Tarnished Icons

TWO

Moscow, Russia, 1996

Katrina Ivanova hurried along the snow-covered Taras Shevchenko Embankment by the Moscow River. When she had finished her shift as an elevator operator in the Ukrainia Hotel, it had been just before midnight, which gave her half an hour to rush down the embankment, go under the Bordino Bridge, hurry through the garden in front of the Kiev railway station, and get to the Kievskaya metro station.

If she missed the last metro, she would either have to take a cab, which she could not afford, or go back to the hotel and ask Molka Lev to help her sneak into an empty room for the night. Katrina did not want to ask Molka Lev’s help. She did not want to ask anyone’s help. She had, in her thirty-two years, been less than pleased with the help offered to her by almost all men and most women. There was always a price to pay.

It was December and a light snow was falling on two days of old snow blown about by a bitter wind off the river. Katrina did not mind the cold or the snow. The colder it was, the less likely she was to be bothered by a drunk or a mugger or one of the new gangs of children who robbed, raped, and murdered. At this hour and in this weather she was unlikely to be disturbed.

A voice, an almost animal wail, rose in the wind in front of her. Katrina’s left boot struck a patch of ice under a thin spot of snow. She almost slipped but held her balance and managed to keep from falling.

Katrina was bundled tight in a lined cloth coat over a wool sweater with a high neck. A wool hat was pulled and tied to cover her ears and pink cheeks. Katrina Ivanova knew she was no beauty, but she was certainly not ugly. Her body was straight and solid if a bit heavy, and her skin was pink and clear. Her hair was as blond as it had been on her third birthday.

There was another sound ahead of her in the near darkness. This too was a voice, a deeper voice, wailing in the wind. Someone was ahead of her along the embankment, out of sight to her left. She would not be able to avoid it.

Maybe it was just the rustling of wind and snow in the trees, or a stray dog, or even two men arguing on the bridge still far ahead, their voices carrying far in the night.

The incidence of attacks on women had, since the end of the Soviet Union, risen so dramatically that the statistics published in the newspapers and given on television were no longer reliable. Rapes and murders were up two or three hundred percent. Gangs slaughtered one another on the street. Criminals, with guns visible under their jackets, were welcomed into the best hotels, including the Ukrainia.

Katrina was good at statistics. She loved statistics. There was certainty in them. Before her, through the haze of white, she could see the lights of Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya Street, where the bridge crossed into the heart of the city.

She stood silently for an instant. No more voices in the wind ahead of her. Another fifty yards to go. No one in sight. The street lamps along the embankment were on, though they were dimmed by the swirl of snow. She could hurry and risk falling or she could go a bit slower. Katrina chose to hurry.

Suddenly in front of her through the whoosh of a gust of wind she heard four sharp, loud cracks like a steel cable striking a metal beam. Now she was sure. There was a moan and then three, four more loud cracks just ahead.

Katrina was frightened. There was no doubting that now, no lying to herself. About twenty-five yards ahead of her a hunched creature suddenly came up from the riverside. It looked like a bear. The creature looked around and saw Katrina.

Katrina, seeing something glitter in the creature’s hand, reached into her heavy red plastic purse and pulled out a Tokareve.762mm automatic. She had purchased it from a waiter in the hotel kitchen almost a year before when she had realized that the new Russia was a place of madness where statistics might be meaningless.

The bearlike figure began to raise its right arm, and Katrina could see that there was something in its hand. She dropped her purse gently in the snow, gripped the pistol in her wool-gloved hands, and leveled the weapon at the hulk pointing at her.

She fired first and the creature stood straight up. It was a man in a long coat and fur cap, and he definitely had a weapon in his hand. He staggered back. Surprised at the shot? Hit by a bullet? Then he fired. Katrina felt a sudden squeezing of her left arm, as if some great gorilla had grasped her in anger. Before she could fire again, the man ran in the direction of the bridge. Actually, it was more like an animal lope than a run, a strange lope that even at this moment seemed odd. Then he was gone into the darkness. She could hear him moving farther and farther away. Her arm hurt and she was frightened. She picked up her red purse and hurried toward the bridge, screaming for help. She hoped someone would hear her and come to help her, though she knew that few would be brave enough to respond to the midnight cries of a woman so far from the busy, lighted streets.

Katrina felt dizzy. Weapon still in her hand, she moved forward. She tried not to look down as she shuffled, but she could not resist and she knew she was bleeding. She could see the dark drops falling onto the snow in front of her, and she looked back to see their dim trail behind her. Katrina was lost in weeping panic as she hurried forward.

