“Who is it?” came a woman’s voice.
“Police,” he shouted. “Open.”
The door opened.
A young woman peered up at him in fear. She wore a purple robe and her hair was wild from washing.
“The man across the way, Chesney,” he said. “Where does he work?”
“I don’t know,” said the woman.
“What’s wrong?” came a voice behind her, and a young man appeared.
Leonid didn’t bother to look at him. “I want to know where the man works who lives in that apartment,” he said.
“Chesney?” asked the man.
Now Leonid looked up. The man looked even younger than the girl and was dressed in an identical purple robe.
“Chesney, yes.”
“He’s English,” said the young man. “He’s with a trade delegation from some heavy-machine company. He told me once.”
“The name of this machine company,” asked Leonid flatly.
The young woman’s robe flapped open and she hurried to cover her breasts. Leonid was not interested.
“I don’t remember,” the young man said. “I think it was Robinson or Robertson, something like that.”
“The girl?” Leonid asked.
“Girl?” asked the young woman. “He has-”
“The Arab girl,” said the man.
“The Arab girl,” agreed Leonid. “How long has she been here?”
“Two nights, maybe three,” said the man. “But she has been here before.”
“If they return,” said Leonid, “you are not to tell him that the police were here. Tell them that you heard noises, if you must tell them anything. Let them think they have been robbed. Go steal something in there if you wish. You understand?”
“We don’t have to-” the young woman began, but the young man interrupted her.
“We understand.”
Leonid turned away and walked down the hall. Behind him the door closed and the lock turned.
A man named Chesney who works for an English heavy-machinery company called Robinson or Robertson. It would be difficult, but not impossible. There were directories, government agencies anxious to guide a Soviet businessman to a foreign investor. It might take a few hours, but it was possible, and Leonid Dovnik fully intended to do it.
At seven in the morning on that day, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov looked out the window of his apartment at the black Zil parked across the street. He considered going down and inviting the men in the car up for some hot buckwheat porridge with butter, but it was not a serious consideration even for a second. The men would not come in and the situation would be very awkward. Rostnikov did not want to make their lives more difficult than they already were.
“They are there?” asked Sarah, moving to his side and putting her arm around his waist.
Rostnikov nodded in the direction of the Zil.
“It looks like a cold morning and their engine isn’t on,” Sarah said.
“Fuel is expensive,” Rostnikov said.
“Then why drive a great fat Zil?”
“Because that is the legacy of the KGB,” he explained, moving from the window and adjusting his tie. Sarah and Porfiry Petrovich had made love this morning, just before dawn, for the first time in many months, since before Sarah’s operation. Tentatively they had clung together and she had put his rough head against her breasts and then she had said, “Would you like to try?”
And he had answered, “I believe we can do more than try.”
It had not been perfect, but it had not been bad either.
“I’m going to look for work,” she said afterward. “The hospital says I am well enough. I am going to try a music store on Kalinin. I have experience. What do you think?”
“If you are well enough and wish to,” he said.
“Iosef will meet me for lunch. We will spend the afternoon trying to find enough food for Sasha Tkach’s birthday party. Will you be back tonight, do you think?”
“Possibly,” he said. “But I may have to stay in Arkush.”
He stood silently as she searched for her good shoes in the freestanding wooden closet in the corner. She found them and turned to him.
“What?” she asked.
“I may have to stay in Arkush tonight,” he said again.
She sat down to put on her shoes.
“You feel …?” he asked.
“Wash your bowl and then let’s go out together,” she said, standing and taking his hand, “My intuition tells me that this will be a good day.”
At seven in the morning, after spending the night trying to straighten up the Nikolai so she might open that night, Tatyana gave up. She looked in what was left of the mirror over the bar and saw the face of a tired woman with puffy eyes and wild yellow hair.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” she whispered. “Forget it.” She got her coat from the back room, turned off the lights, and moved toward the door.
Two foreign-looking men stood before her, blocking the door. She had not heard them enter.
“Closed,” she said. “Come back tonight.”
The men said nothing.
“Closed,” she said. “Can’t you understand Russian?”
The men did not move.
It was at this point that Tatyana felt fear. “You are the police,” she said, hoping that they were but knowing that they were not. These men were too well dressed, too foreign. “What do you want?”
Again they said nothing.
She considered turning and running, but the backdoor was too far away and the pathway to it strewn with bits of broken bottles, shattered mirror, and lost dreams. “It isn’t fair,” she said, brushing back her hair as the two men moved toward her. “It isn’t fair.”
At seven in the morning of that day the man who had murdered a priest and a nun stood in the center of Klochkov Street in the town of Arkush. The street was named in honor of Vasili Klochkov, who, bleeding profusely, had hurled himself with a grenade beneath a Nazi tank, after shouting “Russia is vast, but there’s nowhere to retreat. Moscow is behind us.” That act of heroism supposedly inspired the nearly defeated Russian army to hold their positions and, soon after, turn the tide of the war. But few people in town called the street Klochkov. Most called it Venyaminov, the name it had sixty years ago. Innokenty Venyaminov was a nineteenth-century missionary who carried the gospel of the Orthodox Church to the Aleutian Islands and Russian Alaska.
The man standing in the street knew a great deal of the history of Arkush. Within the past three days he had been responsible for what would certainly be a most important part of that history.
The scrawny rooster belonging to Old Loski cackled beyond the houses. The assassin turned his head, unsure of what to do. He could not go home, could not face the bed he had left, the dreams that were bad, and the thoughts that came in the wakeful darkness, thoughts that were even worse than dreams.
And so, body weary, he had dressed and wandered with the first light of dawn. He had smelled the morning bread of Tkonin the baker and heard the birds in the woods beyond the town where ghosts now walked.
He had done what he had to do, he told himself. He had done what must be done. To do otherwise would have been to betray his family, his name.
Someone called that name from a nearby second-story window. He waved without looking up and moved down the street, hands in his pockets, as if he had somewhere to go.
He would have to go to work soon, though he could not imagine going through the motions of his work. That which had given him respite, even pleasure, before now seemed a horrible, endless burden.
A thought. It had come to him last night when he went home, afraid he would lose his breath and not be able to catch it, afraid that his wife would sense his terror. He walked more quickly to make the thought go away.
The thought would not be stopped. He squeezed his nails into the palms of his hands.
He would probably have to kill again. If he did not, Sister Nina would have died for nothing, and he could not live with that. No, better to kill anyone who might bring shame to his family, make each victim a martyr to his secret. He did not know if anyone else in Arkush knew the shame of his mother and brother.