Red Chameleon

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Damn you, policeman,” she said.

  She threw the rifle over his head, and it sailed down toward Kutuzov Avenue.

  “All over,” Karpo said, feeling his head go light, warning him that he might soon simply pass out.

  “No,” she said, stepping to her right to the edge of the hotel. She looked over the side in the direction she had thrown her rifle. Her hair blew back. Tears were in her eyes.

  “Perhaps, if I aim carefully, I can hit a policeman walking by. On the television they jump from airplanes and guide themselves.” She looked down, and Karpo aimed his pistol at a pink, faded rose on her dress.

  “No,” he commanded.

  She was standing on the narrow wall, not looking at him, looking downward, biting her lower lip.

  “Vera,” he said gently, and she looked at him. He had the impression that she was listening, was considering stepping back.

  She did indeed say, “Maybe,” as her foot slipped on the wet mounting and she went over the edge, her head striking the wall with a horrible crack before she tumbled out of Karpo’s sight.

  Karpo fell to his knees and managed to roll over to the trombone case, to pull it to him. He put his pistol back in its holster and laid his head on the case, his eyes to the gray sky. Emil Karpo passed out.

  Lydia Tkach’s hearing was poor. She resisted the urgings of her son and daughter-in-law to get an electric thing to stick in her ears. At the Ministry of Information Building where she worked filing papers, she was not a popular woman. The primary reason for her lack of popularity was that she called attention to herself by the volume of her conversation. She would, in addition, when able to trap a listener, be sure to get in the information that her son was a high-ranking government official. And so people avoided Lydia Tkach, which made her lonely and crotchety, which in turn made her turn her son and daughter-in-law into a captive audience at home.

  “Something’s wrong,” she shouted with satisfaction when Sasha tried to enter the small apartment without calling attention to himself.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he answered, looking around for Maya. “Mother, I’m just tired.”

  “You look tired,” Lydia shouted. “You look tired and dirty.”

  “Mother …” he said in a loud whisper.

  “What have you been doing?”

  “My job,” he said, taking off his jacket and looking at the closed door of the bedroom, slightly more than closet-sized, that his mother slept in and in which Maya sometimes sought refuge after her long day of work. “Is Maya home?”

  “Resting,” Lydia shouted, holding up a finger to her lips to indicate that they should both be quiet, which was exactly what they were not being. “She’s going to have a baby.”

  “I am well aware of that, mother,” he said, brushing his hair back from his forehead. He wanted to look in a mirror to see if guilt were on his face. Sasha was very good at lying with his face, with his eyes. He had learned to develop it in his work. It was a skill that went well with his youthful, open face, but Marina, the car thief, had seen through it and through him, and now he moved to the table near the window with no place to hide.

  “We’re having dinner,” his mother yelled, a knowing smile on her face. She was a frail woman with an iron will under which Sasha had frequently been broken. Lydia had never been physical, never hit him. She simply kept up her barrage of words and fierce determination until she achieved victory or drove her opponent from the room.

  “We usually do, mother,” he said, his stomach growling, wondering how he could face his pregnant wife.

  “For dinner we’re having kulebiaka stuffed with salmon and cabbage soup,” she said, walking over to him. She was wearing her at-home sack, a simple baglike creation with three holes, one for the head and two for her arms. Lydia claimed it was the fashion in France to wear such things. Neither Sasha nor Maya had argued with her.

  “And you want to know what else?”

  “What else?” he asked dutifully, wanting to put his head in his hands, wanting to take a shower, wanting to emigrate to Albania.

  “Cherry vodka, a whole bottle,” Lydia said, putting her hands on her hips and waiting. Obviously, there was a question to be asked by her son, but he was too distracted to know what it might be.

