Essays
My First Russian Corpse - A Bum, A Bill, And A Body
The eXile
By Carl Schreck
I saw a dead body the other day. It was the first one I've ever seen that I knew was a corpse. In the seven years I've lived in Moscow, I've seen several unconscious bums that I highly suspected were actually dead. But there were no doubts about this guy.
I had stayed home from work with a cold but decided to venture out and buy a five-liter bottle of water to keep myself hydrated and make one of these ridiculous financial transactions I always find myself making here. This particular one involved paying two tax bills -- one for 30 rubles, 39 kopeks; one for 23 kopeks -- for the 14 meters my wife owns in her parents' apartment. That was her property tax for last year: 30.62 rubles (a little more than $1). There was an urgency to this bill because it represented the final hurdle to reclaim a tax refund of several thousand dollars for the apartment we purchased last year. It was well worth braving the long lines and unfriendly cashiers at crusty Sberbank.
The Sberbank is about four minutes by foot from our apartment, on the way to the metro, and I was walking on the sidewalk, staring at the bills and contemplating the bizarrely small sum I was going to give the cashier in exact change, when I walked straight into a piece of red-and-white police tape suspended waist-high. It was anchored by a black SUV and a rusty metal bus stop shelter.
I looked over my left shoulder and saw him sprawled out flat on his back under the shelter, his grimy head under the bench and his boots reaching just short of the sidewalk. He was in his forties, wearing dark pants and a dark-blue sweatshirt -- both of which were dirty, but in the way that an automechanic's clothes are dirty--and had an overgrown buzz-cut and a three day beard. There was a reddish hue to the back of his skull, which made me think there may have been violent circumstances. Or maybe he had been struck and killed by the SUV, a probable enough death in Moscow.
But I surveyed the scene and noticed that the SUV likely belonged to the youngish plainclothes cop in dark pants and a black leather coat pacing around and waiting for the rest of the guys to show up. My first thought was: "What a lousy police tape job." What's the point of taping off just one side of the scene? It reminded me of the Police Squad! gag when the forensics guys walk through the doorway to the next office while Leslie Nielsen sidesteps the door and walks around the entire wall without breaking stride.
Anyway, I didn't have any identification on me, so I decided not to ask any questions and hurried along to the bank.
It was a painless sojourn at Sberbank, with lines backed up only for the windows dedicated to credit and deposits issues. After the cashier handed my receipts back, I went straight back home.
By this time a police van and a meatwagon were at the bus stop, though neither the body nor the lonely strand of police tape had moved. Some cops in uniform were now huddling near the car, while the plainclothes guy was talking to some babushka, who I suppose was expounding on what a ne'er-do-well drunk the dead man was. Before the advent of surveillance cameras, babushki were the eyes and ears of the city, parked on their courtyard benches spewing endless blather about who was fucking whose wife and what a shame it was little Natasha married a Jew, despite certain material benefits.
I was pissed at myself for having forgot my passport, because I really wanted to ask some questions. But having had nary a document check in the last several years, I decided to let it go. When I got home I switched on Ekho Moskvy and heard that two youngsters had found the body of a bum in a trash container in northern Moscow -- my part of town. I looked up the incident on the Internet, but it turned out to be a different street. Regardless, it was a dead bum, so it doesn't take Inspektor Derrik to determine that his heart probably just gave out after years of substance abuse and street living. I soon forgot about it.
Two days later I received a rare call on my home phone.
"This is your local uchastkovy," said the man on the other end. "With whom am I speaking?"
I have a rough idea of the police hierarchy, and as I recall, an uchastkovky ain't particularly high on the ladder. He told me his name was Oleg Vladimirovich and that he was the uchastkovky at my local precinct. He asked for my name and date of birth, my wife's name and date of birth, whether we were renting or owned the apartment. I went along with it and answered him until I began to get nervous giving out so much personal information to a stranger over the phone. I politely asked him to give me his name, precinct, rank and contact information, which he duly did. He then asked me to do him a favor.
