“Destiny?”
“You ask a madman a question and you’ll get a mad answer,”
said Nimitsov. “It was a good fight, wasn’t it?”
“A very good fight,” said Sasha.
“Now, if you will excuse me, I must die.”
And he did.
“Are you wounded, Sasha Tkach? An ambulance is coming.”
“No. I should be but, no, I am not. The dog is hurt.”
Rostnikov left Sasha looking down at the corpse of the lunatic killer who had saved his life, and moved toward the cage of the pit bull. Tchaikovsky was still inside, lying down now, watching the end of the show.
“Dog,” said Rostnikov, “someone will be here soon to take care of your wounds.”
The dog looked up at Rostnikov.
“The Hindus believe in reincarnation till one achieves Nirvana,”
Rostnikov said conversationally, watching Sasha kneeling at the side of Nimitsov’s body. “I would value your opinion, dog. What were you before? Who were you before? I doubt if one remembers when one is reincarnated. What will Nimitsov be? I think a bird, a small, vulnerable bird would be appropriate.”
Rostnikov looked down at the dog who was looking back up at him, his head cocked to the left. No one had ever spoken to him this way before.
“But,” said Rostnikov, now looking at the bodies in the front row. “The truth is that I don’t believe in reincarnation. Atheism when taught from an early age is a difficult religion from which to escape. Perhaps we’ll talk again, dog. As I said, help is coming soon for you.”
Rostnikov checked his watch. If he did the paperwork tomorrow and hurried, there was still a chance he and Sarah could make most of Leon’s concert. He would have preferred the blues, or 1950s American modern jazz on his cassette machine, but this was a celebration. He had hoped for the best and expected the worst when he discovered that his wife needed more surgery. The best, as it seldom does, had come.
“Are you all right, Sasha?” he asked, moving back to his detective, who rose.
“I don’t know what to think, to feel. I think I. . I feel alive.”
“And things that seemed important no longer seem so.”
“Yes.”
“The feeling comes more frequently as you grow older,” said Rostnikov. “Go home. Come in early tomorrow. Write a long report. Kiss your children for me. Kiss your wife for yourself.”
“If she’ll let me,” said Sasha. “You spoke to her.”
“Yes. Go home. Try,” said Rostnikov. “You want a ride? I have a car and a driver.”
“Yes,” said Sasha, following Rostnikov out of the ring and into the darkness behind the stands.
When all the humans were gone, the pit bull walked slowly out of his open cage, ignoring the wounds to his ear and back. He moved to the side of Peter Nimitsov and smelled death. He looked at the bodies in the first row and smelled their death too.
Tchaikovsky sat back and waited as the sound of a siren approached from too far away for a human to hear.
Rostnikov recognized the melody, could hear the playful interchange of themes and instruments. It was not unlike the best work of Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. Sarah took his hand. They were in the large auditorium of the Moscow Technical Institute. The room was about half full. Rostnikov estimated about one hundred people were listening, mostly older people, but a few of college age or a bit older. There were even two little girls in the audience. Sarah and Porfiry Petrovich had brought them. It had been Sarah’s idea.
The girls’ grandmother claimed she was too tired for a concert and that she had never learned to appreciate “smart” music. The girls sat next to Leon’s son, Ivan. The three children had been promised ice cream after the concert, if they weren’t too tired for the treat.
They had all insisted that they would not be too tired, but a glance showed that only Laura, the older girl, was still alert and even attentive.
The piece ended with a solo closing by Leon at the piano. When the last note stopped echoing, the applause began.
“Are you enjoying?” asked Sarah.
“Yes,” said the older girl.
The younger one had fallen asleep and was now in danger of toppling from the wooden seat. Ivan was still awake, but he had begun fighting his heavy eyelids. Rostnikov reached past his wife, picked the sleeping girl up, and put her on his lap. She stirred slightly and put her head on his shoulder.
“It is beautiful,” said the older girl.
