Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Ludmilla Vianovna,” said Sasha. “I was fortunate enough to gain her confidence.”

  The Yak did not pursue the means by which Sasha had gained the female officer’s confidence. He looked at his watch and declared, “Anything else?”

  No one spoke. The goal of all around the table was escape from the room at the earliest possible moment.

  “The meeting is ended. Porfiry Petrovich, please remain.”

  Sasha, Iosef, and Elena stood and headed for the door. Pankov remained in his seat, resisting the urge to wipe his moist brow.

  “You, too,” the Yak said.

  Pankov nodded, gathered his papers, and followed the others out the door.

  When they were gone, the Yak folded his hands and said, “Tonight you will be aboard the Trans-Siberian Express.”

  Chapter Three

  FOR BREAKFAST INNA DALIPOVNA had prepared buckwheat porridge with a large glob of butter and sour cream, a small bowl of kyehfer with sugar, and a glass of strong tea. When her father came in, fully dressed in dark suit and tie, he barely looked at the food. He was absorbed in his newspaper.

  “Submarines,” Viktor Dalipovna muttered, reaching for the mug of tea without looking up from the newspaper or at his daughter sitting across from him at the small table.

  Viktor was fifty-five, brown hair neatly trimmed, gray temples, tall and lean. He was considered handsome, judging by the many women in his life since Inna’s mother had died a decade earlier.

  He drank, making a face at either the taste of the tea or his thoughts on submarines. “Who do they fool? I ask you. Who do they fool?”

  Inna knew the question was not meant to be answered, certainly not by her. She ate some porridge and listened to her father as he shook his head, turned the page, and put down his tea to pick up a spoon.

  “The Americans, the British, even the Norwegians know everything that goes on inside of our submarines. And we spend millions, millions, millions. On what?”

  Inna kept eating.

  “Appearances,” he said. “First the Kursk and now the latest one. They won’t even tell us its name. I tell you, the way to deal with the Americans is not to rattle swords or shake sticks. They laugh at us. We must become capitalists, not a country of criminals and incompetents as we are now, but real capitalists. We have resources. Oil, gas, diamonds, sulphur, forests. Siberia is better than a vast gold mine.”

  He put the paper aside neatly on the table and began to attack his porridge.

  “Well?” he asked.

  This time the question was for her. “Appearances,” she said.

  “No, what did the doctor say yesterday?” he asked, eating as he spoke, a napkin tucked under his collar to protect his white shirt.

  Viktor had come home to the apartment they shared late the night before. He had been out with a woman whom he had met at the Up & Down Club. She said her name was Dorthea. She said she was the wife of a Roumanian watch manufacturer. She said her husband was away for the week, leaving her alone at the hotel. She said many things Viktor did not believe, but she did many things in the hotel room which pleased him and cost him nothing but dinner and a few drinks.

  Viktor was in a good mood. Today he had a meeting with Anatoli and Versnikov about a deal with a department-store chain in Germany. Viktor would probably have to go to Bremen to seal the deal. That was fine with him. He knew a number of people in Bremen who could provide him with the company of engaging and willing women. The last time they had found him a very young woman who claimed to be a Kurd.

  “The doctor?” he prompted his daughter.

  “He said the medicine is working fine,” she said.

  Inna had not met her father’s eyes. She could not when she lied, and she could not for periods longer than a few seconds when she did not lie.

  “Good,” said Viktor, moving to the kyehfer and adding more sugar.

  He had heard what he wanted to hear. For an instant only, he glanced at his daughter before continuing to read the newspaper on the table.

  Inna was thirty-two years old. She had inherited a few things from her father: his leanness, his deep, dark eyes. The rest was the gift or curse of her mother. Inna had suffered from panic and anxiety since childhood, just as her mother had done. While her mother complained, ranted, wept, Inna had learned to keep her sleepless nights and terror-filled waking dreams to herself. Her father did not like them. Her father had hated her mother for her weakness. Her father did not hate Inna. He did his best not to notice her or deal with her. Even when she had been twenty-two and was going to have the baby the gas-maintenance man had planted inside her, her father had not gotten angry. He had clearly been annoyed. He had other things, more important things, to deal with. He had called Inna’s aunt, his sister, and asked her to take her to the clinic and get rid of the problem. He had not asked Inna’s opinion on the matter. The baby was disposed of.

