"Belmondo," Willi recollected. "You don't know how lucky you are." Willi handed Arkady a rubber apron and surgical gloves. "Our assistants are Tajiks or Uzbeks, and when they take the day off for a wedding, everyone else uses it as an excuse to come to work late. Usually this place is humming. Someday the Tajiks are going to take over. They do all that high steel work. Nimble people. But how would you like to fall a hundred stories? All that time to think on the way down."
Arkady declined a surgical mask; masks got clammy and didn't block the smell. Besides, Willi didn't use one. Back in harness, he was thoroughly in command.
"Are you a virgin?" he asked Arkady.
"I've attended."
"But never got your hands dirty, so to speak?"
"No."
"Always a first time."
The external half of the examination of Olga was a search for identifiable features and signs of trauma: birthmarks, moles, scars, needle tracks, bruises, abrasions, tattoos. Willi filled out a chart and body map as he went.
Arkady's job was simple. He lifted Olga as Willi directed. Shifted, posed, positioned her body while Willi snipped an eyelash and a lock of her hair, dug under her fingernails, swabbed and studied every orifice under a UV lamp. Arkady felt like Quasimodo pawing a sleeping Venus.
When the external part of the examination was over, they broke for a cigarette. Fumo ergo sum, Arkady thought.
Willi said, "Not a bruise or a scratch. You know that we aren't supposed to open them up unless there are signs of violence or strange circumstances."
"Isn't it strange when a young woman is found half naked and dead?"
"Not when she's a prostitute."
"And the clonidine?"
"This is where your theory falls apart. Clonidine makes a good knockout pill, but it's a messy poison; essentially you throw up and choke on your vomit. I examined her windpipe. It was clean. All you need do is look at her face. She didn't die gasping for air; she just closed her eyes and died."
No one just dies, Arkady thought. You can be killed by a bullet or a skip in your heartbeat or a vine that starts winding around you on the day you are born, but no one just dies.
Willi was warming to the subject. "Any way you look at it, death comes down to oxygen or the lack thereof. Sometimes accomplished with an ax, sometimes with a pillow and almost always leaving evidence. Manual strangulation, for example, is so personal, so over-the-top. Lots of anger and bruising and not only of the neck. I mean, murder is murder, but manual strangulation brings out the worst in people."
"Do you think she removed her panties before or after she died?"
"The panties again?"
"They caught Victor's eye too."
"The last time I saw Detective Orlov he was asleep on a bench on the Boulevard Ring in the middle of the day."
"He's dry tonight."
"So he'll screw up tomorrow and take you down with him, as if you needed any help."
"What do you mean?"
"Tell me, since when does a senior investigator back up a detective sergeant? Does Prosecutor Zurin know what you're up to?"
"It's Victor's case. I'm just along for the ride."
"If Zurin hears about this you've cut your own throat. Well, you can always be my personal assistant."
"Doing what?"
"In case I drop and anyone tries to resuscitate me, shoot him."
Willi started at Olga's left shoulder, drawing the scalpel under the breast and up to the sternum. He shuffled around the table and made a similar cut from the right shoulder. In one masterly stroke, Willi sliced her from the sternum down, opening her all the way to the tattoo.
She looked aside, deaf to the rattle of hardware on the instrument tray: knives and scalpels of different lengths, forceps, UV flashlight and rotary saw. Willi spread open the soft tissue of her chest and selected a garden pruner with curved blades.
"Maybe I should do this," Arkady said.
"When I want an amateur to touch my work, I'll let you know."
Taking that for a no, Arkady reviewed the chart. Sex: female Name: unknown Residence: unknown Height: 82 cm. Weight: 49 kg. Hair: brown Eyes: blue Estimated Time of Death: by core temperature and start of rigor approximately 2 to 3 hours previous
Her ribs snapped with the sound of green wood cracking Arkady read on. Observations: The deceased was delivered at 0216 dressed in a blue jacket of synthetic material and a white cotton bustier. Two plastic bags arrived with the body. Bag A contained items found on site: a blue denim skirt with decorative stitching and knee-high red boots of faux leather. Underpants were retrieved from an upper bunk in the trailer. Bag B held personal effects that included cosmetics, pepper spray, diaphragm, douche and an aspirin bottle that contained a yellow powder that preliminary toxicological examination has tentatively identified as clonidine, a blood pressure medication sometimes abused as a "knockout" pill.
UV radiation was used to examine the body, jacket and bustier for fingerprints, semen or blood. The result was negative. No bruising, stains or signs of forcible sexual entry. No signs of strangulation either manual or ligature. Bands of pale skin indicated the recent removal of rings from the 3rd, 4th and 5th fingers of the left hand and the 3rd and 4th fingers of the right. The deceased exhibited superficial dirt on her hands and face.
Body in excellent physical condition. Distinguishing marks: tattoo on cusp of left hip. No scars or birthmarks or occupational calluses. No evident lacerations or contusions. No signs of struggle or defensive wounds. No hypodermic needle tracks. No body piercing except earlobes. Material under fingernails was unremarkable.
Willi paused to ask Arkady, "You okay?"
"I'm fine."
Arkady was eight years old on his first visit to a morgue. His father took him to toughen him up. Arkady remembered the general slapping a dead man on the ass and declaring, "He served under me in Kursk!" Some men could saunter into a morgue and browse autopsy tables like a garden show. Arkady had never attained such sangfroid. After twenty years as an investigator he was still as embarrassed by an eviscerated body as if he had caught someone undressed.
With the ribs out of the way Willi detached the girl's heart and lungs and put them together, en bloc, into a pail held by Arkady. In other pails went other organs, wet and glistening as strange sea creatures.
Next, up or down? Up it was.
Olga's hair was thick and vigorous, but with a hairbrush and comb Willi created a part from ear to ear, retraced the part with a scalpel and peeled the top half of the face down to the chin from a red skull and startled eyes.
While Willi sawed, Arkady's mind wandered. He thought about vodka, about Victor's limitless thirst and the half-empty bottle found with Olga. A dirty mattress in a workers' wagon didn't seem appealing even for a prostitute. Yet they hadn't run in and out. Olga and her friend had opened a bottle and stayed long enough for one to dope the other. A toast! How do you toast without glasses? Arkady thought about the tattoo's deep colors and distinct lines, the work of a professional, not a prison camp lifer working with an unsterilized needle and paid for in cigarettes. What species was Olga's butterfly? The writer Nabokov had always been enchanted by "blues," a category of butterflies that were small and drab until they flew and then their wings were iridescent.
Willi repaired the damage. He sewed the body together with twine and the scalp together with black sutures although the girl was largely a hollow, her organs set aside in buckets and bowls and her brain deposited in a jar of formalin to harden enough to slice, which would take at least a week. Quite a night for Olga, Arkady thought. First she is killed and then she is rearranged. Maybe cannibals lurked around the corner.