“You have grown more articulate in prison,” said Rostnikov with his own smile.
“I know what ‘articulate’ means,” she said with something of the same pride her granddaughter had shown in Porfiry Petrovich’s artificial leg. “Thank you.”
Rostnikov said nothing. He moved past her and touched her arm as he walked out the door into the hallway.
The policeman was still in uniform when he got home. His daughter came rushing to him in her nightshirt, and he picked her up as his wife moved to the center of the room with a resigned smile.
The policeman didn’t remove his black jacket. He scooped the giggling child up in his arms and threw her into the air. Not too high. Not high enough to frighten her, but enough to make her giggle even more and to make her yellow curls bounce. She was a little alionshka, a fair-haired beauty.
“She heard you at the door,” his wife said. “She came flying out of her bed past me. I don’t understand how she could have heard. Maybe she just sensed it.”
The policeman nuzzled the child’s neck and asked her what she had done that day. It was a mistake. The girl was almost eight and could talk nonstop. Sometimes she made sense.
“She should get to sleep,” his wife said.
He nodded and held the little girl in his arms as she spoke. He grinned with love as he moved past his wife, pausing to give her a kiss on the nose. The policeman’s wife smiled, but it wasn’t a sincere smile. She hoped he didn’t notice.
“Hungry?” she called as he took me little girl to the bedroom.
“Starving,” he said.
“I have chicken,” his wife said.
“Amazing,” he said from the small bed in the corner, where he placed his daughter. This had always been the child’s bed. When she was an infant, they had pushed the bed against the wall and set up a trio of high-backed chairs on the other side. The head-and footboards of the bed were old but made of sturdy wood. The child, still talking, took her stuffed clown, Petya, into her arms.
The policeman gently touched the child’s lips to let her know it was time to stop talking. She yawned as he leaned over to kiss her.
“You will be home when I wake up?” she asked sleepily.
“For a little while,” he said. “But don’t try to get up early. I won’t leave without talking to you.”
“You promise me?”
“I promise you,” he said.
He left the room, moving around his and his wife’s bed, and closed the door. There was enough light from the window to keep the bedroom from being completely dark. Almost directly outside of the second-story apartment was a street lamp.
While his wife prepared his dinner, the policeman walked back to the apartment door and took off his jacket.
“I’m sorry I’m so late,” he called as quietly as he could across the small living room into the kitchen area.
The house smelled of chicken and he was hungry.
His wife made a sound but asked nothing. It was as he hung up his jacket that he noticed the blood on the left sleeve. How could he have missed the blood? He had checked in the car mirror and washed himself at the station. Was he growing careless? What would his wife have thought had she seen the blood? Had she seen it? She would think, he concluded, that he was a policeman and it is not unusual for a policeman to be in contact with blood from time to time.
His wife, whose name was Svetlana, was not the kind to ask questions. She had never been a beauty. Too thin. Almost no breasts. But her skin had always been smooth and clean and her eyes a perfect blue. Her hair was cut short. It was blond, a dark blond, but still …
The policeman spat on his hand and wiped the spot away with his fingers. Now his jacket was relatively free of blood, but his fingers were a watery red. He moved across the room to the sink behind his wife and washed his hands.
Svetlana was a good wife, a quiet wife. She used to ask about his days, but he had never told her much, and as the years went on, he told her less and she asked less. Instead, at the dinner table they talked of her day, which consisted of taking care of their daughter and trying to edit technical manuscripts at the kitchen table. Svetlana was educated, far more than her husband, though she was careful not to show it. Her editing brought in much-needed extra money. But she didn’t talk much about her work. She talked about their daughter and any visitors they had, including his sister. She talked about how she had gotten food for the day. She talked a bit about the news and who was sick and who was well. More and more she talked with her head just a little bit down, not quite looking him in the eyes. He noticed, but he said nothing.