“It is beautiful,” Sarah agreed, reaching over to touch her husband’s arm.
The next piece began.
Destruction, creation. Death, beauty, thought Rostnikov. He decided that if he could make the time tomorrow, he would find the young Israeli rabbi, Avrum Belinsky, and have a serious talk which would probably clarify nothing but, Rostnikov was sure, would make a one-legged policeman a bit more at peace with the chaos that is Russia.
The trio on the low stage began another piece.
“Brahms,” Sarah whispered.
Brahms would be most appropriate, Rostnikov thought as he smelled the clean sweet hair of the child on his lap.
The children were both asleep in the living room and, thank whatever gods there may be, Lydia Tkach was not in the apartment.
Sasha sat next to Maya on the bed. Neither spoke. Neither reached out to touch the other. There was a night chill of impend-ing Moscow rain in the air. People were going nearly mad waiting for the rain that refused to come. Maya wore flannel pajamas Sasha had given her for her birthday two years earlier. Sasha was in his white boxer shorts and the extra-large Totenham Hotspurs soccer shirt he had confiscated from a shipment of illegally imported goods from England a few months earlier. The three suitcases were on the floor in the corner. They were closed, waiting, threatening.
“Something has happened to me, Maya,” he said.
She said nothing. He went on.
“I would normally be depressed now, afraid of losing you and the children, dreading the need to face my mother, cursing my work. But I’m not. I feel calm, as if the things that usually get to me are not important. I don’t want you to go. I will surely weep.
But if you must, I’ll try to understand. You surely have reason to leave.”
“You are reacting to being alive when you should be dead, Sasha,” she said softly, her head down. “Lydia is right. You should try to do something less dangerous, but I know you will not.”
She was right.
“Maya, I did it again. The weakness came. I became a different person, Dmitri Kolk, criminal.”
“You were with a woman,” said Maya. “I knew. I could tell from the guilt in your voice on the phone. Did she have a name?”
“Tatyana,” he said.
“Was she pretty?”
“Thin, but pretty, yes.”
“Did you have to do it? Would the people you were with be suspicious if you didn’t?”
“Maybe. No,” Sasha said, “I was drunk. I was playing a role.
Forgive me if you can, but I was enjoying playing that role.”
Maya turned her head toward him. “Sasha, you just told me the truth.”
“I know.”
“You have always lied in the past.”
“Yes. I told you. Something has changed. Don’t go, Maya.”
“Twenty-two days’ trial,” she said. “I’m not threatening you, Sasha. It just seems reasonable, enough time to see if you’ve really changed.”
“Twenty-two days,” he said. “An odd number.”
“I took a leave from work,” she said. “I have twenty-two days.
We can spend time together. I’m not sure I have much hope. I’ll call my office in the morning and say I might like to come back. They’ll be happy to have me. No one else knows the billing system program.”
Maya worked for the Council for International Business Advancement. She liked the job. She did not want to lose it. She would decide what to do about the Japanese businessman when the
need to decide arose. What she would do would depend primarily on Sasha.
“Would you like to get under the covers and make love?” she asked.
“What?”
“I still love and want you,” she said, “I’m just not sure I can live with you.”
“I would like very much to make love. The moment you asked the question, I was immediately. . I love you, Maya.”
“I know, Sasha Tkach,” she said. “But that is not enough.”
Iosef sat in his small, comfortable one-room apartment trying to read a play by a new writer named Simsonevski. Simsonevski had three plays produced in the last year, all in the little theaters in storefronts or the back rooms of shoe stores or churches. Iosef had seen all of the plays, liked none of them. The one in his lap-he was wearing only his underwear and a plain white T-shirt-was even more grim than the others. There had been one suicide, one murder of a husband by a wife, one young woman going insane (with a stage note indicating that she should bite off her tongue), and a soldier who has an epileptic seizure onstage.
