Death Of A Russian Priest

TEN

Sasha stood watching the girls with their hair wild and waving, covering their eyes, teeth white or appearing to be white in the dull, dim light of the Nikolai Café. The girls danced with gaunt men, with each other, or alone. Bodies touched and parted and touched again. There was no single style, though at least three of the twenty girls wore tight skirts that looked like shorts and black stockings with flower patterns.

The light was supposed to be intimate. It was supposed to hide the eyes, fill the sockets with a deep yellow. The music blared like clanking metal, vibrating as if the charged strings of the instruments were forever trying to tune up and forever angry because they were unable to achieve the elusive sound they sought.

And the girls, some with yellow artificial hair swept up like old French or American movie stars, dressed in tight silken blouses that showed the size and shape of their breasts and skirts that hugged tight, swayed and smiled as if they had wonderful secrets.

“You see her?” asked Elena. She and Sasha sat at the end of the bar, trying not to drink their warm, dark beer.

“No,” said Sasha.

“I admire the zeal with which you examine each face and body,” she said, “on the chance that the Arab girl might be disguised as a Russian girl.”

“She is not here,” said Sasha, looking away from the dance floor to the crowded tables where teenage boys in slick imitation leather made jokes they convinced themselves were funny and the girls laughed too loudly to mean it.

There was little room to move, and it was almost impossible to hear anything except the laughter and the music that tingled across the bar and beneath Sasha’s feet.

The woman they had spoken to that morning, Tatyana, was not there. Two young men, who were not so young when one looked too closely, served drinks from behind the bar. Girls in white blouses, who were not as old as they appeared when one looked too closely, served the tables.

“Another beer?” asked one of the not-so-young men behind the bar as if he knew just how bored Sasha must be with the people of the Nikolai.

Sasha looked at the man. His teeth were stained and crooked.

“We haven’t finished these,” said Elena, holding up her glass.

The bartender shrugged and moved off to a customer down the bar, a man of about forty with an artificial flower behind his right ear and an empty glass held high.

There was a door in the wall behind the small dance floor. The door was covered with strings of dangling mustard-colored beads. The beads parted and Tatyana entered the café and looked around with distaste. She paused to light a cigarette, then maneuvered her way through the crowd, touching a breast here, a buttock there, and exchanging an intimate smile with each girl she touched.

Tatyana’s yellow hair was swept up in back so that her neck showed like smooth weathered marble.

Elena watched the woman make her way toward the bar. She was the same woman, yet changed. She wore much more makeup and her clothes were clinging but not immodest. She was twenty years older than anyone else on the floor, and Elena felt that the emotions the younger people feigned were so clearly felt by this woman that she had no need to act. Tatyana’s eyes came up through the crowd and found Sasha and Elena.

“If she goes back through the beads, you follow her,” Sasha said. “I’ll go out the front and stop her at the rear entrance.”

Elena said nothing. They had found the rear entrance, checked the low windows before they had entered the Nikolai. Then they had gone to the bar, where, since they were the only customers who did nothing to draw attention to themselves, many had glanced their way.

Elena put down her glass and watched Tatyana make her way through the crowd. Tatyana did not turn or look away. She continued to inch her way along the swaying young backsides. When she reached the man with the flower behind his ear, he looked up from his drink at the mirror above the bar, shouted “Tatyana,” turned, and put his arm around her waist. Elena expected her to push the drunk away or sting him with a word. Instead she smiled, removed the cigarette from her overly red lips, and kissed the man, fully, deeply, with her mouth wide. People around them whooped and applauded. When she removed her open mouth from his, the drunk sank back, removed the flower from behind his ear, and stuck it in his mouth.

“You look like policemen,” Tatyana said, moving to Elena’s side. “You are bad for business. Customers here see a policeman and they find other places to go.”

“You called the Syrian,” said Elena, pulling back from the touch of Tatyana’s shoulder against hers.

Tatyana shrugged and looked over Elena’s shoulder at Sasha, who looked back at her. “You would be very appealing if you smiled,” she said to him.

“I will probably smile when I order everyone to leave in about five minutes,” he said. “You called the Syrian.”

“I called the Syrian,” Tatyana agreed. “Who do I look like?” She was looking in the mirror over the bar.

Elena followed her gaze and examined the image. Tatyana’s eyes were half-closed, the cigarette in the corner of her wide mouth. “Dietrich,” she said.

Tatyana looked at Elena and Sasha in the mirror and saw no recognition. “Marlene Dietrich,” Tatyana said.

“Do you know where the girl is?” asked Sasha.

