by Brad Ashlock
After Meet The Press, he went upstairs and took a shower. There were three bathrooms in his house: one on the left just before entering the kitchen, one between the guestrooms downstairs, and a third through the master bedroom. He always used the upstairs one to shower. It still smelled like Jenny there because of all the perfume bottles lining the bathroom counter. Naumkin showered, toweled himself dry, and dressed. He had expensive tastes. After a childhood suffering through Stalin’s Terror in wooll-stuffed burlap rags, the cashmere sweater, silk boxers, heavy corduroy pants, and thick argyle socks he donned not only felt comforting against his skin, they were a testament to his powers of survival. He was Medvedkin, the Little Bear, Tigran Naumkin, Master of Defence.
He found a belt and, while threading it around his waist, remembered the finely dressed stranger who had visited his village in the Ukraine in 1940. The Terror, Stalin’s mad plan to transform Russia into an industrial nation in murderous time, had been in full swing. Ukraine had been annexed. Its people, Naumkin’s people, were slaves, their quaint farms forced to produce beyond their limits to supply Stalin’s cities. Naumkin’s family didn’t even know what a city was. As a boy, Naumkin imaged Stalin to be a giant demonic head set in a circle of flames, the machine mouth chomping up and down, devouring the crops, the land, and the people.
The well-dressed stranger was a chess player from Riga. He had heard rumors of a young Ukrainian orphan who wandered the countryside from town to town, using chess to gamble for food. The stranger was Victor Shaked, a scout, coach, and servant of Stalin. Chess was very important in the new Russia. The game was cheap and would distract the people from everyday hardships. The Russians would dominate chess, and probe scientifically into the game like no one before. They also sought young talent. Victor Shaked had discovered two other boys years before who developed into powerful Grand Masters. He was hopeful the little wandering orphan with the chessboard and pieces would show similar potential.
Shaked had found the prodigy not far from the village where the boy had supposedly been born. Shaked was accustomed to towns thinned of its people, accustomed to desolate fields of over-farmed soil, parched and dead as the farmers buried beneath. The boy was huddled in a stable with two other orphans. After a brief introduction, he finally leaned the boy’s name.
“If you can beat me, Tigran, I’ll take you back to Moscow with me.”
Naumkin shuddered as he remembered Victor Shaked’s words. He fastened the belt buckle and went downstairs for his coat and gloves. His whole life had hinged on one game with a well-dressed stranger from Moscow. It was a terrifying thought, but he, at the time, hadn’t taken the man seriously; besides, Naumkin was too hungry to be terrified of anything. He had been resigned to a fate of death by starvation, or frostbite, or being shot during some pathetic thievery. As winter pressed, these seemed like quite possible and acceptable options. What was Moscow? Some place of flames where Stalin’s mouth munched up and down, consuming the world?
Naumkin still remembered his game against Shaked, move for move. Naumkin, at the time, didn’t really know any openings. He had taken what his father had taught him as far as he could, and then relied on instincts. He had had the white pieces against Shaked and played something like a Queen’s Indian reversed. Shaked had happily resigned on the twenty-seventh move. They had played amid the hay of the stable on his father’s chess set, the board that now resided in the display case downstairs next to Rasputin’s.
What if he had lost the game? What then? Those ghastly fates he had resigned himself to flashed through his mind as he opened the automatic garage door and got into his station wagon. The engine, like his knee, had trouble after cold nights. He backed into the turnaround and then headed down the slick macadam of his driveway to Rogue’s main road. Life wasn’t about what-ifs, it was about dealing with the position on the board, doing your best in lost situations to do what you had to do to stay alive as long as possible, hoping for the opponent to slip or run out of time; or, if one was winning, you couldn’t lose your head, you couldn’t get dizzy from success and blunder. There was danger everywhere. Americans had learned that on 9-11. He passed houses with Old Glory billowing beneath the State or the “Don’t Tread on Me” flags. Naumkin liked the Don’t Tread on Me banner, bold and yellow with a coiled snake. This was an amazing country.
