Rostnikov’s Vacation

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Rostnikov’s leg was not to be trusted. It had been injured when Rostnikov, a fifteen-year-old boy fighting the Germans outside of Rostov, had encountered a tank, which he succeeded in destroying. He had come back from the war, become a policeman, married, and had a son whom, in a moment of long-regretted zeal, he and his wife had named Iosef, in honor of Stalin. He had worked his way into the Procurator General’s Office, only to be transferred on “temporary but open-ended duty” at the age of fifty-five to the MVD—the police, uniformed and ununiformed, who direct traffic, face the public, maintain order, and are the front line of defense against crime. It had been a clear demotion for his too-frequent clashes with the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Besopasnosti, the State Security Agency, the KGB, clashes that were inevitable because the KGB had the power to investigate any crime that posed a threat to national security or the economy and the KGB interpreted its powers broadly.

  For more than a year, Rostnikov and his closest associates had been on the staff of Colonel Snitkonoy, the Gray Wolfhound. The responsibilities of the colonel’s staff were largely ceremonial, but boundaries between the branches were so thinly drawn that ceremony frequently became substance if an individual investigator so desired.

  After watching the bathers and reading for a half hour or so—he was almost through a John Lutz novel about a woman in New York who takes in a murderous roommate—Rostnikov would rise, get the circulation going again in his leg, and then read some more. He had discovered a pattern among the bathers at the crowded, rocky beach. Early morning belonged to the serious bathers, who sought the invigorating confrontation of the cold Black Sea water. Theirs was a ritual to be taken seriously, and they certainly did not look as if they enjoyed themselves.

  Then came the short-time vacationers and families, who felt obligated to bring their blankets down and join the crowds on the long, narrow shale beaches. Few of them stayed in the water long. They wanted only to say that they had entered and enjoyed the sea. Many of them were fat. Rostnikov himself, known to colleagues as “the Washtub,” was solid and compact and heavy, the legacy of his parents and the leg that allowed him little movement. But his devotion to lifting weights had kept him from looking like the nearby vacationers, who seemed not in the least embarrassed to show their bellies over brief swimsuits.

  In the very late afternoon and early evening, when the sun was no longer high and after Rostnikov was gone, the beach would belong to younger bodies, and occasionally there would be real laughter. Rostnikov had planned to spend more time with his wife on the beach in the early evening, but Sarah, who was still recovering from rather delicate brain surgery, did not yet have the energy for a late-day excursion after her necessary afternoon visits to the Oreanda sanitarium.

  Just before noon each day, Rostnikov would take the slow walk back for a modest lunch with Sarah at the Lermontov Hotel, after which they would take the short bus ride to the sanitarium, where Sarah would receive her treatments while Rostnikov used the weights in the small physical therapy room. Then back to the hotel, where the attentive Anton, one of the hotel waiters who had taken them under his wing, would stop by to ask if they had a good day or needed anything.

  Following a brief or lengthy rest, depending on which Sarah needed, they would eat in the dining room at their usual table, and Rostnikov would practice his English on the American tourists, most of whom grumbled about the poor accommodations, the poor service, and the pollution of the sea and who only reluctantly admitted to an appreciation of the area’s beauty. And then, about an hour or two before sunset, as Sarah and Rostnikov sat on their wooden folding chairs, looking out at the sea from the ridge next to the Lermontov Hotel, Georgi Vasilievich would show up, gaunt, slow, sadly smiling.

  Rostnikov and Sarah had encountered Vasilievich at the sanitarium on their first day in Yalta. Rostnikov and Vasilievich had met each other many times over the years when Rostnikov was an inspector with the Procurator General’s Office and Vasilievich a senior investigator in the intelligence directorate. Vasilievich had, in his younger days, served undercover in USSR embassies in Paris, Bangkok, and Istanbul. By 1972, he had returned for permanent duty inside the Soviet Union on assignments related to possible foreign agents operating in Moscow. Since Rostnikov’s demotion to MVD ceremonial staff, he had not run into Vasilievich, and at first he had not recognized the obviously ill man in the corridor, but Vasilievich had recognized him.

