Death Of A Russian Priest

SEVEN

In his office in Lubyanka Colonel Lunacharski shifted the telephone from his right to his left ear. The right ear was moist. What he really needed was his old phone, on which you could simply talk into the box while sitting back or examining a file. The inconvenience of having to hold a sticky plastic receiver reminded him of the distance he would have to travel to redeem himself.

The first call, from Arkush, came late in the afternoon. The report was complete. Colonel Lunacharski took notes.

“They arrived slightly after two, had tea at the Communist party hall, and prepared a list of those they wished to interview,” Klamkin reported. “Would you like the entire list over the phone?”

“Yes.”

They went through the list, name by name, detail by detail.

“I want backgrounds on all of them,” Lunacharski said.

“How deep?”

“To birth or before, if records permit. What else?”

“Rostnikov is returning to Moscow for the night,” the agent reported. “The other one, Karpo, will remain.”

“Where will Rostnikov’s investigation take place?”

“Party hall.”

“Do you have equipment to monitor?”

“One of the new directionals would be useful.”

“We cannot get one,” the colonel said, hiding his bitterness. In his previous position at the fifth directorate Lunacharski would simply issue an order and any technology would be available instantly. Now … “Use the standard plants. They will be adequate.”

“Yes,” said Klamkin.

“Then drive back here to report. I don’t care what time it is. I’ll be in my office.”

By six o’clock three more reports had come in. The colonel had access to the pool of typists, but like a good officer, he distrusted the pool. The departmental assistant who had been assigned to him could type, but Lunacharski distrusted him, too. He had requested his own assistant from the fifth, but the request had been denied without explanation.

He would prepare his own reports for General Karsnikov until he could identify someone within his structure whose loyalty he could depend on. Klamkin was good, but there was a difference between “good” and “loyal.”

The last call came in before seven and was the most distressing of all.

“Tkach and Timofeyeva are at the Syrian embassy,” the agent reported. “They went there directly upon leaving the Zalinsky apartment.”

The caller waited for a response from the colonel but heard only a pause, during which Lunacharski savored the likelihood that Tkach and Timofeyeva had gone well beyond their authority in approaching the Syrian embassy.

“Continue to monitor their activity,” he told the agent. “Give me a report when they go home for the night. I will be here at all times.”

It was almost eleven at night when Colonel Lunacharski decided to call his wife. “I’ll not be home tonight,” he said.

“All right,” she answered.

“I will stop by in the morning, early, to shower and shave and change my clothes. I may have to work all night tomorrow, too.”

“When will you sleep?”

“When I can. On the couch here.”

“Good night, then,” she said.

“Good night,” he answered, and hung up the phone.

He had known she would be up, that she had within the hour returned home from the apartment of her lover, a low-ranking member of the State Commission on International Trade. The lover traveled frequently. Lunacharski kept track of the man’s schedule through an agent who was told that the man was a security risk.

Lunacharski was neither vengeful nor angry nor jealous. He was, in fact, pleased that this man kept his wife distracted, kept her from draining his energy with domestic battles. His work required Lunacharski’s full attention and it was work to which he now returned.

When Leonid Dovnik entered the Nikolai Café that morning, Tatyana was just hanging up the phone.

“So?” she asked.

“So,” he answered, setting his packages on the bar. “He is dead.”

Once Tatyana would have shuddered or at least shrugged with resignation. She had known the young man, Grisha Zalinsky, had seen him in the Nikolai many times, heard him laugh, watched him touch the Arab girl gently, tried to remember what it felt like to be touched like that by a man.

Leonid went into his pocket and came out with a crumpled package of letters tied together with string. He handed them to her and she walked behind the counter.

“I found these under his socks,” he said.

Leonid watched as she took out a lighter, lit a cigarette, and pulled out the first letter.

She read it slowly and looked at him. “I wonder who would pay more for these love letters from an Arab girl to a Jew, the father or the daughter? If they are all as descriptive as the first …You want to read them?”

“No.”

“Find her,” Tatyana said, opening the second letter. “Do not bring her back here. Do not let her know that you have found her. Just find her.”

Leonid moved toward the door without a question, which was one of the reasons Tatyana liked using him. He had absolutely no curiosity. He ate, drank, enjoyed having money, though he did not seem to spend very much of it, and he seemed to have no sexual appetite. Tatyana had twice attempted to take him on the cot in the storeroom. The first time was after she had been rejected by a customer, a woman. The woman, not much of a prize, had almost sneered. She had tried to take Leonid Dovnik in anger more than lust, but he had simply said that he wasn’t interested in such things.

