“He’s still not there,” Sergei called.
“Good,” she said, moving from her soft chair to the closet where she kept her coat. She had not removed her boots when she came in earlier. They were a bit tight from the snow and it was the devil to get them on and off. She looked forward to coming back and taking them off later.
“Still not there,” Sergei said, striding back into the room as she tied her babushka under her chin.
“Good,” she repeated.
“But he will be back,” he said, adjusting his glasses and looking at the closed door. “He will be back.”
Rostnikov had left his post at the window reluctantly, but he had agreed to join Galich for dinner and he was hungry. The two sandwiches had not been enough nor had he expected them to be.
When he opened the door of his house for Rostnikov, the former priest looked even more like a woodsman than he had that morning. He wore the same flannel shirt and jeans but he also wore a fur vest. He had shaved and combed his hair.
“Come in,” he said heartily. “I hope you like fish.”
Rostnikov closed the door quickly behind himself and said, “I love fish. In fact, as my wife will affirm, I feel a certain affection for almost all foods. She sometimes accuses me of being more interested in quantity than quality.”
“And,” said Galich, taking his guest’s coat, “is she correct?”
“She is correct,” said Rostnikov with a sigh, “but my interest in quality should not be entirely discounted.”
They ate at Galich’s worktable. He had cleared a section at one end and set out a rough tablecloth. On the table was a bottle of vodka, a bowl of boiled potatoes, a roughly shaped loaf of warm, dark bread and four large fish which had been baked whole.
“Caught them in the river this afternoon,” Galich said after they had sat down. He let Rostnikov serve himself and the policeman did so generously. “If you’re here long enough, I’ll take you fishing through the ice. That’s about the only fishing we get to do here for months. The Yensei, at this point, is frozen more than two hundred days a year.”
“And when it isn’t frozen?” asked Rostnikov.
“Ah,” said Galich, a piece of boiled potato bulging in his cheek, “when it isn’t frozen it roars north to the Arctic Ocean. Rolling waves chase one another forming great whirlpools. It’s magnificent, mighty, more than 2,600 miles long. And its banks and depths hold treasures of history in spite of everything that has been swept by its force into the ocean.”
Galich paused in his chewing and seemed to be gazing into the depths of the Yensei of his imagination.
“I should like to see that,” said Rostnikov.
“Yes,” said Galich returning to the present, nodding his curly white-maned head and resuming his chewing. “It must be experienced.”
“You love it here,” Rostnikov observed reaching for a second fish.
“Yes,” agreed Galich. “If I weren’t so old, perhaps I would become a taiozhniki, a forest dweller. There are Evenks in the taiga beyond the town who don’t encounter civilization for years. No one knows how many of them there are. The government can’t find them, keep track of them. The forests have been theirs since God created man. They named the river, Yensei, “big river,” a thousand years before we came. You mind if I refer to God?”
“Not at all,” said Rostnikov. “Do you mind if I help myself to more vodka?”
“Not at all,” said Galich, “but you have really had very little. Are you trying to keep a cool head while you get me to talk, Inspector?”
“Perhaps a little,” Rostnikov agreed. “But just a little. It is as difficult to stop being a policeman even for a brief time as it is to stop being a priest.”
“Sometimes more difficult than one would like,” Galich agreed, downing the last of his glass of vodka and reaching for the bottle.
“There are Evenks nearby?” asked Rostnikov.
“A few, from time to time,” said Galich. “Even a shaman, name of Kurmu, though the government thinks there aren’t any shamans left. There are plenty of them. Shaman’s a Evenk word. It means priest-healer, not witchdoctor. Shamans are both religious figures and healers. In some places shamanism has been wedded with Buddhism, particularly among the Buryats. It’s even been merged with Christianity among the Yakuts. In this territory along the river, in the taiga and up to the Arctic Ocean it seems to have kept its base in ancient pantheism.”
“Fascinating,” said Rostnikov with a smile, holding his hand over the top of his glass as Galich reached over to try to refill it.
“I’m a bit drunk,” said the former priest. “It’s not often I get a guest who is willing to listen to my ramblings. I had the new captain at the weather station over for dinner once about four months ago. Too young. No imagination. No fire. No interests but permafrost. Who wants to spend a night talking about permafrost?”
“You speak the Evenk language?”
“A little,” Galich said with a shrug, pouring himself another glass of vodka. “I have much time to learn, think.”
“What do you think of Samsonov?” Rostnikov said picking up a small, elusive piece of fish with his fingers.
“See,” laughed Galich, “what did I say? I get drunk and you go to work, but I don’t care. Not tonight. Samsonov is a weakling and I’m sure Kurmu is better at curing if it comes to that.”
“But he’s had the nerve to become a dissident,” Rostnikov prodded. “To ask to leave the country.”
“I don’t know how much of it is his idea,” Galich said looking up at Rostnikov.
“You mean his wife wants to leave?” asked Rostnikov.
“You are an observer of men. I am an observer of details,” said Galich. “I hear little pieces of information, see small artifacts and I put them together into a story. Then, with each piece of new information I reshape the story hoping that it comes closer to the truth. Is that the way you work?”