“Everyone is too young,” Tatyana said, shaking her head. “You want a drink? I’ll buy.”

“We’ve got drinks,” said Elena.

“You have water,” Tatyana whispered into Elena’s ear. The woman’s breath was warm and sweet. Elena forced herself not to move.

“You called the Syrian,” Sasha said again. “Do you know where the girl is? If you do not answer, we will take you to a very small holding cell in District Eleven where you can sit all night on a bench in a very bright little room with nothing to do while you try to remember.”

Tatyana smiled. “You are a year too late, pretty policeman,” she said. “You can’t do such things anymore. People will run and tell on you and you will have to say five Hail Yeltsins in penance.”

“You are drunk,” said Elena.

“I am stoned,” Tatyana corrected in English.

“What?” Elena asked. The woman’s face was now inches from hers.

“Your partner is very pretty,” she said. “And you are very, what are the words in French, plantureuse et douce.”

Elena looked puzzled.

“She says you are full-figured and sweet,” said Sasha.

“Est-ce que vous parlez français?” said Tatyana, turning her attention to Sasha.

“Oui, je le comprends,” he said above the music. “You can answer in French or Russian, but you will answer. I will ask once more and then I will climb on this bar, break that mirror, and order everyone to leave.”

“I have a better idea,” said Tatyana, looking into Elena’s eyes. “Why don’t the three of us go in back, climb on top of the beer cases in the storeroom, and take off our clothes?”

“The girl,” said Elena evenly.

Tatyana looked past her in triumph and said to Sasha, “Did you hear that? The little tremor in her voice? She is tempted, our petite choute.”

A man to Sasha’s right had his back turned. He was engaged in earnest conversation with a very young girl with long dark hair. Sasha pushed the man out of the way and climbed up on the bar.

Heads turned toward him, smiles crossed faces. A few people clapped, believing a young drunk had decided to make a dancing fool of himself. One of the four young-old men in the electric band saw him, pointed with his guitar, and the music went wild. Sasha looked down at Tatyana, who was whispering something to Elena.

“Quiet,” shouted Tkach, pushing the hair from his eyes.

No one was quiet.

“Get down,” said Tatyana. “You’ll get yourself hurt.”

“I am the police,” Tkach shouted, reaching down for his half-full glass of warm beer.

“It is Sting,” shouted a young male voice, and those nearby who heard roared with hollow laughter.

Sasha flung the glass at the mirror. Shards of glass sprayed the bartenders and patrons, who covered their heads and eyes.

“Get down, Tkach,” Elena said, touching his leg. Around her was an ocean of faces beginning to realize that this might not be a drunken joke. The music stopped suddenly, except for one guitarist with spiked hair whose eyes were closed. Another guitarist poked the spike-haired one in the shoulder and the final guitar let out a thin eeeel and died.

Conversations died; all attention turned to the show at the bar.

“We are the police,” Sasha shouted. “This bar is closed. Hard currency has been exchanged here.” He pulled out his wallet and held it up with his red identification card and picture showing.

“Throw it here and give us a look,” came a tough voice from the yellow-gray shadows.

“No, pull your trousers down and give us a look,” came a woman’s voice, which brought further howls.

Tatyana reached for Sasha’s right leg and grabbed his trousers. “Get down,” she cried. “You … get down. I’ll talk to you.”

“You’ll talk to me when everyone leaves,” shouted Tkach. “You had your chance.”

“Leonid,” Tatyana screamed, pulling at Tkach, but there was so much noise from the crowd that no one could hear her.

Elena grabbed Tatyana’s wrist and wrenched it from Sasha’s leg. Tatyana’s free hand went between Elena’s legs as one of the bartenders shoved Sasha from behind. He fell forward into the drunk with the flower in his mouth, and both went tumbling onto the floor. Something smelled foul and acrid as he tried to stand. A booted foot caught him in the chest. Sasha had the sense that people were trampling him, stampeding toward the door. He felt like a soccer ball rapidly losing air. Women screamed. Men cursed. Something hit him behind the ear.

“Smash the bastard,” Tatyana’s voice cried.

Somewhere in the mesh of voices a musical instrument hit something hard and echoed like a wind chime. Somewhere close by, a fist came down against Sasha’s ear and he sank back onto the floor.

Another foot. Another fist. Sasha covered his face and tried to roll into a ball as he had been taught to do in situations like this. He had also been taught that situations like this should never be allowed to happen.

