The Brodsky Affair: Murder is a Dying Art (19 page)

Candles and the fluttering firelight threw a mellow and smoky glow around the timber walls. It gave a soft blush to her ‘holy’ corner, where there hung her Mother of God icon. From such small delights she drew comfort. This year was Maria’s first Christmas. Times like these were rare. She drew back the curtains of her memories, her family lost and divided by war.

She thought of Mikhail.

There had been no word from him since the day she and Lev had fled and had miraculously made it to Switzerland and then into France. War had separated them and Lev had left for Paris. She only wanted to return back home. God knows how Lev found her again. She appreciated his letters, three or four times per year, which she bundled in a faded yellow ribbon. He’d never married, although he had a son, Leonid, about the same age as her daughter.

Her eyes overflowed with tears. Above where Maria slept hung the two paintings, stained by wood smoke, Mikhail had given them to her not long before the Nazis arrived. Although she did not understand them, she had vowed she would leave them to Maria, from an uncle she might never meet. It would be a link to times that had been good, with much laughter… where life had been full of zest.

The firelight flickered across the paintings and she stared at them, recalling his life, and his gentle love. But now, not knowing if he was alive or dead, these two paintings were all she had left of him. The first suggested old men struggling with machines, the image blurred by a coloured conception of speed and movement, cut through with lines like needles and fading into distant curves. The second was dominated by a large black rectangle surrounded by a montage of landscape from which stricken faces could be made out – images of war. From its hazy momentum, she swore she could feel his presence.

~ * ~

Tamsin hit the throttle, crashing through the gears and propelling the begrudging Civic into a screaming wheel spin, away from New Farm. Jack held on to the grab handle, biting on his bottom lip.

“Where are we going?” he shouted above the revved engine.

“Anywhere but here!”

“Find an inn or motel and let’s stop.”

“What the fuck do we do now?”

“The police must be looking for us.”

“Us or that Professor Grigori.”

The Civic screeched through narrow tracks and New Farm vanished rapidly behind them. Third-rate roads zigzagged through unfamiliar swathes of deserted Russian farmlands, often running alongside disused and rusting railway tracks, with lonely sooty chimneys towering out of nowhere. Trees and forests of birch and pine cloaked them from view. Every so often, the woods would surrender to a blackened blight of broken and smashed tree stumps.

“What a godforsaken dump,” Manton shouted over the protesting engine noise. “Hey look!” He pointed to a road sign. “That’ll do.” The sign in Russian and English indicated the Motel Gorky, 6 km from Golovchino.

The car heaved with a cracking crunch to the right as Tamsin, without slowing, swung into the turn.

“Okay?”

“As well as can be expected. We need to go through every detail or we’re going to end up dead, courtesy of International Art Sourcing.”

Tamsin continued gunning the car at speeds. “Look, there it is up in front.” He pointed toward what looked like a long, curved building just off the road.

“That’s it.” Tamsin sounded relieved, her eye distracted by the large Russian tricolored flag fluttering in a soft breeze from a flagpole. “What’s this lot doing here?” She pointed to an array of assorted Russian military vehicles parked around the compound, before bringing the gasping Civic to a halt close to the main reception area.

“Oh shit, I forgot.”

“Forgot what?”

“Golovchino. It’s a national nuclear weapons storage area.”

“What!”

“Don’t worry. They’re buried somewhere near here in a vast underground ravine. We wouldn’t get within miles of them and I don’t intend to. Besides, if anybody is looking for us, hiding in the middle of them is probably the last place they’re going to look. C’mon, let’s see what’s available.”

She swung herself out of the car and headed to the Motel entrance, pushing open the heavy glass door of the Gorky Motel.

The sour reek of stale beer caused her to wrinkle her nose and look across to Jack.

“What a God-awful smell, and look at the decor.” She indicated the bright orange and brown furnishings and upholstery. On small shelves around a central desk stood cheap plastic pots, filled with forlorn spider plants in need of water. She saw Jack shake his head in disbelief as she examined the desk nameplate of Sergei Egorov. But he wasn’t there. With a clenched fist, she rapped hard on the bell.

