Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express ir-14

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  In his apartment, he would make copies of everything in his briefcase on the machine he kept in the alcove of his bedroom. The Yak lived modestly. His goal was not luxury but power. His physical needs were simple. His ambition was great but well calculated for his own protection. He did not aspire to the highest offices of Russia. He aspired to gently dictate policy to those who held such offices.

  Documents like the one in his briefcase, tapes he had been collecting along with favors granted, would soon put him in position for a major move. He would savor his power like a secret collector of great art who kept his treasures for his own eyes and information and the simple, pure satisfaction of having them.

  Once home and having made the copies, he would follow his long-established pattern of protecting his acquisitions by making copies in triplicate and securing them where they could not be found.

  He retrieved his coat from the small closet behind his desk and reflected on what had been a very good day. Earlier, the unspoken agreement with Nikoli Lovski had gone smoothly. The Yak had arranged for the release of the man Akardy Zelach had shot and had assured Lovski that there would be no further inquiry into the situation regarding his son. In fact, there would be no report on the incident. It was a family matter. Lovski had made it clear that he fully understood and appreciated what the director of the Office of Special Investigation was doing.

  As a test of their new understanding, the Yak had said to Lovski that he would very much appreciate it if Lovski’s media “gave proper credit to the heroes who had, at the risk of their own lives, made Moscow safe from the subway killer.”

  Lovski had said that he would see to it that Iosef Rostnikov and Elena Timofeyeva were treated as heroes and their positions with the Office of Special Investigation made quite clear.

  “And, of course, we will see to it that you too are given full credit.”

  “I would prefer it if my name and contribution were not mentioned,” the Yak had said.

  “Then they will not be,” Lovski had readily agreed. “There may be one problem, which I leave fully to your discretion. Your man, Karpo. He is a bit …”

  “He will be no problem,” the Yak had said reassuringly.

  And that had ended the conversation. It had been a good day. The car was waiting for him when he stepped beyond the gates of Petrovka. The snow was deep now. The sky dark. The air cold, a brisk, satisfying cold. Yes, it had been a good day.

  It had not been a particularly good day for Elena Timofeyeva. If one discounted the pain and the twenty stitches in her shoulder, however, it could have been much worse.

  There was one small lamp on the table next to the bed and it was turned on the lowest of its three-way bulb.

  “I can stay but a minute,” Porfiry Petrovich said, standing over her at the bed in her aunt’s tiny bedroom. “You are all right?”

  “Some pain, tired, but all right,” she said with what she hoped was a smile.

  She looked very pale, and Rostnikov suspected that she had a fever. He reached down and touched her forehead. She was decidedly warm but not hot.

  “I’m taking pills,” she said. “Anna is doing her best to play nurse. She is not very good at it, but she tries.”

  “I will let you sleep,” he’ said. “I will come back tomorrow.”

  “You look tired,” she said.

  “I am,” he said, touching her hand.

  She gripped the hand and said, “Has Iosef told you?”

  His son was in the next room, the only other room of the tiny apartment, with Anna Timofeyeva.

  “What?”

  “We have decided to marry as soon as I am out of this bed,” she said. “He asked me to tell you.”

  “You have told me and I am pleased,” Rostnikov said.

  “I do not intend to leave my job,” she said.

  “I would not wish you to,” said Rostnikov. “Recover. Sarah and I will plan a wedding.”

  “Small,” she said. “Talk to Iosef. A small party. No religious wedding. A simple state wedding.”

  “May I ask you a question?” Rostnikov said.

  “Yes.”

  “If it is an intrusion? …”

  “You want to know if we plan on children.”

  “Yes.”

  “At some point. We have talked. At some point.”

  “Good. Now sleep.”

  She closed her eyes and smiled.

  “Shall I turn off the light?”

  “No,” she said. “I prefer it on, at least for tonight.”

  Rostnikov nodded and left the bedroom.

  Anna Timofeyeva sat in her chair near the window with her cat, Baku, on her lap. Iosef stood, a cup in his hand.

  “Coffee or tea, Porfiry Petrovich?” she asked.

  “Coffee, perhaps.”

  Iosef moved to the small stove near the door to the apartment to get the cup of coffee for his father.

  “You look tired, Porfiry Petrovich,” Anna said.

  “I am,” he replied, taking the cup from his son. He took a sip. The coffee was tepid but strong. “And you, Anna Timofeyeva? How are you?”

  “Angry,” she said with resignation. “But I have been told it is bad for my heart to be angry, so I try to convince myself that the anger is something I can put into an imaginary box and hide in the cabinet with the soup cans.”

  “And does it work?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “But I am trying. I read about it in a book Elena and Iosef gave me. Mysticism.”

  Her reaction to the word mysticism was a nod of resignation. She was a pragmatist, always had been. She had been quite comfortable in the Communist Soviet Union, though she acknowledged its defects. Authority had been clear. The world had been solid and tangible. You worked. You died. Now her niece and the man she was going to marry gave her books about achieving tranquility. Anna was willing to exert her considerable will on being calm. She needed and wanted no books. One could rely on one’s mind if not one’s body.

