Red Chameleon (6 page)

“Forgive us,” said the old man in Russian, but a Russian had sounded old, unused, and tinged with another accent that sounded American. The old man displayed no look of regret on his face. His eyes, instead, were far away or long ago.

“I understand,” Vladimir said, resisting the urge to massage his feeling-deprived hand and wrist. He would not give the Americans the satisfaction. On the other hand, he decided not to insult them. Everyone knew Americans were mad, violent, but having behaved with violence, they often responded with guilty generosity. These were well-dressed men with money. A sizable tip might be in order.

Vladimir walked off slowly, with, he felt, dignity. He weaved his way around the tables, filled with people, most of whom were in military uniforms. He paused inside the door to the kitchen and looked back across the dining room at the two men at the table. Only at that point did Vladimir rub his wrist and look at it, pulling back the cuff of his frayed white shirt. Through the small window in the door, Vladimir could see that the old man had forgotten his fish and had laid his hand on the package Vladimir had been punished for almost touching. The younger man ate, but he kept his eyes respectfully on the old man, who was saying something.

Misha Kvorin was smoking as he leaned against the wall behind Vladimir. The two were not exactly friends, though they had known each other for more than ten years. Misha had the sour, sagging face of a pike.

Misha, looking, as always, bored, pushed himself from the wall, pulled down his black jacket, and slouched toward the door to look over Vladimir's shoulder across the room.

“The two at eighteen,” Vladimir said. “The old one and the mean-looking one. You see—you see that thing wrapped on the table?”

“I see,” Misha said with a little cough.

“What do you think it is?”

“A package,” Misha said, turning away.

“I tried to move it out of the way, and the younger one grabbed my wrist. I had to almost twist his arm off to make him let go.”

“So?” said Misha, stepping aside so another waiter, almost as old as the old man at the table, could get past and out the door with a tray of zakuski.

“So,” Vladimir said, “we should tell the police when they leave.”

Misha gave a small and not amused laugh. “You want to go to the police? Who goes to the police, about anything? What do the police do? And this, over this? A package a foreigner won't let you touch? A package he puts right out on the table in plain sight?”

“But—”

“What do you think is in it? A shotgun?” Misha laughed, searching for his cigarettes. “Drugs? The severed limb of a Politburo member?”

“At least we should tell Comrade Tukanin,” Vladimir tried again. Comrade Tukanin was the party organizer for the kitchen workers. He had the reputation of being more eager than any other group leader in the massive hotel. That's what he would do after the Americans were gone. He would make out a report to Tukanin. Maybe it would lead to the Americans being questioned by the police, made to feel uncomfortable or frightened. And who knows, maybe the two Americans did have something in that package they shouldn't have had.

Vladimir brushed past Misha, who gave him a look that made it clear Misha thought Vladimir was a pain in the face.

As it turned out, Vladimir got a ruble from the Americans and decided that filling out a report might delay his vacation or result in his being called back early to discuss his suspicions. Deep down he knew he had never really intended to file a complaint. Grumbling was one thing, action quite another.

And so Vladimir Kuznetsov never did find out that wrapped inside the paper between his two Americans was a cheap, heavy brass candlestick.

R
OSTNIKOV DIDN'T GET HOME TO
his apartment on Krasikov Street till almost eight. He had spent the day on the case of the old Jew who had been murdered. Normally, other cases, problems, requests, needs, public testimony, would take up his time, intrude so that a murder like this would drag on and probably be forgotten. But Rostnikov had plenty of time and no distractions, since the assistant procurator was keeping him isolated from the mainstream of activity at Petrovka.

From the records he could check and a few phone calls, Rostnikov had discovered that Abraham Savitskaya had been born in the village of Yekteraslav in 1902. Savitskaya had immigrated to the United States in 1919, just as the Revolution had begun. He had returned to Russia in 1924. Somehow Savitskaya had been given a series of minor but secure positions on the fringe of the Party. For six years he had been a clerk with the Soviet War Veterans Committee. After that he had been listed for almost a dozen years as a caretaker for the Committee for Physical Culture and Sport of the USSR Council of Ministers. In 1935, at the age of thirty-three, Abraham had been retired with a pension as the result of disability. Rostnikov had not been able to discover the nature of the disability. It was a slightly peculiar background, but Rostnikov had encountered life stories far more peculiar.

