"Nonsense. These women are someone's daughters, maybe sisters, maybe even wives." He gave Nikolai a broad smile.
Nikolai felt Anchev's hand squeeze his heart and not let go while he smiled at the young Colonel's pain. Inside the Soviet Embassy, just back of where they stood, she worked nights in the communications center. When she hadn’t come home this morning, he had thought she needed to work late—it happened. But the dead bodies at his feet… They did this to her because they knew about him. Now, what about Sasha, their one-year-old daughter? Was she safe? Was she even still alive? KGB had no limits.
"I have a call to make. I'll be right back," he told Anchev.
"Don't leave me here with these dead women," Anchev said with a smirk. "Although I was married to a dead woman once. Did I ever tell you that?" He turned, but Nikolai was entering the gates.
Nikolai took the stairs two at a time. “Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God!”
He made the call to the babysitter from his desk, one of twenty-five in the KGB officers’ room. Mrs. Johnson's voice was worried as she told him there was no Yulia. "What has happened? How long will I stay with Sasha today?"
He panted, swallowing air. “Is Sasha well? She’s with you?”
“Of course, she’s with me. Why on earth would you even ask?”
"Please wait there. I'll be coming soon, I promise."
He hung up and hurried back outside. He needed to get home and take Sasha away. But first, he had to know if that frozen corpse was his Yulia.
He stood beside Anchev and watched the crime scene techs. One of them broke an arm free of the snow and tested its rigor by pulling it upright, where it remained, accusing the sky. “Limbs frozen and full rigor, Inspector Winnike.”
“It’s the internal organs I’m concerned about,” said the new arrival, the Inspector, a man wearing a trench coat and smoking a pipe.
Anchev taunted, “What can you tell me so far, Inspector? Do we have the killer identified by your forensics?"
The Englishman turned to the KGB commandant. "This blood bath tells us the faces were whittled down to the bone while the women were alive. Someone wanted these ladies to suffer. It reeks of KGB! Does that help get you started?"
Nikolai shuddered—suffered indeed. Yulia had endured torturous pain for his sins, about which she had never even been aware. The daughter of a KGB colonel, she would have turned him in had she known about him. He had to step back to the sidewalk to collect himself. No one noticed the blood had drained from his face.
But still, he remained unable to leave.
After another half-hour, the police dogs arrived and sniffed the bodies. They then sniffed the snow cover along the street and then loped inside the embassy fence. Anchev started to say something when he saw the dogs on Soviet soil, but Nikolai saw his jaw relax. Nothing was said.
Nikolai regained his calm and went back inside. He sat at his desk, giving the dogs time to do their work. He again dialed his house number. He waited for three rings. Then Mrs. Johnson's familiar voice said hello.
"Mrs. Johnson, can I speak with Yulia, please?"
"Yulia is not here, Nikolai. I'm so frightened!" She was keeping her voice down for Sasha.
"I don't know where to start," he said as if in a haze. "I don't know."
"Tell me what's wrong, Nikolai."
"She didn't call you and say she was coming home?"
"No calls."
"Stay with Sasha. Do not answer the door.”
Nikolai played it through his mind, her last twelve hours. She left home for work at six last night. Arriving at the embassy, she placed headphones over her ears and eavesdropped on British MI5 agents until midnight. When she stopped, she fitted the headphones back on the hook above her name, ate lunch, then typed reports until four when she should have come home and quietly slipped into bed.
Nikolai rang up Yulia's supervisor and asked about last night. He told Nikolai that Yulia hadn't returned after her lunch break at midnight. "Is she ill?"
He dropped the phone in its cradle. This couldn't be happening. Who else to call? There was no one.
He returned to the crime scene, the blood bath.
More police had arrived, and a few more KGB had come to see. A dense fog had crept in, so the police had set up portable lights. Now they fired up a generator with a hose attached to the exhaust.
The Inspector said to Anchev and Nikolai, "They're not frozen internally.”
“And how can you know that? Are you a soothsayer?” taunted Anchev.
“Thermometer, sir. They do have those in the Soviet Union?”
“Go on. What else can you tell us?”
“They've been here maybe since dawn. But we need to move them fast because ice crystals can damage cells and make it impossible to detect certain causes of death. We're melting them out."
Nikolai looked at the mutilations. What other cause of death could there be?
The Inspector added, “The hot air won't even deprecate latent prints."
Nikolai asked, “Is there any ID on the bodies? Any papers?"
"You think they’re able to turn out their pockets, Colonel?” replied Anchev sarcastically. “Your face is quite pale. Go back inside and let the English do what they do best, examine their war dead.”
Nikolai urgently wanted to break through the knot of men and examine between the near one’s breasts for the mole. But even that would be inconclusive. Besides, it wasn't her, he said to himself, forcing his mind to think differently. If they really knew about him, it would be him lying there in the snow, not Yulia. That bit of logic gave him hope.
He jogged back inside and again called home. No answer at all this time. He panicked, pounding his desk. Hold on, he demanded of himself. Mrs. Johnson might have taken Sasha next door to her flat. That had happened before and was actually a good thing. He pulled open his desk drawer and found a tin of mixed nuts, which he ate one at a time, planning his next moves. After returning the nuts to their drawer, he wiped his hands on a napkin then redialed his number. This time Mrs. Johnson answered and said Sasha was with her. Sounding much calmer now, she told him not to worry.
“Please take her next door to your flat.”
“Is it trouble at work, then?”
At 1 p.m., he went back outside to the scene. Anchev had disappeared. The generator exhaust had finished the ice, and the medical examiner was working backboards under the bodies.
Dog tracks were everywhere across the snow, proof the British investigation was examining every inch of Soviet soil.
He stepped to the street side of the scene when a glint caught his eye. Then he saw it. Seven sausages lay upon tinfoil. A sniffer dog brought an eighth and opened his mouth, dropping it amongst the others.
Nikolai's eyes were riveted on the find. A crime scene technician saw the look on his face. "Distal phalanges—that's fingertips to the KGB."
Nikolai couldn't look away, wondering which of them might have brushed his face.
Anchev strolled back outside to enjoy Nikolai’s destruction. He came and stood beside the young Colonel. "The dogs will find the missing parts. My only hope is they"—laughing heartily—"don't eat the fingers!"