Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 33

“Hello. Are you Nadezhda Zakharova?”

“Yes, I am.” The plump, gray-haired woman nodded and wiped her floury hands on her apron.

“My name is Polyanskaya. I’m from Moscow. Twelve years ago you sent your son Igor’s story to my magazine.” Lena pulled the old letter out of her bag and handed it to her.

Nadezhda Ivanovna took it cautiously with her fingertips.

“You’re that same journalist? I remember. Of course I do.”

“Gran! Who’s come?” A child’s voice came from the back of the apartment.

“It’s for me, Igor,” the woman shouted in response.

“Something’s burning in the oven!” A sturdy, crew-cut boy of thirteen came into the front hall. “Hello.” He nodded to Lena and stared at her curiously.

“Please, come in, take off your coat.” Her hostess remembered herself. “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

She ran to the kitchen. It really did smell like something was burning there.

“What’s your business here?” the boy asked gravely, not taking his eyes off Lena.

“Personal business.” She smiled, took off her jacket, and started unlacing her boots.

Her hostess reappeared, without her apron now, and invited Lena into the room. Lena was immediately struck by a large portrait made from a blown-up photograph of First Lieutenant Zakharov on the wall.

“So many years have passed. Here is my grandson, grown up already,” Nadezhda Ivanovna said, sitting at the table across from Lena. She nodded at the boy. “When little Igor was born, big Igor was already gone. Three months later.” She sighed, fell silent, and propping her chin in her palm, looked at Lena quizzically.

“Nadezhda Ivanovna, I know your son Igor was on the team working the Slepak case.”

“What’s this? Have they decided to look for the real killer again? After so many years?”

“Why again?” Lena asked softly, feeling her fingers turn cold.

“An investigator from the General Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow came specifically to talk to me about it. A long time ago, in ’84, I think. A year after Slepak was convicted. She questioned me, in great detail, about what my Igor had told me and when. I gave her his diary and a few other papers. I hoped they’d find the real killer and at the same time whoever killed my little…”

“I’m sorry, Nadezhda Ivanovna. Are you absolutely certain the woman was from the Prosecutor’s Office?”

“Please, I’m an educated woman, after all. She showed me her identification. And asked her questions professionally. I did have a police officer for a son, so I do have some understanding of these things.”

“Forgive me again, but you didn’t ask me for any identification,” Lena remarked.

“But I remember you.” Her hostess smiled in response. “You performed at the police officers’ club. I was sitting in the first row. You have a memorable face. And you haven’t changed at all. It’s not often anyone comes here from Moscow, especially from such a famous magazine. And my Igor read your letters to me out loud and the editorial notes you wrote him. And I subscribed to the magazine for years. You were a special correspondent, and your photo was above all your articles. No, don’t think I would let just anyone into my home.”

“Nadezhda Ivanovna, if you have such a good memory for faces, maybe you remember what the woman looked like?”

“I can’t describe her in detail, of course. But you know, she was… How can I put it? Outwardly unpleasant, her face… Basically, an unpleasant face. But a very fine person. A very charming woman. Now what her name was, I don’t recall.”

“Did you ever tell any of Igor’s colleagues about her visit?”

“Oh no! She warned me from the very beginning that the General Prosecutor’s Office was reviewing the case in secret. She said there was reason to suspect the real killer worked for the police. That’s why she asked me not to tell anyone anything. She even made me sign a nondisclosure agreement. It was an official form, ‘Office of the Prosecutor of the USSR.’ She promised to return Igor’s diary, but she didn’t. I guess the investigation hit an impasse and she forgot about it.”

Sure, Lena thought. She forgot.

“So there are no papers left?” she asked.

“None. I gave her everything I had. Not that there was much. A notebook, Igor’s diary, and some statements he wanted to write. There were drafts of those statements, all scribbled over and illegible.”

“Who did he intend to write to? Do you remember?”

“To the General Prosecutor’s Office.”

“Did he ever actually write and send them?”

“No.” Nadezhda Ivanovna shook her head. “He didn’t. He wanted to clarify something else before sending anything. And he never got the chance.”

Lena didn’t spend long with Nadezhda Zakharova. She’d promised Michael she’d be back by six. He was excited about visiting the old librarian.

“Someone who’s worked so many years in a book depository has to know a lot,” he’d said. “Not only that, she can tell us about the 1920s and 1930s, about dekulakization, about how the Bolsheviks hunted down pagan shamans. She’s a living witness. I can’t let this opportunity slip by.”

Lena planned to find the building where Volkov once lived tomorrow. She didn’t know the address, but she hoped to find it from memory. Doubtless there were still people there who remembered him. She’d say she was writing an article about the great producer’s youth. But that was tomorrow. Right now she had to catch her breath. She was running on fumes.

She was ten minutes late. Michael and Sasha were sitting in the hotel lobby, and Michael was chatting in English with a beautiful stranger.