  “Porfiry Petrovich,” he had said, shaking his head and holding out his hand American style. They had never been intimate, had never been close enough for a friendly hug, though Porfiry Petrovich had felt the urge when he finally recognized the man who had in the few years since he had last seen him moved uncomfortably into old age. “What’s wrong? Why are you here? The old leg wound?”

  “No,” Porfiry Petrovich had said, not wanting to explain, to open a dialogue with Vasilievich, who was a notorious busybody. He was also, Rostnikov knew, one of the most tenacious and valued investigators in the GRU.

  “It’s me,” Sarah had said. “I had an operation. Brain growth.”

  A look of pain had crossed Vasilievich’s face; whether from Sarah’s news or his own malady was not clear.

  “I’m fine now,” Sarah had said. That was not quite true, Rostnikov had thought. Her red hair had grown back, but she had lost weight, weight she had trouble regaining, and her cheeks were not as pink as before, though he hoped the Yalta sun would help.

  “My wife died a few years ago,” Vasilievich had said, looking beyond them as if he could see her ghost.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah had said.

  Vasilievich had shrugged.

  “I’m here because I was ordered to come,” he had said, with an enormous resigned sigh. “Order directly from General Pluskat. Heart checkup. Emphysema. Fifty years of smoking, but I feel no worse than I have for a decade, and, Porfiry Petrovich, I tell you I am bored here. I need my work, not memories and regrets.”

  Porfiry Petrovich had politely invited Georgi Vasilievich to visit them at the hotel. Neither Sarah nor he had expected Vasilievich to come, and Rostnikov had secretly hoped he would not accept the invitation, for Vasilievich was walking gloom and horror stories.

  But since that first encounter in the corridor of the sanitarium, Vasilievich had made the slow and tortured journey each night to the Lermontov Hotel to watch the setting sun, drink tea, and talk. And, much to his surprise, Rostnikov had found himself anticipating these visits and even enjoying Georgi Vasilievich’s company.

  The talk had been of the past, not the personal past but the professional past, the murders, thefts, their encounters, particularly the Fox-Wolfort investigation in 1971 in which a visiting East German major, who may have been a West German agent, had been found dead in a broom closet of the memorial chapel of the Grenadiers, directly behind KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square. The German had been skewered with a Byzantine cross ripped from the wall. Vasilievich and Rostnikov had cooperated in finding the prostitute who had done it when the German had attempted to rape her in the broom closet.

  Rostnikov had not sought this vacation. In fact, he had fought against it. Too much was going on in Moscow. Citizens had just voted in the first open national election since the Bolsheviks had been soundly beaten in 1917. The Party Congress was coming up. People were going mad on the right and left. Young people were ignoring the law. Jews, even one of Sarah’s cousins, Rafael the carpenter, were being singled out, beaten, blamed for the economic change. The lines in stores were longer than they had been since after the war, and the assumed loss of cultural identity was erupting among even the lesser-numbered minorities. There was not less crime but more since the reforms, far more and far more violent. There was no foundation. The law and those who enforced it were no longer a strong kiln but a leaking sieve punctured by the three-pronged pitchfork of perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness), and demokratizatsiya (democratization). Growing pains, Sarah had suggested, and he had agreed, but he thought it b
est to be present and in Moscow during the growth.

  “But,” the Gray Wolfhound, Colonel Snitkonoy, had said, standing before Rostnikov in his office in Petrovka, the central police building, “your presence will not change all this. It will be waiting for you when you return.”

  The Wolfhound had spoken with his usual great confidence. He was a man buoyed by recent victory. Chance, Rostnikov, and his own instinct for survival had strengthened his political position over the past several months. Colonel Snitkonoy was a tall, slender man with a magnificent mane of silver hair. His brown uniform was always perfectly pressed. His three ribbons of honor, neatly aligned on his chest, were just right in color and number. On formal occasions and for appropriate foreign visitors, whom he frequently escorted, the colonel could trot out an array of medals with the brightness of a small star and the weight of an immodest planet. He had been, at the moment he ordered Rostnikov on vacation, impressive as he strode, hands clasped behind his back.

