Rostnikov’s Vacation

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “I knew,” said Tkach.

  The woman’s large nose and eyes were quite red from a constant, slow stream of weeping and nose blowing. She had entered wearing a babushka but had removed it when Tkach had led her to the bench. Her hair had stood up, gone in all directions, wild, ridiculous. She looked like a clown, but Tkach could neither bring himself to tell her nor ignore her.

  “Arkady, let me tell you, is not very smart,” she said. “I know that. I am not a fool. But he works hard. He does what he is told.”

  “I know,” said Tkach.

  “He does what he is told,” she repeated, watching a man in white push a cart down the corridor.

  “He is a good man,” said Tkach.

  “He speaks of you fondly,” she said, turning to Sasha with a pained smile.

  “I …” Sasha began, knowing that the confession was about to come out unbidden. He bit it back angrily. Confession, he reminded himself, would be a self-serving indulgence.

  Zelach’s mother was watching him, waiting for him, with her clown face, to fill out the sentence he had begun. He was rescued by a woman in white who emerged from the surgery, pulling a white surgical mask from her face, and moved toward them. Tkach rose and helped Zelach’s mother to her feet.

  “He will live,” the doctor said wearily with a smile. “I think you should go home now, get some rest, and come back in the morning, when he’ll be able to talk.”

  “Thank you,” said Zelach’s mother, taking the doctor’s hand.

  “How is he?” Tkach asked.

  “Three broken ribs, one in two places,” the doctor said, nodding at a pair of men in suits who hurried past. “Concussion, severely lacerated wound on the chin. The left eye was a problem. He will probably have no vision from it.”

  “No …” the mother began.

  “For how long?” asked Tkach.

  “For the rest of his life,” said the doctor.

  “Did he speak?” asked Tkach. “Say anything?”

  “One thing, yes,” said the doctor, massaging the bridge of her nose. “He said, ‘They had a key.’”

  Though he now had someplace to go, Sasha had insisted on taking Zelach’s mother to her apartment, where she, in turn, had insisted on feeding him a thin fish soup with bread. The idea of food was repellent, and the smell of the fish as he sat was even more threatening than the hospital odor. But he ate, slowly, silently, reassuringly, trying not to think of how tiny the apartment was, how filled it was with photographs of Zelach at all ages, of mementos of the man’s life down to a childish framed painting of Borotvitskaya Gate, complete with pyramid tower topped by what looked like an inverted ice cream cone.

  “Arkady painted that when he was fourteen,” his mother said proudly when Tkach had entered the room and glanced at the less than skillful but certainly recognizable Kremlin tower.

  He ate all of the soup, listened to every word, accepted her offer of her son’s razor with which to shave, and gave her reassurances and proper responses. It would be over soon, possibly by morning. Zelach would awaken, would tell the investigators what had happened. Tkach had not lied to the team that had come to the hospital, but neither had he told the truth. He had been too distraught, too anxious to go to Petrovka. He was expected to write a full report before the day ended.

  “I must go now,” he said, turning from the sink in the corner and handing the old woman the razor he had just rinsed.

  The old woman took it.

  “This razor was my husband’s, Arkady’s father’s,” she said, putting it on an open shelf lined with white paper near the sink. “It was given to him by his captain when the war ended.”

  “It’s very sturdy,” said Sasha.

  She looked at his freshly shaven face and said, “You are a boy.”

  He could say nothing, could not even smile. He touched her hand, said, “He will be fine,” and hurried out the door.

  It was late morning, warm, and the streets were full when Sasha reached the sidewalk. He was filled with a sense of urgency and wondered why he had not felt it before, why he had stumbled through the morning when what he should and must do was quite clear. Perhaps it was too late. He walked quickly, almost ran in the direction of the Engels complex. People stepped out of his way or cursed as he hurried for almost three blocks before he stopped, stood for an instant, and then went to the nearest Metro station.

