People Who Walk In Darkness (Inspector Rostnikov)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  She allowed herself a small smile.

  “I think I should like to meet this famous editor,” Jan went on, digging into the small white paper bag on his lap for the last of the seeds. “Before we send you off with her and the diamonds.”

  “It can be arranged,” said Oxana.

  “I have the Moscow detectives today. I shall run them to every corner of Kiev and back. What is the name of your editor?”

  “Rochelle Tanquay,” she said. “She gave me a card. Here.”

  Oxana reached into her small, quite fashionable red leather purse and handed it to him. On it was the name of the woman in gold script and a cell phone number.

  “Call her,” he said. “Set up a time. Late night at Eric’s Bar.”

  “What do I tell her?”

  “That you want her to meet your fiancé, your handsome Ukrainian police detective. What does your Rochelle look like?”

  “Pretty,” said Oxana.

  “Better than ugly,” he said. “Call.”

  She took a sky blue ultra-thin cell phone from her purse and punched in the number on the card Jan held up for her.

  Four rings and then, “Hello.”

  “It’s Oxana.”

  “Yes. Can you leave tomorrow evening? The photographer will be available most of next week, and then he has to go to Bahrain.”

  “Of course. Can we get together tonight for drinks?”

  “I’ve got a dinner meeting,” said Rochelle. “It will have to be late.”

  “Late is fine. Do you know Eric’s Bar, across the street from the Kinotheater Kiev on Chervonarmiyska Street?”

  “I’ll find it. What time?”

  “What time?” Oxana repeated looking at Jan.

  He held up ten fingers and then another one.

  “Eleven?”

  “Eleven,” said Rochelle.

  “I’ll bring my fiancé,” said Oxana. “He’s a policeman. He would very much like to meet you.”

  Jan nodded yes.

  “Perfect,” said Rochelle. “Eleven at Eric’s Bar. I look forward to it.”

  The call ended, and Oxana returned the phone to her purse as Jan crumpled the empty white bag and dropped it into the metal trash container to his right. He got up. So did she.

  Balta watched them walk down the path together. He was reclining on a blanket under a tree about fifty yards away. In front of him was a gathering of six old men watching two other old men playing chess on a park bench. They provided near perfect cover.

  Balta decided to follow the man with Oxana. At the moment he looked like someone for whom he should have some concern. Balta had no doubt that he could handle the man if it were necessary or if it would help get the diamonds. And he felt that this just might be the case.

  He welcomed the challenge.

  The street was almost empty. The few people James Harumbaki passed were drunken men and a woman who clutched her purse as he approached from behind her. She looked over her shoulder, saw this black man with his mouth open panting behind her, and pressed herself against the wall, searching inside her oversized bag for the knife her husband had given her for things like this.

  James saw the fear in her eyes and simply kept running, losing blood from the stub of his finger, leaving a red trail as he bled through the cloth napkin he had snatched from the table in the bar.

  It was not easy to will the world back into submission. He tried as he trod on, no longer running, not looking back over his shoulder. There was no need.

  Even with his loss of blood, the out-of-shape Russians were no match for the lean, athletic Botswanan. Still, he could hear someone coming behind him. James had no idea where he was running. His thought now was to get out of sight of his pursuer, hide until daylight, hope that he could stop the bleeding, and perhaps even get back to Patrice and the others and reunite with his missing finger.

  His run was now a slow shuffle. He chanced a glance over his left shoulder. There came a large man.

  The man was jogging steadily. He was not one of the three Russians who had taken him prisoner, killed his friends, and cut off his finger. This man was fully clothed and determined, and definitely not out for a jog.

  James willed himself to hurry. His body did not respond. He turned and spread his legs to meet the man who was coming. Maybe he could surprise the man, kick him between the legs, break his collarbone with a blow to the neck. The options were not good, but at least there were options.

  The man was closing. Far behind him, in the light from a street lamp, was another man, a slouching creature who reminded James less of a man at this distance than of a monster.

  The pursuer closed in now.

  Then there was the sound of a car behind the man. James saw headlights coming closer. The car screeched as it changed gears. James headed for the sidewalk.

  The car almost hit the pursuing man and skidded to a stop in the street next to James. The back door of the old Zil opened.

  James knew the car. He had ridden in it to the bar.

  No escape. He looked at the man coming down the street and could see now that the man was holding a gun.

  “Kuda namylilsja. Where do you think you are going? Get in now you black son of a bitch,” shouted Kolokov.

  “I had that audience and you took it from me. Now I think I’ll take something from you.”

  The man in the street with a gun, no more than twenty yards away now, shouted, “Stop.”

  James went through the open door of the car.

  Iosef fired a shot, and then another as the car in front of him took off down the street. When it had turned a corner, Zelach appeared at his side. Unlike Iosef, Zelach didn’t appear to be breathing hard.

  “I thought you do not work out,” said Iosef, panting.

  “I do not.”

  “Are you even sweating?”

  “No,” said Zelach. “Yoga.”

  “You do yoga?”

  Iosef was looking down at the trail of blood he had been following.

  “Yes. My mother, too. She taught me.”

