Rostnikov’s Vacation
An Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov Mystery
Stuart M. Kaminsky
With love for Enid, who made time begin
Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
“Who are you?”
“A pedlar.”
“How is it you know that I am being followed?”
“A friend told me.”
“A spy?”
“Yes.”
“And you are a spy too?”
“No,” said Yevsey. But looking into Zimin’s lean, pale face, he remembered the calm and dull sound of his voice, and without any effort corrected himself. “Yes, I am.”
Maxim Gorky, The Life of a Useless Man, 1907
The KGB is a very conservative organization. It’s been trained to fight international imperialism, Zionism, the Vatican, Radio Liberty, Amnesty International, Titoists, Maoists, and spying organizations. And now they are left without a job. All these bad names have disappeared from the horizon. And so they either go left, as I did, and I am not alone. But most of them go to the right. They say the country is being betrayed, the country’s falling apart. They say we have to stand and fight to the end.
KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin in an address to the Congress of Communist Party Progressives in the Oktober Theater, Moscow, June 1990
PROLOGUE
THE HISTORY OF THE secret police of Russia from the days of the czars to the present is quite convoluted, which is, perhaps, to be expected. The organization has gone through many names and many leaders.
Under the czars, the Okhrana, or the Guard, was created to protect the royal family and its staff from assassination attempts. After the Revolution, at the end of 1917, the Okhrana inspired the Cheka, or Extraordinary Commission, under Felix Dzerzhinsky, who reported directly to Lenin. After Lenin’s death in 1922, the Cheka was reorganized and became the GPU, or State Political Administration. The following year, the name was changed to the OGPU, or United State Political Administration. Eleven years later, in 1934, Stalin murdered the ranking officers of the OGPU and formed the NKVD, or People’s Commisariat of International Affairs. In 1941, Stalin renamed the organization NKGB, or People’s Commisariat of State Security. Five years later it was renamed once more, this time the MGB, or Ministry of State Security. It wasn’t until 1954, however, that the name KGB, or Committee of State Security, was adopted. Who knows when the next change will come.
Col. Nikolai Zhenya of the KGB knew this history well. He considered that history and his own future as he stood at the window of his office at 22 Lubyanka, the Moscow home of both KGB headquarters and the Lubyanka Prison. It was a new office into which the colonel had moved only days before, a larger office, to signify his rapid rise. The lead of the recent coat of gray paint on the walls scratched at his palate and nostrils.
To mask the taste and odor, Zhenya took a long drink from the cup of tepid tea he held in his hand. Nothing changed.
He looked around the office—new desk, new chairs, new photograph of Lenin, but a much smaller, safer photograph of Lenin, a photograph that could easily and quickly be taken down, placed in a file-cabinet drawer, and replaced with a photograph of the Kremlin at dusk. He knew there were those inside the offices around him who were considering whether they should now remove the traditional pictures of Lenin and be just a bit ahead of the other officers on the floor. Or should they wait in case the political tides so changed that their loyalty to revolutionary idealism would be admired while their carefully timed discretion would be respected? It was a game of survival, dependent not upon one’s true beliefs but upon the illusion one could maintain about beliefs.
There were quiet moments like this before the day began, before the first knock at his door, when Colonel Zhenya wondered how long he would be able to enjoy his most recent promotion.
Colonel Zhenya, who had risen rapidly through the ranks and was now, at forty-five, one of the youngest colonels in any branch of the KGB, had never truly enjoyed his successes. He had considered each betrayal, each manipulation, each intrigue in which he had engaged, a fragile rung, one as fine as a spider’s thread in the ladder upward. There was no goal but to keep climbing, to keep distancing oneself farther and farther from the bottom.
The colonel, who was rapidly losing his hair and had taken to brushing it straight and severely back, pushed aside the white curtains and looked down at the traffic that swirled around the thirty-six-foot-high statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky in the square below. Dzerzhinsky had organized the Cheka—the organization that had paved the way for the KGB, “the sword of the Revolution”—for Lenin.
Now the sword of the Revolution was in the hands of the moderates, and they could not even use it to cut cheese. The sword was poised over Colonel Zhenya’s head.
The colonel’s office was on the top floor, and above him, since it was shortly after five in the morning, he could hear the political prisoners being exercised on the roof, their synchronized steps tramping like sheets of heavy rain.
ONE
IN THE EVENING OF the very same spring day that Col. Nikolai Zhenya stood at the window of his new office in Lubyanka, three men, two in Moscow and one in Livadia, less than two miles from Yalta, were out walking.
Before the night was over, one of the men would call his wife, another would witness a murder, and the third man would be dead.
In spite of his burden, Yon Mandelstem walked briskly through the small park just beyond the Sokol Metro Station, from which he had just emerged. The case that bounced against his side was worn like a small mail sack over his shoulder. As an added precaution or to give himself better balance, he also held firmly to the cloth handle of the case.
The clouds above him closed in on the sun, and a faint sound that may have been distant thunder whispered from the west.
