A third knock.
Ludmilla sighed and over the sound of the laughing man on the television shouted, “Who?”
“Police,” came a woman’s voice.
“I don’t believe you,” said Ludmilla, looking at the dead bolt and four locks on her door.
“I’m here with another officer,” the woman who claimed to be a police officer said. “We’ll slip our identification cards under the door.”
Ludmilla still sat. The man on the television had stopped laughing. Perhaps the snow would stop soon. There was a Mozart opera at the Bolshoi. She couldn’t remember which one, but there would be Americans, French, Canadians. They and the newly rich young Russians were her customers.
The cards came under the door.
“They could be forged,” Ludmilla said. “Anything can be forged if you have the money.”
“We are here to talk to you and about the man who attacked you,” came a young man’s voice.
“That was ten years ago,” said Ludmilla.
“Almost,” said the woman outside.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Ludmilla said firmly.
“We think he is still attacking women,” said the female voice outside. “We think he is hurting them badly, raping and beating them. We think he may eventually kill one of his victims.”
“Go to them,” shouted Ludmilla, knowing that her next-door neighbor, Maria Illianova, was listening to every word.
“You are the only one who has seen him,” said the woman.
Ludmilla sighed, got up on her arthritic legs, and moved slowly to the door. When she got there, she looked down at the two identification cards, but she didn’t bend to pick them up.
She opened the door.
Sasha and Elena heard the locks click and watched the door come open. According to their information from the original report of the attack, Ludmilla Henshakayova was a large woman of not yet seventy. The woman before them in a loose-fitting dress was thin and seemed ancient. She looked at Sasha and Elena and then stepped back so they could enter the small apartment.
Sasha paused to pick up their identification cards and hand Elena hers.
The door closed and Ludmilla said, “With two police inside, I can lock it later.”
On the television, the laughing man was now interviewing an actor. Ludmilla couldn’t remember his name but she recognized him. He sat across from the laughing man, confident, handsome, legs crossed.
“Ludmilla Henshakayova,” Elena said gently to get the woman’s attention.
“I’m sorry,” said Ludmilla. “I suffer from the Russian diseases of fear, loneliness, melancholy, and a desire to forget the past.”
The room was not at all what either Elena or Sasha had expected. The neighborhood was nearly a slum and had been for years. Half a block away sat the remains of a building so poorly constructed it had collapsed about four years earlier, killing more than a dozen people.
But this room was immaculate. The walls were clean. Two framed posters of flowers were side by side on one wall. The other walls were bare. The concrete floor was covered by a large, darkly ornate rug, and the chairs and narrow bed in the corner were covered in matching knitted covers of yellow and green. The fourth wall held a full bookcase that stood about six feet high and fourteen feet across. In the corner were two chairs and a table covered with a bright yellow tablecloth. On a polished table in a corner sat the black-and-white television where the laughing man and the movie star were talking.
Both Elena and Sasha saw the low armchair at the window. Elena’s aunt had a chair near their window, where Anna Timofeyeva sat for hours, sometimes the whole day, except to do her prescribed walking and to eat a little. Elena sensed her aunt’s memories in that chair. Sasha imagined his mother, Lydia, in such a chair, but not for long. Lydia had the patience of a fly. Sasha sensed his mother’s fear of loneliness and her ever present impatience. Lydia would not sit still in such a comfortable chair for more than five minutes before she rose and began searching for someone to call, something to do.
“Sit,” said Ludmilla.
“May we turn the television off?” said Elena.
“Yes,” said Ludmilla, going back to her chair at the window.
Sasha anticipated her, stepped ahead, and turned the chair slightly so it could face the two investigators, who sat in the straight-backed wooden chairs. Sasha glanced out of the window at the cemetery. A trio of crows swooped down on a large tombstone that was leaning decidedly to the right.
“A little girl detective,” Ludmilla said with a shake of her head as if she expected no more than madness from the new Russia. “A pretty little girl.”
Elena wasn’t sure whether she should be flattered or insulted.
“The attack,” Elena said.
They had decided that whichever one of them seemed to have the better rapport with the woman would lead the questioning.
Ludmilla now looked at Sasha.
“And a boy detective, too. A boy detective with eyes as old as mine. You know, I used to be a poet. I can show you some of my books, the magazines in which I was published, some posters for readings I did all over the Soviet Union.”
She paused and looked up at the two posters on the wall. Sasha and Elena followed her gaze. Indeed, under the flowers both posters carried printed announcements of appearances and readings. One poster was in French. The other was in Russian.
“I no longer write poetry. And then …”
She trailed off, pulled her distant memories in, and sat up to say with renewed strength, “Tea?”
“No, thank you,” said Elena. “We know it has been a long time, but we have very little information on the attack.”
If it hadn’t been for Karpo’s notes, the information they had found in the general files would never have led them to this woman. There had been only a brief entry. Ludmilla’s name, age, and address. There was also a note on the standard form indicating the location where she was attacked and a description of both the method of attack-knife, sneaking up from behind, hand over the eyes-and the attacker. The attacker’s description was simply “Young man, dark hair, brown eyes, khaki jacket. Attempted to take victim’s purse. She fought him off.”
There were no other entries on the case, and neither Sasha nor Elena thought that there had been any follow-up investigation. It was Karpo’s notes that indicated the victim was a highly regarded poet. It was Karpo who had written in his notebook the address of the apartment building in which they now sat. The official report had the wrong address.
“What is he doing to these women?” asked Ludmilla.
“Violent rape,” said Elena. “So far he hasn’t killed anyone, but …”
“I used to be big and strong,” said the old woman. “Now I am not as weak as I look, but I have lost my need to write what I see and feel.”
“Can you remember the man clearly?”
Ludmilla smiled, rivulets of wrinkles forming around her narrow mouth. There was irony but no mirth in the smile.
“Yes. You want to know what he looked like then and what he looks like now?” she said.
“Now?” asked Tkach. “You’ve seen him recently?”
“I saw him.”
“Did you call the police?” asked Elena.
The smile again.
“Do you think they would care?” she asked. “Do you think they would even write down what I would tell them, an old woman claiming to see the man who attacked her almost ten years ago?”
Both Elena and Sasha knew that the woman was right. In a Moscow gone mad with violence, there was neither time nor inclination to follow up reports about old crimes. There were approximately one hundred thousand policemen in a sprawling city of nine million. Few wanted to be policemen. Even armed with Kalishnikov automatic weapons and wearing bulletproof vests, the police, who worked twelve-or fourteen-hour days, were no match for the new mafias and street gangs who were better armed. The police of Russia, unlike those of America, were permitted to fire on suspects who tried to flee or looked as if they would fire weapons at them. The death rate among criminals was high. Official statistics showed that the Moscow police had fired weapons more than fifteen hundred times in the past year compared to the Los Angeles police, who fired only one hundred fifty times in spite of a much higher rate of violence.