The waiter did not yet bring my ice-cream as the cell-phone squeaked in my pocket. I recognized his voice at once.
“Nicolas? Sokolov? You hear?”
“I hear you, yes. Speak louder!”
“It’s Fomin speaking. Too noisy here! Listen, I won’t come to you, I cannot, emergency’s here. Do you hear me?”
I told him I heard him all right. His voice was trembling, breath coming in gasps. I heard also noise in the phone: voices, knocks, raps.
“Nicolas, I’m sorry! You know there is a dead body beside me! Hey, you hear me? Dead body of employee found just this morning. Police is here, lots of them. I can’t come over to you.”
“I understand, and don’t you worry, I’ll see you some other time. I’m sorry.”
“No, no, today! You should come here! Right now! You hear me?”
I was startled: never did I go to any crime scene with a dead body, not yet having seen the client, or figure out what my job might be.
“Come over to you now? Serious? Just to see some corpse?”
“Yes, now, while the body is still here! Can’t you? Please.”
“What should I unearth for you over there?”
“The cause of his death. It’s very important to us!”
“To whom?”
“To the leaders of our party. Please.”
“OK, I’m coming.”
I wrote down the address. That was inside the central Bulvarnoe ring, half an hour by bike, the headquarters of their party: Communist party, or more accurately, one of them. There were several just in Moscow, all of them inside Bulvarnoe ring neighboring Kremlin, the tiny hairs of once powerful Communist party of Soviet Union. I left the café and hopped over my Harley. As I pulled from the parking lot I felt a pleasant tickle inside of me, and I knew what it meant: coming days won’t be dull for me.
When I arrived the body was lying on two office tables drown together. Over the body, from the head with ruffled blond hair to the naked pale feet, was dangling a thick electric cable. I recognized this man just glancing at his pale face with half-closed eyes. But not just his face or eyes, but everything here, including this twisted cable, seemed to me an absolutely improbable, a hundred percent déjà vu. Or more precisely, like a hundred-year-old photograph that I’ve seen so many times before.
Police investigators just left this place before I came here, and in this ordinary city apartment stayed only employees or, more to the point, this party’s head members. When I entered this apartment from the staircase two huge young men at once blocked my way. But they were not professional guards – I can easily spot those. These looked like old Soviet style volunteers of militia,