Polina Dashkova - Madness Treads Lightly

Lena nodded. “I understand.”

“You’re going to have to stay here in the meantime.”

“What about my daughter?” Lena asked, remembering what the deaf-mute had communicated to her earlier. “Are you going to stop threatening her?”

“We’ll leave your daughter in peace.” He relaxed back into his chair and added, “For now. Then we’ll see. By the way, when does your husband get back?”

“Tomorrow night,” Lena told him without blinking. “Vladimir Mikhailovich, if I am going to stay here while you verify my story, I have a few personal requests.”

“Go ahead.”

“A hot shower, clean sheets, slippers, and a mirror,” Lena listed. “Yes, and a blanket and pillow, too.”

“No problem.”

“There, Nina. Now we need to get everything we can from her. She’s a gold mine.”

Nina’s strong, warm hands kneaded Curly’s hairy back in smooth, practiced movements. A beautiful cathedral with three cupolas tattooed in many colors of ink was clearly visible through the gray fluff.

“You know what I realized when she told me all that, puss? You can’t know, you can’t even guess!” He groaned and turned over on his back, caught Nina’s hands, and squeezing her strong wrists, pulled the young woman toward him.

Her kind face came very close. Her straight, light brown hair tickled his shoulder.

“I’m getting old, that’s what,” he exhaled into her soft, mute lips. “Kiss me.”

She slipped out of his hands and began calmly unbuttoning her long silk blouse.

“Ten years ago, Nina, I would have finished off that viper with my own hands. It’s a thief’s code of honor,” he continued, watching the blouse fall to the thick rug. “There isn’t room on this earth for snakes like that, to say nothing of in prison. Six girls! In prison they don’t forgive even one. They sodomize him right off.”

Nina was chilled, standing there naked. But he kept talking.

“You know how much their business is worth?” He squeezed his eyes tight. “And it’s all going to be mine! Right down to the last kopek. They’ll hand it over without a murmur. When they find out who I have here, they’ll hand it over immediately. They aren’t afraid of the court or the prosecutor. They’re afraid of the disgrace, which is worse than death for them. And here’s their disgrace, alive and unharmed, sitting with me and asking for a blanket and pillow.”

Nina quietly started dressing, but Curly didn’t even notice, carried away as he was by his own monologue.

“Regina’s problem is she thinks there’s no one smarter or cleverer in the world than her. She thinks she can outwit anyone, even me. Fuck that!”

He shook his heavy, hairy fist in the air. “She’s outwitted lots of people. But not me. Fuck it!”

His fist slammed into the hard edge of the bed and fell still. His fat-fingered hand unclenched and fell limp.

“But I’m getting old. In the old days I would have smeared Regina and her pervert all over the wall, and that would have been sweeter than all their wealth. I would have spat on their wealth. To an honest thief, honor is more precious than anything. I’m not that man anymore. I’m getting old. And times have changed. These aren’t my times. They’re for other people.”

His room in the Sovetskaya Hotel on the Leningrad highway wasn’t bad at all. Michael could have stayed there and worked for several days. He could have gone back to the Tretyakov, and the Pushkin Museum, and the Bolshoi Theater. But he didn’t feel like going anywhere. Or working. He couldn’t listen through the tapes of his Siberian conversations. All he heard was Lena’s voice as she interpreted the stories of scholars, art historians, Old Believers, and museum curators. And Michael would feel sad and frightened all over again. What if Lena didn’t make it? He was the one who’d talked her into going to Siberia.

For the second day in a row, Michael lay on his hotel bed with Oscar Wilde’s fairy tales. It was an old, well-worn edition that had belonged to his mother, and he’d carried it around with him wherever he went. When he felt sad, he would choose a tale at random and read it. But right now he couldn’t even read. He looked through the lines he’d known since he was a child and thought about what had happened in Siberia.

The nice Russian police officer with the funny name Sichkin had paid him a visit. And his name was Michael, too—Mikhail, that is, Misha for short. He didn’t speak a word of English so he had a very young interpreter with him. Their conversation was brief and confused.

“Dr. Barron, we would like you to stay around a few more days,” he said, and Michael noticed his embarrassment as he said that. “We don’t have the right to demand this of you. We’re just asking. For Lena’s sake.”

“Yes, of course, I have no intention of leaving until I see Mrs. Polyanskaya with my own eyes. I have to know she’s all right. I was the one who asked her to accompany me to Siberia. It’s my fault all this happened.”

“We suspect she was abducted,” the Russian police officer told him gloomily.

First they’d rummaged through his things and stolen his tin of talcum powder, then they abducted his friend. He wondered what that Chekist Sasha, the Gogol lover, was thinking. Did he appreciate the danger? He’d spirited Michael away but left Lena at the mercy of some unknown thugs. All these young men from the KGB inspired no trust in Michael at all. He liked the police officer Sichkin much more, but Michael placed his main hopes on Lena’s husband. He was a colonel, and that’s no joke. He must have serious resources, and most of all, he wasn’t searching for just anyone—he was searching for his wife.

When a tall, fair-haired man in a formal suit appeared in his hotel room and said in quite decent English, “Hello, Dr. Barron. My name is Colonel Krotov, I’m Elena Polyanskaya’s husband,” Michael breathed a sigh of relief.

Entering the room behind Sergei Krotov was the same young interpreter.

“You speak good English,” Michael quietly commented. “Why do you need an interpreter?”

“My vocabulary isn’t large enough. We have much to talk about, and I would hate to miss a single word of what you will say.” Sergei smiled.

The interpreter slipped into their conversation only rarely, only helping Sergei with the odd word.

“I don’t understand why the Federal Security Service, knowing the danger, didn’t avert it,” Michael said agitatedly. “I have the feeling they set Lena up, although I absolutely can’t imagine what good that would do anyone.”

“Michael, please, tell me in detail about everything that happened in Siberia,” Sergei asked him.

“I think we have to start with Moscow,” Michael said agitatedly. “Before I didn’t give it much thought, I didn’t see any connection. But now… someone tried to break into the apartment one night.”

Sergei noticed the professor’s detailed story of his time in Moscow made no mention of the entire day they were driven around the city and taken to a private club by a wealthy man in a Mercedes. He himself knew this from Misha, who had learned it from Major Ievlev.

The old man doesn’t want to tell on Lena. Sergei chuckled to himself. He thinks, what if this involves something other than friendly relations? So he’s keeping quiet about Volkov, just in case.

“She visited an old librarian, at the Veterans Home.” Sergei pensively repeated the professor’s last sentence. “Valentina Gradskaya.”

“Yes.” Michael nodded. “Sasha never should have left her there.”