“Very much,” Rostnikov admitted.
“Yes,” said Galich confidentially, reaching over to pat the inspector’s arm with his hand, “but the difference is that sometimes you can have your story confirmed. Mine remains forever conjecture. I must be careful not to be too creative or I lose the truth.”
“The same is true of my work,” said Rostnikov, allowing the former priest to pour him just a bit more vodka. “Ludmilla Samsonov?”
“A lovely woman,” said Galich raising his glass in a toast. “A very lovely woman.”
“A very lovely woman,” Rostnikov agreed raising his glass to meet that of his host.
The glasses pinged together and the men drank.
“Are you getting what you want from me, detective?” asked Galich after he had drunk more vodka.
“Yes,” said Rostnikov, “some information, a good meal and good vodka. Let me ask a direct question before we are both too drunk to make sense. What is the General writing?”
Galich grinned and shook his head.
“Magnificent,” he said. “You noticed too. It took me a long time to figure it out and then it struck me.”
“He’s not just writing articles on old military battles,” Rostnikov said.
“He is not,” agreed Galich. “The desk is facing the window so he can see anyone coming and hide whatever he is working on. The desk would be better where mine is. It would catch more light, but he is afraid of being come upon suddenly. From the front you can see anyone coming and have plenty of time to hide things. And he talks too vaguely about his articles, never shows them. Not that he is uninformed. On the contrary, I’m sure he could write articles, but I think he is working at something, working even harder at it than I do at my work and he seems driven as if he still has battles to win. One would expect a military man in exile to be a bit more depressed now that he is away from that for which he has been trained. No, our little general has a secret.”
“You should have been a detective,” said Rostnikov toasting his host.
“Perhaps, if the Evenk are correc
t about reincarnation, it may be so in another life. I’ll be a fisher of men,” Galich toasted back. “God, I can’t get rid of the religion.”
“It runs through the blood like vodka,” sighed Rostnikov feeling more than a little drunk himself though he had consumed far less than his host.
“It runs warmer than vodka and it won’t wash away,” Galich said in a voice that may have betrayed some bitterness. “Would you like to see some armor, some mesh armor I’ve been restoring? Found it near the rock, the great rock where …” he paused, remembering.
“Where Karla Samsonov died,” Rostnikov finished.
Galich nodded but didn’t answer.
“I’d like very much to see the armor,” Rostnikov said.
Galich got up slowly, carefully, and walked toward the cabinet against the wall. Outside, through the window, Rostnikov could see the moon over the forest. The tops of the trees were silver white. Rostnikov felt quite content. Ideas were beginning to take shape. A story was starting to tell itself deep inside him.
“Definitely Russian thirteenth century,” said Galich, fumbling at the door of the cabinet, but before he could get it open someone knocked at the front door.
“Famfanoff,” said the former priest. “Would you let him in?”
Rostnikov agreed and, with a bit of difficulty, got up from the table. He should have moved his leg around a bit more during the long meal, but he had forgotten and now it was complaining.
The knock was repeated twice before Rostnikov made it to the door, threw open the latch and opened it. It was not Famfanoff but Emil Karpo illuminated by the nearly full moon, an erect black-clad figure with a face as white as the snow behind him.
“Come in,” Rostnikov said. There was something, an urgency on the face of Karpo that was unfamiliar. Karpo stepped in.
“Ah,” called Galich from the cabinet where he now stood holding a mesh net of metal. “Your sober friend. Bring him in for a drink.”
“I do not drink, Comrade,” Karpo said evenly, not taking his eyes from Rostnikov. “Comrade Inspector, a message has come through at the weather station from Colonel Snitkonoy’s office. You are to call your wife.”
The glow of the vodka disappeared. He had been encouraging, nursing it, but now it was gone. He had feared this call for months, feared the message that meant his son, Josef, were injured, possibly … He had feared this call.
“I must leave,” he told Galich who had been listening.
“Of course,” the former priest said. “This,” he said, holding up the armor, “has waited for more than five hundred years. It can wait a bit longer while you deal with the present and I get some sleep.”
Rostnikov thanked his host for dinner, hurriedly put on his coat and followed Karpo into the night.
“I can quit,” said Sasha Tkach pacing the space near the window of his apartment. He spoke quietly because, in the darkened area across the room, Pulcharia slept fitfully.
Sasha’s mother was out for the evening at his aunt’s and uncle’s apartment near Proletarian Avenue off of Bolshiye Kamenshchiki Street. Her absence was a blessing.
Maya seemed to have recovered from the afternoon better than her husband. There was a slight bruise on her cheek, but no other injury, and she shared none of her husband’s anger when she found that the two young men who had attacked her would get away without further punishment.
“You sent them both to hospital,” she had said gently, touching his arm. “And Pulcharia and I are fine.”
“It’s not enough,” he had said.
“What is it you want?” she had asked.
“I don’t know. Justice. Punishment.”
