The Holy Thief (16 page)

“Have you eaten?” Babel continued.

“I have cheese dumplings for him, haven’t I?” a grumpy Shura said, coming from the kitchen with a plate and an empty glass.

“I told you she was listening,” whispered Babel, and Shura leaned over and slapped his arm.

“Don’t be like that, Shura. Sit down now, and we’ll see what kind of a story Captain Korolev has for us.”

Babel poured wine into Korolev’s glass before crossing his legs beneath him.

“I’m afraid I can’t talk about this particular case,” Korolev said, feeling awkward.

“Don’t worry, Captain, I was only teasing. Have some wine and food and when you feel refreshed we’ll talk. Avram is telling us about Armenia.”

Korolev lifted the glass of red wine and enjoyed the warm taste of it, beginning to relax as the bird-like man began to speak. Korolev looked over at Valentina Nikolaevna and was struck by the sharpness of her profile and the way she listened to Ginzburg. Her look was benevolent, even motherly, as though she wanted to shield him from the times they lived in. His wife, Lena, regarded him with the same affectionate gaze, although when she looked up at Korolev her face became closed and careful.

When Ginzburg finished his tales of the sun-baked Armenian hills, the conversation wandered from talk of Paris, where Babel had spent part of that summer representing Soviet literature at a writer’s conference, to the construction of the Metro, on which Babel’s wife Tonya worked as an engineer. Without being aware quite how it had come about, Korolev found himself telling the story of the rapist, Voroshilov—the trail of clues, the relief on the young man’s face when he was caught. Although Shura, leaning against the kitchen door, maintained her stony face, he couldn’t help notice the way she stared at him. Not at his eyes, he thought, but at his mouth, so that she didn’t miss a word he said. It was Babel, however, who asked what clothes the rapist had worn, how he’d managed to obtain such a fine pair of boots, which lectures had been on the list that led to his undoing, and so on.

“What happened to him, the dog?” Shura asked when he finished.

“He’ll get eight or ten years I should think, depends on what the court decides. It doesn’t matter.”

“How so?” Ginzburg asked, but Korolev was sure he already knew the answer. He’d been in the Zone, or close to it—Korolev was sure of that now. He had the prison pallor of a
Zek.
Babel coughed, then picked up a bottle of wine.

“Come, friends, let’s finish this off and we’ll open another.”

“Tell us, Captain, why doesn’t it matter?” Ginzburg’s wife asked now and there was accusation in her tone. Perhaps she didn’t understand. He looked at Babel, who shrugged his shoulders and poured out the wine, his eyes on the stream of red. Korolev sighed. Well, if they wanted to know, why shouldn’t they? There were no children present.

“There’s a hierarchy in a prison, even in a police cell. At the top sits the ranking Thief, the ‘Authority,’ then his lieutenants, then down through the Thieves to the lowest apprentice. Then beneath the Thieves are the other prisoners and then the politicals. At the bottom, beneath everyone, are the untouchables. No Thief, nor any other prisoner, will touch them except to commit violence upon them, sometimes sexual violence. They sleep underneath the bunks in case they contaminate a bed. They have their own cutlery, as a fork used by an untouchable would contaminate anyone who used it after them and bring them down to the untouchable’s level. They are given the filthiest jobs. And they don’t last long. Voroshilov will end up like that, as a rapist, unless he’s very lucky. It’s the Thieves’ morality.”

Shura nodded her head, a short jab downward with a hard mouth. It was peasant justice also. Harsh, even brutal, but just in a peasant’s eyes, and she approved. Babel gave a half-smile.

“They have their own rules. It’s difficult for cultured people to understand.”

Valentina Nikolaevna looked at him in confusion. “How could this be allowed to happen? The Thieves are not the law.”

“They are in the camps and the guards allow it,” Ginzburg said and his eyes burned. “The Thieves are the guards’ dogs, and the rest are the sheep. That’s what the Thieves call us—the politicals and the rest—sheep. And they can shear us whenever and however they want. The untouchables are there to tell us that, no matter how bad it gets, it can get worse. And to make us complicit because we all conspire against the untouchables. After all, if we helped them, we would become one of them. It’s a little microcosm of Soviet society, wouldn’t you agree, Captain?”

Korolev looked at Ginzburg in the silence that followed and saw how his chin was lifted, as though expecting a blow. Korolev sighed and shook his head.

