— I could walk by myself and carry your case.
— I think I can manage.
— Father, I’m glad you’re home.
Still carrying his daughter, he used the base of his case to push open their door. He stepped into the kitchen. There was affection from his youngest daughter who ran over to greet him. He watched his family’s pleasure at his return. They took it for granted that when he went away, he’d come back.
Nadya had her eye on the cat. Evidently jealous of the attention she was getting from her father, the cat jumped down from the window, joining the family reunion, rubbing itself against her father’s leg. As Andrei lowered her to the floor she accidentally dropped her foot onto the cat’s paw, causing it to screech and dart away. Before she could enjoy any small sense of satisfaction her father took hold of her wrist, crouched down, staring at her through his thick square glasses, his face trembling with anger.
— Don’t ever touch her.
Nadya wanted to cry. She bit her lip instead. She’d already learned that crying made no impression on her father.
Andrei let go of his daughter’s wrist, standing up straight. He felt flustered and hot. He looked at his wife. She hadn’t moved forward, but she smiled at him.
— Have you eaten?
— I have to put my things away. I don’t want anything to eat.
He wife didn’t attempt to hug or kiss him, not in front of the children. He was strict about these things. She understood.
— Was your work successful?
— They want me to go away again in a couple of days. I’m not sure for how long.
Without waiting for a reply, he was already feeling claustrophobic, he moved to the door that led to the basement. The cat followed him, its tail up high, excited.
He locked the door behind him, descending the stairs, immediately feeling better now that he was on his own. An elderly couple had previously occupied this downstairs space but the woman had died and the man had moved into his son’s apartment. The housing bureau hadn’t sent another couple to replace them. It wasn’t a nice room: a basement sunk into the riverbank. The bricks were always wet. In winter the room was freezing. There was a burzhuika, a wood-fired stove, which the elderly couple had been forced to keep running for eight months of the year. Despite the basement’s many disadvantages it had one advantage. It was his space. He had a chair in one corner and a slender bed which had belonged to the elderly couple. He occasionally slept down here when the conditions were tolerable. He lit the gas lamp and before long another cat had entered through the space in the wall where the pipes from the burzhuika ran outside.
He opened his case. Amongst his papers and the remains of his lunch there was a glass jar with a screw-top lid. He unscrewed the lid. Inside the jar, wrapped in an old issue of Pravda, sodden with blood, was the stomach of the girl he’d murdered some hours ago. He peeled the paper away, carefully making sure no paper was stuck to the flesh. He put the stomach on a tin plate, slicing it into strips then again into cubes. Once he’d finished he fired up the stove. By the time it was hot enough to cook the meat there were six cats circling him. He fried the meat, waiting till it had turned brown before tipping it back onto the tin plate. Andrei stood watching the cats around his feet, enjoying the spectacle of their hunger, holding the food, teasing them, watching them yelp. They were desperately hungry, frenzied by the smell of cooked meat.
After he’d had his fill of teasing them he put the food down. The cats squeezed together in a circle around the plate and began to eat, purring with delight.
Upstairs, Nadya stared at the basement door, wondering what kind of father preferred cats to children. He was only going to be home for two days. No, she was wrong to be angry with her father. She refused to blame him, the cats were to blame. A thought came into her mind. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to kill a cat. The hard part would be getting away with it.
Same Day
On Vorovski Street, Leo and Raisa joined the back of the grocery-store queue. The queue would take several hours before it reached inside, where each person would place their order before being made to wait in a second queue to pay for the item. After those two queues there was a third queue to collect the item. They could easily remain in these various lines for up to four hours, waiting inconspicuously for Ivan to come home.
Having failed to persuade Galina Shaporina to speak, they were in danger of coming away from Moscow with nothing. Raisa had been pushed out of the apartment, the door shut in her face. Standing in the hallway, surrounded by staring neighbours, many of whom might be informers, there was no way they could try again. It was possible that Galina and her husband had already notified the State Security forces. Leo didn’t think that was likely. Galina clearly believed that doing as little as possible was the safest course of action; if she tried to inform there was a possibility she’d be incriminating herself, drawing attention to herself. That was a small consolation. Their only achievement so far was to recruit Fyodor and his family into their investigation. Leo had instructed Fyodor to send any information he might be able to discover to Nesterov since mail addressed to Leo was being intercepted. Even so, they were no closer to identifying the kind of man they were looking for.
In these circumstances Raisa had pushed hard to speak to Ivan. What other options did they have except to leave the city empty-handed? Leo had reluctantly agreed. Raisa hadn’t been able to get a message to Ivan. There was no way they could post a letter or make a call. She’d taken a calculated risk hoping that he’d be here. But she knew he rarely left Moscow, certainly not for any length of time. He didn’t holiday, had no interest in the countryside. The only reason she could think that he wouldn’t be at home was if he’d been arrested. On that front she could only hope that he was safe. Even though she was looking forward to seeing him again she was under no illusions — this was going to be an awkward encounter. She was with Leo, a man Ivan hated as he hated all officers of the MGB, a rule to which he made no exceptions. There were no good ones. However, it wasn’t his dislike for Leo which worried her most. Rather, it was her affection for Ivan. Though she’d never cheated on Leo sexually, she’d cheated on him with Ivan in almost every other way, intellectually, emotionally, criticizing him behind his back. She’d struck up a friendship with a man defined by being against everything Leo had stood for. There was something awful about bringing these two men together. She wanted to tell Ivan as quickly as possible that Leo wasn’t the same man and that he’d changed, that his blind faith in the State had been broken, smashed. She wanted to explain that she’d been wrong about her husband. She wanted them both to see that the differences between them were smaller than they’d ever realized. But there was little hope of that.
Leo wasn’t looking forward to meeting Ivan — Raisa’s kindred spirit. He’d be forced to watch as the connection sparked between them, forced to see up close the kind of man Raisa would’ve married had she been free to choose. That still hurt him, more than his loss of status, more than his loss of faith in the State. He’d blindly believed in love. Perhaps he’d clung to the notion as a way of counteracting the nature of his work. Perhaps subconsciously he needed to believe in love as a way of humanizing himself. That would explain the extreme justifications he’d created to rationalize her coldness to him. He’d refused to contemplate the possibility that she hated him. Instead, he’d closed his eyes and congratulated himself on having everything. He’d told his parents that she was the wife he’d always dreamt of. He’d been right — that was all she’d been, a dream, a fantasy and she’d shrewdly agreed to play along, all the time being terrified for her own safety, confiding in Ivan her true feelings.