Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express ir-14

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “The likelihood that she will find you,” Elena said, “is very small.”

  “But,” her aunt said, “what other plan do you have? More police on the platforms? We know you cannot get them. Your plan cannot hurt.”

  “Cannot hurt,” Elena exclaimed, rising from her chair. “It can get him killed.”

  “The woman is not big,” Iosef said. “I’ll be alert. And there are not really that many men in suits and ties, carrying briefcases, on the metro. They are above the ground in cabs and private cars.”

  Elena considered trying to reach Iosef’s father, but Rostnikov was on a train to Siberia. Iosef was his only son. He would surely dissuade him. She could go to the Yak, but she was certain he would see nothing wrong with the plan. He would not be the one making a target of himself on the metro platform, and the Yak had no great fondness for Iosef. Elena considered that it might even be possible to simply order Iosef not to do it. She was the senior inspector on the case. But to issue him an order in this situation might be a blow to their relationship.

  She looked up at Iosef cradling the cat in his arms. He was no fool and he had several advantages in the situation. He had been an actor. He would not overact his role as a businessman. He was an ex-soldier, a combat veteran of the Afghanistan disaster. He had a keenly developed sense of danger.

  Elena had little choice.

  “All right,” she said, stepping in front of him and reaching out to pet Baku. “But I will be there every moment.”

  Iosef smiled.

  Inna’s mother’s name had been Katyana. Inna’s mother had been perfect. Katyana, Inna thought as she sat at the table, her wrist wrapped tightly and resting under a bag of ice, had betrayed her daughter by dying.

  Inna adjusted the bag on top of her wrist. The wrist no longer hurt in the same way. It was now either numbly frozen or burning.

  Inna’s life was no life. She took her pills and existed to please her father. There was nothing else. She was trapped, too frightened and too dependent to walk away. Where would she go? She had no other relatives. What would she do? She had no skills.

  Viktor Dalipovna was her life. She had to take care of him. What if something should happen to him? Things happen, you know. He could have a heart attack, be killed in a robbery, get hit by a car or truck. One of the women he sometimes spent the night with might kill him in his sleep for the money in his wallet, his watch, his ring. He did not take good enough care of himself in many ways. His diet was bad. Inna fed him healthy meals. She never argued or disagreed with him. She snuck vitamins into his food, cut every speck of fat from his meat, even watered his vodka but ever so slightly.

  Inna looked around the room. She would have to get up soon, retape her wrist, work through the pain, get her father’s dinner ready. Had she taken the medicine? She couldn’t remember. Had she meant to? Probably not. She was not supposed to take too much. But she had been taking none of it.

  She put the question to her mother, whose ghost sat across from her on the other side of the table. The dead Katyana was the same age as when she had died, a mature, plump, pretty woman.

  “Did I take the medicine?” Inna asked.

  “Yes,” her mother said. “Don’t you feel it?”

  “No.”

  “Then perhaps you did not take it,” Katyana said. “We can count the pills. We can keep count so you will know. Prepare a sheet of paper, write the date. Make a check mark when you take the pill.”

  “Yes,” said Inna, but she knew she would not do it. It was curious. Each day, she woke up certain that she could keep track of everything, pills, shopping, cleaning. She needed no list. But then she discovered that she could not remember if she had taken a pill or eaten lunch. In the grocery, she could not remember if the night before she had onions or potatoes or whether the night before she had served his favorite salad, sahlad eez reedyeesah, sliced, radishes with salt and sour cream. That particular dish did not matter. He would not care if he had it every day.

  “It is just the idea of not being able to remember,” she explained to her dead mother.

  “I know,” Katyana answered. “How is your wrist?”

  “It … I don’t know.”

  “Take off the ice,” her mother advised. “You have had it on too long.”

  Inna removed the top bag of already melting ice and slowly lifted her hand. “It hurts,” she said.

  “You might have to go to the clinic,” her mother said.

  “They would know what I have been doing,” she answered.

  “How? A woman hurts her wrist. How would they know?”

  “I am not good at lying.”

  “Then you will suffer.”

  “Yes,” she said, biting her lower lip to hold off the pain as she moved her hand.

  “A little suffering is not a bad thing,” her mother said. “But when the suffering is more than a little you should do something.”

  “I will be fine,” Inna said.

  “I worry about you,” her mother said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you are crazy. You are crazy and you don’t take your medicine. You know that both of these things are true.”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “I cannot stop. I will grow even crazier if I stop. I love my father. He must know. I must drive it into his heart. He must know. He must reach over and smile sadly and say something, anything, like ‘You are my daughter.’”

  “He is not that kind of man,” Katyana said.

  “I know,” said Inna, resting her throbbing arm in her lap. “I must go shopping.”

  “Make a list,” her mother said.

  “I don’t need one,” Inna said.

  “This is not a good day for you to show your love,” Katyana said gently. “Do not go in search of your father on the trains.”

  “I search for both of us, for you,” Inna said.

  “I know, but not today.”

  “Tomorrow?” Inna asked, almost pleading.

  “Tomorrow, if you must,” her mother said with a smile.