The second time had been more calculating. It was after he had begun doing “jobs” for her and she thought that sex might bind him, at least that is what she told herself. She did not wish to be rejected by this dull hulk again, and if it happened, she did not want it to be because he found her unappealing. Once again he rejected her.

“I don’t like doing that,” he said.

She hadn’t bothered to ask him why he didn’t like sex, but she could tell this time that it was the truth. He was not rejecting Tatyana the individual. He would have rejected any woman. She asked him, gently because he had killed at least seven people with no apparent remorse, if he liked men.

“You mean homosexual? No.”

And that had ended it. Since that second attempt their relationship had been all business. He spent much of his time seated at a table in the rear of the café drinking beer in the shadows. Tatyana had no trouble ignoring him until he was needed to eject a drunk or do a chore for which a favored customer had paid in hard currency.

“I just saw two people, a man and woman, come out of here,” he said. “They were arguing.”

“Police,” Tatyana answered, considering whether she wanted a drink. Both the good and bad thing about running a bar was that you could drink whatever and whenever you wished. Leonid Dovnik did not drink anything harder than beer. Leonid Dovnik did not smoke. Leonid Dovnik did not like women. Leonid Dovnik did not like men. Leonid Dovnik did not even like to do what he did best, kill. “Do you want to know why they were here?”

Leonid looked at her blankly.

“They are looking for the girl,” she said, leaning toward him over the counter.

“We are looking for the girl,” he said.

“We will be paid well by her father if we find her first,” she said.

“It would be easier if I just killed her,” he said. He looked into his bag to be sure everything he had bought was there. A piece of meat would have been good. He could make a kind of casserole or meat pie. But he had no meat.

“Our goal is to make money,” Tatyana said, lighting another cigarette to help her think. She leaned forward, elbows on the bar, head in her cupped hands. “When you find her, don’t do anything. I told you. Just let me know.”

The door to the café opened and Yuri, the cleanup man, shambled in. He looked at Leonid and Tatyana and scurried away to the storeroom to fill the wash pail with water.

“Perhaps we can have them bid against each other, those people who want her found and those who do not,” Tatyana said. “I’ll work on it. First, we must find her.”

Leonid stood up. “Can you put my groceries in your refrigerator?”

“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

The Syrian embassy in Moscow is located at number 4 Mansurovsky Street. It is open from 9:00 A.M. to 2:30 P.M. Monday through Friday. It is a relatively busy embassy compared with those of, say, Thailand or Australia. It is busy because the interests of the commonwealth states and Syria are often similar enough to make frequent intercourse worthwhile. The foremost of these interests is oil, an interest grown all the more vital since the disastrous loss of supplies from Iraq and the collapse of the ruble. The People’s Oil Industrial Investment Euro-Asian Corporation was promising new Siberian oil wells and improved transportation systems, but oil production had begun to fall even before the demise of the old Soviet Union and was expected to continue to fall by at least ten percent a year, perhaps till the end of the century.

As they sat in the small waiting room of the embassy, Sasha Tkach and Elena Timofeyeva were not aware of the depth of the relationship of their country and Syria, but they knew that an Arab oil minister was to be treated with sensitivity and courtesy.

There was nothing to look at in the room except a large photograph of Syria’s President Assad, staring to his right in the general direction of Poland.

The room was almost unbearably hot. Both Sasha and Elena had removed their coats and rested them on their laps. Now they awaited the return of the man with the thick dark hair and bushy mustache who had led them into this room.

“Kahk dyeelah? How are you?” Elena asked.

Sasha was staring at the president of Syria.

“How are you?” Elena repeated.

“I am growing sullen again,” he said.

“Have I told you you are a difficult man to work with?” Elena said.

“Yes, but I am not always difficult.”

“One hundred percent of the time in my experience,” she said.

“And that experience, you must admit, is very, very limited.”

“If you-” Elena began, but stopped abruptly when Sasha put his finger to his lips and motioned over his shoulder with his thumb.

At first she sensed rather than saw or heard the man who had entered the room. Tkach had not even looked in the direction of the man behind him, but he had known he was there.

