I got to the elevator just in time to get my hands on the closing door. The rest you know.”
“Let’s get Sasha and leave,” said Elena.
The elevator came to a stop at the floor of the suite.
“I may have an alternative idea,” said Rostnikov, looking back at the dog which had crept forward on its belly. “Back,” he said firmly.
The dog slunk back, not wanting the clamp of the man’s fingers around his neck or the taste and texture of the strange leg. By now the dog was firmly convinced that the man was completely made of plastic and metal and could not be hurt.
The elevator door slid open.
Awkwardly but gently, Rostnikov helped Elena out of the elevator and reached back in to press the button for the first floor. The dog looked up at Rostnikov and Elena as the door slid closed and the bloody elevator started down with the dog inside.
“You said you have an alternate idea?” said Elena as Rostnikov lifted her in his arms and asked her which room was hers and Sasha’s.
“Yes,” said Rostnikov. “I’m afraid you are going to have to die.”
“I don’t understand,” said the confused young man in uniform and helmet, weapon at his side, helmet strap digging deeply into his chin.
They were standing outside of Yulia Yalutshkin’s apartment.
Zelach had been sent down to the lobby. Iosef had checked the bedroom. Yulia was gone. It was clear that someone had slept in the bed besides the woman. The bed was still slightly warm and there were a few dark hairs between the sheets, possibly pubic hairs.
“A man came out of this apartment while you stood guard,” said Iosef, trying to remain calm. “And the woman is gone.”
“No man came out,” the young policeman said. “And she didn’t. . I thought she was. .”
“What happened?” asked Iosef.
“She asked me to come in,” the policeman said. “She needed someone to help her button the back of her dress.”
“So you went into her bedroom?”
“For an instant. I could see her the entire time.”
Zelach reappeared, panting, and said, “The doorman saw Pleshkov and the woman leaving the building about ten minutes ago.”
“Your name, Officer,” asked Iosef.
“Nikita Sergeivich Kotiansko,” the young, bewildered man said, looking at the closed door.
“How long have you been a police officer?”
“Six weeks,” Kotiansko said.
Actually, Iosef knew it wasn’t a matter of experience as much as common sense. Nikita had neither tool to fall back on.
“How did she get out? We can assume Pleshkov was hiding in the living room and hurried out when you went into the bedroom, but how did she get away?”
Zelach and Iosef waited for an answer.
“It must have been when she asked me to pick a different dress out of her closet. I couldn’t button the dress. The holes were too small. She said she was going to get something to drink.”
“So she wasn’t wearing anything,” said Iosef.
Nikita stood at attention, not looking at the two inspectors.
“Very little,” said the policeman. “I didn’t think she would run away. This is her apartment. She had no clothes on.”
“She almost certainly had a dress hidden in the living room,”
said Iosef.
Though he said and showed nothing, Zelach thought his partner was amazingly clever.
“Did she touch you, Nikita Sergeivich?” asked Iosef calmly.
“Once, my cheek,” said the policeman. “Said I should look for something in the closet I liked. She touched my cheek. I could smell her perfume. What will happen to me?”
“Go up to the roof,” said Iosef. “You’ll find a shed with some evidence. Touch nothing. Guard it. Hope that it rains and you get very wet so I feel sorry for you.”
“Yes, Inspector,” said the young man.
Nikita Sergeivich Kotiansko moved very quickly.
Viktor Petrov was as dedicated to his work as a hotel security guard as he had been dedicated to his work as a police sergeant before his wounding. Viktor was thirty-three years old and lucky to be alive. He had been involved in a shoot-out seven years earlier when he had just made sergeant. Three young boys were caught inside of a store where they were cleaning out its contents. Petrov had been shot by a fourteen-year-old. Death had seemed certain, but almost miraculously he had survived his chest wound. Petrov, recovering in the hospital, had been visited by the minister of the interior himself and given a medal. He was then told that he had a collapsed and unfixable lung and, therefore, would be honorably retired with a pension. The pension, he knew, was not enough to feed, clothe, and shelter himself, his wife, and their then infant son.