  “I will be nothing if I do not go,” Inna tried to explain. “I will disappear. My body will be here but I will have no thoughts, no meaning. You understand?”

  “Perfectly,” her mother said.

  “I don’t, but I know it is so.”

  And then her mother was gone. It was always like this. She would be there and it would be quite natural. She would not be there and that would be natural too. Inna knew her mother was dead but she did not have to address this reality. In fact, she chose to address no reality at all other than keeping herself reasonably clean, taking care of her father, and keeping the knife very, very sharp.

  Chapter Three

  The world is long, there is no consolation

  For those who join at the end of the line

  Porfiry Petrovich sat at a table in the dining car with the three other men from his compartment, the Americans dressed casually and the slightly dapper, somewhat portly man with the neatly trimmed beard, wearing a suit and tie, who had identified himself as David Drovny-a dealer in men’s clothes on his way to Vladivostok to approve a shipment of material from Japan.

  Meanwhile, Sasha was making his rounds of the eighteen cars in search of the suitcase. Meals were the best time for such a search because people would be in the dining car. Even if they were not, he would make up an excuse, be at his charming boyish best, apologize, ask for help with something, and without giving himself away examine the luggage, perhaps even swaying slightly and reaching out to touch a particularly interesting suitcase, to balance himself, and feel for its contents.

  “Never made it this far during the war,” one of the Americans, the tall one named Allberry, said. “Liaison with Russian intelligence near Rostov.”

  “OSS?” asked the other American, Susman.

  The tall American nodded and said, “I helped get some information from our people to the Russians,” said Allberry. “We’d broken the Nazi codes. It help
ed a little. Always wanted to come back.”

  “And here we are, Bob,” said the smaller, bald American with a sigh. “I never made it past Rome. Landed in Casino. Thought about making this trip from the day the war ended. Then the Cold War. Ellen died last year. Figured, what the hell.”

  “What the hell,” Allberry agreed, patting the other Americans shoulder.

  Rostnikov listened to the men at his table talk and looked out the window past a forest of birch trees that came almost to the train tracks. Snowdrifts stretched up the trees, and nooks in the fleeting branches were tinged with the soft whiteness. From time to time he could see an isolated dacha or two, sometimes four or five in a group, retreats for the upper-middle class, their roofs decorated with tufts of snow.

  On the table before the four men was a plate of hard-boiled eggs, another of fried eggs with small slices of ham, an urn of black coffee, slices of black bread, and small cups of yoghurt.

  “The breakfast,” Drovny said in English, buttering a thick slice of bread, “is standard fare. Nothing you would not get in a second-class hotel in Irkutsk. But the lunch and dinner …”

  “Good, huh?” asked one of the Americans.

  Drovny smiled and said, “Rice with minced mutton.”

  Plov eez bahrahnyeeni, thought Rostnikov.

  “Boiled beef tongue, roast pork with plums, goulash, beef Stroganoff,” Drovny went on. “Not the equal of some of the restaurants I could take you to in Moscow, and nothing like Paris, but palatable.”

  “I’m a steak-and-potatoes man,” Allberry said. “Doing it so long, it’s in my blood. But I’m willing to try. I remember back in those months with a Russian intelligence general we had a dish with beef, veal, and chicken in gelatin served with a mustard sauce. Sounds terrible, right? But it was damned good.”

  “Kholodets,” Drovny said. “That is what it is called. Served with charlotka, a creamy vanilla and raspberry-puree dessert. Delicious.”

  The American laughed. “I’m afraid we weren’t near any of that.”

  “Yes,” said Drovny, reaching over to pat the man’s arm in congratulation for his willingness to experiment with the standard cuisine of the country he was visiting. “And you?”

  He was looking at Rostnikov.

  Rostnikov had already told the men that he was a plumbing contractor; but he was, like Drovny, a Russian. “I am willing to try any food,” he said.

  “A large man with a large appetite,” said Drovny with a big grin, as if he had made a joke.

  Rostnikov looked around the car. All the tables were full. He did not see the woman he had spoken to the night before, the one who had given him the name Svetlana Britchevna.

  “This egg,” said Drovny. “It reminds me of something.”

  “What’s that?” asked one of the Americans.

  “It reminds me of a funny story,” Drovny said. “Two flies go into an insect restaurant. The first fly orders shit with garlic. The second one orders shit but adds, ‘Hold the garlic. I don’t want my breath to smell bad.’”

  The two Americans laughed. Rostnikov smiled as the joker asked, “Which is more useful, Russian newspapers or Russian television? The newspaper,” he answered himself. “You can wrap fish in it.”

  Five cars down, Sasha Tkach was slowly making his way through the train. His plan was simple. He would check the empty compartments, the ones in which the occupants were dining, out in the corridors, or visiting with other passengers. He kept a list of the cars and compartments and checked them off. He would return periodically to see if unchecked compartments were empty.

  If a compartment were, at the moment, unoccupied, he would slide open the door when he was confident no one in the corridor was watching, then quickly look at the luggage and reach out to feel particular pieces. In five cars, he had found nothing promising.

  Some people passing had looked at him as he moved slowly or loitered. He gave them his best smile and a good morning. The smile still worked, though he did not feel it.

