She didn’t answer.
“And can we sit?”
She sat at one of the three wooden chairs at the small kitchen table, and he sat across from her. He considered asking for another glass of water just to keep his hands busy. Most Russians smoked. It was a habit Rostnikov’ had never considered.
“Mikhail Posniky, Lev Ostrovsky, Shmuel Prensky,” he said. “I thought, perhaps, your brother Lev might be named for Ostrovsky, who was one of the men in the photograph.”
“Never,” she said without emotion.
“Your parents would never name-”
“Lev was named for my grandfather. But Mikhail Posniky-I heard that name. My father knew him, went to America with him. I think he died.”
“And Shmuel Prensky?”
“The magic snake,” she answered, looking down at her hands. “The poison snake of gold. To say his name is like saying the name of the Lord. It is forbidden.”
“Your father said this?”
“In the dark, once or twice. At night. To my mother when she lived. Inspector, have you ever thought that being alive is very difficult?”
“I have thought this, yes.”
“And?”
“And I eat my borscht, lift my weights, read my books, do my work.”
“Do you have a wife and children?”
“A wife, a son, a grown son.”
“You said your wife is Jewish. You said that the day my father was killed. Was it a lie?”
Their eyes met and Rostnikov smiled. “It was no lie.”
“Shmuel Prensky is Jewish,” she said almost to herself.
“So were all the men in the photograph,” Rostnikov said in return, wanting to reach out and pat the nervous hand of the woman as it rested on the hard wood table. But he did not reach out.
She shrugged, dismissing the thought.
“Where is your brother?”
“At the home of a friend,” she said. “He grew tired of all the police. All the questions.”
“All the- You mean more policemen came to talk to you since I-since your father’s death?”
Her head was shaking in confirmation.
“They came, asked these same questions. Came again. We can’t move. Can’t hide. We can only sit and answer. In life, no one ever came to see father. Now that he is dead, he has many visitors. Do you think it is hot in here?”
“It is hot,” Rostnikov agreed. “I must go.”
He could tell her now that the investigation was closed. It wasn’t too late. What could she do? Could she cry, wail? This was a woman with dreaded dreams who wanted her candlestick, her photograph, and a reason for insanity.
Rostnikov stood up with the help of the table, because, as usual, his leg had begun to stiffen. Sofiya watched and, he noticed, rubbed her own crippled leg. As he moved to the door, she rose, took a step toward him, and looked up at his face with a question. He opened his arms, and she put her head on his chest. He held her, patted her head, and waited for her to weep. He felt her cheek against his shoulder, her breasts against his chest, and wondered how long it had been since anyone had held and comforted Sofiya Savitskaya. He wondered, in fact, if she had ever been held and comforted, and inside himself he wept for her.
They stood that way for several minutes, and she was so silent that Rostnikov thought she might have fallen asleep. He could feel her breathing against him.
“I must go,” he said gently, but she didn’t move back. He took her arms and held her a few inches away as he repeated, “I must go,” and then he sat her in the kitchen chair. Her eyes were closed, and her shoulders remained close together as if she had been hypnotized.
“I will come back when I know more,” he promised, going to the door. The woman did not move. He went out and closed the door noiselessly behind him. Then he paused to listen. If she cried, he might go back, invite her for dinner, stay with her and tell his life story, spin a tale about Isola in America, about Ed McBain’s world of police who caught criminals and knew nothing of politics, of police who were supported by their system, policemen named Carella, Meyer, Kling, and Brown, of policemen in a nightmare world but one in which they could comfort each other and those they encountered who were the victims of the madness.
Rostnikov went home. He wondered when he looked up at the evening sun if Sofiya Savitskaya would remain in that chair, her shoulders together, her eyes closed, until a prince came who would break the spell. Rostnikov felt the grit and sweat under his rapidly wilting collar and knew he was no prince. He was, at best, a comic knight or a guardian of the secret, but he was no prince.
He almost wandered into a hole in the street clearly marked with a sign indicating remont, or repair, and he put off going home by entering a bakery where the line to find out the price was reasonably short. He got the price and then went to the line to pay the cashier. Ten minutes later he had gone through the third line, the one to pick up the bread, and was on his way home.
“Let’s go to a movie,” he growled when he finally returned to his apartment and saw Sarah, her red hair tied back, her face solemn, her dress dark, placing food on the table.
She stopped, looked at him with her hands on her hips, and cocked her head to one side, which reminded him of the way she had looked one afternoon in 1962 when he had teased her about going on a vacation. He remembered that it was 1962, because he had just finished the investigation of the murder of the three shoe-store clerks on Lenin Prospekt, and he had been feeling wonderful.
“The Mir has a French movie about Napoleon and Josephine,” she said, testing him, for she knew that Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov’s taste went to action films and comedies.
“The Mir sounds perfect,” he said, putting his bread on the table.
“Maybe, we could find-” Sarah began, ready to concede some ground.
“The Mir it shall be,” he said. “We will eat after I lift my iron babies. I will wash, and we will lose ourselves in decadent history and French romanticism. You smile? Does that mean we shall hold hands and kiss in the darkness like children?”
“You were never a child, Porfiry Petrovich,” she said, checking something cooking that smelled sweet and indefinable to Rostnikov, who had begun to remove his clothes and prepare himself for his beloved weights. It would, he decided, be a perfect night. He would merge with the weights, sweat upon his own sweat, exhaust himself, and eat. He would eat as if he were in a terrible contest in which he had to extract all taste and savor all odors to win. Then he would go with Sarah to the French movie and love it, talk about it, imagine himself Napoleon. For one night he would not be in Moscow. One night. That was all he could do, and deep down he thought that was all he really wanted to do.
EIGHT
Emil Karpo opened his eyes, expecting to see the gray sky above the roof of the Ukraine Hotel. Instead, he saw pale gray walls, the solid, unsmiling face of Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, and he heard voices around him.
“I saw a French movie last night,” Rostnikov said, looking down at him. “The French laugh too much, with too little feeling and with almost no reason. Do you agree?”
“I’m not an expert of the French mentality,” Karpo croaked through his painfully dry throat. He realized now that he was in a bed, in a hospital.
A man was standing beside the chief inspector. He was about forty with a birdlike chest and glasses with wire rims that made him look like an intellectual from a 1930s movie about the Revolution.
“The woman who fell from the roof,” Rostnikov said. “She was the Weeper?”
Karpo nodded.
“This is Monday morning,” Rostnikov said. “I’m going to sit on your bed.” He did. “They didn’t call me yesterday when it happened. I think it was Procurator. Khabolov’s way of punishing me for the destruction of his Chaika. Well, you are supposed to be curious. You are supposed to be amused. You are supposed to be burning with curiosity about this destroyed Chaika, and you just lie there.”