The Beat Officer

March 11, 2020

The local beat officer on Krivaya was called Somov, and all of Krivaya knew him, and he knew all of Krivaya — at least, so he himself believed.

He was a man of about forty-five, of medium height, solidly built, with a broad, tired face like that of a man who has long and finally lost his illusions about humankind but goes on discharging his duties towards it — without love, but without malice either, the way one discharges one's duties towards an old, cantankerous, but still blood-related uncle. He wore a uniform jacket that was a little tight across the shoulders and a uniform hat which he kept pushing back on his head so as to scratch his forehead. His moustache was gingerish and bristly. His eyes — light, attentive, with puffy lids — looked as though everything they saw they had seen before and nothing surprised them.

Captain Viktor Pavlovich Somov. Twenty years in the police, fifteen of them as beat officer for Krivaya and the surrounding streets. In those fifteen years he had broken up, by his own count, three hundred and forty-seven family rows and arrested nineteen thieves, two arsonists and one man who at night stole his neighbours' washing from their balconies and stacked it in his garage in neat piles without doing anything with it. He had found sixty-three lost old people and eleven children. He had rescued a goat from a burning shed. The goat had then bitten him.

Towards anything mystical Somov had the same attitude as towards the washing thief: weary bewilderment. Fortune-tellers, psychics, sorcerers and the like he considered swindlers — not malicious ones, petty ones, the kind you'd almost be sorry to write a report on. He called on Madame Zoya once a year, in the line of duty, to check whether there had been complaints — and each time came out shaking his head. He had never once gone into Grandpa Grisha's shop. Why, he did not know himself. It just never happened.

Beat officers here are generally better known than members of parliament: you see the MP once every five years on a poster, but the beat officer every day — by the beer kiosk, by the school, in a stairwell where he writes in his notebook who broke whose window. People go to the beat officer when a neighbour is drilling on a Sunday, when the cat has gone missing, when the husband hasn't come home for the night, and sometimes simply to talk, because there's no one else to talk to; and Somov, grunting, listened to those who came to talk as well: once he sat for two hours with an old woman from number nineteen who had called him out over a "suspicious noise," which turned out to be her own refrigerator — and left only when she had told him her whole life and given him tea with cherry jam.

And on the eleventh of March, at half past ten in the morning, Somov called on the palmist.

---

Grisha was just seeing out the first client — a young man who had taken "Work" — when uniform boots came down the stairs, heavily and unhurriedly. The door opened.

"Good morning," said Somov, taking off his hat. "Beat Officer Somov. Is the proprietor in?"

Grisha was flustered. The four pages of instructions had everything — what to do if a client cried, what to do if a client shouted, what to do if a client tried to get behind the curtain. There was nothing about the police.

"The master doesn't meet clients," said Grisha out of habit.

"I'm not a client," said Somov. "I'm the beat officer."

"The master needs to concentrate."

Somov gave him a long look. Then he took his ID from his breast pocket and, opening it, held it in front of Grisha's face, the way you hold a piece of sausage in front of a dog's nose.

"Young man," he said patiently, "I'm here about a missing person. I need to speak to the proprietor. Right now. You can tell him exactly that."

Grisha looked round at the curtain. Behind the curtain it was quiet.

"Master," said Grisha, "it's the police."

Behind the curtain there was a silence, and then Kesha's voice said:

"Tell him to wait a minute."

"I'll wait," Somov agreed, and without asking permission sat down on the client's chair. He looked around. His gaze lingered on the box of tissues "for the emotional ones," and he snorted. He looked at the table, at the black coins, at the ledger pressing down some sheet of paper. He said nothing.

---

Kesha sat behind the curtain and could not stand up.

Not because he was afraid of the police — he had nothing to fear; the shop was registered all fair and square, taxes paid, papers in order. But because beyond that curtain was a person, and that person wanted to see him. Face to face. Not through Grisha, not through a parchment. And Kesha had not gone out to people — really gone out — for six months or so, since Grisha appeared. Before Grisha he had, for some years, by force, through "I can't" — and each time lay exhausted afterwards in the evening, as if he had been unloading railway wagons.

"A missing person."

Kesha knew who was missing. He had known from the second Somov said those words. Known with that heavy knowledge from under his ribs. The ninth of March. A blot over two days, three. And after it — grey, empty, faded.

He stood up and went out.

Somov rose to meet him — whether from politeness or habit — and they stood facing each other. Kesha could see the officer taking him in: thin, pale, in his grandfather's patched sweater, unshaven, his eyes sunken from lack of sleep. He probably did not look his best. He probably fitted the description "suspicious type" better than anyone on Krivaya.

"Somov," said the officer, holding out his hand. "Viktor Pavlovich."

Kesha hesitated for a second — shaking hands was unfamiliar to him and, to be honest, unpleasant — but he shook it. Somov's palm was broad, dry and warm. Kesha, from old habit, barely touching it — without looking, without wanting to — managed to feel something: tiredness, sleepless nights, some old pain, a daughter… He pulled his hand away faster than was polite.

"Innokenty," he said.

"Grandpa Grisha's grandson?"

"His grandson."

