The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (10 page)

He checked around the caravan again. The murder had occurred, it seemed, just before Dorj returned from Dalandzadgad, where he had gone to arrange for an ambulance to take the dead man away. It would have been much easier to have been able to call one with the aid of a portable telephone, but nothing of the sort had been made available to him out here in the desert. Batu, whom he had left at the circus as an official guard, had heard strange noises from the caravan. When there was no reply to the young policeman’s shouted inquiry, he had finally tried the door. It had been securely locked from the inside.

The small caravan was of vintage nineteen fifties design; no doubt it was towed behind one of the circus’s old lorries as the troupe moved from place to place. But now it stood alone, surrounded by flat, empty ground, some distance from both the hangar and the other circus vehicles. Dorj’s footsteps crunched on the gravel as he circled it. Batu would probably have heard, and surely seen, anyone trying to approach by stealth.

The caravan was as decrepit as the rest of the circus, Dorj thought as he noted a couple of badly patched holes in its rusted walls, half hidden by the freshly applied paint. There was a tiny window in each side wall and a vent in the curved roof. Dorj paced back a short distance, to get a better look at the vent. The opening was far too small for anyone to squeeze through. Dorj, thin as he was, wouldn’t have got more than an arm through it. For a moment he wondered about Dima, the small clown, but decided that even Dima could never have managed to squeeze through the vent. As for the windows, he noticed on closer inspection that they were sealed shut by carelessly applied and obviously undisturbed paint.

Glancing through the window, he saw the two dead men, Zubov now on the bed and his apparent murderer on the floor near him, were decently covered by a couple of pieces of canvas, perhaps the remains of the Circus Chinggis’s missing Big Top.

“Ah, Cheslav, I wish you could speak,” muttered Dorj. Then he recalled what Batu had said about calling back the souls of the dead, and hurried away from the caravan.

“Everyone hated Zubov,” Dima stated, confirming what Larisa had told Dorj. The midget, wiping dry, cracked make-up from his chin, was seated on a crate near the hangar door.

The inspector inquired why Zubov had been so hated.

“You saw the way he treated me! Do you doubt it?”

“He treated everyone the same, then?”

“Of course he did. Isn’t that always the way with people like him?” Dima climbed off the crate. He barely came up to Dorj’s waist. “He used to constantly criticize me for not being short enough,” he continued. “Can you imagine that? He’d laugh and shout at me that I couldn’t even manage to be small enough to be a proper midget.”

“He kept you on, though,” the inspector reminded him.

“He had no choice.”

Dorj asked him what he thought would happen to the little circus once the investigation was closed.

“I won’t be running it, that’s for certain!” Dima replied. “But as to that, Zubov didn’t confide in anyone. Who knows what his arrangements were?”

As patches of Dima’s make-up were removed, wrinkles were revealed at the corners of his mouth. Dorj realized that the man was middle-aged. It was difficult not to think of him as a child.

“Why was it that the others hated him?”

“You mentioned Larisa’s story, how the beast turned her into a cripple, but all the women had reason to hate him, the old lecher.”

“What about Ivana, Cheslav’s wife?”

Dima nodded. “They all did, as I said. And then there’s Fabayan Viktorovich, our aerial artist. He was angry that Zubov refused to take the circus to Moscow to perform. And he – Fabayan, that is – thought he should be the headline act. Zubov did not agree. Now, if you don’t mind, there’s work to be done, whatever our future might be. If I were you, Inspector, I would look no further. A corpse can’t be punished and Zubov’s murderer deserves no punishment. So perhaps there’s justice for the downtrodden, after all.”

“I’m glad you found me, Inspector,” Ivana said as she opened the door to let Dorj into the trailer. “For I have a confession to make. I’m afraid I am a murderer.”

Dorj had had opportunity to keep his Russian polished, but still he was not certain he had understood her words correctly.

“Yes, that’s right, Inspector. I’m a murderer,” she repeated calmly. She had changed from her bloodied clothing into a tight pink leotard. It did not conceal her body as had the diaphanous robes; it was hardly mourning apparel, Dorj thought.