Before she could knock again, the office door swung open with a slow reluctance. Bent low, carrying a clipboard, appeared a man of about fifty, looking like a character out of Sesame Street. His head looked too small for his body and his face hard to distinguish. His torso was covered in a square-necked jumper of bright yellow and black stripes, causing him to look like a fat yellow wasp. Without looking up, it spoke, “
Dobro Pozalovat
.”
Welcome
. Tamsin’s hand clutched at her mouth to suppress a giggle and one glance at Jack made her worse.

The wasp remained bent low. “You want a room? We have number six. It is 1650 Rouble. You want?”

“We want,” said Tamsin, pushing her money across the desktop.

Sergei, the wasp, reached for the money and then stretched out for the keys. Without making eye contact, he held up the keys in delicate fingers a card shark would have envied, and let them fall into her outstretched hand. Without another word he scuttled back behind the doors.

Once outside in the fresh air, Tamsin swore she could hear a mockingbird calling from somewhere among the trees. But she knew better… she wanted out of all this.

~ * ~

Room Six, a standard motel model, included an ancient Rubin
TV encased in a brown plastic surround with chromium plated control buttons.

“Oh God, just look at that, will you?” said Jack, holding up his hands in disbelief. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Noah’s Ark was sitting out in the backyard somewhere.”

“Well, at least it’s a bolt hole to get our heads together and work out where we go from here.”

“Either the authorities are slow off the mark in transmitting our details, or our drone back there hasn’t checked his messages. What d’you think?”

“I don’t want to think about it. A friendly cultural interchange has become a complete horror show. If you really want to know, it’s become un-fucking-believable!”

“Tamsin, I’m so sorry I’ve dumped you in a complete pile of shit, none of which has anything to do with you. Please go home, please.”

“Don’t doubt it. I’d love to. But this is also my problem. We are both, whether we like it or not, somehow involved in two murders. It is cutting right through our relationship and has given me further reason to wonder. We need to talk about that some other time. For now, we owe a debt to Katherine and that has to be fulfilled. So, let’s get on with it. But the issue is not over, not by a long way!” Snatching the notes away from under his arm, she slapped them down on the bedside table and opened them up. “All we know so far is that at least one painting,
No. 10 Girl of Peace,
has ended up with a murderer, presumably working with this IAS. Why Katherine ended up dead, I don’t understand.”

Manton didn’t acknowledge the rest of her speech. Now was not the time.

“It’s a mystery. There’s obviously something going on here we don’t understand. You’re right and painting number 10 is another on my chart. We need to find the missing numbers,” he said.

“Her notes halt at Golovchino. She’s listed aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. Many must have died when the Nazis started executing and deporting Jews in the district in late 1941. Others may have survived, escaped, died naturally or moved on. Or, the lineage came to an end.” She paused.

“What’s wrong?”

“I know it might sound melodramatic, but don’t you see? Brodsky’s paintings, they’re a connection – an eloquent statement of social and political record. They are valuable Russian history.”

“Of course I see that and it looks like somebody else does as well. The few I’ve seen are superb. They’re a witness to a community that was shredded to bits. I think we owe not only Katherine but Nikita Brodsky. I don’t want their deaths to be meaningless. Am I making sense?”

“Perfectly.”

“So, what have we found out?”

She scrutinised the notes written in Russian.

“Lev and Sofia Brodsky escaped the Nazis leaving Mikhail behind. Lev, it seems, settled in Paris after the war, working as a multi-lingual interpreter for the armed forces. Katherine indicates he never married but lived with his lover, Gabrielle. They eventually had a son, Leonid. Lev died in 1985, three years after Gabrielle, and what became of Leonid, she doesn’t say.”

“What about Sofia?”

“This is more interesting. She married a Russian man, Taras Charkov, moved back here and in 1947, they had a daughter named Maria. Sofia died almost to the day that Lev died in 1985. Don’t you find that spooky?”

Manton ignored the question. “What about Maria? Where’s she now?”

“According to Katherine, she must still be here. If she is, she must be in her early sixties. The records show she married a local man, Ilya Bromovitch.”

