Stuart Kaminsky: Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express

“The meeting is ended. Porfiry Petrovich, please remain.”

Sasha, Iosef, and Elena stood and headed for the door. Pankov remained in his seat, resisting the urge to wipe his moist brow.

“You, too,” the Yak said.

Pankov nodded, gathered his papers, and followed the others out the door.

When they were gone, the Yak folded his hands and said, “Tonight you will be aboard the Trans-Siberian Express.”

For breakfast Inna Dalipovna had prepared buckwheat porridge with a large glob of butter and sour cream, a small bowl of kyehfer with sugar, and a glass of strong tea. When her father came in, fully dressed in dark suit and tie, he barely looked at the food. He was absorbed in his newspaper.

“Submarines,” Viktor Dalipovna muttered, reaching for the mug of tea without looking up from the newspaper or at his daughter sitting across from him at the small table.

Viktor was fifty-five, brown hair neatly trimmed, gray temples, tall and lean. He was considered handsome, judging by the many women in his life since Inna’s mother had died a decade earlier.

He drank, making a face at either the taste of the tea or his thoughts on submarines. “Who do they fool? I ask you. Who do they fool?”

Inna knew the question was not meant to be answered, certainly not by her. She ate some porridge and listened to her father as he shook his head, turned the page, and put down his tea to pick up a spoon.

“The Americans, the British, even the Norwegians know everything that goes on inside of our submarines. And we spend millions, millions, millions. On what?”

Inna kept eating.

“Appearances,” he said. “First the Kursk and now the latest one. They won’t even tell us its name. I tell you, the way to deal with the Americans is not to rattle swords or shake sticks. They laugh at us. We must become capitalists, not a country of criminals and incompetents as we are now, but real capitalists. We have resources. Oil, gas, diamonds, sulphur, forests. Siberia is better than a vast gold mine.”

He put the paper aside neatly on the table and began to attack his porridge.

“Well?” he asked.

This time the question was for her. “Appearances,” she said.

“No, what did the doctor say yesterday?” he asked, eating as he spoke, a napkin tucked under his collar to protect his white shirt.

Viktor had come home to the apartment they shared late the night before. He had been out with a woman whom he had met at the Up amp; Down Club. She said her name was Dorthea. She said she was the wife of a Roumanian watch manufacturer. She said her husband was away for the week, leaving her alone at the hotel. She said many things Viktor did not believe, but she did many things in the hotel room which pleased him and cost him nothing but dinner and a few drinks.

Viktor was in a good mood. Today he had a meeting with Anatoli and Versnikov about a deal with a department-store chain in Germany. Viktor would probably have to go to Bremen to seal the deal. That was fine with him. He knew a number of people in Bremen who could provide him with the company of engaging and willing women. The last time they had found him a very young woman who claimed to be a Kurd.

“The doctor?” he prompted his daughter.

“He said the medicine is working fine,” she said.

Inna had not met her father’s eyes. She could not when she lied, and she could not for periods longer than a few seconds when she did not lie.

“Good,” said Viktor, moving to the kyehfer and adding more sugar.

He had heard what he wanted to hear. For an instant only, he glanced at his daughter before continuing to read the newspaper on the table.

Inna was thirty-two years old. She had inherited a few things from her father: his leanness, his deep, dark eyes. The rest was the gift or curse of her mother. Inna had suffered from panic and anxiety since childhood, just as her mother had done. While her mother complained, ranted, wept, Inna had learned to keep her sleepless nights and terror-filled waking dreams to herself. Her father did not like them. Her father had hated her mother for her weakness. Her father did not hate Inna. He did his best not to notice her or deal with her. Even when she had been twenty-two and was going to have the baby the gas-maintenance man had planted inside her, her father had not gotten angry. He had clearly been annoyed. He had other things, more important things, to deal with. He had called Inna’s aunt, his sister, and asked her to take her to the clinic and get rid of the problem. He had not asked Inna’s opinion on the matter. The baby was disposed of.

When he got home that night, he had asked, “Is it taken care of?”

Inna had said yes.

“No complications?” he had asked.

“I’m a little sore. I’m tired.”

“Rest,” he had said. “I’ll get something to eat at Rodyoki’s. I’ll bring back something for you.”

And then he had gone. He had awakened her after midnight. Slightly drunk, he had handed her a jar of borscht, deep and green. She had told him she wasn’t hungry.

“Sleep,” he had said. “I’ll put it in the refrigerator. You can have it in the morning.”

And they had never again spoken of that day or of the baby.

Inna had inherited more from her mother: a dry, humorless look, washed-out blond hair, and a distinct lack of beauty. Her plump mother had looked more like a mother to Viktor than a wife. And now it was common for the few people they met together to assume that Inna and Viktor were husband and wife instead of father and daughter. Indeed, on one occasion, an old woman clearly assumed that Inna was older than Viktor.

Inna had learned how to please her father. The few times she had displeased him were the result of sudden outbreaks that seemed to have no specific cause. Perhaps a dozen times in the past ten years she had lost control, ranted, and wept about suicide.

Viktor’s solution was to take her to the nearest state hospital. That was during the waning days of the Soviet Union when Viktor had been a Communist with a large C and a black-market capitalist with a small c. The Soviet solution to all mental ills was the same: drugs. Can’t manage your child? Keep her drugged. Is she too agitated? Give her drugs. Is she depressed, angry, sullen, confused, annoying, too silent, too talkative, too anything? Drugs.

And it had worked. Inna had taken large doses of pills and a syrupy red-brown liquid. She was sleepy most of the time, moving in a tranquil dreamlike state, but she was docile. Then, several months ago, she had awakened from a night of sleep feeling as if she could stay in bed forever.

She stopped taking the medications. She did not tell her father. Anxiety returned. She welcomed it. She was awake. She had rejoined the living. She had searched for something to do, something to distract her besides keeping house for her father, watching television, and going to the park to sit and listen to her neighbors gossip.

“Good,” Viktor said, pushing away his empty bowls and finishing his tea. “The shopping money is on the table near the door.”

She acknowledged with a nod, though he did not look at her. She knew there would be enough to provide him with his favorite foods and delicacies, particularly blyeeni sah smeetah-nigh, pancakes filled with sour cream and then baked. She planned to make that for his dinner tonight, along with a sausage thinly sliced just the way he liked it so he could place the pieces on a slice of bread.

“You will be home for dinner?” she asked.

“Who knows?” he said, reaching for his briefcase next to the front door of the apartment.

“I’ll have something ready,” she said.