Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 1

Moscow, March 1996

Lena Polyanskaya wrestled the stroller through the deep March slush and lumpy melting snow like a Volga boatman. The narrow street was lined with tall, hardened snowdrifts, and any speeding cars splashed the pedestrians with thick brown muck.

Two-year-old Liza kept trying to stand up in the stroller so she could walk on her own little feet. She thought she was too big for a stroller, and anyway, there were so many interesting things to look at: sparrows and ravens making a racket as they fought over wet bread crusts, a shaggy ginger pup chasing its own tail, and a bigger little boy walking toward them, gnawing on a bright red apple.

“Mama, Liza wants an apple, too,” the little girl informed her mother seriously, standing up yet again.

A big bag of groceries was hanging off the stroller handle, so the second Lena lifted Liza to seat her properly, the stroller tipped all the way back and the bag split open.

“All fall down,” Liza summed things up with a sigh, gazing from her mama’s arms to the groceries strewn through the muck.

“Yes, my love, all fall down. Now we’ll pick it all up.” Lena had carefully set her daughter on the sidewalk and was picking the groceries out of the slush and brushing them off with her glove when she noticed someone in a dark blue Volvo parked across the street, watching her intently. The tinted windows reflected the snowdrifts and pedestrians, so Lena couldn’t see exactly who was watching her, but she could feel that person’s gaze.

“We do make an entertaining spectacle.” She grinned as she managed to reattach the bag to the stroller handle, get Liza seated, and shake the dirt off her leather gloves.

When she turned into her own courtyard, she spotted the Volvo again. It drove by very closely, at minimum speed, as if the people in it wanted to remember exactly which door the young mother with the stroller entered.

There were two of them—a woman behind the wheel and a man in the passenger seat. Lena didn’t get a good look at them, but they got an excellent one of her.

“Are you certain?” the woman asked quietly after the door shut behind Lena.

“Absolutely. She’s barely changed in all these years.”

“She has to be thirty-six now,” the woman observed. “And that young mama couldn’t be over twenty-five. And the child’s so young. You haven’t mixed something up? It’s been a few years, after all.”

“No,” the man answered firmly. “I haven’t mixed anything up.”

The telephone trilled in the empty apartment.

“Can you talk now?” Lena barely recognized the voice of her dear friend and former classmate Olga Sinitsyna. The voice in the receiver was so strange, hoarse and very soft.

“Hi, Olga, what’s happened?” Lena pressed the receiver between her ear and shoulder and started untying the ribbons on Liza’s cap.

“Mitya’s dead,” Olga said very softly.

Lena thought she’d misheard.

“I’m sorry. What did you say?” she asked, pulling off Liza’s boots.

“Mama, Liza has to go,” her daughter solemnly informed her.

“Olga, are you home right now? I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes. I just walked in. I’ll get Liza undressed, put her on the potty, and call you right back.”

“Can I come over right now?” Olga asked quickly.

“Of course!”

Olga and Lena were the same age—thirty-six. Mitya Sinitsyn, Olga’s brother, was two years younger. How could a perfectly healthy thirty-four-year-old man full of strength and plans for the future who didn’t drink, use drugs, or have any connections to crime, drop dead?

Before Olga arrived, Lena managed to feed Liza lunch and put her to bed, wash the dishes, make a pot of cabbage soup, and start the laundry. Today she planned to translate at least five pages of a massive article about the latest psychological research on serial killers, “Cruelty and the Victim,” by the trendy American psychologist David Crowell.

Even though Liza was scarcely two, Lena worked a lot and still ran the same literature and art department at Smart magazine as she had before her daughter’s birth. The editor in chief had done his best to accommodate her and let her come in just two days a week. The lion’s share of her work she took home to finish at her computer at night. On her two in-house days, she left her daughter with a lonely old neighbor, since neither Lena nor her husband Sergei Krotov had living parents. Liza was growing up without grandmothers or grandfathers, and for Vera Fyodorovna, a well-educated pensioner, spending the day with a calm, loving child was sheer joy. And the money Lena and Sergei paid her came in handy, given her miserable pension.

