Red Chameleon

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  From the records he could check and a few phone calls, Rostnikov had discovered that Abraham Savitskaya had been born in the village of Yekteraslav in 1902. Savitskaya had immigrated to the United States in 1919, just as the Revolution had begun. He had returned to Russia in 1924. Somehow Savitskaya had been given a series of minor but secure positions on the fringe of the Party. For six years he had been a clerk with the Soviet War Veterans Committee. After that he had been listed for almost a dozen years as a caretaker for the Committee for Physical Culture and Sport of the USSR Council of Ministers. In 1935, at the age of thirty-three, Abraham had been retired with a pension as the result of disability. Rostnikov had not been able to discover the nature of the disability. It was a slightly peculiar background, but Rostnikov had encountered life stories far more peculiar.

  At the scarred desk in his small office, Rostnikov had stared at the photograph of the four men in a small village taken sixty-five years ago. There was so little of the dead old man in the photograph that he wondered how anyone could possibly identify one of the other men all these years later as Sofiya Savitskaya had done. They were probably all dead. The life expectancy of Russians was not officially published, but it was surely less than seventy-five years. Only the best-fed men in the government and the primitives in the Caucasus who stuffed themselves with goat milk and runny yogurt lived that long.

  After a few minutes, the four young men in the picture began to look familiar to Rostnikov. First, the one on the left, the thinnest, with the cap, reminded Rostnikov of one of the men who swept the halls in Petrovka on alternate nights. The man next to him looked suspiciously like the famous clown Popoff, though Popoff was now almost two decades younger than the man in the photograph. Rostnikov had taken the photograph and left it for Zelach to have copies made. It was possible Rostnikov would never get the photograph back, let alone the copies. Even had the word not gotten out that for some unspecified reason Rostnikov was no longer privileged, the system was painfully slow unless the case had a special red stamp indicating that it was being conducted in conjunction with a KGB investigation. No one talked to Rostnikov about his lowered status. They assumed, he was sure, that he had spoken up once too often or that his Jewish wife had finally proved too great a deficit.

  Getting up the stairs in his apartment building was long and difficult with an almost useless left leg, but Rostnikov looked at the daily climb as part of his training program. It was amazing how, if he wanted to do so, he could convert the difficulties of normal Moscow life into advantages. A lack of elevators in the city meant climbing stairs. In long lines at stores, Rostnikov could read his American novels. Without a car, Rostnikov had to take the subway and walk miles each week. Others argued that the hard life of a Muscovite made its inhabitants strong, tough, and hard, while Americans, English, and the French were soft from too much convenience. Why, then, Rostnikov thought, do we not live as long as they do? His thoughts had grown morbid, and his mind was wandering. He did not see the young man coming down the stairway who turned a corner on the third floor and almost collided with him.

  Rostnikov staggered back, almost falling, and the boy, large, wearing a black T-shirt and American jeans, hurried past him without apology. Rostnikov, who didn’t recognize the boy, reached back with his right hand and clasped his right hand over the boy’s shoulder.

  “What are you doing, you crazy old fool?” the boy said, trying to wriggle out of the firm grasp. The boy was about seventeen, the same age as the young men in the photograph he had spent more than an hour looking at that day, but this boy was bigger, better fed.

  “Who are you?” Rostnikov said, still holding the wall with one hand to keep from being pulled off balance.

  “Let me—” the boy began, but Rostnikov dug his hand into the shoulder and lifted the boy up, off the stairs. The face before Rostnikov changed from angry defiance to startled, pale fear.

  “Who are you?” Rostnikov repeated.

  “My shoulder,” the boy squealed.

  “You are whose?” Rostnikov repeated, not particularly happy with himself and realizing that he might well be taking out on this rude boy his frustration with a system and situation over which the boy had no control.

  “Pavel Nuretskov,” the boy said.

  Rostnikov put him down but still gripped the shoulder. “You are related to the Nuretskovs on the sixth floor?”

