“Which is?”
“This.”
Rostnikov wanted more tea, but that would let Vonovich know he had time to pause, to wait, to try to think. It would have to go on.
“Ivan Sharikov,” said Rostnikov, looking directly into the eyes of the creature before him.
“What about him?” Vonovich answered. “Can I get more tea?”
“He’s dead. No you can’t, not yet.”
“Water? Coffee?”
“Don’t you want to know how Sharikov died?” Rostnikov tried.
Vonovich shrugged and spoke while looking at a spot on the wall above Rostnikov’s head.
“He was nothing to me, another cab driver. We had words a couple of times, that’s all.”
“Words?”
“All you do is ask questions about everything,” Vonovich burst out.
“That is my job. Yours, at the moment, is to answer them.”
“I had a few arguments with Sharikov. He was a difficult, stubborn man.”
“And you are as gentle as a Georgia peasant. Someone stabbed your friend in the face with a broken vodka bottle.”
Vonovich shrugged again. His hat moved precariously on an angle.
“That is a chance you take when you drive a cab in Moscow at night.”
“How do you know it was night?” Rostnikov jabbed.
“He drove at night. I guessed. Who knows? Who cares?”
“You killed him. That’s all.” Rostnikov rose as if the meeting were suddenly over, and Vonovich looked bewildered.
“That’s all?” asked the giant. “You tell me I killed someone and that’s all?”
“We have all the evidence we need. Where were you last night?”
“Driving my cab.”
“Except,” said Rostnikov sitting again, “for the time you were arguing with Aleksander Granovsky in the hall of your apartment building.”
“Ha,” laughed Vonovich, a single mirthless laugh. “Now you are going to say I killed him too. I was running around Moscow killing everybody as fast as I could. Bing, bing, bing.”
“You tried to kill a police officer tonight,” Rostnikov reminded him.
“Accident,” corrected Vonovich holding up his hand. “Accident.”
“The gun,” Rostnikov tried.
“Left in my cab this very evening by a fare I dropped at the airport. I was going to turn it in.”
“I’m taping this conversation, you know,” Rostnikov said. “Do you know how stupid you sound?”
“I don’t care to hear it.”
“I was not offering to play it for you. Your apartment is full of stolen property. Your cab has an illegal supply of vodka. You have American money in your pocket, and you have shot a policeman. What do you think will happen to you?”
“I’ll be given justice?” Vonovich asked, starting to rise. His hat fell off again.
Rostnikov sat back heavily while the giant groped for it.
“Vonovich, we know about the murder, all about the murder. We have evidence. Can’t you see your bloody victim before you? Don’t you want to confess and make both of our nights easier?”
Vonovich rose from the floor, hat in hand, face pale, eyes confused and still a bit drunk.
“It was an accident,” he said, almost too low to be heard.
“What?” demanded Rostnikov.
“An accident. I didn’t know I would…we fought and I just…I was too…I didn’t expect him to die.”
“But die he did. Where did you get the sickle?”
Vonovich looked bewildered. “Sickle?”
“You killed Granovsky with a sickle, you fool.”
“Granovsky?”
“Who did you think we were talking about?” Rostnikov was up and shouting. “Did you kill someone else too?”
“I have nothing to say,” said Vonovich. “I have said too much.”
“You’ll say more.”
“No.”
And Rostnikov knew that the “no” was probably all he could get for now. He had all he needed. Rostnikov turned off the tape recorder, rose, and went to the door. He opened it keeping his eyes on Vonovich, who was twisting his upper mustache.
“Take him to the cells,” Rostnikov told the officer.
The policeman reached over to nudge the sitting bear, who was startled and began to rise as if to respond. Vonovich realized where he was and grew docile as he walked ahead of the policeman.
“Thank you, Comrade Inspector,” Vonovich called back.
Rostnikov could think of nothing the man had to thank him for. When the policeman and prisoner were gone. Rostnikov pulled out his tape and went up to the office of Procurator Timofeyeva. She let him in almost immediately.
Young Lenin smiled down at him from the wall, and Procurator Timofeyeva sat in exactly the same position he had left her in earlier, wearing the same uniform and looking just as weary.
“And?” she said.
Rostnikov handed her the tape, which she took and placed on a machine which she pulled from a drawer. She set it up and listened intently, moving only once to adjust her glasses. When the tape ended, she snapped off the machine decisively.
“Congratulations, Comrade Rostnikov,” she said with a tired smile. “You’ve done your job well. I’ll call the Chief Procurator at once and inform him that Granovsky’s murderer has been caught.”
Rostnikov looked down at his hands. He was seated in the comfortable black chair before her desk and wished it were further away in a dark corner. He should certainly be quiet now, but he could not be.
“Has he?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Timofeyeva impatiently. “You have his confession. He knew both victims, quarreled with them, tried to kill a policeman.”
“I think at some time this Vonovich has quarrelled with everyone in Moscow,” Rostnikov said, looking up. “I think this Vonovich did murder someone, but not recently and not Granovsky or the cabdriver.”
Procurator Timofeyeva looked at the pile of work on her desk and then at Rostnikov.
“Is that what you want me to tell the Procurator General, Porfiry Petrovich, that you haven’t caught the murderer?”
“It is not my position to tell you what to say, Comrade Procurator,” he answered.
“Porfiry,” she answered in a voice Rostnikov had never heard from her before, a voice with the timbre of emotion and something else. “There is so much to this. It is best that there be an end, that the murderer be this worthless enemy of the state, that the world know it was the deed of a drunken lout, a criminal. It is best.”
“As you say, comrade,” Rostnikov agreed rising.
“Go home, rest. You have a heavy caseload. Get back to it. I’ll take care of the report.”
“As you wish.”
“As I wish,” she repeated with words far away. “There is much to be done, Porfiry, and too few of us to do it. Even after all these years the old society is still disintegrating. As Lenin told us, this disintegration is manifest in an increase of crime, hooliganism, corruption, profiteering, and outrages of every kind. To put these down requires time and an iron hand.”
“Of course,” he said. Her hand reached out for the phone and she waited while he left and closed the door behind him.
Rostnikov picked up his coat in his office and went home. He could not justify a police car now so he took the bus and walked telling himself it was over but realizing that he could not accept this. Oh, he could accept it with his body and go on with his caseload. It would not be the first case that ended without a solution or with one that Rostnikov thought was wrong. No, this one would continue to bother him because if Vonovich were not the killer then the killer was still out there in one of the buildings he was passing or a hotel or walking the streets.
Rostnikov had difficulty accepting the priorities of his society. He recognized them, understood them, sympathized with them, but it was difficult. He had perhaps read too little Lenin and too much Dostoyevsky, or maybe too many of the American police stories that he had bought from Chernov the bookseller, the stories in which Ed McBain’s 87 Precinct Police always got their man or woman. If he ever got to America, Rostnikov wanted to meet Ed McBain, or at least visit the city of Isola.
Sarah had a pot of soup and a half loaf of black bread ready for him when he got home.