The rifle was oiled, ready and waiting near the rear door.
Rostnikov had a great deal on his mind. Normally, the cold would have driven him down the slope as quickly as his leg would allow, but he barely noticed the cold. All he could think about was the phone call. He was but dimly aware of where he was and where he was going. It almost cost him his life.
The sailors in the weather station, an efficient, comfortable box of a building with walls painted white, were in gray sweaters and matching sweat pants and they all looked young, even younger than his Josef, even the commanding officer whose face was serious and pink. The large room in which they were congregated held a variety of odd machines with dials, pointers and cylinders. The machines hummed and clicked as Rostnikov looked around for a phone.
“This way, Comrade Inspector,” the officer said. He obviously knew something was happening, something that suggested that sympathy was in order for this limping man.
Rostnikov thanked him and followed the officer through an open door to a small office with very bright overhead lights and a small desk that looked as if it were made out of plastic. The decks, walls and even the phone were the same gray as the casual uniforms of the sailors.
“I don’t know how to …” Rostnikov began.
“Let me,” the officer said with a very small, supportive smile. “Let me know the number you want and I’ll see if I can get you through. It should be easy. This is a military phone.”
Rostnikov gave him the number of his apartment in Moscow and the man made contact with an operator almost immediately.
“Sometimes the lines …” the officer began. “Ah, here it is.”
He handed the phone to Rostnikov and left the room quickly and quietly, closing the door behind him.
Rostnikov listened to three rings and then the phone was picked up in Moscow.
“Sarah?” he said before she could speak.
“Yes, Porfiry, who else would you expect to be here?” Her voice would have sounded perfectly calm to anyone but him. He detected the strain. “I should have known they would call you. I didn’t want them to. It could have waited till you got back.”
“Is it Josef?” he asked softly.
“No,” she said. “On the contrary. He is fine. At least he was last Thursday. I just got a letter from him.”
“Then …?”
“It’s me,” she said softly.
“The headaches,” he said.
“They think I might have some kind of growth, a something on the brain,” she said.
“They think,” he said, sitting on the steel chair behind the desk.
“They know,” she said. “They did a machine thing with my head.”
“I see,” he said.
“It’s probably nothing much,” Sarah said.
He imagined her sitting on the dark little bench near the phone, her left hand playing with the loose strands of auburn hair at the nape of her neck. She paused and he said nothing.
“Porfiry, are you still there?” she asked.
“Unfortunately, I am still here and not in Moscow,” he said, his voice dry, very dry.
“Will it be long? Will you be long?” she asked quite matter-of-factly.
“I’ll try to get this finished in a few days. I’m doing some things to move it along. Who did you see? What are they going to do?”
“My cousin Alex sent me to a friend of his, another doctor. She did the test. I’m afraid it will cost, Porfiry Petrovich. She is a private doctor, private clinic just outside of Moscow. She’ll try to keep it down, but, I’m sorry.”
“We will pay. We have some money,” he said. “What are we paying for?”
She laughed, a sad variation on her familiar laugh.
“An operation,” she said.
“When?”
“As soon as possible. It can wait three or four days for you to get back. She assures me that I should be fine. It doesn’t look as if it is anything to worry about.”
“Allow me the indulgence of worry,” he said.
“I’ll join you.”
“I’ll try to get Josef back on leave,” Porfiry Petrovich said, looking around the room for something to focus on, finding a small bookcase whose technical volumes were neatly lined up. “I might be able to …”
“You can’t,” she said gently. “Don’t waste your time trying. I know you’d like to.”
“What is the doctor’s name? The one who will …”
“Operate? Dr. Yegeneva. Olga Yegeneva. Remember when Josef went with that girl named Olga?”
“Yes.”
“This one is nothing like her, but she is young, a child almost with big round glasses like mine, clear skin and her hair cut short. I like her.”
“Maybe we can make a match,” he said with a smile.
“I think she’s married,” Sarah said. “Who is paying for this call?”
“The navy. Don’t worry.”
“What is it like there?”
“Cold, dark. Peaceful on the surface. Boiling beneath. How are you feeling?”
“Surprisingly, not bad. I feared the worst for weeks and hearing it was a terrible relief. You understand?”
“Yes,” he said. The room seemed a bit blurred.
“I don’t know how you feel, Porfiry Petrovich. I’m never sure how you feel and I don’t think you know how you feel. The irony is that you seem to understand perfectly how everyone else feels but yourself, but that is a bit deep for a phone conversation in the middle of the night from Siberia. The line is very clear.”
“I think they do it by satellite or something,” he said.
Silence again, a slight crackling sound on the phone. For an instant he feared that they would be cut off.
“Sarah,” he said. “I love you very much.”
“I know, Porfiry Petrovich. It would help if you said it a bit more often.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Enough,” she said. “Get your work done. Find whoever or whatever they sent you to find and get back. I’ve dusted your weights. Do they have weights for you there?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good. Stay strong. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye,” he said and she hung up.
