Tarnished Icons

FOUR

Ludmilla Henshakayova was startled by the knock at her door. She had been sitting at her window looking out at the snow starting to fall again. In the corner a man on the television screen began to laugh. Ludmilla didn’t know why he was laughing and she really didn’t care. He and the electric picture box were there for mindless company. Ludmilla did not like to be alone.

Another knock.

Ludmilla did not live in the best of neighborhoods. Her apartment building was in fatal disrepair, and from her window not far from where the trolleys turned she could see only the ancient cemetery and its occasional visitors. Mostly, from the window, she watched the ugly huge crows perch on the tombstones, leaving their claw prints in the snow. Ludmilla was nearly seventy and barely able to survive on her pension plus the money she made selling flowers in front of the Bolshoi when the opera, ballet, or other event was going on. Such events were frequent, and Ludmilla needed the money badly, but recently the cold had gotten to her, and Kretchman, the flower supplier, had suggested that she stop until the weather grew warmer. But how could she?

A third knock.

Ludmilla sighed and over the sound of the laughing man on the television shouted, “Who?”

“Police,” came a woman’s voice.

“I don’t believe you,” said Ludmilla, looking at the dead bolt and four locks on her door.

“I’m here with another officer,” the woman who claimed to be a police officer said. “We’ll slip our identification cards under the door.”

Ludmilla still sat. The man on the television had stopped laughing. Perhaps the snow would stop soon. There was a Mozart opera at the Bolshoi. She couldn’t remember which one, but there would be Americans, French, Canadians. They and the newly rich young Russians were her customers.

The cards came under the door.

“They could be forged,” Ludmilla said. “Anything can be forged if you have the money.”

“We are here to talk to you and about the man who attacked you,” came a young man’s voice.

“That was ten years ago,” said Ludmilla.

“Almost,” said the woman outside.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ludmilla said firmly.

“We think he is still attacking women,” said the female voice outside. “We think he is hurting them badly, raping and beating them. We think he may eventually kill one of his victims.”

“Go to them,” shouted Ludmilla, knowing that her next-door neighbor, Maria Illianova, was listening to every word.

“You are the only one who has seen him,” said the woman.

Ludmilla sighed, got up on her arthritic legs, and moved slowly to the door. When she got there, she looked down at the two identification cards, but she didn’t bend to pick them up.

She opened the door.

Sasha and Elena heard the locks click and watched the door come open. According to their information from the original report of the attack, Ludmilla Henshakayova was a large woman of not yet seventy. The woman before them in a loose-fitting dress was thin and seemed ancient. She looked at Sasha and Elena and then stepped back so they could enter the small apartment.

Sasha paused to pick up their identification cards and hand Elena hers.

The door closed and Ludmilla said, “With two police inside, I can lock it later.”

On the television, the laughing man was now interviewing an actor. Ludmilla couldn’t remember his name but she recognized him. He sat across from the laughing man, confident, handsome, legs crossed.

“Ludmilla Henshakayova,” Elena said gently to get the woman’s attention.

“I’m sorry,” said Ludmilla. “I suffer from the Russian diseases of fear, loneliness, melancholy, and a desire to forget the past.”

The room was not at all what either Elena or Sasha had expected. The neighborhood was nearly a slum and had been for years. Half a block away sat the remains of a building so poorly constructed it had collapsed about four years earlier, killing more than a dozen people.

But this room was immaculate. The walls were clean. Two framed posters of flowers were side by side on one wall. The other walls were bare. The concrete floor was covered by a large, darkly ornate rug, and the chairs and narrow bed in the corner were covered in matching knitted covers of yellow and green. The fourth wall held a full bookcase that stood about six feet high and fourteen feet across. In the corner were two chairs and a table covered with a bright yellow tablecloth. On a polished table in a corner sat the black-and-white television where the laughing man and the movie star were talking.

Both Elena and Sasha saw the low armchair at the window. Elena’s aunt had a chair near their window, where Anna Timofeyeva sat for hours, sometimes the whole day, except to do her prescribed walking and to eat a little. Elena sensed her aunt’s memories in that chair. Sasha imagined his mother, Lydia, in such a chair, but not for long. Lydia had the patience of a fly. Sasha sensed his mother’s fear of loneliness and her ever present impatience. Lydia would not sit still in such a comfortable chair for more than five minutes before she rose and began searching for someone to call, something to do.

