Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 15

It took Liza a long time to get to sleep. Lena kept telling her how she and Nanny Vera were going to the country, to a holiday house. They were going to take walks in the woods, breathe the fresh air, and watch the coming of spring.

“What’s a holidouse?” Liza asked.

“It’s a house in the woods in a very pretty place. People go there for vacation,” Lena explained.

“Are you coming with us?”

“We’re all going together. We’re driving with Aunt Olga. And then Papa will pick you up.”

“I want you to stay with us at the holidouse.”

“Liza, sweetie, you and Nanny Vera won’t be there long without me. And I’ll be working.”

“Why?”

“So that we have enough money to go to the sea this summer.”

“I don’t want to go to the sea, I want to be with you and Papa. Is Papa coming back soon?”

“Yes, little one, Papa’s coming back soon. Have you already decided which toys you’re taking with you to the holiday house?”

Liza was out of her little bed in a flash. She ran to her toy box and started pulling out one toy after another very seriously, saying, “I’ll take you, little elephant, and you, little dog. And I’ll take all my blocks. And this big car, and my dolly stroller. Don’t cry, dolly, I’ll take you with me to the holidouse.”

It was eleven thirty by the time Liza closed her eyes. But even in her sleep she kept murmuring, “Mama, Mama, I want to be with you and Papa… Let’s all go to the holidouse together, please…”

Highway Patrol was starting on channel six. Lena turned on the kettle, pulled her legs underneath her on the kitchen sofa, lit a cigarette, and without looking at the screen, listened distractedly to the offscreen announcer’s voice and thought about what she had to do tomorrow. Stores and cleaning in the afternoon, and Michael was arriving in the evening. He’d asked whether he could spend the couple of nights before their flight to Tyumen at Lena’s so he wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel.

“There are no hotels anywhere in the world more expensive than in Moscow,” he’d said, apologizing.

She’d probably have to cook something and organize a dinner in honor of his visit.

“One person has been reported dead in a fire on Zaslavsky Street,” the offscreen voice said. “At about three in the morning, residents of the first and second floors were awakened by the strong smell of smoke coming from an apartment on the building’s first floor.

“Arriving firefighters discovered the body of a young woman in the apartment. The deceased, Ekaterina Sinitsyna, had lived there alone as of very recently. According to neighbors, she kept to herself and did not abuse alcohol.”

Lena shuddered and stared at the screen. “According to preliminary reports, the fire was caused by smoking in bed.”

The screen changed and a report on road accidents followed. Lena turned off the television and dialed Olga’s number.

“Yes, I know.” Olga sighed. “We should have expected this. She injected a huge quantity of morphine, a fatal dose, and fell asleep with a cigarette.”

“The fire started at about two?”

“Yes, by three everything was in flames.”

“I spoke to her just after one. Some woman had come to see her. Katya apologized and set the receiver down to go open the door. When I tried to call her back, the line was busy. Olga, they killed her. The same people who killed Mitya. It’s all so smooth and logical again. A failed singer indulges in drugs with his addict wife and then hangs himself. A few days later, his wife dies as a result of an accident completely typical of drunks and addicts. It’s all too logical, too neat.”

Lena fell silent. She could hear Olga sobbing softly into the phone.

“Olga, sweetheart, I beg of you, please, listen to me. You didn’t want to listen to Katya last night. Listen to what she read out to me.”

Lena took the phone into the bedroom, turned on the computer, and opened the “Rabbit” file.

“The text was on a crumpled piece of paper that was in Mitya’s jacket pocket. And this second one, it was on a cassette of songs that Mitya left with me.”

“Was Mitya trying to blackmail someone?” Olga asked hoarsely after she’d heard the whole thing.

“At the least, he was thinking about whether or not he would. I think he decided not to. It made him sick. Try to remember all your last conversations. Look around your house. Maybe there’s something still there. Could he have left his diary and address book with you?”

“Fine.” Olga sobbed. “I’ll try. But we definitely don’t have his diary or notebook. You know what our apartment is like; there isn’t anything just lying around. Everything is in its place.”

After talking to Olga, Lena immediately dialed Misha Sichkin. But no one answered. Listening to the long beeps, Lena remembered that Misha’s wife, Ksenya, often turned the phone off after midnight. And it was almost twenty to one.

Who else in Seryozha’s department could she call at this hour? No one, probably. She had to wait until tomorrow, when she could call Misha at work. At least she wouldn’t have to start at the beginning. He already knew about Mitya and the fake doctor.