The footsteps in the snow where the man who shot her had come up from the embankment lured her toward the edge of the drop to the river. Lights from the other side of the river reflected off the water-bobbing jigsaw pieces-and she saw them. About ten feet down. There were four figures laid out in a line almost perfectly straight, as if they had arranged themselves and were about to make identical snow angels. But these figures did not move.

The light wasn’t good enough to see clearly, but Katrina knew. In her heart she knew that the four were dead, murdered by the creature who had shot her.

She trudged forward, too weak and frightened now to scream. He would leap out. She knew it. From behind a clump of snow-covered bushes or a stone block that marked the drop to the river. Something moved ahead. She fired again, not trying to hit anything but trying to keep the creature at bay.

A dog scuttled out from behind a stand of birch trees and fled in fear into the narrow parkway away from the river.

Katrina reached the street. She saw the frightened faces of three bundled old men. She passed out.

When she opened her eyes, a broad flat face appeared before her. She tried to bring it into focus. For an instant she thought it might be the man from the river, but something about the concern in his eyes and the warm feeling of a white room calmed her.

“We’re in a hospital,” the man said gently. “You have lost some blood but you will recover. Agda is being brought here in a police car. We found her name in your purse.”

Katrina nodded, her mouth painfully dry.

“Water,” she whispered.

The burly man poured a glass of water from a pitcher next to her bed.

“Just a sip or two,” said the man.

She nodded and did as she was told.

The man appeared to be in his fifties. He had dark hair just beginning to turn gray and the body of a small delivery truck. Under his coat he wore a yellow turtle-neck sweater that gave him the appearance of having no neck at all.

“My name is Chief Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov,” the man said. “My colleague is Inspector Timofeyeva.”

Katrina turned her eyes but not her head to a second figure in the room, a young, pretty, blond woman definitely on the solid side. The young woman was wearing an open dark coat and a long red scarf. She could have been mistaken for Katrina’s younger sister.

“We are with the Office of Special Investigation, Petrovka,” the man said. “Can you talk?”

“Yes,” she said dryly. She took another small sip of water. “Will I be able to use my arm again?”

“Yes,” said the young woman. She stepped to the edge of the bed and touched Katrina’s right arm gently. “The wound is not bad. What happened?”

Katrina told her story. The young woman took notes and the man stood, hands in his pockets, listening. When Katrina finished, the man said, “You did not recognize the man you shot?”

“Did I shoot him?” Katrina asked.

“There were two sets of blood drops,” he said. “Yours and someone else’s. Yours went straight to the street. The other person’s went into the park. He apparently got into a car he had there.”

“Are you sure it was a man?” the young woman asked.

Katrina nodded yes and said, “At first I thought it was a big animal.”

“I mean,” said the young woman, “could it have been a woman?”

“No,” said Katrina.

“Could you identify him?” the young woman asked.

“No,” said Katrina. “But you said I shot him?”

“It appears so,” said the man.

“I’m going to show you photographs of the four dead men,” Elena Timofeyeva said. “Can you look at them?”

Katrina closed her eyes and nodded another yes. Elena held up Polaroid head shots of the dead men on the river-bank. Each face was eerily illuminated by the white flash of necessary light. Katrina looked at the four faces. Two of them had their eyes closed. Two had open eyes. One of the two with open eyes looked frightened. The other with open eyes looked angry. All four had dark holes in their foreheads and faces. Three of the men were young, possibly even in their teens or twenties. The defiant man was older, but she couldn’t tell how much older.

“No,” Katrina said. “I’ve never seen them.”

Elena put the photographs away.

“Anything you can tell us about the man who did this?”

Katrina thought and remembered the man coming up from the riverbank, aiming at her and then …

“He walked funny,” she said. “Like an animal.”

“You say he moved quickly,” said Rostnikov.

“Yes, I think so, very quickly. Not like a cripple.”

Elena Timofeyeva glanced at Rostnikov, who continued to look down at the woman lying in the bed. Only six months earlier, Rostnikov, at the urging of his wife and son and his wife’s cousin Leon, who was a doctor, had agreed to allow the removal of his left leg just below the knee. It no longer made medical sense to preserve a gradually decaying leg, subject to infection and providing no support.

It had taken Rostnikov weeks to come to terms with this truth. He had earned the withered leg as a boy soldier fighting the Nazis. He had destroyed a tank. The tank had almost crushed his leg. For almost half a century Rostnikov had lived with the pain from the leg. Because he was a war hero, he had been allowed to become a policeman after the war. He was powerful. He was calm. He possessed the one attribute that made him an ideal member of the police in the cold war period-he had no ambition other than to live with his wife and his son and do his job.

He had moved up the ranks as a street officer and then as a detective in the office of the procurator general of Moscow. When he ran afoul of some of the powerful and displayed a determination that could not be blunted even by political expediency, he was eventually transferred to the supposedly dead-end job of investigator in the Office of Special Investigation, a dumping ground for cases no one wanted.

