Monstrum - Donald James

Russia in the early twenty-first century: a civil war has subsided into an uneasy peace; police inspector Constantin Vadim is transferred from Murmansk to head an investigation in a crime-ridden Moscow district. His task: to solve a succession of brutal murders committed by a killer who has become a terrifying local legend: The Monstrum. But Vadim has never investigated a murder. The real reason for his transfer is his uncanny resemblance to the new vice-president, Koba - Vadim is his double. Why has he been given the impossible mission to find The Monstrum? Is the case linked to the new government? Vadim finds himself on the bloodstained social fringe of Moscow and the very centre of the new Russia - a position which attracts the attention of his estranged wife, Julia Petrovna, a general in the defeated Anarchist army. Her capture would be a high prize for the men who run Vadim's life. And as Vadim pursues The Monstrum these two worlds move inexorably closer to one another, threatening both to crush the inspector before he can capture the killer and the emerging democracy before it is fully formed.

Monstrum. By the time of the third murder, it was a word evoked by every shout of alarm, by every blast on a militia whistle, by every woman's scream in a district of Moscow where shouts and screams had never been uncommon. Within a week of the third murder there were the beginnings of a cult: the word appeared as elaborately worked graffiti on concrete walls; young men swaggered the streets with the word emblazoned across the back of their jackets; in the cellar discos, reckless girls wore T-shirts with the Monstrum's swollen hands engulfing their breasts.

But on the streets all women are equal. At night they hurry home no longer thinking of footpads and snatched purses. A new word - Monstrum - has entered their vocabulary of terror. Like a rising tide of infected river water, the word washes against the shanty houses of Red Presnya, swilling through the lives of the inhabitants of the dark alleys and ruined tower blocks, leaving a scum of fear.

All this was happening in Moscow in the year 2015, the year Russians had begun to think of as the New Dawn.

Chapter 1

We have already begun our descent on Moscow Airport. If I look out of the window of Police Flight 120, I see, through a gap in the clouds, the Moskva River snaking south towards the city. Even from this height I can see the destruction. Where the Anarchist forces fought to the last, shelling has destroyed whole districts. Elsewhere, everything seems normal.

We are losing height rapidly now. I see a big road and parallel rail lines and. as we bank, I see the long lake and the suburb which surely must be Chimki-Chovrino. I have my map open on my knees. My eyes move restlessly from it to the patchwork below and back again, trying and failing to identify landmarks.

If I behave like a provincial, my excuse is that I am a provincial. From where? From the town of Murmansk. You will have heard of it surely? On the far north Gulf of Kola. This will be my first time in Moscow.

When the cloud thickens. I am no longer staring down at the city. In the glass I see the image of my face thrown back at me and I examine it with the surprised head-cocking intensity of a bird before a mirror. I turn this way and that. When the stewardess passes I pretend to fiddle with my seat belt.

Believe me, brothers, I didn't always look like this. You see me here today, with my new straight nose, my upper lip fuller by a fraction and laugh lines prematurely wrinkling the corner of my eyes ... And you ask, perhaps, like Julia Petrovna who knows my vanity as only an ex-wife can, you ask why I should possibly want to add a few years to my thirtysomething God given? My answer, feeble for a man who aspires to be the hero of this account. is that I was never really in a position to choose.

My compensation, in the meantime, is that in Julia's view the new leaner jawline makes me look distinctly more sympathetic. She said that. And I'd like to think that it's a remark that's meant to be taken at face value, so to speak. With Julia, of course, I can never be quite sure.

So for the moment, we are banking over the lake at Chimki. We shall be landing at Moscow-Tushino in ten minutes. To the other police officers travelling to the capital I am exactly as introduced: the prominent Homicide Inspector Constantin Vadim (I who have never investigated a homicide) newly promoted to Moscow District 13. A homicide inspector of skill and subtlety, so my fellow police officers will conclude from the simple fact of promotion. I, of course, know better.

So, very soon, will you.

But for the full chronology of my decline and fall I must begin my story earlier and take you back almost three months. to my sparsely furnished studio apartment in Murmansk, early on the historic evening of September 1st, 2015.

In response to an insistent tapping. at my door, I came out of my shower, winding a towel round me. This year we have heating. September in Murmansk you need heating. I opened the door, already anticipating the waft of cold air from the landing. They say, in September, only Norilsk is colder.

'This one is on me,' the black-marketeer wheezed. He was bending over a carton of champagne, catching his breath at the top of the long flight of stone steps that leads up to my apartment. I couldn't see his face but I knew it was Vassikin from the fringe of black hair round his yellowing, dented skull. A small boy of perhaps six or seven years stood in an over-large blue parka beside him.

Vassikin lifted his head. 'All good things come to an end,' he said. He pushed the carton towards me with his foot.

I opened the door wider. 'What's all this about. Vassikin? What's come to an end?'

'Ah.' He smiled spectrally. 'You've not heard the news, Inspector? They've just announced that Moscow fell to the Nationalist Army an hour ago. The Anarchists have surrendered on all remaining fronts. We've won the war, Inspector.'

