Stuart Kaminsky - The Dog Who Bit a Policeman

The man was good. He did not look away. Instead, he walked directly up to Elena and said, “You dropped this.” He held up the black shopping bag. A white art-deco figure of a woman decorated the back.

“No,” she said politely.

“No?” he said, apparently puzzled. “I could have sworn. .”

“ Prastee’t’e, excuse me.”

“Two honest people,” the round man said with a smile. “I find a bag and try to return it, and you, who could take it and whatever it contains, reject the offer of that which is not yours. It seems to be from a very expensive shop, too.”

“Your good fortune,” Elena said with a smile of her own, and turned away.

The man was indeed remarkably good, and Elena knew she had a problem. She could lose the man, but that would bring suspicion upon her. Her evasion of the couple, crude though their methods had been, might well raise questions, but to lose this man would have been very dangerous. Elena abandoned the idea of visiting her aunt and headed slowly back to the hotel, pretending to look in the shop windows.

The rotund man moved slowly, smiling, having a good idea now that she had been frightened into heading back to the hotel. He had watched her elude the incompetent couple. The woman known as Lyuba had been very skillful in her evasion of the couple. It certainly looked like a professional effort. The rotund man, who was Peter Nimitsov’s uncle, continued down the street.

It took Iosef Rostnikov and Zelach only two hours to find Yulia Yalutshkin, the sometime mistress of Yevgeny Pleshkov, the missing member of parliament.

The soccer coach, Oleg Kisolev, had told them where they might find her at midnight. Midnight and might were not enough reason for Iosef to delay his search. Kisolev might possibly know where to reach his friend, or the Yalutshkin woman, and might warn them that the police were looking, and where they might be looking.

The computer center at Petrovka was desperately in need of up-dating, new programs and people to feed data into the system’s memory, not to mention one full-time technician to service the existing system until he or she went mad.

Iosef was well aware that there were stacks of arrest-and-questioning reports that had never been fed in. Such stacks report-edly were several feet high and filled an entire office, from which two computer programmers had been ejected to make room. It was rumored that the central computer staff, badly undermanned, had reached an unspoken agreement to simply throw out or shred huge piles of reports when no one was looking. These legendary stacks supposedly dated back at least four years.

Still, it was a place to begin. He got an order from the Yak and was given a computer next to a woman of about forty with a very sour look on her face. The woman was built like a small automobile and squirmed in her chair, muttering to herself and cursing the computer. Iosef was usually able to charm even the most lemonlike of faces with his smile of even, white teeth. This woman was not to be charmed. He gave up the effort and began his search.

Meanwhile, Zelach, who did not know how to use a computer, was in the file room on the far side of the building, searching through written reports for anything on Yulia Yalutshkin or Yevgeny Pleshkov. It would have seemed logical to an outsider for the file room and computer room to be next to or near each other, but, in fact, given Russian thinking, the distance kept the computer people from simply piling the files in that secret office or destroying them. The computer staff was young. The file-room staff was old and did their job-slowly, but they did their job.

The search lasted much of the afternoon, with Iosef finding very little. The Yalutshkin woman had been questioned for a variety of incidents, all dating back several years. There were probably many more incidents that he could not find. She had witnessed a murder, been present at the suicide of a young woman who jumped through a window at a party, reported the theft of a number of possessions taken from her apartment when she was out “with a friend” all night. It was all petty, and as with most high-class prostitutes, she was never arrested for streetwalking or in connection with any drug offenses. What Iosef did walk away from the computer with was an address where Yulia lived four years earlier and a very bad headache.

As he rose, the sour-faced muttering woman, whose fingers had been dancing on the keyboard in front of her while she looked down at a pile of documents through the lenses of her half-glasses, paused. “I have American aspirin,” she said, stopping her typing and glancing up at Iosef.

“How do you know I have a headache?”

“That screen,” she said. “There’s something wrong with it.

Everyone who uses it gets a headache. Maybe it’s too bright. And I eat a handful of aspirin three times a day. I think I am addicted. I know I need them.”

“American aspirin would be very helpful,” he said.

The woman reached under her desk, lifted up a large black bag with a large black zipper, and fished out a white plastic bottle. She handed it to Iosef.

“Thank you,” he said, starting to open it.

“Keep it,” she said, “I have many. You’re Porfiry Petrovich’s son.”

“I am.”

“He is a good man in a world of filth.”

Iosef didn’t know what to say. So he nodded.

“I may be overstating the condition of the world in general and Moscow in particular,” she said, removing her glasses and placing them next to her computer. “Sitting here for eleven years, reading what I read. . it may give me a distorted picture of the world, but I don’t think so.”

“Thank you for the aspirin,” Iosef said.

The woman nodded, put her half-glasses back on, and went back to racing her fingers over the keyboard.

Zelach had turned up several things, including another address where Yulia Yalutshkin had lived.

The two detectives, after Iosef had taken four aspirin, were on their way to the most recent address they had found. When they got to the building on Monet Street just off Ostrov, Iosef had the feeling that they would not find Yulia Yalutshkin here. In the past several years, assuming her record was reasonably accurate, she had almost certainly moved beyond this neighborhood.

The five-story apartment building was run down, its white concrete facade a dirt-covered and splotchy gray. Inside the doorway, THE DOG WHO BIT A POLICEMANNN79

the hall needed sweeping and the inner door, which supposedly required a key, was opened by Iosef with his police identification card. There really wasn’t an inner lobby, just a stairwell of concrete.

The detectives moved upward, following the light from a window on the first landing.

The apartment was on the second floor. Iosef and Zelach walked down the narrow corridor lit only by a window on each end. It was early in the afternoon but there was noise coming out of many of the apartments, the noise of loud television, louder arguing voices, children laughing and crying. There were also smells, not exactly good ones, but definitely strong and cabbage-sweet. The walls were painted something that used to be yellow.

Iosef was accustomed to such places, though the soft little ball of depression still came to life inside his chest. Zelach, on the other hand, did not seem to notice.

“Here,” said Zelach, stopping in front of one of the doors on his right.

Iosef nodded at the shadow of the Slouch, and Zelach knocked firmly. There was a sound of music, soft and classical, beyond the door. Iosef guessed that it was Mendelssohn. There was no answer.

Zelach knocked again as Iosef moved to his side so that both men were facing the door when it opened.

“ Kto tahm, who is it?” came a woman’s voice.