The relative incompetence of the couple did not keep Elena from remaining alert. She had planned to see her aunt, Anna Timofeyeva. Normally, she would not have considered such a visit while undercover, but her aunt had shown small signs of distress over the past few weeks, including one moment at dinner when Anna gasped, started to reach for her chest, and brought herself under control, saying, “Gas.”
Anna Timofeyeva had been a Soviet procurator, a very successful, workaholic procurator whose chief investigator had been Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. A heart attack had ended Anna’s career and forced her into one-bedroom retirement, looking into a cement courtyard watching mothers and small children, waiting for visits, which she dreaded, from Lydia Tkach. Anna would never speak up if she was not feeling well. Elena knew her aunt would prefer to die in the chair at the window with her cat, Baku, in her lap than admit weakness.
But Elena was worried and had decided that she had to talk to her aunt, had to convince her to see a doctor, preferably Sarah Rostnikov’s cousin, Leon.
Had she told Porfiry Petrovich, he would have understood, probably would have volunteered to visit Anna himself, though he would certainly have little hope of success. But to tell Rostnikov would have put him in an awkward position. Elena was supposed to be undercover, contacts made in only one way and only if necessary. If Porfiry Petrovich sanctioned her visit home and did not tell the Yak, it was possible that something could go wrong and Rostnikov’s position as chief investigator, not to mention Elena’s safety, would be compromised.
No, Elena had decided to do it on her own and to be very careful. Sasha was back in the hotel waiting to be picked up that evening by Boris Osipov; taken to the small arena where he was to bring Tchaikovsky to do battle against one of the dogs that Illya and Boris’s boss had chosen. Sasha suspected that the dog Tchaikovsky would be fighting would be a particularly vicious one with an excellent survival record.
Elena walked down Kalinin Street to Vorovsky Street and paused in front of the small old Church of St. Simon the Stylite. The church, during the generations of Soviet Communism, had been the exhibition hall of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Nature. She didn’t know what it was used for now. She looked at her watch and caught a glimpse of the couple standing in the doorway of one of the twenty-four-story blocks of flats ahead.
There were five blocks of flats on her right, built in the 1960s, each containing 280 apartments.
Elena looked impatiently at her watch and moved to the jewelry shop, past the couple who had entered the building before which they had stood. They did not appear again till she entered the pedestrian underpass in front of the Moscow Book House. They continued to remain far behind, but not so far that they would lose sight of her.
Elena had walked slowly, going up the stairs at the end of the tunnel, moving past a sudden rush of a dozen or so people coming down. As soon as she reached the broad sidewalk, she did her best to act as if she had forgotten something. Turning, she started back across the street, dodging cars, moving quickly. She managed to enter the bookshop and close the door in time to look back and see the couple emerge from the tunnel on the other side of the street. Elena stood back as the couple looked in all directions, had a quick discussion, and headed for the nearest shop.
As soon as they disappeared inside, Elena moved back to the street and went quickly to her left, away from them. The couple was now lost behind her, searching shops and cafes.
But Elena knew that one of two things had happened. Either the people who wanted her watched were incompetent, or she was meant to spot the couple, lose them, and feel free. That would mean someone far more able was somewhere nearby watching her.
She decided on caution and was rewarded when she turned her head suddenly and found her eyes meeting those of a rotund man with pink cheeks, carrying an American shopping bag. The bag was black. So were the man’s eyes, even at a distance of a dozen paces.
The man was good. He did not look away. Instead, he walked directly up to Elena and said, “You dropped this.” He held up the black shopping bag. A white art-deco figure of a woman decorated the back.
“No,” she said politely.
“No?” he said, apparently puzzled. “I could have sworn. .”
“Prastee’t’e, excuse me.”
“Two honest people,” the round man said with a smile. “I find a bag and try to return it, and you, who could take it and whatever it contains, reject the offer of that which is not yours. It seems to be from a very expensive shop, too.”
“Your good fortune,” Elena said with a smile of her own, and turned away.
The man was indeed remarkably good, and Elena knew she had a problem. She could lose the man, but that would bring suspicion upon her. Her evasion of the couple, crude though their methods had been, might well raise questions, but to lose this man would have been very dangerous. Elena abandoned the idea of visiting her aunt and headed slowly back to the hotel, pretending to look in the shop windows.
The rotund man moved slowly, smiling, having a good idea now that she had been frightened into heading back to the hotel. He had watched her elude the incompetent couple. The woman known as Lyuba had been very skillful in her evasion of the couple. It certainly looked like a professional effort. The rotund man, who was Peter Nimitsov’s uncle, continued down the street.
It took Iosef Rostnikov and Zelach only two hours to find Yulia Yalutshkin, the sometime mistress of Yevgeny Pleshkov, the missing member of parliament.
The soccer coach, Oleg Kisolev, had told them where they might find her at midnight. Midnight and might were not enough reason for Iosef to delay his search. Kisolev might possibly know where to reach his friend, or the Yalutshkin woman, and might warn them that the police were looking, and where they might be looking.
The computer center at Petrovka was desperately in need of up-dating, new programs and people to feed data into the system’s memory, not to mention one full-time technician to service the existing system until he or she went mad.
Iosef was well aware that there were stacks of arrest-and-questioning reports that had never been fed in. Such stacks report-edly were several feet high and filled an entire office, from which two computer programmers had been ejected to make room. It was rumored that the central computer staff, badly undermanned, had reached an unspoken agreement to simply throw out or shred huge piles of reports when no one was looking. These legendary stacks supposedly dated back at least four years.
Still, it was a place to begin. He got an order from the Yak and was given a computer next to a woman of about forty with a very sour look on her face. The woman was built like a small automobile and squirmed in her chair, muttering to herself and cursing the computer. Iosef was usually able to charm even the most lemonlike of faces with his smile of even, white teeth. This woman was not to be charmed. He gave up the effort and began his search.
Meanwhile, Zelach, who did not know how to use a computer, was in the file room on the far side of the building, searching through written reports for anything on Yulia Yalutshkin or Yevgeny Pleshkov. It would have seemed logical to an outsider for the file room and computer room to be next to or near each other, but, in fact, given Russian thinking, the distance kept the computer people from simply piling the files in that secret office or destroying them. The computer staff was young. The file-room staff was old and did their job-slowly, but they did their job.