Stuart Kaminsky - Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

“Yes,” her mother said. “Don’t you feel it?”

“No.”

“Then perhaps you did not take it,” Katyana said. “We can count the pills. We can keep count so you will know. Prepare a sheet of paper, write the date. Make a check mark when you take the pill.”

“Yes,” said Inna, but she knew she would not do it. It was curious. Each day, she woke up certain that she could keep track of everything, pills, shopping, cleaning. She needed no list. But then she discovered that she could not remember if she had taken a pill or eaten lunch. In the grocery, she could not remember if the night before she had onions or potatoes or whether the night before she had served his favorite salad, sahlad eez reedyeesah, sliced, radishes with salt and sour cream. That particular dish did not matter. He would not care if he had it every day.

“It is just the idea of not being able to remember,” she explained to her dead mother.

“I know,” Katyana answered. “How is your wrist?”

“It … I don’t know.”

“Take off the ice,” her mother advised. “You have had it on too long.”

Inna removed the top bag of already melting ice and slowly lifted her hand. “It hurts,” she said.

“You might have to go to the clinic,” her mother said.

“They would know what I have been doing,” she answered.

“How? A woman hurts her wrist. How would they know?”

“I am not good at lying.”

“Then you will suffer.”

“Yes,” she said, biting her lower lip to hold off the pain as she moved her hand.

“A little suffering is not a bad thing,” her mother said. “But when the suffering is more than a little you should do something.”

“I will be fine,” Inna said.

“I worry about you,” her mother said.

“Why?”

“Because you are crazy. You are crazy and you don’t take your medicine. You know that both of these things are true.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“I cannot stop. I will grow even crazier if I stop. I love my father. He must know. I must drive it into his heart. He must know. He must reach over and smile sadly and say something, anything, like ‘You are my daughter.’”

“He is not that kind of man,” Katyana said.

“I know,” said Inna, resting her throbbing arm in her lap. “I must go shopping.”

“Make a list,” her mother said.

“I don’t need one,” Inna said.

“This is not a good day for you to show your love,” Katyana said gently. “Do not go in search of your father on the trains.”

“I search for both of us, for you,” Inna said.

“I know, but not today.”

“Tomorrow?” Inna asked, almost pleading.

“Tomorrow, if you must,” her mother said with a smile.

“I will be nothing if I do not go,” Inna tried to explain. “I will disappear. My body will be here but I will have no thoughts, no meaning. You understand?”

“Perfectly,” her mother said.

“I don’t, but I know it is so.”

And then her mother was gone. It was always like this. She would be there and it would be quite natural. She would not be there and that would be natural too. Inna knew her mother was dead but she did not have to address this reality. In fact, she chose to address no reality at all other than keeping herself reasonably clean, taking care of her father, and keeping the knife very, very sharp.

Porfiry Petrovich sat at a table in the dining car with the three other men from his compartment, the Americans dressed casually and the slightly dapper, somewhat portly man with the neatly trimmed beard, wearing a suit and tie, who had identified himself as David Drovny-a dealer in men’s clothes on his way to Vladivostok to approve a shipment of material from Japan.

Meanwhile, Sasha was making his rounds of the eighteen cars in search of the suitcase. Meals were the best time for such a search because people would be in the dining car. Even if they were not, he would make up an excuse, be at his charming boyish best, apologize, ask for help with something, and without giving himself away examine the luggage, perhaps even swaying slightly and reaching out to touch a particularly interesting suitcase, to balance himself, and feel for its contents.

“Never made it this far during the war,” one of the Americans, the tall one named Allberry, said. “Liaison with Russian intelligence near Rostov.”

“OSS?” asked the other American, Susman.

The tall American nodded and said, “I helped get some information from our people to the Russians,” said Allberry. “We’d broken the Nazi codes. It helped a little. Always wanted to come back.”

“And here we are, Bob,” said the smaller, bald American with a sigh. “I never made it past Rome. Landed in Casino. Thought about making this trip from the day the war ended. Then the Cold War. Ellen died last year. Figured, what the hell.”

“What the hell,” Allberry agreed, patting the other Americans shoulder.

Rostnikov listened to the men at his table talk and looked out the window past a forest of birch trees that came almost to the train tracks. Snowdrifts stretched up the trees, and nooks in the fleeting branches were tinged with the soft whiteness. From time to time he could see an isolated dacha or two, sometimes four or five in a group, retreats for the upper-middle class, their roofs decorated with tufts of snow.

On the table before the four men was a plate of hard-boiled eggs, another of fried eggs with small slices of ham, an urn of black coffee, slices of black bread, and small cups of yoghurt.

“The breakfast,” Drovny said in English, buttering a thick slice of bread, “is standard fare. Nothing you would not get in a second-class hotel in Irkutsk. But the lunch and dinner …”

“Good, huh?” asked one of the Americans.

Drovny smiled and said, “Rice with minced mutton.”

Plov eez bahrahnyeeni, thought Rostnikov.

“Boiled beef tongue, roast pork with plums, goulash, beef Stroganoff,” Drovny went on. “Not the equal of some of the restaurants I could take you to in Moscow, and nothing like Paris, but palatable.”

“I’m a steak-and-potatoes man,” Allberry said. “Doing it so long, it’s in my blood. But I’m willing to try. I remember back in those months with a Russian intelligence general we had a dish with beef, veal, and chicken in gelatin served with a mustard sauce. Sounds terrible, right? But it was damned good.”

“Kholodets,” Drovny said. “That is what it is called. Served with charlotka, a creamy vanilla and raspberry-puree dessert. Delicious.”

The American laughed. “I’m afraid we weren’t near any of that.”

“Yes,” said Drovny, reaching over to pat the man’s arm in congratulation for his willingness to experiment with the standard cuisine of the country he was visiting. “And you?”

He was looking at Rostnikov.

Rostnikov had already told the men that he was a plumbing contractor; but he was, like Drovny, a Russian. “I am willing to try any food,” he said.

“A large man with a large appetite,” said Drovny with a big grin, as if he had made a joke.

Rostnikov looked around the car. All the tables were full. He did not see the woman he had spoken to the night before, the one who had given him the name Svetlana Britchevna.

“This egg,” said Drovny. “It reminds me of something.”

“What’s that?” asked one of the Americans.

“It reminds me of a funny story,” Drovny said. “Two flies go into an insect restaurant. The first fly orders shit with garlic. The second one orders shit but adds, ‘Hold the garlic. I don’t want my breath to smell bad.’”