He had defected in 1980 during a tournament in New York. The Soviet Union had always tried to keep its players happy. It rewarded their wins over the Americans with new cars, houses, and even mistresses. Naumkin and his coMr.ades enjoyed as good a life as the U.S.S.R could offer. Naumkin had no family left. Defection was easy. FBI and CIA were always nearby; it was getting to them past the KGB that was the problem. He had shimmied up a rain-guard from the second story restroom of the tournament hall to get to the roof with the hope of going down the fire escape. He never got that far. Half way into his climb up the rain-guard, the metal ripped from its screws and Naumkin fell thirty feet into a trash dumpster. Luckily, it was filled with paper and not bricks, but for the sake of freedom, he would have kindly accepted a dumpster full of shit. He did break his left leg (which he had problems with to this day), but hobbled from the trash just the same. He hadn’t been missed for fifteen minutes. That was plenty of time for him to disappear into the crowds of New York, hail a cab, and seek asylum.
Naumkin turned the red station wagon left and headed to the heart of downtown Rogue. The crowded, flag bedazzled houses thinned into little clothing stores, large barn-like antiques shops, and restaurant bars. Rogue was one of the oldest established towns in Western Michigan. Indians (Naumkin could never remember which tribe and would have trouble pronouncing it if he could) used to live here along the banks of the Rogue River. The settlers who had screwed the Indians out of their land weren’t the brightest representatives of the white race. When it came to naming the river and the town, they wanted to honor their fathers who had come from Rouge, France. They had simply misspelled the damn name.
In the summer, Rogue holds art festivals that attract a lot of tourists, people who like to walk down the streets, admire the historic buildings, buy a few knickknacks and shirts, then head back to Grand Rapids, Greenville, Eidenhoven Township, or wherever else they come from. In the winter, the place is a ghost town. Today was the last Sunday before Christmas, so there was a little more activity than usual, but not by much.
Naumkin closed the car door, yanked up the handle to make sure it was locked, and walked half a block to The Book Kaboose. The Book Kaboose was an actual train caboose that had been converted into a used bookstore. The only modifications involved heating, telephone wires, and a wooden porch with a few stairs (sorry, we don’t have a restroom, ma’am). It was set far back from the surrounding buildings. The way, a recently shoveled and salted macadam path, wound between Rogue’s somewhat famous mounds (Naumkin didn’t know what the little knolls commemorated) on the edge of the river. He managed the stairs, carefully holding onto the railing, and entered The Book Kaboose.
The owner nodded to him. Naumkin bought a book here every couple of weeks. He liked westerns. Louis L’Amour was his favorite author, but he wanted something a little different right now. Westerns were stacked in the back of the caboose between mystery and sci-fi. He leaned painfully over, his finger dancing along the spines while he muttered book titles, waiting for something to jump at him.
“Hmm,” he noised. He pulled a book from the stack and whispered the title to himself: “Warpath by Robert Montgomery.” The cover depicted an Indian Chieftain aiming a tomahawk at a fleeing Confederate soldier while teepees burned in the background. Superimposed in the cloudy sky was an image of a square-jawed cowboy looking lustfully into the doe-eyes of a buxom brunette. Naumkin scowled at the cover, set it aside and looked own the stack again. He made a little pile of candidates, and in the end selected another Louis L’Amour. The cashier bagged the book, and Naumkin headed past the snowy mounds and the rushing river back to his car.
He started the w
agon and wondered if he needed anything else from town. He had just gone grocery shopping a few days ago, but he could have sworn there was something else. Yes, all the salt on the roads reminded him: he needed water softener. He sighed. He hated lugging the bag of salt tablets to the basement. Regardless of what he hated, it had to be done. He took a detour to the grocery store (only a couple of miles away), had the boy haul the bag to the back of his station wagon, and headed home.
