Rostnikov’s Vacation

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Thoughts came quickly. Was it possible that he had simply forgotten to close the door completely when he left? No. Zelach had gone out, perhaps to look for him, and accidentally left the door slightly ajar either when he went out or came back. Those were hopes rather than likelihoods. Sasha had no gun, no weapon, or he would have taken it out now as he pushed open the door.

  The lights were on.

  “Zelach,” Tkach said softly, leaving the door open behind him.

  The first thing he noticed was that the table across the room was empty, that the computer was missing. He stepped into the room cautiously, being certain no one was behind the door, and then he saw the trail of blood across the linoleum. His eyes followed the trail to Zelach’s body, on the floor, halfway into the little bedroom. Zelach was on his stomach, the back of his shirt dark with blood.

  And then there was no thought, only action, and Tkach’s awareness that he was making sounds, perhaps even speaking but not knowing what he said as he moved quickly to Zelach, knelt at his side, and turned him over. Zelach’s left eye was an almost closed purple balloon from which blood curled down his cheek and chin. The chin was split across as if someone had tried to carve a second mouth in the wrong place. The cut was still wet. A thick, almost circular cake of blood with one pod pointing down his forehead lay in Zelach’s hair like a recently dead amoeba. Sasha’s hands moved quickly from Zelach’s neck down, searching for bullet wounds front and back. He found none. That didn’t mean there were none, only that they were not in the most dangerous, most obvious places.

  Tkach leaned over, touched Zelach’s chest, detected beating, and then put the back of his right hand less than an inch below Zelach’s nose. He was sure, at least he hoped, that the fine hairs on his hand moved with the faintness of the fallen man’s breath.

  “Arkady,” Sasha whispered, “eeveenee’t’e, pazhah-a‘lsta. Please forgive me.”

  Tkach’s next instinct was to call for help, but he was sure no one would come running to help a shouting man in Moscow at three in the morning. He got up, went into the hall, and knocked on the door to the apartment directly across from the one in which he had briefly lived as Yon Mandelstem.

  “What?” a man called in a quivering, frightened voice.

  “Police. Do you have a phone?”

  “Yes, no,” came the man’s voice.

  “Open the door now,” said Tkach, knowing that his voice was cracking, “or I will have you charged with obstructing a police officer in the line of duty.”

  “You are the police?” the man beyond the door said, coming closer.

  “Yes,” Tkach shouted.

  “I am a veteran,” the man said, opening the door.

  Sasha pushed past the man and had only the impression that he was fragile. He saw the phone and moved to it. He had to hurry, had to get back to Zelach.

  With a calmness that amazed and appalled him, Sasha called Petrovka 38 and told the woman who answered to send an ambulance and help. Then he asked to leave, a message for Inspector Karpo, to tell him to get to the apartment. The operator paused and then came back on the line.

  “Ambulance is on the way. Team dispatched. Inspector Karpo is on vacation.”

  “Yes,” said Tkach, hanging up the phone and hurrying to the door past the fragile man. Rostnikov, too, was on vacation. He would, as he deserved, face this alone.

  Zelach emitted a sound, definitely a sound, as Tkach entered the room and moved quickly to kneel next to him.

  “Don’t move, Arkady. An ambulance is on the way.”

  “My gun,” Zelach said in near panic, his remaining good eye scanning the ceiling and Sasha’s face.

  Tkach reached around to Zelach’s holster. The gun wasn’t there.

  “I’ll find it,” said Tkach. “Don’t move.”

  Zelach was panicked now. He put his right hand behind him to try to sit up, and then his left arm made a spastic movement, and Zelach screamed silently. His mouth opened, tears bubbled in the corner of his good eye, and he sank back on the floor. Sasha caught his head before it struck the hard floor. The sudden movement started Zelach’s chin bleeding again.

  “Computer,” Zelach said, trying to turn his head toward the table. He couldn’t do it, but the movement started him coughing, and the coughing brought pain.

  “It’s gone,” said Tkach.

  Zelach’s eye moved to Tkach’s face.

  “Crying?”

  Tkach didn’t answer.

  “For me?”