After dinner, if it was not too late, they watched a little television sitting next to each other. They made love infrequently, but when they did, it was gentle and sad and he was careful with her as if she mighty easily bruise or break. There was no passion in their coupling. There had never really been much, but in the beginning it had been better. Now she had no desire.
Tonight it was too late to watch television and he was tired. When they entered the bedroom quietly, they could hear their daughter’s even breathing. The room, like the apartment, was just a bit cold. He was a big man and didn’t mind the cold. But she was thin and wore a sweater to bed.
He whispered to her that the chicken had been delicious and kissed her on the cheek. Light from the street lamp created shadows in the room. Either one of them could have pulled the curtain, but neither did and neither wanted to. They lay in the bed, eyes closed, pretending to fall instantly asleep.
Tonight he had raped his twelfth woman. She had been tall and he had seen her from the front as he had passed her in the car. She had seemed pretty in the lights of the street and in the headlights of his car. Too much makeup but pretty and no more than forty. Her coat was warm and heavy and she wore red boots. The coat had a hood, which she wore over the back of her head of dark hair.
He had followed her from the Polezhayavskaya metro station. He had almost missed her. He had hoped she wasn’t too skinny beneath that coat, that she had big breasts or at least full ones. When the street was clear of traffic, he had turned off his lights and followed her slowly. She did not seem to be aware that the car was behind her. She turned into a small street and he followed, pulling the car to the curb behind her. This street was dark and empty. Had she turned around, he would have, as he had done before, simply identified himself as a policeman and suggested that it was late and he should escort her home, which was exactly what he would have done unless she had refused his offer. In either case, she would have been safe.
But he had gotten out of the car quietly, not closing the door all the way, and quickly followed the woman, who did not look back. He had attacked her from behind as he had all the others except the first, the old woman who had seen him, the old woman he hadn’t raped.
Tonight had been a different experience. He had grabbed the tall woman from behind, hand over her mouth, knife to her throat. She had not struggled as he pushed her into a doorway and ordered her to put her hands on the wall and lean over. He had whispered to her that if she turned around and looked at him, she would die. If she did as she was told, she would live.
The woman had not wept and had not struggled. He had reached under her coat and pulled down her skirt and ripped off her panties. She did not move. He had his erection, had it almost before he had spotted the woman. Now he slipped on the condom and tried to enter her. She was tight and dry. He had told her to loosen up. She had not done so or could not. She did not plead. She did nothing but comply. She did not beg. She did not have the look of a prostitute, but maybe she was an expensive one. Yet her apparent indifference angered him, and it was only with great effort that he began to enter her. He didn’t get far.
He had stepped back in failure and fury and struck the woman on the side of the head with his fist. She had gone to the ground huddled in a fetal ball, her panties in the snow, her hands over her head. Still she didn’t whimper or beg. He went mad and began to hit her with both fists, kick
ing her as he buttoned his pants. It was he who made the noise.
He heard a car. It was a block or so away, but it seemed to be coming toward them. He left her lying there after warning her not to move. She remained perfectly motionless and at that instant he thought he may have killed her. The last he had seen of her was her still body and her red boots.
Now, lying in bed next to his wife, he thought it definitely possible that he had murdered the woman. She had made him lose his sanity for perhaps a minute. She had been nothing but a stiff log. His frustration had turned to fury. She might be lying dead in that doorway.
He was not exactly frightened. He was confident that he could continue to control the situation, especially if the woman was not dead. He should have paused to check, but the car had been coming and he had run back to his own vehicle, continuing to button his pants as he hurried.
He had long ago stopped trying to understand what he was doing or why. It simply came to him from time to time that he had to find some woman alone, to attack her, humiliate her. He would feel a surge of power when he entered her and for hours later, remembering her pleas, her weeping, her fear. But tonight had been different. Tonight had been very bad and unsatisfying.
