Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Sarah, Galina, and Laura were seated at the table. The adults had said nothing to the children about the meeting with their mother.

  Sarah Rostnikov was talking about a concert they would be going to while he was gone. They had an extra ticket. Sarah’s cousin, Leon the doctor, was appearing with his quartet. Leon played piano, had a particular passion for Mozart, and made lots of money in his practice catering to those who could afford his services and held the widespread and almost mystical belief that Jewish doctors were far better than those who were not. Rostnikov was not a fan of classical music though he went dutifully to such concerts and found that he could lose himself in a dreamy, open-eyed meditation almost approaching the near-nirvana he felt when he lost himself in the pragmatic magic of a plumbing problem.

  Sarah looked up at him and smiled. He nodded to show that he was packed. Sarah was still a beauty. Her natural and shiny red hair had grown out following her surgery and she had regained some but far from all of her former plumpness. Her pale smooth skin was a bit more pale than he thought looked healthy, but she’d survived. Except for the frequent headaches, Sarah had recovered enough to go back to work at the Dom music shop on a half-time basis.

  Not for the first or thousandth time, Rostnikov thanked whatever gods might be (or common genetic chance) that their son had turned out to look like his mother. Porfiry Petrovich was not ugly, but he knew that he possessed the flat, homely face common to millions of Russians descended from dozens of generations of peasants. He was comfortable with his face, the face of his own father, and his body, the compact solid body that had earned him the nickname of “the Washtub.”

  “The cake is good,” said Laura, who bore a resemblance to her mother even more striking than Iosef’s to Sarah.

  “Your grandmother is the giver of all cakes and cookies,” he said. “Look at me. I have grown fat with the sweets she brings home from the bakery.”

  “You are not fat,” Nina said, touching his stomach. “You are round and strong and have a plastic leg.”

  “Thank you,” said Rostnikov.

  There were five chairs at the table. Three matched. The other two did not. One of the solid metal chairs with the slightly padded seat was always left open for Porfiry Petrovich, who had learned from experience that the last few inches before he hit a chair with a slight thud could do great damage to a wooden chair. He had destroyed two of them and taken falls that would have embarrassed him had anyone but Sarah been present when they happened.

  There was a mug in front of his place, his Dostoyevsky mug, white, with a drawing of Fyodor on the side. Dostoyevsky had been the favorite author of Porfiry Petrovich’s father. Porfiry Petrovich was, in fact, the name of the lawyer in Crime and Punishment to whom Raskolnikov eventually confesses. It was a name that played at least a small part in Rostnikov’s becoming a policeman when he got out of the army. He had been a child soldier. He had lost the use of his leg to a German tank outside of Rostov.

  Sarah poured hot coffee into his mug and Rostnikov nodded thanks.

  “Are you going to do the weights?” Laura asked.

  It was one of the high points of the girls’ day. Rostnikov would solemnly open the cabinet under the television and CD/cassette player, pull out his bench and heavy rings of weights, turn on something by Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, or Ella Fitzgerald, and in his black gym shorts and one of his sweat shirts with the sleeves cut off, he would do curls, presses, and crunches with appropriate grunts and sprays of sweat. His favorite shirt was a black one with the words “The Truth Is Out There” in white letters across the front.

  The girls would watch, sitting on the floor, enthralled by the spectacle of the powerful one-legged man turning red, the veins of his muscles expanding in purple bands.

  “Yes,” Rostnikov said. “Very soon.”

  Tonight he would wear his Chicago Bulls red sweat shirt, his second favorite. He would do his regular routine, shower, dress, call the cab, and then pick up Sasha and head for the train station.

  “Which way is Siberia?” asked Nina.

  “Toward the rising sun,” said Rostnikov.

  “I had a dream about the sun,” Laura said.

  They all looked at the girl.

  “In the dream,” she said, “the sun faded away slowly, so slowly you couldn’t be sure it was disappearing.”

  “Were you frightened?” Rostnikov asked with great interest.

  “No,” she said. “It was in no hurry and neither was I, and something or someone said ‘Don’t worry.’ I think it was you.”

  “It was,” said Rostnikov. “I have been thinking about the sun.”

  Galina looked at him, remembering the conversation in the Paris Café with her daughter and Rostnikov’s curious comments about the sun.

  “What have you been thinking?” Laura asked.

  “That it is a miracle,” he said; “That if mankind has anything to worship, it is the sun. The ancient religions were right. We owe all to the sun. But the sun does not need our worship. It does not think. It simply is. Just enough of it means life. Too much exposure is dangerous.”

  “I do not understand,” said Nina.

  Rostnikov looked at Sarah, who smiled.

  “Nor do I,” said Porfiry Petrovich. “Nor do I.”

  “Are you going to do the weights now?” asked Laura.

  “As soon as I finish my coffee,” he said.

  The weights were round like the sun and the full moon. There was a wholeness to the circle. The circle Director Yaklovev had given him was not whole. It was not bright, a flawed icon. There was much he had not been told about his mission and much he had been told that rang of Russian fairy tale more than the reality of three hundred pounds of weights on a steel bar.