  Sasha loved his mother, truly loved her, but it was his dream to create some space between himself and her. With the baby coming, Maya was getting increasingly annoyed with the older woman. There was no room to get away after a hard day of work, and there would be less room when the baby came. It had been agreed, primarily by Lydia, that when the baby came, she would stop working and take care of it as soon as Maya was prepared to go back to work. Sasha and Maya had reluctantly agreed. There really was no choice.

  “Do you want to know what we are celebrating?” she finally said.

  Grateful for the help, Sasha said dutifully, “What are we celebrating?” He looked about for the bottle of cherry vodka so he could start the celebration.

  “Guess. If you don’t feel well enough to guess, I can understand.”

  “I’ll guess.” He sighed, sure that their conversation had roused the napping Maya. “I’ll guess.”

  “Then guess.”

  “I’m trying,” he said. The idea came to him quite madly that they were celebrating his moment of infidelity with Marina, that Maya had heard about it, had left, and Lydia had been so struck with joy at her daughter-in-law’s departure that she had prepared a feast. But that made no sense. She stood waiting over him, about to shout.

  “The baby,” he said.

  “We celebrate the baby when we get the baby,” she said impatiently. “Don’t be stupid. You’re a smart boy.”

  “Ah … you’re moving in with Aunt Valentina. Uncle Kolya died, and you’re moving—”

  “That would be something to celebrate? What’s wrong with you?” She reached over and slapped the back of his head. “What’s wrong with you? You look like you— Did you shoot somebody again? Like last time? You shot somebody.”

  He got up from the table and began to search in the small cupboard for the bottle of vodka. He found it, grabbed a glass, and turned back to the table, glancing out the window at the steamy after-rain street below.

  “I didn’t shoot anybody. Nobody shot me. I haven’t lost my job. I don’t know what we are celebrating. For the love of reason, mother, let me breathe.”

  “You are a hopeless case, Sashkala. Sometimes you are a hopeless case. I’ll tell you what we are going to celebrate.”

  He opened the bottle and poured himself a large glass of vodka.

  “Without eating? You are going to drink like your father without eating?” She reached atop the tabletop refrigerator behind him and pulled down a loaf of bread as he began to drink. He accepted the torn handful of bread she handed him and bit off a hunk to follow the half glass he had just downed.

  “We are celebrating, mother, remember? But what we are celebrating not only eludes me; it is beginning to fill me with indifference.”

  She pulled out the chair across from him, reached for the bottle, and poured herself a healthy glassful of vodka. Sasha noticed that she did not accompany it with bread, but he said nothing.

  “We are—” she began.

  “—going to have a new apartment.” Maya’s voice finished from behind him.

  Sasha turned to face her, expecting his eyes to betray his feelings, wanting to shout out his guilt, ask for forgiveness. He did not really hear what she had said. He took her in, her dark eyes, her smile, her simple brown dress, and the clear small circle of her growing belly. Her eyes met his and noticed something. Her smile dropped for a part of a heartbeat and then came back.

  “Sasha,” she said, moving to him, “are you all right? Do you have a fever? Did you—?”

  “He didn’t shoot anyone,” Lydia shouted, taking a drink of vodka.

  “I’m all right,” he said, trying to smile. “I—did you say something about an apartment?”

  �
�Our application was approved.” Maya beamed, taking his head in her hands. “I went down today.”

  “We went down today to the housing ministry,” Lydia amended.

  “In North Zmailova,” Maya said excitedly. “Much bigger than here. One bedroom and a small extra room, big enough for a bed. Lydia can have it. We’ll have our own room with the baby, and later he can go to sleep in the bedroom and we can move him into a bed in the living room. It’s right near the metro station.”

  “I get a television,” Lydia said.

  “Look happy, Sasha,” Maya said, examining his face.

  He smiled, but she could see tears.

  “He was always like that,” Lydia said, reaching for the bread and tearing off a piece. Crumbs fell on her dress. She swiped them off. “Emotional. Like his father after a drink or two. An emotional policeman. You have to control your emotions if you are going to be a success. I told your father that. Did he listen?”

