Stuart Kaminsky - Tarnished Icons

“May I expect the same from you?” said Rostnikov, putting an X through two of his birds in flight.

“Would you believe me if I simply said yes?”

“Yes,” said Rostnikov. “With the knowledge that a situation might well arise in the future. If that were to happen, I would hope that you would give me some advance indication that I could no longer rely on your loyalty.”

“The answer to your question,” said Yakovlev, “is yes.”

“And my answer, too, is yes,” said Rostnikov.

“And now we can get to work,” said the Yak. “I want a briefing on the murder of the four Jews last night.”

Yakovlev moved behind the desk that had a day or two ago belonged to Colonel Snitkonoy. He folded his hands before him and waited. From behind the table where he sat, Rostnikov opened the file he had brought with him.

He had been honest with Yakovlev, though he had not revealed that he had learned of his appointment four days earlier from Anna Timofeyeva, who had gotten the information from an old friend in the procurator general’s office. Anna had told no one else, not even her niece. In part her motivation was to suggest to him that he protect Elena, but she knew he would do so to the best of his ability in any case. In part it was to prepare him for a man who could not readily be trusted. It was, in fact, likely that Rostnikov was aware of the change before Colonel Snitkonoy himself.

Yakovlev, Rostnikov decided, had been reasonably honest with him. However, Anna had also suggested to Porfiry Petrovich that it had been Yak’s idea to leak the news of his appointment through the unwitting dupe in the procurator general’s office. Yakovlev would have wanted nothing unexpected from his new second in command at this meeting. He would have wanted Rostnikov to have some time to come to a conclusion about the abrupt change.

Rostnikov looked at the open file, closed it, and did what he knew Yakovlev wanted. He told him what had happened in simple terms and gave some of his ideas on how he planned to follow up.

Outside the office on the top floor of Petrovka, there came the sudden barking of dozens of dogs, the National Police dogs. With the rise in gang activity and street crime, there should have been more police, but police were expensive compared to dogs, so there were now more dogs, and they were louder when something upset them or it was time to eat. Occasionally a dog would disappear, and the rumor ran through the building that some patrol officers were taking the dogs home for food.

Rostnikov finished his presentation over the sounds of the yowling animals.

“It is my understanding that the foreign press already knows about the murder of the four Jews and the two others,” said Yakovlev. “The New York Times and CNN will have the story. It was given to their correspondents by a very angry rabbi whose phone was wired, a rabbi who is probably also an Israeli informant.”

“I have met the man,” said Rostnikov.

“I can keep some of the circumstances under cover,” said the Yak. “For a while. But an outburst of overt and violent anti-Semitism at this point in the history of our country could be a political bombshell.”

“I understand,” said Rostnikov.

“Good,” said Yakovlev. “Find me this killer or killers. Find them quickly. Do not arrest them. Find them and report to me with a concise single-page report. Find them before they kill another Jew.”

Rostnikov nodded.

There were three men in Moscow whose lives were very much involved in the report Rostnikov gave to his new director. At the moment Porfiry Petrovich began his report, the first man, who lived in one of the concrete-and-granite apartment towers built under Stalin in the 1950s, was just arriving at work. The building where the man lived was beyond the Outer Ring Circle. It took him nearly forty minutes from the Rechnoi Vokzal metro station each morning to get to Moscow and forty minutes when he left his work to go home. The man lived with his wife and seven-year-old daughter, who excelled at mathematics to the point where she was frequently singled out in her school for special honors, and the man and his wife were told that the girl had a very bright future.

He knew his assignment for the day. It seldom varied since his promotion, and he seldom had to think about what he was doing. Intelligence was not called for. Through much of that day as he worked, this man with a wife and brilliant daughter went over his plan: where he would find his next victim, when he would do it, where he would take her. From time to time, he would ask himself why he was doing this. Why had this obsession gradually come over him? He knew he couldn’t and wouldn’t stop. He knew that the pitiful whimpering of the women or their stunned silence tormented him. And he feared that with each attack he grew more violent, out of control, feeling a monstrous anger. But he could not stop. He had, he knew, been given a nickname, the Shy One, but that might well turn into a more tainted name in the future.

But now he simply planned and hoped that the thing that had taken him would pass as it had come and he would learn to live with or even forget what he had done in the past and what he planned to do this very night.

The second man was named Yevgeny Tutsolov. He lived with another young man named Leonid Sharvotz. Both men were in their late twenties. Late the night before, a third man, Georgi Radzo, who was almost fifty, had sat on a chair in the small room looking at Yevgeny silently. The older man was extremely powerful from more than twenty years of loading heavy crates onto trucks. Each day he loaded for nine hours with an hour to eat lunch. He was still loading trucks, but that should soon end. Yevgeny had sat soberly, calmly as the older man had bandaged his shoulder.

“The bullet went through,” the older man had said. “I think you will be all right. It didn’t strike anything vital and slid over the bone and out.”

Yevgeny Tutsolov had wanted to curse, but instead he shook his head and said, “The unexpected. Always the unexpected. I kill the Jews, lay them out. It all goes well and then there is this madwoman pointing a gun at me.”

“It didn’t go well,” the other young man, Leonid, said, seated forlornly on his bed. “Igor … you killed Igor.”

“It was necessary,” Georgi said. “Yevgeny had no choice.”

“The one who shot you, she didn’t get a good look at you, did she?” asked Leonid as the older man sat back to inspect the bandage he had put in place. He had seen far worse injuries on the loading dock. He nodded, satisfied with his first aid, and the wounded Yevgeny put on a clean shirt that buttoned in front. Putting it on was not particularly painful. He was sure he could work his shift the next day.

“It was dark. She was too far away. Even if she saw my face in the light from a streetlight, I’m sure she was too frightened to see clearly. If she had been closer, I might well be dead now or wounded and in the hands of the police. I don’t like counting on luck.”

Yevgeny’s luck had indeed been bad. Herding the four men down the embankment, he had cracked his knee on an unseen rock covered by snow. He had been forced to limp through the execution.

It had taken a good part of the savings of all three men to purchase the AT-9, the American 9mm semiautomatic carbine, that Yevgeny had used. The carbine had the advantage of being relatively light and small. It had also been expensive, even in today’s Moscow gun market. He had killed the first two Jews with it a week earlier, and it had handled perfectly. And he had killed the other three Jews and Igor with barely a second of panic when the weapon seemed to jam, only to come alive when Yevgeny hit the bullet cartridge firmly into place with his gloved palm.