  “Maybe she will teach me.”

  “I’m sure she would,” said Zelach.

  “Good. Now we must find the people in that car.”

  “How?”

  “The Botswanans.”

  Sasha Tkach was afraid.

  He moved slowly up the dark, narrow wooden stairway in the old three-story building that had once housed the offices of the Voluntary Collective of Sewing Machine Operators. The stairway was dark. The steps creaked with each step he took.

  The building had been converted to apartments more than half a century ago. The conversion had been far less than successful. Some of the apartments were small, just single rooms of unimpressive size. Others were four rooms of varying sizes.

  Sasha moved to the door he was seeking, took a deep breath, brushed back his hair, smelled his breath against the palm of his hand, and knocked.

  He had left his gun in the hotel room provided by Jan Pendowski and the Kiev Police Department’s Smuggling Division. He had put on his primary change of clothing, told Elena, who was in the room next to his, that he was going out, and made his way to this building, to this door.

  He knocked again and thought he heard a woman humming. She sounded happy. The sound of happiness was not a good sign.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “It is me,” Sasha said.

  There was a beat. Then the door opened and there stood Maya, looking small, dark, a brush poised touching her long, dark hair.

  “You are here,” she said.

  Had he hoped for a look of forgiveness, or even a tiny smile of appreciation, he would have been disappointed.

  “I am here,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “May I come in?”

  She considered, let her hand with the brush drop to her side and answered, “No. Yes. Come in.”

  She was wearing a pale green dress he did not recognize. Around her neck was a strand of small, glittering glas
s pieces that looked like diamonds. Sasha had given the strand to her as one of the many peace offers made over the years for his inevitable transgressions. Was there hope in it being around her neck?

  She stepped back, let him enter, and closed the door.

  “The children?” he asked, looking around the room brightly lit with aluminum floor lamps and scattered with unmatched furniture.

  “They are with Masha tonight. I am sorry. I did not know you were coming to Kiev.”

  He waited for her to offer him a seat. She did not.

  “Perhaps tomorrow,” he said.

  “You came to Kiev to see the children?”

  “And you, and because of a case. Elena is here with me.”

  “Give her my best.”

  “Would you like to see her?”

  “No. I was about to go out.”

  “I see. Maya, I have changed.”

  “Into what?”

  There was a bitterness in her voice he did not recognize and did not like. He had interviewed too many people, particularly women, not to recognize what she was doing.

  “Who is it?” he asked.

  Maya’s shoulders drooped, but only slightly. She looked at the brush in her hand and then at the wall, wishing that perhaps it would provide some counsel.

  “I am going to dinner with a man from my office.”

  “The Japanese?”

  In response to his history of infidelity, a little more than two years ago Maya had begun a brief affair with an older, married Japanese executive with the company for which she worked.

  “No. I have not seen him since . . .”

  “Are you going to come back to Moscow with the children? I do not mean right away, though that would be . . .”

  “I am not coming back to Moscow,” she said softly. “You are not going to change. I don’t want to spend any more years trying with you and failing.”

  “Would it cost so much to try once more?”

  “Too much,” she said. “How long are you planning to be in Kiev?”

  “Not long.”

  “Can you come back tomorrow morning to see the children before I go to work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  She looked at the door again and then at her watch. He knew why she was doing both. He should have made an effort to make the situation easier for her, but he could not bring himself to do it.

  And then a knock came, startling Maya who looked around for someplace to put her brush. She settled for a small round table with a surface the size of a dinner plate.

  Another knock. She looked at Sasha, trying to decide whether she would choose defiance or pleading. She decided on a plea. Sasha closed his eyes and nodded in acceptance of a truce with good grace.

  Maya opened the door. The man was not impressive. He was slightly shorter than Sasha, at least a decade older, his gray hair thinning significantly. His face showed weathering and suggested reliability. He wore a knowing smile and a very neatly pressed blue suit, white shirt, and a tie that hinted at old English school.

  The man kissed her cheek before she could back away and close the door.

  “This is my husband, Sasha,” she said, folding her hands knuckle white in front of her. “Sasha, this is Anders.”

  The two men shook hands, and Maya said, “I did not know Sasha was in Kiev till he knocked at the door a few minutes ago.”

  Anders nodded and smiled.

  “I have heard a great deal about you,” Anders said in only slightly accented Russian.

  “I have heard nothing about you,” said Sasha.

  “Maya and I work together. I’m Swedish, forty-five, reasonably healthy, a lawyer, unmarried.”

  “And you tell me all this, why?”

  “Because I want to marry your wife and raise your children.”

  “What has she told you about me?”

  “Sasha,” Maya pleaded.

  “That you love her, are a fine father, and a good but immature and very unreliable man,” Anders said.

  Sasha nodded. The assessment was accurate. Sasha liked the man. This encounter would have been so much easier if he could see something in Anders that he could attack, but he saw and felt nothing.

  “Yes,” said Sasha.

  “I think you should go now, Sasha,” Maya said, touching his sleeve.

  He looked down at her hand, willing it to stay where it was, knowing his will had no effect on her and had not for a long, long time.

  “We should go too,” Maya said softly. “Come by in the morning, Sasha.”