“Sit,” said Ludmilla.

“May we turn the television off?” said Elena.

“Yes,” said Ludmilla, going back to her chair at the window.

Sasha anticipated her, stepped ahead, and turned the chair slightly so it could face the two investigators, who sat in the straight-backed wooden chairs. Sasha glanced out of the window at the cemetery. A trio of crows swooped down on a large tombstone that was leaning decidedly to the right.

“A little girl detective,” Ludmilla said with a shake of her head as if she expected no more than madness from the new Russia. “A pretty little girl.”

Elena wasn’t sure whether she should be flattered or insulted.

“The attack,” Elena said.

They had decided that whichever one of them seemed to have the better rapport with the woman would lead the questioning.

Ludmilla now looked at Sasha.

“And a boy detective, too. A boy detective with eyes as old as mine. You know, I used to be a poet. I can show you some of my books, the magazines in which I was published, some posters for readings I did all over the Soviet Union.”

She paused and looked up at the two posters on the wall. Sasha and Elena followed her gaze. Indeed, under the flowers both posters carried printed announcements of appearances and readings. One poster was in French. The other was in Russian.

“I no longer write poetry. And then …”

She trailed off, pulled her distant memories in, and sat up to say with renewed strength, “Tea?”

“No, thank you,” said Elena. “We know it has been a long time, but we have very little information on the attack.”

If it hadn’t been for Karpo’s notes, the information they had found in the general files would never have led them to this woman. There had been only a brief entry. Ludmilla’s name, age, and address. There was also a note on the standard form indicating the location where she was attacked and a description of both the method of attack-knife, sneaking up from behind, hand over the eyes-and the attacker. The attacker’s description was simply “Young man, dark hair, brown eyes, khaki jacket. Attempted to take victim’s purse. She fought him off.”

There were no other entries on the case, and neither Sasha nor Elena thought that there had been any follow-up investigation. It was Karpo’s notes that indicated the victim was a highly regarded poet. It was Karpo who had written in his notebook the address of the apartment building in which they now sat. The official report had the wrong address.

“What is he doing to these women?” asked Ludmilla.

“Violent rape,” said Elena. “So far he hasn’t killed anyone, but …”

“I used to be big and strong,” said the old woman. “Now I am not as weak as I look, but I have lost my need to write what I see and feel.”

“Can you remember the man clearly?”

Ludmilla smiled, rivulets of wrinkles forming around her narrow mouth. There was irony but no mirth in the smile.

“Yes. You want to know what he looked like then and what he looks like now?” she said.

“Now?” asked Tkach. “You’ve seen him recently?”

“I saw him.”

“Did you call the police?” asked Elena.

The smile again.

“Do you think they would care?” she asked. “Do you think they would even write down what I would tell them, an old woman claiming to see the man who attacked her almost ten years ago?”

Both Elena and Sasha knew that the woman was right. In a Moscow gone mad with violence, there was neither time nor inclination to follow up reports about old crimes. There were approximately one hundred thousand policemen in a sprawling city of nine million. Few wanted to be policemen. Even armed with Kalishnikov automatic weapons and wearing bulletproof vests, the police, who worked twelve-or fourteen-hour days, were no match for the new mafias and street gangs who were better armed. The police of Russia, unlike those of America, were permitted to fire on suspects who tried to flee or looked as if they would fire weapons at them. The death rate among criminals was high. Official statistics showed that the Moscow police had fired weapons more than fifteen hundred times in the past year compared to the Los Angeles police, who fired only one hundred fifty times in spite of a much higher rate of violence.

“Where did you see him recently, this man who attacked you?” Elena asked.

Ludmilla looked back at Elena. There was something of herself as a young woman in Elena’s face. The silence was very long.

“Would I have to identify him?”

“Possibly,” said Sasha. “Probably not, if we can find evidence or find out where he lives. Perhaps we could persuade him to confess to one of the recent attacks.”

“You won’t do anything,” Ludmilla said, eyes scanning the small room from bed to bookshelves to television and then back to the two children who were detectives. “And if you talk to him, he might come and find me. He might kill me. I am resigned, not depressed, and I choose to live a while longer.”

“How could he possibly find you? We won’t give him your name,” said Sasha, tossing back his hair.

“The same way you found me,” the old woman said.

“That information is in police records only,” said Sasha.

“Exactly,” said Ludmilla, leaning forward.