Iosef laughed. It was that or cry, but on balance the laugh was called for. He put aside the play knowing he would not pick it up again. It was very late but he thought he would try to find something on television, anything but the news.
He could not match the tragedies of Simsonevski’s play but he could beat it for simple irony. First, the Yak had purposely allowed Yevgeny Pleshkov to go free of a crime he surely committed. The Yak was not one to take bribes. From what Iosef could see, Yaklovev was not interested in material things. Porfiry Petrovich had told him that the Yak lived alone and simply. His wardrobe each day confirmed this in part. No, money was not the culprit in this injustice. Did Pleshkov or the woman have something on the Yak? Iosef didn’t think the Yak would stand for blackmail even if they did have something. He would find a way out. It was something Iosef would discuss tomorrow with his father.
But the problem of the Pleshkov case was less vexing than Iosef ’s embarrassment over arresting the man in the courtyard outside of Anna Timofeyeva’s window. The man proved to be the woman’s brother, a construction worker, not the woman’s husband.
Anna had been right about who the woman was, but Iosef had now revealed that her place of hiding and change of name were known.
They had alerted her, and she would alert her fugitive husband.
Anna Timofeyeva slept through the capture, and when she was told about it when she awakened, she shook her head and said,
“You should have awakened me. I know what the husband looks like.”
That was all she said. She asked them if they wanted tea, which she disliked but drank because she thought it might be good for her. As Anna had moved toward the stove, Iosef and Elena declined the offer of tea and told her that they planned to marry.
Anna went to the small sink in the corner, filled her teapot with water, and turned on the gas on the stove.
“I know,” Anna said.
“How would you?” asked Elena, standing next to Iosef. “I didn’t know he would ask. I didn’t know I would say yes.”
“I knew,” said Anna, rummaging for a tea she might find drink-able.
“You approve?” asked Elena.
“I approve,” said Anna, making a choice of teas, the least of the four evils on the shelf.
“When?”
“We haven’t discussed that,” said Iosef.
“No,” said Anna, pushing the tea she had selected back in the narrow cupboard over the sink.
“No?” asked Elena.
“Tonight I take you both out for dinner,” she said. “An old woman with a bad heart, a young woman with a bad arm, and a man who has made a fool of himself. The perfect trio for celebrat-ing. I still have friends, even a friend or two with a restaurant.”
And they had celebrated at an Uzbekistani restaurant where Anna knew the owner, a former cabinet minister who had once needed the help of the stern procurator.
They had eaten well- tkhum-duma, boiled egg inside a fried meat patty; mastava, a rice soup with chopped meat; maniar, a strong broth with ground meat, egg, and bits of rolled-out dough; a shashlik mar-inated and broiled over hot coals. They had laughed, though Elena was in pain from time to time, and they had made some prelimi-nary plans. She had said that she would like to wait a few months before a wedding, to be sure they had not been carried away by a romantic moment. This seemed reasonable to Iosef.
By the time he got to his room, it was too late to call his parents.
Iosef ’s stomach was contentedly full. That, and Elena’s acceptance of him, made it just a bit easier to face the embarrassment at Petrovka in the morning.
Iosef ’s room had theater posters on each of the four walls, bright theater posters except for the one for the self-indulgent play Iosef had written and starred in. That poster held a place of prominence to remind him that he was not a playwright. He had a two-cushion, sturdy yellow sofa with black trim, two chairs, a worn but still colorful handmade Armenian rug that covered most of the floor, and a desk in one corner. The couch opened into a bed in which Iosef slept. There were three bright floor lamps, one black-painted steel, one a mock Tiffany, and the third a brass monstros-ity from the 1950s. The room was bright. Next to the desk was a small table on which the television sat. The rest of the wall space on all four walls was filled by floor-to-ceiling bookcases he had made himself.
He supposed that after he and Elena were married, this is where they would live.
It could have been worse. He had his own toilet and shower behind the door off the kitchen area. The sink, toilet, and shower functioned perfectly since Porfiry Petrovich had worked on them.