“I’m a criminal investigator, Citizen. I find bad people who have done bad things and I put them in a bad place. What of it? As for Soviet society, it’s getting better. We know it isn’t perfect. Comrade Stalin tells us as much. It’s in the nature of Bolshevik self-criticism to recognize its current flaws. It’s where we’re going, not where we are.”

“We know where we’re going, Captain. We’re going to . . .” Ginzburg stopped and turned to his wife, who’d taken his arm and now shook her head. Babel passed a glass of wine to him and another to Korolev. He seemed comfortable with the break in the conversation, and when everyone had a glass in their hand he raised his own.

“A toast, friends. To our beautiful future.” He held the glass for a moment as though to contemplate the prospect in the color of the wine. Each of them seemed lost in thought and Korolev wondered if they, like him, were imagining what such a beautiful future might be like.

“You’ve won Shura’s heart, you know,” Babel said, when the other guests had left and his wife had gone to bed. “She loves a man with a healthy appetite and a good atrocity up his sleeve. You’ll have to come again—she’ll want to feed you now. If you don’t watch out she’ll make you fat. Look at me. I was a stick when she took me on.”

“A fat stick,” Shura said, from the kitchen. Babel laughed and stood up awkwardly from the daybed.

“Now, Captain, come into my study—we can talk privately there.” Babel led him along the corridor to a room with a desk and a typewriter, a chaise longue and a great many books that were shelved and stacked on or against every available surface. He shut the door behind them.

“It’s not really mine, this room,” Babel said. “I share the flat with an Austrian engineer, but he’s in Salzburg and we don’t know when he’s coming back. It’s been eight months, so I’m gradually taking it over. I don’t think he’s coming back, if the truth be told—but I tell the BMC his arrival is imminent. Of course.”

“An Austrian?” Korolev couldn’t keep the surprise out of his voice.

“Yes, an engineer. I think he decided he couldn’t face another of our winters, so he’s staying at home in the Alps, listening to Mozart and drinking hot chocolate instead. They probably have a different type of snow, a polite kind, very gentle.”

“I would have thought . . .”

“Yes. It is dangerous, but I need the space to write. I assure you I’m not an Austrian spy, by the way.”

“I’m sure of it.”

“Oh, you can’t be sure of it. The Party may decide otherwise.” He winked at Korolev and gave him a slanted smile. Then he frowned. “Pay no attention to Ginzburg—he’s at the end of his tether. Highly strung poets aren’t designed for Five Year Plans and purges.” He put the glass to his lips and closed his eyes as he drank.

“Anyway, what’s all this about? What assistance can a poor writer offer the combined forces of the NKVD and Petrovka Street?”

“I can’t tell you all I would like to,” Korolev began and Babel nodded.

“That doesn’t surprise me. I guessed as much when Gregorin called. Tell me as little as you can, if you don’t mind. I’ve a two-year-old daughter asleep down the corridor and a wife I plan to spend a lifetime with—but I’m happy to help if I can.”

It was Korolev’s turn to nod. “There have been two murders. One of the dead was a Thief. The other was a young American woman, although of Russian birth—it seems she was also an Orthodox nun. The two killings are almost certainly connected.”

Korolev looked into Babel’s eyes for a moment, then opened his briefcase and extracted the envelope of case papers. He took out the woman’s autopsy photographs.

Babel took his time with each picture, seemingly absorbing each pore of her skin, each crusty fleck of blood. He turned the images to see them more clearly and when he had reached the last photograph, the one Gueginov had taken of the girl’s profile, he sighed.

“She was quite beautiful. You would think he must have hated her to do this. But maybe not—he’s such a precise man. See the way the clothes are neatly folded, the body parts arranged in just such a way. I wonder. Perhaps he’s sending a message.”

Korolev leaned forward to look at the girl’s body, all shadows and light in the black and white photograph. “I thought as much myself. The way the ear, eye and tongue are arranged?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of something like this, but I’ve never seen it. It’s something the Thieves used to do. To an informer. Or a spy. It means that the dead person may have heard and seen but he will never tell.” Babel looked up at Korolev, his eyes blinking as though trying to remove the dead girl’s image from his retinas. “But the Thieves would be unlikely to desecrate a church. They might steal from it but they wouldn’t do something like this. Well, not while Kolya rules Moscow, that’s for sure.”

