Sasha was feeling much better when the telephone rang. They were still talking at the table when the sound of the phone cut through his heart.
“It’s the phone,” his mother said, looking suddenly pale. “It’s for you. Who calls here but the police people? I’ll get it.”
He leaped up before she could reach the phone and managed to answer first. Maya looked at him with concern, and he smiled back at her.
It was Zelach.
“I can’t find the chief inspector,” Zelach said wearily.
“Why are you looking for him?”
“The list he wanted is ready, the list of American tourists in Moscow,” Zelach said. “It was long, but the chief inspector said I should make a shorter list of older men, men over seventy-five. That list’s not so long. And-”
“And you have this list?” Sasha said, trying to avoid Maya’s penetrating, questioning eyes.
“I just said I had the list,” Zelach said with irritation. “I want to go home now.”
“Leave the list on my desk. I’ll be right there.”
“But-” Zelach began as Sasha hung up the phone.
“Emergency,” he said apologetically. “I have to get back to the office.”
“Now?” asked Lydia, picking at the crumbs of salmon. “It can’t wait till morning?”
It could certainly wait till morning, but Sasha wanted to get out, to control himself.
“No, it’s an emergency, a murder.”
He moved to Maya, giving her a quick kiss, and started to turn away, but she stood up and grabbed his sleeve.
“What?” he began.
“Whatever it is,” she whispered, “try not to worry. Are you sick?”
“No,” he said, sighing.
“Are you having trouble in your work?”
“A bit,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “But it will pass.”
“Touch the baby,” she said, taking his hand. He touched her stomach. “Everything will be fine.”
And, he thought, waving to his mother, perhaps it would.
To Rostnikov, the apartment building on Balaklava Prospekt looked that day like a child’s gray building block. He had purchased a set of gray plastic blocks for Josef when his son was about seven, and Josef had rearranged his blocks into imaginative structures that he named “the typewriter without keys,” “the radio with no sound,” “the refrigerator with no doors,” “the book with no pages,” and “the ice cream van without wheels.” This, thought Rostnikov, is the apartment without a mouth. It was a thought that depressed him as he slowly climbed the three flights of stairs toward the apartment of Sofiya and Lev Savitskaya. It depressed him because his own apartment on Krasikov Street was so much like it.
Going there was a risk, a slight risk, but a risk nonetheless. He had been officially ordered off the case. Were he to be caught, he could, would, simply say that he was informing those involved, the survivors of the victim, that the investigation would continue under another investigator when time permitted. He would argue, explain, that he was tying up loose ends to keep concerned citizens from lodging protests. The argument would be an absurd one. No one would pay attention to a protest from a distraught Jew whose old father had been murdered, but what could they do to Rostnikov? Take his job? If they wanted to dismiss him from his work, they would simply do it. Rostnikov had no illusions. He would continue to work as long as he continued to have a function that no one else could fulfill.
He ground his teeth as he arrived at the third floor and reached down to rub his complaining left leg. He had stopped home briefly to change into his other suit and to lay out his torn jacket neatly with a note to Sarah asking her please to repair it. The note had been carefully worded, brief but examined, to ensure that no word or phrase could give offense. Sarah’s disappointment at their failure to get out of the Soviet Union had been great. At first she had seemed to accept it as inevitable. She took it like a Russian, but as the days passed and she became aware that an occasional KGB man would inquire about her at her work or she thought about the consequences of their failure to obtain permission to emigrate, consequences more for their son Josef than for themselves, she had begun to brood. The brooding got worse when she was dismissed without reason from her job at the music shop. Brooding didn’t become her. She was normally cheerful, open, supportive. Brooding was Porfiry Petrovich’s specialty. A small apartment could not sustain two brooders without the possibility of explosion.
Rostnikov had not called ahead that he was coming. There was no one to call. The Savitskayas had no telephone. Few Russians had telephones. The latest estimate was that in the entire Soviet Union there were no more than 20 million phones compared to more than 140 million in the United States. It was, therefore, a calculated risk to come to the Savitskaya apartment. The woman was a schoolteacher and the boy a student. They might well be home late in the afternoon. It had also struck Rostnikov that Sofiya Savitskaya was not the most social of citizens. As it was, he was proved right. He knocked once, solidly, on the apartment door and was greeted by a dreamy “Who is there?”
“Inspector Rostnikov,” he said, and waited while she came to the door and opened it just enough to see him, a pointless protection, since he could simply push it open.
“What?” she said, one brown eye showing, puzzled and frightened, through the crack.
“I would like to come in and talk,” he said. “What I have to say need not be shared by the neighbors.”
She hesitated and then opened the door for him to enter. She waited till he was all the way in before closing the door. The apartment was hot, moist and hot, in spite of the open window. There was no draft, no opening for the breeze, should one arise, to seek out and enter.
She stood near the door, and he could see over her right shoulder the space from which the photo had been taken. There was something of the fragile bird about the woman that touched Rostnikov, though she was not thin. In fact, she seemed a bemused, disheveled, slightly younger version of his own Sarah, but that might simply be the cautious Jewishness of both women. There was no clear physical characteristic that marked Soviet Jews from other Russians. But there was a look nurtured by hundreds of years of wariness in an always-hostile culture.
“I would like a drink of water,” he said gently.
“A drink of water,” she repeated, as if no command could be acted upon unless programmed through her own voice. She moved, limped, to the small sink, turned on the faucet, and filled a glass for him. Instead of advancing to give it to him, she stood at the sink, holding it out. Rostnikov nodded solemnly and walked over to take it.
She was not pretty, he decided, looking at her as he drank, but there was that air of Cassandra, a distance, a sense that she was listening to voices on another plane. Rostnikov admitted that there was something intriguing about that, something that attracted him. Her air suggested madness, and madness suggested a vision he could not imagine, a fragile creative power that needed protection.
He drank the water and handed the glass back to her before he spoke.
“We have made some progress,” he said.
She looked at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about.
“Progress in finding the killers of your father,” he explained.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, looking directly at him and making it quite clear that it didn’t matter to her. “All I want is the photograph and the candlestick. Lev and I have very little to remember.”
“When we catch the killers, we will have the candlestick. The killers do not have the photograph, however. We took that, as you may recall. And we will return it shortly.
“I have some names I want to say to you, names of the people who we think were in the photograph. I will say them, and you tell me if your father ever mentioned them, what he said. Can we do that?”