“Detective Borodin speaking, yes.”
“Kuzmin here.”
He rattled his memory but it stayed blank.
“Who?”
“Professor Kuzmin, forensic pathology lab, Second Medical Institute. Did you send me the specimens recovered from the Metropol bombing? The file has your name on it.”
“Ah, yes, I am the officer in charge of the case.”
“Well, you’re a bloody fool.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I have just finished my examination of the remains of the body recovered from that hotel room. Along with a lot of bits of wood and glass that have nothing to do with me,” said the irascible pathologist.
“So what’s the problem, Professor? He’s dead, isn’t he?”
The voice on the phone was becoming shrill with rage.
“Of course he’s dead, poltroon. He wouldn’t be in bits in my lab if he was running around.”
“Then I can’t see the problem. I’ve been years in Homicide, and I’ve never seen anyone more dead.”
The voice from the Second Medical Institute took a grip on itself and dropped to the coaxing tone of one speaking to a small and rather dim child.
“The question, my dear Borodin, is, Who is dead?”
“Well, the American tourist of course. You have his bones there.”
“Yes, I have bones, Detective Borodin.” The voice stressed the word detective to imply the policeman would have trouble finding his way to the washroom without a guide dog. “I would also expect to have fragments of tissue, muscle, cartilage, sinew, skin, hair, nails, entrails—even a couple of grams of marrow. But what do I have? Bones, just bones, nothing but bones.”
“I don’t follow you. What’s wrong with the bones?”
The professor finally exploded. Borodin had to hold the phone away from his ear.
“There’s nothing wrong with the bloody bones. They’re lovely bones. They’ve been lovely bones for about twenty years, which is the period I estimate their former owner has been dead. What I am trying to get into your pin-size brain is that someone took the trouble to blow to bits an anatomical skeleton, the sort every medical student keeps in the corner of his room.”
Borodin’s mouth opened and shut like a fish’s.
“The American wasn’t in that room?” he asked.
“Not when the bomb went off,” said Dr. Kuzmin.
“Who was he anyway? Or, as he is presumably still alive, who is he?”
“I don’t know. Just a Yankee academic.”
“Ah, you see, another intellectual. Like myself. Well, you can tell him I like his sense of humor. Where do you want me to send my report?”
The last thing Borodin wanted was for it to land on his own desk. He named a certain major general in the militia Presidium.
The major general received it the same afternoon. He rang Colonel Grishin to give him the news. He did not get a bonus.
By nightfall Anatoli Grishin had mobilized his private army of informants, and it was a formidable force. Thousands of replicas of the photo of Jason Monk, the one taken from his passport, were circulated to the Black Guard and the Young Combatants, who were spewed onto the streets of the capital in the hundreds to search for the wanted man. The effort and the numbers were greater than during the hunt for Leonid Zaitsev, the missing office cleaner.
Other copies went to the clan chief of the Dolgoruki underworld mafia with orders to locate and hold. Informants in the police and immigration services were alerted. A reward of one hundred billion rubles was offered for the fugitive, a sum to take the breath away.