Korolev found himself blinking now, but with surprise. He’d heard of Count Kolya, but Babel’s offhand reference implied a personal knowledge of a man reputed to be the Chief Authority of all the Thieves in Moscow. It wasn’t an elected position, it was open to challenge, but Count Kolya was never challenged. At least, if he had been, the challenge had been dealt with so quickly and savagely that it had barely rippled the surface of his reign. The Militia had been trying to track him down for seven years, but a wall of silence surrounded him and any time the wall looked as if it might be penetrated, the informant who’d seemed to be a promising prospect had either disappeared or shown up dead. Now that Korolev thought of it, one of them had been mutilated in just such a way.

Babel tapped the side of his nose. “I was born in Odessa, Captain. Do you think I made up the stories I wrote about Benya Krik? I changed his name, but if you ask any of the old Militiamen from Odessa they’d tell you all about him. As brave and honest a Thief as ever broke a maiden’s heart. It was just that his version of honesty was quite different from yours and mine, and most certainly from the Party’s. They caught him in the end. A bullet in the neck, I’m told. But they probably needed more than one to finish him. And he was revenged by his fellows, you can be sure of it.”

“Do you know Count Kolya?” Korolev asked and Babel exhaled a long breath, then nodded.

“I talk to him sometimes when I go out to the Hippodrome. Horses are a weakness we share. You might not spot him straight away, except that if you were to look in his direction for a little longer than you should you’d find three or four handy-looking lads with blue fingers have surrounded you, and then you get the strong impression it’s time to go and look at the horses for the next race.”

“You know Count Kolya.” Korolev wasn’t asking the question again, just expressing a quite amazing fact.

“Why do you think Gregorin sent you to me? The NKVD use me as a line of communication from time to time, although I try not to know what they communicate about. I’ll tell you this, though. Kolya would never desecrate a church in this way. He’s not a Believer, at least not the way I suspect you may be, but there’s a code he must live by the same as any other Thief. If this was done on his instructions or with his consent—well, he wouldn’t be the Chief Authority for long.”

Babel seemed oblivious to the fact that Korolev’s blood had concentrated in his toes.

“A Believer, Isaac Emmanuilovich? Me?”

Babel looked up at him and smiled.

“Am I wrong?” He leaned across and put his hand on Korolev’s arm, smiling. “Comrade Korolev, I apologize if I’ve offended you. I must be mistaken.”

Korolev drank the rest of the wine in a single gulp and wondered, not for the first time that day, how the hell he’d got himself into this mess. He took a deep breath, put the glass down firmly on the table and thought for a moment.

“I think I agree with you. If it was a message, maybe it was a message sent to the Thieves. Maybe to Kolya himself. The dead Thief was tortured as well. See these electrical burns on the girl’s body—they both have them.”

Babel whistled. “Is that what they are? You hear things, of course . . .”

“What things?”

“Things. How people are interrogated these days. I’ve heard that electricity isn’t only used to brighten Lenin’s Lamp.”

Korolev suspected Babel was coming to conclusions about what kind of a person might be behind the killings.

“Look, Comrade,” Korolev said, emphasizing the word “Comrade” and putting into it all the loyalty and hope that old soldiers like Babel and himself remembered from the bitter years after the German War. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but there’s someone going round killing people and I want to stop them, if I can. Whoever they are.”

Babel rolled the red wine round his glass, let it settle and then drank. He pursed his lips in appreciation and then shifted his gaze to Korolev.

“There’s racing tomorrow. Trotters and flat. A horse I follow is in with a chance so I’d have been going anyway. If I see him, I’ll approach him. I presume you’d like to know his side of it, if he’ll tell me. I’ll have to let him know who’s asking, of course.”

“It might be better if he were to agree to a face-to-face meeting. That way you wouldn’t hear things you might not wish to.”

Babel shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Why not?”

“It might be possible and, of course, even a man like me would rather not hear some things. Although I am curious—my God, I’m curious.”

He paused and smiled a cat’s smile, full of speculation and mischief.

“It will have to be quietly done, of course,” he continued. “The first rule in the Thieves’ world is non-cooperation with the Soviet state in any form, you know that. What Ginzburg said—it’s not quite right. Even in the prison system the Thieves bark at the sheep for their own purposes, not because they’re told to. Is there something in it for Kolya?”