'Moscow's fallen? The Popular Front has capitulated?'

'The good people have won,' the boy said.

Vassikin rubbed at the back of his dented head. He allowed himself another ghost of a smile. 'And I bring you champagne to celebrate the peace. May peace prove as profitable as war!' he added piously.

They stood there as I picked up the champagne and swung it onto the hall table. Vassikin is tall, pear-shaped and ungainly. His clothes seem to have been carefully selected from some rich Westerner's cast-offs. He wears a worn blue pinstripe suit and a yellow tie decorated with horses' heads. With his sad eyes, you can only think of him as a kind of shabby dandy.'

'What will you do with the peace, Vassikin? Go back home to Petersburg?'

'My son prefers we stay in Murmansk.'

The boy had his father's dark brown eyes. He nodded confirmation.

'Your son decides for the family?'

'There are only the two of us now.'

'Why do you think the good people won?' I asked the boy.

'Because we have love in our hearts for our country,' he said unhesitatingly. 'And for justice.'

I looked at Vassikin. He shrugged.

'You think the Popular Front don't have love in their hearts?'

At that age there's no doubt to contend with. 'The Anarchists and Marxists have love only for themselves,' the boy stated authoritatively.

I didn't ask Vassikin in for a drink. That would have broken the delicate balance between us. All the senior inspectors in Murmansk Station 7 recognised that. You accepted gifts from Vassikin in return for a blind eye cast over his bulging warehouse. But you never invited him to your table.

I closed the door on Vassikin and his son and stood looking down at the champagne. The end was not unexpected, of course. The Marxist- Anarchist alliance, which fought under the name of the Popular Front, had been reeling back on all the major battlefields. And now the long Civil War was over. Our armies. the Nationalist armies (more accurately the armies of National Democracy) under the white flag with its black double-headed eagle, had won. Professor Peter-Paul Romanov and General Leonid Koba had finally brought us to victory.

Like all victories it was a victory of sorts. It seemed that half the Russian land surface had moved back a millennium. Where the Popular Front armies had been defeated a vacuum had been left which would take our own White armies a long time. to fill. Warlords ruled the marshes and forests and would have to be dug out before the reconstruction could begin. But at least Moscow had fallen. It was only a matter of time now before the American president would recognise the new government of the Russian National Democratic Party.

A good Murmansker would celebrate his fortune. The people of Murmansk had been supporters of the party of National Democracy from the beginning, five years ago. Unlike so many others across Russia, we had suffered little. Today we had won. But for me there was, a deep shadow over this victory.

I carried the champagne into the kitchen, took out two bottles, opened the window and stood them on the ledge to chill. For a moment I looked out over the low-rise 1980s rooftops to where the pale sun was setting over the Gulf of Kola. The cold air brushed my chest. In a month the sun would have disappeared for the winter. Four months of Arctic night. Temperatures so low that braziers had to be lit beside the bus stops to keep workers from freezing to death while they waited in lines. But peace.

I had entered this war with a woman I loved. though our causes differed. Today, five years later, my cause had triumphed. But it was Julia who had attained renown. As a decisive general, a gifted leader of a division comprised entirely of women, how could she not become famous? During the war the Western media had followed her exploits. There had been articles in the New York Times; I had heard profiles describing the beautiful Russian Anarchist woman general on the BBC East European service.

But where was Julia now? In hiding somewhere in the birch woods outside Petersburg? Or one among a restless drift of prisoners behind coils of barbed wire? Or dead. Lying, God forbid, beneath a wind-brushed mound of snow at any one of a dozen Anarchist battle sites between Petersburg and Murmansk?

Chapter 2

Murmansk en fête. Julia would have smiled at the idea. But she would certainly have stopped, as I did, to watch the jitterbugging in Koba Square. Mid-twentieth-century American jazz was the rage. Some very young girls wore home-made ballerina shoes and bouffant petticoats. I watched a tall, strong girl dance wilfully with her partner. A miniskirt for her, and heels. She fought him every inch of the way, with terrific rhythm and style, forcing him to follow her lead.

Thirty-eight years old, I should be too young for nostalgia. But I'm beginning to believe that for Russians nostalgia begins in the cradle. We're like the Irish, you know. obsessed with our past. Like the Irish in one or two other ways too, perhaps. No matter, for me, as I stood on the side of the square and watched the students dancing, it was all very touching and reminiscent of a youth which had seemed to me to pass in hours rather than years.

From time to time the blast of whistles stilled the band., and the rattle of kettledrums would announce the approach of another victorious Nationalist column. Then the dancers would fall back and begin a slow hand-clap which would build up to a tremendous cheer as a regiment of infantry marched through the square, in tattered uniforms, the huge white flags with the black double-headed eagles of Old Russia unfurling at the head of each column.

And the jazz band would play 'Rodina', our national song, and the crowd would sing and weep that the war was at last over and Russia was emerging from her long agony.

