Rostnikov looked at his wife and was relieved to see a smile.
“It was nice of you to come to our son’s play,” said Sarah. “Are you enjoying it?”
“I don’t like plays about secrets,” she said. “Everyone whispers. Movies are better.”
“Perhaps we can suggest to Iosef that he write a movie, a loud movie,” said Rostnikov. “May I buy you a coffee?”
“I didn’t come to see the play,” she said. “I came to talk to you.”
“I considered that possibility,” said Rostnikov. “Coffee?”
“Pepsi-Cola,” Lydia said.
They were at the bar now and Rostnikov ordered three Pepsi-Colas. Then they stepped through the crowd, heading back toward the auditorium.
The intermission was ten minutes. Rostnikov knew there could not be more than five minutes left. He faced Lydia politely.
“She is going to get my son killed,” said Lydia, loud enough to attract the attention of at least a dozen more people.
“She?” asked Rostnikov.
“The little girl you have him working with, the one who is trying to seduce him and get him killed. Sasha is a husband, a father. Soon he will have two children. I don’t believe anyone in Russia today should have two children, but they did not ask me. I told them, anyway, but it was too late. He is behaving … Inspector, I think my son is afraid.”
The shrill insistence in her voice had given way to anguish as she finished. Sarah touched her shoulder, and Lydia bit her lower lip to hold back the tears.
“He’s out now with that girl in some bar called Nicholas looking for some Turkish woman,” Lydia said in a considerably lower voice than before. She lifted her eyes to Rostnikov and then went on, “I’ve never seen him afraid like this before. He doesn’t even know he is afraid. It’s making him angry like his father.”
It was time to go in for the second act and the crowd flowed toward the inner doors.
“We will talk to you after the next act,” Sarah said, putting her arm around the older woman.
“I’ve got to go back to the apartment,” said Lydia. “Maya and the baby need me. They don’t like to be alone. Besides, I don’t understand whispering plays. Your son is in the play, too? Which one?”
“The one who wanted to torture. …The tall one with the short brown hair,” said Sarah.
“Tell him to speak up,” she said, and turned to Rostnikov. “Will you do something for my son? You have one child. I have one child.”
“I will do something,” Rostnikov said.
“Does Porfiry Petrovich lie?” Lydia asked Sarah.
“When he must. But he is not lying now.”
Lydia nodded, looked at Rostnikov, not fully convinced, and put on her coat.
“I will do something,” Rostnikov said, touching Lydia’s shoulder.
Everyone was inside by now but the three of them.
Lydia nodded once and then once again before she moved into the night.
“What will you do?” asked Sarah.
“Now? Now I am going to see an Afghan die and a very angry soldier who called for blood be blamed for it, though he is not responsible. The disillusioned, compassionate soldier will turn out to be the murderer. He will have murdered this man who is like his own father because he cannot bear to see him killed by someone who doesn’t respect him.”
“Iosef let you read the script?” she asked as they moved back into the darkening theater.
“No,” he said, “but I am a policeman and he is my son.”
“You could be very wrong,” she said.
“I am probably wrong,” he agreed. “But that is the play I would write.”
“What will you do about Sasha Tkach?” whispered Sarah.
“Quiet,” said someone behind them, so Porfiry Petrovich didn’t have to answer.
TEN
Sasha stood watching the girls with their hair wild and waving, covering their eyes, teeth white or appearing to be white in the dull, dim light of the Nikolai Café. The girls danced with gaunt men, with each other, or alone. Bodies touched and parted and touched again. There was no single style, though at least three of the twenty girls wore tight skirts that looked like shorts and black stockings with flower patterns.
The light was supposed to be intimate. It was supposed to hide the eyes, fill the sockets with a deep yellow. The music blared like clanking metal, vibrating as if the charged strings of the instruments were forever trying to tune up and forever angry because they were unable to achieve the elusive sound they sought.
And the girls, some with yellow artificial hair swept up like old French or American movie stars, dressed in tight silken blouses that showed the size and shape of their breasts and skirts that hugged tight, swayed and smiled as if they had wonderful secrets.
“You see her?” asked Elena. She and Sasha sat at the end of the bar, trying not to drink their warm, dark beer.
“No,” said Sasha.
“I admire the zeal with which you examine each face and body,” she said, “on the chance that the Arab girl might be disguised as a Russian girl.”
“She is not here,” said Sasha, looking away from the dance floor to the crowded tables where teenage boys in slick imitation leather made jokes they convinced themselves were funny and the girls laughed too loudly to mean it.
There was little room to move, and it was almost impossible to hear anything except the laughter and the music that tingled across the bar and beneath Sasha’s feet.
The woman they had spoken to that morning, Tatyana, was not there. Two young men, who were not so young when one looked too closely, served drinks from behind the bar. Girls in white blouses, who were not as old as they appeared when one looked too closely, served the tables.
“Another beer?” asked one of the not-so-young men behind the bar as if he knew just how bored Sasha must be with the people of the Nikolai.
Sasha looked at the man. His teeth were stained and crooked.
“We haven’t finished these,” said Elena, holding up her glass.
The bartender shrugged and moved off to a customer down the bar, a man of about forty with an artificial flower behind his right ear and an empty glass held high.
There was a door in the wall behind the small dance floor. The door was covered with strings of dangling mustard-colored beads. The beads parted and Tatyana entered the café and looked around with distaste. She paused to light a cigarette, then maneuvered her way through the crowd, touching a breast here, a buttock there, and exchanging an intimate smile with each girl she touched.
Tatyana’s yellow hair was swept up in back so that her neck showed like smooth weathered marble.
Elena watched the woman make her way toward the bar. She was the same woman, yet changed. She wore much more makeup and her clothes were clinging but not immodest. She was twenty years older than anyone else on the floor, and Elena felt that the emotions the younger people feigned were so clearly felt by this woman that she had no need to act. Tatyana’s eyes came up through the crowd and found Sasha and Elena.
“If she goes back through the beads, you follow her,” Sasha said. “I’ll go out the front and stop her at the rear entrance.”
Elena said nothing. They had found the rear entrance, checked the low windows before they had entered the Nikolai. Then they had gone to the bar, where, since they were the only customers who did nothing to draw attention to themselves, many had glanced their way.
Elena put down her glass and watched Tatyana make her way through the crowd. Tatyana did not turn or look away. She continued to inch her way along the swaying young backsides. When she reached the man with the flower behind his ear, he looked up from his drink at the mirror above the bar, shouted “Tatyana,” turned, and put his arm around her waist. Elena expected her to push the drunk away or sting him with a word. Instead she smiled, removed the cigarette from her overly red lips, and kissed the man, fully, deeply, with her mouth wide. People around them whooped and applauded. When she removed her open mouth from his, the drunk sank back, removed the flower from behind his ear, and stuck it in his mouth.