  “Their nephew,” the boy said, trying to remove Rostnikov’s hairy fingers from his shoulder with no success.

  “You are rude,” Rostnikov said. “We are living in rude times.”

  “Okay,” the boy said, giving up on removing the fingers.

  “Okay?”

  “We are living in rude times,” Pavel agreed.

  “If you see me again,” Rostnikov said softly, “you will say good evening or good morning, comrade.”

  Rostnikov released the shoulder, and the boy hurried down the stairs, rubbing his shoulder, and hissing back, “Only if you can catch me, lame foot.”

  “You catch more with patience than speed,” Rostnikov said softly, knowing even a whisper would carry down the stairway and knowing that the disembodied whisper would be more frightening than a bellow. Rostnikov never shouted. When suspects or superiors shouted, Rostnikov always dropped his voice slightly till they wore down or became quiet so they could hear him. Patience was his primary weapon.

  Sarah was home and had a meal on the wooden kitchen table: sour cabbage in vinegar and oil, smoked fish, and brown bread with tea.

  Something had gone out of Sarah since Rostnikov’s plan to leave Russia had failed. She had put on a few pounds, and her generally serious round and handsome face smiled even less than it had previously. She had lost her job in a music shop and was having trouble finding another, though she was now working a bit for one of her many cousins who sold pots and pans. Rostnikov’s salary had been badly strained for almost two months.

  “Josef?” he asked, hanging up his jacket and moving to the table. “Did he write?”

  “No,” she said. “And we can’t tell. We haven’t the money.”

  “I’ll call him tomorrow from Petrovka,” Rostnikov said, avoiding her eyes and tearing off a chunk of brown bread. “He’s all right.”

  “He’s a soldier,” she said with a shrug, sitting with her hands in her lap, watching her husband eat. “I might have a job next week. Katerina knows someone, a manager at the foreign secondhand bookstore on Kachalov Street.”

  Rostnikov paused, his hand on the way to his mouth with a glass of tepid tea. The prospect of his wife’s working for the foreign bookstore lightened his heart for an instant. What was it the English writer Shakespeare said? he thought. “Like lark at break of day arising from the sullen earth.” Shakespeare should have been a Russian.

  “That’s wonderful,” he said, “but—”

  The “but” was inevitable, part of the protective response of all Russians even when their prospects were better than those of Sarah Rostnikov. Hope was reasonable, but never expect the hope to be fruitful.

  After dinner, Rostnikov lifted his weights for an hour, wearing the torn white shirt with “1983 Moscow Senior Championship” printed on it. He knew Sarah considered his wearing the shirt a childish remnant of his moment of triumph a month earlier when he had won the senior park championship. At the same time, he was sure she did not begrudge him his childishness.

  The weight-lifting routine was a ritual involving the patient shifting of weights after each exercise, because Rostnikov did not have enough weights to leave them on the bars for each session. Thus, whatever weight and routine he ended a workout with became the first routine of his next workout.

  He was just finishing his two-handed curls when the knock came at the door. The windows of the apartment were wide open, and a slight breeze had rippled the curtains occasionally but not altered the heat. Sarah sat across the room, watching something on television, but when Rostnikov looked up at her, he had been sure that she was absorbing nothi
ng she saw on the screen.

  His eyes had been on her when the knock came, and she had given a little start of fear.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” he said as the knock came again. He put down the bar and crossed the room. There was a pause and another knock. The knocks were not loud and demanding, nor were they sly and obsequious. They were not the knocks of timid neighbors or aggressive KGB men.

  When he opened the door, Zelach’s hand was raised, unsure of whether to knock again. His broad and not bright face looked relieved to see Rostnikov before him, sweating, hair plastered down on his forehead.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Come in, Zelach,” he said, stepping back.

  “This is my wife, Sarah,” he said, nodding toward her.

  Zelach smiled painfully.

  “Tea?” she said.

  “I—”

  “You may have tea, Zelach, while you tell me why you are here,” Rostnikov said, returning to his workout.

