militia officers—it was bad for business—it had happened in the past. Armed and trained as they were, cops could protect themselves, but the average citizen, the teacher or factory worker or accountant, what chance did they have? None, really. The militia had neither the money nor the manpower to protect every witness, and the average citizen knew it, so they kept their mouths shut and kept their heads down. Even now, some of the restaurant’s patrons were terrified for their lives, having simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was a wonder places like this managed to stay open at all.
It was that kind of fear, Rosikhina thought, that made people wish for the old days, the return of Stalinesque control of the country, and in many ways Putin was doing just that with his “reform programs.” There was no middle ground with that, though. As long as there were political freedoms, personal rights, and an open market in Russia, there would be crime, both large and small—and there was in Stalin’s time, too, but not nearly as much. But that argument was something of a straw man, wasn’t it? Something that old communist hard-liners and ultranationalists used to decry democracy and capitalism, all the while forgetting or ignoring that the iron-fisted control of Soviet Russia had come at a high price indeed. What was that old saying? Hardship truncates memory? Rosikhina’s father, a Yakut fisherman by birth, had his own take on the concept: “When you’ve got a shrew for a wife, even the ugliest ex-girlfriend looks enticing.” And that, he knew, was what Soviet Russia really was, an ugly ex-girlfriend. Certainly she had her positive traits, but nothing you’d like to be reunited with. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an opinion many of his fellow citizens—some forty percent of them, according to the latest polls, suspect as they may be—shared. Or maybe it was what Oleksei had once accused him of being, a cockeyed optimist. Or was it “blind optimist”?
Now he gazed out the front windows of the restaurant, watching the grim-faced customers standing in tight clusters, their breath steaming in the cold night air, and wondered if his optimism was in fact unwarranted. A restaurant of thirty or so people who’d just twenty minutes earlier watched a man’s brains get blown out the side of his skull, and not a one would probably lift a finger to help them catch the killer.
“True, but you never know,” Rosikhina replied. “Better to ask and be surprised than the converse, don’t you think?”
Oleksei shrugged and smiled as only a Russian fatalist can. What can you do? Not much excited Oleksei; his composure was as permanent as the cigarette he seemed to always be smoking.
Then again, on rare occasions a few useful witness details would inadvertently slip through and give them something to pick at. More often, though, the statements were vague or contradictory, or both, leaving investigators with nothing but what they could glean from the body or bodies left behind.
“Besides,” Rosikhina said, “without all those useless witness statements to process, we won’t have four glorious hours of paperwork and bad coffee ahead of us.”
“Four hours? If we’re lucky.”
“Damn it, where’s the coroner?”
Until the victim was officially pronounced dead, the body would remain where it was, dead and glazed eyes staring at the ceiling.
“He’s on his way,” Oleksei said. “I checked before I came. Busy night, I guess.”
Rosikhina leaned over and snagged the gun’s trigger guard with his index finger and lifted it from the seat. “Nine millimeter.” He ejected the magazine and cycled back the slide. A bullet tumbled out of the chamber and clinked onto the floor.
“Well, he was ready for something. Any missing?”
Rosikhina shook his head and sniffed the barrel. “Happened too fast, I suspect. Recently cleaned. Well, I’ll be damned. . . . Look, of all things, Gennady, the serial number’s been erased.”
“Will miracles never cease?”
Bad guys often acid-erased the serial numbers on murder weapons but rarely re-inscribed them. If that was the case here, the Makarov’s number might actually lead somewhere. Cockeyed optimism.
And probably misplaced, Rosikhina reminded himself.
As often happened in homicide cases, whether in the West or in Moscow, Lieutenant Rosikhina and Oleksei would learn little either from those present in the restaurant at the time of the murder or from the canvass of the surrounding neighborhood. The Chechnyan community was tight-knit, distrusting of the police, and deeply afraid of the Obshina. And with good reason. Its brutality knew few bounds. A