There was a chill in the room. It had been there since they had come in. Elena and Sasha had kept their jackets on, but now they were acutely aware of the heavy chill.

“You mean …?” Sasha began.

Ludmilla closed her eyes and nodded.

“He is a policeman?” said Elena.

“He is a policeman,” echoed Ludmilla.

The package had been delivered to Petrovka. It was addressed to Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, Office of Special Investigation. Karpo, Iosef, and Paulinin stood looking down at the package. The four people who worked in the mail room had been told to leave.

After the bomber had contacted Rostnikov, the small army of callers had been put into motion and the warnings had begun. People in the energy industry and others even vaguely connected to or supporting nuclear power had been told “penguin,” and the callers had checked off the names of everyone they reached. Later Karpo and Iosef would go over the report, providing, of course, that the package they were looking at did not contain a bomb that killed them.

Paulinin was a forensic technician. He had a laboratory on the second underground level of Petrovka and was an expert in everything from examination of bodies to explosives. Most of the officers of Petrovka and all of the scientific employees, including the part-time pathologists who conducted autopsies, shunned Paulinin, who was considered a walking encyclopedia but more than a bit eccentric. He looked rather like a bespectacled, nearsighted monkey with an oversize head topped by wild gray-black hair. His office-laboratory was cluttered with piles of books and objects from past investigations. Here a pistol with the barrel missing. There, on the tottering pile of books on the edge of a desk, some false teeth in a mason jar.

The disheveled scientist adjusted his glasses. He put down the cheap red plastic toolbox he had brought with him, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a pair of rubber gloves in a plastic bag. Paulinin put on the gloves, returned the empty plastic bag to his pocket, and got on his knees before the brown package that looked rather thick to be containing only a five-minute message.

Paulinin appeared to be praying to the package. Around him letters and packages sat in unattended piles. Ancient cubbyholes of various sizes were stuffed with mail.

Paulinin leaned forward and sniffed at the bundle from one corner to another. Then he put his right ear next to the package, not quite touching it. He removed a stethoscope from the red plastic box, put it on with a flourish, and looked into space as he gently listened to the parcel. Next he ran his fingers along the rim of the package, pausing at one point. Still on his knees, he slowly turned the bundle over, touching only the rim. Iosef held his breath as Paulinin began to tap gently at the parcel with his rubber-covered fingers. Then, suddenly, he stood, picked up the package by the edges, and said, “I’d say it contains a single sheet of paper and a solid block of wood, probably birch, judging from its weight. I’ll x-ray, then check for fingerprints if I am able to open this and see what else the contents tell me.”

Karpo didn’t bother to answer. Once the package was in Paulinin’s hands, he would do what he wanted with it in his huge, cluttered laboratory in the basement. Karpo had learned that Paulinin was indeed brilliant. He was also, to put the matter kindly, considered to be a bit mad. But it was a madness Karpo had learned not only to accept but to deny. Paulinin was lucid and prone to his own tastes and angers. The anger he sometimes displayed was aimed particularly at all the Petrovka pathologists. He was only a little more tolerant of the so-called forensics experts who at least were not, according to Paulinin, prone to prance like pathology divas. Few things delighted Paulinin more than to be brought a corpse the pathologists had examined and autopsied, for he was always certain of finding something they had overlooked. What he delighted in even more was to be given the corpse first. Such luck came his way only through the Office of Special Investigation and a handful of inspectors in other offices and departments who knew of Paulinin’s skills.

Karpo also knew that Paulinin was a lonely man who had made gestures of friendship toward the Vampire. The overtures had been small: a cup of tea in a suspicious beaker in Paulinin’s laboratory and, much later, an invitation to share the lunch Paulinin had brought with him that day. Twice now the strange pair had gone out to relatively inexpensive cafeterias for lunch. Paulinin considered Emil Karpo his only friend.

“Come to my laboratory in one hour and forty minutes, Emil Karpo,” Paulinin said. “I should have something by then. We can have tea while we talk.”

“One hour and forty minutes,” Karpo agreed, and scientist and package disappeared through the door.

“What if he blows it up accidentally?” said Iosef.

“Then we shall certainly feel the tremor,” Karpo responded with no trace of sarcasm or humor. “If we feel no such tremor and we go to Paulinin’s laboratory, you will accept his offer of tea.”

“Fine,” said Iosef.