  When he got home that night, he had asked, “Is it taken care of?”

  Inna had said yes.

  “No complications?” he had asked.

  “I’m a little sore. I’m tired.”

  “Rest,” he had said. “I’ll get something to eat at Rodyoki’s. I’ll bring back something for you.”

  And then he had gone. He had awakened her after midnight. Slightly drunk, he had handed her a jar of borscht, deep and green. She had told him she wasn’t hungry.

  “Sleep,” he had said. “I’ll put it in the refrigerator. You can have it in the morning.”

  And they had never again spoken of that day or of the baby.

  Inna had inherited more from her mother: a dry, humorless look, washed-out blond hair, and a distinct lack of beauty. Her plump mother had looked more like a mother to Viktor than a wife. And now it was common for the few people they met together to assume that Inna and Viktor were husband and wife instead of father and daughter. Indeed, on one occasion, an old woman clearly assumed that Inna was older than Viktor.

  Inna had learned how to please her father. The few times she had displeased him were the result of sudden outbreaks that seemed to have no specific cause. Perhaps a dozen times in the past ten years she had lost control, ranted, and wept about suicide.

  Viktor’s solution was to take her to the nearest state hospital. That was during the waning days of the Soviet Union when Viktor had been a Communist with a large C and a black-market capitalist with a small c. The Soviet solution to all mental ills was the same: drugs. Can’t manage your child? Keep her drugged. Is she too agitated? Give her drugs. Is she depressed, angry, sullen, confused, annoying, too silent, too talkative, too anything? Drugs.

  And it had worked. Inna had taken large doses of pills and a syrupy red-brown liquid. She was sleepy most of the time, moving in a tranquil dreamlike state, but she was docile. Then, several months ago, she had awakened from a night of sleep feeling as if she could stay in bed forever.

  She stopped taking the medications. She did not tell her father. Anxiety returned. She welcomed it. She was awake. She had rejoined the living. She had searched for something to do, something to distract her besides keeping house for her father, watching television, and going to the park to sit and listen to her neighbors gossip.

  “Good,” Viktor said, pushing away his empty bowls and finishing his tea. “The shopping money is on the table near the door.”

  She acknowledged with a nod, though he did not look at her. She knew there would be enough to provide him with his favorite foods and delicacies, particularly blyeeni sah smeetah-nigh, pancakes filled with sour cream and then baked. She planned to make that for his dinner tonight, along with a sausage thinly sliced just the way he liked it so he could place the pieces on a slice of bread.

  “You will be home for dinner?” she asked.

  “Who knows?” he said, reaching for his briefcase next to the front door of the apartment.

  “I’ll have something ready,” she said.

  But he was not listening. He was studying the contents of the closet door
he had opened.

  “It is supposed to snow today,” he said, looking from his down jacket to his black wool coat.

  “I think I’ll kill someone today,” Inna said softly, starting to gather the breakfast dishes.

  “I think the jacket,” Viktor said. “It comes down low enough to cover my suit jacket.”

  “On the subway,” Inna said, across the room in the tiny kitchen, putting the dishes in the sink. She carried each dish in her left hand. The pain in her right wrist had subsided but she was afraid to put any pressure on it. Her father had not noticed that she had avoided using the hand. She had not expected him to notice even if she dropped a plate.

  “Here,” Viktor said, turning, jacket on, buttoning it. “How is this?”

  “You look very handsome,” she said. “Distinguished. Perfect.”

  Inna knew that if she looked in the mirror, which she seldom did, she would not see a distinguished, perfect person. She would put her face close to the glass, watch a small circle of steam appear and fade, and look at the permanent mask she did not want to wear.