Though he told no one, Petrov had no desire to return to duty following his shooting. He was afraid because he was a young man in a job growing more dangerous. He had been given an honorable escape.
Petrov had drifted from job to job. For almost a year he was on the security staff of the Bolshoi Theater. The job paid poorly and the hours were terrible but there were perks, including food from various company parties, mainly for wealthy foreigners.
But Petrov’s wife had grown ill with a disease of weariness the doctor called chronic fatigue syndrome, which he said could not be cured. Petrov’s wife couldn’t work.
So Viktor Petrov moved on to a job that paid much more. He became, as his father had been, a waiter. For a year he had waited tables at a private club. After being a policeman, however, he found it humiliating to be an anonymous figure to loud men and over-dressed women. He found it humiliating to constantly be saying
“thank you very much” for tips he had earned.
And so, Viktor had found, through a friend who was not only still a policeman but now a captain, the job of security guard at the Leningradskaya Hotel. The hotel was one of the seven huge concrete monstrosities built on Stalin’s orders in the 1950s. Some found the hotel strangely beautiful. Others pronounced it a hideous tower whose rooms should be reserved for visiting mad scientists.
Petrov liked working there and asked to work nights when he would chance on few hotel employees and fewer guests. If a patron of Jacko’s Bar in the hotel grew unruly, it was not Petrov’s problem.
Jacko’s had its own security. His primary job was to check the doors to be sure they were locked, and look for thieves.
Security at the front door was good, but from time to time one of the petty criminals, gypsies, or desperate homeless who spent their hours in the Leningradsky, Yarolslavsky, or Kazansky railway stations directly across from the hotel made their way in. Petrov was armed, an American.38-millimeter pistol that he had been ordered to buy with his own money.
The rooms of the Leningradskaya were not fancy or particularly well furnished, but they were relatively clean and, by Moscow standards, which were far beyond the reach of Petrov, relatively inexpensive.
Early in the morning, before the sun was quite ready to rise, Petrov had moved slowly down the halls, hearing or imagining that he heard the loud band in Jacko’s that played every night almost till dawn.
Everything was fine. The cleaning crew was already at work.
Doors were locked. No suspicious people were roaming the halls or hiding in supply closets. The door to the small exercise room was open, which was not unusual. The night staff frequently forgot to lock it. Petrov had a key and was prepared to lock the door when he heard something inside. He went in slowly. The room was dark and had no windows.
Petrov considered calling out but for some reason decided against it. He remembered where the light switch was and moved along the wall to click it. The room went cold-white as the fluo-rescent lights sputtered and tinkled to life. The free weights were in a corner. The machines-treadmill, bicycle, and others which Petrov did not know and did not know how to use-were empty.
He had been about to click off the lights and leave when he heard a sound beyond the door that led to
the small shower and toilet. No light was coming under the door. One of the three showers was running. Water was hitting the tiles.
Petrov felt sweat forming on his brow and a very bad feeling in his stomach. He imagined armed young men beyond the door, ready to kill anyone who disturbed them as they hid. He imagined even worse. He could have backed out of the weight room and into the hall where he could find the floor phone and call for help. But what if there was no one beyond the door? What if the incident was reported by whoever came to back him up? The hotel knew his background. Petrov might well lose his job. He could not afford to lose his job. In all likelihood, someone had simply left the water running in a shower. He took his weapon from his holster and pushed open the shower room door.
Darkness as the door remained open, light from the weight room barely cutting into the darkness. Petrov crouched and pointed his weapon. He really expected and hoped to see nothing.
Moments like this had haunted him since he had been wounded. It was better, he frequently told himself, to be overly cautious and prepared than to be confident and dead.
“Is anyone here?” he said, expecting no answer as he reached for the switch.