From the turn around, he backed into his garage, and then cradled the plastic bag of water softener tablets down the basement steps. He filled the water softener container and brushed his hands together. Salt got into the cracks between his finger joints and burned. He returned to the ground floor, put his coat away in the closet, and washed his hands. He fixed himself a sandwich, ate it next to the chessboard on the kitchen table with a cream soda, cleaned up every crumb, and then went out to the garage, closed the automatic door, and retrieved the bag from The Book Kaboose.
He liked to read in the living room to chamber music. He set the bag on the kidney-shaped table and went to his haunches in front of the stereo adjacent to the television. As Bach’s Mass in B Minor filled the house, Naumkin sprawled upon the divan and pulled the book from the plastic bag. He looked at the cover. This wasn’t the Louis L’Amour novel he had selected, no this was that atrocious, clichéd, racist looking pulp, Warpath.
“Son of a bitch, “ Naumkin whispered. “I must be getting Alzheimer’s.” Oh well, it was Sunday, he had nothing to do, and—what was it they used to say?—you can’t judge a book by its cover. He settled back into the divan, flipped to the first page, and began to read.
The book wasn’t a L’Amour, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as Naumkin had feared. He got to Chapter Fiver before dog-earing the page and slipping the book under the divan for later. So far, the hero, Cort Wilder, fresh from the battlefields of the Civil War, rescues a squaw on his way back to the family farm in Missouri and his sweetheart, Rose Kellem. The thugs Wilder had filled with lead in his dashing rescue of the squaw were Sam Duncan’s men. Sam Duncan practically owns the little settlement of Coyote, Arkansas, and he’s’ not about to have his plans of expanding the town after the war be delayed by a bunch of filthy red skins who aren’t smart enough to sell a few key acres of their reservation. Oh yeah, Duncan knows those few key acres are secretly loaded with silver, a fortune he’ll stop at nothing to acquire.
Pretty ham fisted, but, as far as Tigran Naumkin was concerned, entertaining just the same. He had read most of the great Russian novels, followed by Charles Dickens, Billy Budd and all the other classics, but could never resist a good yellow pulp book. His interest began with detective stories, briefly dipped into thrillers, took him on a sojourn through sci-fi (mostly Asimov, Clark, and Herbert), and finally to westerns, Louis L’Amour in particular.
A few months before they moved to Michigan, he and Jenny had taken a trip to America’s great West. They went as far as Utah. It was the most beautiful country he had ever seen. The cowboy stories reminded him of that time with his wife in the Badlands. They had actually ridden horses with real modern-day cowboys. It was the best vacation he and Jenny ever had (not that there had been that many). Just the same, Naumkin didn’t think there was a more beautiful place on earth than Colorado, nor a more beautiful woman than his wife had been at the time they were there. She was just so… alive.
Now she’s just a corpse, like Papa. The terrible cognition split through his skull like a meat cleaver, alien and cold. He was ashamed at the thought, and wondered where it had come from when his mind had been so focused on happy memories. No need to feel guilty about it, he had thought worse. After mourning Jenny for over a year, he spent several months loathing her. How could she leave him? How could she be so damn selfish? He never really loved her, he settled for her. These terrible, stupid thoughts had seemed to bloom like weeds in his brain. He’d pull them out with guilt and self-recrimination, but they would just pop up again. Time, he knew from experience, would put things in their proper order. In a few months, his anger had passed, his guilt had passed, and all that remained, even in an exaggerated idealized form, was his love for Jenny and the memory of her love for him.
The high-pitched digitized ring from the kitchen shattered his reflections and the Bach. He arose from the divan and picked up the phone.
“Tigran, this is Gordon Dudley.”
“Oh? Yes? Hello.”
The Chocolate King sighed. His exhalation cracked in telephonic distortion. “You didn’t go out walking today, did you?”
“No. I did yesterday, but not today. Why?”
“My granddaughter, Meeko, she wasn’t in her room this morning. We think maybe she ran off last night.”