Now Lena had virtually no doubt that the mysterious Valentina Yurievna had not been casing her apartment. It was no accident that after her visit Lena had been left feeling as though her visitor had x-rayed her. That woman was connected to the people who did away with Mitya and Katya. She was just feeling Lena out. They wanted to know what she knew and how dangerous she was.

But in that case, why hadn’t anyone shown up at Olga’s for the same purpose? Olga was his sister, after all.

But that wasn’t what was most important. She needed to understand why all this was happening. Who benefited and why.

For now she could draw just one cautious and highly vague conclusion: it had something to do with their Siberian trip long ago. Those memories were why Mitya had come to see her the month before. He’d been trying to clarify something with her, but at the time she hadn’t attached any importance to it. She’d thought he was just feeling nostalgic for his youth.

Lena had a pretty decent memory, but the events of fourteen years ago had settled somewhere very deep down. Over the intervening years so many significant things had been layered over them. Fourteen years felt like a lifetime.

Maybe photographs would help. She doubted there were any from the trip. They hadn’t had a camera with them, but there had to be lots of university photos from 1982. Maybe if she looked through them, some unexpected yet important detail would come to mind.

She only had one photo album. Seryozha had bought it especially for photos of Liza. Lena had never kept albums. She kept her old photographs at the bottom of her great-grandmother’s antique trunk in the entryway.

As she rummaged through the old trunk, Lena found a large, light gray sweater. It was very old. It had belonged to her father, but Lena had shamelessly taken it from him. She liked to go around in her papa’s big sweaters. They felt especially warm and cozy. She had taken this very sweater with her to Siberia in the summer of 1982.

Her papa had died five years ago, but to this day, the most trivial thing—a random object or a turn of phrase—would bring memories of him flooding in, drowning out everything else. It especially hurt that her papa had never seen Liza. He’d wanted a grandchild so badly, but Lena had had too complicated a personal life and too interesting a job. She’d thought she had plenty of time for that.

Her papa was never sick. When they got the terrible diagnosis of stomach cancer at the cancer center on Kashirka and the doctors told Lena there was nothing to be done—that Nikolai Polyansky had no more than two months to live—she didn’t believe it. To the very end she didn’t believe it. She kept hoping the doctors were wrong, that a miracle would happen.

Lena had no one in the world but her papa. He’d raised her alone. Her mama, a hiker and master sportswoman, had fallen off a cliff on Mount Elbrus when Lena was barely two.

I was the same age as my Liza now, Lena suddenly thought. I’m not climbing mountains like my mama, but there is something serious and dangerous in my life right now.

Lena shook free from the flood of memories and discovered she was sitting on the floor of the entryway, her face buried in her papa’s old sweater.

This was the sweater she’d been wearing fourteen years ago, standing on the step in the train car door. The train was going from Tyumen to Tobolsk. It was a bright but foggy night. The sense of solitude and the endless taiga racing past had etched itself firmly in her memory. She’d had a bizarre and unpleasant conversation with the Tobolsk Young Communist on that train. With Volkov… the very same Veniamin Volkov.

He was now a famous producer and businessman. Gosha Galitsyn had gotten the shivers when Lena told him she knew “Volkov himself.”

Suddenly her heart started pounding madly. Mitya had talked about some famous producer but hadn’t named him. No. It couldn’t be.

Finally finding the torn, stuffed folder of old photographs and going through them quickly, Lena was surprised to come across one she’d completely forgotten about.

It was a large black-and-white photo. A few people, young men and women in construction brigade outfits, were standing against some kind of trailer. And in the middle were Mitya, Olga, Lena, and Veniamin Volkov.

Mitya was smiling straight at the lens. Olga was smiling, too, but looking down. Lena’s face in the photograph was tense and distraught. Looking more closely, she realized why. Tall, broad-shouldered Volkov was standing next to her and looking at her. He was looking at her and not at the camera, and Lena looked uneasy under his gaze.

On the back of the photo it said Tobolsk, June 1982, the Hope construction brigade.

They’d performed for the brigade. That was one of their best performances. Later they’d had tea in the construction trailer, the same one that was in the photo. The men from the brigade had sent it to the youth magazine where Lena and Olga were spending their internship, accompanied by an amusing letter. The letter was long since lost—but the photograph had survived.