Rosikhina knew it wasn’t done at close-contact range. There were no powder-burn marks on the skin around the wound, nor any stippling. The wound itself was perfectly round, which further ruled out a contact shot, which usually left behind a distinctive star-shaped rip in the skin. Rosikhina covered his nose against the fecal stink. As did many victims of sudden death, the man’s bowels and bladder had relaxed. He carefully pulled back the man’s sport coat, first the left side, then the right, patting the pockets for a wallet. There was nothing but a silver ballpoint pen, a white handkerchief, and an extra button for the man’s suit coat.
“How close, you think?” he heard, and turned around.
His sometimes partner, Gennady Oleksei, stood a few feet away, cigarette dangling from his half-smiling lips and hands shoved into the pockets of his leather coat.
Over Oleksei’s shoulder Rosikhina could see that the uniformed militia officers had finished herding the restaurant’s customers out the front door, where they stood milling around, waiting to be questioned. The restaurant’s staff—four waiters, a cashier, and three cooks—were seated at the now-empty tables, giving their names to another officer.
Oleksei and Rosikhina worked in the Saint Petersburg militia’s Main Office for Combating Financial Crimes, a subdivision of the Criminal Investigations Department. Unlike most Western police agencies, Russian operativniks were not assigned permanent partners. Why this was no one had ever explained to Rosikhina, but he assumed it had something to do with funding. Everything had to do with funding, from whether they got their own cars from week to week to whether they worked alone or with partners.
“You’re assigned?” Rosikhina asked.
“Called me at home. How close?” Oleksei repeated.
“Two to six feet. Easy shot.” He noticed something lying on the seat behind the victim’s buttocks. He leaned over for a closer look. “Got a gun,” he told Oleksei. “Semiautomatic. Looks like a Makarov. He was trying, at least. A second faster on the draw and maybe ...”
“Now, there’s a question for you,” Oleksei said. “Would you rather go like our friend here, knowing it was coming, or would you rather just . . . poof. Be gone. Nothing.”
“Good Christ, Gennady ...”
“Come on, play along.”
Rosikhina sighed. “I guess I’d rather go in my sleep—a hundred years old and lying next to Natalia.”
“Pavel, Pavel . . . You never humor me.”
“Sorry. I don’t like this. Something’s off. It feels like and looks like your standard Mafia hit, but this sure isn’t your standard victim—not sitting in a place like this, at least.”
“He was either very brave or very stupid,” Oleksei said.
“Or desperate.” To come into a place like this, their Caucasian Russian victim had to be in search of something more than a good bowl of djepelgesh and some of that god-awful pondur music—music that sounded to Pavel like cats in heat.
“Or really hungry,” Oleksei added. “Another boss, maybe? He doesn’t look familiar, but he could be on the books.”
“I doubt it. They never travel without their own little army. Even if somebody had managed to get to him here and put a bullet into his head at this range, his bodyguards would have started a god-awful firefight. There’d be holes everywhere, and a lot more bodies. No, we’ve got one bullet and one dead man. Very deliberate. An ambush, professionally done. The question is, who is he and why was he important enough to kill?”
“Well, we’re not going to get any answers out of this bunch.”
Rosikhina knew his partner was right. Fear of, or loyalty to, the Obshina tended to silence even the most helpful of souls. The witness reports would invariably fall into one of three general categories: I saw nothing; someone in a mask ran in, shot the man, and ran out, it all happened so fast; and Rosikhina’s favorite, Ya ne govo’ryu po russki. I don’t speak Russian.
And of those accounts, the only true statement they’d get was likely the last one: It all happened so fast. Not that he blamed any of them. The Krasnaya Mafiya, or Bratva (brotherhood), or Obshina—whatever the name or denomination—was ruthless beyond compare. Witnesses and their entire families were often targeted for death simply because some boss in some dark basement somewhere had decided the person might have information they might disclose to authorities. And it wasn’t merely a matter of dying, Rosikhina reminded himself. The Mafia was often ingenious and unhurried in its execution methods. What, he wondered, would he do in similar circumstances? Though the Mafia generally refrained from killing