Stuart Kaminsky - Rostnikov vacation

Yon Mandelstem continued, feet splashing in puddles, toward his goal, Building Two.

A few people emerged from the buildings and looked up at the clouds, which thundered a farewell and moved west, away from Moscow.

Opening the door was awkward. He could not put his case down on the wet ground, but it was difficult to open the heavy door with only one hand. Fortunately, someone came to his rescue and pushed it open.

"It stopped raining?" asked the woman who had opened the door as she stepped back to let Yon enter.

"Yes," Yon answered, removing his glasses, panting slightly.

In the dim light of the narrow hallway, Yon now recognized the woman. She was in her late thirties, possibly even forty, dark, made up, and wearing a blue dress with white flowers.

"I don't want to get my hair, my dress, wet," she said. "It's so… You just moved on ten? I've seen you."

"Yes," he said. There were no elevators in the Engels Quartet. In fact, there was not much to recommend the buildings or the series of slightly lower apartment buildings constructed in the 1950s and 1960s in the area. The service was terrible, worse since the reforms, for not even political pressure could get the repairmen to work. The airport was too close, and the flight patterns went directly over this section. Still, one was lucky to get an apartment, and Yon knew he would not have gotten his if he did not have special connections.

He had caught his breath, moved past the woman, and was ready to climb the stairs. He wanted to get to his room, lock the door behind him, check the treasure under his arm, and then get out of his wet clothes.

"My name is Tamara," the woman said, stepping toward him and holding out her hand.

Yon quickly tried to dry his palm on his wet trousers and held out his hand.

The woman's hand was warm and soft. She had a nice smile, a clear complexion.

"Yon Mandelstem," he said, brushing away the lock of hair that had fallen over his eyes.

"Jewish?" she said.

"Yes," he said a bit defensively, taking a quick step up the stairway.

"Not a good time to be Jewish," Tamara said, shaking her head. "Don't look so frightened. I'm not an anti-Semite. I can prove it. I'll be back in two hours.

You can come to my apartment for a drink. Number eleven-six."

"I… I don't think."

"My husband is in Lithuania or someplace that's giving us trouble," she said with a wave of her hand, indicating either that her husband's whereabouts were of no consequence or the location of Lithuania did not matter in the course of human events.

"A soldier?" Mandelstem asked.

"No," she said with a little laugh, advancing on him. "An electrician. So?"

"So," he said, feeling the weight of the load in his aching shoulders.

"So, are you coming to my apartment later?" She was close enough for him to feel her breath on his face. It was warm, a bit sweet.

"Perhaps," he said, turning suddenly and starting up the stairs. "Perhaps another time."

"Won't be another time," she said, shaking her head. "I'm using the apartment of a friend. She's coming back in a few days and I'll have to go. Tonight will be best."

"I'll…"Yon began.

"Think about it," she said, giving him a broad smile and turning her back as she headed for the door.

Yon began to climb the stairs.

Below him, Tamara shook her head, touched her breasts with both hands to be sure they were still there, and went into the evening, almost bumping into a lean man wearing a workman's jacket and a cap pulled down over his eyes.

"Prastee't'e, excuse me," she said with a smile that showed even white, though a bit large, teeth, of which she was particularly proud. The man did not look at her.

Yon Mandelstem was exhausted when he reached the door to his apartment. He put down his case, glancing around the empty corridor to be sure no one was watching. No doors were cracked open. A sound that may have been bitter laughter came from one of the apartments nearby, but he could not tell which one. He got his key out, opened the door, placed his case inside, stepped in, turned on the light, and closed the door behind him.

He looked around the small room, locked the door, took off his glasses, placed them in his jacket pocket, and moved the case across the room to the desk in the corner before he began to strip off his wet clothes. He threw the clothes in the general direction of the worn but serviceable dark sofa against the wall.

Then, naked except for his sox, he moved into the second small room, which served as a bedroom. He reached over and took off his sox as he hopped toward the little cubbyhole in which a shower beckoned.

He threw back the shower door and found himself facing a grinning man with bad teeth.

There was a chill in the Crimean evening air. Georgi Vasilievich pulled up the collar of his jacket, shook his shoulders, and began walking along the czar's lane from Livadia to Oreanda. Although it was still early in the evening, the thick woods blocked out the setting sun, making it seem much later.

Vasilievich walked slowly. He told himself it was because he enjoyed the woods, the outdoors. He was a man of the city, and he wished to savor the clean air, the solitude. He told himself these things, but something inside him would not listen. Georgi Vasilievich was a policeman, a good policeman, who recognized a lie even when it was one he was telling to himself. No, the truth was that he was getting old. He was tired. Perhaps General Petrovich was right to insist that he take his vacation, that he spend several weeks in the sanitarium for rest and therapy. He had been working hard, as had all in the GRU, the chief intelligence directorate of the Soviet General Military Staff. Unrest in the military was evident at all levels. The work load was impossible. And it was being conducted with no reward, no appreciation from the people, no appreciation from their superiors, who were too distracted in the new turmoil created by Gorbachev to reward with even a word the efforts of…

The path turned and brought him to the rotunda at the seashore. He always stopped at the rotunda. In the week he had been making this trip since Dr.

Vostov had prescribed the walk, Vasilievich had paused at the rotunda, both coming and going, to admire the view and to catch his breath.

Vasilievich had a heart condition. One could not argue with that fact. He had experienced a heart attack. But it was four years earlier, and his health reports had been well within the bounds of acceptability from the moment he had been released from the hospital. The rest would, he had reluctantly concluded, be good for him. But, fortunately, in Yalta he had found more than the sight of the sea and woods to occupy him. He had discovered a puzzle that he believed he had now solved.

Georgi Vasilievich put his large arthritic hands on the railing and looked out at Machtovaya Rock, its gray bulk split in two. He had been told by an old woman who helped clean

the sanitarium that archaeologists had found a cave beneath the rocks, under the water level, where ancient ancestors of man once dwelt.

An animal or another late walker stirred leaves on the path behind him.

Vasilievich did not turn. He imagined or tried to imagine for a breath of a moment that it was his wife, Magda, a few steps behind him, that she would join him to look where his eyes now turned, at the Krestovy Cliff, the bloody cliff where, Vasilievich knew, the White Guards had shot the revolutionary sailors and workers of both Sebastapol and Yalta. At the base of the cliff stood the church that had been built on the ruins of a palace destroyed by fire more than one hundred years ago. He needed no old woman to tell him that. The church stood only a few hundred yards from the sanitarium, whose roof now caught the last rays of the sun.