  “She will be all right?” Rostnikov asked.

  “She will be fine,” said Iosef glumly.

  “He thinks it is his fault,” said Anna, stroking the cat, whose eyes were shut in contentment.

  “Of course it was my fault,” Iosef said, looking into his empty cup. “I should have seen, been more prepared. She could have been killed because I was not alert.”

  “One cannot anticipate all contingencies,” said Anna Timofeyeva. “You deal with crime and criminals, sometimes lunatics. You are a policeman, not a bricklayer.”

  “I know,” said Iosef. “But …”

  “If you spend your life going over each act that you did not and could not anticipate,” said Anna, “you will fail to address the present.”

  “Anna Timofeyeva does not believe in the past,” Rostnikov explained, gulping down the last of his coffee. “And she does not believe in God.”

  “There is no past,” she said. “It is gone. There is now. There may be tomorrow. That is what you address. That is where you live, right where you stand.”

  “You have turned to philosophy,” Rostnikov said.

  “I have time for reflection and the reading of mystical books which, thankfully, tend to be very short, though obscure.”

  “I must go home. I called Sarah from Petrovka. She wanted to come but I told her to stay, that I would be home soon. She is waiting up for me. Iosef?”

  “Anna Timofeyeva has invited me to stay here tonight,” Iosef said.

  “In Lydia Tkach’s apartment,” Anna said. “Lydia is thankfully away somewhere, looking at religious paintings with her artist. She left me the key. She will not mind.”

  Rostnikov looked at his son and touched the younger man’s cheek. “Elena said you will be married when she is well,” he said. “We will have a party. Who shall we invite?”

  “I … just a few friends,” said Iosef.

  Rostnikov nodded and moved to the door. Perhaps he would include the Yak and Pankov on the guest list. It would be inter
esting to see them attempting to be sociable. He doubted if either would come but the possibility intrigued him.

  “Perhaps a surprise or two,” said Rostnikov.

  “I can do without surprises for a while,” said Iosef.

  Rostnikov nodded to Anna, touched his son’s arm, and left the apartment.

  Twenty minutes later, Rostnikov entered the apartment on Krasnikov Street as quietly as he could in the hope of not waking the two girls and their grandmother, who slept in the front room. One more week and grandmother and grandchildren would have their own apartment, only a single room, but a large one on the floor above. But for now they were here. Rostnikov moved slowly and as quietly as his mechanical leg would allow.

  He made it to the bedroom without awakening the sleeping trio, opened the door, and found Sarah sitting up in the bed, a book in her lap, a pillow behind her back. The only light in the room came from a small reading lamp on the table next to the bed. He closed the door behind him and stood for a moment looking at her.

  She was pale, a paleness that contrasted with the darkening red of her hair, which had grown back since her operation. She wore the blue nightgown he had bought for her when she got out of the hospital. Sarah Rostnikov was still a lovely woman. She smiled and patted the right side of the bed next to her, his side.

  He moved to her and sat.

  “How is Elena?”

  “She will be well. They want to marry soon. Perhaps next week.”

  Sarah nodded.

  “I told them we would have a party.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “You can?…”

  “Galina and the girls will help me. It will be fine, Porfiry Petrovich. Hungry?”

  “No. Tired.”

  “Take off your clothes and Lenin, shave, shower, and come to bed.”

  “Lenin?”

  “I have decided,” she said, “to call your alien leg Lenin. You should have something to call it.”

  “Why Lenin?” he asked, starting to undress.

  “You can engage in secret political discussion and seek cooperation to your mutual satisfaction,” she said. “And no one will know but the two of you.”

  “Then Lenin it is,” he said, looking at her.

  “The Korcescus on the second floor are having trouble with their toilet again,” she said.

  “I will deal with that challenge tomorrow night.”

  “Porfiry Petrovich,” she said. “How long has it been since we made love?”

  He thought for a moment.

  “You have not been …”

  “I am well,” she said. “If you are too tired …”

  “I am definitely not too tired,” he said.

  “There is one condition.”

  “What is that?”

  “Lenin goes under the bed where he belongs,” she said.

  Rostnikov laughed. He rarely laughed. The world was often amusing, tragic, dangerous, and touched with individual sadness, but not funny. He could not remember the last time he had laughed. Granted, this had been a brief laugh but it was a real one.

  “I’ll shower first,” he said.

  “Shower later,” Sarah said.

  Chapter Nine

  Don’t cry for me I never cried for you

  Just left without the name

  Of the place I’m going to

  Left without so much as a whisper to remind you

  I’m traveling to forget you

  And to find you

  In the morning the sun was shining and the snow had stopped falling. For today at least there would be a clean, soft white blanket covering Moscow. People would be polite. Some might even smile. This was Moscow weather. If there were no rain the snow would slowly take on a fragile crackling crust of gray, and if it did not melt it would begin to break out in irregular pocks of dirt and city grime. Smiles, always held dear and protected by seriousness, would fade. All would wait for, hope for, discuss the winter, the expectation of a fresh snow.

  “It will snow tomorrow,” said Maya in a whisper, lying next to her husband on the mattress laid out on the floor. “The television said so.”