  When he had first been transferred to the Wolfhound’s command, Rostnikov had taken the man for a fool, and perhaps the colonel was a fool of sorts, but he was a fool with a sense of survival, a fool who rewarded loyalty and appreciated it, a fool who was no fool at all.

  Rostnikov had begun to speak in protest that morning less than two weeks before, but the colonel had raised his right hand to stop him.

  “Your wife could benefit from the sanitaria, the sea water,” he said. “How many sanitaria are there in Yalta?”

  The only other person in the room was the Wolfhound’s assistant, Pankov, who correctly assumed the question was for him.

  “Forty or—” Pankov began, and was interrupted by the Wolfhound.

  “Yalta is the Venice of the Soviet Union,” the Wolfhound had whispered, as if it were a secret to be shared only by the three men in the room. Rostnikov did not respond. Pankov nodded in agreement.

  Pankov, a near dwarf of a man who was widely believed to hold his job because he made such a perfect contrast to the colonel, was a perspirer, a rumpled bumbler whose few remaining strands of rapidly graying hair refused to obey grease or brush.

  “Gorky lived in Yalta, Chekhov, too,” the Wolfhound had said.

  Rostnikov, of course, knew this but said nothing. Pankov had looked mildly surprised at this information.

  “You can visit his house, the house where Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard,” the Wolfhound went on. “Pankov will make the arrangements for everything. This is an order.”

  And so it was. And so Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov had found himself standing on the hill on which the Lermontov Hotel was built, folding chair under one arm, American paperback under the other, feeling more tired than he had after many a long night of interrogating a murderer or waiting in a car for the appearance of a car thief or burglar.

  From the moment of their arrival and from nowhere and everywhere the waiter Anton had appeared. Anton seemed to be from another time, another planet. Apparently he did not understand that Soviet waiters and hotel personnel did not cater to the needs of their customers. The Soviet way was to be wary, to wait to be asked and then to treat any request as an imposition. Anton, however, was not in the least bit surly. He had, he said, lived his entire life, except for his military duty, in Yalta. He, and his father before him, had been named for Anton Chekhov, and both had attended School Number 5, which had previously been the Yalta Gymnasium for Girls, the gymnasium, Anton said proudly, where the great Chekhov had been on the board of trustees.

  “My grandfather was a waiter in this hotel, as was my father. My grandfather had the honor of serving Chekhov himself on many occasions. Chekhov was very fond of fish. Would you like some help with your chair, Comrade Rostnikov?” he asked with a very small smile that showed reasonably even though not large teeth.

  Anton was a short man with wire-rim glasses and short brown hair. He was, at best, wiry; at worst, scrawny.

  “I’m fine, Anton,” said Rostnikov.

  “Back for lunch at one?” Anton asked as Rostnikov started down the slope for another morning at the beach while Sarah rested.

  “At one,” Rostnikov agreed.

  “Drinks?” asked Anton, whose voice was a bit farther away as Rostnikov came to the bottom of the slope. He was sure Anton’s hands were clasped together.

  “Ask Mrs. Rostnikov when she gets up,” Rostnikov called over his shoulder.

  The sky threatened rain, but Rostnikov trudged on. Families hurried past him toward the beach, their beach shoes clapping on the path. Rostnikov limped resolutely, folding chair under his arm, anxious to finish his book. Ten minutes later, he positioned himself in more or less his usual spot and was pleased to see a reasonably handsome woman in a red swimsuit lying on a blanket not more than twenty yards away. Thunder rumbled, but the clouds were not dark enough to clear the beach or make Rostnikov think of an early return. Sarah would be sleeping, resting. If it rained, it would rain, and he would get wet as he walked to one of the cafés near the beach, where he could eat an English biscuit and continue reading while having an overpriced cup of coffee or tea.

  He was comfortable in his chair, absorbed in his book, letting conversation and the general wave of water and voices wash around him when a single word caught his attention.

  “Vasilievich,” came a man’s voice.

  Rostnikov looked up. A man nearby, a bony old man with a little gray beard and a potbelly, had said the word to a lumpy woman sitting beside him on a blanket.

  Rostnikov rose, his leg already a bit stiff, tucked the book under his arm, and moved to the bony man.

