The Twelfth Department

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Moscow was beginning to wake as he walked home. It must have rained because the streets were wet and their reflection of the yellow morning sky had turned them golden. He was tired, certainly-his shoes felt like they were made of lead-but he was alive and he was safe, relative to the last few days anyway. And a citizen couldn’t ask for much more these days.

Sometimes a murder was like a pebble thrown into a pond, the ripples from it spreading wide-and that had been the case here. A bullet fired on a Monday had killed the professor in the morning and contributed to the arrest of the People’s Commissar for Health in the afternoon. On Tuesday, it had claimed another life-Shtange’s-and seen Priudski arrested. And last night the bullet had claimed Colonel Zaitsev-and Korolev could only guess the colonel’s fall would lead to many others.

One bullet had wreaked havoc.

Korolev walked slowly, thinking it through, amazed that he and Yuri had somehow been spared.

But then he remembered where he was going and who might be waiting there for him-and he picked up his pace. By the time he turned the corner of Bolshoi Nikolo-Vorobinsky he was almost running. He must have woken half the house as he clattered up the staircase to the apartment.

They were waiting for him, and as he entered the shared room he saw three faces looking up at him. They must have been sleeping on the chesterfield. Valentina stood, rubbing at her eyes, but Yuri was already running toward him, grabbing him around his waist and Natasha, Valentina’s little girl, joined him a moment later. And then all four of them were holding each other, not saying anything, and Korolev found that his eyes were damp-and it wasn’t from sadness.