"You know your neighbors in apartment 54? I have a telegram from a hospital that someone registered at that apartment named Yelena Deneigin has been checked in there. I've called and called, and no one picks up the phone. I came over last night, but no one opened the door. Do you have a cordless telephone?"
I informed him that I did, indeed, have a cordless telephone. Then came the favor request:
"Can you go over there and knock on the door and take the phone with you? I'll stay on the line. Just tell them the uchastkovy wants to talk to them about Yelena Deneigin. When they come out, just hand them the phone."
I froze. First of all, I try avoid any interaction with my neighbors, and especially these neighbors, a family of Caucasians whose 60-year-old matriarch has been quite rude to us in the past. Secondly, I started to suspect I was being set up; that the second I stepped out the door I would take a hammer to the back of the skull while criminals ransacked our apartment. I needed some time to calculate my next move.
"I need about 10 minutes," I said. "I have something important to do."
"Fine, I'll call back," he said.
After hanging up I immediately went to the door and looked through the peephole. Nothing alarming. Certainly no one was visible, nor were there any ominous shadows, but if they were pros, they would probably make sure they were out of sight. I put my key in the top lock and turned it several times to the right, just for extra insurance.
After a quick call to my wife to let her know I thought I might be in danger, I looked up the guy's name on the Internet. Indeed, the official web site of city police actually had a press release posted about this particular major in August 2006 after he took a knife in the hand while arresting a Georgian purse-snatcher.
This did not comfort me. The robbers lurking outside my door could have easily looked up the guy's name. So I looked up the telephone number of the precinct and after three tries managed to get a duty officer on the phone. Oleg Vladimirovich, he told me, was not in his office.
I left a message, hung up and began pacing back and forth between my computer and the peephole. I was trying to remember if I'd read about similar set-ups in the Srochno v Nomer "Death Porn" section of Moskovsky Komsomolets. Then the phone rang. It was Oleg Vladimirovich.
He asked me if I could do the favor for him, after which I told him I was highly uncomfortable leaving the house at the request of a total stranger by telephone. I was nervous and began stuttering, and finally he said gruffly: "Alright then, I'm coming over. What's your door code." I told him just to ring my apartment, and I'd let him in.
I sat down to play a game of Internet chess to calm my nerves. He was downstairs five minutes. I opened the door and watched him clamber up two flights of stairs to my door. He was older than he sounded on the phone: short and thin, gray hair cropped tightly, a little graying Hitler-stasche. He was in his uniform with a black leather police bomber and smelled of nicotine.
As we shook hands I apologized for the distrust, but I really thought maybe robbers were using his name to lure me outside. He seemed genuinely surprised when I outlined the set-up.
"That's what you were worried about?" he said.
I told him I saw the report about the knife to the hand he took.
"Really? It's on the Internet? Can I see it?"
"Sure," I said. He went over to the neighbors' place and rang the doorbell. He turned around and said he'd stop by when he was finished.
I went back to my chess game, and in another five minutes he was ringing my doorbell. I let him in and guided him over to the computer to show him the press release. He managed to sneak in a pot-shot about the tidiness of our apartment.
"What is this, creative disorder?"
I held up my laptop for him to read the report, which he did aloud and, seemingly, in one breath. The entire report. Four-hundred words. Out loud.
"You know, that guy was just convicted," he said after he finished reading. "But he's name wasn't Mirtskhulava [as in the report]. It was something that ended in 'shvili.'"
I refrained from mentioning that almost every press release from city police has their noble officers arresting guys whose last names end int "idze," "shvili," "yan," and "iyev." Rarely does one come across an "ov." And if it's an "enko," you know the perp has a Ukrainian passport.
He seemed in a hurry to leave, and I didn't really feel like offering him tea. But as he was on his way out, I remembered the dead bum.
"What happened to that guy who died at the bus stop the other day?" I asked.
"The bum?"
"Yeah. Did he just die?"
"I'm not sure. Prosecutors took the body. They're doing the autopsy."