Stuart Kaminsky: Rostnikov vacation

Magda had died five, no, nine years earlier, he thought. It couldn't be. But it was. He smiled. Sentiment. He was not a sentimental man. He had displayed no great affection for Magda while she lived. In fact, they had fought often, and he could recall no instance of their having embraced over the final twenty years, and yet he missed her. When she died, he had secretly rejoiced, his somber eyes downcast, the suggestion of tears threatening. He rejoiced in his freedom. He could work whatever hours he wished, smoke his pipe in his underwear, watch the television. But that sense of freedom survived less than a year. He was not sure how much less. The feeling of loss had come gradually.

This time the sound on the path behind him made Vasilievich turn. He should be wearing his glasses. He knew that, but Georgi was a proud man. He had once been a large man, but the years, his illness, and something in the soul that he could not quite understand and in which he did not believe had begun to shrink him.

There was nothing, no one, there. But still, it did not hurt to be cautious. He bent down at the edge of the rotunda and pretended to tie his shoe while he glanced toward the trees without turning his head.

Vasilievich resumed his journey and became absorbed almost immediately in the problem he had been picking at for the past few days, the problem he had been reluctant to share with Rostnikov, who would have been sympathetic but have thought him an old fool.

Vasilievich would have liked to quicken his step, but he hesitated, fearing that sudden jolt, the loss of breath he had experienced but once four years ago before his heart attack.

"I am better," he said to himself, moving forward, head down, as if against a strong, chill wind.

"I am fine," he said aloud but not loudly.

And with that his decision was made. He wanted no more of this place, this solitude. He would go back to the sanitarium, pack his things, and inform Dr.

Vostov that he would be returning to Moscow on the first available plane. He had an open ticket. He need but call the air-Definitely something behind him.

Definitely. He stopped and stepped off the path next to a tree. He was, himself, thin, gnarled. From a distance he could have been a branch growing from the base of a dark tree. He slowly, carefully, removed his glasses from his jacket pocket and placed them on the end of his nose. When they were properly perched, Georgi Vasilievich stood motionless, as he had done hundreds of times in the past while stalking a criminal. He willed his breathing to be shallow, to mingle with the sounds of the woods, the waves brushing the shore beyond the trees. He had no weapon. Why would anyone need a weapon on a hospital vacation? His pistol was locked in the metal box in his office desk in Moscow.

He stood listening for five or ten minutes. Nothing. Rostnikov was right, or would have been right if Vasilievich had been foolish enough to share his idea with him. All he had told Rostnikov was that he was working on something, putting notes together that he might soon share with him, but he was not prepared to do so yet. Georgi Vasilievich was an old fool who had played too many games, seen too many deaths. Georgi had looked over at Rosmikov with the knowing little smile he had cultivated for more than forty years, a smile that told suspect and colleague alike that he, Vasilievich, knew something, had a secret of great importance to this suspect or colleague.

He stepped back onto the path, feeling even more chilled. The blood circulated poorly in his feet, and his hands were numb.

"It's not cold," he hissed to himself, chiding himself silently as he walked.

"You're an old fool talking to himself, an old fool who can't think straight, can't tell-"

Two men stood before him on the path. He sensed them long before he saw them and looked up. He could not run or hide. His body would no longer tolerate or support such action. He assessed the situation quickly, efficiently, and walked toward the men whose faces he could not yet see. When he was perhaps two yards from them, he stopped, pushed his glasses up and found that he could make out their faces, could see what they were wearing. One man was a mountain, massive, wearing a blue sweater and a dark frown. The second man was small, very small, and thin, with a wild eye that did not join its partner in looking at Georgi Vasilievich.

And in that moment all became clear. He had not imagined it. He had figured it out, had figured it all out. He fleetingly wished that he had shared his knowledge with Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. He stopped walking as a large wave beyond the trees slapped the shore.

Though the film at the Oktober Theater was not over and Emil Karpo had never seen it, indeed, had not been in a movie theater for more than twenty-five years, he stood up and left. He had been sitting in a seat on the aisle while above him on the screen fat Hungarians were laughing, acting like buffoons, and chasing thin blond women who occasionally spoke words in French.

Emil Karpo did not dislike movies. But neither did he like them. He followed the young woman who had left the vast auditorium of 2,500 seats moments before.

Lenin had said that film had a function, a crucial propagandistic function.

Movies were supposed to have brought enlightenment, reinforcement of revolutionary ideas, and idealism. Generally, Karpo considered both movies and television pointless narcotics. Lenin had praised film, and Karpo had taken it as an act of faith, which he called reason, that Lenin knew what he was talking about. Perhaps at one time films did have some seductive power that could be used to ease the people into the Revolution, but that was long ago. Perhaps the words of Lenin had great power to convince those who wished to truly believe, but that was not so long ago. Now statues of Lenin were being toppled in provincial towns. The slowly growing truth of the dream was being ignored, and on twenty-foot-high screens in the darkness Hungarians and Americans were showing their teeth and selling illusions.

However, in this case, the darkness and relative quiet of the theater was a distinct improvement over the basement den, the Billy Joel, where the young woman he was following had just spent two hours in smoke-filled and drug-dimmed purple light, listening to some band called Pe 'r'ets-Pepper-scream and blast something called heavy metal on their electronic instruments.

Emil Karpo had not dared enter. He was at least twenty years older than the youngest patron in the Billy Joel, and he knew that there was no way he could sit inconspicuously. Emil Karpo was a tall, corpselike figure with vaguely Oriental features. His hair was dark and thinning, his cheekbones high, his skin tight and pale, and his face expressionless. All of Emil Karpo's clothing was black, even his T-shirts and several turtlenecks. He was known among criminals and police alike as the Tartar or the Vampire. He knew this and did not mind. He also knew from the faces of those he encountered that they sensed a cold, silent fury that he in fact did not feel.

And so he knew he could not enter the Billy Joel. Instead, he had found a dirty window in an alleyway behind the club and had used his two-inch-long glass cutter to make a hole so small that it would probably not be noticed till someone came to clean the window, if that ever happened.

He had watched her through the hole, had watched the others, had seen drugs passed, bodies sold. Somewhere within him he was ill. It was not so much that these young people were corrupted but that after seventy years of Soviet rule there was more chaos than there had been since the czars. The club had been chaos, noise, decay. Had he entered, he knew he would be enduring one of his headaches within minutes. So he had watched from the window, patiently. Had watched as he had so many times in the past.