Maria and I said at the same time. We were no longer whispering.
Anatoly withdrew the mirror and stood up. “Does Enrico usually take naps on the kitchen floor?”
“Of course not!” Maria replied. “Why do…My God, is he lying on the floor of the kitchen?”
Without waiting for Anatoly to answer she began to pound on the door. “Enrico! Enrico, answer me! This isn’t funny anymore. Open this door!” Then, she pursed her lips and whistled. “Giovanni, sweetie, open door. Open door, Giovanni.”
I looked at Anatoly. “Is she talking to the parrot?”
Anatoly didn’t answer. Instead he pushed Maria out of the way, took three steps back and in a rush of motion broke the chain on his first try.
Maria rushed past him to the kitchen where, from the front door you could see the loafered feet of a man lying on his back. For a split second I hoped that maybe Enrico was just passed out in a drunken stupor, but Maria’s scream put an end to my optimism. Anatoly went to her and when I heard him swear loudly in Russian I knew we had trouble.
Maria let out another penetrating scream and a man from the condo next door stepped out into the hall. “What’s going on?” he asked. A wet mat of gray hair clung to his scalp as he tightened the belt of his terry-cloth robe.
“Nothing good,” I said quietly. I reluctantly stepped in and, passing the impassive parrot, walked into the kitchen. Maria was hysterical and Anatoly was trying to drag her away from what was on the floor.
It was a body, presumably the body of Enrico. There was little question that he was dead. No one could lose that much blood and live. And the way that it caked on his throat, bringing grim attention to the gash that had been made there—it was too sick. And there was the murder weapon, lying beside him caked in the blood it had spilled. Not a knife, but an honest-to-God scythe. The kind that you would expect someone to carry while dressed up like the grim reaper on Halloween, except this blade wasn’t plastic. Above the globs of crusted red blood there was the unmistakable gleam of real steel.
“Maria, we have to call the police,” Anatoly was saying as he struggled not to slip in the pool of body fluids on the floor. “We don’t want to disturb the crime scene any more than we already have.” His hands were around her waist and, considering his significantly bigger size, he should have been able to pull her away easily. But Maria was flailing like a panicked swimmer on the verge of drowning. She was knocking things off the counter, a large bowl of washed arugola, a plate of half-made hors d’oeuvres, it all fell into the blood as she clamored to get free. I stepped around Enrico and grabbed one of her arms just as she reached back in an attempt to claw at Anatoly’s face.
“Let me go!” she cried. “I have to help him!”
“You can’t,” Anatoly breathed as he finally got a firmer hold of her and together we dragged her out of the room. “All you can do is calm down and call the police.”
She tried to claw at him again, but he managed to pin her to the floor. “Call the police, Sophie.”
“I think someone else may have already done that.” I gestured to the staircase and now, in addition to the little man still standing in his bathrobe, there was a small collection of people standing in the stairwell, looking aghast. “Did any of you call the police?” I asked.
It was a moment before anyone spoke, but eventually an elderly woman who couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds, stepped forward with her hands on her hips. “Why is your friend assaulting that poor woman?” she asked.
“I’m not assaulting her,” Anatoly yelled back. “I’m trying to keep her from messing up the crime scene. Now, if it hasn’t been done already, call the damn police!” But he clipped the last word short and his head immediately jerked up and he stared across the apartment.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Sophie, when you came in, did you see any open windows?”
“No. My guess is that if there was an open window the bird would have found it long before us.”
“But the bird didn’t find it,” Anatoly muttered. “And the chain lock was on the door.”
Maria wasn’t yelling or struggling anymore, and when Anatoly carefully released her she curled up in a little ball and began to sob.
“Do you think he’s still in there?” I asked.
“Who’s still in there?” screeched the old lady from the stairwell. “Was somebody robbed? We all didn’t haul ourselves out of bed for nothing, we want to know what’s going on!”
“Should we go in and check it out?” I asked. I was praying that the answer was no. I liked investigating crimes, but I didn’t like confronting murderers. It had been my experience that they weren’t very friendly people.
“That depends,” Anatoly said. “Has anyone called the police?”
“I have.” I turned to see a tall, heavyset man with small wire-rimmed glasses push his way past the other people. With effort, he managed to sit on the ground by Maria’s side. “Maria, they should be here soon. Are you all right?”
“Toby?” she croaked.
He let out a gentle laugh. “You lived here for years and never remembered my name. Now you’ve been out of the building for two months and it rolls off your tongue.”
“Can anyone tell me if there’s any other way out of this condo other than this door?” Anatoly called out.
“Just the door,” bathrobe man confirmed.
“Good, and I can see the fire escape from that window so no one can get on it without my noticing.” Anatoly pointed to the window at the other end of the hall. “If the killer’s in there he’s trapped. We’ll wait for the authorities to arrive. They’ll handle it.”
The word killer was echoed in a series of whispers throughout the stairwell.
“They murdered Enrico,” Maria whimpered. She was still in the fetal position and Toby was rubbing her back. “Someone…someone took my beloved amore from me!”
“So that’s it then?” Toby asked, looking up at us, “Enrico’s really dead?”
Anatoly nodded just as we heard the sounds of sirens in the distance. I silently prayed that the murderer was still around, hiding in the dark corners of Enrico’s condo. As creepy as it was to think that someone so violent could be so close, I was also aware of how all this was going to look to the police if they didn’t immediately catch the killer. If the fact that I had discovered two dead bodies in a short period of time bothered me, it was sure to bother the police even more.
“You fucking bitch.”
I jumped and then peered into Enrico’s apartment from where the voice came…not a human voice, but the voice of that seemingly mild-mannered bird now perched on top of the sofa. He stared at me with his sharp avian eyes and repeated, “You fucking bitch.”
The bird went out of focus as did everything else. For a moment all I could see was blurred colors and the vague forms of the things and people around
