Stuart Kaminsky - Rostnikov vacation

Just before noon each day, Rostnikov would take the slow walk back for a modest lunch with Sarah at the Lermontov Hotel, after which they would take the short bus ride to the sanitarium, where Sarah would receive her treatments while Rostnikov used the weights in the small physical therapy room. Then back to the hotel, where the attentive Anton, one of the hotel waiters who had taken them under his wing, would stop by to ask if they had a good day or needed anything.

Following a brief or lengthy rest, depending on which Sarah needed, they would eat in the dining room at their usual table, and Rostnikov would practice his English on the American tourists, most of whom grumbled about the poor accommodations, the poor service, and the pollution of the sea and who only reluctantly admitted to an appreciation of the area's beauty. And then, about an hour or two before sunset, as Sarah and Rostnikov sat on their wooden folding chairs, looking out at the sea from the ridge next to the Lermontov Hotel, Georgi Vasilievich would show up, gaunt, slow, sadly smiling.

Rostnikov and Sarah had encountered Vasilievich at the sanitarium on their first day in Yalta. Rostnikov and Vasilievich had met each other many times over the years when Rostnikov was an inspector with the Procurator General's Office and Vasilievich a senior investigator in the intelligence directorate. Vasilievich had, in his younger days, served undercover in USSR embassies in Paris, Bangkok, and Istanbul. By 1972, he had returned for permanent duty inside the Soviet Union on assignments related to possible foreign agents operating in Moscow.

Since Rostnikov's demotion to MVD ceremonial staff, he had not run into Vasilievich, and at first he had not recognized the obviously ill man in the corridor, but Vasilievich had recognized him.

"Porfiry Petrovich," he had said, shaking his head and holding out his hand American style. They had never been intimate, had never been close enough for a friendly hug, though Porfiry Petrovich had felt the urge when he finally recognized the man who had in the few years since he had last seen him moved uncomfortably into old age. "What's wrong? Why are you here? The old leg wound?"

"No," Porfiry Petrovich had said, not wanting to explain, to open a dialogue with Vasilievich, who was a notorious busybody. He was also, Rostnikov knew, one of the most tenacious and valued investigators in the GRU.

"It's me," Sarah had said. "I had an operation. Brain growth."

A look of pain had crossed Vasilievich's face; whether from Sarah's news or his own malady was not clear.

"I'm fine now," Sarah had said. That was not quite true, Rostnikov had thought.

Her red hair had grown back, but she had lost weight, weight she had trouble regaining, and her cheeks were not as pink as before, though he hoped the Yalta sun would help.

"My wife died a few years ago," Vasilievich had said, looking beyond them as if he could see her ghost.

"I'm sorry," Sarah had said.

Vasilievich had shrugged.

"I'm here because I was ordered to come," he had said, with an enormous resigned sigh. "Order directly from General Pluskat. Heart checkup. Emphysema. Fifty years of smoking, but I feel no worse than I have for a decade, and, Porfiry Petrovich, I tell you I am bored here. I need my work, not memories and regrets."

Porfiry Petrovich had politely invited Georgi Vasilievich to visit them at the hotel. Neither Sarah nor he had expected Vasilievich to come, and Rostnikov had secretly hoped he

would not accept the invitation, for Vasilievich was walking gloom and horror stories.

But since that first encounter in the corridor of the sanitarium, Vasilievich had made the slow and tortured journey each night to the Lermontov Hotel to watch the setting sun, drink tea, and talk. And, much to his surprise, Rostnikov had found himself anticipating these visits and even enjoying Georgi Vasilievich's company.

The talk had been of the past, not the personal past but the professional past, the murders, thefts, their encounters, particularly the Fox-Wolfort investigation in 1971 in which a visiting East German major, who may have been a West German agent, had been found dead in a broom closet of the memorial chapel of the Grenadiers, directly behind KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square. The German had been skewered with a Byzantine cross ripped from the wall.

Vasilievich and Rostnikov had cooperated in finding the prostitute who had done it when the German had attempted to rape her in the broom closet.

Rostnikov had not sought this vacation. In fact, he had fought against it. Too much was going on in Moscow. Citizens had just voted in the first open national election since the Bolsheviks had been soundly beaten in 1917. The Party Congress was coming up. People were going mad on the right and left. Young people were ignoring the law. Jews, even one of Sarah's cousins, Rafael the carpenter, were being singled out, beaten, blamed for the economic change. The lines in stores were longer than they had been since after the war, and the assumed loss of cultural identity was erupting among even the lesser-numbered minorities. There was not less crime but more since the reforms, far more and far more violent. There was no foundation. The law and those who enforced it were no longer a strong kiln but a leaking sieve punctured by the three-pronged pitchfork of perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness), and demokratizatsiya (democratization). Growing pains, Sarah had suggested, and he had agreed, but he thought it best to be present and in Moscow during the growth.

"But," the Gray Wolfhound, Colonel Snitkonoy, had said, standing before Rostnikov in his office in Petrovka, the central police building, "your presence will not change all this. It will be waiting for you when you return."

The Wolfhound had spoken with his usual great confidence. He was a man buoyed by recent victory. Chance, Rostnikov, and his own instinct for survival had strengthened his political position over the past several months. Colonel Snitkonoy was a tall, slender man with a magnificent mane of silver hair. His brown uniform was always perfectly pressed. His three ribbons of honor, neatly aligned on his chest, were just right in color and number. On formal occasions and for appropriate foreign visitors, whom he frequently escorted, the colonel could trot out an array of medals with the brightness of a small star and the weight of an immodest planet. He had been, at the moment he ordered Rostnikov on vacation, impressive as he strode, hands clasped behind his back.

When he had first been transferred to the Wolfhound's command, Rostnikov had taken the man for a fool, and perhaps the colonel was a fool of sorts, but he was a fool with a sense of survival, a fool who rewarded loyalty and appreciated it, a fool who was no fool at all.

Rostnikov had begun to speak in protest that morning less than two weeks before, but the colonel had raised his right hand to stop him.

"Your wife could benefit from the sanitaria, the sea water," he said. "How many sanitaria are there in Yalta?"

The only other person in the room was the Wolfhound's assistant, Pankov, who correctly assumed the question was for him.

"Forty or-" Pankov began, and was interrupted by the Wolfhound.

'' Yalta is the Venice of the Soviet Union,'' the Wolfhound had whispered, as if it were a secret to be shared only by the three men in the room. Rostnikov did not respond. Pankov nodded in agreement.

Pankov, a near dwarf of a man who was widely believed to hold his job because he made such a perfect contrast to the colonel, was a perspirer, a rumpled bumbler whose few remaining strands of rapidly graying hair refused to obey grease or brush.

"Gorky lived in Yalta, Chekhov, too," the Wolfhound had said.

Rostnikov, of course, knew this but said nothing. Pankov had looked mildly surprised at this information.