Death Of A Russian Priest

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

“Iosef is a good actor,” said Sarah.

  “The one playing Vasha, the compassionate soldier, is a fine actor,” said Rostnikov. “You like the play?”

  “Of course,” said Sarah. “He’s afraid you won’t like it.”

  “I’ll tell him the truth,” Rostnikov said.

  “If necessary, lie,” said Sarah, and she kissed his cheek.

  “So far I like it,” he said as they moved up the aisle with the crowd.

  When they reached the line for the snack bar, someone behind them said, “Don’t you return telephone calls?”

  Both Rostnikov and Sarah knew who they would see before they turned, and since Lydia Tkach had been so loud; many others turned with them. Lydia was wearing a green dress with a green necklace that was almost lost in the ruffles around her neck. In her right hand she carried a rather wrinkled coat.

  “It is good to see you,” Rostnikov lied. “You have met my wife, Sarah.”

  “Of course,” shouted Lydia, taking Sarah’s hand. “Jewish lady with the brain tumor. It is good to see you again.”

  Rostnikov looked at his wife and was relieved to see a smile.

  “It was nice of you to come to our son’s play,” said Sarah. “Are you enjoying it?”

  “I don’t like plays about secrets,” she said. “Everyone whispers. Movies are better.”

  “Perhaps we can suggest to Iosef that he write a movie, a loud movie,” said Rostnikov. “May I buy you a coffee?”

  “I didn’t come to see the play,” she said. “I came to talk to you.”

  “I considered that possibility,” said Rostnikov. “Coffee?”

  “Pepsi-Cola,” Lydia said.

  They were at the bar now and Rostnikov ordered three Pepsi-Colas. Then they stepped through the crowd, heading back toward the auditorium.

  The intermission was ten minutes. Rostnikov knew there could not be more than five minutes left. He faced Lydia politely.

  “She is going to get my son killed,” said Lydia, loud enough to attract the attention of at least a dozen more people.

  “She?” asked Rostnikov.

  “The little girl you have him working with, the one who is trying to seduce him and get him killed. Sasha is a husband, a father. Soon he will have two children. I don’t believe anyone in Russia today should have two children, but they did not ask me. I told them, anyway, but it was too late. He is behaving … Inspector, I think my son is afraid.”

  The shrill insistence in her voice had given way to anguish as she finished. Sarah touched her shoulder, and Lydia bit her lower lip to hold back the tears.

  “He’s out now with that girl in some bar called Nicholas looking for some Turkish woman,” Lydia said in a considerably lower voice than before. She lifted her eyes to Rostnikov and then went on, “I’ve never seen him afraid like this before. He doesn’t even know he is afraid. It’s making him angry like his father.”

  It was time to go in for the second act and the crowd flowed toward the inner doors.

  “We will talk to you after the next act,” Sarah said, putting her arm around the older woman.

  “I’ve got to go back to the apartment,” said Lydia. “Maya and the baby need me. They don’t like to be alone. Besides, I don’t understand whispering plays. Your son is in the play, too? Which one?”

  “The one who wanted to torture. …The tall one with the short brown hair,” said Sarah.

  “Tell him to speak up,” she said, and turned to Rostnikov. “Will you do something for my son? You have one child. I have one child.”

  “I will do something,” Rostnikov said.

  “Does Porfiry Petrovich lie?” Lydia asked Sarah.

  “When he must. But he is not lying now.”

  Lydia nodded, looked at Rostnikov, not fully convinced, and put on her coat.

  “I will do something,” Rostnikov said, touching Lydia’s shoulder.

  Everyone was inside by now but the three of them.

  Lydia nodded once and then once again before she moved into the night.

  “What will you do?” asked Sarah.

  “Now? Now I am going to see an Afghan die and a very angry soldier who called for blood be blamed for it, though he is not responsible. The disillusioned, compassionate soldier will turn out to be the murderer. He will have murdered this man who is like his own father because he cannot bear to see him killed by someone who doesn’t respect him.”

  “Iosef let you read the script?” she asked as they moved back into the darkening theater.

  “No,” he said, “but I am a policeman and he is my son.”