“You will not want to accept his offer,” Karpo said, “but you will overcome the impulse to refuse.”

“I am not expecting blyeenchyeekee s vahryehn’yehm, blinis filled with jam. I have drunk suspicious brown water from the bleached skull of an Afghan tribesman and eaten small rodents,” said Iosef with a grin. “I was a soldier. We often had such interesting experiences.”

“We shall see,” said Karpo heading for the door to tell the mail room staff that it was safe to come back.

The building on Balakava Prospekt in which the Congregation Israel met had been purchased with Israeli money in the form of German deutsche marks. The building was small and the price unreasonable, but it suited the needs of Avrum Belinsky and his small congregation recently decimated by the murders of six of its members. The two-hundred-year-old building had been a Russian Orthodox church. It was basically an anteroom and a large open room. During the Communist reign, the cross on the single turret of the building had been taken down. Then the building had been used for a while as an office of the automobile licensing bureau, then as a meeting hall for party members who also belonged to the construction workers guild, and later as an unsuccessful tourist site where copies of icons were sold and a few hung on the walls.

The church had been purchased from the Russian government by a German businessman who traded a variety of services, primarily intervention with the government and appropriate mafias, to foreign investors for hard currency. He had planned to use the church as a storage space, but it had proved inconvenient. The space was too small, and the traffic was often heavy during the day with no place to park and unload a truck, even a small one, without being noticed. There were too many prying eyes among the neighbors. The businessman decided to move his storage space outside the city. He would have sold the building for half the price he got from the Jews if they had chosen to haggle. Jews were supposed to haggle. The serious Israeli rabbi who spoke perfect Russian had simply asked the price and, in the name of some Russian members of the congregation, purchased the church.

When Avrum moved in, it held nothing more than a small wooden table and a single badly scratched folding chair. The large high-ceilinged room featured a warped wooden floor lying over frozen earth. There was no heat, and the first order of business, after properly blessing the new synagogue, had been to heat the space before the winter came. Building the bema-the small wooden platform where the rabbi conducted the services-was easy. Getting a podium was easy. He had brought his own ark and two Torahs, all relatively new and waiting for the congregation to give them a history of prayer, tears, determination, devotion, and hope. He had no trouble mounting the ark on the wall behind the podium. Even getting chairs had proved far easier than Avrum had anticipated. He bought fifty-the synagogue could hold no more-from a man who claimed to have a right to them since they had been used for Communist neighborhood study meetings and he had been custodian of the building on Narodnaya Prospekt where the meetings had been held for almost half a century. Nor did Belinsky have great trouble attracting a small congregation, which had continued to grow in spite of the first two senseless murders of young men. Only one of the twenty-four people who came when word circulated that a synagogue existed in this part of the city could speak a bit of Yiddish. None could read or write Hebrew. Only two of the males had been circumcised. Few had read the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, from which he would read at each weekly service in Russian and Hebrew. Their sense of the trials of Abraham and Moses were mythic and distant, not powerful lessons in endurance and faith that could sustain their lives.

The greatest problem to overcome among the Russian Jews was that they did not want to be clearly identified as practicing Jews. Anti-Semitism was always an issue, one they had learned to live with by presenting themselves as atheist Soviet citizens who did not practice their religion. Many had changed their names so they would not appear to be Jewish. That Belinsky had been prepared to cope with, and he did so far better than he had anticipated. But he had not been prepared for murder. Perhaps a beating, swastikas on the door, or even a few acts of desecration, but not murder.

Heating had been a serious problem. Belinsky could not find reasonably honest contractors to do the work. He could tell instantly which ones were frauds, and he knew after a moment or two of questioning which ones were completely unreliable. Finally, though he knew nothing about heating, Belinsky had decided with the help of volunteers, three of whom had now been murdered, to construct his own heating system. He had settled on four metal wood-burning stoves, one to be placed in each corner of the chapel. They would vent through holes made in the roof. He bought the four identical stoves through an old man who was a member of the congregation and refused to tell where he was getting them.

Belinsky had helped build roads, railroad lines, buildings, bunkers, and houses on three kibbutzim. But he knew nothing about heating, the winter had come quickly, and the stoves worked only minimally. Congregants still appeared on Friday nights and Saturday mornings and occasionally for discussions, Hebrew language lessons, and Torah studies, which were conducted during the week, but the wood-burning stoves were far from adequate.