With an irony that was not lost on some of the more intelligent of the members of the National Police and the KGB, the Office of Special Investigation not only took on dead-end cases but also managed to solve most of them. Rostnikov had gradually brought other investigators from the procurator general’s office. Their moment of initial glory came when Rostnikov’s people thwarted an attempt on the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. They had since managed to walk the line that allowed them to survive the political breakup of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party.

Through all this, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov had been accompanied by his withered left leg. It was not an easy decision to let it go.

Rostnikov’s surgery had been performed in Moscow by an American surgeon obtained through a friend in the FBI who had been assigned to counsel the Russian police on dealing with organized crime. Within days after the surgery Rostnikov had begun learning to walk with a prosthetic leg. Gradually the pain went away. In its place was an occasional soreness where what remained of his leg had to be fitted into the device he now had to endure. He walked with only the slightest of limps, and though he told no one, there were many times when he missed the leg that had given him half a century of torture. He even wondered what had happened to the leg, but he had decided never to ask.

Rostnikov said to Katrina, “The ground was trampled by the first police who arrived, but basically, the prints in the snow were clear.”

A tall, thin woman in white, who Rostnikov guessed was probably from Uzbekistan, came into the room and whispered to Rostnikov. He nodded and looked down at Katrina with a smile.

“Inspector Timofeyeva has a few more questions. Your friend Agda is here.”

As Rostnikov left the hospital room with the nurse, a woman came quickly in. She was a short older woman in a heavy coat. Her dark hair was a wild mess, and she was pink-cheeked from the cold. Rostnikov was already out of the room when the tearful Agda bent over to kiss her friend on the mouth and whisper to her.

Elena stood back waiting. In spite of the difficulty of getting information through the outdated computer network, Rostnikov and Elena had known a number of things about Katrina Ivanova before they talked to her at the hospital. They knew her age, that she had come from Georgia as a child, that she had never used her gun before, that she was a reliable employee of the Ukrainia Hotel, and that she had a long-term relationship with Agda, who played the violin with a band at the Metropole Hotel. Elena stepped farther back to give them some privacy.

Before he had taken five steps into the hospital corridor, Rostnikov found himself facing a man of about forty, slightly shorter than himself and considerably lighter. Through the man’s open jacket it was clear that he was remarkably muscular.

Though it was warm in the hospital, an unusual phenomenon for any Russian building in the winter, the man did not remove his small fur cap. He was clean-shaven and light-skinned, with light brown hair and cheekbones tightened in determined anger.

“What happened?” the man demanded. Rostnikov could not quite place his accent.

“Who are you?” Rostnikov asked.

“I asked a question,” the man said, standing very close to Rostnikov. People passing in the hall tried to ignore the two men, who looked as if they might be about to engage in a monumental brawl.

“As did I,” said Rostnikov. “My name is Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. And you are?”

“Belinsky, Rabbi Avrum Belinsky.”

“Ah, yes. I wanted to talk to you. Your name was on cards in the wallets of four men murdered tonight. You knew the victims?” Rostnikov handed the rabbi the Polaroid pictures.

“My question first,” said Belinsky. “I’ve seen the bodies. Identified them. I have no need of photographs to remember them.”

The man seemed nothing like what Rostnikov expected in a rabbi.

“Four men were murdered on the Taras Shevchenko Embankment slightly after midnight,” said Rostnikov. “Judging from the names we retrieved from the bodies, the four men were Jewish.”

“With the two last month, that makes six,” Belinsky said. “All from our congregation. We can’t and won’t lose more Jews. What are you doing to find the murderers?”

“What can you do to help us?” asked Rostnikov, thinking he felt a twinge in his no longer extant left leg.

“More questions for answers,” said Belinsky impatiently. “I have some information that might be relevant. But how do I know you and the rest of the police will bother with the murders of Jews?”

“My wife is Jewish,” said Rostnikov. “And my son, therefore, is half Jewish. In the old Soviet Union and the days of the czars, that would have made him entirely Jewish. As he discovered when he was in the army, under our new system too, he is considered Jewish.”

“And you don’t want that,” Belinsky said sarcastically, now taking off his jacket and draping it over his arm.

“I needn’t tell you it is difficult to be Jewish in Russia, now and always, Avrum Belinsky,” said Rostnikov. “You are not Russian, are you?”

“I’m Israeli,” said Belinsky. “I came here to help rebuild the Jewish community. We are not to be stopped. A Jewish community center just opened in Saint Petersburg where they estimate there are one hundred thousand Jews. There were only some sixty synagogues in all of the Soviet Union, half of them in Georgia. Now we are trying to reignite Judaism in Russia, to give dignity and faith to those who have too long been without it.”