Tomorrow, when he was the object of jokes at Petrovka, he would concentrate on thoughts of his and Elena’s future. There was no doubt that word of his calling out a squad to arrest an innocent construction worker would be all over the building, and that there were some who would make lame jokes about the event.
Think of Elena, he told himself, removing the pillows from the couch and opening it into a bed. Think about telling your father and mother. He finished making the bed, propped up his pillows, and turned on the television. There was nothing worth watching.
He turned it off and then turned off the lights.
Tomorrow he would ask Elena if she had changed her mind, tell her that he would understand. He was certain she would not change her mind and that she had already taken plenty of time to decide.
Overall, thought Iosef, it had been a good day.
He lay back in his bed and fell asleep almost instantly.
Emil Karpo sat at the desk in his cell-like room, entering new data in his black book on the new Mafias. Even though he had a computer, Karpo did not fully trust it. He had heard tales of computers losing data, breaking down, crashing in bad weather. He would enter the data on the computer tomorrow night.
Karpo was fully dressed, scrubbed clean with rough soap, teeth brushed, face shaved.
He wrote his last word for the night, closed the book, and turned to look at the painting of Mathilde Verson on the wall.
Emil Karpo had only one bright image in his dark room, the painting of Mathilde, the reminder of a great failure.
Emil Karpo needed the smiling image of Mathilde on the wall to remind him that she had been real. Her red hair was flowing, her cheeks were white. Karpo’s memory held the black-and-white images of hundreds of criminals, but they were flat, dead images.
He turned away from the painting, rose, removed all his clothes, and hung them neatly in his closet. Everything in the closet with the exception of the few things Mathilde had bought for him were black. He closed the closet door and moved naked to the cot. Before he turned off his single light next to the cot, he tried to imagine Raisa Munyakinova in her holding cell. He could not. He simply knew she was there.
She had done no more than he had considered. Mathilde had been gunned down on the street between two Mafias. Raisa’s son had been torn by bullets. But Karpo wa
s certain he would not be able to kill as she had. His belief in Communism was gone.
Mathilde was gone. All he had was the daily solace of doing his job, a job that would never end.
He turned off the light.
Chapter Fourteen
It was raining, finally it was raining, a light but insistent morning rain.
The Yak stood at the window of his office, hands clasped behind him, looking into the Petrovka courtyard below.
“You will turn over all of your notes on the dogfights, the killings, and the foreigners you have arrested to me,” said the Yak.
“This is now an international issue and I shall present it to the proper agencies of investigation. You have done a good job, as usual, Chief Inspector Rostnikov.”
Rostnikov was seated behind the dark conference table in his usual seat. He was slowly drawing pictures of birds in flight. He imagined that one of them was Peter Nimitsov.
“As for the Pleshkov investigation,” Yaklovev said, his back still turned, “there are some irregularities, but the case is closed. Your son has done an excellent job. Please prevail on him to go on quietly to his next assignment. Tell him that his mistake yesterday in calling out the special squad is of no consequence.”
“I will,” said Rostnikov. “He will find the ham thief.”
“Finally,” the Yak said, turning to face the man whose eyes and pencil were fixed on the notebook before him. “The Mafia killings.
They continue. They grow worse. But you have taken into custody someone who committed some of the murders. We can inform the media, give her name.”
“A mistake,” said Rostnikov without raising his eyes.
“Mistake? I’ve read the report from you and Emil Karpo. What is the mistake?”
“She didn’t do it,” said Rostnikov. “Mistakes can be made, as they clearly were in the case of the prominent Yevgeny Pleshkov.”
Silence except for the rain hitting the window.
“I see,” said the Yak. “All right. The woman is of no consequence to me. What do you intend to do to insure that she. .?”
“She has relatives in Odessa,” said Rostnikov, “but I don’t think she will leave the grave of her child.”
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