The sound he then heard over the water was definitely human, definitely in pain. Petrov went down on one knee, weapon held out, trying to see into the near darkness. The sound, a low, weak groan, came again.
“Who is it?” Petrov repeated.
This time there was a weak “Oh. Oh. Oh.”
Viktor stood quickly, hit the light switch, and crouched again with his gun outstretched and ready. He tried not to tremble. He tried so hard not to breathe that it made him dizzy, a frequent occurrence resulting from the fact that he had but one functioning lung.
The doors of the two toilets stalls were open. The stalls were empty. Lying on the shower tiles, water hitting his face, was a big man, a naked man with a bad complexion and blood streaming from two wounds to his chest. The blood poured across the tattoos on his body and formed a river to the shower drain.
There was nowhere to hide in the shower room or the weight room. Whoever had done this was gone, but Viktor took no chances. He wasn’t sure what he should do, but he decided to turn off the shower. He did so carefully, trying not to get his only decent pair of shoes too wet. Then he turned his attention to the big man.
“Are you alive?” Petrov said, knowing that it was a stupid question.
The man was alive, but not very. Viktor put his gun away and knelt without thinking of what damage it might do to his pants.
The man opened his eyes and saw Viktor. The eyes darted around the room. The man grabbed Viktor’s hair and pulled him to within inches of his own face. Even about to die the man was extremely strong.
“I had a wound like this,”Viktor said calmly. “I survived. So will you.”
The big man shook his head once to show that he had no illusions about survival.
“Who shot you?” asked Viktor, prying the dying man’s fingers from his hair with great difficulty.
“Little boy,” the man said.
“A little boy shot you?”
The dying man shook his head again. “Little boy. . dead.”
“Who shot you?”
“Shot because of dead boy,” he said. “I didn’t even remember him. I didn’t know.”
“But who shot you?” Petrov asked.
“No,” the big man said, closing his eyes. “I understand. I would do the same.”
And with that he died.
Petrov stood and ran for the door, slipping and almost falling on the wet floor. He hurried through the weight room and into the hall, where he went to the floor phone and called the desk, telling them to put two security men on the front door, another one at the employee entrance, and another at the loading dock immediately.
And to stop anyone who had wet shoes.
“And call the police, now,” he said. “A guest has been murdered and the killer probably has not had time to leave the hotel.”
“I don’t. .” the desk clerk began.
“Do it, immediately,” Viktor said, reverting to the days when he had been a sergeant and had barked orders to younger officers.
“You are wasting time. Look for wet shoes. Remember, wet shoes.”
Viktor hung up before the clerk could say more.
He thought quickly. The doors were going to be covered. So was the loading dock. If the killer planned to leave the hotel, he stood a good chance of being caught. But, Viktor thought as he raced back to lock the weight room door, if the killer was a guest, the chances of catching him quickly or at all were not great.
Viktor prayed that he had not made any mistakes.
“. . will relieve pressure on the brain,” Leon said, sitting forward in his chair and holding the hands of his cousin who sat before him.
He had always thought Sarah very beautiful, and he, like others in the family, had wondered why she had chosen the bulky, homely, gentile policeman with the bad leg when she could have done better. Gradually, however, Leon had learned to appreciate Porfiry Petrovich’s wit and compassion, but above all he appreciated the policeman’s sincere love of Sarah. For that, Leon could easily tol-erate Rostnikov’s eccentricities.
They were in Leon’s large parlor furnished with French antique furniture and tastefully punctuated by a shining and beautiful black piano near the five windows that were letting in light in spite of the darkness and threat of rain. Through a door in one of the walls was Leon’s office and examining room, where he had, increasingly, because of the ever-dwindling level of medical care in Moscow’s hospitals, begun to perform more and more outpatient surgery.
Sarah’s problem, however, was well beyond his ability and definitely the job of a specialist.
“Then there is no danger?” she said.
“There is always danger,” he said. “But in this case it appears the danger is only slight, very slight. Remember the last time when I told you that there was distinct danger?”
