Vera, however, was a half mile away when the couple passed in front of a large apartment building, one of the many on the street that housed the most important and privileged nachalstvo, bosses, in the Soviet Union. A chauffeur-driven car stood in front of one building where Chernenko supposedly lived. The couple paid no attention but whispered something to each other that the driver, pretending to look straight ahead, assumed was sexual. It made the driver shift and wish he could remove the jacket of his semimilitary uniform. It was a hot day, a muggy hot Thursday.
A jogger, complete with Western sweat suit, flew past the young couple, seriously intent on three or four miles before dinner. His hair was white, and he was lean and fit, an unusual figure on the streets of Moscow. The serious joggers were like this one, head forward, arms low, pace steady. The less serious moved slowly, sometimes almost walking. The jogging suit made it clear, the runner hoped, that he was indeed running and not simply walking.
As the couple passed a group of men and women arriving home from work, the woman tugged at the sleeve of the young man and pointed at a white Chaika parked in front of an apartment building about four car lengths from the building’s entrance. He seemed at first reluctant to look at the car but then smiled weakly and gave in. Like two honeymooners, they peered through the window and examined the upholstery of the car that the likes of them would never own.
“Well,” said the man in a pebbly voice from a throat planed dry by too much vodka.
The woman smiled, her pink cheeks a contrast to the broken veins on the man’s hose, visible at close range.
“Yes,” she said decisively.
The street was relatively clear. Cars passed, the sound of traffic rattled past them, and pedestrians ambled forward, carrying cloth shopping bags and briefcases. Standing on the sidewalk, his eyes toward the front of the apartment building, the muscular man, who looked not quite so young at close range, leaned against the car as the woman moved to his side to join him. Behind her back she tried to open the door to the Chaika. It was locked. They talked of this and that and nothing for a few seconds, mentioned a possible picnic in the park, and waited for a break in the crowd. It came, a brief one, and the woman turned, pulling a hollow metal tube of twelve inches or so from her bag. Quickly, without looking back, she leaned forward and thrust the steel tube against the car’s window. Her arms were strong and the thrust powerful. The bar penetrated the window almost noiselessly and the circle of glass fell to the plush seat within. She withdrew the bar to the patter of the man with the mashed nose, who repeated, “Khorosho, good” as she worked. She dropped the bar into her shopping bag, pushed her fingers through the small hole, and lifted the button inside.
She stood, turned again, and looked around the street. They continued to look like a pair of lovers who had paused on their nightly walk to admire the apartments of the great and near-great men who ran the country.
“Now,” she said softly when an older couple passed in front of them. Had the older couple paid more attention to the two at the car, they would have seen that the man was perspiring. The sun was already going down, and the early evening was turning cool.
The young woman turned, opened the door of the white car, slid across the seat, and pulled a metal bar and a wire with a clip at the end of her shopping bag as the man jumped in at her side, closed the door, and looked back over his shoulder.
“Use the mirror,” the woman said without looking up from what she was doing under the dashboard. “Don’t draw attention.”
The man wiped his forehead and glanced at the mirror without looking at the woman. He tried to keep himself from panting like a dog as he counted slowly. By the time he reached seven, the woman had started the car. He stopped counting as she sat up. In the rearview mirror, he saw a pair of men step out of the apartment building and look around. They glanced at the Chaika, and the young man reached inside his jacket for the pistol, which stuck clammily to his stomach.
“Go,” he said. “Go.”
She sat up with maddening calm, looked back over her shoulder for an opening in traffic, and began to ease out of the space. In the mirror, the man saw the two men at the apartment entrance turn the other way and wave.
“Done, Ilya,” the woman said. He looked at her beautiful, strong face and marveled once again at her coolness. Ilya wanted nothing more than a drink.
“When we get this to the garage, we are done, Marina,” he said, opening the glove compartment to keep his hands from trembling.
As Marina sped along Botanical Street past Dzerzhinsky Recreation Park, a dog shot into the street. She swerved deftly to miss it and barely avoided a collision with a tourist bus. Oriental faces peered out the bus window.
“Drive carefully,” Ilya hissed between closed teeth.
“Next time I’ll hit the dog,” she said jokingly.
It was then that he found the report among the papers in the glove compartment and almost threw up on the freshly scented seat of the newly shampooed Chaika. He controlled the hot, vile, small ball of fear that rose from his stomach to his throat and spoke as calmly as he could, which, he was sure, was not calm at all.
“This car belongs to the deputy procurator general at Moscow,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“No,” Marina replied calmly, looking out of the window, her arm on the open window as she glided along like a movie star. “It belongs to us.”
The train ride back from Yekteraslav was hell. Zelach brooded, pouted, almost sucked his thumb. He shifted and squirmed and demanded more attention than a petulant child. Rostnikov’s leg hurt at the knee, and he couldn’t read. He knew he would have to face Sarah’s growing anguish if she hadn’t found work. He worried about Josef, his son, and wondered why there had been no letters from him in Kiev for almost three weeks. Rostnikov tried to build a tale from the bits of information he had gathered about the old men in the photograph. Nothing came. He put the book aside and turned to Zelach.
“Why the brass candlestick?” he said.
Zelach shrugged.
“Hidden value? An antique?” Rostnikov went on as the train rattled forward, buzzing electrically. There were few passengers going toward the city in the late afternoon. Passengers were going the other way, away from Moscow as the workday ended. It had not been difficult to catch a train. They ran frequently, a tribute to the efficiency of the system, according to Emil Karpo. Rostnikov had once suggested to Karpo in return that it demonstrated quite the reverse. Because the train system had to meet its quota of hours in service, trains often ran empty, sometimes in the middle of the night, wasting power. They were ghosts, zombies plodding forward to meet quotas like the vest factory in Yekteraslav. Rostnikov had discovered that the vest factory often went twenty-four hours in ceaseless production of second-rate vests for which there was no market. Work quotas had to be met. People had to be kept busy.
“It may have been incriminating,” Rostnikov went on.
“What?” Zelach answered drowsily.
“The brass candlestick the killers took from the Savitskaya apartment.”
Zelach shrugged. The candlestick held no interest for him. His impulse toward enthusiasm had waned with the afternoon. Zelach was exhausted from two days of effort to impress the Washtub. The trip and that leathery old man had proved too much for Zelach. A conductor came past to check tickets, and Zelach scowled at him. Zelach would gladly have paid his own way back to that town for the joy of crushing the skull of that old man on the porch who had led to Zelach’s humiliation.