  “Are you going to be in the weight-lifting contest in the park? Grandmother says you are.”

  “I am,” Rostnikov said, removing the bench, bar, and weights from the cabinet under the television in the living room.

  “Will you win?” Nina asked.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But there are other strong men in Moscow, many, and they do things to help them win.”

  “Like what?” Laura asked as he slid the weights onto the bar.

  “Take pills, herbs they think will make them stronger, legal pills,” he said, making sure the weights were balanced.

  “Is that fair?” asked Nina.

  “It is legal,” he said, getting next to the weight and lifting it so that he could set it atop the bracket at the end of the bench.

  “What else do they do? To win?” asked Laura.

  “When the judge claps his hand, the competitor must lift,” he said, lying on his back. “If one is watching the judge, one can begin an instant before the hands come together and have a fraction of a second more for the lift.”

  He was reaching for the bar now, looking at the weights on either side.

  “Do you do these things?” asked Laura.

  “No,” said Rostnikov.

  “You do not want to win?” the girl pressed.

  “Yes, I want to win,” he said, “but I want to win knowing that I have followed the rules, my rules. If I do not, there is no pleasure in winning, simply a trophy which I do not feel I deserve. You understand?”

  “Yes,” said the girl. “I think.”

  “Good,” said Rostnikov, gripping the bar. “Now, when you are ready, clap your hands.”

  Misha Lovski, the truly Naked Cossack, tapped his forehead on the steel bars to the driving beat of his own voice and guitar being played at concert volume.

  He could feel the vibrations when he put his hands to the walls or wrapped them around the bars. The music had been playing for hours. He didn’t know how many hours. It might even have been days. He had tried to sleep but the bright lights and pounding music made it impossible.

  He sang along with himself now.

  Keep the clubs beating faster.

  Keep the fists driving harder.

  Drive them back aga
inst the wall.

  Nail the fuckers one and all.

  If you don’t kill them, they’ll kill you.

  Do it to them before they do it to you.

  You know who they are. Line up along the street.

  Pull it out and beat your meat.

  Slam the running slant-eyed freaks.

  Smash the screaming Jewish beaks.

  Ram the rotten queers and geeks.

  Shout like Cossacks as they fall.

  Then have a pint of blood alcohol.

  His voice was almost gone. All that came out was a hoarse croak. He had cried and laughed, huddled in the corner with his mattress. He had crapped and pissed in the plastic bucket, using torn-up sheets of old newspaper that had been left for him. With his fingers he had eaten what they had given him, though he had no idea what the brown mush in the bowl was, something like meat mixed with kasha. And they had given him just enough water, also in a pot.

  Like a trained monkey he had learned that when the lights went out and the music stopped, the door to the room beyond his cage would open, revealing nothing, and he would be expected to put out his bowls, which would be replaced by others.

  He had tried to talk to the person whose footsteps he heard. He had tried each time.

  “What do you want?” he had demanded the first time. “Money? Call my father. He’ll pay. Just get it done.”

  No answer. Just a door closing. The next time it was, “Get me something to wear, you bastard, you gol-uboy, queer fucking bastard.”

  No answer. Just a door closing. Then, after hours of light and blaring music, “Leave the lights on. Keep the music coming. It gives me something to do, something to sing and beat.”

  No answer. Just a door closing. The last time it had been but his hoarse croak, “Turn it off. No more light. No more music. If I don’t get some sleep, you will kill me.”

  No answer, so he added, “The hell with you. Drive me mad. Drive me crazy. I will go okhvet, nuts, but I will emerge a mad genius, more popular than ever, and I will find you and beat your head in with my guitar, drag you on stage and beat you till your putrid blood and brains run and smell. See, you inspire me. I have just written the words to a new song. I will call it ‘Surviving the Cage.’”

  This time, just before the door closed, he heard a sound in the darkness, perhaps a laugh. It wasn’t much but he held onto it, tried to place it. But before he could, the lights were on and he heard his own voice screaming over the speaker, “Kill your mother. Kill your father. You never asked them to be born.”

  He reached through the bars for the cracked metal bowl of brown mush and the cup of warm water. As he ate, he rocked his head. He knew it was only a matter of time before he was completely mad. The problem was that he did not know how much time had passed.

  He stopped rocking. An idea had come. A project. Something to keep him busy. Yes. He smiled and looked beyond the bars at the far wall behind which he was certain they were watching him.

  He touched the fuzz of his growing beard, leaving a stigma of brown mush, and smiled cunningly toward the wall.

  The Naked Cossack had a plan.

  Chapter Seven

  ZELACH HAD DINED WITH his mother in their small apartment which she kept impeccably neat and clean, smelling and looking like something from a different era, a different place. The place it looked like was an apartment in Voronezh south of Moscow, near the Ukrainian border. Zelach’s mother had been born there, a gypsy who did not look like one and who escaped to marry a slow-witted but decent Moscovite policeman who thought her quite beautiful. Akardy Zelach had been born six months after they had married. She had never, to this very day, told him of his gypsy blood. There was no reason to do so. The boy had looked like his father the moment he was brought painfully into the world.