Elena’s eyes met Sasha’s with a question, her mouth opening slightly. Sasha smiled enigmatically, stood, and turned. Elena stood and turned also.

“I am Hassam Durahaman,” the man said in a deep voice that betrayed no accent.

He was tall and trim and wore an unwrinkled blue suit. His skin was dark in sharp contrast with his white hair and thin white mustache. He stepped forward and held out his hand to Tkach. Tkach responded and found the grip firm and powerful. Durahaman nodded, almost a bow, in Elena’s direction.

“Coffee?” he asked, turning his back and motioning for them to follow. The man who had ushered them in entered the room.

“Yes,” said Tkach.

The second man took Sasha and Elena’s coats and the oil minister said something in Arabic. The man bowed and disappeared behind them as they entered a large office with a desk to their right. To their left a quartet of armchairs covered in a silky, muted red material circled a round table inlaid with what seemed to be thousands of black and white stones in an elaborate design. There was a large, ornate, rectangular rug. The background of the rug was a dull cream yellow. The foreground was a variety of colors, primarily red, in a labyrinthian pattern.

Durahaman moved to the table, held his palm out to Tkach to take a seat, and pulled out another chair for Elena. As she sat he pushed the chair in for her.

“Thank you,” she said.

When they were seated, the minister adjusted his trousers adroitly to keep them from wrinkling, rested his arms on the arms of the chair, and looked at them. “You have come to report on your efforts to find my daughter,” he said. “I can see by your faces that you have not located her. Am I correct?”

Elena waited for Sasha to answer, but he said nothing. “Correct,” she said. “But we have some ideas. We know where she spent much of her time and with whom. We would like to know if you have any information on where she might have gone or the people she associated with.”

Tkach pulled the photograph of Amira and Grisha Zalinsky from his pocket and held it forward for the oil minister to see.

Durahaman barely glanced at it. “Ah, the Jew who was murdered this morning,” he said as the door through which they had come opened. “Our coffee.”

The dark-haired man set a silver tray on the mosaic table. On the tray was a brass coffeepot with an ornate handle. The coffee cups were also brass with matching handles.

“How did you know about Zalinsky?” asked Elena.

“Sugar?” Durahaman asked.

“Two, please,” said Elena.

“None,” said Tkach, though he normally took three cubes at least if he could get them.

Durahaman poured and then waited while Sasha reached over to pick up the cup. The brass handle was painfully hot. He put the cup down gently and said, “I’ve changed my mind. I would like sugar. Three lumps.”

Durahaman nodded, dropped three cubes into his cup, and handed Sasha a spoon.

Elena reached for her cup, picked it up, and barely got it back into the saucer. A few drops spilled on the table. “I’m sorry,” she said, leaning over to wipe the spots with a napkin.”

Durahaman lifted his own steaming cup to his lips with a forgiving smile in her direction and sipped slowly.

“This table has withstood two revolutions,” he said. “A man died on this table. That was in Egypt many years ago. It took me four days to clean the blood from between the small tiles.”

“A steady hand and great patience,” said Tkach.

Elena tried to pick up her coffee again. It was too hot. Sasha had already picked his up and was drinking. She was damned, she decided, if she was going to play this game. She left the cup where it was.

Durahaman said, “Observe the carpet beneath our feet. It was made by hand more than three hundred years ago. I am told it took a year. The artist worked with infinite patience more than ten hours a day. The rug is priceless, but it is of no value unless it is seen and appreciated.”

“Like your daughter?” asked Tkach.

The minister did not answer.

“How did you know about the death of Grisha Zalinsky?” Elena asked again.

“A grateful friend in the law kindly informed me,” he said. “You are not drinking? Too strong?”

“Too hot,” she said.

“And is it too hot for you, Inspector?” he asked Tkach.

“No,” said Tkach. “I am a deputy inspector.”

“Yes,” said Durahaman. “You are both young. Experience with coffee and life are very helpful when one wishes to stay unburned and alive.”

“Your daughter is still missing,” said Tkach. “But we will find her.”

“It is your job to say that, Deputy Inspector,” Durahaman said, reaching out for the coffeepot. “You’d like a bit more? Not too strong, is it?”

Tkach accepted the coffee without putting the cup back in the saucer. Hassam Durahaman smiled at Elena. His teeth were white. She found him very charming.

“I have sent my limited staff in search of Amira,” he said. “I have a few humble resources.”

