"Good night," she said. "I love you."
"And I love you," Sasha said.
Maya hung up the phone, but Sasha continued to talk, turning as the men worked their way closer to him. Sasha had no gun. He was supposed to carry one, but less than three years earlier he had shot a boy during a robbery of a government liquor store. The image of the moment in which Sasha's eyes had met those of the boy. who was only sixteen, haunted Tkach. But what was worse, Sasha found that he could not remember the boy's face. For almost a year he had searched the faces of young men he encountered on the street, hoping that a face would bring back a vivid memory, but it did not happen. Tkach carried no gun, and he knew the two men were making their way toward him.
"No," Tkach said aloud now so that they could hear him. "I've got to be at work.
Why? Because I'm the only one who can handle the program. You think any fool can deal with a computer program like that?"
Sasha rummaged through his mind to find some work phrase that would be particularly Jewish, a phrase that would be right for Yon Mandelstem, but he could come up with none. He settled for an inflection, a movement of the shoulders and arms that he had observed in his former neighbor, Eli Houseman.
"Then you don't, Eli," Sasha said. "I'm sorry for you."
A group of women suddenly burst through the bushes not ten yards from where the two men watching Sasha Tkach were hidden. The women were laughing: two of them were holding hands. Sasha recognized the woman Tamara, whom he had met in the hall of Engels Four a few hours earlier.
"Good-bye, Eli," he said vehemently, and hung up the phone.
He turned as if irritated by his call and let his eyes meet those of the woman who was looking at him. Sasha smiled and stepped onto the path so that the quartet of women would meet him.
Tamara held out her arms to stop her companions, one of whom was very young, perhaps eighteen, and trying to look much older, which only succeeded in making her look even younger than she was.
"Ah," Tamara cried, "there he is, the one I told you about. Man petit Juif.''
The woman's French accent was weak, much weaker than that of Sasha, who pretended that he did not know she had called him her little Jew.
The women giggled, and Tamara stepped forward. "Out for a walk?" she asked.
Sasha looked directly at her but saw the movement of the men in the bushes as they stepped back into deeper darkness.
"Yes," he said. "I couldn't sleep."
"Maybe you'd like that drink?" she asked.
Her friends giggled. She turned to them with a warning look.
"I'd like it," Sasha said.
Tamara took his arm and moved out along the path.
"Tell us about it tomorrow, Tamma," one of the women shouted.
"I hear they tickle," another woman added.
Sasha pretended not to hear as Tamara waved her friends away and led him toward the buildings. Sasha turned his head and smiled, looking back at the trio of women behind but seeing along the path, in the light of a lamp, the two men, perhaps fifty yards away. They may have been looking at the three women. At least a passerby would assume so, but Sasha knew that their eyes were on him.
He smiled and let Tamara take him. She smelled of cheap makeup, alcohol, and woman, and she held him as if he were a prize she had captured in the park, her little Jew, the trophy. Guilt, relief, and excitement ran through him. As the Jew he pretended to be, he despised this woman. As the man he pretended to be, he needed her protection. And as Sasha Tkach, he felt the softness of her left breast against his arm through her dress.
"They were going to kill me," said Elena Kusnitsov.
She was sitting in her kitchen chair, the same chair the man named Jerold had tied her to and from which the police had released her. When the tape had been removed, Elena Kusnitsov had tried to rise, but her left knee began to dance, and she had to sit down. It had continued to bounce up and down unbidden, as if hearing a tune the rest of Elena could not appreciate. She had tried to use her hands to stop the dance and had succeeded, at least for the moment.
It was bad enough to be frightened, to have to face killers, to have to sit here with this ghost of a policeman hovering over her, but to suffer the humiliation of this mad, frightened foot of hers was enough to bring tears to her eyes.
Elena did not want to cry, certainly not in front of this policeman, who stood there patiently waiting for his witness's leg to cease its spasms.
Elena, who was sixty-three, quite mistakenly prided herself on her ability to appear forty. She dyed her hair, watched her weight, wore clothes she believed were fashionable, and made up her face carefully each morning, after lunch, and immediately after coming home from her job at the Beriozka, the Birch Tree, dollar shop in the Metropole Hotel. She was a woman of culture who could sell American cigarettes or Russian vodka in three languages. She talked to important people from foreign countries every day. Wearing the very dress she was now wearing, she had spoken to Armand Hammer, the wealthiest American in the world.
This should not happen to her. She looked at her knee and felt her eyes fill with tears.
"I'm not doing this on purpose," she explained.
"I know that," said Emil Karpo. "We can wait."
Elena did not want to wait. She wanted this frightening creature out of her small apartment.
"When you go, I will close that window, the window through which the two had climbed. I will close it and nail it shut. Never rnind Popkinov. I don't care if he is the district maintenance officer, I don't care if he is a party member. I don't care if you are a party member," she said, trying to sound defiant.
"I am a party member," said Karpo.
' 'I don't care. Boris Yeltsin, our president, quit the party,'' Elena Kusnitsov said.
The knee. The damnable knee. When would it stop? When would he leave? The noise of ambulances, police cars, curious people outside looking at the body the policeman told her was there, those noises had not stopped. They came through the open window and contributed to both Elena's fear and defiance.
Karpo leaned over and reached down toward Elena with his left hand.
Elena released a tiny whimper and cringed, almost falling backward in her chair.
"No," she said.
There was no point in Emil Karpo explaining that he simply wanted to reassure the woman, calm her down so that he could get information from her. Rostnikov would have had her quiet long ago, would have had her eager to cooperate, but Rostnikov was not here, and Karpo had a criminal to pursue.
Elena's knee had stopped dancing. She smiled up at Karpo, her makeup a smear, her hair wild, and then the tears came.
Karpo waited patiently while she sobbed.
"Ask," she said through her tears.
"I can wait," said Karpo.
"I want to answer, and I want you to leave," Elena said through her sobs. "My father was construction foreman on the Moskva Swimming Pool. This should not happen to me."
"Did the two men speak?" Karpo asked, taking out his notebook.
"Yes," she said, brushing back her hair with her right hand. "I look terrible."
"What did they say?"
"They didn't know I understood them," said Elena. "I speak three languages in addition to Russian."
She looked up at Karpo to see if he would challenge her.
"What language did they speak?" ' 'English,'' she said. ' 'The young one with the orange hair spoke very bad English. The other one, the older one with a beard, he was American."
"What did they say?"
"Nonsense, they said. They are crazy people. Crazy people speak nonsense. The one with orange hair put his face right in front of mine. He wanted to kill me.
He told the other one to get him a Madonna."
"What else?" asked Karpo.
"Jerold," she said. "The American one with the beard was Jerold."