Belinsky had been able to reach all but a few of the remaining members of his congregation to urge them to come to a meeting that night to discuss the killings and to pray for the dead. The congregation barely had a minion-the ten men needed to conduct the morning prayers. Fourteen men in the congregation had been bar mitzvahed so that a minion was possible. Five of those men were now dead.

Belinsky stood at the closed door of the synagogue to usher each reluctant, frightened, or angry member inside. At eight-thirty, half an hour after he had called for the meeting, he moved down the center aisle past the wooden chairs and up to the bema, where he stood in front of the podium. There were thirty-one people seated before him-young and old, even a few children. There were more people than he expected, even some new faces, which he examined carefully without looking directly at them. The new faces were angry, determined. They were not there to make trouble. They were Jews who had been brought out by the very acts of horror and violence that had been designed to send them hiding in fear. Everyone kept their coats or jackets on. All wore hats or black kepahs, which were kept in a wooden box just inside the synagogue door. All who entered the house of worship were required to cover their heads as God had commanded. The rabbi himself wore slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. This was a meeting at which prayers would be said, but it was also a meeting at which work would be discussed. He had decided not to wear his suit and tie.

Belinsky saw eyes looking around but heads not moving. There would be spies in the room, perhaps even the murderers, perhaps the police. There was not a person in the room who did not fear for his life. Yet they had come.

“Chaverim,” Belinsky began softly. “Friends. For almost five thousand years, oppressors have risen to murder us by the millions, the dozens, and individually because we are Jews. Sigmund Freud, a practicing Jew, said that the Jews had been the scapegoats of the Western world. He said that there was an animal need in civilizations to have a group to blame for the failure of crops, the outbreak of plagues, and their inability to make a living, and to satisfy their need to feel superior. This anti-Semitism was not only among Christians. It existed thousands of years before the birth of Christ. It was present not only among the ignorant and uneducated but among those who feared the determination of the Jews to survive and even under the worst of circumstances, to prosper and take care of each other. We have been blamed for most of the problems of Western civilization, and we have been hated because God proclaimed us the chosen people. An American poet once wrote, ‘How odd of God to choose the Jews.’ But through Moses and Abraham he did choose us. He tried us, tested us. We prayed for protection and salvation, and God always answered and sometimes the answer was no. We have been tested, but we survived. We have our own nation. We have a renewed respect in the world, and with that respect has come fear.”

It was at this point that the door opened. Heads turned, almost expecting hooded men with machine guns. Avrum Belinsky looked at the limping policeman who closed the door and quietly moved to a seat at the rear of the small synagogue. He kept his fur hat and his wool-lined coat on.

“The six young men who have been murdered,” Belinsky said, looking at Rostnikov, who looked back at the rabbi, “the six young men whose only offense was that they were Jews who wanted to practice their religion will be honored by our continuing to worship. There are those among us who have said we should give up, that they will kill us all, that the police will not find them, probably not even look for them. There are those among us who know that many of the police, many in the procurator general’s office and State Security are anti-Semites. But there are some who will honor the law, honor our dead.

“Several weeks ago we held a service for two dead members of our small congregation whose names we inscribed on the plaque that hangs on that wall. On Friday we will hold services honoring four more. We will fight back. We will pray to our Lord, to help the police find the murderers. Does anyone wish to speak?”

A thin man in his thirties, clean-shaven, his dark face marked by a broken nose that had never healed properly, stood and said, “I say we arm, every one of us who does not already have a weapon. I say we should conduct our own search, that we should travel in groups when possible, that we should keep our hands on the triggers of our weapons and have them ready at the slightest sign of danger.”

There were murmurs among the congregants; small arguments began. Belinsky looked at Rostnikov. Guns in the hands of private citizens were against the law, but it was a law increasingly ignored.

A woman’s voice said, “If we kill them, we will all be condemned. More people will hate us.”

Belinsky nodded, said nothing, and pointed to a man in his sixties, heavyset and wearing a workman’s cap, who stood and spoke.

“I’m a clerk, a bookkeeper for a night club where they play loud music, the Rusty Sputnik.”

A ripple of laughter crossed the somber room.

“I’m a clerk,” the man repeated. “I have always been recognized as a Jew though I never declared or practiced the faith of my fathers and their fathers before them till now. Under the Soviet Union most of us lived as suspicious characters. I have spent my life expecting to be fired, accused, pounced on for no reason other than that I am a Jew. Rabbi Belinsky has given me and my family pride in our identity. I will fight if necessary, though I am only a nearsighted bookkeeper. That’s all I have to say.”