  Sasha wasn’t listening to his mother.

  “Let’s eat,” Maya said softly.

  The dinner went well, and Sasha, after the bottle was finished, determined to devote himself to being a good husband, a good son, a good father, and a good policeman. A few minutes after making that solemn resolution to himself, he had some difficulty remembering just what it was he had resolved to do. He knew it involved his family and recalled, perhaps, that it had involved working to get his mother a television set.

  Sasha was feeling much better when the telephone rang. They were still talking at the table when the sound of the phone cut through his heart.

  “It’s the phone,” his mother said, looking suddenly pale. “It’s for you. Who calls here but the police people? I’ll get it.”

  He leaped up before she could reach the phone and managed to answer first. Maya looked at him with concern, and he smiled back at her.

  It was Zelach.

  “I can’t find the chief inspector,” Zelach said wearily.

  “Why are you looking for him?”

  “The list he wanted is ready, the list of American tourists in Moscow,” Zelach said. “It was long, but the chief inspector said I should make a shorter list of older men, men over seventy-five. That list’s not so long. And—”

  “And you have this list?” Sasha said, trying to avoid Maya’s penetrating, questioning eyes.

  “I just said I had the list,” Zelach said with irritation. “I want to go home now.”

  “Leave the list on my desk. I’ll be right there.”

  “But—” Zelach began as Sasha hung up the phone.

  “Emergency,” he said apologetically. “I have to get back to the office.”

  “Now?” asked Lydia, picking at the crumbs of salmon. “It can’t wait till morning?”

  It could certainly wait till morning, but Sasha wanted to get out, to control himself.

  “No, it’s an emergency, a murder.”

  He moved to Maya, giving her a quick kiss, and started to turn away, but she stood up and grabbed his sleeve.

  “What?” he began.

  “Whatever it is,” she whispered, “try not to worry. Are you sick?”

  “No,” he said, sighing.

  “Are you having trouble in your work?”

  “A bit,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “But it will pass.”

  “Touch the baby,” she said, taking his hand. He touched her stomach. “Everything will be fine.”

  And, he thought, waving to his mother, perhaps it would.

  To Rostnikov, the apartment building on Balaklava Prospekt looked that day like a child’s gray building block. He had purchased a set of gray plastic blocks for Josef when his son was about seven, and Josef had rearranged his blocks into imaginative structures that he named “the typewriter without keys,” “the radio with no sound,” “the refrigerator with no doors,” “the book with no pages,” and “the ice cream van without wheels.” This, thought Rostnikov, is the apartment without a mouth. It was a thought that depressed him as he slowly climbed the three flights of stairs toward the apartment of Sofiya and Lev Savitskaya. It depressed him because his own apartment on Krasikov Street was so much like it.

  Going there was a risk, a slight risk, but a risk nonetheless. He had been officially ordered off the case. Were he to be caught, he could, would, simply say that he was informing those involved, the survivors of the victim, that the investigation would continue under another investigator when time permitted. He would argue, explain, that he was tying up loose ends to keep concerned citizens from lodging protests. The argument would be an absurd one. No one would pay attention to a protest from a distraught Jew whose old father had been murdered, but what could they do to Rostnikov? Take his job? If they wanted to dismiss him from his work, they would simply do it. Rostnikov had no illusions. He would continue to work as long as he continued to have a function that no one else could fulfill.

  He ground his teeth as he arrived at the third floor and reached down to rub his complaining left leg. He had stopped home briefly to change into his other suit and to lay out his torn jacket neatly with a note to Sarah asking her please to repair it. The note had been carefully worded, brief but examined, to ensure that no word or phrase could give offense. Sarah’s disappointment at their failure to get out of the Soviet Union had been great. At first she had seemed to accept it as inevitable. She took it like a Russian, but as the days passed and she became aware that an occasional KGB man would inquire about her at her work or she thought about the consequences of their failure to obtain permission to emigrate, consequences more for their son Josef than for themselves, she had begun to brood. The brooding got worse when she was dismissed without reason from her job at the music shop. Brooding didn’t become her. She was normally cheerful, open, supportive. Brooding was Porfiry Petrovich’s specialty. A small apartment could not sustain two brooders without the possibility of explosion.