At the scarred desk in his small office, Rostnikov had stared at the photograph of the four men in a small village taken sixty-five years ago. There was so little of the dead old man in the photograph that he wondered how anyone could possibly identify one of the other men all these years later as Sofiya Savitskaya had done. They were probably all dead. The life expectancy of Russians was not officially published, but it was surely less than seventy-five years. Only the best-fed men in the government and the primitives in the Caucasus who stuffed themselves with goat milk and runny yogurt lived that long.

After a few minutes, the four young men in the picture began to look familiar to Rostnikov. First, the one on the left, the thinnest, with the cap, reminded Rostnikov of one of the men who swept the halls in Petrovka on alternate nights. The man next to him looked suspiciously like the famous clown Popoff, though Popoff was now almost two decades younger than the man in the photograph. Rostnikov had taken the photograph and left it for Zelach to have copies made. It was possible Rostnikov would never get the photograph back, let alone the copies. Even had the word not gotten out that for some unspecified reason Rostnikov was no longer privileged, the system was painfully slow unless the case had a special red stamp indicating that it was being conducted in conjunction with a KGB investigation. No one talked to Rostnikov about his lowered status. They assumed, he was sure, that he had spoken up once too often or that his Jewish wife had finally proved too great a deficit.

Getting up the stairs in his apartment building was long and difficult with an almost useless left leg, but Rostnikov looked at the daily climb as part of his training program. It was amazing how, if he wanted to do so, he could convert the difficulties of normal Moscow life into advantages. A lack of elevators in the city meant climbing stairs. In long lines at stores, Rostnikov could read his American novels. Without a car, Rostnikov had to take the subway and walk miles each week. Others argued that the hard life of a Muscovite made its inhabitants strong, tough, and hard, while Americans, English, and the French were soft from too much convenience. Why, then, Rostnikov thought, do we not live as long as they do? His thoughts had grown morbid, and his mind was wandering. He did not see the young man coming down the stairway who turned a corner on the third floor and almost collided with him.

Rostnikov staggered back, almost falling, and the boy, large, wearing a black T-shirt and American jeans, hurried past him without apology. Rostnikov, who didn't recognize the boy, reached back with his right hand and clasped his right hand over the boy's shoulder.

“What are you doing, you crazy old fool?” the boy said, trying to wriggle out of the firm grasp. The boy was about seventeen, the same age as the young men in the photograph he had spent more than an hour looking at that day, but this boy was bigger, better fed.

“Who are you?” Rostnikov said, still holding the wall with one hand to keep from being pulled off balance.

“Let me—” the boy began, but Rostnikov dug his hand into the shoulder and lifted the boy up, off the stairs. The face before Rostnikov changed from angry defiance to startled, pale fear.

“Who are you?” Rostnikov repeated.

“My shoulder,” the boy squealed.

“You are whose?” Rostnikov repeated, not particularly happy with himself and realizing that he might well be taking out on this rude boy his frustration with a system and situation over which the boy had no control.

“Pavel Nuretskov,” the boy said.

Rostnikov put him down but still gripped the shoulder. “You are related to the Nuretskovs on the sixth floor?”

“Their nephew,” the boy said, trying to remove Rostnikov's hairy fingers from his shoulder with no success.

“You are rude,” Rostnikov said. “We are living in rude times.”

“Okay,” the boy said, giving up on removing the fingers.

“Okay?”

“We are living in rude times,” Pavel agreed.

“If you see me again,” Rostnikov said softly, “you will say good evening or good morning, comrade.”

Rostnikov released the shoulder, and the boy hurried down the stairs, rubbing his shoulder, and hissing back, “Only if you can catch me, lame foot.”