“Don’t you think of sending my little Liza to day care!” Vera Fyodorovna would say. “As long as I’m on my feet and of sound mind, I’ll stay with her as much as you need.”

For Lena, having Vera Fyodorovna in the apartment across the way was a godsend. It wasn’t only that Sergei’s salary as a colonel in the Interior Ministry—he was deputy chief of the Criminal Division in the Domestic Counterintelligence Administration—barely supported them, but also that Lena herself couldn’t live without work. She realized she’d be replaced the instant she eased up even a little.

Lena’s time was scheduled down to the minute, and she was beyond exhausted, sleeping five hours a day at most. Now she only had one of her two precious hours of Liza’s afternoon nap left, that is, a good two pages of translation. But Lena didn’t even bother to sit down to her computer.

Ever since Olga’s call, all she could think about was Mitya. She imagined what must be going on now with his parents and his eighty-year-old grandmother, Zinaida Lukinichna, who, despite her advanced age, still had her wits and a keen perception of life… and death.

What could have happened to Mitya? An accident? Did a car run over him? Did a brick fall on his head? But everyone knows a brick doesn’t just fall on anybody’s head.

Lena had just turned on the electric kettle and poured coffee beans into the grinder when the doorbell rang.

Olga was standing in the doorway wearing a black kerchief, her grandmother’s, probably. Tousled, bright gold locks poked out helter-skelter. It was obvious at first glance that she hadn’t combed her hair or washed and had thrown on whatever was at hand. The news of Mitya’s death had caught her unawares. So it was an accident?

“He hanged himself,” Olga said in a dulled voice as she took off her coat. “He hanged himself last night, in his apartment. He looped his belt around the gas pipe above the kitchen door.”

“Where was his wife?” Lena asked quickly.

“Sleeping. Sleeping peacefully in the next room. She didn’t hear a thing.”

“Who found him?” Lena wanted to say “his body” but faltered. It was hard to refer that way to Mitya, who recently had dropped by for a visit and sat right here, on the kitchen sofa, sparking energy, health, and plans for the future.

“His wife. She woke up, went into the kitchen, and saw him.”

All of a sudden Lena noticed that Olga had stopped calling her brother’s wife by her name. Before she’d had nothing but praise for her.

“What happened next? At least have some coffee. Do you want me to ladle out some soup for you? I just made it.”

“No.” Olga shook her head. “No, I can’t eat anything. Or drink. Open the window a little and let’s smoke while Liza’s asleep. What really happened, no one saw.” Olga shrugged nervously and took a deep drag. “We only know what she said, and she doesn’t remember anything. She pulled Mitya out of the noose herself.”

“Wait a sec,” Lena interrupted her. “But Mitya was six feet tall and solidly built. Katya’s like Thumbelina, half his weight and three heads shorter.”

“Yes, she said it was very hard. But she couldn’t leave him like that, and she was hoping he might still be alive. Don’t worry, I’m thinking straight. I realize that anything’s possible, but out of the blue like that, without even a note. And Mitya had always considered suicide a terrible sin. This is not enough to tell the police, of course, but Mitya was baptized, he was Orthodox, he went to confession and took communion. Rarely, but still. Now there can’t even be a funeral because suicides don’t get funerals. Any sin can be prayed away—except this one.”

Olga had dark circles under her eyes, and her hand holding the dead cigarette was trembling.

“He dropped by to see me about a month ago,” Lena said softly. “He had so many plans. He was telling me he’d written five new songs, he’d gotten in to see some famous producer, and now he said he’d have one music video after another coming. I don’t remember exactly what we talked about, but I got the impression Mitya was doing great. Maybe a little too excited, but in a good way. Did some hopes he had connected with that producer fall through?”

“Those hopes of his were born and died ten times a month.” Olga grinned sadly. “He was used to it and took it totally calmly. All kinds of producers, big and small, were endlessly popping up in his life. No, if we’re talking about what truly worried him, then it was his own art, not in terms of popularity and money, but whether he could—or couldn’t—write. The last month he’d been writing like never before, and for him that was the main thing.”

