Rostnikov’s Vacation

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “We should visit Alupka,” Sarah said, touching her husband’s hand.

  “We should,” he agreed, turning to her, intending to smile, but the smile was lost in a thought.

  They said nothing more. When they reached the sanitarium, Rostnikov, as he always did, escorted her to the radiology section. He was about to take a seat next to her when she said, “Go. I’ll meet you back here. I have a book.”

  She held up the book of poetry she had been carrying for weeks. The book was large, old, and tattered, with a red leatherlike cover. It had been a favorite book of Sarah’s mother. Rostnikov knew that his wife had barely read it, that though she had been an insatiable reader before her surgery, it was almost impossible for her to read now, but the history, weight, and even the smell of the book gave her the comfort a child’s doll or stuffed bear would give.

  They were more than thirty years beyond the routine of his refusing to leave and her persuading him. He nodded, looked around at the other patients who were waiting, and left, trying to minimize his limp. For reasons that he did not wish to explore, Porfiry Petrovich did not want his limp to suggest that he was a patient.

  He found Dr. Vostov at the swimming pool. He was sitting on a white-enameled chair, under a broad red-and-white umbrella on a stand, supervising therapy for an ancient quartet in the shallow water. Vostov, a round man of average height, with very curly black hair peppered with gray, was wearing sunglasses, which he had to lift up constantly because he was taking notes. Between notes, he watched a burly woman therapist in the water take the quartet through their routine.

  “Dr. Vostov?” Rostnikov asked.

  Vostov, absorbed in his work, looked up, surprised. His skin, Rostnikov could now see, was pale.

  “I am Inspector Rostnikov, MVD.”

  Vostov seemed unsure about whether or not to rise. He started up and men changed his mind, lifting his sunglasses to take a look at the policeman.

  “I’m supervising,” Vostov said quite apologetically. “Would you like to sit while … ?”

  “It is a bit difficult for me to get up and down,” Rostnikov said. “Old injury. I would prefer for the moment to stand.”

  “You are a patient here?”

  “No, my wife. Georgi Vasilievich was a … a colleague.”

  “Ah,” said Vostov. “I see. Yes, I remember. He was some sort of government—” And then to the therapist in the water: “Work the legs, Ludmilla, the legs. Two more minutes.”

  His attention returned to Rostnikov, who stood patiently.

  “Seawater in the pool,” whispered Vostov. “Buoyant, curative. Seawater and very little sunshine. They come for the sun and sea air. They’re half right. The sun will kill them. Show me a pale man or woman and I’ll show you a potentially healthy person.”

  “Interesting theory,” said Rostnikov. “Vasilievich’s body. I would like to see it.”

  Vostov looked bewildered. He rose, tucking his notebook into a pocket of the white hospital jacket he wore open over a rumpled suit.

  “I don’t know if it is still here,” said Vostov. “They called and said they would like to pick it up this afternoon.”

  “They?” asked Rostnikov.

  “Family,” said Vostov. “At least I think so. I didn’t talk to them.”

  “Let’s look at the body,” said Rostnikov.

  “Two full minutes more, Ludmilla,” Vostov called back as he moved away from the pool.

  Ludmilla didn’t bother to nod or answer.

  Georgi Vasilievich’s was not the only body in the cool white room.

  “There are three others,” Vostov whispered, moving past two waist-high carts on which bodies lay covered with sheets. “Sometimes there are none. Sometimes … you know. Old people, sick people.”

  “Yes,” Rostnikov whispered as they approached the third cart.

  Each morgue had its own rules, Rostnikov knew. Hospital rooms of death were equally divided between those in which you were expected to whisper and those in which you were not.

  “Here,” said Vostov, stopping in front of the third cart and pulling back the sheet.

  Vasilievich was smiling. Rostnikov had seen many corpses, knew the rictus of death. This was not such a smile.

  “Heart,” said Vostov quietly. “Not fully unexpected.”

  Rostnikov pulled back the sheet, keeping Vasilievich’s lower half covered. Vasilievich was a very hairy man. Vostov stood silently, sunglasses now in his breast pocket, while the policeman examined the hands of the corpse, turning them over.

