"Smith, Martin Cruz - Gorky Park" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Martin Cruz)

For the next hour, he pulled the records on young Detective Fet, satisfying himself that the man had only worked on cases of special interest to the KGB. Arkady left headquarters through the courtyard fronting on Petrovka Street. Militia clerks and women returning from long shopping breaks picked their way around the limousines that filled the circular driveway. He waved at the guard box and walked to the forensic labs.

At the autopsy-room door Arkady stopped to light a cigarette.

'You going to puke?' Levin looked up when he heard the match strike.

'Not if it will interfere with your work. Keep in mind, I'm not getting extra like some people.' Arkady was reminding Levin that pathologists were paid 25 percent more than ordinary doctors who worked on the living. It was 'hazard pay' because nothing was so dangerously alive with toxic flora as a corpse.

'There's always a chance of infection,' Levin said. 'Just one slip of a knife  '

'They're frozen. The only thing they can give you is a cold. Besides, you never slip. For you, death's just a bonus.' Arkady inhaled until his nose and lungs were thoroughly corrupted with smoke.

Ready, he entered an atmosphere of formaldehyde. The three victims may have been wildly dissimilar as personalities; as cadavers they were uniquely three of a kind. Albino-white, just a tinge of lividity around the buttocks and shoulders, skin raised in fat goose bumps, a hole above each heart, fingers without tips and heads without faces. From scalp line to chin, and from ear to ear, all flesh was cut and removed, leaving masks of bone and black blood. The eyes had also been dug out. That was how they had come out of the snow. Levin's assistant, an Uzbek with a runny nose, was adding new embellishments, cutting into the chest cavities with a rotary saw. The Uzbek kept putting the saw down to warm his hands. A good-sized body could stay like ice for a week.

'How do you solve murders if you can't stand the sight of dead people?' Levin asked Arkady.

'I arrest live people.'

'That's something to be proud of?'

Arkady collected the preliminary charts from the tables and read:



Male. Europoid. Hair brown. Eyes unknown. Age app. 20-25. Time of death from 2 wks. to 6 mos. Frozen before any significant decomposition could occur. Cause of death, gunshot wounds. Soft facial tissue and third phalanges of both hands missing due to mutilation. 2 possible fatal wounds. Wound 'A' fired at contact at mouth fracturing from upper jaw, bullet traveling at 45 degrees through brain and exiting high in posterior of skull. Wound 'B' fired 2 cms. left of sternum into heart, rupturing aorta. Bullet marked GP1-B recovered loose in chest cavity.



Male. Europoid. Hair brown. Eyes unknown. Age app. 20-30. Time of death app. 2 wks. to 6 mos. Soft facial tissue and third phalanges lost to mutilation. 2 possible fatal wounds. Wound 'A' fired at contact at mouth, fracturing upper jaw and breaking off incisors, bullet traveling at diverted angle through brain scoring inside posterior of skull starting 5 cms. above meningeal groove. Bullet marked GP2-A recovered loose in skull cavity. [GP2-A was the slug Pribluda had dug out.] Second wound 3 cms. left of sternum through heart region. Bullet marked GP2-B recovered from inside left shoulder blade.



Female. Europoid. Hair brown. Eyes unknown. Age app. 20-23. Time of death app. 2 wks. to 6 mos. Cause of death gunshot wound 3 cms. left of sternum into heart, rupturing right ventricle and superior vena cava, exiting from back between third and fourth ribs 2 cms. left of spine. Heads and hands mutilated as males GPI and GP2. Bullet marked GP3 found inside dress behind exit wound. No signs of pregnancy.



Arkady leaned against a wall, smoking until he was almost dizzy, concentrating on the papers in his hands.

'How did you get the ages?' he asked.

'Lack of wear on the teeth.'

'Then you've done a dental chart.'

'Done, but it won't help much. One steel boiler-plate molar in the second male.' Levin shrugged.

The Uzbek handed over odontology charts, along with a box of broken incisors notated as the bullets had been.

'One's missing,' Arkady counted the teeth.