SIX
It took less than an hour on the phone back at Petrovka for Rostnikov to find the first garage where there was a mechanic named Artiom. He had continued to call garages and had located two more Artioms.
“We’ll start with these three,” Rostnikov said, standing slowly.
His desk was in the corner of a large office that had been divided into four cubbyholes with low fiberboard walls over which one could both look at and hear one’s neighbors. Each little section had a desk, a phone, and two chairs. There was no uniformity to the furniture. It was whatever Pankov had been able to scrounge, beg, and steal from other offices in Petrovka. There was a cubbyhole office for Rostnikov and one each for Emil Karpo, Sasha Tkach, and Elena Timofeyeva. The only sign of Rostnikov’s superiority was that his cubicle was the one with the window. When he had been a chief inspector with the procurator general’s office several flights down, he had had his own office. It had also been small, however, and his window had looked out not at the outside world but at a line of desks of those of lesser rank. He had not liked that office. He definitely preferred his present cubbyhole. From the sixth floor of Petrovka he could look down into the rapidly decaying courtyard and guard gate, where two armed officers stood, one of them smoking, an act that would have meant his job a year before. Now no one except the corrupt, the desperate, the stupid, and the psychotic seemed to want the low-paying, dangerous, and despised job of being a police officer.
“Rostnikov?” Hamilton said.
“Yes?” Rostnikov had paused to look out the window.
“The Artioms,” Hamilton reminded him.
“Of course,” said Rostnikov. “Look at this.”
Hamilton moved to join Rostnikov at the window and look down at the guards and the courtyard.
“The changing weather and a lack of interest,” Rostnikov observed. “Only one bush still blooming and flowering. Do you know the name of that bush?”
“No,” said Hamilton, locating the bush.
Rostnikov took his notebook from his pocket and made a crude drawing of the shrub and its flowers, then scrawled a description of it. He put the notebook back in his pocket and asked, “Do we start with the three Artioms or with the wife?”
“We Americans would do both at the same time,” said Hamilton.
“We are a small department. To do that, I would have to remove one of my associates from the case he or she is working on,” said Rostnikov. “Or I would have to ask permission to assign an investigator from one of the other departments, and it’s likely that that investigator would be chosen for his or her dependability to report back to an officer within his or her own department. Should anything be uncovered that might lead to an arrest, that department would rush in, make the arrest, and get the credit.”
“Tricky,” said Hamilton.
“It has been like that for almost six hundred years,” said Rostnikov. “When the first little huts went up to form a village where the Kremlin now stands, the Russian people began to develop a society of distrust, corruption, and subservience. Then came the czars, then the Communists, and now the frightened confusion until a new authority is firmly in command. Russians are not built for capitalism. It has turned them into victims, cowards, and criminals.”
Rostnikov reluctantly left the window, walked out of his cubicle, and headed toward the door to the office.
“You care about the credit?” asked Hamilton, following.
“The survival of our department depends upon Colonel Snitkonoy’s outstanding record for taking on the most difficult cases and handling them to everyone’s reluctant satisfaction,” said Rostnikov. “You have two children?”
“Yes,” said Hamilton.
They passed a few people, a woman and two men, in the hall. One of the men nodded at Rostnikov. He nodded back. Rostnikov and Hamilton stopped in front of the elevator.
“You have photographs?” asked Rostnikov.
Hamilton reached into his back pocket, removed his wallet, opened it, and handed it to Rostnikov.
“Good,” said Rostnikov as he took in the picture of a boy around twelve with his arm around a younger girl, who had a tooth missing in the middle of her mouth. Both were smiling. “The girl looks like you. The boy?”
“Like his mother,” Hamilton said.
Rostnikov looked at the floor indicator over the elevator. It seemed to be stuck on the first floor.
“I think it is broken again,” Rostnikov said. “We will have to walk down. Beautiful children.”
Hamilton started to put his wallet back in his pocket. Rostnikov caught his hand.
“In the front pocket,” he said. “It is not so stylish, but more difficult for pickpockets.”
Hamilton smiled.
“I’m an FBI agent.”
“Yeltsin’s pocket has been picked in a crowd of people cheering as if he were a god,” said Rostnikov, heading for the stairway,
The trip six floors down the stairway was slow and painful for Porfiry Petrovich. Hamilton had placed his wallet in his right front pocket. It made an awkward bulge. He would have to remember to remove it and put it in his rear pocket before he went back to the FBI’s temporary offices in the U.S. Embassy building.
People shuffled past them in both directions when they hit the wide, bare lobby. A helmeted and armed duo of guards near the door glanced at them, and a uniformed woman at a small desk where people were checked in and out looked up at the well-dressed black man.
“They don’t know what to make of me,” Hamilton said as they moved into the courtyard of Petrovka. The wind was brisk and chilly.
“They probably think you are a rich African or American businessman setting up bribes for protection,” said Rostnikov, who moved very slowly now.
“You want to rest?” asked Hamilton.
“The day moves on and we have Artioms to meet,” said Rostnikov in English. “That is a reasonable approximation of your Robert Frost?”
“Very close. We have Artioms to meet,” Hamilton replied.
“And late-flowering bushes that shall reveal their names,” added Rostnikov, moving through the wrought-iron gates where a car, a Buick, sat waiting.
Rostnikov nodded at the car. Hamilton returned the nod. Hamilton opened the front door and held it open while Rostnikov slid in. Hamilton got in the backseat.
There had been seven Chazov brothers in alclass="underline" the oldest, Yakov, was probably around thirty and had left the one-room apartment three years earlier. It was not really an apartment but the end of a second-floor hallway in a converted office building. A flimsy wall and door had been put up by the Communist party-appointed carpenters, who didn’t know what they were doing.
Elvira Chazova, who was forty-one going on seventy, had worked with her sons to steal bricks and wood and a new door to reinforce the front entrance. Two decades ago, after being almost beaten to death by Elvira and her then ten-year-old son, her first husband had crawled out of the apartment and never returned. Elvira had heard that Yakov, recently returned from prison after serving a long sentence for robbery with force, was now living in the streets with friends. At present Elvira had three sons living with her, plus a baby and another on the way. Government investigators, frowning on the number of children, had threatened her, but had in the end given her a meager subsidy, which was supplemented by whatever her children could bring in. Sometimes the boys posed as ragged Gypsies and begged in subway stations. Their favorite hangout was Pushkin Square in the little park in front of McDonald’s. On three occasions the boys had followed drunks from the Pushkin Square underpass, beaten them, and taken their money. Twice they had stolen bottles of liquor from the Night Flight disco near the square.
Elvira herself had sat cross-legged with a tin cup beside her in the subways and in doorways where foreigners would see her. She held her latest baby on her lap and rocked him, looking as pathetic as she could and thanking each donor aloud while cursing each one who gave her nothing.