directors of vital State concerns and the like—in short, the type of people who needed to be inside the Kremlin five minutes after the phone rang.

“You do know the place,” Popov said, having the good grace to appear a little guilty. “Good, that makes things easier.” The first inspector considered his pipe for a moment or two. “Needless to say, it’s not somewhere I can send just
any
detective. It has to be someone who has experience in such…”

Popov hesitated, as if considering how best to acknowledge the fact that Korolev had found himself handling more than one investigation involving senior Party members, foreign spies, State Security, and the like—investigations that had damned nearly left Moscow CID with one less detective on its books.

“Well, I suppose whoever I send has to be able to deal with
delicate
matters. As the saying goes, Alexei Dmitriyevich—no good deed goes unpunished. You’ve done some good deeds in the past and here’s your punishment—the chance to do another good deed.”

Popov’s use of Korolev’s patronymic was strange—things were usually more informal between them. But perhaps Slivka’s presence accounted for it—and not some other, more worrying, reason.

“I’m always ready to do my duty,” Korolev said—there wasn’t much point in saying anything else. “What do we know about the dead man?”

“He was called Azarov. A medical man—a professor, I believe. I don’t know much more but I’ll see if I can get his Party file, information as to where he works and so on for you. Anyway, his maid found him half an hour ago and the sergeant at the local Militia station knew enough to call us in straightaway. Given where it is, there isn’t a moment to lose—Morozov has a car waiting for you in the courtyard.”

Slivka’s frown deepened another millimeter or two.

“Comrades, I won’t pull the wool over your eyes on this,” Popov continued. “It won’t be too long before important neighbors with nervous wives start calling me asking why we haven’t arrested the murderer. In fact, the building management have already been on the phone, very keen to do anything they can to ensure the matter is resolved ‘as soon as possible.’ And maybe it won’t just be them who’ll want this tidied up quickly. There are other people who won’t like blood being spilled that close to the Kremlin.”

“Of course,” Korolev said, thinking that the “other people” would be his old friends in State Security. You could throw a stone from the roof of Leadership House and land it in the Kremlin’s gardens. More or less. Of course they’d take an interest in a killing that close to where Stalin laid his head.

“Forensics?” Korolev asked, doing his best to ignore the dread swilling round his innards. He wouldn’t be going to the zoo with Yuri tomorrow—that much seemed certain.

“Ushakov and Levschinsky. They might even be there already,” Popov said, sucking on his pipe. “And Dr. Chestnova will look at the body for you.”

Popov’s thin smile revealed a certain satisfaction that he’d preempted Korolev’s next request.

“Well then,” Korolev said, rising. Slivka did the same and Popov nodded his approval.

“With luck, it will be easy enough,” Popov said, nodding in the vague direction of Bersenevka. “Maybe the wife did it. Or the maid. The sergeant is called Belinsky—he’ll give you all necessary assistance. If you need anything—call me.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Slivka drove down Neglinaya Street until it ended opposite the Metropol Hotel, where she turned right. In Teatralnaya Square, the white facade of the Bolshoi was vivid against the purple sky. The weather had turned humid that morning and now dark clouds were rolling across the city from the west. They looked heavy with rain and, unless he was mistaken, they’d be dropping it on Moscow in the not-too-distant future.