“My wife is here with my children,” Sasha said.
“I know,” said Pendowski. “I’ll take you to her. And?”
“We are looking for a woman, a model, a very beautiful model who has been in television ads. She took a suitcase containing diamonds from a woman who was then murdered on a train back to Moscow.”
“Yes, I know all this. I think I can help you,” said Pendowski with a grin as he started the car.
And he could help them. And he would help them, but not nearly as much as they wished and not in the way they wished.
Jan Pendowski could, if he wished, drive them directly to the apartment of Oxana Balakona. He knew it well. He had recently spent the night next to, on top of, and under Oxana in her bed. And he could certainly take them directly to his own small apartment where, locked in a small, extremely heavy steel safe with very thick walls, was the decorated wooden box into which he had transferred the diamonds.
Jan Pendowski’s plan was to be pleasant and helpful to the Moscow officers, particularly the pretty and not model-thin woman. Jan had grown tired of the thin Oxana whose bones he could feel when his body was pressed against hers. The firm flesh of Elena Timofeyeva was very inviting. She was seated close enough for him to smell. Her scent was pure and natural, a welcome change from the sweet and artificial scent of Oxana Balakona.
The next few days promised to be interesting and very rewarding for Detective Pendowski. He had many circles and dead ends for the Russians before he killed Oxana and delivered her to them.
Chapter Eight
The office of Fyodor Andreiovich Rostnikov, Director of Security, Alorosa Mine, and the Town of Devochka of the Siberian Territory, did not match his title. It was not tiny, but it was small, about the size of a freight elevator. There was one wall with a window. The window faced an open plane of tundra and a distant vision of taiga-a vast forest of birch, pine, spruce, and larch. Occasionally, if the season was right, there was a chance that a reindeer would appear in the distance, and lemmings ran free and multiplied and multiplied. Few other animals inhabited the perpetually frozen hundreds of thousands of acres of land perma-frosted to a depth of 4,760 feet.
The town was built on steel legs driven into the permafrost and heated by huge pumps. This kept the buildings from freezing in the winter, when the temperature went down to about 100 degrees below zero, and sinking in the summer, when temperatures rose well over 100 degrees and a sickly rotting smell permeated everything. When the first buildings had been constructed in 1950, the warm air they gave off caused the permafrost beneath them to soften. The buildings sank.
Fyodor Rostnikov looked out of the lone window in his office. Behind him bookshelves covered the wall. File cabinets were lined up on the right. On the wall to his left was a single piece of art, a realistic painting, as tall as a man, of a steel girder in a field of green grass. A very small man was craning his neck back and holding onto a workman’s cap as he looked up at the top of the girder, where a glittering, white, multifaceted diamond glowed.
“My wife did it,” Fyodor said, looking at Porfiry Petrovich, whose eyes were on the painting. “Her name is Svetlana. We have two children, a boy, eighteen, and a girl, ten. The girl has what they call mild autism.”
“When did you come here, Fyodor?”
“You may call me Fedya.”
They were seated in wooden chairs in front of the steel desk, cups of tea within easy reach on little wooden mats that looked Japanese.
“Fedya.”
“My mother and I came here forty-two years, four months, and eight days ago to be with her husband. I was raised in this very building.”
Fedya looked around as if he had never noted his surroundings before.
“He is dead, mining accident. She died of cancer just two years ago. Anything else you want to know?”
He ran his flattened fingers over the right side of his bearded chin.
“You no longer hate our father?”
“I’m not venerating his memory,” said Fedya.
“And me, you hate me?”
“I did for a very long time and then I realized one day that what he had done to me and my mother was not your fault. I resented, yes, but no more. It took too much time and energy.”
Porfiry Petrovich nodded and drank some tea. Both men knew why the information was being provided. The brothers had to work together for a few days. Actually, it had to be seven days at most because of the deadline the Yak had given him.
“The murder,” said Rostnikov.
“Which one?”
“There have been more besides the Canadian?”
“Hundreds that I know of. There may have been more. There’s no way of knowing the total number of people who simply died in the mine or while constructing the mine and these buildings. Record keeping was terrible. We’re not Germans. All the possible murders are buried with whatever records exist. Mind if I pace?”
“No.”
“Would you be more comfortable removing your leg?”
“Yes, but it’s not worth the effort of taking it off and putting it back on. It supports me but it does not comfort me. I was able to talk to my old, shriveled leg.”
Fedya nodded in understanding and began to pace, pausing from time to time to look out the window.
“Tsar Nicholas ordered diamond expeditions to Siberia in 1898. No diamonds were found. Every one of the eighteen men who came to the Yakuntia Basin perished. It was not till Stalin ordered expeditions back to Siberia to find diamonds in 1947 that some success was achieved, but the cost was great-not that Stalin cared. Your only son is named Iosef?”
“Yes.”
“For Stalin?”
“Yes. It was a mistake. I have made and continue to make many of them,” said Porfiry Petrovich. “My son is not one of those mistakes.”
“He could change his name,” said Fedya, looking out the window.
“Stalin did not own eternal rights to the name.”
“What does Iosef do?”
“He’s a policeman. He works with me.”
“Runs in the family. Our father, you, me, and your son.”
“It’s possible.”
“The winters,” Fedya said, resuming his pace. “Then as now, seven months of winter. Steel tools became so brittle that they broke like dry kindling. Oil froze solid. Rubber tires exploded. Then, when that first summer came, the top layer of permafrost melted, created a muddy, fly-infested swamp as big as half the countries in Africa.”
“And people died?” said Porfiry Petrovich.
“Hundreds. And all of them and all of us, until the fall of the man of steel, were happy to be here. We had a doctor, medical supplies, books to read, a job to do-a very dangerous job but a job-but most of all we had. .”
“Food,” said Porfiry Petrovich.
“Food,” agreed his brother, almost spilling what remained of his tea. “And warm bedrooms.”
“Murders,” Porfiry Petrovich said.
“Madness, fights, jealousy,” said Fedya.
“Isolation here can be maddening. In 1953 a man, a small man, went mad in the mine. He had a pick. He screamed and imbedded the tool’s sharp point in the head of three people, the back of two people, the stomach of another and, worst of all, he came out of the mine and used his pick on two children, one a little boy and the other a little girl. The alcoholic security guard shot the madman. The children were on the way to wait for their father, who was the wild man’s first victim. You know where this is going, don’t you?”
“The ghost girl,” said Rostnikov.
“The ghost girl. She began appearing in the mine a month or two later. She’s been seen at least nine times since 1963, probably more. There may have been people who did not want to be ridiculed, but ridicule would not have come easily to those who claimed to have seen her.”