“There it is,” said Ivan, pointing a little off to the right.
“Your great-grandfather came from a town like this one,” said the older policeman to the younger.
The younger policeman looked through the front window at the cluster of small buildings ahead of them.
“You are sure they are not expecting us?” Rostnikov asked the driver.
“They are not,” said Ivan.
“You are certain?” asked Rostnikov.
“I … well, who knows?” said Ivan. “But I don’t think so.”
Ivan was soon proved wrong.
When they drove down the street, a few dozen people stood in front of the stores and former church. There were five cars and two pickup trucks parked on the concrete street, which had no sidewalk. Ivan pulled the car to a stop next to the general store and beside the memorial obelisk.
The day was dark and damp as the Rostnikovs got out of the car. Ivan got out quickly and moved to a group of people, hugging first a narrow woman of about fifty and then some other men and women. Porfiry Petrovich and Iosef stood waiting while Ivan completed his greetings and basked briefly in the admiration of his family and friends. He was probably the second most successful of the sons who had left the town.
“Inspector Rostnikov, this is Alexander Podgorny.”
A heavy man took a step forward and extended his hand. The man had a large belly, a knowing smile, and a crop of white hair brushed straight back and whispered by the slight wind.
“And,” said Rostnikov, “this is my son, Inspector Iosef Rostnikov.”
Podgorny shook Iosef’s hand and stepped back.
The small crowd was silent, watching.
“Our meeting hall is inside,” said Podgorny. “We can go in and talk, or go to my home.”
“The meeting hall will be fine,” said Rostnikov, following Podgorny, trying to remain steady on his insensate leg.
Behind them the people who had stood on the street waiting for the arrival of the important visitors filed in after them. A table and chairs had been set up on the small platform where priests and party officials had once stood. Podgorny ushered the Moscow detectives to the table, where they sat.
An audience began filling the folding chairs facing the platform. Ivan the driver was not sure whether he should be on the platform at the table or in the audience. He opted for the audience and sat between the man and woman who Porfiry Petrovich assumed were his parents.
“You are looking for Tsimion,” said the fat man, whose eyes were very dark and moving from one to the other of the detectives.
“We are looking for information on where we might find him. We believe that he may be in great danger,” said Rostnikov, folding his hands. He had done his best to sit without looking awkward. He had done well but not perfectly.
Podgorny sat on one end of the table. Iosef and his father sat behind it, facing the audience. Iosef expected that when Podgorny was finished, the people before them would begin asking questions.
“You have made a long trip for nothing,” Podgorny said sadly. “We know nothing of Tsimion or where he might be. We wish that we did. If he is in danger, we would like to help him. But … we know nothing.”
“He has a father, a brother, and a mother,” said Rostnikov. “We would like to talk to them.”
Podgorny shook his head sadly. “Unfortunately, they are working today,” he said. “And as I said, they have heard nothing from Tsimion. We would like to offer you a meal, show you what little there is to see of our town, and then have Ivan drive you back to St. Petersburg.”
“That is very kind of you,” said Rostnikov. “We will accept the meal and the tour, but since we have come this far, I would like to talk to Tsimion Vladovka’s family. I am sure Ivan Laminski knows the way to their farm.”
“That will not be necessary,” said a man about “age, rising from the back of the small hall. “I am Boris Vladovka.”
The man was wearing a dark-green shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His work pants were dark with stains of white potato dust. He was average in height, lean, with tightly muscled, veined arms. He was dark from years of the sun.
Next to Vladovka sat a younger man with a beard.
“This is my son Konstantin, Tsimion’s brother.”
His son, arms folded across his chest, was dressed like his father, though his face was not as dark. Konstantin nodded, his face serious. He did not rise. An older woman, who looked frightened, took Konstantin’s hand. The conclusion was simple. This was the wife of Boris and the mother of Vladimir and Konstantin.
“Shall we talk here or somewhere? …” Rostnikov began.
“Here,” interrupted Boris emphatically. “We are a family, all of us. The entire town. We have no secrets from each other.”
“I believe that,” said Rostnikov, “but do you have secrets from the rest of the world?”
Something touched the rugged face of Boris Vladovka, but just for an instant.
“All families have secrets,” said Boris. “They are no business of those outside. They are of no interest to those outside. If you have questions, ask. We will do our best to answer. And then we will ask you to leave.”
“Perhaps we will leave after we eat and have a tour of your town,” said Rostnikov. “Perhaps we will remain till tomorrow. We’ve had a long trip.”
“Yes,” said Boris, still standing.
“Do you know where your son Tsimion is?” asked Rostnikov.
“No,” said Boris.
“Do you know where he might be?” asked Rostnikov.
“No,” said Boris.
“I wish to ask the same question of your wife and son,” said Rostnikov.
“They will tell you the same thing,” said Boris.
“I expect so,” said Rostnikov with a smile. “It is not a matter of what they say, but how they say it. So …”
The bearded man seated next to Boris Vladovka gently removed the hand of the older woman from his and stood up. He was as tall as his father, a bit fuller of body.
“My brother is dead,” the man said.