The young woman was stunning. Fiery red hair to her waist, slanting green eyes, high cheekbones, and a large, sensual mouth. She was dressed simply and expensively in light gray woolen trousers and a black cashmere sweater.

Approaching, Lena was hesitant.

“Here you are at last!” Michael exclaimed joyously. “I’d like you to meet Natasha.”

The young woman cast an appraising glance at Lena, nodded coldly, and continued telling Michael her recipe for preparing authentic Siberian pelmeni. But Michael interrupted her.

“I’m sorry, Natasha.” He smiled as he rose from his armchair. “It’s time for us to go. We have another meeting planned for today.”

“You have such a full program,” Natasha crooned, and she rose as well. “So we’re agreed, Michael?”

She was a head taller than Lena and looked down at her with an arrogant, incinerating gaze.

“Natasha has antique cookbooks from the last century, with recipes for the local cuisine,” Michael explained guiltily when they’d started for the car with Sasha, who’d been silent the whole time.

“And she invited you to her place? Michael, you were the one who gave me a talking to about morals.” Lena shook her head.

“Child, I’m old enough that I can allow myself certain liberties, especially in a foreign country, especially at the edge of the world. She’s such a beauty, this Siberian Natasha, and the poor thing doesn’t have anyone to speak English to. She’s forgetting the language and is very upset over that.”

“Does she live here?”

“No, she’s from Omsk. She’s visiting her aunt, who lives in a private house from the last century. A real wooden cottage!”

“What was she doing in the hotel?”

“Drinking coffee in the bar.”

“Michael, she’s not a…”

“No,” Michael said firmly. “She’s not a prostitute. Prostitutes look completely different. I should know.”

“You have a lot of experience with them?”

“More than you, at any rate.” Michael chuckled sarcastically.

Right then Sasha chimed in. Not talking, but singing. He started humming a famous song under his breath: “She’s just a working girl…”

“Sasha, what can we do?” Lena asked quietly. “He’s going to go see her.”

“Jealous, are you?” Sasha laughed.

“Don’t mock me. We have to think of something.”

“Serves you right if they kidnap your old American! I warned you.”

“Sasha, cut it out.” Lena was nearly crying. “She clearly is a prostitute and they obviously sent her.”

“What are you saying!” A grimace of comic fright was reflected in the small mirror. “Imagine! I never would have guessed! I’m so naive I thought the beautiful Natasha had sincerely fallen for your old friend. She introduced herself very professionally. I saw it all. High class. Enviably so. The only thing I don’t get is whether your professor really thinks she’s interested in him. He seemed to take it all at face value.”

“He’s just sociable. And he’d love an adventure. And here’s this beauty. Some men, the older they get, the more gullible they let themselves be about the selfless romantic intentions of beautiful young women.”

“I don’t think she’ll disappoint him or take his money,” Sasha noted thoughtfully.

“And you’re going to drive Michael right to them?” Lena grinned nervously.

“Of course! I, Sasha, the evil pimp, am going to drive your friend straight into their clutches.” Sasha pressed his lips resentfully. “Why this mistrust? If you’re so smart, use your brains a little!”

“You want to use her to figure out—”

“We already are.”

“You’re talking about me being an old playboy, aren’t you?” Michael chimed in.

“What else?” Lena chuckled.

Along the way, they stopped at a small market and bought a bouquet of white roses.

The Veterans Home was on the outskirts of Tobolsk. It was a five-story brick building that looked like a hospital. An armed guard met them at the front door.

“Who are you here to see?”

“Valentina Yurievna Gradskaya, room 130.”

“Do you have any identification?”

Lena held out her journalist credentials and Michael’s navy passport.

“What’s this, a foreigner?” The guard raised his eyebrows.

“A professor. From America.”

“Go on in.” The guard nodded and handed back the documents. “Second floor, down the hall on the left.”

There was a thick runner on the hall floor. And pots of flowers on the windowsills. It was clean and oddly quiet. They didn’t meet a soul on their way to room 130.

“Yes yes, come in!” a cheerful old lady’s voice answered their knock.

It was amazing to see a perfectly homey, very cozy room in such a bureaucratic institution: a round table in the middle, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a small antique writing desk with a nice new Unis typewriter and a neat stack of manuscripts, a low ottoman covered with a large knit afghan, an elegant étagère from the turn of the century, and on it, a 1960s-model record player and two rows of records.

Valentina Yurievna had scarcely changed. She had the same snow-white, neatly cut and coifed hair and wore the same silk blouse with the round collar, a small brooch at her neck. She was even thinner, and there was something touchingly childlike about her face. Lena had long noted that the faces of very old people who have lived a long life without growing bitter become almost childlike.

“Looking at you, I’m not at all afraid of growing old,” Michael said in English, and he smiled and held out his hand. “Professor Michael Barron, Columbia University, New York.”

