The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (9 page)

He stopped and glowered around the room. “The three shots that were heard by the two witnesses were the ones already on the tape recorder! Cozzens even remarked that they were somewhat
muffled!
. . . The tape recorder ran itself out silently again, till Gertie, in the excitement that followed the discovery of Gosling’s dead body, managed to flip the switch off.”

“Good God!” muttered somebody in the room,

Banner cleared his throat with a big sea lion noise. “Haaak! Although Gertie had been terrorized into helping Lockyear remove a threat to his existence as a spy, she wanted desperately for one of us to know the truth. She knew she was being watched by everybody, their side as well as ours, so she couldn’t come right out and tell us about it. She drew two circles, one inside the other, on a piece of paper. She didn’t dare hint further. She was trying to call our attention to the reel of the tape recorder – circular. Yunnerstand? And she was trying to help us, boys. If she had completely obeyed the instructions of the murderer, I never would’ve found the tape still on the recorder in that office – she would’ve destroyed it. Last night the murderer killed her as a safety measure, thinking that his trail on tape had been completely wiped out.”

D
uring his years with the Mongolian police Inspector Dorj had witnessed crimes in sufficient variety to inspire several Shakespearean tragedies, but until the crowbar-wielding midget sent the locked door of the circus caravan flying open the inspector had never seen a man murdered by a corpse.

Hercules the lion-tamer was, it is true, an exceptionally large and powerful corpse, but a corpse nevertheless. He lay wedged between the bed on which Dorj had last seen him and the blood-smeared door of the ancient caravan’s lavatory cubicle. His enormous hands were still reaching for his victim. Nikolai Zubov, sprawled partly under the table near the door, was now beyond Hercules’ reach, but the ugly welt ringing the circus owner’s neck made it clear what must have happened. Dorj said so.

“Clear?” muttered Dima, the midget, peering around Dorj into the disordered caravan. Dima’s bone white clown makeup ran with sweat from his efforts with the crowbar, turning his face almost as ghastly as Zubov’s. “How can you say it is clear when it seems Zubov was strangled by a dead man?”

“Of course the lion-tamer was dead,” said Batu, Dorj’s assistant. “The lion went berserk and practically disembowelled him. No one could have survived a gaping wound like that. You’re lucky you got bored and left the performance before the lion-taming act started.”

Dorj now regretted dragging the young man to the circus, which had turned out to be a sorry affair even before the accident. “You kept an eye on the caravan while I returned to town to make arrangements?”

“I would have seen anyone approaching.”

“So only Zubov and Hercules were inside?”

A cloud-like frown passed over Batu’s round, flat moon of a face, a typical Mongolian face in contrast to Dorj’s sharper-angled features. “The names of those deceased should not be spoken so soon after death. Souls linger. So many people, saying their names – they may call the dead back from the lower world.”

Dorj had long since abandoned trying to talk Batu out of his native beliefs and instead had taken to occasionally exposing the young man to some culture – unfortunately, as it turned out, in the case of the circus. So now he simply instructed his assistant to begin the tedious collection of evidence and then, to be alone to consider the conundrum, walked away from the caravan and the abandoned Russian airplane hangar the circus had borrowed for its performances.

A rutted track led into the desert where a cold September wind rolled small bits of gravel against his carefully polished shoes. Unlike Batu, who had grown up in a
ger
, the traditional movable tent of the Mongolian nomads, Dorj was city bred. Until the great earthquake that some called freedom had driven him to a posting in the Gobi, he had rarely strayed far from the relatively cosmopolitan world of Ulaanbaatar.

He was not comfortable in his own country. He hated the Gobi, a featureless immensity beside which men and the culture Dorj valued so highly seemed small and insignificant. Out here Batu’s half-civilized ideas about returning souls seemed almost plausible. Or at least as good as any explanation the inspector had for a murderous corpse.

Staring out to the far off horizon where mountains sat like clouds, Dorj tried to recall what he had witnessed earlier. It was possible those events might have something to tell him about Zubov’s mysterious death. But since the lion-tamer’s death had been a grisly accident, Dorj had not examined the scene as carefully as he would have if a crime had been committed, and he regretted it now.

The inspector had arrived at the hangar door just as the lion-tamer’s corpse was being laid beside it, beneath a line of carelessly slapped on posters advertising that those who visited the circus would, among other delights, view a recreation of:

“The First Labour of Hercules. See The Mighty Hercules Slay the Nemean Lion.”

Dorj had been struck by the irony of Hercules’s death because, while some survived the vagaries and misfortunes of life by seeing dark humour in it all, he survived by noting the irony.

And thinking back now, what else had he noticed, aside from distressed circus-goers edging past the corpse?

Zubov was standing outside the hangar, still wearing his ringmaster’s top hat, speaking to a muscular young man decked out in spangled tights.

“Perhaps if I go back and perform my act, it will distract the crowd,” the young man suggested.

“Conceited fool!” the older man snapped back. “Go help direct them out the exits and make sure they don’t panic. Do you think anyone wants to see you preening and swinging like a monkey, with a man lying dead right outside?”

Zubov was soft featured, chubby around the middle, but his voice was harsh. His magic tricks involving a red ball and three boxes with obviously false bottoms had driven Dorj outside.

Dorj also remembered a woman standing beside the door, head bent. She was a tall, striking blonde, perhaps nearing middle age but it was difficult to be certain, given her heavy make-up. She was dressed in layers of diaphanous sequined material that billowed in the bitter wind, but she stood motionless, a great glittering icicle.

Because he was a government official at the scene, Dorj introduced himself to Zubov. There were arrangements to be made.