  “We will, of course, have him washed completely before his family—”

  “Don’t,” said Rostnikov, moving to the foot of the table to examine the corpse’s feet and legs.

  “Don’t … ?”

  “Leave the body as it is,” Rostnikov said softly. “Where are his clothes, the ones he was wearing?”

  That Dr. Vostov did not know. He had to summon an aide, a very tall blond man with an enormous nose, who summoned an assistant, a woman with very thick glasses, who acted as if they had interrupted her in the middle of sex, which was highly unlikely, or food, which was a far greater possibility.

  “He died peacefully,” Vostov said with a little laugh as they waited, a laugh that was intended to convey that the policeman, who had asked that the body not be touched, was inappropriately thinking like a policeman, that Dr. Vostov had seen far more of death and knew it well and professionally.

  “Where was he?” Rostnikov said, covering Georgi Vasilievich’s face with the sheet. “Where was he found?”

  “On a wooden deck chair facing the sea,” Vostov said, pointing upward. “He must have gotten up early. Many of our patients have difficulty sleeping.”

  “Did anyone see him on the deck before his body was found?” asked Rostnikov. He was moving around the room now, slowly.

  “No. You mean when he went out? No. He was found very early, and our—”

  Vostov was cut short by the appearance of the woman with thick glasses, who dropped a duffel-bag-sized yellow plastic bag on an empty cart and walked out without a word.

  “May I ask what you are looking for, Comrade Inspector?” Vostov asked, moving around to watch the policeman open the yellow bag and remove trousers, jacket, shirt, underwear, sox, and shoes, all of which he examined carefully as they spoke.

  “You may.”

  “Then I’m asking,” said Vostov, considering now the possibility that this barrel of a policeman was a bit dim-witted.

  Rostnikov dropped the clothes back in the yellow bag.

  “I want you to lock this bag someplace safe,” said Rostnikov. “You will be held personally responsible. Then I want an autopsy.”

  Dr. Vostov could not control his sigh of exasperation. Less than a year ago one would not have dared to show exasperation with the police, but this was a new era that had touched even the Crimea.

  “But, Inspector,” he said as Rostnikov handed him the bag and moved to the door through which they had entered. “People the here almost every day. If we took the time to perform pathology—”

  “He was murdered,” said Rostnikov. “Please take me to his room.”

  “Murdered? No, no, no. He had a heart attack. I …” Dr. Vostov moved in front of Rostnikov to face him. Rostnikov stopped and looked at the doctor patiently.

  “There is dirt on the palms of both of Georgi Vasilievich’s hands,” Rostnikov explained as people passed them in the corridor. “That same dirt is on the knees of his trousers. It is not on his face. It is not on his shirt or jacket. When I saw him last night, shook his hand, it was clean, his pants were clean. At some point between the time he left my hotel and the time he was found dead, Vasilievich knelt on the ground with his palms in the dirt. Why would he do that?”

  Dr. Vostov pondered the question and tried to come up with an answer, but he had none.

  “That doesn’t—” he began.

  “There is also dirt on the back of his right hand and the knuckle of that
hand—”

  “He had arthritis,” Dr. Vostov almost pleaded.

  “The knuckle is broken on his middle finger,” said Rostnikov.

  “Broken?”

  “Someone made Georgi Vasilievich kneel, put his hands out and his head down, and then they stepped on his hand. Take me to his room.”

  Dr. Vostov shook his head as if this were simply all wrong, as if, given a few moments, he could explain it all. He began walking to the stairway and then up.

  “Why would anyone do that?” Vostov asked.

  “To get him to tell them something,” said Rostnikov, doing his best to keep up with the doctor, who now seemed to be in quite a hurry.

  “Wait, wait. You mean some gang, kids, bums … Maybe they were just… maybe robbery, beating for fun,” Vostov said. “It happens. Even here it happens. Kids from the city on vacation with their parents. Bored. Picking on the old people, the sick people,” he went on, trying to keep the conversation quiet.