“You catch more with patience than speed,” Rostnikov said softly, knowing even a whisper would carry down the stairway and knowing that the disembodied whisper would be more frightening than a bellow. Rostnikov never shouted. When suspects or superiors shouted, Rostnikov always dropped his voice slightly till they wore down or became quiet so they could hear him. Patience was his primary weapon.

Sarah was home and had a meal on the wooden kitchen table: sour cabbage in vinegar and oil, smoked fish, and brown bread with tea.

Something had gone out of Sarah since Rostnikov's plan to leave Russia had failed. She had put on a few pounds, and her generally serious round and handsome face smiled even less than it had previously. She had lost her job in a music shop and was having trouble finding another, though she was now working a bit for one of her many cousins who sold pots and pans. Rostnikov's salary had been badly strained for almost two months.

“Josef?” he asked, hanging up his jacket and moving to the table. “Did he write?”

“No,” she said. “And we can't tell. We haven't the money.”

“I'll call him tomorrow from Petrovka,” Rostnikov said, avoiding her eyes and tearing off a chunk of brown bread. “He's all right.”

“He's a soldier,” she said with a shrug, sitting with her hands in her lap, watching her husband eat. “I might have a job next week. Katerina knows someone, a manager at the foreign secondhand bookstore on Kachalov Street.”

Rostnikov paused, his hand on the way to his mouth with a glass of tepid tea. The prospect of his wife's working for the foreign bookstore lightened his heart for an instant.
What was it the English writer Shakespeare said?
he thought.
“Like lark at break of day arising from the sullen earth.” Shakespeare should have been a Russian.

“That's wonderful,” he said, “but—”

The “but” was inevitable, part of the protective response of all Russians even when their prospects were better than those of Sarah Rostnikov. Hope was reasonable, but never expect the hope to be fruitful.

After dinner, Rostnikov lifted his weights for an hour, wearing the torn white shirt with “1983 Moscow Senior Championship” printed on it. He knew Sarah considered his wearing the shirt a childish remnant of his moment of triumph a month earlier when he had won the senior park championship. At the same time, he was sure she did not begrudge him his childishness.

The weight-lifting routine was a ritual involving the patient shifting of weights after each exercise, because Rostnikov did not have enough weights to leave them on the bars for each session. Thus, whatever weight and routine he ended a workout with became the first routine of his next workout.

He was just finishing his two-handed curls when the knock came at the door. The windows of the apartment were wide open, and a slight breeze had rippled the curtains occasionally but not altered the heat. Sarah sat across the room, watching something on television, but when Rostnikov looked up at her, he had been sure that she was absorbing nothing she saw on the screen.

His eyes had been on her when the knock came, and she had given a little start of fear.

“There's nothing to worry about,” he said as the knock came again. He put down the bar and crossed the room. There was a pause and another knock. The knocks were not loud and demanding, nor were they sly and obsequious. They were not the knocks of timid neighbors or aggressive KGB men.

When he opened the door, Zelach's hand was raised, unsure of whether to knock again. His broad and not bright face looked relieved to see Rostnikov before him, sweating, hair plastered down on his forehead.

“I didn't mean to—”

“Come in, Zelach,” he said, stepping back.

“This is my wife, Sarah,” he said, nodding toward her.

Zelach smiled painfully.

“Tea?” she said.

“I—”

“You may have tea, Zelach, while you tell me why you are here,” Rostnikov said, returning to his workout.

“I—”

“And you may sit.”

Zelach looked around for someplace to sit, pulled out a kitchen chair, and sat straight and awkward.

“You have something to tell me, or is this simply your first social call?” Rostnikov asked, wiping his wet forehead with his sleeve as he finished his curls. Sarah handed Zelach a cup of tea.

“The photograph,” he said. “I made the calls. There is an old woman in Yekteraslav who remembers Savitskaya. I called the district police. My cousin's wife's brother is a sergeant. He went to the village and called me back.”

“Why didn't you just call us?” Sarah said politely.