Mandelstem, this young, serious-looking, bespectacled man in a dark suit and equally dark tie, looked neither right nor left. He ignored the rusting twenty-foot-tall iron hammer and sickle standing just off the path beyond the trees he was passing. Nor did he even glance at the two boys fishing off the low concrete wall over the pond as he moved on.
One of the boys, a twelve-year-old named Ivan, looked over his shoulder at the blond young man who had begun to perspire from both his pace and the weight of the case and whatever was in it. Ivan thought fleetingly that the man was carrying a very small refrigerator, the kind his grandfather and grandmother had in their apartment on Pushkin Street. The shape was right, perhaps even the weight. Something tugged gently at Ivan’s line. It proved to be not a fish but a ripple created by the warning wind of the coming rain. When the boy looked back, the young man with the case was gone.
Yon Mandelstem hurried on, his round spectacles slipping forward on his nose, but he did not slow his pace or loosen his grip on the case to adjust the glasses. Instead, he balanced his burden on his hip and, in annoyance, moved his hand quickly to his face to push the glasses back on his nose, knowing that they would only resume their descent until he dried the perspiration from his nose.
A distant crack of thunder and the rapidly darkening skies urged Mandelstem on even more quickly. He reached the street on the far side of the park as the rain hit. He waited for a trio of cars to pass and then tried to run. The case bounced awkwardly, uncomfortably, against his side, his hipbone catching a metallic thud with each hurried step. Reluctantly, he slowed down, resuming his rapid walk.
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The two boys who had been fishing in the park ran past him, laughing at the rain. A babushka, an old woman wearing a black sweater and carrying a mesh bag containing what looked like some potatoes and a small block of quivering cheese, almost bumped into Yon Mandelstem on the sidewalk. Their eyes met, and through the raindrops that now dampened his vision he became alert and clutched his case to him as if he feared an attack by the soggy creature before him. She hurried away, muttering.
Yon Mandelstem was just past Building One of the four 14-floor concrete high-rise apartment buildings known to their older tenants as the Friedrich Engels Quartet when the rain abruptly stopped. It had lasted no more than a minute or two, and the sky was already clearing. A huge plane that had just taken off from the Sheremetyevo International Airport boomed overhead.
Yon Mandelstem continued, feet splashing in puddles, toward his goal, Building Two.
A few people emerged from the buildings and looked up at the clouds, which thundered a farewell and moved west, away from Moscow.
Opening the door was awkward. He could not put his case down on the wet ground, but it was difficult to open the heavy door with only one hand. Fortunately, someone came to his rescue and pushed it open.
“It stopped raining?” asked the woman who had opened the door as she stepped back to let Yon enter.
“Yes,” Yon answered, removing his glasses, panting slightly.
In the dim light of the narrow hallway, Yon now recognized the woman. She was in her late thirties, possibly even forty, dark, made up, and wearing a blue dress with white flowers.
“I don’t want to get my hair, my dress, wet,” she said. “It’s so … You just moved on ten? I’ve seen you.”
“Yes,” he said. There were no elevators in the Engels Quartet. In fact, there was not much to recommend the buildings or the series of slightly lower apartment buildings constructed in the 1950s and 1960s in the area. The service was terrible, worse since the reforms, for not even political pressure could get the repairmen to work. The airport was too close, and the flight patterns went directly over this section. Still, one was lucky to get an apartment, and Yon knew he would not have gotten his if he did not have special connections.
He had caught his breath, moved past the woman, and was ready to climb the stairs. He wanted to get to his room, lock the door behind him, check the treasure under his arm, and men get out of his wet clothes.
“My name is Tamara,” the woman said, stepping toward him and holding out her hand.
Yon quickly tried to dry his palm on his wet trousers and held out his hand.
The woman’s hand was warm and soft. She had a nice smile, a clear complexion.
“Yon Mandelstem,” he said, brushing away the lock of hair that had fallen over his eyes.
“Jewish?” she said.
“Yes,” he said a bit defensively, taking a quick step up the stairway.
“Not a good time to be Jewish,” Tamara said, shaking her head. “Don’t look so frightened. I’m not an anti-Semite. I can prove it. I’ll be back in two hours. You can come to my apartment for a drink. Number eleven-six.”
“I … I don’t think.”
“My husband is in Lithuania or someplace that’s giving us trouble,” she said with a wave of her hand, indicating either that her husband’s whereabouts were of no consequence or the location of Lithuania did not matter in the course of human events.
“A soldier?” Mandelstem asked.
“No,” she said with a little laugh, advancing on him. “An electrician. So?”
“So,” he said, feeling the weight of the load in his aching shoulders.
“So, are you coming to my apartment later?” She was close enough for him to feel her breath on his face. It was warm, a bit sweet.
“Perhaps,” he said, turning suddenly and starting up the stairs. “Perhaps another time.”
“Won’t be another time,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m using the apartment of a friend. She’s coming back in a few days and I’ll have to go. Tonight will be best.”
“I’ll …” Yon began.
“Think about it,” she said, giving him a broad smile and turning her back as she headed for the door.
Yon began to climb the stairs.