  Sasha nodded. He suddenly had questions that he knew he could not ask: Did she love this man?

  “Tomorrow,” he said, taking Anders’s offered hand and then moving to the door.

  When the door had closed behind him, Sasha heard their voices but he could not make out what they were saying.

  Gerald St. James listened calmly to the caller and with his free hand popped a ripe, black Greek olive into his mouth. After listening for a few minutes, he said, “No more killings.”

  “No more are needed,” said the caller.

  “That is for me to determine. It was for me to determine before you disposed of, what’s his name?”

  “Lebedev.”

  “Lebedev. The policeman from Moscow? Is he competent?”

  “Yes.”

  “Meaning he could cause a great deal of damage.”

  “Yes.”

  “But if he were killed, they would send another.”

  “But not one so competent, probably.”

  “Keep me informed, and I may revise my order.”

  “To . . . ?”

  “Refrain from killing. This has become very messy. I don’t like things messy.”

  The caller knew that in his younger days, when Gerald St. James was a Bulgarian street robber, killing had been very messy.

  “If it is necessary, it will not be messy.”

  “Good.”

  St. James hung up. Let the caller worry about it. The entire operation was not going smoothly. The murders at Devochka were drawing too much police attention. The termination of the Botswanan connection in Moscow had run into problems. The recovery of the transported diamonds in Kiev was at best incomplete.

  St. James was alone in the house in Kensington-Highgate. His very English wife was visiting friends for the weekend. One of those friends was Vikki Thorpe. Vikki’s husband was Sir Charles Thorpe, former head of the British consulate in northern Russia, the area which included all of Siberia.

  Gerald St. James would get up in the morning, drive himself to pick up his wife, and conveniently run into Sir Charles. Gerald had a proposal he wished to make, a very subtle proposal which he hoped the sometimes-obtuse member of the House of Lords was capable of understanding.

  Weak links, weak links, weak links. Balta was an expert in finding weak links, be they in the personalities of those he stalked or worked with or those at the base of their necks that invited the blade.

  Balta didn’t enjoy killing. It was simply something he did well. Other people’s dying was his living. The question now, as he lay naked in bed after a hot shower, was: who was the weak link, and who might he have to kill.

  Oxana would give everything up with the threat of a sharp razor stroke across her cheek. He would not even have to kill her, though if he went that way he might as well.

  The policeman on the park bench, the one she was working with and certainly sleeping with, was a good choice. He was probably a pragmatist who would give up the diamonds in the hope of living another day, going on to something else or going after Balta. Balta would have to find out, meet with the policeman, probe his weakness.

  It would all be decided in the morning.

  He checked his watch. It was time. He had to make his call. He was sure that his cell phone was fully charged.

  As he placed his call, Balta moved before the full-length mirror behind the hotel room door. It amused him to wonder what St. James would th
ink if he knew Balta was admiring his naked body in the mirror while he talked to him on the phone.

  “Yes,” St. James said after the second ring.

  “I’m in Kiev. I have not found the diamonds yet. Tomorrow perhaps. I do have the money.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Premier Palace Hotel.”

  “Keep me informed.”

  Balta went back to the bed. He had peeled back the blanket and laid on the sheets still damp from the touch of his body after the shower. He would give the money to St. James, but he would report that he had been unable to find the diamonds though he had tortured and killed both the policeman and the model. He had every intention of getting the diamonds. He had no intention of giving them to “Sir” Gerald St. James. Balta would take them to Paris, where the buyer was waiting. And with his wealth, he would go to the United States, where opportunities suitable for his talents awaited him.

  Chapter Ten

  “January 7, 1951, 11:52 p.m. Report by Serge Vortz, Soviet Party Commissar, Devochka Mine.”

  Fyodor Rostnikov, glasses well down his nose, read from the thin black plastic-covered document.

  He looked up at Porfiry Petrovich, who nodded at him across the desk, urging him to continue to read the report.

  They were sitting in the same small meeting room where the Moscow detectives had sat the day before with the elected board of the town and mine. With the murder of Anatoliy Lebedev, the board was now reduced to four.

  In front of Karpo who, as always, sat erect, dressed in black, ignoring the beam of sunlight that streaked past his face, was a mug of hot water. Before Fyodor and Porfiry Petrovich were mugs of strong black tea. All the mugs were white with pictures of a young Linda Ronstadt smiling up at them.

  Emil Karpo had spent two futile nights in the cafeteria drinking tea, watching and listening to the few people who approached him. Though everyone acted suspiciously, none was clearly guilty of two murders.

  “I was in the shaft,” Fedya continued reading.

  Shift Leader and Mine Safety Director Ivan Memendov was ahead of me in Tunnel Number Three, investigating a shifting of rock reported by Mining Crew Four.

  Porfiry Petrovich, sharpened pencil in hand and pad of paper before him, wondered how he was going to finish the drawing upon which he was working. The drawing was of the room in which they were sitting. Karpo and Fyodor were rapidly scratched faceless images but seated upon the table a creature of no clear species crouched, ready to leap out of the drawing. Porfiry Petrovich was intrigued.