"There isn't another bruise on his body. They tried pain and decided it wouldn't work. He wouldn't tell them. Then they killed him."
They were on the second floor now, moving down the corridor past curious patients, nurses, and cleaning staff.
"What did they want?" Vostov said. "No, no. With all respect, Inspector. I think … You know, sometimes professional people come for a vacation or treatment here, and miss their work. Architects see design, structural defects, in the hotels. Factory managers see inefficient management. That kind of thing. It's understandable. May I suggest-and I don't want to sound… I mean, the seawater and whirlpool baths would help your leg."
Vostov stopped in front of a door when they reached the end of the corridor. He shook his head and pushed the door open.
There was not much inside the small room, a metal clothes locker whose door stood slightly open, a chest with three drawers, all slightly open, a bed. On the wall there was the reproduction of a Cezanne harbor.
Rostnikov walked to the chest of drawers, opened them, and then closed each one.
He moved to the closet, then the bed, and finally moved to the center of the room to simply stand with his hands folded in front of him and look around. He stood for more than a minute without speaking.
"Inspector…" Vostov began, looking around at the room. This was now well beyond him. "I must get back to my patients."
"Someone searched this room and tried to make it look as if he or she did not," said Rostnikov, so softly that Dr. Vostov moved closer to catch a few words.
"What was that?" Vostov said.
"Nothing," answered Rostnikov, opening a drawer. The clothes were just slightly disheveled, the way a man living alone might throw them in a drawer, but Georgi Vasilievich was a humorless man who lived an ordered life, who would not tolerate a wrinkle in his bed covers or conversation.
Vostov was quite convinced now that the block of a man before him was one of the many who visited Yalta because they had suffered what the Americans called a "nervous breakdown." People being murdered, their rooms searched without a sign.
It was nonsense.
"What were they looking for?" asked Vostov, as if he were humoring a small child.
"I don't know," said the policeman, "but I will find out. An autopsy now, Dr.
Vostov, please."
"I don't think…" Vostov began, but Rostnikov turned, and their eyes met. "There is no reason, and the family might not-" ' 'Georgi Vasilievich had no family. His wife is dead. They had no children. Are you a married man, Doctor?" asked the inspector.
"Yes, bull…"
"Children?"
"One," said Vostov.
"Girl or boy?"
"Girl… woman," said Vostov. "She's thirty-five years old."
"Grandchildren?"
"Two," said Vostov.
"Pictures?" asked the inspector with a smile.
"Yes," said Vostov, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a wallet.
Vostov's eyes did not leave those of the inspector as he opened his wallet and turned it to show to Rostnikov.
' 'May I?'' said Rostnikov, reaching for the wallet and adding, "My name is Porfiry Petrovich. And yours?"
"Ivan," said Vostov, letting Rostnikov take his wallet and examine the photograph.
"Boy looks strong, an athlete. Girl is very delicate."
"Vladim is twelve, plays soccer. Irina is ten."
"Ballet?" Rostnikov guessed, looking at the child's photo.
"Yes," said Vostov, accepting his wallet back.
"When I looked in Vasilievich's wallet, I saw two photographs: his GRU identification and a photo of him as a young man with his arm around the shoulder of a woman. My wife and I have one son, a grown son, too, not married," said Rostnikov, sighing deeply and looking once more around the room before ushering Vostov toward the door.
"Your son's name?"
"Iosef," said Rostnikov. "Just released from the army. Wants to work in the theater. Do you like working in Yalta, Comrade Vostov?"
They were walking back down the corridor now, in the same direction from which they had come.
Vostov shrugged.
"It's not Moscow," he said.
Rostnikov nodded in understanding.
"I sleep a great deal here even when I'm not tired," said Rostnikov as they came to the stairway and stepped out of the way to allow a pair of well-dressed, very young men to move past them.
"Some of it's the air," explained Vostov. "Some of it is letting down from the pressures."
"Georgi Vasilievich, I am sure, did many things of which he should not have been very proud. He leaves no one and nothing behind him, Ivan. He will be easy to forget. Too easy. Someone murdered him and did not try very hard to hide it.
Someone murdered him and thought no one would care. And, Comrade Ivan Vostov, this offends me."
They reached the bottom of the stairs.
"I'll order the autopsy," said Vostov, following his own deep sigh.
The right corner of Rostnikov's mouth moved into a slightly lopsided smile, and he reached out to give the doctor an encouraging squeeze of the right arm, being careful not to cause even the slightest pain.
THREE
The grinning man with bad teeth standing in Yon Mandelstem's shower was a plainclothes policeman named Arkady Zelach, known to the other inspectors on the fourth floor of Petrovka as Zelach the Slouch.
Arkady Zelach was a hulking, out-of-shape man who lived with his mother in the same small apartment in which he had been born forty-one years earlier. He had become a policeman because his father had been a policeman. He had never considered doing anything else, nor had his parents. Since he had neither brains nor intuition, Zelach relied totally on the judgment of his superiors and his mother, which made him quite valuable to both. He was loyal to his mother, whom he understood perfectly, and to Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, whom he under-Stood not at all.
He grinned, not because he found the naked man in front of him, who was not really Yon Mandelstem, funny, but because it seemed the best face to wear when in doubt. People who didn't know him tended to think he was amused by something they had said or done. But that was only true of people who didn't know him.
' 'Why are you hiding in the shower?'' asked Sasha Tkach, motioning Zelach out.
Zelach moved to let Sasha reach in and turn on the shower.
"I didn't want anyone to know I was here," Zelach said while Sasha waited for the water to grow tepid enough to step under.
Tkach didn't bother to respond. He simply nodded and touched his face. He needed a shave.
"Go watch the door," Tkach said. "If someone breaks in, shoot them."
This Zelach understood.
The real Yon Mandelstem was a computer programmer with the Ministry of Labor in Leningrad. The apartment in Building Two of the Friedrich Engels Quartet had been obtained in the name of Mandelstem, who had been transferred to the Ministry of Labor in Moscow. However, the real Yon Mandelstem never got to Moscow, nor would he ever get there. He was in Saratov, using yet another name while he assisted for one week in the computer training of young men and women who would be operating the offices of McDonald's hamburger chain as it expanded throughout the Soviet Union. If anyone checked, they would find Sasha Tkach, with Mandelstem's identification, using Mandelstem's computer at Mandelstem's desk, though no one expected anyone to check. Following his week in Saratov, the real Mandelstem would leave the Soviet Union and immigrate to Israel. The papers had been prepared quickly and quietly, and he had been informed and told to pack within three hours for his trip to Saratov and then out of the country.
Mandelstem, who looked very little like Sasha Tkach, had been quite willing to go, had even kept an emergency suitcase packed.