“Is that a sermon?” asked Rostnikov.

“It comes from one of my sermons,” Belinsky admitted. “When you check on my file, you will find that I was an officer in the Israeli army, that I have been twice wounded. I volunteered for this job when a group of Jews in Moscow requested assistance. I was, you will also discover, a member of the Olympic team in Germany when the massacre took place. I knew the men who died there as I knew the men who have died here.”

“You were a wrestler?”

“Greco-Roman,” Belinsky said.

“You lift weights?” asked Rostnikov.

Belinsky looked irritated.

“Yes,” he said.

“There will be a meeting in a few hours of the Office of Special Investigation, in which I work,” said Rostnikov. “I will ask that I be assigned exclusively to this case with adequate support.”

Belinsky nodded, still wary.

“Don’t do anything on your own, rabbi,” Rostnikov said.

Belinsky didn’t answer.

“Now,” said Rostnikov, “let’s go to the canteen for some tea and talk.”

Belinsky hesitated and then nodded in agreement.

Sasha Tkach was running late. It seemed as if there were a few truths by which he could live with some certainty. First, he would never get enough sleep. Second, he would always be running late. Third, he would never escape from his nearly seventy-year-old mother, Lydia, who, though she now had a tiny apartment of her own, spent almost every evening and many nights in the already cramped apartment of her son, his wife, and their two children. Sasha had found her the small but neat room in a concrete one-story apartment building. Elena Timofeyeva, the only woman in the Office of Special Investigation, had arranged it.

Actually, Elena, who lived in one of the two-room apartments in the building, had enlisted the aid of her aunt, with whom she lived. Anna Timofeyeva, who still had friends who owed her favors from her days as first deputy director of the Moscow procurator’s office, had gotten Lydia into the building. Anna had laid down a series of rules by which Lydia Tkach could live there. The rules were in writing. First, Lydia could visit Anna and Elena only when invited or in the case of a real emergency. The determination of whether the situation was an emergency would depend on Anna’s assessment of information given in no more than two sentences. Second, Lydia must wear her hearing aid when visiting. If it was broken, she could not visit. Third, discussions of her son’s job or complaints about her daughter-in-law were not to be tolerated. Although it wasn’t a rule, Anna made it clear that she did not particularly want to hear about Lydia’s grandchildren unless it was Anna who brought up the subject. Lydia had agreed to abide by the rules. She still spent as much time at her son’s apartment as her daughter-in-law Maya’s tolerance would permit. As much as Maya disliked the frequency of her mother-in-law’s visits, she had to admit that Lydia’s willingness to take care of the children while Maya worked was extremely helpful.

Sasha was an investigator in the Office of Special Investigation. He and Emil Karpo had been transferred to the office with Rostnikov when Rostnikov had lost favor within the procurator general’s office. The Office of Special Investigation had been a strictly ceremonial dead end until the often confused regime of Yeltsin and the reformers, when it took on more important cases, often politically sensitive ones, that the other investigative branches-State Security (formerly the KGB), the Ministry of the Interior (including the mafia task force), the National Police (formerly the MVD), the procurator’s office, the tax police-did not want. It was not uncommon for disputes to rage at a crime scene as to which of the investigative branches had jurisdiction. Often, two police districts would engage in heated argument in front of the public about who was in charge. The criminal investigation system of Russia was not quite in a shambles, but everyone seemed to be lying back and waiting to see if the reformers would hold on to power or the new Communists and Zhirinovsky Nationalists would combine and seize control. No one wished to fail. It was easier to shift the difficult cases to the Office of Special Investigation.

Sasha, who was over thirty but looked no more than a few years past twenty, dressed quickly to the morning din of his apartment. Lydia has slept over, and now, refusing to wear her hearing aid, she was shouting about having slept badly. Pulcharia, who was nearing four years old, was telling Maya, her mother, that she did not want to stay with Grandma Lydia. Illya was gurgling calmly in his makeshift crib.

Sasha examined himself in the mirror of the tiny bathroom. The bulge of the gun in the holster under his jacket did not show. The suit he wore was baggy and a bit frayed. A new suit was out of the question. His salary and Maya’s combined were barely enough to keep the family fed, dressed, and in a reasonable two-room apartment. He adjusted his shirt, slightly yellow from too many washings, and decided this was the best he could do. Besides, he would be out on the streets in his coat and scarf most of the day.

He was alone in the bedroom with the baby. When Lydia slept over, which was often, she slept in this room on the bed with Pulcharia. The baby slept in the other room. Even with the door to the bedroom closed, Lydia’s snoring could be heard just below the decibel range of a metro. Pulcharia had always been completely oblivious of her grandmother’s snoring.