He had placed his holster and handgun on the high shelf near the apartment door. He had placed his watch on the table next to the bed. The dials glowed in the darkness. He lay on his side watching them, watching the second hand, trying to hypnotize himself into sleep.
It took only ten minutes before he was snoring gently.
His wife, however, now that he was asleep, rolled on her back and looked out the window toward the light. She had a vivid imagination, which she kept to herself, and she was a careful observer. She had seen her husband wipe something from his jacket and then immediately move to the sink to wash his hands as he made very small talk about visiting her mother on his next day off.
She got up slowly, quietly, and tiptoed across the room. She listened to his gentle snoring, knowing it was real. Normally she was lulled by the duet of her husband’s gentle snore and her child’s more subtle breathing, but for months it had been more difficult to hear this music of the night. One instrument was flat.
She opened the door and stepped into the living room, closing the bedroom door almost all the way behind her. There was a window in the living room, too, but the light was not as bright as in the bedroom. She moved in faint shadows to the front door and turned on the small overhead light they seldom used. Then she pulled the sleeve of her husband’s jacket into the light and looked at it carefully. The stain was faint where he had attempted to remove it, but he had done so hurriedly. She could see it. She was not sure what it meant. He was a policeman. He had no reason to hide a bloody spot on his sleeve. It was not the first time he had come home with a sign of what he did to earn a living. Once he had a broken hand. Another time, a deep bandaged gash on his forehead. She shivered inside her sweater, turned off the light, and went quietly back to bed.
She slept little that night.
Yevgeny Tutsolov went over all of the mistakes he had made as he sat in the one-room apartment he shared with Leonid Sharvotz. At the moment he was sitting, alone in his underwear, applying compresses to his aching leg where the rabbi had kicked him.
It had been a disaster, a farce.
The towel was cool. He took it off and limped to the small stove in the corner, where he kept the water just below boiling. He dipped the towel in the hot water and wrung some of the water back into the pot. His hands burned, but that would pass quickly. He limped back to his chair and placed the towel on the black-blue-yellow patch above his right knee.
The television was on in front of him. The picture was terrible and the show boring, but Yevgeny liked the sound of other human voices when he was alone. He had no great love for humanity as a whole or for his supposed friends in particular, but he did not like to be alone with his own thoughts.
He had killed six people. Five of them had been Jews. He felt no remorse, not even for Igor Mesanovich. Igor was a fool, not because he wanted to get out of the plot but because he wanted the killing of the Jews to stop. He wanted to find another way. Yevgeny was the smartest of the group, the leader. He had decided early that there was no other way. He knew, in fact, that there were certainly other ways, but he couldn’t think of any that made sense, and once he had killed the first two Jews, they really had no choice.
Georgi lived across the way in a building identical to the one Yevgeny and Leonid lived in. They were outside of Moscow in one of the “new” planned apartments near the airport. From the moment the buildings had been completed sometime in the 1950s, they had ceased to be new and had begun crumbling. Shoddy plumbing, heating, insulation, and wiring were more than problems. They were disasters.
Yevgeny was almost thirty. Georgi was almost fifty. He should have been the leader, but he was stupid, khitry, clever but stupid. Yevgeny was beginning to think that he himself was, while not stupid, careless. What would it have hurt to take the money from the bodies of the Jews? Yevgeny needed money. His job in the hotel laundry paid barely enough to live on even when combined with what Leonid made working as a perfume salesman in the giant GUM department store. GUM had made a miraculous comeback with the arrival of capitalism, and the perfume shop had done more than respectable sales with both tourists and the nouveau riche, who were mostly into illegal enterprises. Leonid was a good salesman. He was boyish, handsome, and looked like an aristocrat, which, in fact, he was.
Yevgeny hadn’t taken the money from the dead Jews and Igor because he and the others had decided the killings had to look like anti-Semitic attacks on members of the growing congregation. Leonid and Georgi had no great fondness for Jews, but neither did they have sufficient animosity to kill or even attack them. They were more concerned about survival. Igor had actually grown to like many of the Jews with whom he had dealt as he passed himself off as one of them.