He told himself to keep from tightening his back muscles as he groped for his knee and felt something solid crash against the knuckles of his right hand. He waited for the next blow, not knowing where it would land, wondering if Elena was alive. No blow came. It was a trick. If he opened his eyes and rolled over, he was sure the bartender with the bad teeth would smash him in the face with a beer bottle.

Sasha forced himself to roll over and open his eyes, to search for Elena, to try to help her. Above him, horizontal and five feet off the ground, was a man with a surprised look on his face. The man was suspended as if he were part of a stage magician’s act, and then, suddenly, the levitation stopped and the man flipped over past Sasha’s huddled body and skidded into a table. Another man, this one larger than the one who had flown past, tripped over Tkach with a loss of air and tried to regain his balance, but he was moving too quickly and the bar caught his back with a snap.

“Are you badly hurt, Sasha Tkach?” Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov said, reaching down to him.

Tkach took his hand and was lifted easily to his feet. “Elena?” he asked, and then he saw her.

Tatyana was bending over the bar as if she were trying to vomit on the other side. Elena was holding the woman’s head down. Elena’s hair was wild, a wispy curl coming down over her right eye. There was a sound near the beaded curtain at the rear of the stage. Sasha looked and discovered that only his right eye was open.

In front of the curtain stood a large man in a leather jacket. Leonid Dovnik’s eyes met those of Rostnikov, who saw that the man was considering whether to advance or retreat. Even with one eye Sasha could see that in spite of what the Washtub had done, the man was not afraid. That frightened Sasha. Elena looked up in time to meet Dovnik’s eyes, which had turned to her. He looked at her for a moment, fixing her in his memory. Then, in no hurry at all, he turned and went back through the curtain.

The two men Rostnikov had thrown across the room lay groaning, one with fingers trying to hold in the blood from a smashed nose, the other grasping his back and trying to stand erect.

“What are you doing here?” asked Tkach on wobbly legs.

“Your mother found me,” said Rostnikov. “She was afraid you might be doing something foolish and dangerous, which, as we both know, is absurd.”

He reached over to Tkach and touched his swollen eye. Tkach winced and pulled back. Rostnikov shook his head and moved to Elena at the bar. “You are unhurt, Elena Timofeyeva?”

“I am fine,” Elena answered. Her voice was almost calm, though Rostnikov could hear the last faint note of excitement and fear.

“Let her up,” he said, and Elena released Tatyana, who pushed herself up and looked about the café. Her makeup was smudged.

“You didn’t have to do this,” she said to Elena. “What have I done to you? I had some fun, told you you were attractive. Is that a reason you two should break up my café?”

“We are sorry,” said Rostnikov, handing her a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket. He never used a handkerchief himself, but he had discovered it was very useful to a policeman when dealing with a weeping suspect or witness. “My young colleague is about to become a father for the second time.”

“Well, why didn’t he say so?” said Tatyana, turning with the handkerchief in hand to examine herself in the mirror. But there was no longer much of a mirror behind the bar.

“He has a lot on his mind,” said Rostnikov. “May I sit?”

“If you can find an unbroken chair,” said Tatyana.

“I have a bad leg,” explained Rostnikov, finding a chair and sitting.

“I am sorry,” said Tatyana, “but I can’t pay for this damage. Mirrors, chairs. Do you know what they cost? If you can even find them.”

Rostnikov looked around. The two injured men were now gone and there was quite a bit of damage.

“And the business I just lost,” she said. “I’m not a wealthy woman.”

“Where is the Arab girl? Amira Durahaman?” asked Elena. “Her father will give you the reward if you know.”

“You didn’t have to hurt me because I made you feel something you never felt before,” Tatyana said.

“I made love to two women when I was in college,” Elena said. “It was mildly interesting. You think too highly of yourself.”

Sasha Tkach pulled out a chair and sat next to Sasha. Both men looked at the two women.

“I’ll get the reward?” Tatyana asked.

“If there is a reward,” said Elena.

“I would like,” said Sasha, “a mineral water with no gas. Is that possible?”

Tatyana shrugged and moved behind the bar.

“Inspector,” Elena said. “I would like your permission to find a basin and wash myself.”

“Wash,” said Rostnikov. Elena moved toward the beaded curtains.

“I’m sorry,” said Tkach, feeling his tender ribs. “I made a serious mistake. “

“Not if you wished to commit suicide in the line of duty. If that was your goal, then there was no mistake, just the accident of my arrival. It is very strange, Sasha Tkach. I have never seen a fight in a bar before. In all my years as a policeman, never a fight until tonight. It was like a John Wayne movie.”