  “Who did this?” said Tkach, but he knew; even before Zelach spoke, he knew.

  “Two men, big, one with a yellow beard, long hair. One with red hair. Water. Can I have water?”

  “Not now,” Sasha said. “You may have injuries inside.”

  “Dry, thirsty,” Zelach said, turning his head from side to side, in search of water.

  “Soon,” said Tkach. “When did they come?”

  “Water would be good,” he answered. “Tkach, oo men-yah’ boleet galavah. My head hurts.”

  “Water might be very bad.”

  “Before I could—”

  “We’ll talk later, Arkady,” Tkach said as he heard the first distant blare of the ambulance.

  “Later,” Zelach agreed. “Yes. You called an ambulance?”

  “Yes.”

  “I heard you call an ambulance. I’m going to the hospital. Tell my mother. Don’t frighten her, please. Tell her I’m fine even if I am not.”

  “I will. I want to tell you what happened last night, why I wasn’t here with you.”

  But the lie didn’t come. The ambulance was close now. He could get the lie out, but it would not come.

  “I was with a woman. I should have been here, but—”

  “You know where I live? You know my number?” Zelach said, closing his good eye.

  “I can get it,” said Tkach. “Last night …”

  “Do I look very bad, Sasha?” he said, so softly that Tkach could hardly hear him, and then a man came through the door, and another man, and a woman and an MVD officer whom Tkach recognized, Dolnetzin, the man in charge of the computer-theft squad.

  “You do not look good, Arkady,” Tkach said.

  “Keep my mother away. Lie to her,” Zelach said. “I think my eye hurts the most.”

  Dolnetzin looked down at Zelach, sighed very deeply, and whispered orders to the man and the woman with him as they went back out through the door.

  Sasha was not sure if Zelach had heard his confession or had absorbed it if he had. It had been stupid and self-serving to confess. Zelach was in no condition to ease Sasha’s guilt. There would be time later.

  “Tkach,” said Dolnetzin, a tall young man with a mustache that helped only a little in making him look older. He was no more than a year older than Sasha, but two grades higher and in charge. “What happened?”

  “Later,” said Tkach, holding Zelach’s hand and not looking at Dolnetzin as the ambulance driver and an assistant hurried in with a stretcher.

  For now Tkach would not be getting a shower. He would wear the clothing that smelled of Tamara, perhaps for hours, and, he decided, as he stood up, that was as it should be and what he deserved, for he knew that while he had slept in her bed, two men had turned Zelach into the pained creature before him.

  The ambulance driver and his assistant opened the stretcher and tried to place Zelach on it carefully, slowly, but even the tiniest movement caused a groan of agony.

  Sasha stood and turned to face Dolnetzin, who waited, hands folded in front of him. Dolnetzin wore a British tweed jacket over a white shirt and a plaid sweater.

  “I’m going to the hospital with Zelach,” Sasha announced.

  “What happened?” Dolnetzin asked again, much more firmly than before.

  “I failed him,” said Sasha, looking anxiously toward the door and seeing the handle of Zelach’s gun barely poking out from beneath a reproduction of a seascape that had apparently fallen to the floor in the struggle.

&nbs
p; “I will need more than that, Tkach,” Dolnetzin said.

  “There is no more,” said Sasha, moving to the seascape, picking up the weapon, and putting it into his pocket. “Now I must go.”

  He hurried through the door and ran after the stretcher.

  Dolnetzin had twice seen others lose control when they had felt responsible for the death of a fellow officer. There was a madness in their eyes that could either be fought or allowed to run its course. Dolnetzin decided to let it run its course, which was why at such an early age he was a full inspector in charge of a division, with the promise of a very bright future.

  Yakov Krivonos was gone. He had been replaced by Yakov Shechedrin. Yakov looked in the mirror at the young man before him. It was the kind of young man he hated. Short hair combed back, perfectly shaved, wearing a suit with a tie.

  “Wear these,” Jerold said, handing him a pair of glasses with heavy dark rims.

  “No,” said Yakov.

  “Wear them,” Jerold said again. “Believe me.”