  “I’m going,” he said. “Be good. Take your medication. Put on your coat if you go out.”

  “I’m going to take a ride on the metro,” she said.

  “Where?” he asked, a hand on the door.

  “Shopping,” she said.

  He made a sound and left the apartment. The sound of the closing door remained in the room as Inna returned to the sink to finish cleaning the dishes.

  Her mother, plump, resigned, appeared at her side as she carefully soaped and rinsed each plate, cup, knife, and fork. Her mother often reappeared to talk to her daughter, give her advice and support. Occasionally her mother preached, but generally she gave her approval to Inna’s plans.

  “You are going on the metro again?” her mother asked as Inna finished a cup, rinsing it with running water.

  “Yes,” Inna said.

  “And you will try to kill him again?”

  “Yes,” Inna said. “For you and for me.”

  “I do not need him dead now,” said her mother, standing with folded arms, leaning close. “He will be dead soon enough. I am in no hurry.”

  “I must,” Inna said, without looking at her mother.

  “Your wrist?”

  “It will be all right,” Inna said, finishing the last dish and placing it in the metal rack next to the sink.

  “You hate him that much,” her mother said.

  “No,” said Inna. “I love him that much.”

  Inna looked at her mother now. She did not question whether her mother was a ghost or a creation of her imagination. Inna simply accepted.

  “Wear something warm,” her mother said. “It is supposed to snow tonight.”

  Inna dried the long, sharp carving knife.

  “I will,” Inna said.

  For breakfast, Pavel Cherkasov ate a large platter of frankfurters and sliced tomato with three cups of coffee. The breakfast had been brought to his room at the Hotel Rossia. It cost the equivalent of twenty American dollars. Pavel didn’t care. It wasn’t his money.

  He ate slowly, watching the television screen, on which a serious-looking American policeman with a mustache was giving orders in dubbed Russian to a pair of underlings, one of whom was black, the other a thin, pretty Chinese woman.

  Pavel poured more salt on his tomatoes. His blood pressure was high, but what good was food without salt? What good was life without pleasures? Food was Pavel’s principal pleasure but not his only one. He liked to make people laugh. He longed to be a comedian, to stand in front of a crowd of people and make them laugh with his stories and jokes. He had told one of his jokes to the man who had brought his breakfast.

  “I should take my Vitamin B-I pill for my memory with this meal,” he had said in earnest deadpan, “but I forgot where I put the bottle.”

  The dour man in the white jacket and bow tie had smiled, a smile that could have indicated sympathy for Pavel’s misfortune or quiet appreciation of the joke.

  Pavel had given him only a moderate tip.

  In his pocket Pavel carried small lined note cards on which he wrote jokes that he thought of, incidents he viewed that he thought were funny, humorous things said on television or in the occasional movie he attended.

  Some of Pavel’s best jokes he could never use except in particular company. They were not sexual in content but dealt with the comic aspects of the violent world with which he dealt. He had seen a humorless Mafia hit man park carefully and legally in a zoned area on Gorky Street when Pavel had pointed out the man’s target. The hit man, known only as Krestyaneen, “the Peasant,” had explained that there were too many accidents on the streets of Moscow and one had to obey the parking laws. The man had not been joking. The Peasant had gotten out of the car, crossed the street, shot one of two men who were deep in conversation. Three bullets to the head. Then the hit man had returned to the car and very carefully pulled out of the space, avoiding even the slightest touch to the rear of the Lada parked in front of him.

  The story was funny, but only if you knew it was true.

  Pavel had never performed the entire, ever-evolving stand-up routine he had been working on for more than five years for anyone but himself, though he regularly tried individual jokes on waiters, shopkeepers, clerks, and people he met in bars or restaurants. He had taped the routine and kept reworking the lines and delivery. He had tried copying the styles of various comics and settled on a mix of Yuri Obleniki and the American George Burns.

