The relative incompetence of the couple did not keep Elena from remaining alert. She had planned to see her aunt, Anna Timofeyeva. Normally, she would not have considered such a visit while undercover, but her aunt had shown small signs of distress over the past few weeks, including one moment at dinner when Anna gasped, started to reach for her chest, and brought herself under control, saying, “Gas.”
Anna Timofeyeva had been a Soviet procurator, a very successful, workaholic procurator whose chief investigator had been Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. A heart attack had ended Anna’s career and forced her into one-bedroom retirement, looking into a cement courtyard watching mothers and small children, waiting for visits, which she dreaded, from Lydia Tkach. Anna would never speak up if she was not feeling well. Elena knew her aunt would prefer to die in the chair at the window with her cat, Baku, in her lap than admit weakness.
But Elena was worried and had decided that she had to talk to her aunt, had to convince her to see a doctor, preferably Sarah Rostnikov’s cousin, Leon.
Had she told Porfiry Petrovich, he would have understood, probably would have volunteered to visit Anna himself, though he would certainly have little hope of success. But to tell Rostnikov would have put him in an awkward position. Elena was supposed to be undercover, contacts made in only one way and only if necessary. If Porfiry Petrovich sanctioned her visit home and did not tell the Yak, it was possible that something could go wrong and Rostnikov’s position as chief investigator, not to mention Elena’s safety, would be compromised.
No, Elena had decided to do it on her own and to be very careful. Sasha was back in the hotel waiting to be picked up that evening by Boris Osipov; taken to the small arena where he was to bring Tchaikovsky to do battle against one of the dogs that Illya and Boris’s boss had chosen. Sasha suspected that the dog Tchaikovsky would be fighting would be a particularly vicious one with an excellent survival record.
Elena walked down Kalinin Street to Vorovsky Street and paused in front of the small old Church of St. Simon the Stylite. The church, during the generations of Soviet Communism, had been the exhibition hall of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Nature. She didn’t know what it was used for now. She looked at her watch and caught a glimpse of the couple standing in the doorway of one of the twenty-four-story blocks of flats ahead. There were five blocks of flats on her right, built in the 1960s, each containing 280 apartments.
Elena looked impatiently at her watch and moved to the jewelry shop, past the couple who had entered the building before which they had stood. They did not appear again till she entered the pedestrian underpass in front of the Moscow Book House. They continued to remain far behind, but not so far that they would lose sight of her.
Elena had walked slowly, going up the stairs at the end of the tunnel, moving past a sudden rush of a dozen or so people coming down. As soon as she reached the broad sidewalk, she did her best to act as if she had forgotten something. Turning, she started back across the street, dodging cars, moving quickly. She managed to enter the bookshop and close the door in time to look back and see the couple emerge from the tunnel on the other side of the street. Elena stood back as the couple looked in all directions, had a quick discussion, and headed for the nearest shop.
As soon as they disappeared inside, Elena moved back to the street and went quickly to her left, away from them. The couple was now lost behind her, searching shops and cafés.
But Elena knew that one of two things had happened. Either the people who wanted her watched were incompetent, or she was meant to spot the couple, lose them, and feel free. That would mean someone far more able was somewhere nearby watching her. She decided on caution and was rewarded when she turned her head suddenly and found her eyes meeting those of a rotund man with pink cheeks, carrying an American shopping bag. The bag was black. So were the man’s eyes, even at a distance of a dozen paces.
The man was good. He did not look away. Instead, he walked directly up to Elena and said, “You dropped this.” He held up the black shopping bag. A white art-deco figure of a woman decorated the back.
“No,” she said politely.
“No?” he said, apparently puzzled. “I could have sworn …”
“Prastee’t’e, excuse me.”
“Two honest people,” the round man said with a smile. “I find a bag and try to return it, and you, who could take it and whatever it contains, reject the offer of that which is not yours. It seems to be from a very expensive shop, too.”