  Yakov put on the glasses and looked at himself again in the mirror. No doubt. If he had encountered a person like this yesterday, he would have wanted to hurt him, may even have followed him, beaten him, and taken his money and the watch he was wearing, kicked him two or three times in the face.

  “I don’t like it,” Yakov said.

  “One day,” said Jerold. “Then you’ll be on a plane for Paris. Money and Paris. And then Las Vegas.”

  “I don’t like it,” Yakov repeated, looking at himself in the mirror, scowling at himself. He was sure Carla would laugh at him when she saw what he looked like. She would laugh at him in spite of what he would do. She would laugh at him, and he would throw her through the window again. And then he remembered. How could he forget that? Carla was dead. She wasn’t going to laugh at him.

  Jerold looked over Yakov’s shoulder and smiled. “You look fine. No one will notice you. Let’s go over it again.”

  “I know it,” said Yakov, turning from the mirror. “I don’t have to go over it.”

  “We go over it one time more, maybe two,” said Jerold gently, reasonably, “and then I give you two capsules. No, I’ll give you four.”

  Yakov make it clear that he was annoyed with a surly response of “All right.”

  And with that Jerold lifted a briefcase onto the table, opened it, and revealed a compact piece of finely polished, smooth maple wood, with a pistol grip on one end, and tubes of metal and a telescopic sight painted black, each piece firmly and neatly held in place by at least two black straps.

  Yakov stood in front of the open briefcase and looked at Jerold, who pulled out a stopwatch.

  “Twenty seconds last time,” said Jerold. “Let’s get it down to eighteen. Fifteen gets you two extra capsules. Now.”

  Yakov moved quickly. His fingers were too short for playing the guitar, which was what he planned to do—learn to play the guitar and start a rock band in Las Vegas. But Yakov did not have the discipline to play a musical instrument. Jerold helped him, coached him, told him he was talented, assured him that he would make it, that the idea of a Soviet rock bank in Las Vegas would create a sensation. He told Yakov of American girls, and Yakov listened and took the capsules.

  “I have an important question,” Yakov said in English, his fingers moving to the sections of the Walther WA 2000 in the briefcase. “I have been thinking much about it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does Madonna have real yellow hair?”

  “It is real,” said Jerold quite seriously.

  “You have seen?”

  “Yes.”

  “There,” said Yakov, holding the assembled weapon in his hand, the same weapon with which he had shot through the door at Emil Karpo.

  “Eighteen seconds,” Jerold said, putting the watch down and smiling.

  Yakov nodded his head knowingly. He knew he was getting better.

  In fact, he was not. Jerold had lied. It had taken Yakov twenty-two seconds. He had lied because he wanted an excuse for giving Yakov the extra capsules, wanted the excuse for bringing Yakov Krivonos closer to death, as close as he could possibly bring him after Yakov completed the task that had been set for him with the weapon he now lovingly cradled in his arms like a favored stuffed animal.

  Not long after Sasha Tkach opened the door to the apartment in Engels Four, two women in Yalta, sitting on a park bench, began laughing.

  The women had started early in the morning with a cup of tea just inside the lobby of the Lermontov Hotel. Had either Sarah Rostnikov or Andy McQuinton had a better grasp or any real grasp of each other’s language, they might have abandoned the outing. When they had left the hotel, the sky had been gray and getting darker. A wind threatened, and the temperature had dropped to fifty degrees Fahrenheit, but they were formidably dressed and suitably determined.

  They had smiled at each other in the lobby and exchanged shrugs, indicating the awkwardness of the situation into which they had been cast the night before. In spite of that awkwardness, it was clear that they wanted to share each other’s company. It was also clear that Sarah would take the lead. She knew a little English compared to Andy’s complete lack of Russian. Besides, it was her country.

  What surprised Sarah was that she was the more physically able of the two. Sarah, who was only weeks beyond major surgery, was by far the more vigorous, and in spite of Andy’s willingness to go into town on the bus, it was clear that she was not well.