The older woman began to cry. She was comforted by a pleasant-looking woman at her side.
“You are certain?” asked Rostnikov.
“We talked on the phone last week. I spoke to my brother,” the man said. “He said he was dying. I asked for information. He gave me none. He asked me to take care of our parents, our family. I told him I would. My brother is dead.”
There was a certainty and sadness in the voice of the bearded man that convinced Rostnikov of his sincerity. But though Tsimion Vladovka may have been convincing on the telephone, he may not have been telling the truth.
Rostnikov looked at the faces of those before him. They sat in clear anticipation, waiting to be questioned, waiting for the eyes of the detectives from Moscow to fall on them. Rostnikov looked at his son and it was clear that Iosef had seen the same look.
“I must do my job,” said Rostnikov with a sigh. “Boris Vladovka, if we can have a few minutes with you and your family, and perhaps a word or two with some of your neighbors, I think we will be able to leave quickly and file our report. My mission, however, is to find your son, to find him alive or dead. You understand?”
“I understand,” said Boris, looking down.
Rostnikov turned his eyes to Boris’s surviving son.
“I understand,” said Konstantin.
Podgorny rose now, not sure of what he should say or do.
“A meal has been prepared in my house,” he said. “If the Vladovkas would join us…”
“We will,” said Konstantin, putting his hand on his fathers shoulder.
“Then …” Podgorny began as the door at the back of the room opened and a small boy came in, looking around. He spotted Boris and ran to him. Everyone in the room waited while the boy whispered to the farmer, who bent over to listen. The boy stopped and Boris stood and said, “We have another visitor.”
“A man with an umbrella,” sai
d Rostnikov.
“Yes,” said Boris suspiciously.
“Perhaps we should all go out and give him the greeting you were all kind enough to give to me and my son,” said Rostnikov, getting up a bit awkwardly.
Iosef had not strapped on his holster. His gun lay in the suitcase in the back of the Mustang. He expected no trouble, but he would cut short the greeting and get Ivan to open the trunk as soon as possible.
Chapter Eight
Valery Grachev was halfway home when the boy in the park began to signal that there was no money in the gym bag in front of Elena Timofeyeva. He knew the bag contained paper and nothing else. Vera had confirmed it. The wooded areas, he was sure, were streaming with police moments after the boy signaled. While Sasha Tkach was rushing madly through the park searching for him, Valery was on the metro going to work, where he had parked his motor scooter very early in the morning. Valery smiled at a woman across from him. She was well dressed, a black suit, short hair, made-up, and carrying a black handbag. She was reasonably pretty but not nearly a match for Vera Kriskov.
Valery was under no illusions. Well, perhaps he was under one illusion. He knew Vera did not love him for his looks, but he thought she did because he was both smart and a satisfying lover who was eager to do what she wished done.
What she wished done now was to have him kill her husband, a task he had been quite willing to accept. He had even purchased a weapon through someone he had met in the same park from which he was now traveling. The man, a very bad chess player with very bad teeth and a smoker’s cough, though he was no more than thirty, had bragged that he “had connections.” He knew Valery only by his nickname, Kon, and when Kon had expressed an interest in purchasing a particular kind of weapon, a rifle he could fire accurately from a distance of two hundred yards, the man with bad teeth had confidently and confidentially said that it could be arranged for the right price.
Valery, with money given to him by Vera, had paid that price, and the weapon was now in the rented closet of a bicycle shop, alongside the two sets of negatives he had taken, plus a pistol he had also purchased from the man in the park with bad teeth. The pistol was clean but it looked a bit old to Valery, who knew little about firearms.
“It’s a classic,” the man had confided, using his back to shield the weapon from the view of anyone who might be approaching. “Put it in your pocket. Here’s a box of ammunition. It’s a nine-millimeter Makarov. Powerful. Simple to fire. Effective. I won’t lie to you. It is not the perfect weapon for long distance, but you have the rifle for that, complete with the best scope that can be had.”
Valery had learned to distrust anyone who said, “I won’t lie to you” or “trust me.”
The train was full. It was rush hour, but through the standing bodies, Valery’s eyes met those of the woman in black. She glared at him. He smiled back.
Vera had left to him how Yuri Kriskov was to be killed. She didn’t care, as long as it was soon.
She had urged him to be careful. He wanted to think that she was concerned about him. He knew that, at least in part, she was afraid that if he were caught, she too would be caught. It was understandable. The queen had to be protected. The game would end when the black king was dead.
It was hot in the metro car. Valery was standing, holding a metal pole, crunched between people. An old man with bad breath was almost staring him in the face. A woman pressing into his side made grunting sounds whenever the train jostled or stopped. He felt warm, very warm. Perhaps he was coming down with a fever.
He suddenly decided to get off at the next stop and forced his way through the crowd. He was short and powerful and well equipped for entrance to and from train cars.