  Zelach’s mother loved her son and worried about him. He had talents but no great intellect. He was a follower, and when she died she wondered whom he might follow.

  They ate boiled potatoes, thick fish soup, and bread with water.

  “I must work tonight,” he said as he ate.

  “I know,” she said.

  He had not told her before this moment, but her comment did not surprise him. She almost always knew when he had to work, when his mind was on something other than the meal or the television screen. She usually knew what he was thinking. This did not disturb him. It was reassuring.

  The words to one of the Naked Cossacks songs kept running through his head:

  Spit on your friends. Shit on your friends. They’ll do the same to you.

  Just clasp their hands and walk in step when you agree on what to do.

  On what to do, on what to do, and who to do it to.

  “Akardy,” his mother said. “Yes.”

  “You are bouncing your head while you eat.”

  “A song I can’t … it just …”

  “Listen to the song,” she said, tearing off a piece of bread. “It may tell you something.”

  Emil Karpo ate alone in his room, which was about the same size as Misha Lovski’s cell. The room held very little furniture—a cot near the single window whose shade was almost always pulled down, a chest of drawers, a free-standing simple wooden closet, a desk in front of a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with files of cases he had worked on, open and closed cases, and cases that he had never been assigned but were still open.

  What free time Karpo had, he gave to those files and their challenge.

  He ate one cucumber, one tomato, one onion, a thick slice of unbuttered bread, and a piece of plain boiled chicken he had prepared on his hot plate on the dresser.

  There were two lights in his room, one a bulb in the ceiling, the other a small table lamp.

  The only color in the room was a painting above the dresser, a painting of and by Mathilde Verson, a gift from her. The woman in the foreground looking up the hill to a barn was definitely Mathilde, though her face was turned. Mathilde, the woman of the city, the part-time prostitute whom he had paid once every two weeks for her services until she had stopped taking the money and they had become something more than client and provider. That lasted three years, four months, and six days. She was shot in the crossfire between two Mafias, gangs disputing territory or trying to make a point which may not have been clear to either gang.

  The phone next to the computer rang. He picked it up and said, “Yes.”

  “Emil,” came Rostnikov’s voice. “I am going on a train ride.”

  Karpo said nothing.

  “Sasha is going with me. To Siberia.”

  “Yes.”

  “While I am gone, you are in charge.”

  “I understand.”

  “I left the file on the subway attacks on your desk.”

  “I shall read it in the morning unless you feel I should get it immediately.”

  “No, just be acquainted with the case, should you be needed. In an emergency, you can reach me on the Trans-Siberian Express, the number two. I’ll be in compartment twelve, car three-two-seven-eight.”

  Karpo did not bother to write the number. He would remember it.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Emil, as I recall, you can see the sun over the hill in your painting of Mathilde. Is that correct?”

  Karpo did not have to turn to the painting.

  “That is correct.”

  “Then I have a very important question. Is the sun rising or setting? Have you ever asked yourself that question?”

  “No,” Karpo said, now turning to the painting.

  “Look at it with fresh eyes and tell me what you think when I return.”

  “I will do so.”

  “You are working on the Lovski case tonight?”

  “Yes. Zelach and I are going to a club called Loni’s where Lovski was apparently last seen.”

  “Find him,” said Rostnikov. “And don’t forget the sun.”

  He hung up and Karpo turned his wooden chair so that he could face the painting above his dresser.
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  Pavel Cherkasov dined, as he had planned, at the Uzbekistani restaurant on Neglinnaya Street. There was a good crowd, but Pavel had assured himself a table near the wall with a few bills passed to the maître d’. With a bottle of Aleatiko wine to guide him, Pavel, as planned, had started with maniar, moved on to shashlik, followed by an order of Tkhum-dulma. He ordered a second bottle of wine and turned to the patrons at the next table, a well-dressed couple in their fifties.

  “A glass of wine?” he offered.

  The man smiled and Pavel motioned to the waiter, who came over quickly. He knew Pavel from previous visits, knew the man would leave a big tip if he were served quickly and if the waiter smiled or laughed at his jokes.

  “The other night I came in here,” Pavel said in a whisper to the couple at the next table after the waiter had moved to get two clean glasses. “I said to the waiter, ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a rat.’ And the waiter replied, ‘Then you’ve come to the right place.’”

  The woman gave a slight tic of her left cheek that might have signaled offense or a touch of amusement. It encouraged Pavel, who poured wine from his bottle into the glasses the waiter had brought.

  “Listen, listen,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “An American and a Russian go to hell and the devil says, ‘You have a choice of American hell or Russian hell. The difference between them is that in American hell you get one bucket of shit to eat every day. In Russian hell, you get two buckets.’ The American takes American hell. The Russian, to the American’s surprise, takes Russian hell.”

  The woman and the man to whom Pavel was speaking were definitely not amused, but Pavel chose not to notice.

  “A year later,” Pavel said, “the American and the Russian meet. ‘How is your hell?’ asks the Russian. ‘Just as promised,’ the American answers. ‘One bucket of shit to eat every day. And Russian hell?’ ‘Just as I expected. The shit deliveries seldom arrive, and when they do come they are late and there are never enough buckets to go around.’”