  “They didn’t take his wallet and money, and they brought him back to the sanitarium. Not kids, not bums. They broke only one knuckle,” Rostnikov said. “There isn’t another bruise on his body. They tried pain and decided it wouldn’t work. He wouldn’t tell them. Then they killed him.”

  They were on the second floor now, moving down the corridor past curious patients, nurses, and cleaning staff.

  “What did they want?” Vostov said. “No, no. With all respect, Inspector. I think … You know, sometimes professional people come for a vacation or treatment here, and miss their work. Architects see design, structural defects, in the hotels. Factory managers see inefficient management. That kind of thing. It’s understandable. May I suggest—and I don’t want to sound … I mean, the seawater and whirlpool baths would help your leg.”

  Vostov stopped in front of a door when they reached the end of the corridor. He shook his head and pushed the door open.

  There was not much inside the small room, a metal clothes locker whose door stood slightly open, a chest with three drawers, all slightly open, a bed. On the wall there was the reproduction of a Cézanne harbor.

  Rostnikov walked to the chest of drawers, opened them, and then closed each one. He moved to the closet, then the bed, and finally moved to the center of the room to simply stand with his hands folded in front of him and look around. He stood for more than a minute without speaking.

  “Inspector …” Vostov began, looking around at the room. This was now well beyond him. “I must get back to my patients.”

  “Someone searched this room and tried to make it look as if he or she did not,” said Rostnikov, so softly that Dr. Vostov moved closer to catch a few words.

  “What was that?” Vostov said.

  “Nothing,” answered Rostnikov, opening a drawer. The clothes were just slightly disheveled, the way a man living alone might throw them in a drawer, but Georgi Vasilievich was a humorless man who lived an ordered life, who would not tolerate a wrinkle in his bed covers or conversation.

  Vostov was quite convinced now that the block of a man before him was one of the many who visited Yalta because they had suffered what the Americans called a “nervous breakdown.” People being murdered, their rooms searched without a sign. It was nonsense.

  “What were they looking for?” asked Vostov, as if he were humoring a small child.

  “I don’t know,” said the policeman, “but I will find out. An autopsy now, Dr. Vostov, please.”

  “I don’t think …” Vostov began, but Rostnikov turned, and their eyes met. “There is no reason, and the family might not—”

  “Georgi Vasilievich had no family. His wife is dead. They had no children. Are you a married man, Doctor?” asked the inspector.

  “Yes, but I…”

  “Children?”

  “One,” said Vostov.

  “Girl or boy?”

  “Girl … woman,” said Vostov. “She’s thirty-five years old.”

  “Grandchildren?”

  “Two,” said Vostov.

  “Pictures?” asked the inspector with a smile.

  “Yes,” said Vostov, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a wallet.

  Vostov’s eyes did not leave those of the inspector as he opened his wallet and turned it to show to Rostnikov.

  “May I?” said Rostnikov, reaching for the wallet and adding, “My name is Porfiry Petrovich. And yours?”

  “Ivan,” said Vostov, letting Rostnikov take his wallet and examine the photograph.

  “Boy looks strong, an athlete. Girl is very delicate.”

  “Vladim is twelve, plays soccer. Irina is ten.”

  “Ballet?” Rostnikov guessed, looking at the child’s photo.

  “Yes,” said Vostov, accepting his wallet back.

  “When I looked in Vasilievich’s wallet, I saw two photographs: his GRU identification and a photo of him as a young man with his arm around the shoulder of a woman. My wife and I have one son, a grown son, too, not married,” said Rostnikov, sighing deeply and looking once more around the room before ushering Vostov toward the door.

  “Your son’s name?”

  “Iosef,” said Rostnikov. “Just released from the army. Wants to work in the theater. Do you like working in Yalta, Comrade Vostov?”

  They were walking back down the corridor now, in the same direction from which they had come.

  Vostov shrugged.

  “It’s not Moscow,” he said.

  Rostnikov nodded in understanding.

