Balta was taken to a small office where a lean man wearing an unimpressive wig to cover his bald head made a show of rising. He was ridiculous. Dressed in crimson slacks, a blue blazer, a puffy white shirt, and a crimson scarf that almost matched his slacks, he made a show of adjusting his jacket as he sat.
“I am Anatole Deforge,” he said in a French accent which did not disguise his Slavic origin. “And you wish. .”
“To find an old friend I’ve lost track of.” Balta continued smiling.
“An old friend. Then you are not interested. .” he said with disappointment.
“Not at the moment,” Balta added, leaving the door open to what the man who called himself Deforge might be planning to offer.
“Well,” Deforge said with a shrug. “Perhaps. .”
“Perhaps,” said Balta. “I’m looking for Oxana Balakona.”
“Which of us isn’t?” said Deforge.
“You know where she lives?”
“I can find out if she has a residence in Kiev. I know she works here from time to time. I’ve never had the pleasure of representing her.”
Oxana Balakona was far above the aspirations of this little man, but Balta knew how to deal with little men.
“You’ve been very kind,” he said. “I’ll certainly urge her to see you.”
“Would you?” he asked.
“Yes. Perhaps I could get her to come with me to see you later in the week.”
Deforge could not keep himself from clasping his hands till his knuckles were white.
“My door will always be open to both of you.”
“Her address?” said Balta.
Deforge held up a finger to indicate that he would take care of the matter. He picked up his phone and made a call without looking up the number.
“Nina,” he said. “I need the phone number and address of Oxana Balakona. . No. . Yes. Of course, my sweet. If anything comes of it, you will be involved.”
There was a pause. Deforge looked at Balta and smiled. His teeth were false, large, and slightly yellow.
“Ah yes, Nina, fine. I will.”
He hung up and scribbled on a square yellow sheet he tore from a pad.
“You want me to call the number for you?” Deforge asked, holding out the sheet. “It would be no trouble.”
“No, thank you,” said Balta, taking the sheet from him. “I think I want to surprise her.”
The train pulled into the Kiev station. It had been on time. Lydia had packed for Sasha. She had done it quickly, efficiently. Everything had been fitted neatly into the blue cloth duffel bag. The price he had paid for her help had been a twenty-minute speech on life, loyalty, the need for caution, the sad demise of the Communist Party, the end of the benevolent Soviet Union, her certainty that Elena Timofeyeva would try to seduce him, his responsibility to her, his wife, his children, and the uncertainty of Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov’s motives.
Sasha had listened, or pretended to, without the usual exasperation and arguments. Lydia had tried with increasing perseverance to get her son to react, but he was having none of this. His lack of response worried her far more than her fear that something might happen in a backward place like Kiev where people marched in the streets over elections.
Adding to her concern was the fact that he leaned over and kissed the top of her her head before he left the apartment.
She had decided that she would have to talk to Rostnikov about Sasha as soon as the Chief Inspector returned from whatever ludicrous expedition he had undertaken in Siberia.
Elena’s packing had taken no more than five minutes. It consisted of putting her small zipper bag of makeup, toothbrush, and tooth powder into the brown leather suitcase that she always kept ready under the bed.
She had ceded the window seat to Sasha so she could watch him during the train ride. His behavior in Georgi Danielovich’s apartment, his taking away the addict’s gun, could have been brave or suicidal. Elena considered the latter to be more likely. His smile did not reassure her. It made her more suspicious.
“You want to go see Maya and your children when we get there?” asked Elena as they walked to the exit where a Kiev detective was to meet them.
“Yes,” Sasha said.
Good, Elena thought but did not say.
“Maya has a cousin, Masha, a model,” he said. “Maybe she can help us find the model we’re looking for.”
The four o’clock meeting in Moscow with the Africans who had given Georgi the diamonds to deliver to Kiev had been a bust.
Georgi had been there, suitcase in hand, pacing in front of the toy store, glancing furtively at Lubyanka Prison, looking as conspicuous and obviously addicted as he was. Elena and Sasha had been watching from inside the toy store. People had passed Georgi, even a young black man in jeans and a blue T-shirt, but the man had not stopped.
After ten minutes Georgi had suddenly stopped pacing. He looked around as if listening to something and then reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone, which he held to his ear. He listened, began to say something, and stopped. He put the phone back in his pocket, went up to Elena and Sasha, and said, “They know you’re in here.”
“What did they say?”
“They want their money. I wanted to tell them that I did not have their money,” he said woefully. “But they knew that too. They want me to find the person who killed Christiana and took their money. Shit, I cannot even find my way to the fucking toilet half the time.”
“We will find whoever killed Christiana and took the money,” Sasha said.
“But you will not give the money to the black guys who gave me the diamonds to deliver.”
“No,” said Elena.
Georgi chewed on his lower lip and said, “What do I get out of this?”
“With a little luck, you get to Odessa and you stay alive,” said Sasha.
“That is something,” Georgi said.
Now, in Kiev, Sasha and Elena were in search of a thief and murderer and millions of rubles in diamonds. They had eight days left and the promise of help from the Kiev police unit that dealt with illegal traffic and theft of diamonds and other precious jewels.