Sasha stepped out into the combination living room/dining room/kitchen where he and Maya slept on the floor. The futon had been rolled up and stored, and the room was reasonably neat, but the look from Maya as their eyes met let him know with sympathy that neither of them would escape the apartment this morning without conflict. Maya, dark, pretty, showing no sign of having had two babies, shrugged slightly and shook her head, her short, straight dark hair moving in near slow motion.

Maya was dressed for work, dark skirt, green blouse, shoes with a low heel. She looked beautiful. He wondered how many men made passes at his wife in the course of her day at the Council for International Business Advancement. Sasha tried to ignore his mother and moved to give his wife a kiss. She was already made up, so the kiss was nearly chaste.

“Me,” said Pulcharia, knee-high to his baggy trousers, holding out her arms.

Sasha picked her up, kissed both her eyes and nose and hugged her, thinking that in spite of Lydia’s insistence that the child looked like Sasha’s grandmother, Pulcharia was clearly Maya’s child. This was how Maya had looked as a child. They had photographs. Lydia denied the striking resemblance and insisted that her granddaughter was a replica of Lydia’s own mother.

Sasha put his daughter down and accepted a cup of coffee and a slice of bread from Maya. Only then did he turn to his mother, a small, wiry woman with a determined face that would have been considered handsome were it not for her nearly constant scowl. There was more than a bit of gray in her short, wavy hair. She wore a sagging, heavy blue robe and regarded her son with a look of determination.

“Dobraye utra,” Sasha said, continuing to eat. “Good morning, Mother.”

“Two things,” Lydia shouted as Pulcharia sat herself down at the table near the window and ate last night’s bean soup and a large piece of bread. The child had the enviable ability to tune out her grandmother.

“Yes, Mother,” Sasha said, sitting in front of a bowl of soup and joining his daughter. He was sure that Maya had finished eating sometime before.

“First,” said Lydia, “the child kicks in her sleep. She moves all around. I can’t sleep.”

Lydia’s unceasing snoring was evidence to the contrary, but Sasha looked up as his mother moved toward him.

“I’m afraid you’ll just have to sleep in your apartment more,” he said.

Hovering over him, she ignored his comment. Maya looked at her watch, gulped down the remainder of her coffee, kissed Pulcharia, gave Sasha a look of sympathy, and moved to give the baby a good-bye kiss. “Second, this apartment is too cold,” Lydia said.

“Everyone’s apartment is too cold or too hot,” said Sasha. “It is a fact of winter life in Moscow.”

“I intend to complain,” Lydia went on.

“To whom?” he asked, dipping his bread into the soup.

“Third,” Lydia said. Maya was putting on her coat.

“I thought you said there were only two things,” Sasha said before he could stop himself.

“Grandma did,” Pulcharia confirmed.

“You have still made no effort to be assigned to an office job,” Lydia said.

“I don’t want an office job,” Sasha said with what he thought was remarkable composure considering that he had gone through this conversation with his mother perhaps a hundred times before.

“You have a family,” she said.

Maya closed the door quietly and escaped.

“Yes,” he said.

“People try to kill you. You do dangerous things.”

“Sometimes,” he said.

“You’re like your father,” Lydia said. “You have a temper. You’re easily angered and your emotions get you into trouble.”

Sasha checked his watch. On this point, he knew, his mother was right. Sasha’s father, whom Sasha did not even remember, had been an army officer. He had died on duty in Estonia when Sasha was two. The official cause of death was pneumonia, but Lydia was convinced that he had died of debauchery.

“Your father was always volunteering to go to distant places, even Siberia,” she said, “because of his hot blood.”

And, Sasha was certain, to escape from his wife, who had been a beauty but who almost certainly had the same personality then as she was displaying now.

“Today you ask for a transfer to a ministry office position,” she insisted. “I will go back and see some of my old friends. They have already said they would help.”

Sasha took his and Pulcharia’s bowls and put them and the spoons in the small sink behind him.

“No, Mother,” he said.

“Then I will talk to Porfiry Petrovich again,” she shouted.

To this the baby reacted with a scream followed by crying. Lydia didn’t seem to hear him. Pulcharia ran to the crib, where she had some success in quieting little Illya.

“Porfiry Petrovich has no power to transfer me,” Sasha said. “Besides, he would not do so without my consent, even if he could.”

“Colonel Snitkonoy,” she said. “I’ll go directly to him.”

“He will pat your hand, tell you he understands, promise to see what he can do, and then forget you came except to tell me that it would be best if I did what I could to keep you away from him.”

“Stubborn,” she said. “Like your father.”

Sasha nodded.

“He needs a new diaper,” Pulcharia called. “He stinks.”