  “Pardon me,” he said. “What did you say about Vasilievich? Who … ?”

  “Yah n’e poneema’yoo vahs,” the man said slowly. “I don’t understand. We are Hungarians. Gavaree’t’e pazha-ha’lsta, me’dlenn’eye. Please speak a little more slowly.”

  “You speak English?”

  “A little,” the bony man said.

  “Vasilievich. You said something about someone named Vasilievich,” Rostnikov said in English.

  “Correct,” the man said. The woman next to the man turned and shaded her eyes with her right hand to look up at Rostnikov. “Someone with the name Vasilievich in another room in the hall from my wife’s father at the sanitarium. He died during the night. Not her father. Vasilievich.”

  “Georgi Vasilievich?”

  “Yes,” said the bony man. “You know … knew him? They said it was heart. Man had a bad heart. Died in a chair outside the sanitarium. Must have been there a long time. Found by a Mrs. Yemelova.”

  “Yemelyanova,” the woman corrected him.

  “Yes, correct,” said the bony man. “She found him. You knew him?”

  “Yes,” said Rostnikov. “Thank you.”

  Rostnikov broke his routine. He returned to the hotel, informed Sarah of Vasilievich’s death, and with Sarah went down to the lobby to call the local MVD office. He identified himself to the woman who answered, and she confirmed that Georgi Vasilievich was dead and that his body lay in the Dysanskay Sanitarium.

  Anton appeared. “You’re back early,” he said. “I saw you come back. Is everything well? Do you want early lunch?”

  The Lermontov lobby was small, dark, and, at this hour, almost empty except for a trio huddled in conversation around a small table near the window, the clerk behind the desk, and an odd duo—a huge, formidable-looking bear of a man and a small, nervous man with a dancing eye—in a far corner. The man with the dancing eye seemed to be looking at Rostnikov.

  “Would you like early lunch?” Anton repeated.

  Rostnikov did not answer.

  “What is being served?” Sarah asked.

  “Sour cabbage in vinegar and oil, veal loaf, and sugared apples.”

  “No, thank you,” said Sarah.

  Anton looked as if he were about to try again, but Rostnikov’s vacant look stopped him.

  “We’ll go to the clinic early today,” Rostnikov said softly.

 
“Yes,” said Sarah, taking his arm. She looked at the mildly bewildered Anton and said, “Someone my husband knew for many years died.”

  Anton nodded.

  Sarah looked pale. It was not that she or Porfiry Petrovich had any great affection for Vasilievich. Rostnikov knew that Vasilievich was not an easy man to like, and Sarah had been careful to say that Vasilievich was not a friend, but “someone my husband knew.” Nonetheless, Vasilievich had been with them, alive the day before, and her recent operation reminded her that life was fragile and death always nearby.

  “I’ll get my things,” Sarah said.

  “A sandwich to take with you?” Anton offered. “Or a vobla, a dried fish, to nibble on the way?”

  “Are you like this with everyone?” asked Rostnikov.

  “Like what?” Anton asked, mopping up crumbs with his hand from a small white wooden table nearby.

  Rostnikov didn’t answer. His eyes held those of the waiter.

  “You are a policeman,” Anton said. “Policemen are to be respected. We get many of them here. And it is my honor, as it was my father’s before me, and my grandfather’s, to be assigned to those of rank.”

  “I am not Chekhov,” said Rostnikov.

  “And,” Anton said, standing, with no trace of irony, “I am not my grandfather.”

  Rostnikov nodded in agreement, and Anton departed, cradling in his cupped hand the table crumbs, which he bore like a delicate prize.

  The Oreanda sanitarium was not far, but it was too far from the Lermontov Hotel for Sarah and Rostnikov to walk. There was a bus that made the rounds of the hotels and brought outpatients to the sanitarium twice each day. Normally, they took the late-afternoon bus. Today they managed to catch the morning bus, which was only ninety minutes late instead of the usual two and a half hours. They rode in bumpy silence, very much aware of other passengers: the silent ones, who looked out the window, pretending they had hope for their ailments; the resolute ones, with hope, who read books or let their eyes make contact with others.