There was a chill in the air and a gray sky, which was not particularly welcoming, but the man standing next to the blue and white police car was. He wore dark slacks, a pale blue shirt, and a tan zippered jacket. He was about forty, and to Elena he resembled the Australian actor Russell Crowe.
“Timofeyeva and Tkach?” he asked, holding out his right hand.
“Yes,” said Elena. “Elena Timofeyeva.”
“Sasha Tkach.”
“Jan Pendowski, Detective Inspector.”
They shook hands.
Pendowski opened the car doors. Elena got in the front passenger seat, Sasha in the back. Pendowski got in the driver’s seat and looked at Elena with the approval of a man who was confident of his appeal.
“My wife is here with my children,” Sasha said.
“I know,” said Pendowski. “I’ll take you to her. And?”
“We are looking for a woman, a model, a very beautiful model who has been in television ads. She took a suitcase containing diamonds from a woman who was then murdered on a train back to Moscow.”
“Yes, I know all this. I think I can help you,” said Pendowski with a grin as he started the car.
And he could help them. And he would help them, but not nearly as much as they wished and not in the way they wished.
Jan Pendowski could, if he wished, drive them directly to the apartment of Oxana Balakona. He knew it well. He had recently spent the night next to, on top of, and under Oxana in her bed. And he could certainly take them directly to his own small apartment where, locked in a small, extremely heavy steel safe with very thick walls, was the decorated wooden box into which he had transferred the diamonds.
Jan Pendowski’s plan was to be pleasant and helpful to the Moscow officers, particularly the pretty and not model-thin woman. Jan had grown tired of the thin Oxana
whose bones he could feel when his body was pressed against hers. The firm flesh of Elena Timofeyeva was very inviting. She was seated close enough for him to smell. Her scent was pure and natural, a welcome change from the sweet and artificial scent of Oxana Balakona.
The next few days promised to be interesting and very rewarding for Detective Pendowski. He had many circles and dead ends for the Russians before he killed Oxana and delivered her to them.
Chapter Eight
The office of Fyodor Andreiovich Rostnikov, Director of Security, Alorosa Mine, and the Town of Devochka of the Siberian Territory, did not match his title. It was not tiny, but it was small, about the size of a freight elevator. There was one wall with a window. The window faced an open plane of tundra and a distant vision of taiga-a vast forest of birch, pine, spruce, and larch. Occasionally, if the season was right, there was a chance that a reindeer would appear in the distance, and lemmings ran free and multiplied and multiplied. Few other animals inhabited the perpetually frozen hundreds of thousands of acres of land perma-frosted to a depth of 4,760 feet.
The town was built on steel legs driven into the permafrost and heated by huge pumps. This kept the buildings from freezing in the winter, when the temperature went down to about 100 degrees below zero, and sinking in the summer, when temperatures rose well over 100 degrees and a sickly rotting smell permeated everything. When the first buildings had been constructed in 1950, the warm air they gave off caused the permafrost beneath them to soften. The buildings sank.
Fyodor Rostnikov looked out of the lone window in his office. Behind him bookshelves covered the wall. File cabinets were lined up on the right. On the wall to his left was a single piece of art, a realistic painting, as tall as a man, of a steel girder in a field of green grass. A very small man was craning his neck back and holding onto a workman’s cap as he looked up at the top of the girder, where a glittering, white, multifaceted diamond glowed.
“My wife did it,” Fyodor said, looking at Porfiry Petrovich, whose eyes were on the painting. “Her name is Svetlana. We have two children, a boy, eighteen, and a girl, ten. The girl has what they call mild autism.”
“When did you come here, Fyodor?”
“You may call me Fedya.”
They were seated in wooden chairs in front of the steel desk, cups of tea within easy reach on little wooden mats that looked Japanese.
“Fedya.”
“My mother and I came here forty-two years, four months, and eight days ago to be with her husband. I was raised in this very building.”
Fedya looked around as if he had never noted his surroundings before.
“He is dead, mining accident. She died of cancer just two years ago. Anything else you want to know?”
He ran his flattened fingers over the right side of his bearded chin.
“You no longer hate our father?”
“I’m not venerating his memory,” said Fedya.
“And me, you hate me?”
“I did for a very long time and then I realized one day that what he had done to me and my mother was not your fault. I resented, yes, but no more. It took too much time and energy.”
Porfiry Petrovich nodded and drank some tea. Both men knew why the information was being provided. The brothers had to work together for a few days. Actually, it had to be seven days at most because of the deadline the Yak had given him.
“The murder,” said Rostnikov.
“Which one?”
“There have been more besides the Canadian?”
“Hundreds that I know of. There may have been more. There’s no way of knowing the total number of people who simply died in the mine or while constructing the mine and these buildings. Record keeping was terrible. We’re not Germans. All the possible murders are buried with whatever records exist. Mind if I pace?”
“No.”
“Would you be more comfortable removing your leg?”
“Yes, but it’s not worth the effort of taking it off and putting it back on. It supports me but it does not comfort me. I was able to talk to my old, shriveled leg.”
Fedya nodded in understanding and began to pace, pausing from time to time to look out the window.
