“Of course, Regina. I’ll clear this up and call first thing tomorrow morning. Is his flu that bad?”
“I’m telling you. A temperature of 102. Aspirin’s taken it down a little. You know what this nasty flu is like. You just had it yourself. By the way, how are you feeling?”
“Thank you for asking. I seem to be back on my feet.”
“That’s great. So I’ll expect your call tomorrow morning. Kisses, Grisha. Say hello to Innochka for me.”
She hung up and sat for a while, focusing on the flames dancing in the fireplace. When Lyudmila brought in her dinner tray, the phone rang.
“There’s no peace for you, Regina Valentinovna.” The cook shook her head. “Day or night. Why don’t I answer and say to call you back? You should be able to eat in peace.”
But the phone was already in Regina’s hands.
“You were looking for me?” She heard a voice that made her heart leap for joy.
“Thank God,” she sighed with relief.
“Is it that bad?” The man on the other end of the phone chuckled raspily. “You’d think I was your long-lost brother. Didn’t we just see each other? All right, come to Sokolniki tomorrow at six thirty. The same pavilion. Remember?”
“Of course I do.” Regina smiled into the phone.
The call significantly improved her appetite. She finished the tender, nicely browned chop in five minutes.
In Tobolsk they stayed in the same hotel Volkov had put her, Mitya, and Olga in fourteen years ago. The town was just as cozy as she remembered. Lena had liked it before, too, much more than Tyumen’s pollution.
There were lots of old buildings left. Tobolsk’s famous wooden citadel had been preserved, along with its exceedingly rich library, which contained many unique and ancient volumes. It had been fourteen years since she’d been there, but Lena couldn’t forget that particular, soul-stirring smell of antique folios you find only in quiet, provincial libraries. For some reason, the books in big city libraries smell completely different. It wasn’t even about their bibliographic value. As an elderly librarian had told her fourteen years ago, in the provinces time breathes differently, deeply and calmly.
Entering the stacks with Michael, Lena remembered that old librarian, small and withered, with short snow-white hair. Cold, she’d been wrapped up in a large, downy scarf. What was her name? Valentina Yurievna? Or not? So many years had passed, and theirs was a brief, chance episode.
Lena remembered the librarian not only because she’d let her and her young Muscovite companions into the library’s rare manuscript archive, but because unlike many provincials, she didn’t complain about her out-of-the-way existence. On the contrary, she sincerely believed she couldn’t live anywhere else on earth but in the ancient wooden town of Tobolsk. She’d spent her entire conscious life among books. She hadn’t ventured farther than Tyumen, though she knew France from Balzac and England from Dickens and assured Lena that she knew the world much better than most who’d had the chance to travel its length and breadth.
At the time she was over seventy. She could scarcely be alive now. Nonetheless, Lena decided to ask.
“Valya… Valentina Yurievna is alive,” the oldest librarian there told her. “A year ago she had to move to the Veterans Home. She’s ninety now and doesn’t have any relatives to take her in. She’s all alone in the world.”
“Well, not all alone,” the other librarian, a little younger, interjected. “She does have a daughter in Moscow. They say she’s gone far.”
“Yes, a daughter.” The older woman nodded dolefully. “I’ve spoken with her on the telephone and by letter. She sends money to support her but hasn’t visited once. The conditions at the Veterans Home are fine, of course. Valya has a separate room and we stop by sometimes. You should visit her if you have the time. She’s so pleased when people come to see her.”
“I doubt she remembers me.” Lena shook her head. “So many years have passed.”
“She’ll remember. She has an excellent memory and an amazingly bright mind. And if she doesn’t remember, it will still be nice for her.”
“Good.” Lena smiled. “Give me the address and I’ll drop by.”
“You can take your professor along. I don’t think anyone knows the history of Tobolsk better than Valya. Not only that, she is fluent in English and French. It will be quite a treat for her to speak English with a professor from New York.” The older librarian wrote the Veterans Home’s address on a slip of paper and explained to Lena how to get there.
Later, unfolding the slip, Lena read: Valentina Yurievna Gradskaya. Lena paused. It wasn’t only the last name that put her on her guard, but the name and patronymic as well. Valentina Yurievna was the name the fake doctor had given. But she immediately checked herself. It had to be a coincidence. Right?
Major Ievlev flew into Tyumen in the dead of night. He woke up at eight, did some quick exercises, rubbed himself down to the waist with ice-cold water—an old army habit—had a quick breakfast in the hotel buffet, and headed for the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office. He sat in the archive the entire day, studying the thick files from a twelve-year-old criminal case.
Nikita Slepak was a model citizen compared with the serial killers of his day—Chikatilo, Golovkin, Mikhasevich, and Jumagaliev. He didn’t do anything particularly horrible to his victims, didn’t disembowel them, didn’t dismember their corpses, didn’t eat their organs, didn’t hang them on a rack in a specially equipped cellar. His victims were all girls ages fifteen to eighteen. And there were six of them in all. Four of them were strangled with the killer’s bare hands; two were killed with a precise knife blow to the heart. Each had been raped before being murdered, but not in an outlandish, disturbing way.
Slepak was given the title of serial killer with great reservation. His first victim had been eighteen-year-old Galina Kuskova, a resident of Tyumen. The fifth of many children in an underprivileged family, Galina had suffered from a mild form of mental retardation. After completing her special school, she had worked as a prostitute. Her place of residence was listed as the Moscow Restaurant, the most expensive and elegant hotel in town. The mental disabilities that prevented her from attending a normal school and working a traditional job by no means kept her from succeeding at the world’s oldest profession.
Her body was discovered in September 1979, in a vacant lot near a construction site on the edge of town. The medical examiner determined that her death was the result of manual strangulation. Before her death, the victim had been in a state of severe alcoholic intoxication and had had sexual intercourse with a man. What was odd about the case was that the murderer hadn’t taken her money or jewelry. When her body was discovered, the girl was wearing three expensive rings and a pair of sapphire earrings. Lying next to her was her purse, still fastened, which, besides holding her passport, also contained three hundred and seventy rubles—a considerable sum in those days.
Later it was discovered that a piece of jewelry Galina Kuskova never left the house without—a small gilded pendant in the form of a bell tower—had disappeared.
According to witness testimony, that evening Galina had been propositioned at the restaurant by Mustafa Saidov, a resident of Azerbaijan, and spent close to ninety minutes in his room at the Dawn Hotel. The doorman and administrator on duty said categorically that at 11:20 the young woman had left the hotel alone, alive and unharmed, albeit visibly drunk. She was never seen alive again.
The next victim was discovered seven months later, in April 1980, in Tobolsk. The body of fifteen-year-old Tobolsk high school student Marina Laricheva was found at an abandoned construction site. She, too, bore the marks of death by manual strangulation.