  Twenty minutes later, he was in the clearing beyond the park. He could see the telephone from which he had called Maya the night before. He walked past the bushes where the two men had watched him, along the path where Tamara had walked with her laughing friends.

  Sasha was filled with rage as he crossed the concrete square and entered the building. A woman on the stairway carrying a cardboard box tied with rope put her back to the wall to let him pass and then hurried down the stairs and out the building without looking back.

  Sasha ran up the stairs, pushed open the stairwell door, and moved quickly to the door of the apartment. He knocked. There was no answer, but he heard someone stir inside.

  “Open up,” he shouted.

  “Who is it?” a man’s voice asked.

  “Police,” he said. “Open the door or I will kick it in.”

  Sasha knew in his heart that he would not be able to kick the door down, but if it was not opened very soon, he would vent his rage upon it.

  The door opened. A frightened wisp of a man who was only as high as Sasha’s chest stood before him, clasping a rumpled blue robe to his bony frame.

  “Where is she?”

  Sasha pushed the door open and sent the little man sprawling.

  “Who?” the man bleated like a sheep.

  Sasha said nothing. The room had been completely changed in a few hours. Sasha turned his fury on the little man, who squealed and put his hands up to protect himself.

  “Who?” he repeated.

  “Tamara,” said Sasha, advancing on him.

  “Tamara? There’s no Tamara here. Oh, the woman, the noisy one,” the man said. “She is below, the apartment below.”

  Sasha stopped, blood pounding in his head. He was on the wrong floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and ran into the hallway.

  The door slammed behind him before he had taken two steps. He moved quickly to the stairway and hurried down. Maybe it was too late in the morning. She would be gone, at work. She would have fled. He opened the door to the hallway and moved to the right door. Someone was inside. She was inside. He knocked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Who is it?”

  Sasha opened his mouth to speak, but for an instant he had forgotten the name by which she knew him.

  “Me,” he said, controlling his voice. “Yon Mandelstem, your little Jew.”

  “I’m getting ready for work,” she said. “I’m late. Come back tonight. Come back at eight.”

  He could hear her moving away from the door.

  “Just for a moment,” he said. “I have something for you. I’m late for work, too.”

  He heard her walk back to the door, and then it opened.

  She was wearing a black dress with a thick belt of many colors. Her hair was pulled back, and she was clearly in the process of getting ready. Her face was clear except for the lipstick on her mouth. It gave her a blank look, the look of an android, an unfinished face. She did not look at him but at the large hand mirror she held before her face.

  “I look terrible,” she said. “But I must go, love. What do you have?”

  Sasha was grinning, a wide, awful grin as he pushed past her and closed the door.

  “Maybe death,” he said, pulling Zelach’s gun from his pocket and aiming it at her face.

  She backed away from him, looking at him, the red lips of her mime face curled inward in sudden fear.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

  He moved toward her, and she backed away till she reached the bed on which they had lain a few hours earlier. She had no room now in w
hich to escape.

  “Where are they?”

  “They?”

  “The two men,” he said. “The two men who beat Zelach in my apartment. The two men you work with. The two men you gave my key to.”

  “Two men?” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m late for work. I have no time for crazy Jews.”

  She tried to move past him, tried to show him that in spite of her fear or because of it she was angry and would tolerate no more of his nonsense, even if he had a gun. He grabbed her arm and stopped her. The mirror was in her other hand. She held it like a frying pan and hit Sasha on the forehead. His grip did not loosen.

  “The two men,” he repeated, tapping the tip of the gun barrel on the edge of the mirror.

  She looked into his face and saw madness, and Tamara was afraid. She tightened her grip on the handle of the mirror, ready to hit him again, but he stopped her by saying very softly, “If you hit me again, I will kill you.”

  And she knew that he meant it. Instead of hitting him with the mirror, she turned it toward him so he could see his face. Blood meandered down from an ugly, raw cut above his right eye, and he saw the look of madness that now made Tamara open her mouth in fear.

  “The two men,” he said. “I’m a policeman.”