“Tsar Nicholas ordered diamond expeditions to Siberia in 1898. No diamonds were found. Every one of the eighteen men who came to the Yakuntia Basin perished. It was not till Stalin ordered expeditions back to Siberia to find diamonds in 1947 that some success was achieved, but the cost was great-not that Stalin cared. Your only son is named Iosef?”
“Yes.”
“For Stalin?”
“Yes. It was a mistake. I have made and continue to make many of them,” said Porfiry Petrovich. “My son is not one of those mistakes.”
“He could change his name,” said Fedya, looking out the window.
“Stalin did not own eternal rights to the name.”
“What does Iosef do?”
“He’s a policeman. He works with me.”
“Runs in the family. Our father, you, me, and your son.”
“It’s possible.”
“The winters,” Fedya said, resuming his pace. “Then as now, seven months of winter. Steel tools became so brittle that they broke like dry kindling. Oil froze solid. Rubber tires exploded. Then, when that first summer came, the top layer of permafrost melted, created a muddy, fly-infested swamp as big as half the countries in Africa.”
“And people died?” said Porfiry Petrovich.
“Hundreds. And all of them and all of us, until the fall of the man of steel, were happy to be here. We had a doctor, medical supplies, books to read, a job to do-a very dangerous job but a job-but most of all we had. .”
“Food,” said Porfiry Petrovich.
“Food,” agreed his brother, almost spilling what remained of his tea. “And warm bedrooms.”
“Murders,” Porfiry Petrovich said.
“Madness, fights, jealousy,” said Fedya.
“Isolation here can be maddening. In 1953 a man, a small man, went mad in the mine. He had a pick. He screamed and imbedded the tool’s sharp point in the head of three people, the back of two people, the stomach of another and, worst of all, he came out of the mine and used his pick on two children, one a little boy and the other a little girl. The alcoholic security guard shot the madman. The children were on the way to wait for their father, who was the wild man’s first victim. You know where this is going, don’t you?”
“The ghost girl,” said Rostnikov.
“The ghost girl. She began appearing in the mine a month or two later. She’s been seen at least nine times since 1963, probably more. There may have been people who did not want to be ridiculed, but ridicule would not have come easily to those who claimed to have seen her.”
“She killed people?”
“Let us say, she was proximate when people died.”
“You believe in this ghost girl?”
Fedya stopped pacing and sat in the chair facing his brother. He lowered his voice and said, “No, but that is said only in the relative privacy of this office which, as far as I can tell, is clean of microphones. In here, I’m an atheist. Out there with the people who live here and work the mines, I am an agnostic. Some of these good and not-so-good people have families that have been here four generations. They are the families of criminals sent to this Gulag. They have developed their own lore. I respect it or I cannot do my job. So, as someone said, ‘Sometimes the prospect of two and two equaling five has a definite attraction.’ ”
“Dostoevsky,” said Porfiry Petrovich.
“I know,” said his brother. “You want to talk to more people or you want to go into the mine?”
“Both. People first. Mine later.”
“I have from time to time kept track of you,” said Fedya. “Curiosity. Even in so remote a spot as this, it is remarkable what a security officer can access with a computer-even information about a Chief Inspector of Police in Moscow.”
“And I, I confess, have from time to time kept
track of you. It is remarkable what a Chief Inspector of Police in Moscow can, with a telephone, discover about a security officer at a remote mine in Siberia.”
“Yes, the mine. We must not in our nostalgic journey forget about why you are here. Your man Karpo is down there right now. Would you care for a slice of apple square or a Gogol Mogol?”
“Very much.”
“Good,” said Fedya. “Let’s see what they have in the cafeteria.”
Oxana did not trust Jan Pendowski. There were many reasons. First, he had the diamonds now. Second, he was a policeman, a corrupt one to be sure, but the police, she believed, were divided into only two groups, the ones with devious minds and the ones who took the most direct approach. Oxana had known both. Jan was devious, but not nearly as clever as he thought himself to be. Oxana was certain the diamonds were in his apartment. She was certain he meant to go with her to Paris, let her sell the diamonds, and then kill her. It was the only reasonable thing to do. They were very good at pleasing each other in bed or on the floor, but they were not in love.
And so, Oxana meant to get into Jan’s apartment, find the diamonds, and then kill him.
Meanwhile, the gods of her great grandparents looked down at her. Her agency had called. An editor of Paris Match was going to be in Kiev for a few days to set up a layout. The editor, Rochelle Tanquay, wanted to meet Oxana for dinner to discuss featuring Oxana in a spread, at least six photographs, to be shot in Paris in a week.
That was why Oxana was ushered to a table at the same restaurant where Balta had dined the night before.
And Balta was there again at this most interesting meeting.
Rochelle Tanquay was slim, elegant in a dark dress, hair cut in a Louise Brooks bob, perfect makeup. She was extremely pretty, perhaps thirty-five, maybe a bit older.
“I speak French,” said Oxana.
“And I speak some Russian, but I’m sure your French is better than my Russian,” said the woman with a smile, offering Oxana a cigarette, which Oxana accepted.
“I brought my portfolio,” said Oxana.
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