"Nobody Will Cry" by Polina Dashkova, summary

The action-packed detective novel "Nobody Will Cry" was written in 1998. This book is a tense psychological narrative about the price of random decisions, the intertwined criminal enterprise of the 1990s, and broken human destinies. The plot weaves together events in post-Soviet Moscow and Prague, where the thirst for profit collides with revenge and belated retribution.

Death in Prague and the missing million

At the end of May, a deadly manhunt unfolds in Prague. A young entrepreneur, Denis Kurbatov, is relentlessly pursued by a black-mustached Turkish hitman. A year ago, Denis was accidentally taken hostage by drug dealers in Ankara, managed to escape with someone else’s cash advance, and dumped the dangerous cargo. Now the drug mafia is catching up with the fugitive.

Shortly before his death, Denis accidentally picks up a leather briefcase containing a million dollars from a neighboring hotel balcony. The briefcase had been hidden from a nighttime raid by Ilya Andreevich Golovkin, a modest Moscow supplier for a pasta factory and secret treasurer for a gangster boss nicknamed Skvoznyak. Denis hides the loot in a dilapidated house near Prague, and just before his death, he manages to send a handwritten fax from a travel agency to Moscow, to the number of his former brokerage firm, Star-Service. A minute later, a hitman kills Denis with a shot from a pistol with a silencer.

Wrong number and other people’s secrets

In Moscow, the deceased’s older brother, Anton Kurbatov, is hastily liquidating the Star-Service company. Fleeing a gangster raid and the tax inspectorate, he cancels the company’s phone numbers. The telephone exchange immediately transfers the vacated number to a private apartment occupied by thirty-year-old simultaneous interpreter Vera Saltykova.

Vera is overwhelmed with urgent work for an international environmental conference, is struggling with a painful and dead-end affair with the narcissistic publisher Stas Zelinsky, and is also looking after ten-year-old Sonya, the daughter of her school friend, a microbiologist. Vera’s home fax machine is constantly receiving other people’s business papers, including a short note in Czech from Denis Kurbatov with the address of a hiding place in the town of Karlštejn.

Hunting for witnesses

Meanwhile, a terrified Golovkin returns to Moscow. He meets with Skvoznyak, a brutal gangster named Nikolai Kozlov, a former orphanage survivor with a false psychiatric diagnosis, raised by the thief-in-law Zakhar and trained in deadly martial arts by his mentor Mongol. Skvoznyak demands the million be returned. Learning that the trail leads to Denis Kurbatov, murdered in Prague, and the shuttered firm Star-Service, the gangster begins searching for a way to contact the firm’s owners through a new phone number.

Skvoznyak kidnaps Vera’s setter, Matvey, during a walk, using a plausible pretext to gain the translator’s trust. Introducing himself as Fyodor, a security guard, he returns the dog, fixes the apartment’s plumbing, and begins persistently courting Vera. Tired of loneliness, the woman accepts his marriage proposal, even though ten-year-old Sonya and the clever dog instinctively sense the hidden threat.

Meanwhile, a young subway worker named Volodya is hunting Skvoznyak. In 1994, Skvoznyak’s gang brutally slaughtered Volodya’s entire family for their modest belongings. The young man constructs compact explosive devices and wages a personal war against the criminals. He’s tracking Golovkin and hopes to catch the ringleader.

A chain of reprisals and exposure

Events escalate rapidly. Golovkin is given a lethal dose of clonidine by random female robbers, after which the police discover a stolen Marc Chagall painting in his hiding place. Skvoznyak visits Zakhar’s grave at Pyatnitskoye Cemetery, identifies Klyatva, the MUR informant, and kills him with a blow to the throat in a safe house.

That evening, Stas Zelinsky comes to Vera’s and encounters her "fiancé." Stas is horrified to recognize Fyodor as the gangster he saw on the stairs of his murdered lover’s house three years ago. Skvoznyak follows Zelinsky to the entrance, enters the apartment at night, stuns Stas’s sleeping wife, Inna, with a blow to the neck, and stabs Zelinsky to death with a kitchen knife, making it look like a drunken brawl.

Anton Kurbatov persistently calls Vera and asks her to find her brother’s last message. They meet on Mayakovsky Square. Vera hands Anton a piece of paper containing a fax and tells him about her fiancé Fyodor’s strange behavior. Anton shows her a photograph from Denis’s Turkish archive, and Vera, horrified, recognizes the dangerous criminal as her suitor.

They turn to the experienced and experienced lawyer Semyon Izrailevich Katz. The lawyer contacts the police general, demanding an immediate raid. However, Major Yuri Uvarov is leading the gang’s investigation, and at that moment, he is unsuccessfully ambushing Skvoznyak’s accomplice in the Moscow region.

Interchange in Moscow

Skvoznyak resorts to open action. His accomplices kidnap little Sonya from the street to blackmail Vera. The girl manages to escape from the car on a country road, and Volodya, arriving just in time, kills the kidnappers with a pistol and brings the rescued child back to the Saltykovs’ house.

A bloody finale unfolds in Vera’s apartment. Skvoznyak takes Vera and Anton hostage, demanding they reveal the Prague address. The bandit severely beats Vera and begins to strangle Anton. An armed Volodya bursts into the room. A deadly hand-to-hand fight ensues. Realizing he can’t defeat his enemy physically, Volodya pushes Skvoznyak onto the balcony and detonates a grenade strapped to his belt. The explosion sends both men falling from the fifth floor onto the pavement, killing them. The police and Uvarov’s task force arrive and find the surviving hostages, along with Sonya, crying over the body of her savior.

The False Finale in Karlštejn

After interrogations and investigative procedures, shaken by the nightmare they’d experienced, Vera and Anton fly to the Czech Republic. They reach a dilapidated house on a hill in Karlštejn, climb to the attic, and find the treasured plywood crate that once held Mocha coffee. Beneath the crate, there indeed lies a briefcase stuffed with wads of hundred-dollar bills.

At a Prague exchange office, a cruel and bitter truth is revealed: all the money in the briefcase is counterfeit, laundered through a criminal bank. At a street café, a suitcase left on a chair is promptly stolen by a local thief. Left penniless in a foreign country, Vera and Anton, having survived the death of their loved ones, take the evening train back to Karlštejn to rent a modest room at the station and try to move on with their lives.