  “I—”

  “And you may sit.”

  Zelach looked around for someplace to sit, pulled out a kitchen chair, and sat straight and awkward.

  “You have something to tell me, or is this simply your first social call?” Rostnikov asked, wiping his wet forehead with his sleeve as he finished his curls. Sarah handed Zelach a cup of tea.

  “The photograph,” he said. “I made the calls. There is an old woman in Yekteraslav who remembers Savitskaya. I called the district police. My cousin’s wife’s brother is a sergeant. He went to the village and called me back.”

  “Why didn’t you just call us?” Sarah said politely.

  “I was working late,” Zelach said. “Inspector Rostnikov said—”

  “I appreciate your conscientiousness, Zelach,” Rostnikov said, wiping his forehead with his sleeve and moving forward to pat the man’s shoulder. Zelach smiled and gulped down his tea. “Tomorrow you and I will take a journey to Yekteraslav on the electrichka. We’ll take sandwiches and talk to old ladies. Perhaps we’ll wander in the fields of wheat.”

  Zelach looked puzzled.

  “They grow soybeans in that area now. My cousin’s—”

  “Poetry eludes you, Zelach. Did you know that?” Rostnikov said.

  “I know,” Zelach said. “I was always better in numbers in school, though I was none too good in that.”

  “Go home now,” Rostnikov said, leading Zelach to the door. “You’ve done well.”

  Zelach smiled and looked around for someplace to put his empty teacup now that he was half a dozen feet from the table. Rostnikov took it with a nod and ushered the man out the door, giving Zelach just enough time to say a polite good-bye to Sarah.

  When the door was closed, he turned to his wife.

  “Is it important?” she said with a touch of curiosity he wanted to catch, nurture, and use.

  “An old man was murdered this morning,” he said. “An old Jewish man.”

  “And someone cares?” she said with what might have been sarcasm, a mode Rostnikov had seldom seen in his wife.

  “I care,” said Rostnikov softly, though in truth it was less that he cared about the gnarled old man than about the man’s children, especially the woman with the bad leg and the edge of madness to her eyes. And, in truth, it was a case. Somewhere there was a man or woman, men or women, who had committed a crime. The crime had been handed to Rostnikov, and his skill was being challenged by the criminal, possibly by the procurator, and certainly by himself.

  “I care,” he repeated, and moved toward the bedroom and the shower stall beyond, which he hoped would deliver warm water but from which he expected only a cool dip.

  After Vera Shepovik had fired her rifle from the roof of the Ukraine Hotel, she had not wept. She had sobbed in frustration when the gun had jammed after the first shot. Vera’s plan had been to kill as many people as possible in case she was caught. She had seen the porter come through the door, weaving slightly, and had backed into the shadows, away from the edge, behind a stone turret. She had wept again in frustration, because she wanted desperately to shoot the obviously drunken little man. For a moment she even considered leaping from behind the protective bricks, beating the man to death with her rifle, and throwing him down to the street. It would have been a minor inconvenience. Vera was a robust woman, a muscular woman who at the age of forty had been an athlete, skilled at both the javelin and hammer. In 1964, she had just missed the Olympic team. That had been the highlight of her life. The lows had been far more plentiful.

  First Stefan had been killed. They had told her it was an accident, but it had been no accident. It had been the first step in the conspiracy against her, a conspiracy by the state, the KGB, the police. She knew the reason, too. The steroids. They had urged her to take those steroids for competition and to prepare her for the Olympics. Now, even twenty years later, they were still warning her to keep her quiet, to keep her from creating an international scandal that might ruin the reputation of the Soviet athletic system. They had, of course, lied to her. One doctor had said she needed psychiatric help, but it was not a psychiatrist she needed; besides, the state didn’t believe in psychoanalysis.

