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 spa.r.s.e 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.
Embarra.s.sed, 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.
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 c.o.c.katoo 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 a.s.sured the woman softly.
Under normal circ.u.mstances 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 rea.s.sured 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 gla.s.s 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 compet.i.tion, 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."