  “I …” she began.

  “Do not lie,” he said, putting his forehead to hers, whispering his words.

  “Now I know why that man was in your room. They told me about it. If you’re a policeman, you could get in trouble for what we did last night,” she said. “You could lose your job, go to jail. You can’t do anything or say anything. Get out of my way.”

  She tried to pull out of his grasp, but he held tightly and said, “If you do not tell me, I will shoot you, and then I will shoot myself.”

  He let her pull back enough so that she could see his face again. As she looked at him, he reached down, took the mirror from her hand, and held it up so she could look at her own frightened face, which was now covered with blood from his wound.

  “I can’t,” she said with a sob. “You don’t understand.”

  “You will tell me where they are,” he said evenly, forcing her to look into his eyes. “I will get them. You will have enough time to pack whatever you can carry and get out of Moscow. And you will never return to Moscow.”

  There was no dealing with madness.

  She nodded in agreement.

  “In the next building,” she said. “Engels One. Apartment 304.”

  Sasha let her go.

  “If you call them, I will come back for you,” he said, moving to the door.

  “I won’t call them,” she said, reaching up to wipe his blood from her face. “There’s no phone here.”

  Sasha left the apartment.

  He encountered no one on the way down the stairs, but outside in the concrete courtyard a quartet of old men parted for him as he strode toward Engels One. The old men looked at Sasha’s bloody face, saw the gun in his hand, and hurried on.

  Emil Karpo was definitely not good for business at the Billy Joel. It wasn’t that business was brisk in the afternoon. On the contrary, most of the tables were empty, and the music was provided by unpaid groups trying out in the hope of a paid nighttime engagement.

  Yuri Blin, whose real name was Yuri Tripanskoski, tried to pay no attention to the ghostly figure in black who sat unblinking at a small table near the far wall, watching him. Yuri, who was only twenty-eight but whose great bulk disguised his age, watched the Busted Revolution perform on the slightly raised platform that served as the Billy Joel stage.

  Yuri was just developing the proper posture of an overweight, triple-chinned rock impresario. He developed it from watching tapes of American and British gangster movies. The tapes were copies from Finnish television that he bought at 150 American dollars each. Two years ago, Yuri Tripanskoski had been a third-rate black marketeer, a fartsov-schchiki, dealing in anything he could get his hands on, from Hong Kong cigarette lighters with naked Oriental women painted on them to low-quality duplications of American rock recordings. He had made a poor living and worked much harder than a criminal should have to work. After all, what was the point in engaging in crime if you had to work just as hard and earn just as little as a peasant? But Yuri did what he did. He knew he could not stop.

  He had come to Moscow from the Byelorussian town of Gantsevichi, where his father worked on a collective farm. For the first twenty-four years of his life, the greatest excitement he had was a trip to Minsk for a regional party to honor the productivity of the collective on which his father worked. It was during that party, with its tables of food no better than what he got at home, that Yuri decided to change his name and move to Moscow. It took every ruble he had saved and the four hundred he stole from his parents to pay the necessary bribes to get the papers from the local Communist party headquarters.

  And in just four years Yuri Blin had moved from petty black marketeer to owner of one of the most popular clubs in Moscow. He was so successful that from time to time he even considered returning the money he had stolen from his parents.

  Yuri always wore dark suits and conservative imitation British school ties. He liked to think that he looked like a French businessman.

  Perhaps, the pale creature in the corner was after a bribe? The threat would come, and Yuri would have to decide. He was already paying bribes to two different groups, the ones in jeans, who called themselves the Mafia, and to the police, who ambled in from time to time in their gray uniforms and red-trimmed caps, playing with their nightsticks.

  Yuri could handle them. He had seen Sydney Greenstreet, Francis L. Sullivan, Dan Seymour, Thomas Gomez, Peter Lorre—especially Peter Lorre—handle all of them.