  “You could be very wrong,” she said.

  “I am probably wrong,” he agreed. “But that is the play I would write.”

  “What will you do about Sasha Tkach?” whispered Sarah.

  “Quiet,” said someone behind them, so Porfiry Petrovich didn’t have to answer.

  TEN

  SASHA STOOD WATCHING THE girls with their hair wild and waving, covering their eyes, teeth white or appearing to be white in the dull, dim light of the Nikolai Café. The girls danced with gaunt men, with each other, or alone. Bodies touched and parted and touched again. There was no single style, though at least three of the twenty girls wore tight skirts that looked like shorts and black stockings with flower patterns.

  The light was supposed to be intimate. It was supposed to hide the eyes, fill the sockets with a deep yellow. The music blared like clanking metal, vibrating as if the charged strings of the instruments were forever trying to tune up and forever angry because they were unable to achieve the elusive sound they sought.

  And the girls, some with yellow artificial hair swept up like old French or American movie stars, dressed in tight silken blouses that showed the size and shape of their breasts and skirts that hugged tight, swayed and smiled as if they had wonderful secrets.

  “You see her?” asked Elena. She and Sasha sat at the end of the bar, trying not to drink their warm, dark beer.

  “No,” said Sasha.

  “I admire the zeal with which you examine each face and body,” she said, “on the chance that the Arab girl might be disguised as a Russian girl.”

  “She is not here,” said Sasha, looking away from the dance floor to the crowded tables where teenage boys in slick imitation leather made jokes they convinced themselves were funny and the girls laughed too loudly to mean it.

  There was little room to move, and it was almost impossible to hear anything except the laughter and the music that tingled across the bar and beneath Sasha’s feet.

  The woman they had spoken to that morning, Tatyana, was not there. Two young men, who were not so young when one looked too closely, served drinks from behind the bar. Girls in white blouses, who were not as old as they appeared when one looked too closely, served the tables.

  “Another beer?” asked one of the not-so-young men behind the bar as if he knew just how bored Sasha must be with the people of the Nikolai.

  Sasha looked at the man. His teeth were stained and crooked.

  “We haven’t finished these,” said Elena, holding up her glass.

  The bartender shrugged and moved off to a customer down the bar, a man of about forty with an artificial flower behind his right ear and an empty glass held high.

  There was a door in the wall behind the small dance floor. The door was covered with strings of dangling mustard-colored beads. The beads parted and Tatyana entered the café and looked around with distaste. She paused to light a cigarette, then maneuvered her way through the crowd, touching a breast here, a buttock there, and exchanging an intimate smile with each girl she touched.

  Tatyana’s yellow hair was swept up in back so that her neck showed like smooth weathered marble.

  Elena watched the woman make her way toward the bar. She was the same woman, yet changed. She wore much more makeup and her clothes were clinging but not immodest. She was twenty years older than anyone else on the floor, and Elena felt that the emotions the younger people feig
ned were so clearly felt by this woman that she had no need to act. Tatyana’s eyes came up through the crowd and found Sasha and Elena.

  “If she goes back through the beads, you follow her,” Sasha said. “I’ll go out the front and stop her at the rear entrance.”

  Elena said nothing. They had found the rear entrance, checked the low windows before they had entered the Nikolai. Then they had gone to the bar, where, since they were the only customers who did nothing to draw attention to themselves, many had glanced their way.

  Elena put down her glass and watched Tatyana make her way through the crowd. Tatyana did not turn or look away. She continued to inch her way along the swaying young backsides. When she reached the man with the flower behind his ear, he looked up from his drink at the mirror above the bar, shouted “Tatyana,” turned, and put his arm around her waist. Elena expected her to push the drunk away or sting him with a word. Instead she smiled, removed the cigarette from her overly red lips, and kissed the man, fully, deeply, with her mouth wide. People around them whooped and applauded. When she removed her open mouth from his, the drunk sank back, removed the flower from behind his ear, and stuck it in his mouth.

  “You look like policemen,” Tatyana said, moving to Elena’s side. “You are bad for business. Customers here see a policeman and they find other places to go.”

