Blood and Rubles

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Holding a forkful of sausage, Sasha looked seriously at his mother and said, “What did Pulcharia call you?”

  “Pahnohs,” Lydia belted out, folding her arms in indignation. “Diarrhea.”

  Sasha examined the bowl of dark, thin soup his wife had just placed beside his plate.

  “Why?” asked Sasha.

  “I told her she had to go to the toilet,” said Lydia. “When she woke up from her nap while the baby and I were watching that show with the clown. I told her, ‘Use the toilet.’ She called me ‘diarrhea.’”

  “Maybe she was just telling you that she had … Can this conversation wait till I finish eating?”

  “I know the difference between a child telling me she has a problem with her bowels and a child calling me a name,” said Lydia, ignoring her son’s request.

  “She is three years old,” said Sasha.

  “No excuse. I never let you make excuses,” said Lydia, looking at Maya. “I never let him make excuses. Just the truth. Am I right?”

  Though Lydia was not within a kilometer of being correct, Sasha said, “My mother is right.”

  “And Maya refused to discipline her,” Lydia went on, feeling a wave of triumph.

  “I didn’t think she had done anything that deserved discipline,” said Maya, taking a seat at the small table.

  “It is nice to be home,” Sasha said, reaching out to touch his wife’s hand. Maya’s hands were soft. Maybe if he yawned a few times and reminded his mother that he had to get back to work in a few hours, his mother would retire to the bedroom with the children and read a book. Maybe he and Maya could pull out the sofa bed, turn out the lights, make love, and still have time for enough sleep.

  “So, what are you going to do?” Lydia insisted.

  “I’ll beat her with a belt when I return in the morning,” he said. “Or maybe I should get it over with and pull her out of bed now for the beating. She’ll never forget it.”

  He tried the soup. Beans. Still warm. The soup was good. He dipped his bread in it.

  “You will not strike that precious child,” Lydia said indignantly. “I never laid a hand on you when you were a child. Neither did your father.”

  Sasha contemplated the selectivity of his mother’s memory.

  “I’ll starve her for a week,” said Sasha. “Maya, no food for Pulcharia for a week. Make a note.”

  “Stop,” Lydia insisted. “You don’t intend to do any of those things.”

  “Then, Mother, what shall I do? Maya, what is in this sausage?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Maya. “It’s not bad, though.”

  Sasha agreed. He simply didn’t like eating the unknown.

  “Deprive her of … of television,” Lydia said. “For two days.”

  Since Pulcharia seldom looked at television, Sasha agreed.

  “I would, however, like to ask her why she called you a name,” he said.

  “Pahnohs,” she reminded him as he continued to chew a piece of the unidentifiable sausage.

  “I will ask her about this gross violation the moment I next see her,” said Sasha. “Immediately after dinner I would like to get some sleep.”

  “You can sleep in the bedroom,” Lydia said. “Maya can clean up, talk a little, watch the television. We’ll wake you.”

  “I’m sure you will,” said Sasha. “But I want to shave, get out of my clothes, shower, and go to sleep in here, with my wife, who will, as usual, have to get up early for work.”

  “You want to make love,” Lydia said indignantly.

  “That is a possibility,” Sasha agreed, smiling at his wife.

  “You take away my last crumb of dignity and you smile,” said Lydia with an enormous sigh.

  “You have my full and deep respect,” said Sasha.

  “I made the soup,” Lydia said, looking at the bowl from which her son was drinking.

  “Perfect,” Sasha said.

  Lydia talked. Sasha and Maya listened. When he was finished eating, Maya cleared the table. Lydia was on to one of her favorite subjects—Boris Yeltsin and his stooges who had succeeded in making things much worse instead of even a little better.

  “I’m not saying I agree with Zhirinovsky,” she said. “But he has a point. And Yeltsin is a drunk who doesn’t know what he’s doing. If it weren’t for the Americans and their money, Yeltsin wouldn’t be wearing those pressed suits and designer ties. You know where he would be?”

  “No,” said Sasha.