  No, there was no one to trust. First it had been Stefan they had pushed in front of the metro at the Kurskaya station. Then her father had been murdered. They had said it was a heart attack, that he was seventy-eight years old, drank too much, smoked too much, but she knew the truth. One by one, as a warning to her, they had murdered people she knew. Sometimes they were very subtle. Nikolai Repin, whom she had gone to school with, was dead of some unknown cause. She was told this by another old acquaintance she happened to meet in front of the National Restaurant on Gorky Street. Vera had not seen Nikolai for at least ten years, but this woman, whose name she could not recall, had happened to meet her, had happened to mention his death. Vera was no fool. The meeting had not been by chance. It had been planned, another warning. She had been careful, so careful not to let them know, not to let her mother know of the conspiracy around her. Vera knew they were trying to poison the air in her small apartment, and so for years she had set up a tent in her room, a tent of blankets held up by chairs and the kitchen table. There was ample air under the blanket for the night, though there was always the slight smell of poison in the room each morning, and in the summer it had been almost unbearably hot under the blanket. Her mother had survived miraculously, probably because she had grown immune to the poison. Luck.

  Vera had checked her food carefully for years, feeding a bit to Gorki, her cat, before she ate it. She never ate out where they could slip something in.

  And then they had gotten through her defenses. Vera wasn’t sure how they had done it, probably through special rays in the wall. It didn’t matter. They had done it. For almost a year she had kept quiet about the pains in her stomach. Once in a hospital, she was sure they would simply cut her open, remove the remnants of the steroids, and let her die, stomach open, no one caring. They would stuff a rag in her mouth and wheel her into the corner to die, possibly shunt her body into a little closet. They didn’t care. She had no use, no value. Then they had finally gotten her into a hospital when she collapsed at the box factory where she worked. The doctor who examined her said Vera had stomach cancer. Vera did not weep. No one would see her weep. They all looked at her with curiosity, as if she were some specimen, some experiment that had gone wrong and now would not quietly die so she could be swept into the garbage.

  The doctor had recommended surgery, but Vera had declined. The doctor had not seemed to care. No one seemed to care about Vera. As far as they were concerned, she was already dead, taken care of, gone, swept into the garbage. But they were wrong. They had killed her, but they had made the mistake of not finishing the job.

  The Moisin rifle had been her father’s in the war. It was too large, too awkward, and she wasn’t sure the rifle would work. The bullets were so old. Her father had sometimes taken her hunting when she was a child, and she had been a natu
ral shooter. The idea was simple. She would pay them back, make them realize what they had done. Those people who walked past her, unsmiling, uncaring. She had become a pawn of the state and then had been cast out, and they had been reasonable, all of them who walked past and didn’t care what the old men who ran the country did to innocent people like Vera. If she could, she would put a bullet into every solid Soviet face in Moscow, but what she wanted most was to destroy the authorities who conspired against her—police, KGB, the military.

  She wept with fury each time she climbed a hotel roof, her rifle hidden in that idiotic trombone case. She had avoided elevators and made the painful trek upward through stairways, fire escapes. And then the rifle, the damned rifle, always had something wrong with it. She had now shot five people. That she knew, but she had no idea of whether she had killed them or not. The newspapers never carried stories on such things. But she knew she had hit them. She had watched them go down. She wanted them dead. They had expected her to be dead in a few months, but it was they who had died first. Each shot was justice.

  She could have leaped out that night and killed the porter, but she could not count on her stomach to allow her to make the run. In addition, had she thrown him to the street, someone below might have realized where the shots originated, and the police might come after her, catch her before she was finished.

  “What are you doing, Verochka?” her mother called across the room. The old woman was embroidering near the window to catch the sun before it was gone.

  Vera had told her mother nothing of the cancer, nothing of her frustration, her anger, her fear.

  “Thinking,” Vera said.

  “Thinking,” her mother repeated.

  The two were a contrast. The mother, a small round creature with scraggly white hair and thick glasses, the daughter, massive, with a severe pink face and brown hair tied back with hairpins. Vera was more like her father, at least her father when he had been younger.