“Very nice to meet you. As I understand it, my colleagues at the library recommended you pay me a visit. You must be a historian?” She had classical English, without the clipped American vowels and deep snarl. “And you must be his interpreter.” She addressed Lena in Russian. “I think you’ll be glad at the chance to rest a little. I know what a hard job simultaneous interpreting is. What’s your name, child?”

“Lena.”

She had decided not to mention to Gradskaya just yet that they’d already met. In forty minutes, Sasha would come pick up Michael and take him to his meeting with the beautiful Natasha. And Lena would stay here. That was their agreement. She wondered where he was actually going to take Michael. How would she and Sasha communicate?

“Lena, dear, you can look at the art books first. And there are albums of old photographs. I’ve collected them my whole life,” Gradskaya said to her. “What interests you most?”

Lena asked for the albums. She loved old photographs. Ladies in hats on a background of painted landscapes, infants in clouds of lace, men with top hats and absurd mustaches, and the perfectly still, serious faces of Siberian peasants. On the next few pages, the same ladies in the starched headscarves of the sisters of mercy, the men in military uniform, the trenches and machine guns of World War I, a Cossack captain sitting on a rearing horse, an enormous hospital ward. Then came very different faces, leather jackets, shorn women—a brutal fire in their eyes—emaciated, raggedy children.

Lena picked up the next album, and a large cardboard photograph fell out. High School No. 2, Class of 1963. The faces of the graduates and teachers in separate ovals, pale vignettes of stars, spikes, sickles, and smokestacks. Lena was about to set the photograph aside when suddenly her glance fell on the inscription under one of the photographs: Regina Gradskaya.

She was by far the most unattractive of all the female graduates—a broad, flattened nose, buck teeth, a large chin, and small, deep-set eyes. Lena couldn’t take her eyes off that face.

Right then she heard a knock at the door. Sasha walked into the room. Michael, expressing his profuse thanks, began getting his coat on.

“I’ll come back for you in half an hour,” Sasha said, glancing at Lena.

“You don’t have to worry. I can get back to the hotel.”

“Whatever you say.” He shrugged.

“Valentina Yurievna, may I spend a little more time with you? I wanted to talk about these photographs,” she said to Gradskaya.

“Yes, child.” Valentina Yurievna nodded. “I’d be happy to have you stay. I so rarely have visitors.”

When Sasha and Michael had gone, Gradskaya looked at Lena closely through her glasses.

“Tell me, where might I have seen you before?”

“It was a very long time ago.” Lena smiled. “Fourteen years ago you let three young Moscow students into the book depository. Then you treated us to tea and cranberry preserves and told us all kinds of interesting stories.”

“What do you know.” The old woman shook her head. “I don’t remember that at all, but I’ve been looking at you and trying to figure out where I’ve seen you. Speaking of tea, if you would like some, I have a kettle and all the essentials. Open the buffet. You’ll find everything there.”

Behind the little buffet’s glass door there was a Tefal electric kettle, a sugar bowl, an open box of Lipton tea bags, a jar of cookies, and a few tea glasses in antique silver glass holders.

“You know, this is a very peaceful institution,” Gradskaya said while Lena was making the tea. “It’s clean and comfortable here and always as silent as the grave. Top-quality medical attention, massage, all kinds of procedures. Only there’s no one to talk to. At one time this was a boarding house for Party veterans. Now the local nouveau riche park their old folks here. No more than five rooms are occupied on each floor. It’s very expensive to stay here. I held out as long as I could, you know, but age is age. I’m grateful to my daughter, of course, but…”

“Forgive me, Valentina Yurievna.” Lena held out the large group photograph and pointed to the unattractive girl. “Is this your daughter?”

“Yes.” The old woman nodded. “That’s Regina.”

Lena noticed a shadow cross Gradskaya’s face. Her lips pursed slightly and her eyes narrowed—but only for a second.

“Do you have any other photographs?”

“What for, child?”

“You see, I think I’ve seen this face somewhere. Maybe I met your daughter. Does she live in Moscow now?”

“She’s lived in Moscow for a long time. And you may well have met her. The world is terribly small. Only I don’t have any other photographs. Not even baby pictures. This is the only one.”

“That’s odd. You collect photographs. So many pictures of other people.”

“Regina destroyed all her photos. And then she destroyed her face.” That last sentence came softly, with an edge of irritation. Lena could tell the old woman didn’t like this conversation about her daughter, but she had to take it to its conclusion. There was no other choice.

“She destroyed her face?” she echoed quietly.

“Get that stack of magazines there, on the shelf.”

She quickly skipped through a few well-known glossy publications and silently handed Lena an opened magazine—the same one Gosha Galitsyn had shown her recently. Smiling dazzlingly from the centerfold was the “sweet couple”—Veniamin Volkov and his beautiful wife, Regina Gradskaya.

“My daughter had a series of plastic surgeries done at a Swiss clinic,” Valentina Yurievna said. “She’d suffered her whole life over her appearance.”