  “In a little apartment with a big bottle,” Lydia said triumphantly.

  Sasha had argued with such observations before. This time he nodded and yawned.

  “That’s not a real yawn,” his mother said. “That’s a yawn that says, ‘Mother, go to bed.’ Fine. I have books. It’s early, but I have books. You haven’t asked me how I feel today.”

  “How do you feel today?”

  “Toot bahlyeet, a little pain right here,” she said, pointing to her stomach, “and a touch of pahnohs.”

  Sasha did not smile.

  “A good reason to get into bed and get some rest,” Sasha said, reaching over to touch his mother’s thin arm. She put her hand on top of his and smiled.

  After a shower and a shave, Sasha emerged in an oversized white American T-shirt that had a crude cartoon of a yellow-haired boy and words that Maya had told him meant “Don’t Have a Cow.”

  The humor and meaning had always escaped Lydia, who finally retired to the bedroom with a thick paper-covered book. Maya was already in bed. She wore a blue and white long-sleeved nightgown tied at the neck. When the bedroom door was closed, she slipped out of her nightgown and let him see and touch her. Then she reached over and turned off the lights. They made love to the sound of Lydia screeching a lullaby in the shower.

  “Romantic,” Sasha whispered.

  “Funny,” she whispered back.

  He rolled her over onto her stomach and climbed gently on top of her from behind.

  “All right?” he asked.

  She lifted her buttocks and rose to her knees. In the shower Lydia squealed, “Never any soap in this house.”

  Emil Karpo sat at his desk eating a sandwich he had purchased at a stand near the Belorussia train station. The bread slices were thin, the pink and white sheet that passed for ham was even thinner, and there was barely the hint of butter. A bottle of water stood next to the sandwich, which lay on a sheet of paper.

  Karpo stopped in his review of his notes from time to time to take a bite of sandwich and a drink of water. It was Thursday night, the night he would normally be with Mathilde. He continued his search. There were Igor Kuzens listed in the directory, and the MVD computer system had come up with a probable Igor Kuzen, a medicine hijacker, but he was in prison. The name had touched a memory in Karpo. He had seen it somewhere, written it somewhere, and now he was going methodically through his cross-index in search of a reference. All names listed in his books of notes were cross-indexed.

  He couldn’t find it.

  Karpo sat back to finish his sandwich. There was a table lamp before him and a standing lamp in the corner. Mathilde had placed a painting of some people having a picnic on one wall, a painting of a huge red flower on another. She had found a patterned blanket for his cot and was on the verge of convincing him to buy a real bed. She had brought life to Emil Karpo. Communism had been his meaning, but Mathilde had brought life. Now she was dead. A stray bullet from an automatic weapon. The cross fire between two gangs fighting over what? Territory? Nuclear weapons?

  Emil Karpo tried to summon anger, but he couldn’t. It was an emotion he bore little of when he was a child and none when he became an adult. He was determined, relentless. He could feel regret at the enormous waste of human life he saw—a murdered child, a woman raped and left for dead, a young man with a meat hook through his body. He had seen this and much more, and it had made him determined to find whoever committed such atrocities.

  Now Mathilde was dead and he wanted to feel different. It was
Thursday. He wanted to feel angry, but all he could feel was empty. He had lost everything, everything but his work, and he was even beginning to wonder what the point was to that.

  “Spelling,” he said aloud, flipping through the index volume where each entry was clearly printed in his own precise hand. He was now going through the Ts, and that was where he found it. Igor Tuzen. A single reference. July 1986. Questioned in relation to the beating and death of a woman who lived in the apartment next to his. The man had identified himself as a physicist. He’d claimed not to have heard the sound of a struggle on the night of the murder even though he had been home all night. The walls were not thick and the woman’s struggle had been fierce. Tuzen maintained that he had been completely absorbed in his work and that furthermore a hockey game had been blaring on his television. Description of Igor Tuzen: age forty, height approximately five feet eight inches, weight 155 pounds. Thick dark brown hair and a pink, youthful face. Glasses with thick lenses. No nervousness. No signs of regret at the murder of his neighbor. No fear. Cooperative. Sorry that he couldn’t help. Wore a smile all the time as if either the world constantly amused him or he were on the verge of idiocy.