He sat holding the phone for a few seconds and then put it down. Galich’s vodka or empathy sent a pain through his head, a cold pain as if he had bitten into an icicle. He shuddered and picked up the phone again.
Trial, error, persistence and the use of the fact that he was a policeman got him Olga Yegeneva on the phone within six minutes.
“Dr. Yegeneva?”
“Yes.” She sounded very young.
“This is Inspector Rostnikov. You have seen my wife.”
It sounded awkward, formal, wasn’t what he wanted to say at all.
“Yes, Inspector,” she said, perhaps a bit defensively.
“You are going to operate on her. Is that correct?”
“Yes.” She was growing more abrupt. He had reached her at home.
“How serious is the situation?”
“Can you call me back tomorrow, please, at the clinic,” she said coolly.
“I am in Tumsk, Siberia. I don’t know if or when I can get a phone or a line tomorrow.”
“I see. It is serious, but it does not appear to be malignant. However, it is in a position where it is causing pressure and even if it is not malignant the longer we wait the more difficult the surgery.”
“Then operate immediately,” he said.
“She wants to wait for you.”
“I cannot get back for at least two days, possibly three or four.”
The doctor paused on the other end just as his wife had a few minutes earlier, and Rostnikov felt that he had to fill the vacuum of time and space but he did not know what to add.
“It can wait a few days, but not many,” she said much more gently than she had been speaking.
“I’ll get there as soon as I can,” he said.
“As soon as you can
. And Inspector, I really do not think that the danger is great. I cannot deny that some exists but I have done more than forty similar operations and seen quite similar cases. I believe she will be fine.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Forgive me for calling you at home.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I just got home and I was spending a few minutes with my little boy before he went to bed.”
“How old is he?”
“Two years,” she said.
“A good age,” said Rostnikov. “Goodnight, Doctor.”
“Goodnight, Inspector.”
Rostnikov left the office, thanked the young officer, nodded at a sailor with very short hair and freckles who looked up at him, and went out the door of the weather station and into the night.
The path which the navy plow had made that morning had long been filled by drifting snow. He had to move down the slope slowly, carefully. He was no more than a dozen feet from the door of the house on the square when the first shot was fired. It probably would have torn off the top of his head had he not been stumbling slightly. He had stumbled more than a dozen times coming down the slope. Had he looked up and behind him there was a chance, a slight chance that he would have seen a movement in the shadows near the forest higher up the slope between the wooden houses, but he had no reason to do so.
Even as he rolled to his right and the second shot came tearing up a furrow of snow as if an animal were tunneling madly past his head, Rostnikov was aware of the irony. The leg which he had dragged behind him for more than thirty-five years had finally repaid him by saving his life.
He knew now or sensed where the shots were coming from and before the third bullet was fired he was crouching behind the statue of Ermak. A small chunk of Ermak’s hand shattered, sending small shards of stone over Rostnikov’s head.
The fourth shot came from further right and Rostnikov looked around knowing that he would have to make a move if someone did not come out to help him quickly. There was no thought of running. Rostnikov could not run.
It was at that point that the door of the People’s Hall of Justice and Solidarity banged open and Mirasnikov, the old man Rostnikov had been watching all day, came out, his boots not fully tied, his coat not buttoned, the fur hat on a mad angle atop his head. In his hand he held an old hunting rifle.
“Where?” the old man shouted at Rostnikov.
“Up there,” Rostnikov shouted back. “On the slope. By the trees. But don’t step out. He’ll …”
The old man stepped out, looked up toward the slope, put the rifle to his shoulder and fired three times in rapid succession before the rifle on the hill responded.
Mirasnikov tumbled back from the shot that appeared to hit him in the chest.
It had been no more than ten seconds between the time the first shot was fired and Mirasnikov had tumbled back wounded. Other doors were opening now and Rostnikov thought he saw a movement on the slope. The killer was running.
Rostnikov rose and moved as quickly as he could toward the fallen old man. The light from the open door of the People’s Hall of Justice made a yellow path on which Mirasnikov lay.
“Where?” Someone behind Rostnikov shouted as the inspector knelt by the fallen man.
“On the slope by the trees,” Rostnikov shouted back without looking. He had no hope or expectation that anyone would see the assailant. “How are you, old man?” he asked Mirasnikov gently.
An expanding circle of red lay on the old man’s jacket just below his right shoulder.
“Did I get him?” Mirasnikov asked.
“I don’t think so, but I think you saved my life.”
“If I had my glasses, I would have gotten him.”
“I’m sure you would. You can’t lie out here. I’ll take you inside.”
“My glasses. My rifle,” Sergei Mirasnikov said.
“Your glasses are on your head and your rifle is safe,” said Rostnikov picking up the man easily as Karpo, wearing his coat but still bareheaded, came running to his side.
“Are you all right, Inspector?” he asked.
“I am fine,” he said. “Get up to Dr. Samsonov’s house. Bring him down here immediately.”
“Immediately,” Karpo said.