  Yuri sat at his table, the table of honor, flanked by Buster and Buddy and watched the Busted Revolution. Yuri had named Buster and Buddy. Their real names were of no concern. They were chosen less for their abilities than their looks. Yuri had cast them carefully. Both men were in their early thirties, and both looked dangerous. Buster was enormous, dark, with a broken nose, hair greased back. Buddy was wiry, albino, with a mean, nervous look. Buster and Buddy wore suits just like Yuri’s, but their ties were yellow, with little blue circles. Buster, Buddy, and Yuri were impressive, but the Busted Revolution was not.

  The lead singer of the Busted Revolution was a thin boy with long, stringy hair. He wore cutoff jeans and a leather vest and kept losing control of the song he performed, a song he seemed to be creating as he went along. It had started as a version of one of the songs from the Kino album Night but had deteriorated into this mess. The backup guitar and the drummer, who wore the same costume as the lead singer, tried to keep up with the lead, but they had neither the talent nor the enthusiasm for it.

  Yuri had let them go on too long. The four or five other customers in the place didn’t care much. They were treating the Busted Revolution as a joke, but Yuri didn’t want them to think he was taking the group seriously. He had only let them go on as long as they had because he did not wish to deal with the pale man in black, though he knew he would have to do so. This was not a regular customer. This was not trade off the street. This was a man with a purpose, and Yuri was in no hurry to discover that purpose, whether bribe or business.

  But there was no help for it. The lead singer, who screamed on about perestroika, his girlfriend, and Iraq, had strayed into a falsetto that was beyond human tolerance. Yuri removed the cigarette from his lips and leaned over to Buddy, who nodded and shouted over the music, “Stop!”

  The drummer and the backup guitar stopped almost instantly. The game was up, and they knew it. The lead, however, who had paid no attention to his band in any case, bit something that resembled a chord and tried to find his way out of a piercing condemnation of the sewage system.

  This time Buster stood and bellowed, “Stop!”

  And this could not be ignored. The lead singer gave up and looked over at Yuri Blin, who closed his eyes and shoo
k his head no, feeling his chins vibrate, hoping he looked like Francis L. Sullivan in Night and the City. Yuri opened his eyes and saw that the Busted Revolution were moving from the small stage as they argued with each other over which of them was responsible for this disaster. Yuri also saw the man in black rise from his table and move toward him.

  Buster looked down at the seated Blin for a signal that would tell him how to deal with the advancing man. Yuri put his cigarette back in the corner of his wide mouth, held up a balloon-fingered hand, and gestured in a small, calming motion for Buster to stand quietly and wait. Buddy needed no instruction. He knew his role well.

  Emil Karpo stopped in front of the table and looked down at Blin’s round, pink face. He paid no attention to either Buster or Buddy.

  “I am looking for Yakov Krivonos,” Karpo said, holding out his open leather folder, which revealed his MVD identification card.

  Yuri Blin barely glanced at the card. He was protected. He paid well to be protected.

  “That is not a familiar name,” said Blin. “Buster, Buddy, you know anyone named … What was that?”

  “Yakov Krivonos,” said Karpo softly.

  Buster and Buddy shook their heads no, but Karpo was not looking at them. His gaze was fixed on Yuri Blin, who looked around the room and sighed.

  “I’m sorry, Inspector,” said Blin, “but—”

  “His hair is orange, in spikes,” Karpo said patiently. “He had a girlfriend named Carla Wasboniak.”

  “I don’t know that name, either,” said Blin with a smile.

  “A pretty blond girl who came in here frequently. She was here last night, at that table. You sat here.”

  “Sorry,” said Blin. “I do not remember. I wish I could help.”

  Buster shrugged, and Buddy smiled and let out a small squeal of a sound that might have been a laugh.

  Karpo blinked once.

  “I do not have time for this,” he said. “I believe you are lying.”

  “I am offended,” said Blin, now playing to his men.

  “You will tell me what you know about Yakov Krivonos and a man, possibly an American, named Jerold.”

  “I know nothing,” said Blin.