Polina Dashkova: Madness Treads Lightly

For now just one thing was clear: the murderer had been able to enter Ms. Rogovets’s apartment quietly and unnoticed. It seemed likely that he had keys to the front door and possibly to her door as well. The lock on the door was Italian, the latest model, and virtually impossible to pick. And no pick had touched the lock.

That is, either Azarov himself opened the door for his killer, or else the killer had a key to the apartment. The former scenario was more likely because at that time of day Azarov was usually sound asleep, and if the killer had opened the door with his own key, Azarov would have been shot in bed. But instead he was lying in the entry by the front door, which evidently meant he’d been woken by the bell, thrown on his robe, and gone to open the door.

Naturally, the sensible and simple thought that came to Krotov’s mind was that Azarov was finished off by friends of the thugs he’d given testimony against. Thus part two began in the successfully completed preliminary investigation into the Vityaz shoot-out. Krotov’s superiors said he needed to look for leads in the banquet slaughter.

Misha Sichkin, the senior investigator, had a different opinion. He and Krotov knew from experience that these kinds of obvious theories led nowhere. The singer’s murder may easily have had nothing at all to do with the Vityaz massacre.

Krotov felt guilty that he was going to be strolling through London while Misha Sichkin had to conduct this complicated and nasty investigation. Their work involved very few simple or pleasant cases.

The traffic jam on the Ring Road gradually eased up, but the blizzard was in full swing. Finally turning on to Krasin Street, it occurred to Sergei that it was probably real spring in London right now. For the first time in his life he was going abroad—and not just anywhere, but to England.

As he drove up to his apartment building and parked his car, he caught himself thinking that he already missed his family, even though he hadn’t left yet.

He’d been married a little more than two years. Sometimes these twenty-five months of family life seemed like one long happy day, and sometimes he felt like he’d known his wife, Lena, a very long time. No one in the world was closer or dearer to him than she was.

Sergei was forty-two now, Lena thirty-six. At their ages it was hard to feel like newlyweds, but they had—for more than two years.

Before they met, they had each had a taste of both family life and of loneliness. Lena had been married twice; Sergei once, for twelve years with his first wife, Larisa.

He had no children from his first marriage, which was probably for the best. His life with Larisa had been so difficult and dreary that even their rare holidays had become like onerous, dismal obligations for Sergei. All those years, the feeling never left him that when he walked across his own threshold and saw Larisa’s face and heard her voice, he instantly detached—on purpose and in advance, so as not to react to his wife’s constant complaints, big and small, and her frequent and long hysterics.

For many years Sergei racked his brain trying to figure out why it was so hard for him with Larisa. After all, she had lots of good qualities. Larisa was an excellent housewife, and their apartment sparkled with an almost sterile cleanliness. Though she kept herself on a strict diet because she was a professional ballerina, if guests came to their house, she went all out and made kulebiaka, julienne salad, suckling pig in sour cream, and sweet yeasted cakes. More than just a great housewife and hostess, she was practical, smart, and attractive.

Sergei convinced himself their problems weren’t about him or Larisa, but about family life as such. By its very nature, he reasoned, a married life couldn’t be a happy life. He sincerely believed that everything would be just the same with any other woman, so he didn’t divorce Larisa until things became utterly intolerable, until the terrible mutual hostility was strangling them both. Sergei decided on divorce. Larisa raised a fuss for a while but eventually agreed.

Only much later did he realize that it wasn’t about family life as such at all, but about the simple fact that he didn’t love Larisa. And she didn’t love him. Each expressed this in a different way. Larisa would become irrationally jealous, aggressive, and confrontational, and Sergei would maintain a gloomy silence and stay late at work even when there was no need to.

A year after the divorce, he met Lena Polyanskaya. He’d thought he’d never remarry and would live the rest of his life a bachelor. Lena had no intention of marrying, either. She’d had plenty of bitter experience from two marriages. She was pregnant by her second husband, whom she’d only recently divorced. She intended to raise the child alone. When Sergei and Lena met, though, all their plans for a future of proud solitude dissipated like smoke. The two mature, sensible, life-battered people fell head over heels in love. They met and married almost immediately, without giving it too much thought or questioning, as if they were trying to make up for the lost time with each other.

No one but the two of them knew that two-year-old Elizaveta Sergeyevna Krotova was not Sergei’s biological daughter. But that didn’t matter to either of them. Neither Lena nor Sergei was surprised that the child resembled her father much more than her mother. Not the father who sired her, but her real father, Sergei Krotov.

They themselves didn’t notice the resemblance right away, though those close to them did. In the maternity home, when Krotov came to take Lena and his daughter home, the nurse who handed him the baby said, “A chip off the old block!” Later their friends and neighbors would repeat the same thing, and so would the mamas who took their children for walks at Patriarch Ponds, and the doctors at the pediatric clinic. Sometimes some well-wisher might start playing with Liza and say, “Why do you have blond hair, little girl, when your mother’s hair is so dark? Why, you don’t look at all like Mama.”

Lena had dark brown, almost chestnut hair and dark, smoky-gray eyes with dark eyebrows and lashes. But Liza had come out blond and blue-eyed, the spitting image of Krotov, only without his trademark mustache.

Now, nearly two, it was clear that her personality, even her facial expressions, were like Krotov’s.

“When I met you I didn’t immediately see where it was going,” Lena once admitted. “I was still overthinking, doubting. But Liza was sitting in my belly, and it was all perfectly clear to her about you and me. I worried, why hadn’t I met you sooner? But Liza just went and got born looking like you. We got a little Krotov.”

“Curious.” Sergei shrugged. “Who else is our child supposed to look like?”

“At least a little like me,” Lena sighed.

“That’s all right, our next child will look like you,” Sergei consoled her.

As soon as it became clear that Sergei was going to London, Lena forced him to study English every day for at least half an hour. At one time Sergei had known English at a high school level, but by age forty-two he’d managed to forget it all. Lena knew the language perfectly. She made flash cards for him, put them in all his pockets, and demanded that he practice them every free minute he had. But he had way too few free minutes, and his head was filled with very different things.

Only now, walking into his building, did Sergei remember that he hadn’t so much as looked at a single card all day and hadn’t memorized his ten assigned words. He was already preparing himself to go to bed an hour later. Lena worked like a dog all day, too, but she forced herself to memorize her daily quota—ten new words—by midnight.