Moscow, Russia
Arkhip returned to his desk following an hour-long meeting with his captain. He could no longer hide the news of Eldar Velikaya’s death; the murder at the Yakimanka Bar had leaked inside the department and was being broadcast all over state TV. People would now be guarded about what they said—if they said anything. His captain wanted to know the status of Arkhip’s investigation, whether Eldar Velikaya had been the victim of a mafiya hit and if the ministry should brace for a possible war on the streets of Moscow.
Arkhip assured him any such conclusion was premature and unsupported by the current evidence, which was admittedly limited. Though twenty years Arkhip’s junior, and light-years behind Arkhip in experience, that didn’t stop the captain from telling Arkhip how to do his job. He’d even suggested that, with Arkhip on the verge of retirement, the file be transferred to investigators with more vested interest in the outcome. Arkhip gently reminded the captain that he had a perfect record as an investigator, and he assured him he had a vested interest in seeing that the murder of Eldar Velikaya did not besmudge all that he had worked so hard to achieve. He would see the investigation through to its conclusion, and he preferred to remain active until his final day on the job, though if the resolution of this case lingered, he would willingly continue.
Arkhip’s desk computer pinged, an e-mail from the medical examiner’s office with an attachment for his eyes only. He opened the e-mail, then the preliminary medical report on the death of Eldar Velikaya. He picked up his reading glasses from his desk and slipped them onto the bridge of his nose, skimming the opening paragraphs, which provided details about where the body was found, its position, etcetera, etcetera.
Near the bottom he found what he was looking for.
Cause of death: trauma caused by a single gunshot wound to the abdomen.
Arkhip read the sentence a second, then a third time, not believing the words on the screen. He had seen the body. He had seen the bullet hole in the man’s back and the ragged exit wound. He had seen the excessive bleeding on the front of the man’s shirt, the pool of blood on the ground. The man had clearly been shot in the back. Any idiot with even a modicum of training and experience would know this to be true. Which left just one conclusion. This was no error. This was a deliberate fabrication.
He reached for his desk phone to call the medical examiner’s office just as the phone rang. Caller ID did not come up on the digital register, and Arkhip did not recognize the number to be within Building 38, Petrovka Street.
“Mishkin,” he said in a terse tone.
“Arkhip. It’s Aaron.”
“Who?”
“Aaron from the car repair shop. We have finished work on the car you brought us.”
Arkhip needed a moment to grasp the complexities of the call, still focused on the ME’s report.
“I’m afraid it is a bit more complicated than we suspected,” Aaron continued. “Can you meet me at the repair shop in fifteen minutes?”
Things clicked. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can.”
The line went dead.
Ten minutes later, Arkhip departed Petrovka and stepped into another warm Moscow evening. Car and foot traffic on the streets and sidewalks was heavy. Muscovites sat at tables beneath awnings and umbrellas, drinking coffee or beer and getting a jump on the weekend. “Aaron” was Adrian Zima, who worked in the latent fingerprint lab within the ministry’s Criminal Investigation Department. Whenever Adrian believed he had sensitive information to impart to Arkhip, he suggested they meet at the “car repair shop.” The name was his code for the Pit Stop Café, which had once been a car repair shop before the owner fell victim to Moscow’s robust renovation in advance of hosting the 2018 World Cup. The owner, in business more than forty years, was strongly advised to take a payment and find a more suitable area for his business. Like most receiving such offers, he took the payoff and closed his doors.
The Pit Stop was a ten-minute walk from the ministry, near the corner of Petrovka and Strastnoy Boulevard. The repurposing and renovations of the businesses along these blocks seemed to happen overnight. Though Arkhip found it sad to know so many people lost their businesses, the revitalization had accomplished what the government intended, bringing in younger and more vibrant crowds to the cafés, bars, and restaurants, and presenting the world with the modern face of Russia.
Out with the old, in with the new, his Lada would have said. Soon it would be Arkhip who received a not-so-gentle shove to the door. He had one foot on the threshold as it was. What then?