“Your good fortune,” Elena said with a smile of her own, and turned away.
The man was indeed remarkably good, and Elena knew she had a problem. She could lose the man, but that would bring suspicion upon her. Her evasion of the couple, crude though their methods had been, might well raise questions, but to lose this man would have been very dangerous. Elena abandoned the idea of visiting her aunt and headed slowly back to the hotel, pretending to look in the shop windows.
The rotund man moved slowly, smiling, having a good idea now that she had been frightened into heading back to the hotel. He had watched her elude the incompetent couple. The woman known as Lyuba had been very skillful in her evasion of the couple. It certainly looked like a professional effort. The rotund man, who was Peter Nimitsov’s uncle, continued down the street.
It took Iosef Rostnikov and Zelach only two hours to find Yulia Yalutshkin, the sometime mistress of Yevgeny Pleshkov, the missing member of parliament.
The soccer coach, Oleg Kisolev, had told them where they might find her at midnight. Midnight and might were not enough reason for Iosef to delay his search. Kisolev might possibly know where to reach his friend, or the Yalutshkin woman, and might warn them that the police were looking, and where they might be looking.
The computer center at Petrovka was desperately in need of updating, new programs and people to feed data into the system’s memory, not to mention one full-time technician to service the existing system until he or she went mad.
Iosef was well aware that there were stacks of arrest-and-questioning reports that had never been fed in. Such stacks reportedly were several feet high and filled an entire office, from which two computer programmers had been ejected to make room. It was rumored that the central computer staff, badly undermanned, had reached an unspoken agreement to simply throw out or shred huge piles of reports when no one was looking. These legendary stacks supposedly dated back at least four years.
Still, it was a place to begin. He got an order from the Yak and was given a computer next to a woman of about forty with a very sour look on her face. The woman was built like a small automobile and squirmed in her chair, muttering to herself and cursing the computer. Iosef was usually able to charm even the most lemonlike of faces with his smile of even, white teeth. This woman was not to be charmed. He gave up the effort and began his search.
Meanwhile, Zelach, who did not know how to use a computer, was in the file room on the far side of the building, searching through written reports for anything on Yulia Yalutshkin or Yevgeny Pleshkov. It would have seemed logical to an outsider for the file room and computer room to be next to or near each other, but, in fact, given Russian thinking, the distance kept the computer people from simply piling the files in that secret office or destroying them. The computer staff was young. The file-room staff was old and did their job—slowly, but they did their job.
The search lasted much of the afternoon, with Iosef finding very little. The Yalutshkin woman had been questioned for a variety of incidents, all dating back several years. There were probably many more incidents that he could not find. She had witnessed a murder, been present at the suicide of a young woman who jumped through a window at a party, reported the theft of a number of possessions taken from her apartment when she was out “with a friend” all night. It was all petty, and as with most high-class prostitutes, she was never arrested for streetwalking or in connection with any drug offenses. What Iosef did walk away from the computer with was an address wh
ere Yulia lived four years earlier and a very bad headache.
As he rose, the sour-faced muttering woman, whose fingers had been dancing on the keyboard in front of her while she looked down at a pile of documents through the lenses of her half-glasses, paused. “I have American aspirin,” she said, stopping her typing and glancing up at Iosef.
“How do you know I have a headache?”
“That screen,” she said. “There’s something wrong with it. Everyone who uses it gets a headache. Maybe it’s too bright. And I eat a handful of aspirin three times a day. I think I am addicted. I know I need them.”
“American aspirin would be very helpful,” he said.
The woman reached under her desk, lifted up a large black bag with a large black zipper, and fished out a white plastic bottle. She handed it to Iosef.
“Thank you,” he said, starting to open it.
“Keep it,” she said, “I have many. You’re Porfiry Petrovich’s son.”
“I am.”
“He is a good man in a world of filth.”
Iosef didn’t know what to say. So he nodded.