  Rostnikov had not called ahead that he was coming. There was no one to call. The Savitskayas had no telephone. Few Russians had telephones. The latest estimate was that in the entire Soviet Union there were no more than 20 million phones compared to more than 140 million in the United States. It was, therefore, a calculated risk to come to the Savitskaya apartment. The woman was a schoolteacher and the boy a student. They might well be home late in the afternoon. It had also struck Rostnikov that Sofiya Savitskaya was not the most social of citizens. As it was, he was proved right. He knocked once, solidly, on the apartment door and was greeted by a dreamy “Who is there?”

  “Inspector Rostnikov,” he said, and waited while she came to the door and opened it just enough to see him, a pointless protection, since he could simply push it open.

  “What?” she said, one brown eye showing, puzzled and frightened, through the crack.

  “I would like to come in and talk,” he said. “What I have to say need not be shared by the neighbors.”

  She hesitated and then opened the door for him to enter. She waited till he was all the way in before closing the door. The apartment was hot, moist and hot, in spite of the open window. There was no draft, no opening for the breeze, should one arise, to seek out and enter.

  She stood near the door, and he could see over her right shoulder the space from which the photo had been taken. There was something of the fragile bird about the woman that touched Rostnikov, though she was not thin. In fact, she seemed a bemused, disheveled, slightly younger version of his own Sarah, but that might simply be the cautious Jewishness of both women. There was no clear physical characteristic that marked Soviet Jews from other Russians. But there was a look nurtured by hundreds of years of wariness in an always-hostile culture.

  “I would like a drink of water,” he said gently.

  “A drink of water,” she repeated, as if no command could be acted upon unless programmed through her own voice. She moved, limped, to the small sink, turned on the faucet, and filled a glass for him. Instead of advancing to give it to him, she stood at the sink, holding it out. R
ostnikov nodded solemnly and walked over to take it.

  She was not pretty, he decided, looking at her as he drank, but there was that air of Cassandra, a distance, a sense that she was listening to voices on another plane. Rostnikov admitted that there was something intriguing about that, something that attracted him. Her air suggested madness, and madness suggested a vision he could not imagine, a fragile creative power that needed protection.

  He drank the water and handed the glass back to her before he spoke.

  “We have made some progress,” he said.

  She looked at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Progress in finding the killers of your father,” he explained.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, looking directly at him and making it quite clear that it didn’t matter to her. “All I want is the photograph and the candlestick. Lev and I have very little to remember.”

  “When we catch the killers, we will have the candlestick. The killers do not have the photograph, however. We took that, as you may recall. And we will return it shortly.

  “I have some names I want to say to you, names of the people who we think were in the photograph. I will say them, and you tell me if your father ever mentioned them, what he said. Can we do that?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “And can we sit?”

  She sat at one of the three wooden chairs at the small kitchen table, and he sat across from her. He considered asking for another glass of water just to keep his hands busy. Most Russians smoked. It was a habit Rostnikov’ had never considered.

  “Mikhail Posniky, Lev Ostrovsky, Shmuel Prensky,” he said. “I thought, perhaps, your brother Lev might be named for Ostrovsky, who was one of the men in the photograph.”

  “Never,” she said without emotion.

  “Your parents would never name—”

  “Lev was named for my grandfather. But Mikhail Posniky—I heard that name. My father knew him, went to America with him. I think he died.”

  “And Shmuel Prensky?”

  “The magic snake,” she answered, looking down at her hands. “The poison snake of gold. To say his name is like saying the name of the Lord. It is forbidden.”