Stuart Kaminsky: Blood and Rubles

“Can I get you anything?” she asked.

Sasha indicated no.

“The doctor says you are improving rapidly.”

Sasha tried to smile. It came out as a pained grimace.

At that moment the door opened and another visitor entered, moved through the shadows, and stood next to the bed a foot from Elena. The new visitor looked at her, but Elena looked away.

“I’ll tell you the truth, Tkach,” Iosef Rostnikov said, leaning over to whisper. “You look like a dolt with a dunce cap.”

Sasha grinned.

Iosef was taller than his father and built like a soccer player, with strong legs, a lean body, and good, broad shoulders. From his mother he had a handsome face and reddish-brown hair. He was wearing a scarf and jacket over his jeans and a red and black flannel shirt.

Iosef held Sasha’s arm with his right hand. His grip was firm. Sasha reached over to touch the reassuring hand of his boss’s son.

“Your show?” asked Sasha.

“My show,” Iosef said with a sigh, turning to look at Elena. “What can I say? It will open in three days. It will close three days after that for lack of an audience. I am cursed to be out of accord with the public taste. I write a play about Afghanistan. No one comes. I write a tragedy. No one cries. I write a comedy and I’m confident no one will laugh. I am fast becoming convinced that a life in the theater is not for me.”

“If it’s still playing when I get out of here,” said Sasha dryly, “Maya and I will come. I promise we will laugh, at least politely.”

“It is too late,” Iosef said. “I have already applied to join the police. No one wants to be a policeman anymore, so it’s easy to get in. Besides, I think it is in my genes.”

Sasha smiled again and closed his eyes. Iosef loosened his grip and patted the policeman’s shoulder gently.

“I’ll be back,” said Iosef.

Iosef turned, looked at Elena, and invited her with a nod to leave with him. She followed him through the door and into the corridor.

“Good night, Iosef,” she said, extending her right hand.

He took it and held it. “Forgive me,” he said.

“For what?”

“For not calling,” he answered.

“You owed me no call,” she said.

He was looking directly down into her eyes. In the light of the corridor she could see that he had lost weight.

“I have little excuse for not making the call I did not owe you,” he said with a smile. “I’ve been working long hours on the play-writing, directing, building sets, begging for props and money, learning my lines, making decisions.”

“You owed me no call,” she said. “You owe me no apology.”

“You are definitely upset with me and uneasy in my presence,” he said.

“No,” she said.

“You hide it well,” he said. “But I know acting when I see it. I know two things. First, how to shoot all kinds of weapons, because I was a soldier, and second, I know when people are acting, because I have been an actor. I have three great hopes. Would you like to hear them?”

Elena shrugged. They had stopped walking and were facing each other not far from the elevator. Their voices were low. A man pushing an empty gurney and softly humming something that sounded like Mozart moved past them.

“I hope that I make a better policeman than I did a soldier, playwright, or actor,” he said. “That’s one. Two, I hope my parents stay well and safe.”

“And third?” she asked, pushing aside a strand of hair that had fallen across her cheek.

“Third,” he said, “and most difficult to achieve, I hope that you will marry me.”

Elena shook her head as if she were dealing with a comic who had told one too many for the evening.

“We went out three times,” she said.

“Four,” he corrected. “I’m counting the birthday party.”

“Four,” she conceded. “We went out four times. We got … close. And then for almost a month I hear nothing from you. And now a marriage proposal?”

“It is odd, isn’t it?” Iosef said. “But that doesn’t make it any the less sincere.”

“You need a shave,” Elena responded.

Iosef touched his cheek and said, “I loved you from the second I saw you at the birthday party at my parents’ apartment. You walked across the room, ate a cracker, pushed a strand of hair from your face the way you did just now, and I loved you.”

“Are you mad, Iosef?”

“No,” he said. “I have gone without sleep for two days and I am probably a bit strange, but that does not alter the fact that I wish to marry you.”

“Get some sleep,” she said, stepping into the elevator, which had finally arrived and opened its doors.

A fat woman carrying a tray of medicine stepped out, and Elena moved around her to enter the elevator. Iosef jumped into the elevator just as the doors began to close. They both faced forward, not looking at each other.

“Will you come to the opening of the show Friday?” he asked.

“Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps not.”

“We can go out afterward for some coffee,” he said. “If you like, I promise not to propose again that night.”

“Iosef,” she said as the elevator slowly descended. “You do not know enough about me. I don’t know enough about you. If it weren’t that I know your parents, I would think you a lunatic.”

“I spent three long years in the army being quite mad and killing people who struck me as being equally mad,” he said. “Sanity is gradually coming back to me. Slowly, yes, but coming back. Come to the show.”

The elevator door opened. A man and two women got on. They were arguing about someone named Eichen.

“I’ll come,” Elena said.

Iosef and Elena got off the elevator. She started to move across the small lobby of the hospital. A formidable-looking woman in her fifties sat behind the reception desk watching. Iosef took Elena’s hand and stopped her. She turned and looked at him.

“My approach may be ill advised, coming as it does from an exhausted fool,” he said, “but my words are sincere. My feelings are sincere. The only thing standing in the way of all this is what you think of me.”

“I’m still considering that,” Elena said, aware of the eyes of the receptionist.

“Good,” he said. “How are you getting home?”

“Metro,” she answered.

“I have a friend’s car,” he said.

Elena nodded her acceptance. There was much for her to think about. She had been depressed at his long period of inattention. Now his approach was bold and he spoke of marriage. Elena didn’t know what she thought of marriage. She was fairly certain she didn’t want it, not now. There was much for her to think about.

The man who had been following Karpo for two days was very good. There were many reasons why Karpo might be followed, but the most likely one was that the man was connected to the information on the computer disk Karpo carried in his pocket and the printout of that disk he carried in his hand. Karpo guessed that the man had been in military intelligence, the KGB, or the Ministry of the Interior central office. He also guessed that the man was now working for the mafia that had been responsible for the death of Mathilde Verson.

The man had been waiting when Karpo came out of Petrovka early in the morning. He was across Petrovka Street talking to a street vendor and drinking something from a paper cup. The man was wearing a blue pea jacket and a dark knit cap. He did not look at Karpo. When Karpo got to the metro station, he did not see the man, but he was certain that he was there.

When Karpo got off at the Oktyabrskaya station, he spotted the man among the throng of morning workers hurrying to jobs in the district. Karpo walked down Dmitrov Street past the French Embassy at Number 43. The French had kept the original Igumnov House, a late eighteenth-century red-brick building, and in the 1980s erected a modern building beside it. Moscow, like the French Embassy, is a bizarre contrast of periods, a splatter of old architecture, new construction, and crumbling Soviet concrete. Karpo knew every street.