“We’ll put the fat man in my caravan where I can keep on eye on him for now,” the circus owner said brusquely. “Dima! Get the wheelbarrow!” He looked around for the clown.

“Where’s that idiot runt?” Turning back to Dorj, he continued, “You can’t rely on anybody these days. But you must know how it is, Inspector. I suppose you deal with enough underlings yourself – and all of them slackers and idiots.”

Dorj followed as the dead man was taken to the ringmaster’s caravan and laid on the bed. A few moments later, the blonde woman appeared at the caravan door. She resembled a ghost, icily composed, arms folded around herself as if she were trying to hold in a terrible storm of emotions. At last she was overwhelmed.

“Ah, Cheslav! My poor husband, I am so sorry! So sorry!” Weeping, she threw herself onto the corpse.

“Stop it, Ivana,” barked Zubov. “It’s too late to be sorry.”

But Ivana continued to sob hysterically, embracing her dead husband, smoothing his hair and rearranging his blood-soaked clothing as if to somehow repair the damage the lion had inflicted.

Dorj had hesitated, uncertain whether to intervene. He preferred the theatre where tumultuous emotions could be safely observed, caged upon the stage. He had been thankful when some of the other performers finally escorted Ivana away. The chilly wind no longer billowed out her robes; they had been soaked with her husband’s blood.

And those few impressions seemed to tell Dorj nothing at all about how the dead man had committed a murder. Perhaps there was something in Batu’s theory of returning souls after all.

“Watch out!”

As he approached the back of the caravan, returning from his solitary walk, Dorj felt a hand on his shoulder and paused in midstep. There was a loud metallic snap. Glancing down, he saw a trap, rusty jaws now locked shut, sitting on the gravel a centimetre or two from his foot. Turning around, he saw he had been warned by a woman. It was difficult to tell her age because of her beard.

“We catch marmots to feed to the animals,” she explained in Russian. Seeing Dorj understood, she added, “You’re lucky you didn’t step in one of these traps before. I saw you wandering around out here during the show, didn’t I? I’m sorry our performance drove you out into the cold.”

Dorj tried to think of something polite to say while at the same time trying not to stare too obviously at the woman’s somewhat sparse but unmistakable dark beard.

He had a soft spot for circuses. They had a certain magic, an otherworldly air, reminding him of Prospero’s island. Lights, sequins and distance transformed even the plainest of performers into fabulous creatures. But in truth, the Circus Chinggis had immediately struck him as the sort of seedy undertaking where the owners would be more likely than not to toss the main tent into the back of a 25-year-old Russian military lorry, herd the trained fleas onto a dusty lion and slip out of town under cover of darkness. Except, in a nation where thousands of people actually lived in tent-like
gers
, this forlorn circus apparently had no tents to call its own.

“You sold a programme to my colleague earlier, didn’t you?” was all Dorj could think to say.

“I suppose you’re one of those who never forgets a face! My name is Larisa Sergeyevna.”

Her voice was soft, her skin fair. To his chagrin Dorj found his gaze, leaving her beard, caught by her eyes, as blue as the sky over the Gobi.

Embarrassed, the inspector introduced himself. “I regret I will have to ask you some questions. For instance, I gather you haven’t been the Circus Chinggis for long.” He indicated the fresh and badly painted lettering on the side of the caravan.

Larisa glanced quickly at the caravan and then looked away, perhaps mindful of the two dead men inside. “You’re right. A few weeks ago Zubov decided he would have a better chance of meeting expenses by charging tugriks rather than rubles, not that any of us have actually seen either since we crossed the Mongolian border.

“But,” she continued, “Since you asked, let’s see, we were the Comrades’ Circus at one time, not to mention the Paris Troika. I even recall a time when we were just plain Buturlin’s. But I expect we’ll have to remain Mongolian for a while since we’re nearly out of paint, as well as running low on food. Perhaps you’ll give us another chance, and not want your admission money back?”

“I’m sure you put on a fine show. Perhaps it is just that I am out of humour. Or more in the mood for Shakespeare. Not that a circus doesn’t have more than a touch of Shakespeare.”

“You have a silver tongue, Inspector Dorj! I’ve never heard a circus compared to Shakespeare before. He wrote mostly about boring old kings killing each other, didn’t he?”

“But even his historical plays have a lot of magic in them, really. All manner of ghosts and portents, witchcraft and unnatural creatures . . .” Realizing his gaffe, his voice trailed off, but the bearded lady just smiled quietly at him. Then, to his distress, her blue eyes pooled with tears.

“Poor Cheslav,” she said. “He was always so afraid of the lion.”

Dorj gave her a questioning look.

“Cheslav – Hercules – was no lion-tamer. He was our strong man,” she explained. “Alexi, our real lion-tamer, he left us in Erdenet a few weeks ago. He thought he could find work in the copper mines. So Zubov ordered Cheslav to take over. Just like Zubov, that was!”

She turned away and pitched forward suddenly. Dorj caught her arm to keep her from falling. In the instant her warm weight was on him, his breath caught in his chest.

“My weak ankle,” she said. There was anger in her voice. “I used to be an acrobat. Imagine that. Then I got injured, but Zubov insisted I keep performing. He even forced me to keep training on the trapeze. My back is bad now, too. So I’m reduced to hawking programmes.” A tear ran down Larisa’s pale cheek and into her beard. “He was a hateful man. I could almost believe a corpse would rise up to kill one like him!”

When Larisa had gone Dorj remained aware, uncomfortably so, of the pleasurable sensation of her warmth near to him. It occurred to him that she was not so much ugly as she was . . . exotic . . . magical.