  “You called the Syrian,” said Elena, pulling back from the touch of Tatyana’s shoulder against hers.

  Tatyana shrugged and looked over Elena’s shoulder at Sasha, who looked back at her. “You would be very appealing if you smiled,” she said to him.

  “I will probably smile when I order everyone to leave in about five minutes,” he said. “You called the Syrian.”

  “I called the Syrian,” Tatyana agreed. “Who do I look like?” She was looking in the mirror over the bar.

  Elena followed her gaze and examined the image. Tatyana’s eyes were half-closed, the cigarette in the corner of her wide mouth. “Dietrich,” she said.

  Tatyana looked at Elena and Sasha in the mirror and saw no recognition. “Marlene Dietrich,” Tatyana said.

  “Do you know where the girl is?” asked Sasha.

  “Everyone is too young,” Tatyana said, shaking her head. “You want a drink? I’ll buy.”

  “We’ve got drinks,” said Elena.

  “You have water,” Tatyana whispered into Elena’s ear. The woman’s breath was warm and sweet. Elena forced herself not to move.

  “You called the Syrian,” Sasha said again. “Do you know where the girl is? If you do not answer, we will take you to a very small holding cell in District Eleven where you can sit all night on a bench in a very bright little room with nothing to do while you try to remember.”

  Tatyana smiled. “You are a year too late, pretty policeman,” she said. “You can’t do such things anymore. People will run and tell on you and you will have to say five Hail Yeltsins in penance.”

  “You are drunk,” said Elena.

  “I am stoned,” Tatyana corrected in English.

  “What?” Elena asked. The woman’s face was now inches from hers.

  “Your partner is very pretty,” she said. “And you are very, what are the words in French, plantureuse et douce.”

  Elena looked puzzled.

  “She says you are full-figured and sweet,” said Sasha.

  “Est-ce que vous parlez français?” said Tatyana, turning her attention to Sasha.

  “Oui, je le comprends,” he said above the music. “You can answer in French or Russian, but you will answer. I will ask once more and then I will climb on this bar, break that mirror, and order everyone to leave.”

  “I have a better idea,” said Tatyana, looking into Elena’s eyes. “Why don’t the three of us go in back, climb on top of the beer cases in the storeroom, and take off our clothes?”

  “The girl,” said Elena evenly.

  Tatyana looked past her in triumph and said to Sasha, “Did you hear that? The little tremor in her voice? She is tempted, our petite choute.”

  A man to Sasha’s right had his back turned. He was engaged in earnest conversation with a very young girl with long dark hair. Sasha pushed the man out of the way and climbed up on the bar.

  Heads turned toward him, smiles crossed faces. A few people clapped, believing a young drunk had decided to make a dancing fool of himself. One of the four young-old men in the electric band saw him, pointed with his guitar, and the music went wild. Sasha looked down at Tatyana, who was whispering something to Elena.

  “Quiet,” shouted Tkach, pushing the hair from his eyes.

  No one was quiet.

  “Get down,” said Tatyana. “You’ll get yourself hurt.”

  “I am the police,” Tkach shouted, reaching down for his half-full glass of warm beer.

  “It is Sting,” shouted a young male voice, and those nearby who heard roared with hollow laughter.

  Sasha flung the glass at the mirror. Shards of glass sprayed the bartenders and patrons, who covered their heads and eyes.

  “Get down, Tkach,” Elena said, touching his leg. Around her was an ocean of faces beginning to realize that this might not be a drunken joke. The music stopped suddenly, except for one guitarist with spiked hair whose eyes were closed. Another guitarist poked the spike-haired one in the shoulder and the final guitar let out a thin eeeel and died.

  Conversations died; all attention turned to the show at the bar.

  “We are the police,” Sasha shouted. “This bar is closed. Hard currency has been exchanged here.” He pulled out his wallet and held it up with his red identification card and picture showing.

  “Throw it here and give us a look,” came a tough voice from the yellow-gray shadows.

  “No, pull your trousers down and give us a look,” came a woman’s voice, which brought further howls.