  Sasha had no great hope of finding that for which he searched, but he persisted. There would be a stop in twenty minutes. He would have to suspend his search and get out onto the platform. This was proving on the first day to be an exhausting assignment.

  Sasha continued, recalling his brief conversation with Porfiry Petrovich the night before.

  “The man’s name?” Rostnikov had asked. “The one your mother says she might marry?”

  “Matvei Labroadovnik,” Sasha had said. “He is working on the restoration of the Cathedral of the Resurrection in Istra.”

  “Matvei Labroadovnik,” Rostnikov repeated, searching his memory for the name.

  “She says he is famous,” Sasha had gone on.

  “And you believe? …”

  “That he knows my mother has money. That he is not a famous painter. Either that or he is ninety years old, half blind, and slightly mad.”

  “You don’t think a man could be interested in your mother?”

  “Do you?”

  “She has her good points, Sasha.”

  “Such as?”

  “She is generous.”

  “But she charges a great deal for her generosity. Attention, great respect, and the right to dictate how I live.”

  “She loves you and your children,” Rostnikov tried.

  “She smothers us with love, on her terms,” said Sasha. “She is a smothering … I do not know.”

  “Would you not be happy if she indeed had found someone?”

  “I would be relieved, overjoyed. I would throw a party. There would be dancing. But I don’t believe it.”

  Rostnikov had his doubts too but he went on, “We will check on this painter when we get back to Moscow.”

  “And if they decide to marry before we get back? He may want to marry her quickly before he has to meet me, deal with me.”

  “Are you concerned about losing your mother’s money?”

  “A little, perhaps,” Sasha admitted.

  “You are concerned about losing your mother,” Rostnikov tried.

  “As strange as it is, that may be the case,” said Sasha with a deep sigh. “I have grown accustomed to her nagging. Maya would be happy to see her gone. Maya does not care about the money. The children would probably be happy too.”

  “We are not talking about Lydia dying,” said Rostnikov. “Only about her getting married.”

  Sasha laughed. The few other people in the car had looked at him. “You know why I am laughing?” he asked.

  “I think so,” said Rostnikov.

  “I sound like I am jealous,” Sasha said, putting his hand to his chest. “That is what the woman has done to me. I will be thirty-six years old on my next birthday and I still feel like a child when I am with her.”

  Rostnikov said nothing. This was an important moment of realization for Sasha Tkach.

  “I think,” he said, no longer laughing, “I think I understand something. It sounds crazy. The problems I have had with women during my marriage.”

  Rostnikov was well aware of Sasha’s weakness. It had almost cost him his marriage and at least twice had jeopardized his career.

  “It is my mother I want to hurt,” he said. “It is my mother I want to show that I am interested in other women.”

  “It is a theory,” Rostnikov admitted.

  “It seems right,” said Sasha with excitement. “You should have been a psychiatrist.”

  “If simply listening qualifies one, then perhaps you are right, but I would give you a caution, Sasha. What seems clear and true and right when it is night and one is tired and on a train rocking into darkness may not seem quite so right in the sunlight.”

  And Rostnikov had been right. Now, going through the train in search of a suitcase he probably would not recognize, Sasha thought his whole theory about his mother had been little more than nonsense.

  Sasha moved forward, sometimes sensing when someone was in a compartment or catching a glimpse of movement or form on a seat. He h
ad such a sense as he passed the next compartment and was about to open the door of the empty one just past it when a woman’s voice called.

  “You missed me.”

  Sasha turned back. Standing in the doorway of the compartment he had just passed was the quite-beautiful woman who had been talking to Porfiry Petrovich in the lounge car the night before.

  She was wearing a tan skirt and a matching sweater with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair was down and she was smiling.

  “I wasn’t looking for your compartment,” Sasha said, finding it difficult to draw upon his charm.

  “Come in,” she said and walked back into the compartment and out of Sasha’s sight.

  Sasha paused, considered, and moved slowly back to the woman’s compartment, trying to come up with a tale, hoping a creative lie would present itself.

  She was sitting near the window, looking up at him, the morning light cast on the left side of her face, a slight shadow on the right. Her lips were full, red, her smile playful.

  “Sit, please,” she said, pointing to the seat opposite her.

  “I was on my way to-” he began, but she was shaking her head and he stopped.

  “I don’t know how much time we have until the people I am sharing this compartment with return,” she said. “So please examine the luggage. Satisfy yourself.”

  “I don’t know-” he tried.

  “You are wasting time,” she said. Sasha brushed the dangling lock of hair from his forehead and quickly examined the luggage.

  “Satisfied?” she asked.

  He sat back and nodded to show that he was, at least with his search.

  “We passed in the lounge car last night,” she said. “I had just spoken to the plumber and you were about to do so. My name is Svetlana Britchevna.”

  She held out her hand. Sasha took it. Firm grip. A feeling he recognized stirred and he willed it to go away. She held the shake and the feeling battled Sasha’s will. She released his hand and sat back.

  “I did exchange a few words with a one-legged man in the lounge car,” he said. “I did not catch his name.”