  What they lacked in health, they made up in determination. The bus dropped them at the end of Roosevelt Avenue in Yalta’s Old City. The grayness of the early morning gave way to sun and the cold dawn and turned into cool morning. They turned left out of Roosevelt onto Lenin Street, Yalta’s main street, which runs along the sea. When they crossed the bridge over the Vodopadnaya River, Andy was slowing noticeably.

  When they reached Gagarin Park, just a bit beyond, Andy was breathing heavily. Sarah found a bench near the statue of Gorky, just inside the entrance to the park.

  The temperature had climbed to sixty, and robed bathers hurried past them through the park to the nearby beach.

  Andy was breathing a bit less heavily. She pointed at the statue and opened her eyes wide.

  “Maxim Gorky,” Sarah said. “You know?”

  “Gorky, writer. Yes,” said Andy.

  Andy’s face was pale and her well-kept hair a bit disheveled.

  “Gorky,” Sarah said, searching for words in English, “live …”

  She pointed toward Viokov Street, where Gorky had lived at the turn of the century, just doors away from where Anton Chekhov’s school stood. Sarah’s plan had been to walk down to the beach, but considering Andy’s face, she changed her mind.

  The women smiled at each other and watched the determined bathers of all ages head for the cold waters of the Black Sea. A young man with his hair cut quite short and a pretty young woman with long dark hair laughed their way past them.

  “He looks a little like my son James,” Andy said.

  “Gavaree’t’e, pazhaha’lsta, me’dlenn’eye,” Sarah answered, and then said in English, “Please speak more slow.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Andy. “Wait.”

  She opened the knit purse resting in her lap, found a leather sheaf of snapshots, and opened it. She handed the photos to Sarah and pointed to the picture of a young man and woman.

  “Jim,” she said. “My son.”

  “Sin,” said Sarah, reaching into her purse to pull out her wallet. She opened it to a photograph of Iosef, still in his army uniform.

  “Handsome,” said Andy.

  Sarah pointed at the photograph of Jim and said, “Jim, too.”

  They both laughed, a laughter that would not stop, a laughter they both enjoyed and did not want to let go of, a laughter well beyond the humor of the situation. Tears came and people passed. People smiled and wondered.

  The barrier of language had not been bridged. It had been abandoned. They could only sen
se the potential for warmth or wit in the other that existed beyond language. And their laughter was friendship, and their laughter was frustration.

  At the entrance to the park, a small man with one artificial eye listened to the women as he checked his watch and pretended to be waiting for someone. He had followed the women from the hotel and had done so with a dignity of which he was proud, a dignity that did not betray his belief that he had, as always, been given the least important task. Pato—he could not bring himself to think of him as partner—his colleague, had been given the task of following Rostnikov. So be it. There were times when he, Yuri, could demonstrate his determination, take advantage of opportunities to show his skills. It was he who had almost gotten Vasilievich to talk to them, to tell them, not that oaf of a Pato. He had not lost his temper, had not hit the old man, stepped on his fingers, had not killed him, not that he would have hesitated for an instant, not that he wasn’t prepared to kill, not that he hadn’t been properly—The women were laughing still.

  He should get closer. He sighed deeply, looked at his watch again, and tried to give the impression that he was now convinced that the person he pretended to wait for was not coming. With his one good eye watching the two women and his glass eye focused straight ahead, he moved down the path, past the statue of Chekhov and in front of the statue of Gorky, under which the two women sat. He did not hesitate. He moved past them as if he had an appointment. His plan was to find shelter behind trees or a bush, to stay a discreet distance behind. These women were ponderously slow.

  “I’ll never forget this moment,” the skinny American woman said, still laughing as he moved past the bench. He had the distinct impression that they were laughing at him, laughing at his size, his clothes, his misaligned eye, the look on his face.

  He could understand no English, had no idea what her words meant. It filled him with frustration, anger, as he headed for a turn in the path behind an outcrop of bushes and wondered if Pato was having a better time than he. He hoped he was not.

  At the precise moment the one-eyed man named Yuri passed the two women in Gagarin Park as they sat under the statue of Maxim Gorky, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov bit into a sandwich of rough bread, tomatoes, and a rather lumpy butter. He found it quite tasty.