“So, we’re looking for Maria Bromovitchova?”

“We are, but I’ve left the best part last.”

His eyebrows rose. “What are you on about?” He saw her irritating smirk, her eyebrows mimicking his. “C’mon stop pissing me about… tell me for God’s sake!”

“Your people’s champion, Mikhail Brodsky, had a lover, Elena Normova. It seems she was already married. Their affair caused a scandal and they moved to this place. They had a daughter Liliya. When Liliya was three, Elena left Mikhail to live in Lyon, France, taking Liliya with her. It was an amicable split and it was known he’d painted a special work for them. What that is, nobody knows. It was then that Lev and Sofia came to live with him.”

“This is getting complicated,” muttered Jack, squinting. At the back of his mind, what Tamsin said awhile back bothered him. She sounded like she would be breaking off with him soon.

Chapter Twenty One

W
earing a white forensic suit, mask and latex gloves, Kolosov gazed down at Nikita Brodsky’s corpse lying on the farmhouse floor.

The air, hot, humid and smelling of dusty old carpets and fresh blood, encouraged black flies around the body. Close inspection revealed a neat hole had been fired through the centre of his forehead. A dark thin line of congealed blood spread out from his white hair. The photographers had finished and three forensic analysts kitted with swabs, DNA samplers, plastic bags, bottles, powders, tweezers and other items moved methodically around the crime scene. He knew they could take hours, if not days.

Outside in the yard, ringed with yellow and black crime scene tape, stood ambulances and police cars. Kolosov avoided movement that could contaminate the crime scene, although he did feel tempted to light up his pipe.

“Nasty, but professional. Any other wounds?” he asked the forensic examiner.

“Not that I can find.”

Kolosov stood looking down at Brodsky’s body and attempted to unravel what happened. The rest of the house looked neat and tidy. and domestic items stood in neat orderly piles. Nothing seemed to have been taken. His thoughts turned to Danilovova’s murder, the notes she had prepared and the fact that this man had been mentioned in them.
These murders are clearly linked. Somebody badly wants art by Brodsky and is willing to kill for it… but who? This Englishman, Manton, or somebody we don’t know of?

The man at his feet, Nikita Brodsky, Mikhail Brodsky’s cousin, lay dead.
Where are the English pair, have they been here?
The conspicuous discolouration on the wall captured his attention. Something used to hang there.
Could that have been a painting? It fitted like it could have been.
He stood, and walked across to a small pedestal table at the far end of the room. On it stood three framed photographs. One galvanised his attention. A young boy who looked like Nikita was standing with an older person, and the resemblance between them was striking.

Who?

Kolosov was certain they were family. What caught his attention was that mounted on the wall behind them hung a striking painting, although it was mostly indistinguishable. The photo had been taken in the same room that Nikita Brodsky now lay sprawled in a pool of blood. It had been positioned where a gap on the wall now glared down on the scene. He picked up the framed photograph and dropped it into a criminal evidence bag.
Could that have been a Brodsky?

“Eltsin,” he barked at his second. “Have you completed your analysis of the dead woman’s computer report on Mikhail Brodsky yet?”

“I have.”

“Well?”

“It looks as if we should soon be heading to another relative nearby.”

Kolosov nodded. “Show me.” He tugged off the latex gloves with a sharp snap, rolled them into a ball and shoved them into his pocket.

~ * ~

The proximity of military vehicles left traces of diesel fumes in the air, and attested to the district’s national importance. Without their presence, the area was pastoral with five thousand residents, their grazing livestock close to meandering streams and the wandering banks of the River Vorskla. Overlooking them were miles of sugar beet and sunflower crops. The region likely hadn’t changed much since Brodsky lived here and a long time before that.

“Tamsin, this looks unreal. What are we doing here?”

“If you don’t know, who does?”

“From what I can make out, this town has few inhabitants, and streets, or roads cutting through it. Finding Maria Bromovitchova shouldn’t be that difficult if she still lives here. The post office should know. Apart from the war years, she must have lived here most of her life.”

“Okay, but should we find any of his missing paintings, what are we going to do with it?”