The Holy Thief by William Ryan Page A

“Before the Ruh-revolution, I took portraits of the living. Fuh-families, children, that kih-kind of thing. Suh-since the Revolution, I only photograph the duh-dead.”
    It was difficult to make out the spirit in which the remark was made, as Gueginov’s normally quiet voice was competing with the engine and Chestnova, and Korolev looked at him to see if he was making a terrible and dangerous joke. Oblivious to Korolev’s scrutiny, Gueginov took another drag from his cigarette.
    “The cuh-capitalists were a sight to see back then, you know,” he continued. “One of their women’s druh-dresses could feed a family for a year. Muh-maybe two. It was exploitation. I uh-uh-understand that, of course. It was bluh-blood beauty. Now, things are better. Fuh-fairer. I don’t miss those days. And whuh-what I do now is of benefit to suh-society.”
    Korolev wondered what the dead woman would make of such a statement.
    “Huh-here,” Gueginov said, reaching into his pocket to produce a stainless-steel hip flask, “ha-have a drink. My next-door neighbor works for a di-distillery. It’s the real stuff. I did him a phuh-photograph of his wife. It made a nice chuh-change. I’d have done it for fuh-free, if the truth be tuh-told, but he guh-gave me a couple of bottles and I duh-didn’t refuse.”
    Korolev took the flask and the vodka warmed its way down his throat. The dead woman’s hand slipped from the canvas bag with the movement of the truck and brushed against his leg. He reached down to move it and was surprised by the softness of the ice-cold skin.
    When they arrived at the Institute, Korolev stepped down from the back of the ambulance with foreboding. Some of his dislike for autopsies came from the sheer brutality of the procedure. He couldn’t help feeling victims of violence should be left in peace after what they’d been through, but instead they were chopped at, sliced, skinned and sampled. It was worse than butchering in some ways. The dead person, once entitled to all the respect properly due a Soviet citizen, was reduced to nothing more than a piece of meat for doctors and policemen to poke at. Surely the world owed them something more after what had befallen them? And then, of course, there was the fact that even after fourteen years in the Militia and seven years of war he still had to struggle to control his stomach.
    With a dry mouth, he mounted the worn steps of the Institute and was struck, not for the first time, by the melancholy atmosphere of the place. Before the Revolution it had been a nobleman’s mansion, a building built for pleasure. The ceilings still retained frescoes of naked cherubim perched on tufts of cloud, eating grapes and laughing across a cerulean sky, in stark contrast to the whitewash and plain floorboards beneath them. He wondered why they hadn’t been painted over—perhaps there were no ladders available that day. At least they cheered the building up a little; otherwise it seemed reduced to despair by the use it was being put to. The feeling was at its most intense in the pathology department. The glossy white walls, the harsh glare of the electric lighting, the polished concrete floors—they all combined to distort sound, space and even time in some strange way. Whenever he entered the place he had the urge to sit down, cradle the impossible weight of his head in his hands and savor the stink of dead dreams and ruined hopes that permeated the place. He stumbled, nausea rising in him, and looked around for a chair, but the doctor marched on regardless, sweeping him along in her wake, down the corridor and into the main morgue, two walls of which were made up of steel squares, behind each of which lay cold corpses on smooth-running shelves. Formaldehyde, disinfectant and the sweet scent of dead flesh filled Korolev’s nostrils. Somewhere a tap dripped.
    “They’re two to a shelf in there,” Chestnova said, pointing to the steel boxes, “We’ve even got them piled up in