“One more thing, Emil,” he said and he whispered his order as Mirasnikov’s wife came stumbling out the door of the Hall wailing.
The naval officer and two of his men were working their way down the slope toward them and lights were going on in the houses on the slope.
“Of course, Inspector,” Karpo said, and something that only Rostnikov would recognize as a smile touched the corners of Emil Karpo’s face before he turned and hurried past the sailors coming toward him.
Rostnikov moved past the wailing woman with a strange feeling of elation. The killer had made a mistake, a terrible mistake in letting Rostnikov know that something had happened to frighten him, to make the killer think that Rostnikov knew something that required his death. He would go carefully over what he knew when he got back to his room. But that was not the only mistake the killer had made.
Given enough mistakes and a bit of luck, Rostnikov could possibly identify the killer quickly enough so that he could be back with Sarah in a few days.
“A bed,” Rostnikov said to the wailing woman who followed him as he looked around the hall.
“In there,” she said pointing to their room.
“Stop howling, woman,” Mirasnikov groaned from Rostnikov’s arms.
“Howling,” she shouted following them. “Howling, he says. I’m grieving.”
“I’m not dead yet,” Sergei mumbled, but only Rostnikov heard.
Five minutes later Samsonov, with the help of his wife, was working on the old man. Everyone else had been told to go home and Mirasnikov’s wife had been banished to the meeting room.
Rostnikov stood carefully watching Lev and Ludmilla Samsonov while Karpo whispered to him. When Karpo was finished speaking, Rostnikov nodded.
“Our killer is very clever, Emil.”
“Yes, Inspector. Very clever. May I ask about your wife?”
“She needs an operation,” he said. “If I were a religious man, I would say that with God’s help we will be home in a few days.”
“But you are not a religious man,” said Karpo.
“There is no God, Emil Karpo. You know that.”
There were times when Karpo could not tell if Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was making a joke. This was certainly one of those times.
“He’s still in there,” said Zelach as Tkach came panting up the stairs taking them two or three at a time.
It was one of those 1950s concrete block buildings with no personality. This one was on Volgogradskij Prospekt and Volovkatin’s apartment was on the fifth floor.
Zelach was standing on the fifth-floor stairway landing behind a thick metal door. The door was propped open just a crack with a piece of jagged wood.
“There,” Zelach said pointing through the crack at a door. “You can see it.” The lumbering investigator with only minimal ability to think did have a skill, a skill which had resulted in his finding the man who had evaded them the previous day. Zelach was single-minded. If he was told to find Volovkatin, then he would doggedly pursue Volovkatin for years following false leads, even ridiculous leads and vague possibilities if no one gave him a direction in which to go. In this case, he could think of nothing but to go to the apartment and wait in the hope that the dealer in stolen goods would return.
The vague possibility of Volovkatin’s return had prompted Zelach, who had been in the man’s apartment, to leave everything as it was. He did not want Volovkatin to return to an empty apartment and run away. As Inspector Rostnikov had once said, the rat does not step into a trap without cheese. It was the kind of truism that Rostnikov often fed Zelach like a simple catechism. Rostnikov himself tended to discount such simplicities which, though they were often true, were just as often false. In this case, there was a magnificent supply of cheese.
“Good,” said Tkach leaning over and clasping his knees to catch his breath. “We’ll do this right.”
“He’s trying to be quiet in there,” said Zelach, “but he is not being very successful.”
“We are not concerned with his success,” said Tkach straightening up, “but with ours. Let’s go.”
Tkach pushed the door open and stepped into the hall with Zelach right behind. Sasha stood to the right of the door and Zelach to the left. The procedure in this case was clear. They would continue to wait in the hope and expectation that Volovkatin would be leaving. He knew the police were after him and that coming to the apartment created some danger but the cheese had proved too tempting.
If Volovkatin did not leave within an hour, they would have to try the door and even knock. It would end the surprise and Volovkatin might be armed, might do something foolish. There was no other way out of the apartment but, knowing the severity of his crime and the likely punishment, the dealer in stolen goods might do something foolish, might dive through the window or decide to remain in the apartment till they broke down the door, in which case someone other than Volovkatin might be hurt. So the policemen stood against the wall on each side of the door and waited and listened and watched.
Five minutes later an old man staggered drunkenly through the stairway door singing something about rivers. The old man didn’t see the two policemen at first. He was a stringy, gray creature with his cap tipped dangerously close to falling on the back of his head. A cigarette burned down close to the old man’s lips as he concentrated on searching through his coat and pants pockets as he sang. At the moment he fished his apartment key out of one of his inner pockets, he looked up in triumph and saw the two men leaning against the wall.
The old man swayed, stepped back in fear, his cigarette dropping from his lips.
Tkach put a finger to his own lips with his right hand and pulled out his police identification card with his other hand. The old man gasped and his moist red eyes showed fear.
“I’m just drunk,” wailed the old man. “That’s still no crime. Is it a crime now?”
A Cold Red Sunrise Page 14