“Of course,” she said.
“There was,” he said. “And I was honest with you, as I am being now.”
“When can we do it?” she asked.
“I’ve spoken to the surgeon, the same one who operated last time,” he said. “Tomorrow morning. Possibly the next day.”
“So soon?”
“I think it would be best,” said Leon, patting his cousin’s hand.
“The day after tomorrow,” Sarah confirmed.
“Eat nothing after midnight tomorrow,” he went on, still holding her hands. “Be at the hospital at six in the morning. No, make that seven. They always tell you to come at least an hour earlier than necessary. I’ll be there through the whole operation.”
“This,” said Sarah, looking around the beautiful room, “will be very difficult.”
“I know, but you will be all right.”
“No,” she said with a smile. “The difficult part will be telling Porfiry Petrovich and Iosef. The difficult part will be losing my hair again. You know it has not grown in as thick as it was before the last operation.”
“It will grow back and look as beautiful as it does now,” he said with a smile. “And it does look beautiful.”
Sarah nodded her head, but her heart told her something quite different from what her cousin was saying.
Inspector Emil Karpo stood in yet another hotel shower room as a body was being removed. He recognized the dead man as Shatalov the Chechin’s closest bodyguard. The big man had stood behind Shatalov at the burial of Valentin Lashkovich the day before, and he had stepped forward in front of Shatalov when it looked as if there might be a confrontation with the Tatars. Now the big man lay white and dead, and Karpo stood with the security guard Petrov, looking down at the body. Karpo had called Paulinin before coming to the hotel. Karpo had arrived as the cloudy gray dawn was breaking.
“Your name is Viktor Petrov,” Karpo said to the security guard looking down at the body. “You were wounded five years ago in a gun battle w
ith some young teens.”
“Yes,” said Petrov. “How did you remember that and my name?”
Karpo didn’t answer. The man known, among other things, as
“the Vampire,” had not visited him when he was in the hospital.
Rostnikov, who had also been on the siege of the boy thieves, had, however, visited him twice.
“You have done well here,” Karpo finally said.
“Not well enough,” Petrov said. “I heard no shots, and whoever did it managed to get by the guards at all the exits.”
“It would seem,” said Karpo. “Repeat again what the dead man said to you.”
Viktor repeated the words precisely.
Karpo nodded. He asked Petrov more questions and examined the room and the body without touching anything. That would be Paulinin’s job, and he knew the technician would be upset if something were moved or touched, including the body, before he had an opportunity to study the scene.
Something about the dead Mafia man’s words touched a memory in Karpo. There had been a shoot-out between the Chechins and the Tatars nearly a year ago. In addition to one Tatar, several bystanders had been killed, including an old man and a little boy.
He remembered the mother in tears after the battle, holding her dead son in her arms. It reminded him of two things. One was a scene from the movie Battleship Potemkin in which a mother carried her dead son toward the czar’s soldiers, only to be cut down by bullets herself. The other was the death of Mathilde Verson, killed in a cafe in crossfire from two other Mafias. Mathilde had been a prostitute, a woman of great strength and good humor whom Karpo had visited weekly. She had always looked at the policeman, who frightened others, with amusement and understanding. Gradually they had developed a relationship and he had considered her the only living person besides Rostnikov to whom he felt close.
That closeness and Mathilde’s genuine concern for him had begun to bring Emil Karpo to life.
Karpo had slept little on his narrow bed during the night that was coming to an end. He had been plagued by a migraine. The migraines had been coming more regularly recently, and the pills he had been given were of no use if he did not take them before the onset of the pain. Since his warning auras of smells and white flashes had not been coming since Mathilde’s death, he had to suffer the headaches in the darkness of his room, feeling the waves of nausea rise and fall inside him. The headache had gone shortly after the phone call. He had been called because Rostnikov was out and the dead man was a member of one of the two Mafias Rostnikov and Karpo were investigating in connection with what looked like the assassinations of their members.
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