The man sat. There was no applause, but a general nodding of heads suggested agreement. Belinsky knew that those who were wavering were not going to speak. They had found the courage to come here tonight. They would listen and then they would talk to their families, if they had them, and decide whether to shun the synagogue or join together in determination and fear. Belinsky estimated that at least half of the people sitting in the wooden chairs before him were among the undecided.

Belinsky looked at Rostnikov, whose arms were folded before him. Rostnikov’s face showed nothing.

“For those who can attend, funeral services will be held tomorrow for our dead. Their bodies will be here from noon to three, and then we will bury them in the Jewish cemetery.”

“What should we do?” asked a woman carrying a sleeping baby.

“I have spent my life fighting,” Belinsky said. “Fighting against those who would destroy us, exploit us, enslave us. My father and uncles fought the British. My country and family have fought Arabs who wanted to destroy us. We survive. We prosper. We do this because we are willing to fight and, if necessary, die. Because we are small in number, we survive because we do not compromise in battle. Every Jew is a soldier. I think that those who wish to arm themselves should meet with me for training. I think we should go on meeting, holding services. I am prepared to die for my beliefs. Without beliefs worth dying for we simply pass through life.”

With this, Belinsky asked the congregation to rise. He lowered his head and said a prayer in Hebrew. A few in the congregation who had begun Hebrew lessons with the rabbi tried to accompany him. He repeated the prayer in Russian and more voices joined in.

The meeting had ended. Rostnikov stood and waited, putting as much of his weight on his good right leg as he could. He was learning to let his artificial leg help a bit at a time, and each day he believed the pain in what remained of his left leg eased just a bit more as he tried to make the limb of plastic and metal a part of him.

Some congregants stopped to talk to the rabbi, including the young man who had advocated armed defense. Rostnikov couldn’t hear them, but he could see that the discussion was animated, passionate. Belinsky shook the hand of the young man and the others. Soon there remained no one but the policeman and the rabbi.

“It’s cold in here,” Rostnikov said, looking at the four stoves with a pile of wood next to each. “Poor circulation.”

“Of that I am aware,” said Belinsky. “Correcting the problem is another matter.”

Rostnikov’s eyes ran up and down the walls.

“With the help of four men and the proper equipment, I believe we could build a duct system with the existing stoves that would effectively heat the building.”

“We?” asked Belinsky, moving down the aisle toward the policeman.

Rostnikov shrugged.

“You know about heating?”

“I know plumbing,” said Rostnikov. “The principles are not all that dissimilar.”

“I’ll help and I’ll find three others,” Belinsky said. “If the materials are available and not ridiculously expensive, we welcome your supervision.”

“I know where to obtain the materials reasonably,” said Rostnikov. “This will be an interesting challenge.”

“And the challenge of finding the murderers?” said Belinsky.

“You can be assured that the less-than-firmly-entrenched current government does not want an international incident over murderous attacks by anti-Semites,” said Rostnikov.

“It is impossible to understand the Lord,” said Belinsky with a sigh. “Politics, however, I do understand. Expediency triumphs and can be rationalized. It requires no goodwill, only self interest.”

“Therefore …?” asked Rostnikov.

“Therefore, I believe at the moment that you will do your best to find the murderers.”

“And find a way to heat this building.”

Belinsky smiled.

“Perhaps.”

“You have something to tell me,” said Belinsky.

The two men now stood only a few feet apart.

“One of the four dead men on the embankment was not a Jew.”

For an instant, and only an instant, Belinsky looked puzzled.

“All four were of this congregation,” said Belinsky.

“One of the murdered men was Igor Mesanovich,” said Rostnikov, pulling out a notebook and reading between the tiny drawings. “His family goes back many generations. Before the Revolution, they were practicing members of the Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, according to Mesanovich’s brother, who was interviewed a few hours ago by the Saint Petersburg police, they were members of the aristocracy. A few of them were even in the court of the czars. The brother believes that before the Revolution, when much of the family moved to Moscow and lived in this very neighborhood, his family even worshiped in this building.”

Rostnikov closed the book and returned it to his pocket.

“Perhaps Mesanovich wanted to be Jewish,” said Belinsky. “Some people have a wish to be members of a proud minority. Some Gentiles even believe in the truth of our God.”