“You mean you’re not ruling out that Mitya didn’t do it himself?” Lena asked cautiously.

“The police assure me he did.” Olga lit another cigarette.

“Have you eaten anything at all today? You’re smoking like a chimney. Want me to make coffee?”

“Go ahead.” Olga nodded indifferently. “And if I can, I’ll take a shower here. I haven’t even washed today, and I’ve already been to the morgue. Forgive me for showing up here with this nightmare, but being home right now is so tough. I have to get my bearings and then take care of my parents and grandmother.”

“Come on, I’ll give you a clean towel.”

“Lena, I don’t believe he did it,” Olga said softly, standing in the bathroom door. “It’s all so bizarre. Their telephone was out all day. I checked at the station, and the line was completely fine. Something happened to the phone itself, and this morning a neighbor fixed it in a minute. His wife called the ambulance and police from their neighbors’ at five in the morning. It was the neighbors who called me. By the time I got there, they’d already taken Mitya away. You see, that night his wife was… well, high. They told me Mitya was, too. They said it was suicide from drug psychosis. They found needles in the apartment and tracks on his arm. So the police didn’t try too hard. ‘Ma’am, your dear brother was an addict,’ they told me. ‘So is his wife. It’s perfectly clear!’”

“Mitya wasn’t an addict,” Lena said slowly. “He didn’t even drink. And Katya…”

“She’d been shooting up for a year and a half. But not Mitya. Never.”

“Did you see him in the morgue?”

“No. I couldn’t. I was scared I’d faint. He was already in the cold locker. They said there was a line for viewing. There are an awful lot of bodies. If I write a petition to the Prosecutor’s Office, he’ll stay there, waiting his turn.”

“What have you decided?”

“I don’t know. But if he’s going to lie there in the cold locker, my mama and papa and my grandmother are going to have heart attacks over my brother. And they explained to me that a petition wasn’t going to do much. They’d hand the case to some girl working off her Moscow residency permit in the District Prosecutor’s Office, since they don’t have enough investigators. She won’t go and do any digging. It was so clearly a suicide. They have so many unsolved murders now, and this one, just some addict…”

She made a hopeless gesture and closed the bathroom door.

While Olga was taking a shower and putting herself in order, Lena stood by the window, holding the buzzing coffee grinder, and thought about Mitya Sinitsyn. What had they talked about then? He’d been over for a couple of hours, after all. He’d been telling her that he’d written five new songs and he’d even left a cassette. Lena had never gotten around to listening to it. She had to find it.

Yes, yet another megaproducer had appeared on his horizon. But Mitya hadn’t said his name, he’d said, “Terrifically famous, you wouldn’t believe it! I’m afraid I’ll attract the evil eye!”

Then they’d eaten dinner and talked about something else for a long time. We were just reminiscing about our student days, Lena thought.

Mitya graduated from the Institute of Culture and studied to be a theater director. It was an odd major, especially these days, and he never did work in his field. He wrote his songs, sang them for a small circle of friends, and had some gigs in clubs in the late 1980s. He was always in talks about some record, or some CD, or music videos for television.

Nothing ever came of the talks, but Mitya never gave up. He believed he had good songs, that they just weren’t pop. But there was demand for more than just pop. Mitya wasn’t counting on stardom, but he wanted to find his audience, and not through concerts in underground crossings but through more respectable channels—radio, television. For that, though, he not only had to compose good songs and perform them well, he also had to build up the right acquaintances and contacts, hobnob with producers, and offer himself as a product. And Mitya didn’t know how to do that.

Lately he’d been working as a guitar teacher at a children’s drama school. The money was pathetic, but the kids loved him. That was important to Mitya because he and Katya couldn’t have kids, though they’d wanted to badly.

If Lena was to assume what Olga said was true, and Mitya had been murdered, then her first question had to be who benefited? Who could have felt threatened by someone who taught kids classical guitar and wrote songs?

