Chapter Seven
That night in Moscow was a relatively quiet one.
A former farmer from a collective in Georgia, Anatoli Dudniki, weaved his way drunkenly down the middle of Kadashevskaya Prospekt, announcing to the hurtling taxis and cars that it was his sixty-fifth birthday. One driver, who had taken a few drinks himself, screeched to a halt directly in front of Anatoli, who leaned forward over the hood and laughed.
“Like a movie,” Anatoli said. “My life is like a movie now. You hear that?”
The man in the car opened his window and shouted, “Get out of the street, you drunken old bum, before you get killed.”
“You mean,” said Anatoli, none too steady on his feet, “my head could be run over like a melon, a plum, a cabbage, a grape, something? Squish, skwush?”
The man in the car closed his window and drove on.
Anatoli made it to the curb and sat down. A few cars passed but there were no pedestrians. There was a feeling of rain in the air as there had been all day. There was no moon. Anatoli had learned to recognize the coming of rain from his years on that pitiful collective farm where his now-dead wife had learned two hundred ways to prepare potatoes. Oddly enough, Anatoli still loved potatoes, and when others on the collective had complained at the diet, he had nodded in agreement though he did not agree.
“I love potatoes,” he shouted. “You hear that? I love them to little pieces. I could cry over them. I wish I had two potatoes now.
You know what I would do? I would eat one and give one to someone else. That’s the kind of man I am. That’s the kind of man I am.”
Now Anatoli worked in a bar, which was where he was coming from. He cleaned up after closing-sweeping, mopping, tending to the puke in the bathrooms, the sanitary napkins that blocked the toilets in the women’s room, the stuff that stuck to the floor and to the small bandstand. The pay was poor but he got to work alone and drink as much as he wanted to when he finished his cleanup each night. The management never checked the stock. Anatoli drank only the best.
The alcohol compensated for the dirty job, and he could, because he came at closing time, avoid the loud music from the small band trying to sound like Americans, and avoid the young people in stupid crazy clothes who did something they called dancing and laughed at nothing.
“They laugh at nothing,” Anatoli, sitting on the curb, said to no one. “At nothing. Not that there is anything to laugh at if you are not rich.”
Anatoli shook his head. A little drink would be nice, but Anatoli knew better than to ever remove a bottle from the Albuquerque Bar. And so he sat, shoulders down, a huge burp and sigh escaping from him. He should go home, crawl into the narrow bed in the closet in his daughter and son-in-law’s apartment, but he wasn’t quite sure where the apartment was. Things seemed to be turned this way and that tonight. It had always been difficult for Anatoli, but since the revolution had ended and the street names had been changed, it had become worse.
He shifted his right foot, which was growing stiff, and kicked something hard, something in the street next to the curb. The streetlights were dim so Anatoli leaned over to look at the object.
“What’s this? What’s this?” he said, reaching over and picking up the object. “A gun. A weapon. A thing that shoots.”
He held the gun in his hand. It was heavy. He had no idea what kind of gun it was or even, with certainty, that it was real.
“I found a plotka, a gun,” he said aloud. “A weapon. Is this a thing or is this a thing? I could shoot it. I could sell it.”
Anatoli looked at the black pistol in his hand and held it out.
He had never held a gun in his hand. He pulled the trigger. The gun fired and sent him backward. He hit his head on the sidewalk and sat up quickly, at least as quickly as he could with the aid of gawky elbows and arthritic fingers.
He looked across the street. The gun had made a loud noise and the breaking of glass in a window across the street had created an almost musical follow-up.
“It’s a real gun,” Anatoli said, bracing himself with his left hand and firing again with his right hand.
This time the bullet hit brick or concrete and Anatoli saw a spark of light when it struck.
“I think I should get up and get the hell out of here before I am in big trouble,” he said, still carrying on his conversation with the empty street. “I am a cowboy. I am a cowboy with a gun. All I need is a horse and one of those hats. I am going home.”
The problem was that getting up from the curb was now a major chore that he could not accomplish. Oh, he was capable, but Moscow would not cooperate. It kept swaying. He placed the gun in his lap and began singing. The song he sang was “Baby Face.”
Anatoli didn’t know it was an American song. He only knew the Russian words.
“You got the cutest little baby face,” he bellowed hoarsely.
Across the street, three buildings down, Misha Vantolinkov had had enough. He had been awakened by gunfire on his street before.
He had been awakened by gangs of kids shouting obscenities, but the loud croaking of the drunken Anatoli got to him. Besides, the drunk had the words to the song wrong.
Misha, who had to get up at six to get to his job at the reception desk of the Space Museum, turned on the lights and picked up his major luxury, the telephone. He called the police, giving the location but not his name, told them a lunatic drunk was shooting a gun in the street, and then he hung up.
Anatoli Dudniki was singing even more loudly, “I’m up in the sky when you give me a hug,” when Misha got back in bed and covered his head with his pillow.
Ten minutes later a patrol car with two young policemen in it pulled up at the curb. The policemen got out, guns in hand, and ordered Anatoli to stop singing and put down the gun.
Anatoli complied and grinned, showing his few remaining teeth and a look of gratitude.
“I’m not at home,” Anatoli said as he put the gun in the street.
“I have a name, a medal, a daughter, a bed. That is where I would like you to take me, comrades. Oh, I forgot, no more ‘comrades.’
Citizen policemen. I am at your mercy. Get me home.”
He staggered toward the policemen and fell into the arms of the younger one, almost knocking him over.
Eleven minutes beyond that, Anatoli was in a small damp cell in the nearest police lockup. The lockup was located next door to a paper-clip factory whose metal cutting machines throbbed all night and all day.
“This,” he announced with confidence, “is not my bed. I want my bed. This is now a free country. I am a citizen.”
“And,” said the policeman, standing over him as Anatoli sat,
“you have murdered a woman. One of those shots went through a window and killed a young mother.”
“Killed?” said Anatoli, looking at the policeman.
Seconds later, he was asleep.
Raisa Munyakinova sat in the only reasonably comfortable chair in her minuscule apartment. They called it an apartment, but it was just a room. It was enough for her. She had work. She had a place to live. She would survive losing track of the days, having to carefully write her work schedule on the back of a flyer for Canadian cereal and place it under a glass on her tiny table.
The detective who looked like a ghost had not frightened her. It was not fear that now kept her awake. It was her decision to identify the man who had been with Valentin Lashkovich before he was murdered.