“Yes,” said Klamkin.
“Then drive back here to report. I don’t care what time it is. I’ll be in my office.”
By six o’clock three more reports had come in. The colonel had access to the pool of typists, but like a good officer, he distrusted the pool. The departmental assistant who had been assigned to him could type, but Lunacharski distrusted him, too. He had requested his own assistant from the fifth, but the request had been denied without explanation.
He would prepare his own reports for General Karsnikov until he could identify someone within his structure whose loyalty he could depend on. Klamkin was good, but there was a difference between “good” and “loyal.”
The last call came in before seven and was the most distressing of all.
“Tkach and Timofeyeva are at the Syrian embassy,” the agent reported. “They went there directly upon leaving the Zalinsky apartment.”
The caller waited for a response from the colonel but heard only a pause, during which Lunacharski savored the likelihood that Tkach and Timofeyeva had gone well beyond their authority in approaching the Syrian embassy.
“Continue to monitor their activity,” he told the agent. “Give me a report when they go home for the night. I will be here at all times.”
It was almost eleven at night when Colonel Lunacharski decided to call his wife. “I’ll not be home tonight,” he said.
“All right,” she answered.
“I will stop by in the morning, early, to shower and shave and change my clothes. I may have to work all night tomorrow, too.”
“When will you sleep?”
“When I can. On the couch here.”
“Good night, then,” she said.
“Good night,” he answered, and hung up the phone.
He had known she would be up, that she had within the hour returned home from the apartment of her lover, a low-ranking member of the State Commission on International Trade. The lover traveled frequently. Lunacharski kept track of the man’s schedule through an agent who was told that the man was a security risk.
Lunacharski was neither vengeful nor angry nor jealous. He was, in fact, pleased that this man kept his wife distracted, kept her from draining his energy with domestic battles. His work required Lunacharski’s full attention and it was work to which he now returned.
When Leonid Dovnik entered the Nikolai Café that morning, Tatyana was just hanging up the phone.
“So?” she asked.
“So,” he answered, setting his packages on the bar. “He is dead.”
Once Tatyana would have shuddered or at least shrugged with resignation. She had known the young man, Grisha Zalinsky, had seen him in the Nikolai many times, heard him laugh, watched him touch the Arab girl gently, tried to remember what it felt like to be touched like that by a man.
Leonid went into his pocket and came out with a crumpled package of letters tied together with string. He handed them to her and she walked behind the counter.
“I found these under his socks,” he said.
Leonid watched as she took out a lighter, lit a cigarette, and pulled out the first letter.
She read it slowly and looked at him. “I wonder who would pay more for these love letters from an Arab girl to a Jew, the father or the daughter? If they are all as descriptive as the first …You want to read them?”
“No.”
“Find her,” Tatyana said, opening the second letter. “Do not bring her back here. Do not let her know that you have found her. Just find her.”
Leonid moved toward the door without a question, which was one of the reasons Tatyana liked using him. He had absolutely no curiosity. He ate, drank, enjoyed having money, though he did not seem to spend very much of it, and he seemed to have no sexual appetite. Tatyana had twice attempted to take him on the cot in the storeroom. The first time was after she had been rejected by a customer, a woman. The woman, not much of a prize, had almost sneered. She had tried to take Leonid Dovnik in anger more than lust, but he had simply said that he wasn’t interested in such things.
The second time had been more calculating. It was after he had begun doing “jobs” for her and she thought that sex might bind him, at least that is what she told herself. She did not wish to be rejected by this dull hulk again, and if it happened, she did not want it to be because he found her unappealing. Once again he rejected her.
“I don’t like doing that,” he said.
She hadn’t bothered to ask him why he didn’t like sex, but she could tell this time that it was the truth. He was not rejecting Tatyana the individual. He would have rejected any woman. She asked him, gently because he had killed at least seven people with no apparent remorse, if he liked men.
“You mean homosexual? No.”
And that had ended it. Since that second attempt their relationship had been all business. He spent much of his time seated at a table in the rear of the café drinking beer in the shadows. Tatyana had no trouble ignoring him until he was needed to eject a drunk or do a chore for which a favored customer had paid in hard currency.
“I just saw two people, a man and woman, come out of here,” he said. “They were arguing.”
“Police,” Tatyana answered, considering whether she wanted a drink. Both the good and bad thing about running a bar was that you could drink whatever and whenever you wished. Leonid Dovnik did not drink anything harder than beer. Leonid Dovnik did not smoke. Leonid Dovnik did not like women. Leonid Dovnik did not like men. Leonid Dovnik did not even like to do what he did best, kill. “Do you want to know why they were here?”
Leonid looked at her blankly.
“They are looking for the girl,” she said, leaning toward him over the counter.
“We are looking for the girl,” he said.
“We will be paid well by her father if we find her first,” she said.
“It would be easier if I just killed her,” he said. He looked into his bag to be sure everything he had bought was there. A piece of meat would have been good. He could make a kind of casserole or meat pie. But he had no meat.
“Our goal is to make money,” Tatyana said, lighting another cigarette to help her think. She leaned forward, elbows on the bar, head in her cupped hands. “When you find her, don’t do anything. I told you. Just let me know.”
The door to the café opened and Yuri, the cleanup man, shambled in. He looked at Leonid and Tatyana and scurried away to the storeroom to fill the wash pail with water.
“Perhaps we can have them bid against each other, those people who want her found and those who do not,” Tatyana said. “I’ll work on it. First, we must find her.”
Leonid stood up. “Can you put my groceries in your refrigerator?”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.”
The Syrian embassy in Moscow is located at number 4 Mansurovsky Street. It is open from 9:00 A.M. to 2:30 P.M. Monday through Friday. It is a relatively busy embassy compared with those of, say, Thailand or Australia. It is busy because the interests of the commonwealth states and Syria are often similar enough to make frequent intercourse worthwhile. The foremost of these interests is oil, an interest grown all the more vital since the disastrous loss of supplies from Iraq and the collapse of the ruble. The People’s Oil Industrial Investment Euro-Asian Corporation was promising new Siberian oil wells and improved transportation systems, but oil production had begun to fall even before the demise of the old Soviet Union and was expected to continue to fall by at least ten percent a year, perhaps till the end of the century.
As they sat in the small waiting room of the embassy, Sasha Tkach and Elena Timofeyeva were not aware of the depth of the relationship of their country and Syria, but they knew that an Arab oil minister was to be treated with sensitivity and courtesy.
There was nothing to look at in the room except a large photograph of Syria’s President Assad, staring to his right in the general direction of Poland.