Dima had told Dorj that he would find the others in what he called “the back yard”, the area where the rest of the circus lorries, animal trailers and caravans were parked. Their age and condition caused the back yard to resemble a junk yard.

Dorj had noticed a light on in a long trailer, and knocked on its door. Ivana had answered his summons.

Illuminated by a single bare bulb, the trailer was a dim confusion of shadows. It had an exotic smell, a mixture of animal dung and something worse. Evidently it was used to haul circus animals around from place to place.

“Take care you don’t step in that pile of marmots,” Ivana warned him after her astonishing confession. “They’ve been dead for quite some time.” Then she began to sob.

Dorj had never cared much for Russian literature of the more melodramatic kind, and was beginning to think that it perhaps reflected national characteristics more accurately than he had hitherto imagined.

Amid the stark shadows striping the trailer, he could distinguish a few empty cages and pens. The faded paintings on the trailer’s outside walls depicted lions and tigers, trained poodles, alligators and snakes and a trumpeting elephant. A quick look around the interior showed a ragged cockatoo perched sleepily in a bird cage. One of several aquariums held an iguana. A rumble from the darkness at the back of the trailer reminded him that there was, at least, a lion.

“You’re understandably upset,” Dorj assured the woman softly.

Under normal circumstances he would have dismissed Ivana as a suspect, simply because a normal woman could not have inflicted with her bare hands the damage he’d seen on Zubov’s neck. But, he had to keep reminding himself, circus people could not necessarily be judged by what some might call normal standards. After all, so far he had spoken to a man the size of a child and a woman with a beard. Nevertheless, it still seemed impossible that anyone except Cheslav and Zubov could had been locked inside the caravan.

Ivana, who appeared to be unusually normal by circus standards, retreated toward the back of the trailer and Dorj followed her. In the deeper shadows at the far end, the lion’s holding cage was bolted securely to the floor. The lion, which looked scrawny and mangy when viewed at close hand, was asleep. Dorj hoped it would not have to be euthanized.

“We don’t suspect you of anything. You surely could not have strangled Zubov,” Dorj reassured Ivana.

“I’m not speaking of Zubov. It was my husband I murdered.” She quickly shoved something small between the bars of the lion’s cage – a marmot – and wiped her hands on her pink leotards before rummaging in a small cabinet near the cage. “Look here.”

Dorj glanced over her shoulder and saw several glass bottles and a frighteningly large hypodermic on the shelf above them. He began to point out that in fact a dreadful injury had caused her husband’s death. Then another thought occurred to him.

“Are you saying you drugged your husband before he went in the ring with his lion taming act?”

“Not Cheslav. No, I drugged Raisa – the lion. Cheslav could never be a real lion-tamer. A timid man, he was. Raisa is not that fierce, but we always drugged her, for safety reasons, you know? We even drugged her for Alexi, to make her more manageable, or rather Alexi did that himself.

“Since he left, I’ve taken over looking after the animals. Not that I can do much for them. We’re beginning to run out of tranquilizer, as well as their food. It is so sad. Perhaps hunger is what made Raisa so fierce.”

She slammed the cabinet door shut and Raisa, disturbed by the noise, rumbled in her sleep. Dorj felt the raw power of the deep sound vibrating in his chest and through the thin soles of his shoes.

“So Zubov ordered me to cut down on the dosage to make what we had last longer,” the woman continued. “I should have known better. But I was afraid of him, so I did what he said. And now my poor husband is dead. So you see, as I said, I’m guilty.”

“If what you say is true, it was not murder, it was a terrible accident. But in any event, it is Zubov’s murderer I’m interested in finding.” He did not add that the more he found out about the man the less interested he was in the task. Yet, one did one’s duty.

Ivana’s eyes glinted as they reflected the light of the bare bulb. “But the evidence is clear. Surely it shows that my husband got up off his death bed to take his revenge on the man who turned me into a murderer?”

As he walked away from the trailer Dorj found himself looking for Larisa. There were things he had forgotten to ask her about, he told himself. Instead he ran into the young man in spangled tights whom he had seen earlier talking to Zubov.