  When he received his pay for this job, he would take a year off, go on stage in amateur clubs, work on his timing. Deep inside he yearned to be noticed, given a part in a movie, perhaps a role on a television series.

  It was possible. Russia had become a land of opportunity for enterprising people like Pavel Cherkasov.

  Pavel finished his breakfast and moved across the room to pull his suitcase from the shelf next to the bathroom. Later he would retrieve the blue duffel bag he had locked in a box at the train station. Now, however, he put the suitcase on the bed and opened the drawers of the small dresser on which the television sat. It was a day early, but he liked being prepared well in advance. There really wasn’t much to pack. His clothes, already folded neatly, could be washed in a sink and dried on a hanger on the train.

  Pavel had long ago discovered the American company Travel-Smith, which provided clothes and gadgets for people who traveled a great deal, people who wanted to travel light and live out of one carry-on. Pavel was one of these people.

  He spoke six languages, none of them but Russian particularly well, all quite passably. He had passports in a variety of names and nationalities. These he carried inside a box of expensive Dutch-chocolate candy, which he replaced frequently.

  He selected the passport under which he would be traveling the next day. The stamps were right. The photograph was good. It was under the name on this passport that Pavel Cherkasov had purchased his ticket on the Trans-Siberian Express.

  One of the nice things about traveling by train was that it was so easy to carry a gun aboard. Of course he could smuggle a weapon onto an airplane. He knew employees, flight attendants, baggage handlers, people at the machines that checked the handheld luggage, even airport janitors and concession workers at the major airports in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, who could be bribed to cooperate.

  Tonight, before he headed for the Yarolslavskiy train terminal, Pavel thought as he finished packing, I shall eat at an Uzbekistani restaurant on Neglinnaya Street. Tkhum-dulma, a boiled egg inside a fried-meat patty, shashlik marinated over hot coals. No, wait. First he would have a maniar, a strong broth with rice and meat, with hot Uzbek bread. Everything would be served on and in the finest Uzbek porcelain and pottery: And the wine? He was particularly fond of the Aleatiko. A bit sweet but perfectly suited for the meal.

  Moscow was a good place to be if one had money and knew the city. Pavel was very pleased with himself. He would finish packing, lie down, and
play with some ideas he had for jokes.

  He hoped that within the next week he would have enough material to put together a part of his routine about traveling on the Trans-Siberian Express.

  He closed his suitcase, turned off the television, and got back on the bed to rest.

  There was much to think about. Jokes, the relatively simple and safe job he had to do, and what he would do with the money he had already received and the rest that would be given to him when he had completed his task. Later he would get up for lunch. He would eat elegantly but lightly and perhaps treat himself to an early movie before dinner. For a resourceful man with a sense of humor, life could be very good indeed.

  For breakfast, Misha Lovski received nothing.

  He was hungry. He was angry. He was naked. Misha paced. He was in a cage. Literally. A cage with iron bars. There were no windows but there was a single ceiling light outside the cage, well beyond his reach.

  The cage itself was empty except for a narrow mattress on the floor. Misha had grown cold during the night. He had wrapped himself in the mattress and awakened with a stiff neck, which he now massaged as he paced the ten-foot by ten-foot concrete floor.

  “I’m hungry,” he shouted.

  No one answered.

  “I’m cold,” he shouted.

  No one answered.

  He could have been anywhere. He had only the slightest recollection of how he had gotten here. The night before last, two nights ago or was it three, he had been at Loni’s. He had been drinking. He had taken a respectable dose of acid handed to him by a skiny whose name he couldn’t quite remember. The skiny was big. He was with someone else who joined them when Misha was well into his trip. Misha couldn’t remember who the other person had been.

  He remembered voices, music, loud music even for him, smells, sweet for a moment and then as acrid as vomit the next. And he vaguely remembered someone handing him a telephone and telling him he was going to be caged and killed. Was that at Loni’s? He had panicked, said something into the phone, called for help. And that was it. Or perhaps there had been no call. Perhaps he had dreamed or imagined it.