"I knew your grandfather," Somov said unexpectedly. "Not personally. Just saw him about. He always sat on the bench by the tower, I remember, in the evenings. With his pipe. Everyone said hello to him." He paused. "A stern old man."

Kesha did not know what to say to that.

"How can I help?" he asked.

Somov sat back down on the chair — without being invited, as if he owned it — and took several sheets from the folder he held under his arm.

"Leonid Sergeyevich Pastukhov," he read. "Born nineteen ninety-eight. Courier for a delivery service. Do you know him?"

Kesha shook his head. Then he said:

"Lyonya. In the yellow jacket."

"In the yellow jacket," Somov confirmed. "He came here?"

"On the first of March."

"Definitely the first?"

"Grisha writes it in the book."

Grisha, who was standing by the door, rushed to the shelf, took down the visitors' book, found the entry and showed it. Somov read it, nodded and noted something on his sheet.

"Disappeared on the ninth," he said. "On the evening of the ninth he stopped answering. The dispatcher rings — no answer. Orders hanging. On the morning of the tenth, the same. His mother lives in the country, in Olshanka; she rang him — no answer. Yesterday towards evening she rang us. This morning I went to his flat — he was renting a one-room place on Zarechnaya — opened the door with the landlady. Nothing. Nobody. Things in their place. Phone in its place, on the table, battery dead. His yellow jacket in its place, on the hook. That box of his — in its place too. Boots — in their place. But he's not."

"Then what did he go out in?" asked Kesha.

"That's what I'd like to know," said Somov. "If the jacket's on the hook and the boots are in the hall. It's March outside. In his slippers, or what? But the slippers are there too. The landlady says he only had the one pair."

Zarechnaya, where Lyonya rented his one-room flat, is the kind of district here where people move when they have nowhere else to live: five-storey blocks from the sixties along the embankment, poplars that in summer cover the whole quarter in fluff so that the cars look as if they're standing in cotton wool, metal garages, and a playground on which no child has played since the nineties, because in the evenings it's where people gather who have nowhere else to drink. Landladies there let flats to students, couriers and young families, charge little and ask no questions, and the neighbours don't know one another and don't want to. So if someone disappears on Zarechnaya, it's not the neighbours who miss him but the dispatcher — over the undelivered orders — and that, perhaps, is the saddest thing that can be said about Zarechnaya.

He was silent for a moment.

"The neighbours heard nothing. No quarrel, no noise. The camera at the entrance didn't see him on the evening of the ninth — neither going in nor coming out. According to the dispatcher he closed his last order at eighteen forty, two blocks from home. And after that — that's it. As if he'd evaporated."

Kesha was silent, and Somov looked at him with that calm gaze which nothing surprised, the gaze with which he must have looked at all his witnesses — the washing thief and the old woman with the refrigerator alike — and waited.

"The ninth. A blot. If someone calls you by name — do not answer."

He had not written that for Lyonya. He had written Lyonya's on the first of March, before the man in the coat came. He had written Lyonya: "On the tenth you'll meet a girl in a café." A good, bright month.

"Now, why I've come to you," Somov went on. "Among his things we found this." He opened the folder and took out something wrapped in a clear plastic sleeve. "It was lying on the table. Next to the phone. Unrolled. As if before he… well, before he vanished — he'd been reading it. Yours?"

He held out the sleeve.

Kesha took it, and in the sleeve was a parchment. His parchment — thick, yellowish, with uneven edges — he would have known it among a thousand. The edges were curled, as happens when a scroll has lain a long time in a pocket. A bit of coarse thread still dangled from one corner.

"Yours?" Somov repeated.

"Mine," said Kesha.

"Your handwriting?"

Kesha looked at the text: the handwriting was his. His, Kesha's — slanting, small, with long tails on the letters, with the characteristic loop on the capital S. Grandpa's steel pen, Grandpa's ink — black, with a faint reddish tinge, which Kesha ordered from an old little shop in the capital. There could be no doubt.

"Mine," Kesha said again.

"Good," said Somov. "Then perhaps you'll explain what this means?"

Kesha lowered his eyes to the parchment and began to read.

The first line was his. "Heart. March." That was how he always wrote it.

But what came next was not right.

Not "The girl won't come back. On the evening of the tenth you'll meet another — in the café where you'll be picking up an order." Not what he had written on the first of March, not what he had seen. He remembered this parchment — he remembered all his parchments, at least for the last month — and this one he remembered well, because Lyonya's month had been bright, and Kesha enjoyed writing bright months.

There was something else there. In his handwriting — his, his! — with the long tails, with the loop on the S — it said:

"On the evening of the ninth you will be called by name. Go out. You have long been waited for."

Kesha looked at these lines, and it seemed to him that the ink had not yet dried, though the parchment was ten days old — so wetly and blackly did it gleam under the lamp — and he felt the floor beneath his feet slowly, very slowly beginning to sink somewhere downwards, into the neighbouring cellar, to where the water was dripping.

"Well?" asked Somov. "What does it mean, Innokenty? 'You will be called.' Who'll call? Who's waiting? Did you know something? Did you arrange something with him?"

Kesha raised his eyes to him.

"I didn't write this," he said.