“I may be overstating the condition of the world in general and Moscow in particular,” she said, removing her glasses and placing them next to her computer. “Sitting here for eleven years, reading what I read … it may give me a distorted picture of the world, but I don’t think so.”
“Thank you for the aspirin,” Iosef said.
The woman nodded, put her half-glasses back on, and went back to racing her fingers over the keyboard.
Zelach had turned up several things, including another address where Yulia Yalutshkin had lived.
The two detectives, after Iosef had taken four aspirin, were on their way to the most recent address they had found. When they got to the building on Monet Street just off Ostrov, Iosef had the feeling that they would not find Yulia Yalutshkin here. In the past several years, assuming her record was reasonably accurate, she had almost certainly moved beyond this neighborhood.
The five-story apartment building was run down, its white concrete facade a dirt-covered and splotchy gray. Inside the doorway, the hall needed sweeping and the inner door, which supposedly required a key, was opened by Iosef with his police identification card. There really wasn’t an inner lobby, just a stairwell of concrete. The detectives moved upward, following the light from a window on the first landing.
The apartment was on the second floor. Iosef and Zelach walked down the narrow corridor lit only by a window on each end. It was early in the afternoon but there was noise coming out of many of the apartments, the noise of loud television, louder arguing voices, children laughing and crying. There were also smells, not exactly good ones, but definitely strong and cabbage-sweet. The walls were painted something that used to be yellow.
Iosef was accustomed to such places, though the soft little ball of depression still came to life inside his chest. Zelach, on the other hand, did not seem to notice.
“Here,” said Zelach, stopping in front of one of the doors on his right.
Iosef nodded at the shadow of the Slouch, and Zelach knocked firmly. There was a sound of music, soft and classical, beyond the door. Iosef guessed that it was Mendelssohn. There was no answer. Zelach knocked again as Iosef moved to his side so that both men were facing the door when it opened.
“Kto tahm, who is it?” came a woman’s voice.
“Police. Office of Special Investigation. I am Inspector Rostnikov. I am here with Inspector Zelach.”
“I cannot talk,” the woman said. “I’m going out and I am late.”
“This will be very brief,” said Iosef.
“I don’t …”
“Then,” said Iosef with a tone of regret, “this may not be so brief.”
“Identification. Under the door.”
Iosef and Zelach knew this routine. They removed their identification cards and slipped them under the door. In truth, the cards proved nothing. They could be purchased for a few thousand rubles, maybe much less with the new currency.
The door opened and a petite, beautiful woman with short blond hair stood before them, one hand holding out the cards to the two men, the other behind her back. She was obviously dressed for the evening in a black tight-fitting dress and costume-jewelry pearls and earrings. Her makeup was minimal and carefully applied. Iosef’s less-than-successful year as an actor and playwright had taught him about makeup and costumes. This lovely woman was ready for a show.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Police,” said Iosef. “We have a few questions about Yulia Yalutshkin. May we come in?”
“Vighdyeetyee, come in,” she said, stepping aside, her hand still behind her back.
They walked in, leaving the door open.
“I have no answers,” the woman said. “I don’t know her.”
“How long have you lived here?” asked Iosef pleasantly.
“Three years.”
“Yulia Yalutshkin gave this as her address two years ago.”
“We shared the apartment briefly. I haven’t seen her in …”
“You can put the gun down,” Iosef said.
The woman looked at the faces of the two detectives, shrugged, and took her hand from behind her back. Both detectives recognized the .22 North American Mini-Revolver. She put the weapon in a small black purse on a nearby coffee table and closed the door.
“This is a dangerous building,” she said.
“It is a dangerous world,” said Iosef.
“I have had to show it more than once,” she said, turning to them and folding her arms, defiant. “I have had to fire it twice. I think I shot one of the three men on the stairs whose unspoken but clear intentions were rape or theft, quite possibly both.”