“The baby needs a new diaper,” Sasha shouted, walking across the room to take his own coat and wool cap from the rack near the door. “And I am very late.”

“This conversation is not over,” Lydia said.

“Of that I am certain, Mother,” he said, buttoning up.

“Gloves,” Lydia said.

He pulled his gloves from his pocket and displayed them.

“He stinks,” Pulcharia repeated, leaning over the railing of the crib to get the odor more directly.

Sasha hurried back across the room, kissed his mother’s cheek, and marched quickly toward the door.

“I don’t want to stay home with Grandma,” Pulcharia said as he opened the door. There were tears in her eyes.

“She loves you,” Sasha whispered so that his mother could not hear. “You must stay with her.”

“Yah n‘e khachooo,” said Pulcharia. “I don’t want to.”

“I’ll bring you something special,” Sasha said, taking his daughter in his arms and kissing her again. “Now I’m late.”

“We’ll go for a walk,” said Lydia, moving to the crib. “We’ll go to the park.”

“Okay,” said Pulcharia.

When Lydia had worked in the offices of the Ministry of Public Affairs, she had frequently lived with Maya and Sasha and it had been almost tolerable. Now Lydia was retired, on an insignificant and often unpaid pension, and had plenty of time. In spite of the pitiful pension, Lydia was not poor. During her more than forty years in the ministry, Lydia had quietly managed to put away money. What little she saved, she converted from rubles into jewelry, jewelry she bought from people who needed cash for bread. Gradually Lydia learned enough about jewelry to know what she was buying and to make sometimes remarkable purchases. She kept everything in a box she hid carefully wherever she was living. Then, after she had officially retired, with the Soviet Union in the process of falling, Lydia sold her jewelry, piece by piece, at a profit, to the sudden influx of entrepreneurs, carpetbaggers, and outsiders in Moscow.

While Yeltsin stood on the top of a tank proclaiming the end of Communism, Lydia was going to the proper ministry offices and arranging to buy government Bread Shop 61 half a block from where she was living near Solkonicki Park. When Gorbachev had started using words like perestroika-the restructuring of the Soviet communist system-and glasnost-openness to express one’s opinions-Lydia had called a cousin who was a farmer on a collective outside of Kursk and made a deal with him. It was simple. If the government ever did fall and the farmers became free to own and deal, she would be willing to purchase all the wheat he could produce on his land and that of some of his neighbors. It was not an enormous amount, but it would be enough to supply flour for the bread she planned to sell. Lydia’s cousin even knew someone in Kursk who could convert the wheat to flour at a reasonable rate, with her cousin, of course, getting a small commission for that service. Lydia and her cousin would annually reset the price, and she would make it a fair one. Living in fear of having no government to which to sell his crop, her cousin and his friends had readily agreed. Then she had made the necessary vzyatka-the unofficial bribes needed to get services-obtained the necessary purchases, and became the owner of a bread store. The bureaucrats who had sold her the government store that they now deemed worthless were happy to take her money even though its value was dropping crazily. She had bought the store and had full papers and rights to it. It had even left her with significant savings.

While the people of the right and left and middle were marching and buildings were in flames, Lydia offered each of the state employees who worked in the store the opportunity to stay and work for her with the incentive of bonuses if business went well. Some stayed. Some left. They all thought she was a bit mad. Gradually the bread shop workers learned that it was to their advantage to produce and to be reasonably respectful to customers.

Now, more than three years later, Tkach’s Bread Shop, which sold only one size of loaf at a price lower than competing shops, was a thriving business with long lines. It was an assembly line of bread, and prices were listed in rubles and dollars.

Once, a little more than a year before, a gang of young men, too few to be called a mafia, too many to be ignored, and too violent to be reasoned with, had come to the shop and demanded a regular weekly protection payment. The bread shop manager had called Lydia, and she had agreed to meet the gang the next Tuesday morning. When the gang of tattooed young men in leather jackets arrived, they were greeting by the old lady and three men who displayed both their weapons and their police identification. One of the policemen looked like a boy but had a glint of near madness in his eyes. A second policeman was bulky and looked a bit dull-witted. The third was tall and dressed in black, with a paste-white face and sparse combed-back hair. Ultimately the gang decided the money they might collect from the bread shop was not worth a confrontation with these three. Six months later a larger, older gang of Georgians also backed down when Sasha and his fellow policemen showed up. The few rubles they would collect from Lydia were simply not worth dying or going to jail for.

Now, with no protection to pay, Lydia was even further ahead of her competition, and the bread shop thrived. When Lydia died there would be a significant business to be left to her son and grandchildren. She had arranged the proper papers and paid the right people so that this could come to pass.