On the platform of the Novoslobodskaya station he stood on the floor of black-and-green marble rectangles, breathing deeply. It was cool deep underground on the platform, but he was perspiring. People jostled past him as he stood looking without seeing at the familiar stained-glass illuminated panels depicting traditional themes and life rather than the revolutionary artwork that decorated many of the other familiar platforms. He didn’t know quite why but he felt an impulse to run up the stairs. He paused for an instant in front of the panels where a stained-glass man in a stained-glass black suit, wearing a red tie, sat at a desk looking at a large document in his hands. A globe with Russia in the center stood on the man’s desk. Rows of books faced him. The man’s stained-glass brown wooden chair supported him, and squares of windows floated in an eerie green-white light. The man’s office was neat, permanent. Valery was fascinated. The man reminded him of Kriskov. In fact, Kriskov could have been the model for this encircled depiction.
It was like being in a church.
Valery had to get somewhere, do something. Was he doubting his enterprise? Was the promise of Vera Kriskov an illusion? No. He turned from the panel. A feeling of power, almost of flight, ran through him. He pushed past people, slowed, still moving, to drop a few kopeks into the hand of a begging old woman sitting cross-legged at the entrance, and then ran to the phone.
He dropped in a coin and dialed.
“Yes?” answered Yuri Kriskov tentatively.
“You made a wrong move,” said Valery in his disguised voice. “You are now in check. End game.”
“Look,” said Yuri. “I can …”
“Say nothing or I call checkmate,” said Valery, hanging up.
He didn’t run, but he did move quickly past people heading away from the metro entrance. The police would be converging on the phone within a few minutes. He wanted to draw no attention by hurrying. He walked past the begging woman and reentered the station, now able to breathe. He got on the first train and by the time he got to work he was ten minutes late.
“Do we have the negative back?” he asked Nikita Kolodny as he entered the door of the editing room and breathed in the celluloid smell.
“I don’t know,” said Nikita. “Svetlana Gorchinova is looking for you. She is more crazy than usual. Be careful.”
With that, Svetlana entered the room, looked at him and glared.
“You are late,” she said.
Valery smiled and Nikita stepped back in near terror. No one smiled at Svetlana Gorchinova when she chastised, not even Levich or Kriskov.
“I have a fever,” said Valery, still smiling.
Svetlana looked at his pink face and the drops of moisture on his upper lip.
“Then why are you grinning like a fool?” she said.
“Am I grinning? I didn’t know. Perhaps I have a secret,” he said.
“Perhaps you are delirious,” she said, moving to her chair in front of the Avid editing machine.
“Perhaps,” he agreed. “You know, you look like the pilot of a Klingon warship, sitting in front of the editor. The light hits your face eerily. You look determined and formidable.”
She turned in her chair and looked at him. “Go home,” she said. “You are sick. You are talking like an idiot.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” he responded.
Nikita had turned his back and moved to a corner, where he pretended to examine a long-nosed pliers.
“Well,” she said. “I am not perfectly fine having you here. There isn’t that much to do until … there isn’t that much and I don’t want to go through the day with you acting like a maniac.”
“I am perfectly sane,” he said. “A bit feverish perhaps, but …”
“Go home,” she shouted. “Or don’t go home. But go.”
Valery shook his head knowingly and said, “I’ll go.”
“Then go, you fool, and don’t return until and unless you can behave, be quiet, and take orders.”
Valery shrugged and moved to the door. “When I return,” he said, “it will not be as a pawn to take orders, but as a king.” And out the door he went.
Svetlana muttered something and ignored Valery’s parting words.
Nikita Kolodny did not. Nikita suspected that Valery Grachev had taken the negatives. This behavior had made hi
m more than suspicious. But Nikita was a coward. He had come from a long, long line of cowards who rose no higher than their intelligence or lack of it and their desire for safe anonymity would permit. There was no way Nikita would risk his safety and job by reporting what he believed. There were no rewards to be gained and, even if there were, risking Valery’s wrath would not be worth stepping forward. No, Nikita would stand back in the corners of his life, watching, listening. Perhaps if Valery were caught, Nikita might move up to first assistant. That was as far as he aspired to. It would be enough.
Vera Kriskov comforted her husband with no success while the two policemen made calls and tried to trace the man who had just telephoned. The children were at school and, thank God, she thought, they didn’t have to see their father nearly hysterical.
“He’s mad,” said Kriskov, reaching for a cigarette, unable to light it with his shaking hands. Vera helped. “What was he talking about? Chess games? This isn’t a chess game. That bastard is going to destroy my negatives, destroy me. He is going to kill me.
“He is not going to kill you,” Vera said, knowing that the younger of the two policemen in the room had been admiring her since he came into the house. “He will stay away. The police will not let him get close.”
“Like they were going to catch him with the bag of strips of paper,” Yuri said, leaning over to put his head in his hands. “He’s probably burning the negatives now, right now.”
“Why would he do that?” she said. “He’d have to be mad. The negatives are worth money to him. He will call back. He will make a deal.”
“He is mad, Vera,” said Yuri, looking up. “Crazy, crazy mad.” He pounded the sides of his head with the heels of his hands. “A lunatic.”
Vera thought her husband might well be right. Valery Grachev had not done what they had agreed upon. The second call was not just a mistake, it was an act of madness. There was no point to it. Perhaps she should cut her losses, kill Valery, let the police discover the negative, drop the whole idea.
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