  Tatyana reached for Sasha’s right leg and grabbed his trousers. “Get down,” she cried. “You … get down. I’ll talk to you.”

  “You’ll talk to me when everyone leaves,” shouted Tkach. “You had your chance.”

  “Leonid,” Tatyana screamed, pulling at Tkach, but there was so much noise from the crowd that no one could hear her.

  Elena grabbed Tatyana’s wrist and wrenched it from Sasha’s leg. Tatyana’s free hand went between Elena’s legs as one of the bartenders shoved Sasha from behind. He fell forward into the drunk with the flower in his mouth, and both went tumbling onto the floor. Something smelled foul and acrid as he tried to stand. A booted foot caught him in the chest. Sasha had the sense that people were trampling him, stampeding toward the door. He felt like a soccer ball rapidly losing air. Women screamed. Men cursed. Something hit him behind the ear.

  “Smash the bastard,” Tatyana’s voice cried.

  Somewhere in the mesh of voices a musical instrument hit something hard and echoed like a wind chime. Somewhere close by, a fist came down against Sasha’s ear and he sank back onto the floor.

  Another foot. Another fist. Sasha covered his face and tried to roll into a ball as he had been taught to do in situations like this. He had also been taught that situations like this should never be allowed to happen.

  He told himself to keep from tightening his back muscles as he groped for his knee and felt something solid crash against the knuckles of his right hand. He waited for the next blow, not knowing where it would land, wondering if Elena was alive. No blow came. It was a trick. If he opened his eyes and rolled over, he was sure the bartender with the bad teeth would smash him in the face with a beer bottle.

  Sasha forced himself to roll over and open his eyes, to search for Elena, to try to help her. Above him, horizontal and five feet off the ground, was a man with a surprised look on his face. The man was suspended as if he were part of a stage magician’s act, and then, suddenly, the levitation stopped and the man flipped over past Sasha’s huddled body and skidded into a table. Another man, this one larger than the one who had flown past, tripped over Tkach with a loss of air and t
ried to regain his balance, but he was moving too quickly and the bar caught his back with a snap.

  “Are you badly hurt, Sasha Tkach?” Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov said, reaching down to him.

  Tkach took his hand and was lifted easily to his feet. “Elena?” he asked, and then he saw her.

  Tatyana was bending over the bar as if she were trying to vomit on the other side. Elena was holding the woman’s head down. Elena’s hair was wild, a wispy curl coming down over her right eye. There was a sound near the beaded curtain at the rear of the stage. Sasha looked and discovered that only his right eye was open.

  In front of the curtain stood a large man in a leather jacket. Leonid Dovnik’s eyes met those of Rostnikov, who saw that the man was considering whether to advance or retreat. Even with one eye Sasha could see that in spite of what the Washtub had done, the man was not afraid. That frightened Sasha. Elena looked up in time to meet Dovnik’s eyes, which had turned to her. He looked at her for a moment, fixing her in his memory. Then, in no hurry at all, he turned and went back through the curtain.

  The two men Rostnikov had thrown across the room lay groaning, one with fingers trying to hold in the blood from a smashed nose, the other grasping his back and trying to stand erect.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Tkach on wobbly legs.

  “Your mother found me,” said Rostnikov. “She was afraid you might be doing something foolish and dangerous, which, as we both know, is absurd.”

  He reached over to Tkach and touched his swollen eye. Tkach winced and pulled back. Rostnikov shook his head and moved to Elena at the bar. “You are unhurt, Elena Timofeyeva?”

  “I am fine,” Elena answered. Her voice was almost calm, though Rostnikov could hear the last faint note of excitement and fear.

  “Let her up,” he said, and Elena released Tatyana, who pushed herself up and looked about the café. Her makeup was smudged.

  “You didn’t have to do this,” she said to Elena. “What have I done to you? I had some fun, told you you were attractive. Is that a reason you two should break up my café?”

  “We are sorry,” said Rostnikov, handing her a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket. He never used a handkerchief himself, but he had discovered it was very useful to a policeman when dealing with a weeping suspect or witness. “My young colleague is about to become a father for the second time.”