“The Spoilers,” said Tatyana, coming around the bar. “Dietrich and John Wayne.” She placed a glass of mineral water in front of Rostnikov.

“Thank you,” he said. “Please sit. I gather from what I have heard that you may know where to find the Syrian girl.”

“A reward would help pay for the damage your crazy policeman has caused,” she said.

“We can talk to the girl’s father about a reward,” said Rostnikov. “I will suggest he not pay. I will suggest to you that your reward for telling us about the girl will be our departure. Life is hard and getting no easier. But there are exceptions, moments of, if not hope, at least relief. A child is born healthy. A book absorbs us. A friend laughs. Unwanted guests depart and never return.”

“I know nothing of the girl,” Tatyana said, folding her arms. “But if I-”

“Look at me,” Rostnikov said. And she looked at the homely face of a man with large, very sympathetic brown eyes. “My son wrote a play. I saw it tonight. I did not like the play. Not because it was a bad play, but because I saw in it what others may not have seen. The pain of my only son.” He looked at Sasha Tkach, who ran his hand through his hair and turned away. Against the far wall the rattle of beads announced Elena’s return.

“In the play my son’s character is killed. He rose when the curtain went down and men came out to greet us. A boy who knew the missing Syrian girl died this morning. He had a father and a mother. He will not rise and greet his parents. Amira Durahaman has a father. You will tell us where to find the girl. Otherwise I will take you with us, and you will, I am sorry to say, be very unhappy.”

“The girl came in here sometimes,” Tatyana said, looking around at the three policemen. “She came in with a young Jew, sometimes others. I don’t know their names, so don’t ask me. I don’t know names. I give customers nicknames-the Barstool, Hands, the Siberian, Phil Collins. They like that.”

“And the girl?” asked Sasha. “Did you have a name for her?”

“Bright Eyes,” said Tatyana. “I know no more, but I’ll try to-”

“Lock your doors and come with us,” said Rostnikov.

“Please,” Tatyana said, almost in tears.

“Officer Timofeyeva, will you please take-” he began, and the woman crumbled.

“No prison. People are getting lost in prisons. They’re not being fed. Names. Names. I’ll give you names if you promise no prison.”

Porfiry Petrovich nodded at Elena, who took out her pen and notebook and began writing the names that came from Tatyana.

When she was finished, Rostnikov turned to Elena and said, “Go home, sleep.”

Elena Timofeyeva opened her mouth to say something, glanced at Tatyana, who was not looking at her, and decided to say nothing.

“Sasha Tkach, we’ll stop at the hospital, have you looked at, sewn, and patched before we send you home.”

“I can clean up at home,” Tkach said.

“If you go home looking like that,” said Rostnikov, “you will frighten your wife and child and bring the wrath of your mother down on my head. No, my own peace depends on the ability of some tired nurse to put you in acceptable surface condition. On the way we can talk.”

“Her,” said Elena, nodding at Tatyana. “She might run away.”

“She will not run,” said Rostnikov. “She is a woman of property.”

Tatyana looked around the wreck of a room. “I won’t run,” she answered, so softly that Elena wasn’t sure she had heard her. “This street, this city, this café. I won’t run.”

Something vibrated through Tatyana and her voice suddenly rose. “I will survive,” she said. “I will prosper.”

Rostnikov stood, moved the toes of his left foot, and found them still functional. “It has been a busy day,” he said. “And tomorrow promises to be no easier.”

Colonel Lunacharski was not hungry, but he sat alone in the almost empty cafeteria at two in the morning drinking a glass of coffee into which he had stirred three spoons of sugar. Colonel Lunacharski was not hungry, but he was tired. Getting out of his office was essential, and there was no place to go at two in the morning but the small cafeteria for night-duty officers in Lubyanka.

Only weeks before he had been among the elite stationed at Yasenevo, the headquarters of the KGB’s intelligence-and-espionage arm, outside the city. From his office on the twentieth floor, Lunacharski had been able to look down at a lush les, the forest that had given the headquarters the name by which it was known to him and the others who were insiders.

The dining room in Yasenevo had been one of the principal perks of power. But that was gone, at least for him, at least for now.

Since Lunacharski disliked coffee, which he drank to help him stay awake, he could tolerate it only with massive doses of sugar. He was well aware from experience that the sugar and coffee would charge him with energy now, but that the artificial charge would not last. In half an hour he would have to remove his coat and stand outside in the cold air till he felt revitalized enough to go back to his office and take a pill, which would get him through till late in the afternoon.

Vladimir Lunacharski made it a rule to exercise vigorously and never to take more than two pills a week. He was well aware of the dangers of addiction and confident that he could walk the line between his need for wakefulness and his dependency on the orange pills.