  “I sleep a great deal here even when I’m not tired,” said Rostnikov as they came to the stairway and stepped out of the way to allow a pair of well-dressed, very young men to move past them.

  “Some of it’s the air,” explained Vostov. “Some of it is letting down from the pressures.”

  “Georgi Vasilievich, I am sure, did many things of which he should not have been very proud. He leaves no one and nothing behind him, Ivan. He will be easy to forget. Too easy. Someone murdered him and did not try very hard to hide it. Someone murdered him and thought no one would care. And, Comrade Ivan Vostov, this offends me.”

  They reached the bottom of the stairs.

  “I’ll order the autopsy,” said Vostov, following his own deep sigh.

  The right corner of Rostnikov’s mouth moved into a slightly lopsided smile, and he reached out to give the doctor an encouraging squeeze of the right arm, being careful not to cause even the slightest pain.

  THREE

  THE GRINNING MAN WITH bad teeth standing in Yon Mandelstem’s shower was a plainclothes policeman named Arkady Zelach, known to the other inspectors on the fourth floor of Petrovka as Zelach the Slouch. Arkady Zelach was a hulking, out-of-shape man who lived with his mother in the same small apartment in which he had been born forty-one years earlier. He had become a policeman because his father had been a policeman. He had never considered doing anything else, nor had his parents. Since he had neither brains nor intuition, Zelach relied totally on the judgment of his superiors and his mother, which made him quite valuable to both. He was loyal to his mother, whom he understood perfectly, and to Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, whom he understood not at all.

  He grinned, not because he found the naked man in front of him, who was not really Yon Mandelstem, funny, but because it seemed the best face to wear when in doubt. People who didn’t know him tended to think he was amused by something they had said or done. But that was only true of people who didn’t know him.

  “Why are you hiding in the shower?” asked Sasha Tkach, motioning Zelach out. Zelach moved to let Sasha reach in and turn on the shower.

  “I didn’t want anyone to know I was here,” Zelach said while Sasha waited for the water to grow tepid enough to step under.

  Tkach didn’t bother to respond. He simply nodded and touched his face. He needed a shave.

  “Go watch the door,” Tkach said. “If someone breaks in, shoot them.”

  This Zelach understood.

  The real Yon Mandelstem was a comput
er programmer with the Ministry of Labor in Leningrad. The apartment in Building Two of the Friedrich Engels Quartet had been obtained in the name of Mandelstem, who had been transferred to the Ministry of Labor in Moscow. However, the real Yon Mandelstem never got to Moscow, nor would he ever get there. He was in Saratov, using yet another name while he assisted for one week in the computer training of young men and women who would be operating the offices of McDonald’s hamburger chain as it expanded throughout the Soviet Union. If anyone checked, they would find Sasha Tkach, with Mandelstem’s identification, using Mandelstem’s computer at Mandelstem’s desk, though no one expected anyone to check. Following his week in Saratov, the real Mandelstem would leave the Soviet Union and immigrate to Israel. The papers had been prepared quickly and quietly, and he had been informed and told to pack within three hours for his trip to Saratov and then out of the country. Mandelstem, who looked very little like Sasha Tkach, had been quite willing to go, had even kept an emergency suitcase packed.

  This, Sasha thought as the water went from cool to cold, was not the first time he had been away from Maya and the baby. In the past, were had always been the sense of temporary respite, primarily from Sasha’s mother, Lydia, who had lived with them until just a month ago. Lydia had been the guilt and burden of his life.

  Now Sasha and Maya and their daughter, Pulcharia, who was almost two, had their own apartment, and there was a new baby on the way. Times were uncertain, and there were those who still thought that a second child was foolish. Perhaps, he thought, they were right. In any case, he wanted to be home. He was thirty years old, no longer a boy, and he wanted to be home.

  He scrubbed himself angrily. Rostnikov and Karpo were both on vacation, but he, he had to not only remain on duty but to stay away from his wife. The image of the woman, Tamara, in the lobby suddenly came to him, and in spite of the cool water, he found himself growing erect, which made him even angrier. He turned the metal handle all the way, but the water grew no colder nor the spray more powerful.