  Karpo noted the man’s phone number and dialed. The person who answered said no one named Kuzen lived there. Karpo dialed the home of Paulinin. There was no answer. He called Paulinin’s laboratory on the second lower level of Petrovka.

  “What?” Paulinin answered.

  “Karpo.”

  “I have no new information for you,” said Paulinin. “What I have is a new corpse, a Gypsy woman, no obvious means of death. I have a theory.”

  “Do you know a physicist named Igor Kuzen?”

  “Kuzen? Igor Kuzen.” Long pause, then, “Yes, I’ll find it. Igor Kuzen. Not a physicist. Science training. Wrote a few articles back five, ten years ago, discredited nonsense about the effects of nuclear explosions on plant life, changes in gene patterns, acquired characteristics that could be passed on. He was not completely wrong, just completely ignorant. I might be able to find the articles if you can wait.”

  “What happened to Kuzen?” Karpo asked.

  “Went to work for a foreign pharmaceutical company,” said Paulinin. “Started in research, moved quickly down to quality control. Last I heard of him.”

  “The foreign company?”

  “Czech company. Jansco Pharmaceuticals. They make a poor brand of American Prozac. They call it Prinsco. Sells like mad now that everyone thinks he is mad. Can I get back to my corpse?”

  “Thank you,” said Karpo.

  “You have a night open for dinner perhaps?” Paulinin ventured.

  “Perhaps,” said Karpo. “We do not eat in your laboratory.”

  “Out, wherever you say.”

  “Yes,” said Karpo. “When I’ve finished with what I am working on.”

  Next he called the office of Jansco Pharmaceuticals just beyond the outer ring road. He got one of those answering machines and a number to call in case of emergency, which he dialed. A tired woman answered. Karpo asked her how he might find Igor Kuzen. She gave the phone to a man.

  “What is this emergency that you have to find Kuzen?” the man asked with some irritation.

  “Police,” said Karpo.

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” the man said. “I fired him more than eight months ago.”

  “Why?”

  “Passing on formulas to the Chinese.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I’m at home right now. How am I supposed to remember where a former employee lives? I could check in the morning.”

  “I’ll meet you at your office in one hour,” said Karpo.

  “It’s nearly midnight,” the man groaned.

  “One hour.”

  “Just a moment,” said the man.

  The moment passed. Karpo could hear the woman who had answered the call complaining. The man came back on the phone.

  “The last address I can find for Igor Kuzen is Two-thirty-four Lermontov Prospekt. Do you want the phone number?”

  “No,” said Karpo, and hung up.

  He cleaned up the crumbs left from his dinner, drank the rest of the water, put on his jacket, then paused for a moment to look at the painting of the people in the park. He turned off the lights. He set three hairs he plucked from his head at exact markings in the door, where only he would notice. Should someone enter his apartment or try to during the night, the hairs would move, and even if the person was an expert, it would be difficult to find them and return them to their precise positions.

  Karpo checked the pistol in the shoulder holster under his jacket, a Browning that held a thirteen-round clip, and went out into the night. Unlike so many others in the new democratic Russia, Emil Karpo was not afraid of the night. He had, however, begun to fear that he was afraid of being alone.

  NINE

  Night

  “WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR?” the little girl asked.

  It was well past her bedtime, but after dinner Sarah had told him the Karenskovs on the fourth floor had a badly leaking pipe under their bathroom sink.

  Laura and her eight-year-old sister were both frail, with short dark brown hair. They looked nothing like their grandmother, who was in prison for shooting the manager of a government food shop. The grandmother had been raising the children since her daughter disappeared, leaving the brief message that she would return sometime, maybe. The girls’ father was already long gone, and there were no aunts or uncles. The Rostnikovs had taken the girls in, and slowly, cautiously, the children had been coming out of their near-catatonic state. Now the eleven-year-old was expressing a definite interest in Rostnikov’s activities.