  Sasha faced her, his head propped on two pillows.

  “Yes,” he said.

  They said nothing. Her left breast was exposed under her nightgown. When he had gotten home, the children had been asleep in the bedroom. His knees had threatened to give way under him when Sasha opened the apartment door.

  Would she be dressed in a business suit, arms folded before her, ready for no-nonsense discussion, a laying-out of the ground rules of their fragile reconciliation?

  Maya had been sitting on the sofa in her nightgown.

  She had said nothing, simply stood, looking quite beautiful, her dark hair pulled back, her face clear and clean, her full lips in a welcoming smile which, Sasha was certain, carried with it a touch of caution.

  Maya had come to him, moved into his arms. He had pulled her close, gently, his knees still shaking, and then he had wept.

  Now, with the sun coming through the window, he knew it was time to talk, talk about more than the winter and the snow, about more than the Trans-Siberian Express.

  “Your mother is coming back tomorrow,” said Maya, who still had the distinct lilt of the Ukraine in her voice. “She called. She is bringing her artist.”

  “Good,” said Sasha.

  Silence again.

  “Maya, I … I will do better. I must do better. Just stay.”

  She took his right hand and placed it on her exposed breast.

  “I am here, Sasha,” she said. “The children are here.”

  They had made love when he came home. He had shaved and washed on the plane wanting to look as good as possible when she saw him. They had made love. He had been afraid that he would be too tired or too frightened or that she would reject him, but they had made love and it had been good, and strong and long, and she had been satisfied.

  “A new beginning,” she said as the baby began to make small whimpering sounds in the bedroom behind them.

  He kissed her, remembering her smell, a special smell, not sweet but distinct. Each woman had a smell, her own smell, that came not from perfumes or perspiration but from her essence. Maya’s smell was gentle, the hint of some forgotten forest and a spice which eluded him. He put his face to her neck, pulling in her smell, savoring it.

  “The baby is up,” said Pulcharia from the doorway of the bedroom.

  Sasha turned on the mattress to face his daughter. She was going to be four years old in less than a month. She had been gone for more than two months. Pulcharia was the same child and yet a different one. She wore a large white T-shirt that came down to her ankles. Her hair had grown longer and was unbrushed and tumbling into her eyes. She stood looking at her father.

  She is her mother's child, he thought.

  “Pulcharia,” he said.

  She rubbed her eyes and took a step forward, a slow tentative step, and then padded across the floor and into his arms. The baby was crying with conviction now.

  “I will get him,” Maya said, getting up.

  “Kiev looks like Moscow, only different,” Pulcharia told her father. “Why do you have tears?”

  “I am crying for joy,” Sasha said. “I am crying because you are all back.”

  “Are you hungry?” the child asked.

  “Very,” he said. “Let us find something to eat.”

  In the morning the sun was shining and the snow had stopped falling. Vendors, packed in layers of clothes, looking like ragged Marioshki dolls, set up their tables near the metro stations selling kvas, chestnuts, crinkly cellophane packages of American corn chips. People passed. The world was white. The ponds in the parks would be almost frozen by now.

  There was a wariness held in deep check, the recollection of a bombing that kept some of the vendors out of the underground pedestrian tunnels that carried swarms of shuffling people under the broad streets. After the bomb, people had braved the dangers of reckles
s drivers rather than go where they might be trapped by explosion. Now, more were going through the echoing tunnels.

  Viktor Dalipovna had called in to his office and said he would not be coming in that day and possibly the next and possibly the one after that.

  He had taken the metro, gone through a pedestrian tunnel, and walked many blocks. He could have gotten closer, but he wanted time to think, the cold air, the tingle that should slap at his cheeks and make him truly understand the reality of what had happened to his daughter.

  They had given him an address, actually a street where a neighborhood police station was tucked between an old gray five-story office building and a garage. The station was on a small side street. Viktor had lived all of his fifty-five years in Moscow but remembered no police station here.

  There were many things he had not noticed in his lifetime.

  The station was dark. Uniformed young men who did not look old enough to shave stood inside the doors with automatic weapons. People, mostly policemen talking to each other, moved by him, ignoring him.

  Viktor moved to an old desk behind which sat a man with pockmarked face, a heavy man with gray-black hair and a uniform with a collar so tight it turned his exposed neck into a line of taut ridges. The man’s face was red and he wheezed slightly when he spoke.

  “My name is Viktor Dalipovna,” he said. “My daughter is here. I was told I could come.”

  The man behind the desk looked up at him with disapproval and then down at a list on the desk. Viktor could see names, some of them lined out, some open, others underlined in red.

  “Room seven,” the man at the desk said, filling out a small rectangular form and handing it to him. “That way.”

  Viktor took the sheet and moved past the flow of policemen. The station smelled of age and decay. He found room seven, knocked, and a voice called, “Enter.”

  Viktor opened the door and found himself in a very small, dirty white room with a wooden table. On the other side of the table his daughter Inna sat, her hands handcuffed together awkwardly because of the white cast on her right wrist. Next to her sat a man who looked at Viktor and pointed to a wooden bench facing himself and Inna.