Below him, Tamara shook her head, touched her breasts with both hands to be sure they were still there, and went into the evening, almost bumping into a lean man wearing a workman’s jacket and a cap pulled down over his eyes.
“Prastee’t’e, excuse me,” she said with a smile that showed even white, though a bit large, teeth, of which she was particularly proud. The man did not look at her.
Yon Mandelstem was exhausted when he reached the door to his apartment. He put down his case, glancing around the empty corridor to be sure no one was watching. No doors were cracked open. A sound that may have been bitter laughter came from one of the apartments nearby, but he could not tell which one. He got his key out, opened the door, placed his case inside, stepped in, turned on the light, and closed the door behind him.
He looked around the small room, locked the door, took off his glasses, placed them in his jacket pocket, and moved the case across the room to the desk in the corner before he began to strip off his wet clothes. He threw the clothes in the general direction of the worn but serviceable dark sofa against the wall.
Then, naked except for his sox, he moved into the second small room, which served as a bedroom. He reached over and took off his sox as he hopped toward the little cubbyhole in which a shower beckoned.
He threw back the shower door and found himself facing a grinning man with bad teeth.
There was a chill in the Crimean evening air. Georgi Vasilievich pulled up the collar of his jacket, shook his shoulders, and began walking along the czar’s lane from Livadia to Oreanda. Although it was still early in the evening, the thick woods blocked out the setting sun, making it seem much later.
Vasilievich walked slowly. He told himself it was because he enjoyed the woods, the outdoors. He was a man of the city, and he wished to savor the clean air, the solitude. He told himself these things, but something inside him would not listen. Georgi Vasilievich was a policeman, a good policeman, who recognized a lie even when it was one he was telling to himself. No, the truth was that he was getting old. He was tired. Perhaps General Petrovich was right to insist that he take his vacation, that he spend several weeks in the sanitarium for rest and therapy. He had been working hard, as had all in the GRU, the chief intelligence directorate of the Soviet General Military Staff. Unrest in the military was evident at all levels. The work load was impossible. And it was being conducted with no reward, no appreciation from the people, no appreciation from their superiors, who were too distracted in the new turmoil created by Gorbachev to reward with even a word the efforts of …
The path turned and brought him to the rotunda at the seashore. He always stopped at the rotunda. In the week he had been making this trip since Dr. Vostov had prescribed the walk, Vasilievich had paused at the rotunda, both coming and going, to admire the view and to catch his breath.
Vasilievich had a heart condition. One could not argue with that fact. He had experienced a heart attack. But it was four years earlier, and his health reports had been well within the bounds of acceptability from the moment he had been released from the hospital. The rest would, he had reluctantly concluded, be good for him. But, fortunately, in Yalta he had found more than the sight of the sea and woods to occupy him. He had discovered a puzzle that he believed he had now solved.
Georgi Vasilievich put his large arthritic hands on the railing and looked out at Machtovaya Rock, its gray bulk split in two. He had been told by an old woman who helped clean the sanitarium that archaeologists had found a cave beneath the rocks, under the water level, where ancient ancestors of man once dwelt.
An animal or another late walker stirred leaves on the path behind him. Vasilievich did not turn. He imagined or tried to imagine for a breath of a moment that it was
his wife, Magda, a few steps behind him, that she would join him to look where his eyes now turned, at the Krestovy Cliff, the bloody cliff where, Vasilievich knew, the White Guards had shot the revolutionary sailors and workers of both Sebastapol and Yalta. At the base of the cliff stood the church that had been built on the ruins of a palace destroyed by fire more than one hundred years ago. He needed no old woman to tell him that. The church stood only a few hundred yards from the sanitarium, whose roof now caught the last rays of the sun.
Magda had died five, no, nine years earlier, he thought. It couldn’t be. But it was. He smiled. Sentiment. He was not a sentimental man. He had displayed no great affection for Magda while she lived. In fact, they had fought often, and he could recall no instance of their having embraced over the final twenty years, and yet he missed her. When she died, he had secretly rejoiced, his somber eyes downcast, the suggestion of tears threatening. He rejoiced in his freedom. He could work whatever hours he wished, smoke his pipe in his underwear, watch the television. But that sense of freedom survived less than a year. He was not sure how much less. The feeling of loss had come gradually.
This time the sound on the path behind him made Vasilievich turn. He should be wearing his glasses. He knew that, but Georgi was a proud man. He had once been a large man, but the years, his illness, and something in the soul that he could not quite understand and in which he did not believe had begun to shrink him.
There was nothing, no one, there. But still, it did not hurt to be cautious. He bent down at the edge of the rotunda and pretended to tie his shoe while he glanced toward the trees without turning his head.
Vasilievich resumed his journey and became absorbed almost immediately in the problem he had been picking at for the past few days, the problem he had been reluctant to share with Rostnikov, who would have been sympathetic but have thought him an old fool.
Vasilievich would have liked to quicken his step, but he hesitated, fearing that sudden jolt, the loss of breath he had experienced but once four years ago before his heart attack.
Rostnikov’s Vacation Page 1