The apartment was clean, neat, and inexpensively but, to Iosef, tastefully furnished with slightly out of date modern chrome and vinyl furniture. It was a typical Moscow apartment. Small everything. Small living room with an attached little kitchen area. The kitchen was barely big enough to hold a metal-legged table with four chairs around it. The music came from a CD player.
“I don’t have much time,” the woman said, looking at her watch, unfolding her arms, and lighting a cigarette. “So …” She didn’t offer the two men a seat.
“Yulia Yalutshkin,” said Iosef. “The reputation of an important man, perhaps the life of an important man is in danger, Miss? …”
“Katerina Bolkonov,” she said. “I really must go soon. There’s a tea dance for Russian women to meet American businessmen looking for wives. If I’m late, I may not be noticed again.”
“We’ll be brief,” said Iosef. Zelach stood at his side, hands folded in front of him. “Does someone else live with you here?”
“My son,” she said. “He’s twelve. He’s at school. If a rich American picks me, my son can move with me to the U.S. and become an American. We can escape this existence.”
“Yes,” said Iosef.
Zelach was silent and impassive. The idea of living anywhere but Moscow seemed vaguely frightening to him. To go to a place where people spoke another language, had strange thoughts and expectations, was almost a nightmare. Torture for Zelach would be telling him he and his mother had to move to someplace like Paris, London, or Boston.
The woman, whose pale skin was smooth, almost perfect, paced the small living room, still smoking, one hand clutching her arm just below the shoulder, kneading it nervously. The woman’s fingernails were red, long, and probably artificial. She wanted desperately to catch an American.
“I want no trouble,” she said. “I have a job in a magazine publishing office. We publish engineering magazines. I’m just a receptionist-typist, but …”
“We are not here to give trouble,” Iosef said, assuming from her having shared an apartment with Yulia Yalutshkin that she was also a part-time prostitute. Iosef dreaded going back to the computers and files to check on her background. He hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. “We are just here to ask some simple qu
estions.”
“No questions are simple,” she said suddenly, stopping and facing him. “If I get into trouble, the matchmaking service will drop me. We have to be clean. No drugs. I will have to stop smoking even. These Americans have fantasies. My hair isn’t blond, but that’s what they want, so if I am lucky enough to get an American he will never know.”
“Yulia,” Iosef said. “No one will ever know where the information came from.”
The woman gave a slight laugh, shook her head, took a deep drag of her cigarette, and watched the smoke float lazily from her mouth.
“I knew this would happen someday, something like this. Trouble from you if I don’t tell you. Trouble from them if I do.”
“No one will know who told us whatever you have to tell us,” Iosef repeated. “There are always many sources for information.”
“All right,” Katerina said with a sigh. “Yulia had a friend. Yulia’s friend was a foreigner, a German, I think. She never gave his name and I stayed away when he came. He always wore black leather and a false smile. He wanted people to think he was Mafia. Maybe he was. I didn’t like him. Once he tried to proposition me. I told Yulia. She didn’t seem to care. Then one day he came to the door. She was packed. Off they went.”
“Where?”
“Oh, God,” Katerina said. “An apartment on Kalinin. One of those with a doorman. I heard them talking. I heard them talking about how Yulia was going to be some kind of Marta Herring.”
“Mata Hari,” Iosef corrected.
“Yes. She would be a spy. She would seduce secrets from Russians. She would be rich. I heard these things through the door. I did not let them know what I heard. I like Yulia. She was protective, as if I were her sister, and she had lived a difficult life, even more difficult than my own. As beautiful as she was, it was not enough to protect her from the streets. I didn’t like the German. I was afraid for her, but she seemed so excited and she kissed my cheek, hugged me, gave me some money, and promised to stay in touch. I never heard from her again, and when they left, the German stepped back inside this room to put a finger to his lips to let me know that I should be quiet. I have been quiet. It’s getting late. I can’t be late.”
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