  He was lying on his back under the Karenskovs’ sink, his copper-colored tool kit on the floor beside him. The girl, in her nightshirt, was kneeling.

  “Searching for the leak,” Rostnikov said.

  “You are getting dirty,” Laura said.

  “The plumbing is old,” he said. “It rusts, it leaks, it makes noises like the wind and machine guns. Hand me the pipe wrench, that big metal thing with jaws.”

  She found the wrench and offered it into the darkness below the sink. Rostnikov clamped, tugged, grunted, and pulled. Rust flaked over his face and he closed his eyes.

  “No use,” he said, sliding out awkwardly.

  The girl smiled when he sat up. His face was covered with red rust. In his hand was a dirty length of piping.

  “I amuse you?” he asked. “Good. Now hand me that piece of pipe. No, the smaller one.”

  She handed him a short section of plastic piping he had brought with him.

  “The pipes are all forty years old, and made from inferior galvanized steel,” he said. “They are beginning to rust from inside. Small holes are developing in the pipes. They can be patched with tape for a while, but eventually they will all have to be replaced, just like I am replacing this section.”

  The Karenskovs waited in the other room watching television. Rostnikov and the girl could hear the cheerful voices of a man and woman on the television. Then the audience laughed.

  “The plumbing in this building, like most of the buildings in Moscow, is similar to our government,” Rostnikov said, putting down the rusted section of pipe and examining the tube of black plastic the girl had handed him. “It is rusty and rotten. Soon … leaks everywhere. The system is falling apart. It has to be replaced, but the cost is great. Do the new plumbers simply make repairs with plastic tubing?” He held up the plastic pipe section in his hand. “Or do they completely replace the entire system as they have promised but which they cannot afford to do?”

  The girl listened, a look of intensity on her face.

  “You don’t understand, do you?” he asked, reaching out to touch her cheek.

  “A little,” she said.

  When he removed his hand from her cheek, he saw that he had left a handprint of rust and dust. He put the two pieces of pipe side by side on the floor. The black plastic one was longer.<
br />
  “Saw and clamp,” he said, pointing at the tools.

  The girl handed them to him and said, “It’s like being a nurse, a little.”

  “A little,” Rostnikov agreed with a smile. “You would like to be a doctor or a nurse?”

  The girl considered this while Rostnikov turned his body, biting his lower lip to control the pain in his leg, and fixed the clamp and black piping together on the edge of the sink.

  “No,” she said. “I want to be a traffic director. I’ll have a uniform and stand in the street telling cars when to go and stop. Or I’ll be up in one of those little traffic towers.”

  “A noble ambition,” Rostnikov said as he stood up and started to cut the pipe to the same length as the rusty one he had removed. “Well within your grasp.”

  “You are a policeman,” she said.

  “I am,” he answered, continuing to saw.

  “You put my grandmother in jail.”

  It was the first time the girl had spoken of her grandmother, though both Sarah and Porfiry Petrovich had given the girls messages from her.

  “I took her to the judges, who put her in jail,” said Rostnikov without looking away from his sawing. “I am trying to get her out. You know what she did?”

  “Yes,” said the girl, also standing now and watching with interest as Rostnikov sawed. “She shot a mean man who wouldn’t give her bread for me and my sister to eat.”

  “Basically correct,” said Rostnikov as he sawed through the piece of plastic and the loose end fell to the floor.

  The girl picked up the four-inch piece of black plastic and asked, “Can I keep this?”

  “Yes,” said Rostnikov, loosening the clamp and painfully beginning to make his way back under the sink.

  “There may be things I can make with it,” she said, turning it around in her hands.

  “Now,” he said, the top of his body hidden under the sink, “hand me that small can of oil. The blue can.”

  She did so, and after a minute he handed it back out to her.

  “Now the bigger can, the one that looks like a small drum.”

  She handed it to him. Moments later he handed it back out.