Colonel Lunacharski knew well why he disliked coffee. His father, a man of terrible temper, had drunk massive quantities of both tea and coffee. His father’s long, fine fingers had been stained by his addiction to the beans themselves, which, when he could get them, he chewed like candy.

His father, an army sergeant, had died in 1968 of a stroke after a screaming rage over his wife’s having overcooked a ham.

Vladimir thought he remembered when he was an infant and his mother’s breasts gave him sour milk after his father, an army sergeant, had shouted, pounded, and threatened.

The four people in the cafeteria were all at least forty-five years old. Each of them was sitting alone. None of them acknowledged anyone else or looked around. One man near the door had a notebook on the table in front of him, which he thumbed through as he drank coffee. The other two simply put their heads down and ate, though the cafeteria food was no longer the best in Moscow.

Lunacharski had given himself ten minutes, and the ten minutes were almost over. He pushed back his chair and started to rise. Then he saw Klamkin the Frog enter the cafeteria, look around, and head toward him. The colonel was not surprised at the agent’s appearance. He had left a note on the door indicating where he could be found. As Klamkin approached, Lunacharski sat down again, for the Frog was at least two inches taller than he.

“May I?” asked Klamkin, who had brushed back his hair and recently shaved so that he could appear fresh for the meeting.

Lunacharski pointed to the chair across from him and Klamkin sat.

“Spokniokov and Glenin are still outside the Intourist Hotel waiting for the German,” Klamkin said. “Our agent reports that Timofeyeva and Tkach went to the Nikolai Café, where Tkach started a riot. He was beaten but not too badly. Rostnikov arrived to help him.”

“Rostnikov?” Lunacharski thought he might not have heard Klamkin correctly.

“Yes. He went to the theater with his wife, took her home, and then went immediately to the Nikolai.”

“His son’s play,” said Lunacharski.

“Yes. The play was antimilitary but well done.”

“Well done?” asked Lunacharski. “You watched it? Our agents are now doing theatrical reviews?”

Klamkin said nothing.

“And where are Rostnikov and the others now?”

“Home. In bed or at least in their apartments. If Rostnikov goes to Arkush, I will go with him. The only person not sleeping is the Syrian. The light in his apartment window is on and he is pacing. He has people looking for his daughter.”

“Go home, Klamkin. Sleep. Be ready for tomorrow.”

“It is too late to sleep and my apartment building is too noisy in the morning. With your permission, Colonel, I will sleep in the back of the car while Brodivov watches for Rostnikov.”

“Fine,” said Lunacharski. “But don’t become careless. Pull Spokniokov and Glenin from the German before you go to sleep. Reassign them to the search for the Arab girl. I wish to find her before the Syrians or Snitkonoy’s people. Do you drink coffee?”

“Yes,” said Klamkin. “But I prefer tea.”

“Stay here and have a cup before you make the calls,” said Lunacharski. He stood and motioned for Klamkin to remain seated. Klamkin nodded.

As Colonel Lunacharski moved down the corridor he listened to his boot steps echoing through the emptiness. Reports were piled on his desk. What he wanted to do was go into the streets and look for the Arab girl or from the dark interior of an unmarked Zil watch her father pace the floor. What he wanted to do was take the train to Arkush to see for himself, but he had to remain here to monitor the operations. There was no time for indulgence. For him there were reports and pills and a wife he would not have to see for another day.

The world was changing quickly. General Karsnikov sought the possibilities for survival wherever they might be and one of the possibilities lay in the former MVD office of Aleksandr Snitkonoy. Lunacharski had worked out a plan, which he was now perfecting. He would try to be patient. He would watch the Wolfhound’s operation, perhaps even infiltrate it, and demonstrate that while it served a useful function, it was inefficient, ineffective, run by a blustering ass, and peopled by eccentrics who had been unable to function in other security branches.

“The moment will come,” the general had said, “when we can place the evidence before the new Russian administration and I will be able not only to strongly suggest but to present evidence that your department is far more capable of pursuing the special cases of a new government.”

“I understand,” Lunacharski had said.

“I can give you little for this operation, Colonel, but if you succeed, it can mean much for us, much for you. You understand?”

“Completely.”

“We have lost a great deal,” General Karsnikov had said, lighting a foul-smelling Turkish cigarette. “We must work to build a new base of power.”

Colonel Lunacharski had not asked who “we” were, because he knew. In a time when there was little to be pleased with, it was a comfort to be part of the unnamed and waiting army.