Somehow, though she didn’t tell him, Lydia expected Sasha to know all this and be grateful. Normally, however, he had other things on his mind, dangerous things that worried Lydia.

Sasha put his daughter down and went through the door, closing it quickly behind him. As he ran down the stairs, he brushed back the strand of hair that had regularly fallen across his eyes since he was a boy. There was more than a bit of truth in what his mother had said. There was danger, now more than ever before, and there were always bribes and women. He did have a temper. There was, however, a great deal to be angry about.

One of those things was a violent rapist who had survived long enough to earn a nickname, the Shy One. He had managed to commit at least twenty reported rapes without once being seen by his victims, who ranged in age from sixteen to sixty-seven. He had come upon them from behind and dragged them to a dark street or park or train yard. He warned them not to scream, and then he raped them from behind.

The first reported rape had been over two years ago. The rapist had worn a condom and left no semen traces to analyze. After each sexual attack he had beaten the victim, hitting each woman in the head when he was finished. With each attack the beatings had grown worse. All of the victims had received hospital treatment. Seven had required surgery. Two had lost sight in one eye. And the Shy One left no clue at all, which was why the National Police were happy to turn the case over to the Office of Special Investigation and why the Wolfhound had turned it over to Sasha and Elena Timofeyeva with the vague suggestion that Elena might be used as a decoy and Sasha, with his youthful appearance, might watch over her with little suspicion falling on them. The Wolfhound’s ideas were always vague, intentionally so. If his investigators succeeded, he could take credit for their success. If they failed, he would view their failure with paternal sympathy and clear disappointment.

The Shy One had no time pattern, no particular night of the week, no pattern of months, and only the vaguest broad sector of operation. Some of the victims said they heard a car door close immediately after they were attacked, but none could identify any car.

Sasha tried to come up with an idea as he jogged to the bus, but all he could think of was that his mother would be there when he got home and he would have no peace.

Emil Karpo had awakened at five in the morning, just as he had done for more than twenty years. He had awakened in total darkness without an alarm clock. He turned on the small table lamp next to his narrow bed and rose slowly. For weeks after Mathilde Verson’s death, he had slept with the small light on as he had as a young boy. Then, one night, he had turned it off. He slept without clothes despite the weather. Though the past night had been cold, it was no colder than a typical Moscow winter night. On warm nights in the summer, he slept on top of the thin sheet and thick blanket. On cold nights like last night, he had slept under the thick blanket that had been a gift from Mathilde. Mathilde, who had been torn to pieces in daylight on a busy street. She had been caught in the crossfire between two rival mafias. Mathilde had been a full-time telephone operator and a part-time prostitute with a sense of humor Karpo did not understand. They had, over the years, moved from a regular Thursday rendezvous to a teasing friendship to a serious relationship. Karpo wondered what there was in him that had made the bright, pretty woman want to be with him.

Emil Karpo had no illusions about himself. He was tall and incredibly gaunt, though he worked out in his room each morning. He was very pale and wore his straight and thinning hair brushed straight back. Until Mathilde, he had never worn anything but black. She had gradually changed that, but now he was back to his black attire. With Mathilde he had smiled a few times, very small smiles that only someone watching closely would have noticed. People did not tend to watch Emil Karpo closely. He was well aware that both the criminals and police referred to him as the Tartar or the Vampire. Neither name displeased him. It did not hurt to have a reputation. But Mathilde had seen past his white, cold image. Zeema, the winter, suited him and now it was Dikabr’, December, which suited him best of all months.

He looked around the room. Against one wall was a bookcase filled with black notebooks covering the details of every case on which he had ever worked. He had a special marking on those books containing cases that had not been solved. On the desk before the bookcase stood an old table. Two months ago, Karpo had purchased a computer, which rested on the table. It was crude, an old Macintosh II, but it had been expensive. That didn’t matter to Karpo. He had saved most of his salary. He could have lived better, perhaps eaten better, certainly dressed better, but he had simply put his money-cash-in a well-hidden place outside of his room.

Karpo was slowly transferring all of the data from his black books to the computer. He had been reading books on computers and had become convinced from using the one belonging to the Office of Special Investigation that a careful recording of the data in his notebooks might enable him to cross-check information from thousands of crimes and perhaps find information that would tie some things together.

