"Dancing with the Cops" by Elena Topilskaya, summary Automatic translate

"Dancing with the Cops" (1999) is the first book in the "Masha Shvetsova" series by Elena Topilskaya, a former investigator with the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office, who wrote this novel based on her own professional experience. The story is told from the perspective of Maria Sergeyevna Shvetsova, a senior investigator with the district prosecutor’s office — an intelligent, wry woman with a complicated personal life and a keen eye for the underworld.

The book was used as the basis for the television series "Masha Shvetsova", which aired on Russian television.

This book is part of the "Masha Shvetsova" series. It was published together with the second book, "Remember Death," in a single volume under the combined title "The Life of the Honest and the Dishonest." Other books in the series include "The Move with the Queen of Spades" (2001) and "White, Black, Scarlet" (The Soft Paw of Death).

Maria Shvetsova: work and everyday life

Masha Shvetsova works as an investigator in the district prosecutor’s office of one of St. Petersburg’s districts, in a former school building, with a mountain of files on her desk and the usual chaos all around. She has been married for eight years to Igor, a forensic scientist specializing in covert surveillance methods. He is jealous to the point of paranoia, emotionally stingy, and periodically erupts into rages that sometimes lead to strangulation attempts. Masha and Igor have long since lost their intimacy; they live together for the sake of their son and their ailing mother, who immediately "starts dying" whenever their daughter even hints at divorce.

At the same time, Masha is having an affair with operative Anatoly Goryunov. He’s eloquent, generous with compliments, loves to talk about his operational successes and former lovers, and maintains a "safe house" for their rendezvous. Masha recognizes his narcissism and unreliability, but cherishes their relationship — partly because of the warmth she misses at home.

Current affairs and their curiosities

A typical day for Shvetsova involves numerous tasks, each with its own absurdity: a police report on a background check of "registered" sex offenders, the oldest of whom is 84 years old; a search for a defendant whose house was blown down by the wind within five years; a corpse summoned to a non-existent apartment in a non-existent building.

In the midst of this routine, Masha is brought up to a corpse in the basement. Forensic scientist Dima Panov determines that a man between twenty-five and thirty years old was killed by a gunshot wound to the temple; the body had lain there for three or four days. Nearby, they find Uncle Borya, a homeless man who, on the day of the murder, saw two men in leather jackets pull the body out of the trunk of a white Lada and drag it into the basement. He also robbed the deceased — removing his shoes, taking a wallet containing dollars and rubles from his pocket, and hiding the documents he found behind a chimney in the attic of his lair.

The mystery of Major Shermushenko

The documents in the package allow us to establish the identity of the deceased: Anatoly Alekseevich Shermushenko, born in 1972, known in intelligence circles as a member of the Chernorechensk group. However, among his papers is a Ministry of Defense major’s ID with a genuine seal — in the name Shermushenko, but with a personal identification number that, according to information, belongs to a real officer serving in Arkhangelsk.

Masha, along with trainee Stas and the operatives, debates whether this is a top-notch forgery or whether Shermushenko was truly listed as an "active reserve" in the GRU, having been infiltrated into the gang. Neither option seems convincing — it’s too obvious that a real intelligence officer wouldn’t carry such a document in his pants pocket.

Moreover, it turns out that Shermushenko was registered at the same non-existent house on Chashchina Street, 7. The search for the real address is at a dead end.

The murder of Hapland and a parallel trail

That same day, another, much more high-profile crime occurs in Masha’s neighborhood: a sniper from the attic of an apartment building fires an assault rifle at the official Volvo of Boris Khapland, the head of the real estate registration bureau. All eight bullets hit him in the head, all in a single shot. The driver is in shock, his wife has a skinned knee, and the Volvo is crushed by a trolleybus and a Niva that crashes in front of him. The shooting site had been prepared in advance: a barrel, egg cartons used as a stand, and marks on the dusty floor. The assault rifle was thrown onto the roof.

This murder scheme immediately reminds Masha and her husband, Igor, of a case from a year earlier — the assassination of the port director, Petukhov. Back then, a sniper also hid in an occupied building, also prepared a position in advance, and also abandoned his weapon. Then, a random driver for the Atlant company was also killed. Both schemes pointed to the same professional hand.

A Gang Trip: The Extortion Case

Meanwhile, operative Stepushkin tells Masha details of a previous case involving Shermushenko: the Chernorechensk gang held the young man in a hotel room for three days, forcing him to sign a deed of gift for an apartment. The victim’s release was secured by chance — at the passport office, they discovered he was wanted. But the victim ultimately backed down: under the guidance of the gang’s lawyer, Balovanov, he explained his police report as "resentment" and "infantilism." The case fell apart.

A trip to Moscow with material evidence

Shermushenko’s ID attracts the attention of an FSB officer, Sintsov: he visits Masha several times and insistently advises her to hand over the case to her male colleague, Gorchakov, hinting at the danger. Masha refuses. When she says she plans to take the document to Moscow, to the GRU, Sintsov reluctantly agrees to accompany her. The meeting is scheduled at the monument to Peter the Great at the Moscow railway station on Sunday evening.

Second corpse: "disguised" in the forest

While on duty, Masha and Stas venture into a forested area outside the city, where a mushroom picker stumbled upon a freshly buried body. The exhumed corpse is strikingly incongruous: a tailored suit, a shirt with a barely noticeable stripe, a designer tie, new Salamander shoes with intact heels — and yet worn satin briefs with holes, gray socks of the same style, rotten teeth, minimally dented, and tattoos on the shoulder and chest — a cathedral with three domes and a sly devil — as well as the distinctive "balls" on the body. Clearly a criminal with three previous convictions, disguised in someone else’s clothes.

Stas, only on his second day as an intern, sums it up immediately: "a disguise" — someone deliberately dressed a hardened criminal as a wealthy man, hoping he wouldn’t be examined in detail. Fingerprinting the corpse offers hope of establishing his identity by evening.

Background: city, corruption, bandits and power

Throughout the book, Masha, with irony and without pathos, captures the milieu in which she works: deputies with unclear sources of income, gang leaders who settled in houses next to deputy heads of the Main Directorate of Internal Affairs and chairmen of bar associations. Hapland lived in the same monumental house with Moorish arches as officials and gangsters. Lawyer Balovanov quietly works for the Chernorechensk gang in courtrooms. The vice president publicly promises to "get" the killers of his "personal friend" Hapland. The line between the authorities and the criminal underworld in this city exists only on paper.