“But he never told you he wasn’t Jewish?” Rostnikov asked.

Belinsky shook his head and said, “He told us his family was originally from Ukraine, a small shtetl.”

“We Russians are a people accustomed to lying,” said Rostnikov, “lying with such sincerity, conviction, and indignation that we often believe our own lies. I have faced murderers who committed their crime in front of numerous reliable witnesses. The murderers often swore that they had not committed the crime. Their sincerity was convincing. Polygraphs don’t work on us. It has taken us almost a thousand years to perfect this art.”

“Mesanovich was an infiltrator?” asked Belinsky.

“It is possible,” said Rostnikov. “He seems to have belonged to no nationalistic or anti-Semitic organizations. Yet one cannot avoid the possibility that those with whom he conspired distrusted him for some reason, real or imagined, and killed him. In all likelihood he was simply mistaken for a Jew, since he contended that he was one. We are looking into it. So far we have not been able to find Mesanovich’s parents here in Moscow. They have not been home when we called, and we have not found out where they might work.”

Belinsky’s eyes met those of the policeman, and the rabbi made a cautious decision to trust the man.

“Do you have informants within the mafias, the nationalist groups, the hate groups?” asked Belinsky.

Rostnikov shrugged and said, “I have been asked by the director of my office to request that you cease your services and activities until we find the murderers.”

“No,” said Belinsky firmly.

Rostnikov nodded, having anticipated the answer.

“More may die,” said Rostnikov, “as you said.”

“We will help God and the police to try to keep that from happening,” said the rabbi.

“And I will see what I can do about getting the ducting and tools to heat this place adequately,” said Rostnikov.

“Why?” asked Belinsky.

“Because it is cold in here,” said Rostnikov. “And because my wife and son are Jews, as will be my grandchildren. Perhaps one day one of them will choose to come here on a winter morning. I should not want them cold.”

The rabbi examined his visitor with curiosity.

“One last question,” said Rostnikov. “Do you have a favorite color?”

“Yes,” the rabbi said. “Two colors, blue and white, the colors of Israel.”

“I’m exploring a theory that people often reveal a great deal about themselves from the colors they feel drawn to,” said Rostnikov. “It is not my idea but that of a German psychologist who wrote an article I read. It seems reasonable, but the puzzle is what to make of people’s choices.”

“So, you’ve not yet drawn any conclusions?”

“About you, yes. You are an ardent Zionist who might well do something dangerous to find these murderers. The colors don’t tell me this. They confirm it. My own favorite color seems to tell me nothing about myself. But that is the nature of life.”

With that the policeman turned and limped out the door into the snowy night. Belinsky had spent far too much of his time with far too little result keeping the stoves filled with wood. After the funeral he would need to visit each member of the small congregation, not only to help strengthen their resolve but also to urge other Jews to come to stand with them. Belinsky knew he could be very persuasive. That was one of the reasons he had volunteered for this assignment. A horrible irony of the murders could ultimately be that the congregation might grow rather than dwindle, that the money Israel was investing in this congregation would continue to draw those hungry for food and others who shared their outcast state. Belinsky had faith in his God and in his own power of persuasion.

Rostnikov, however, was a nagging puzzle. Belinsky couldn’t afford to like the man, yet he was drawn to the detective’s apparent openness and odd ideas. In addition, Rostnikov had volunteered to help with the heating system. Belinsky would see if that came to pass. It is easy to make promises and only a little harder to ignore them.

He let the fires die down while he sat in a chair in silent prayer. When he felt the fires were safe, he retrieved his coat from the alcove near the entrance, turned out the light, and locked the door.

He headed toward his small apartment, which was only two blocks away. The streets were empty. It was late and it was cold. There was little for the people of Moscow to do except visit friends, talk and drink tea, read a book, watch television, and produce more Russians.

Avrum Belinsky was less than a block from his apartment building when they appeared. There were three of them. Avrum knew they were there fifteen feet before two of them stepped out of the doorway. He knew there was another one behind. He had seen the one behind in the shadows of a darkened house and been careful not to show in his gait or manner what he had seen.

Belinsky’s hand was on the gun in his pocket as he approached the two men who stood before him now, waiting for him to turn around and see that his escape was impossible. But Belinsky didn’t want to escape. He continued to walk forward toward the two men, and he didn’t look behind him.