She had to find that cassette and listen it, only not now, around Olga. That might be painful for her. As it was, she was barely keeping it together.

Wet snow was falling outside. Looking into the courtyard, Lena mechanically noted that Olga hadn’t parked her little gray Volkswagen very well. She was thinking about how Olga was going to have a hard time getting out and might get stuck in a snowdrift when her gaze slipped over the dark blue Volvo, parked only a few meters from Olga’s car and already lightly sprinkled with snow.

“There, you see?” the woman sitting behind the wheel of the Volvo said quietly to her companion. “I never doubted they were still in touch, and pretty close touch, too. Close enough that after what happened, she rushed straight here.”

“I’m afraid,” the man murmured with dried lips.

“It’s all right.” The woman fondly ran her short, well-manicured fingers over his cheek. “You’re doing great. You’ll calm down and realize that this is the last push. Then it’s all over. I know how scared you are right now. Fear comes from deep inside, it rises from the belly to the chest. But you’re not going to let it rise any higher. You’re not going to let it into your head. You’ve been able to stop that thick, burning, unbearable fear lots of times. You’re strong now and you’ll be even stronger when we make this push—difficult and essential, but the last. I am with you.”

Her short, strong fingers slid slowly and gently over his smooth-shaven cheek. Her nails were polished a matte red, which looked garish against his very pale cheek. While continuing to speak quiet, lulling words, the woman was thinking that she mustn’t forget to remove this polish tonight and use something more muted, more elegant.

The man shut his eyes. His nostrils flared slowly and rhythmically. His breathing was deep and calm. When the woman felt his face muscles relax, she turned on the engine, and the dark blue Volvo slowly left the courtyard, came out into the side street, and from there onto the main road, where it got lost in the crowd of cars speeding under the slow, wet snow.

Olga Sinitsyna had been Lena Polyanskaya’s best friend all five of their years together in the journalism department at the university. Afterward they lost track of each other and only reconnected eight years after graduation, totally by accident, on a plane.

Lena was flying to New York. Columbia University had invited her to lecture on modern Russian literature and journalism. In the smoking section, an elegant, well-groomed businesswoman wearing an austere and expensive suit sat down next to her.

It was 1990, and businesswomen like that were still a rarity in Russia. Lena took a quick glance at her and was amazed that a rich American was flying Aeroflot rather than Pan Am or Delta. But right then the woman sadly shook her light blond head and said in Russian, “You take the cake, Polyanskaya! I keep waiting to see whether you’ll recognize me.”

“Olga! Olga Sinitsyna!” Lena was ecstatic.

It seemed incredible that a successful businesswoman would hatch from that ephemeral, sublime creature she always remembered in jeans and a sweater. Olga had been a typical smart Moscow girl of the late 1970s who could argue all night long over Russia’s fate and sacrificial mission and the vicissitudes of existential consciousness and then stand in line for hours, not for boots at the department store, but for the basement exhibit hall on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street or for tickets to a Richter concert at the Conservatory.

Olga Sinitsyna, known all over the journalism department for being scatterbrained and impractical and for her absurd, ill-fated love affairs, and this cool woman with the sparkling American smile, so self-assured, seemed like beings from different planets.

“In the end,” Olga told her, “I was left on my own with two little boys a year apart. I did marry Givi Kiladze, you know. Remember him?”

Givi Kiladze had studied journalism with them and was—unrequitedly—in love with Olga all five years. A Muscovite whose family had come from Georgia two generations before, he only remembered his native language when he wanted to slit someone’s throat. As a rule, the only people whose throats he wanted to slit were Olga or anyone who dared get closer to her than three meters.

“Passion ends quickly. Our life went bad, and we were practically starving. Givi couldn’t find a job and started drinking and dragging hordes of tramps into our home, after which the towels and teaspoons would disappear. Everyone had to be fed and given a place to sleep. He has a generous soul, and there I was with a belly and toxicosis. When little Gleb was born, he sent for his great-aunt to come from their mountain village and help me. His great-aunt was followed by his great-uncle and then another uncle and another aunt. Eventually, I grabbed Gleb and fled to my parents’. That’s when the drama started. Amateur drama: ‘I’ll kill myself! I’ll kill you!’ Basically, we made our peace. At the time I firmly believed a child needs his father, even if he’s crazy.