The conversation had gone on like this after they ate. Maya had spent the afternoon in stores with the baby. She had wanted to return to the normalcy of daily life, to return the baby to the comfort of the usual routine and she wanted to prepare a comforting meal for Sasha who, she was sure, would be upset and need reassuring even more than his wife and child. She had never seen him like that before, never seen him as he had been when he attacked those two at the shopping center of the Economic Exhibition. Sasha, who was always so gentle, had been a raging madman. There had been something exciting about it, but also something very frightening and she was sure that the transformation would leave him shaken. And so, Maya had gone shopping. She selected cheese, butter and sausage. Each was in a different section of the store and each had a separate line for selecting the items and finding the price. Maya bypassed the price line and stood in three more lines, one for each item, to pay. She knew what each item cost. After paying in those three lines and receiving receipts, she moved to three other lines with a less-than-content baby on her back to turn in her receipts and pick up the food. She got into only one argument with someone, a small terrier of a woman with a net bag who tried to get into line ahead of her. It took Maya almost an hour to pick up the dinner.
It had not been a good day but it appeared to be an even worse day for Sasha who was now pacing in front of the window.
“I can sell ice cream,” he said. “I’m good at it.”
“They wouldn’t let you quit,” she said, nibbling small crumbs of cheese by picking them up with the tip of her finger and raising them to her lips. Sasha looked over his shoulder and watched her as he paced.
“There are ways,” he said. “Others have done it. I just fail to do the job, make mistakes, mostly mistakes in reports. After a while I’d be told to find other work. It’s been done. Remember Myagkov? The old man with the funny ears.”
“No,” she said.
“Well, he was separated from the Procurator’s Office two years ago,” said Sasha. “They said he had proved to be incompetent. He was so incompetent that he’s now running an automobile shop, has his own car and lives in a big apartment near Izmailovo Park.”
“What kind of car?” asked Maya.
“A Soviet Fiat-125,” he said, “and …” He stopped his pacing and looked down at her. “Are you humoring me?”
“I’m trying to,” she said smiling up at him, a point of cheese on the tip of her finger near her mouth, “but I’m not doing as well as I would like.”
Sasha shook his head.
“I’m not going to quit, am I?”
“No,” she said, “but if it helps you to pace and complain, I’m happy to listen.”
“Enough complaining,” he said smiling for the first time since that morning. He leaned over and kissed her. She tasted like cheese, and Sasha felt excited. “Do you think we have time before Lydia gets home?”
“Why not call your aunt and see if she’s still there? It takes her at least an hour to get back.”
Tkach moved beyond the baby’s crib. He had turned on a small light on the table near the phone and was about to call his aunt when the phone rang. He picked it up after the first ring and looked back at the crib to be sure the baby hadn’t awakened.
“Tkach,” he said softly.
“It’s me, Zelach.”
“Yes.”
“Volovkatin. I found him.”
“Where?”
“He came back to his apartment building, through the back. I was waiting. He’s up there now. You want me to go up and get him?”
“No. Go inside. Get somewhere where he can’t get past you, where you can watch his door. If he starts to leave before I get there, take him. I’m coming.”
He hung up and looked at his wife.
“I’m sorry,” he said feeling strangely elated.
Maya moved past the crib to her husband, put her arms around him and kissed him deeply, the way she had seen Catherine Deneuve kiss some thin man in a French movie she and Sasha had seen last year.
“I was very proud of you this afternoon,” she whispered. “It made me very excited to see you like that. Is that a little sick, do you think?”
“Maybe a little,” he whispered rubbing his nose against hers, “but don’t lose the feeling.”
Less than two minutes later he was out the
door, on the street and running for a taxi parked at the stand on the corner.
The person responsible for the murder of Illya Rutkin stood in the darkened room near the window. Light came from some windows in Tumsk and the moon helped to brighten the square, but no one was about and no one was likely to be about except those who had no choice. The temperature had dropped again. Even with layer-upon-layer of clothes and the best Evenk-made furs, no one could remain outside tonight without pain. The killer watched, waited, going over the encounter with Rostnikov.
Rutkin had been lucky, had stumbled on a truth, but this one, this quiet block of a man seemed to be working it out. His questions suggested a direction, an understanding, and his suspicion was evident in his watching eyes which belied his stolid, bland peasant face.
There was no point in trying to make his death look like an accident. With two deaths in the small village within a month, it was unlikely that a third death, the death of a man investigating a murder, would be accepted as accidental, regardless of the circumstances. It could be covered up, obscured, but it couldn’t be ignored. Perhaps the assumption would be that a madman was at large. It wasn’t important. At this point it was simply a matter of slowing things down for five days. In five days or so it would all be over.
The killer poured a drink from the bottle on the table and waited, waited and watched. The secret of success was surprise, patience and anticipation. The killer knew that, had been taught that, had already gone out in the snowy night to take care of the possibility of temporary failure.
And so the waiting continued and was eventually rewarded. Just before midnight a round, bundled figure stepped out of the door of the weather station and limped slowly, even more slowly than he had come up the slope, down toward the square. He was alone.
At his present pace, it would take Rostnikov no more than three or four minutes to get back to the house on the square.
The killer lifted the nearby binoculars and scanned the frost-covered windows of the houses around the small square. No one was visible. It was time for the killer to act.
A Cold Red Sunrise Page 13