Why shouldn't I confess that I wept too? I had enough to weep about. But if a city can be, Murmansk was beside itself with joy. The curfew had been suspended. The streets were awash with revellers and soldiers. Horses were being stabled everywhere - in cinemas, meeting halls and even the ground-floor hallways of some apartment houses. A twenty-first-century war it may have been, but when gasoline ran out it became a war fought and won on horseback. A very Russian war.

I crossed the square and headed for the building now known as No. 1, Pushkin Street. The Okhrana, our Nationalist secret police, are housed here. Those of you who recognise the name Okhrana as a revival from Tsarist days will see this as just another example of the way Russians are so reluctant to lose touch with their history. But that's only half the story. The Nationalists having revived the name of the old Tsarist police service, popular usage now insists the Okhrana is called the Cheka - the first Soviet service.

Thus we Russians try to swallow our history in one vast indigestible bite. One day soon we will have to learn to be selective about what we want to take from the past. In the meantime the Okhrana. which we prefer to call the Cheka, hold the best parties and I am invited by Katya.

I have never actually fucked Katya Rolkin but on many of these celebratory occasions the distinction has been so fine as to be pornographic in the recounting. The problem is usually the ubiquity of her husband, Roy. Roy is also a major of the Cheka, which accounts for a degree of caution in this matter with which I would not normally shackle myself. We attended grade school together, Roy and Katya, myself and Julia. In the last years of the old Soviet Union we were all Pioneers together. Into our middle teens even. we were inseparable.

Across the large upper room in Pushkin Street I could see Katya talking to a pair of middle-aged strangers. Glass in one hand. her back resting against a carving of the Virgin and Child (did I mention that at one time this building was a convent?), Katya's eyes slid desperately about the room. I've no doubt that I was only one of half a dozen of her eligible invités and perhaps she'd already passed the time of day with one or two of the others. But she did react well to seeing me, abandoning her guests within moments and weaving shoulder first through the crowd to arrive by my side. When she reached a small clearing in the guests right in front of me she sashayed forward. rolling her hips.

'What do you think?'

'Of the dress?'

She stuck out her tongue. 'Constantin-' she came up close. one hand outstretched holding her champagne glass - 'it's months since I've seen you!'

I kissed her perilously close to the mouth and felt her tongue brush at my cheek.

'Have you been so busy with your footpads and cat burglars that you've not an hour to spend with honest people? And good friends at that? But what a night! Have you seen the crowds out there? They're ecstatic.' She stopped. 'If only Julia had been here to see it!'

'If Julia had been here to see it, she would not be up here drinking champagne with us,' I said. 'She'd be downstairs locked up in a basement cell.'

She screeched. with laughter and stopped suddenly. 'That's not funny,' she said. 'That's not something to joke about, Costya.'

'I wasn't joking.'

'Here, give me another glass. You know what I mean,' Katya went on as I reached out and took a glass from the loaded table beside me. 'If only Julia had seen things the way we did. The way we do.' She paused, eyeing me, already quite drunk. 'Do you understand it?'

'No.'

'Why did she see things differently, Costya? What is it in her make-up that made her an Anarchist and us Nationalists?'

How many times I'd wondered. But it wasn't something I wanted to debate with Katya. Nor something she was very interested in debating with me. 'The gossip is-' she had a mind which switched subjects with the speed of a camera shutter - 'that Leonid Koba is having an affair. . .' she eased her pelvis back and forth . . . 'with President Romanov's daughter. The married one.'

'Her husband is not likely to raise objections,' I said. Her father may have been nominal president of the new republic but Leonid Koba was, after all, head of the Cheka.

'Naughty of you,' she said. 'Is that why you've never taken up the chances I've shamelessly offered. Because Roy is a major in the Cheka?'

'And because he's an old, old friend,' I said with a smile she knew I didn't mean. 'Where is he tonight, incidentally?' I said, looking over heads of guests for the portly figure, inevitably in uniform.

'He'll be along later,' Katya said. 'I was rather hoping you might have got here earlier.'

'Why is that?'

'I have something to show you. Something I'd like your opinion on.'

'Shall I bring my drink?'

She stood on tiptoe and cast a quick glance round the room, a last- minute check in the direction of the door.

'He isn't here' I said. 'I've already looked.'

She rolled her eyes. 'Bring a bottle.'

Moments later we were glued together in an upstairs storeroom, our tongues twisting and thrashing like the mythical mating of serpents. Our breath sighed and whistled, glasses crashed to the floor, pieces of silky underwear became detached. 'My God, Constantin ... Costya ... You drive all other thoughts from a woman's mind!'

Except thoughts of her husband. We both heard Roy Rolkin's voice calling up the stairwell. Katya and I were clearly never destined to be real lovers, never even destined to slake our Just fully.

She was not unaccustomed to moving swiftly in these circumstances and was out of the darkened storeroom within seconds. I waited five minutes. smoked a cigarette and looked out at the comings and goings in the floodlit courtyard below, before making my way downstairs and slipping inconspicuously, I thought, into the press of Cheka guests.

Roy Rolkin's plump hand took me by the elbow. 'Let me get you a drink, Constantin,' he said. 'I want to talk to you.'

He was in uniform of course.