His luck had remained. There was no other copy in the laboratory. He looked carefully, thoroughly. He was certain. He moved downstairs to the dead man’s office. Drawers, files, top of the desk, nothing. He was sure. He even checked to see if there was a second backup disk. This had been the most dangerous part of the evolving plan. If he were found in the dead man’s office he would make an excuse, but his presence would be noted. He would surely be a suspect, a secondary one to be sure, but a suspect. Again he was certain. Nothing there.
He went back to his office, checked everything, put the report in his briefcase, signed out, and went home.
That night, at home, in bed, certain that he would sleep well and be ready for the chaos that would come during the night or in the morning when the body was discovered, a new thought came and Vanga suddenly realized that he was a fool.
He sat up in panic. What if Bolskanov had a copy of the research in his home? On a home computer? A hard copy? Maybe several copies, just lying in the open? Vanga had never been to Bolskanov’s apartment, didn’t know where it was, though he could have found out simply by looking at the … wait, he had a copy of the two-sheet directory in the top drawer of his desk, which stood in a corner of his bedroom. He rose quickly, found the address, and stood thinking.
He rejected the idea of dressing, going to the man’s apartment, breaking in, searching. Far too dangerous, even more dangerous than going back to the lab, finding the dead man’s keys and attempting to sneak into the apartment, search, and get the keys back before the body was discovered, if it had not already been discovered.
No, he would not reveal the paper as his own till he was certain. He would suggest that he go with the police to search Bolskanov’s apartment for anything that might shed light on his murder. If they said no, he might suggest that when the investigation was done he would like to look for some notes he and Bolskanov had been working on. He had to remain calm. There would be no reason for the police to bring anyone else to the dead scientist’s apartment, and the police would not understand what the paper meant even if they found a copy. Vanga would work that out.
The shoes, the shoes. What if they were too stupid to check the shoes? Then, somehow, he would have to suggest it to them, subtly. He hoped that would not be necessary. As it had turned out, it wasn’t.
But hours after he had committed murder, Andrei Vanga could not sleep. His mind was racing. He had to slow it down.
He got back in bed and picked up the copy of War and Peace that rested on his night table. Perhaps once every month or so he would read a bit of it. He had never actually finished the book and felt guilty about it. Tonight he would read. He would read till he fell asleep.
He remembered reading somewhere or hearing on the radio or the television that a movie was being made about the life of Tolstoy. Though he seldom went to the movies, he would make it a point to see this one.
He read: “The day after his initiation into the lodge Pierre was sitting at home reading a book and trying to fathom the significance of the square …”
It was after midnight. Lydia was snoring in the bedroom and Sasha sat at the table in the tiny kitchen, cutting slices from the block of yellow cheese his mother had left out for him along with a small loaf of bread. He sat in his shorts, not wanting to get into the bed on the floor. He continued to feel free, able to do anything, full of good will, and, at the same time, wanting desperately for Maya and the children to come back. It was a contradiction Porfiry Petrovich had pointed out and that Sasha could not comprehend and was not certain that he wished to, though he knew the contradiction would haunt him.
The television, a small black-and-white on the table before him, was tuned to a station showing a documentary about bears in the Ural Mountains. He had the sound turned down very low so that Lydia would not wake up, come in, and complain. She was almost deaf, yet she could hear a television through a door even if the sound was nearly off. It was a gift granted only to mothers who in spite of failed eyesight could see the hint of a frown on a child’s face, or despite deafness hear the whisper of an aside across a room full of people, providing the aside was made by their son or daughter.
The table was cluttered. Sasha decided that it was time to clean up, which meant putting the bread back in the bag, covering the cheese with plastic wrap, putting them in the refrigerator, and consolidating the papers he had spread out to look at. He would brush his teeth in the small kitchen sink so he wouldn’t have to go past Lydia to the bathroom. That meant he would have to go down the hall to use the community toilet for the three apartments on the floor which had no private toilets. It was worth it.
A bear was standing tall on its rear legs in front of a woman with a very wide-brimmed hat. She looked skinny, English or American, but she could have been Russian. Russian women with a bit of money had learned how to look like people who spoke English or French. She was very pretty in a healthy kind of way. Sasha paused, cheese in one hand, bread in the other.
The woman was smiling at the bear. The bear was showing its teeth. The woman reached over and scratched the bear’s chest. Sasha was fascinated. The documentary was on film, so he knew the woman would not be torn apart on television. And yet there was a tension. If he could not have Maya in bed tonight, the woman with the hat … The bear turned its head sideways in ecstasy. It would have been nice to be that bear instead of a tired policeman whose wife had left him, and who stood holding a plate of cheese.
The scene changed. A sincere, thin man with white hair, wearing a suit, was sitting behind a desk. Behind him was a map of the Ural region. Sasha looked at the pile of papers he had to put away. If he didn’t organize anything, and he didn’t plan to do so, he could simply push it all together, shove it in his briefcase, and worry about it in the morning.
His eyes fell once again on his copy of the artist’s sketch of the man the beggar had described and the chess players had identified. Kon. It looked like many sketches, but something … the description-stocky, homely-and the drawing. Sasha, for just a moment, felt that he may have seen the man somewhere. He stood dreamily trying to put a living face to the drawing. His memory was normally very good, not as good as Emil Karpo’s but better than Elena’s.
No, it didn’t come. He turned off the television set, felt the stubble on his chin, put the food away, and gathered the papers into a pile with the sketch on top.
Then he went to bed.
In the dark, the baby did not turn restlessly or cry, Pulcharia did not come in and ask for water or to climb into bed with her parents. Maya did not reach over in her sleep to touch his bare bottom.
As he went to sleep, he felt the inexplicable euphoria of the past days begin to slip away.
Chapter Ten
In the morning, Nadia Spectorski awoke to a fresh, vivid, and inexplicable vision that seemed to mean absolutely nothing. It was another overcast day. Somewhere north of the city clouds were rumbling. Her room was small, brightly decorated, small computer desk in the corner with a flowerpot and cactus next to the Compaq Presario 2240. Next to the cactus was a kaleidoscope that she looked through every morning for a few minutes, losing herself in the never-repeating meditation of changing colors.
The vision was just as vivid as the one in which she had seen the murder of Sergei Bolskanov through the eyes of the killer. Nadia had feared that she had simply remembered what she herself had done and that she was the killer, but there were too many details, little things that convinced her she had not done this thing.