“My Gleb has dark hair and eyes, but my younger, Gosha, was born blond and blue-eyed. That idiot started howling that Gosha wasn’t his son. You know what I did to keep my sanity? Started learning Japanese! Picture this: a nursing mama with an infant at her breast loudly reading Japanese characters while the father of her children runs around with a dagger shouting, ‘I’ll murder you!’ while Gleb, at two and a half, is sitting on the potty and saying in Georgian, ‘Papa, don’t kill Mama, she’s good!’ It was his mountain relatives who eventually set him straight.

“Meanwhile, there wasn’t so much as a coin in the house. We lived on what my parents gave us. They couldn’t give us a lot but they gave us everything they had. Packages would come from the mountains, too—homemade wine, figs, nuts. Basically, I went back to my parents again—took the kids and left. For good. Givi would show up in the middle of the night, drunk as a skunk. It’s a good thing Mitya was there and could step in. Otherwise Givi would have killed me without batting an eye. He was jealous, even of my own brother.”

“You could have called.” Lena sighed. “Why did you totally vanish?”

“What about you?” Olga grinned. “Why did you?”

“Things happened.” Lena shrugged. “I have my own skeletons in my closet. Did you learn Japanese after all?”

“Did I ever! You know, I’m actually grateful to Givi. If he hadn’t driven me to Japanese, I wouldn’t be the manager of the Russian branch of Kokusai Koeki. I started translating the manuals for the computers and office equipment they sell without having the foggiest idea what they were. But I had to feed my children, and mama and papa, and my grandmother, and Mitya. My little brother—he’s still a deadbeat—writing all his songs and playing his guitar, and not doing anything he doesn’t want to do. But he does like to eat.

“So I had to earn the money, and I turned out to be pretty good at it. I got hooked on it and pretty quickly started earning a lot. Mama and Grandma stayed with the children while I built my career. I’ll be senior manager soon, then deputy director, and then the sky’s the limit. Everything’s great now. I’m making tons of money, and sometimes I look in the mirror and see this woman I don’t recognize. Remember the poems I used to write? And my paper on Kafka? That was when I used my brain, whereas now… No, of course, I use my brain now, too, but sometimes I get the feeling that instead of a brain, there’s a computer in this crock of mine spitting out decisions.”

“Come off it, Sinitsyna.” Lena started laughing. “Everything’s going great for you, and not just kind of, but for real. The Kafka and the poetry, they’re still in there, they didn’t go anywhere; it’s just your youth that’s passed. There’s a time for everything.”

“But your youth hasn’t passed,” Olga said, looking into Lena’s big, smoky-gray eyes and her skinny, makeup-free face. “Polyanskaya, you look exactly the way you did in our first year.”

“Stop it!” Lena shook her head. “I’m just skinny, so I look younger. Also, business suits and makeup are by no means required in my work. I am in journalism, so I can get away with the same old jeans and sweaters. Your position requires more of you, you’re our businesswoman.”

Six years had passed since that meeting on the plane. Olga had become deputy commercial director for the Russian branch of Kokusai Koeki. Lena ran the literature and art department at the joint Russian-American magazine Smart, and two years ago she’d gotten married and given birth to a daughter, Liza. But Olga Sinitsyna hadn’t remarried. She was disillusioned from her first experience of family life. She spent the crumbs of free time she had left after work on her sons and younger brother.

For those six years, Lena and Olga stayed in touch, calling each other and getting together fairly often. Each realized that the older you get, the harder it is to make new friends. You have to treasure your old ones. You have to have someone you can call at any time, day or night, someone who’ll be glad to hear from you. Someone who remembers you young, carefree, and defenseless. And when you’re together, you too can remember what that felt like, if only for a few minutes.