“Like your friend in the law?” asked Tkach.

“Yes, like my friend in the law. In my country young men are taught to be polite to those in positions of power and authority.”

“I am sure,” said Tkach, putting down his cup and rising, “that our superiors and your friends will keep you informed about our efforts to find your daughter. Now, we must get back to work.”

“The young lady has not had her coffee,” Durahaman said calmly, “and I have something to tell you.”

Tkach stood awkwardly for a moment. His fingers, he knew, were burned, probably blistering. He looked at Elena and sat again, arms out on the arms of the chair as were those of his host. Elena tested the handle of the cup. It was still hot but manageable. She brought it to her lips.

“A woman called me several hours ago,” Durahaman said. “She said that she was sure she could locate my daughter. She wanted confirmation of the reward which the police had indicated I would pay. I asked her what police and she described a handsome young man with unruly hair and a very lovely young woman.”

Durahaman smiled again and toasted Elena with his cup. “I confirmed the reward,” he said, looking now at Tkach. “In fact, I increased the reward and told her she would be paid in hard currency, French francs not American dollars. Do you know this woman?”

“Yes,” said Elena.

“I do not like people making offers on my behalf without my consent,” said Durahaman. “I do not pay extortion. My country and my people have learned a great deal from our enemies.”

“The Israelis,” said Tkach.

“Yes,” said Durahaman. “If this woman finds Amira, I do not intend to pay her. However, I expect you to meet her again, if necessary, tell her she will be paid, and get my daughter.”

“You want us to lie,” said Elena.

“As you already have in my name,” he reminded her. “It is not my honor that is in question. It is yours. It is growing late.”

As he rose slowly Elena hurriedly finished her coffee. “And,” he continued, “you have work to do.”

“There has been a murder,” said Tkach. He stood up with Elena. “The murder of a young man who knew your daughter well. She may be in danger. She may be dead.”

“I hope no one is foolish enough to harm her,” Durahaman said, holding out his hand to guide them toward the door. The meeting was definitely over.

“We will find the murderer,” said Tkach as they walked.

“The murder of the Jew is of no interest to me,” Durahaman said gently.

“No interest?” asked Tkach. “A Jew was your daughter’s … friend and you are-”

“-not interested,” said Durahaman. “Understand me. It is not Jews as a race I despise. It is Israel. I am a Semite, as are the Jews. My quarrel and that of my country is a political, not a racial, issue. Perhaps we shall speak again soon.”

The man who had served the coffee was standing outside the office door when Durahaman opened it. The man handed the police officers their coats and Durahaman stepped back inside the office and closed the doors without another word.

Tkach’s burned fingers tingled with electric pain as he put on his coat. The dark-haired man helped Elena on with hers and led them toward me front door.

“Your oil minister is descended from royalty?” asked Elena.

“Hassam Durahaman was born the fifth son of a street cleaner in Damascus,” the man said; “He did not learn to read or write until he was twenty-three. He has fought often, in many countries, has been severely wounded five times, and has lost his left lung.”

“Fascinating,” Sasha Tkach said sourly.

“He and his only surviving brother are known to have personally assassinated three traitors to Syrian liberty,” the man said, opening the front door for them. “He is a man of respect in my country, a man who is known for his determination and his successes.”

“And,” said Elena, stepping out onto the sidewalk, “what would he think of your telling us all of this about him?”

“He ordered me to tell you,” said the man. “And he ordered me to tell you that I had been so ordered.” With that the Syrian closed the door of the embassy.

“He lied,” said Tkach.

“About what?”

“His daughter and her Jewish lover,” he said. “He cares.”

“So what now?” asked Elena with a sigh. “Back to the Nikolai?”

“Now,” replied Tkach, “I go home and eat. I will meet you in front of the Nikolai at ten.”

“You think she is dead?” Elena said.

“Dead, kidnapped, on her way to Australia, who knows?” he said, rubbing his eyes. “We do what we must do. We look.”

“If she is still in Moscow and alive, I think it would be best for her if we are the ones to find her.”

“Or,” said Tkach, “if no one finds her.”

The night was growing cold, and Sasha was feeling the chill, but it did not seem to bother Elena.

“Go home and meet me at ten,” Sasha said, wanting to take care of the tingling pain in his fingers. He turned abruptly, shoved his hands in his pockets, and strode away.