“That is terrible.”
“Yes. Uh, you didn’t see anything—”
“No.”
“Nothing strange. A strange car, or anything?”
“No one comes up here and I can’t see the main road from my house. I went into town for an hour or so.”
“OK. Well, thanks, Tigran.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No, not really. If, maybe you, uh, you could keep your eyes peeled for anything strange. She’s got a bright red coat.”
“I have your number,” Naumkin said. “I’ll check out my window every now and then.”
“She’ll probably just be in the woods. She’s pretty upset. My daughter and her husband are getting a divorce, you see, and Meeko and her mother came up to stay with me for a few weeks.”
“Ah, that is a difficult time.”
“Yeah, well, just call me if you see anything strange, or if you see her anywhere. Here, let me give you my personal cell phone number.”
“OK,” Naumkin said, getting a pen and a notepad from a drawer and taking the number.
“Now,” Dudley said, strain heavy in his voice, “you call that if you see anything out of order. For all we know she was abducted out of her own room.”
“I see. Yes. Anything else, Gordon?”
“No.”
Naumkin hung up the phone and raised his eyebrows. He scuttled down the hall to the guest bedroom that had a window overlooking the field, Dudley’s woods, and the white and brown. Squinting, he frowned, hunting for a red dot that might be a child. There was no red in the white and brown. Nothing in the white and brown but brush, tire tracks, the smell of pine and—Naumkin felt an icicle of dread pierce his heart and dive through his chest to his stomach, filling his bowels with cold. He turned from the window, his hand brushing against the blind in the quick motion, making a rattlesnake sound. He rushed back to the telephone. Gordon Dudley’s cell phone number was still on the pad on the counter.
Dudley answered quickly.
“Gordon, I forgot to tell you something. When I was out in your woods yesterday I came across a pack of dogs.”
“A what?”
“Dogs. I didn’t actually see them, but they had been walking around my ATV after I parked it down by the field in the woods. There must have been at least five dogs.”
“Five dogs?”
“Yes, maybe six.”
Dudley whispered something, maybe Jesus Christ, and then spoke up: “You didn’t see them?”
“No. But I know a dog’s paw print when I see one.”
“Thank you, Tigran. I’ll pass that on to the sheriff.”
Naumkin hung up the phone and returned to the window in the guest room. He fixed the bent blind and peered out once again to the field of white and brown. Although he had no children of his own, the young always had a special place in his heart. They were magical creatures, like elves if there were such a thing as elves. Naumkin had never really had a childhood that he could remember. He had been forced to skip over the Magic Mountain and go straight to the Ninth Circle of Hell. Maybe the girl (what was her name? Meeko? People would name their kids anything these days) was still on Gordon Dudley’s estate. Kids do things like that when they’re scared and hurt. Although Naum
kin had lost his parents in a much more horrible way than divorce, he guessed both losses shared similar anguish. She was probably huddled in some shed on Dudley’s estate, angry with her mother for taking her away from Papa, and she would make them both get together again by forcing them to go looking for her.
This was a comforting thought, but there was something in Gordon Dudley’s voice that indicated the situation was worse than the happily concocted scenario Naumkin had constructed. Dudley sounded more than just worried. He sounded something other than afraid and something other than just guilty; he sounded like he was holding something back. Naumkin had spent a lifetime reading people despite their intentions to camouflage themselves. At the chessboard, a simple shift in the chair could serve as a warning flag. Some players smirked when they were heading toward a favorable position; others, when spotting a move that could crush them that might otherwise go unnoticed, covered their mouths with their hands, looked away from the board, or began to sweat like pigs. Each opponent had his own tic. Naumkin couldn’t claim he knew Gordon Dudley well enough to make such judgments, but if he trusted his instincts, Naumkin would say the millionaire knew something or at least suspected something important, and he wasn’t going to tell anyone about it, let alone some senior citizen patzer.