On the wall near the door to the hall sat a chest of drawers, so old it was almost an antique. There was a painting on the wall. Mathilde had painted it. Craig Hamilton, the black FBI man who had been one of the agents assigned to help in the Russian fight against organized crime, lived in Washington and was a lover of art who frequently visited the National Gallery with his family. He had declared Mathilde a talented artist. Mathilde had given the painting to the Rostnikovs. Karpo had come to his room shortly after her death to find the painting on the wall. Each morning he paused, as he did now, before he began his workout to gaze in the semi-darkness at the reclining figure of a woman looking up a grassy hill, her face away from the viewer, her red hair, like a young Mathilde’s, billowing in a gentle wind. At the top of the grassy hill stood a small house. On the wall behind Karpo’s bed was the door to the closet where his dark clothes hung neatly in front and the clothes that Mathilde had bought, made, or convinced him to purchase were in boxes on the shelf. The fourth wall was to the right of Karpo’s bed. It had the single window that Emil Karpo opened only in the morning to determine the weather.

It was little more than the cell of a monk. Karpo, in fact, had set up the room to resemble that of Lenin’s original Moscow room. Emil Karpo had zealously believed that Marxism would eventually weed out the corruption of individuals and that Communism would unite the world. He had been certain of his convictions from the first meeting he went to as a small boy holding his father’s hand, when he saw the red banner with the hammer and sickle covering the large wall behind the speakers who stood on the low platform and shouted with passion of the transformations that Soviet Communism would bring to the world. On that night, at that meeting, the workers, except for his father and a few others, had shouted till it hurt the boy’s ears. His father, whom he now resembled, had simply squeezed the boy’s hand.

Karpo had become a policeman in order to help stop those who broke the laws of the state and impeded the progress of the Communist dream. The Party, flawed as it might have become, had been his religion. Now the Soviet Union was gone and a group of opportunists calling themselves Communists were threatening to take over the government in free elections. But Karpo knew theirs was not the Communism in which he had believed. That was dead. These new Communists said they would rid Russia of the mafias and reunite the Soviet Union. Karpo, who was on the cold concrete floor doing pushups, knew that it was too late. The people had exchanged the corruption of Communism and its promise for the corruption of capitalism and its inflation, lack of direction, and the growth of a wealthy criminal element. The bribes were still necessary. The food was more scarce. The political promises now were more hollow.

It was not Communism that had failed. It was humanity. The animalism of humanity, the weakness of people, the ease of corruption, the lack of real commitment from top to bottom, had destroyed the dream that could have been a reality. It had all relied ultimately on faith, not on God and not on the system, but in people, the Russian people, the Soviet people, to commit themselves to Communism and its ultimate promise. Karpo now had little faith that the people had the ability to escape centuries of corrupt survival under any system. Capitalism was not the savior. It was only another facade behind which the weak and uncommitted-almost everyone-could hide.

Only Mathilde had helped him through, and the example of Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, who behaved as if nothing surprised him, as if society was mad regardless of who controlled it, as if only individual people-women, children, the innocent and relatively innocent-counted. Rostnikov’s attitude had frequently gotten him into trouble with the MVD, the KGB, and military intelligence, but he had managed to survive. Karpo had decided early in his career that he would stay with and respect this limping eccentric man who frequently smiled at the folly of the world.

Karpo finished his one hundredth push-up, rolled onto his back, put his legs up on his bed, and began to do his several hundred abdominal crunches. He had no need to count. His body told him how many he had done. Next he propped himself on his arms so that his long legs could reach into the air. He began pumping his legs, bicycling, slowly for a minute or two, then faster and faster. He continued for fifteen minutes and was barely breathing hard when he stopped and rose. He had worked up a very slight sweat, and in spite of the coldness of the room, he was warm. He got a towel from his bottom drawer, one of the three towels he owned, took the blue plastic box with the bar of soap inside, wrapped the towel around himself, and went into the hall. It was not yet six. The narrow hallway with the dull gray walls was empty. Even those who had to be at work early waited for the policeman to take his morning shower and get back to his room before lining up to douse themselves in the trickle of quick cold water. No one wanted to run into the Vampire. It was an unwritten rule of the building off Vernadskogo Prospekt. Many wondered why a policeman, a detective, chose to live in a place like this when he could certainly do much better, but he had been there as long as any of them could remember.

Back in his room, Karpo, fully dry, hung his towel on a bar next to the window and slowly dressed. His watch told him that he had two hours to work on his computer. Already he had uncovered some interesting data that he wanted to discuss with Porfiry Petrovich. Karpo had a possible lead in the case of the person who had been sending letter and box bombs to seemingly unrelated Moscovites. One of the victims had died. Eight had been seriously injured.

He focused on this as he worked on his computer. All else was blocked out, even the call the night before from Pankov, the small, quivering assistant to the director of the Office of Special Investigation, Colonel Snitkonoy, the Gray Wolfhound. Pankov had simply said that the director ordered the appearance of all members of the office for a meeting the next morning at nine. The morning briefing was always scheduled, and Karpo thought briefly that there must be something of great importance at issue if a call had to be made. He knew better than to ask Pankov what the issue might be. He would know soon enough.