“I’m Fabayan Viktorovich, the aerialist,” the young man said, after Dorj had introduced himself. “In fact, I’m the Fabulous Flying Fabayan, as the posters say. Or would have said, if Zubov had ever got them printed.”

Dorj, shivering in his thin coat as the wind picked up, suggested they talk somewhere more sheltered. Fabayan led the way back to the hangar, where the fluttering circus posters Zubov had handprinted in bold red letters, and that long ago from the crumpled looks of them, still promised a brave show with jugglers and clowns, fortune-tellers and snake-charmers, acrobats and contortionists, and of course, the mighty lion-taming Hercules.

“I just want to check on my rigging, though I doubt we’ll be putting on another performance tonight. Accidents happen in threes, we always say. I’m sure you will have many questions.”

As they entered the ill-lit, empty hangar, Dorj asked the muscular young man about the lion tamer.

“Cheslav was a roustabout, not a performer,” replied Fabayan, contempt evident in his tone. “He was an out-of-work stonemason. Zubov spotted him leaving after a show in Chelyabinsk. We needed some muscle to set things up, to help move cages, to haul up the rigging.” He indicated the complicated arrangement of ropes, nets and trapezes half hidden above them. “I couldn’t trust him with the knots or getting the nets in the right places, or any of that. Eventually Zubov gave him the lion-taming act.”

Nothing at the circus was what it seemed, thought Dorj. Its amazing and glittering wonders were nothing more than tawdry deceits. Yet what about a murderous corpse? What sort of deceit was that? Or was that real?

Dim light outlined the web of ropes high up in the cavernous hangar. Certainly the distance between Fabayan’s trapeze, up near the ceiling, and the hard concrete floor far below was real enough.

“It takes true skill to perform up there,” boasted Fabayan, following Dorj’s gaze. “Buturlin recognized talent. He was born to the circus. He was the one who engaged me. If he were still alive, it would be different.”

“Buturlin was the former owner?”

“Yes, and then Zubov and he became partners. Buturlin died a year or two ago. But Zubov, he was originally just the accountant; he knows nothing about talent or the circus.”

“Zubov did perform some magic,” Dorj pointed out.

“Anyone can buy a trick box. The only thing Zubov made disappear was our pay cheques. If he had headlined my aerial act rather than a fat, unemployed labourer and a drugged big cat, we would be the toast of Moscow by now.”

Fabayan’s voice echoed around the empty hangar as he walked about, testing several thick ropes dangling from above. Dorj followed a few steps behind.

“Why did Zubov imagine you would do better business in Mongolia?” he finally asked.

“Because we would have no competition, or so he said. But, more importantly, as it turned out, he did not realize that you Mongolians don’t have enough tugriks to keep the traffic lights working, let alone pay for art.”

Not put diplomatically, but true enough, reflected Dorj. It struck him that the deaths of both the owner and his favoured lion tamer had at once removed two impediments to Fabayan’s career. He wondered who else might have been angered by Zubov’s refusal to headline aerialists. “Do you perform alone?”

“At the moment, yes. However, I have been training Ivana. Naturally, the audience wants thrills and artistry such as I provide, but I also needed a vision of beauty on the wires, to complement my performance.”

The young man stared up into the shadows, a bird with its wings clipped.

“Isn’t it dangerous, trying to learn something like that at her age?” Dorj ventured delicately.

The other dismissed the suggestion. “Ivana is closer to my age than Cheslav’s,” he said, somewhat heatedly it seemed to Dorj. “Besides, she is an accomplished acrobat. She took over for Larisa when she could no longer continue her act. Her acrobatic act, at least. We no longer have a contortionist. Larisa was the only one of us with that talent.”

Larisa had mentioned only her acrobatic skill. For a moment Dorj said nothing. He was thinking about her remarkable blue eyes. It was hard to imagine those blue eyes belonged to a woman who was, or had been, a contortionist, as well as . . . Dorj forced his thoughts back to more important matters.