The most immediate problem, however, was that they had not anticipated the young rabbi’s ability not only to defend himself but to attack them when he was cornered. Georgi had suffered a badly broken nose, which had been hastily taped by a nurse Yevgeny had been seeing. The nurse thought they might eventually live together, even consider marrying. Yevgeny had said it was definitely an idea for the near future, when he finished his current business venture. Yevgeny had no plans to marry the woman, who was well built, loaned him money, and was ten years his senior.
After treating the broken nose, the nurse had said that Georgi had almost been killed. If a little more pressure had been put into the blow, broken bone would have penetrated his brain. Yevgeny had said his friend and he had gotten into a fight with some drunken street toughs who had attacked them. The nurse acted as if she accepted the explanation. Yevgeny was handsome, confident, and a pleasure in her bed the infrequent times they wound up there.
Mistakes, problems. Now the Jews would be more determined to stay. They had to be driven out. Perhaps Yevgeny and his friends simply should have murdered the rabbi, but these people were determined. Another rabbi would be sent from Israel, and the next one would probably come with protection.
The wound in his shoulder, which he had treated himself, did not bother Yevgeny, though his arm had been stiff in the morning. The woman at the top of the embankment had been a very poor shot, lucky to even graze his shoulder. But, on the other hand, she might have been lucky enough to kill him.
He was sure that he had hit her with his single shot, but, truth be told, Yevgeny was not a particularly good shot either. This was all new to him. He was a poor laundry worker and a mediocre murderer. His ancestors, he had told Leonid, would have handled this better. His great-great-grandfather and those of Leonid, Georgi, and Igor were trained warriors who had gone to their execution wordlessly, with courage, but that was more than a century ago. With the Revolution, families like theirs had buried their aristocratic heritage and embraced Communism. Some of them even believed in it.
He had to le
ave for work in an hour. He would do his best to hide the limp he would certainly have. He would give the same excuse to the laundry manager that he had given to his nurse. The manager, a woman, tall, a little older than he with short, straight, dyed blond hair, was always well groomed and handsome if not traditionally pretty. Yevgeny did not quite hate her, but he certainly resented her and her attitude.
If he could get past the problems, and he was determined to do so no matter how many Jews had to be killed, he would no longer need this job. Yevgeny would no longer need Russia.
The idea came to him as a burst of pain shot through his sore leg. A bomb. If murder did not budge these stubborn Jews, the destruction or at least partial destruction of their place of worship would certainly force them to move, at least temporarily. And if a few more Jews died in the process, it wouldn’t hinder Yevgeny and his fellows in attaining their goals.
Yevgeny knew nothing of bombs, but Leonid had studied mechanical engineering. He knew something of such things. They would discuss it tonight. Georgi might be able to help get the materials Leonid would need if Leonid had any idea of how to make a bomb.
The Jews might be determined, but so was Yevgeny. The Jews had their congregation and place of worship to protect. Yevgeny was after much higher stakes.
He took off the now cool wet towel and tested his leg. It hurt. It really hurt. What kind of rabbi were they dealing with?
Yevgeny forced himself to dress in the same slacks and heavy wool shirt he had worn the day before. In five minutes, slowed by pain, he was dressed, hair brushed, teeth brushed, black shoes brushed and polished. He knew it would be agony to pull his far-from-new black galoshes on, but he had only one pair of decent shoes, so he went through the agony, after which he stood panting and biting his lower lip for about fifteen seconds before putting on his coat and hat and turning off the television.
He had killed and had discovered that he had no regrets and no remorse, not even over Igor. Yevgeny knew he could kill again, and he now wanted to, not just for the sake of the plan but to see the rabbi dead. He wanted the confident Jew standing in front of him, knowing he was going to die, and Yevgeny wanted to pull the trigger and watch the man fall.
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