Red Chameleon (2 page)

“My little brother's in his room,” she said, standing between the two men and the small apartment.

“If you want to wait for my father—” she began, but got no further. The younger man pushed her aside and drew from his pocket a huge gun that seemed to have a life of its own, pulling the young man behind it, searching corners. Sofiya staggered back a few steps with feelings she didn't understand. She was afraid but excited as the young man stepped toward her and aimed the gun over her shoulder at the bedroom door.

“No,” she screamed. “That's my bedroom—my brother. He's just eleven.”

The young man slapped her out of the way again and pushed open the bedroom door. She could see Lev sitting on the bed, beyond looking up in terror.

“Who're you talking to?” Abraham shouted down the hall from the bathroom.

“Pa,” Sofiya screamed. She hobbled forward toward the bathroom, but the younger man grabbed her by the hair and punched her in the left breast, sending streaks of pain through her body as she fell. The bedroom door came open, and Lev ran out, fear in his eyes.

“Go back,” Sofiya screamed, dragging herself toward her brother.

“What's going on?” shouted Abraham. Sofiya could hear the old man rising from his bath. She turned and pulled her useless leg to the hallway, a confused Lev clinging to her. Then the room and the world went into a series of still images she would never forget, snapshot images of the young dark man handing the gun to the old man. Then the image of the young man with his foot raised. Then the bathroom door kicked open. A blast of light and the memory of a terrible ringing echo. The blast repeated and repeated. She covered her ears and felt Lev's face buried against her sore breast, and then it was over. The two men came back to the small apartment, took something, gave Sofiya a warning glance, and left.

Sofiya and Lev sat huddled on the hall floor in shock forever. When forever passed, they stood hand in hand and moved into the hall toward the open door of the bathroom. They knew Abraham was dead before they saw his thin white arm sprawled awkwardly out of the tub and one gray foot twisted against the wall. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was angry, and
Izvestia
sank slowly in the red water. They stood looking down at the father they had never seen naked in life and were transported into a new world where time and life meant nothing.

“We'll have to clean the floor quickly,” she said. “And then we'll have to call Comrade Tovyev and tell him about the broken door and then …” But her voice was no longer saying words; it had taken on a life of its own and was screaming louder than the echo of death.

“An old Jew's been shot in his bathtub on Balaklava Prospekt. Central desk has the house number.”

The message had been given to Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov over the phone. It was brief, informative, and carried far more than its message. Rostnikov had grunted and the new assistant procurator, Khabolov, hung up before Rostnikov could reply, “Yes, comrade.”

The assistant procurator's words were a reminder that Inspector Rostnikov was now reduced to handling insignificant Moscow murders and that one could mention “Jews” to him in a patronizing way. Rostnikov's wife, Sarah, was Jewish. The assistant procurator certainly knew this. If Sarah were not Jewish, Rostnikov himself would probably have been making the call to an inspector while he, Rostnikov, sat in the assistant procurator's chair in a small office with a cup of tea in his palms.

In Moscow, the investigation of a crime is a question of jurisdiction, and the investigation of important crimes is an important question of jurisdiction. Minor crimes, and no one is quite sure what a minor crime is, are handled at the inquiry stage by MVD, the national police with headquarters in Moscow. Moscow itself is divided into twenty police districts, each responsible for crime within its area. However, if a case is considered important enough, a police inspector from central headquarters will be assigned. The
doznaniye,
or inquiry, is based on the frequently stated assumption that “every person who commits a crime is punished justly, and not a single innocent person subjected to criminal proceedings is convicted.” This is repeated so frequently by judges, procurators, and police that almost everyone in Moscow is sure it cannot be true. This assumption of justice is also made for military and state crimes handled by KGB investigators, who determine for themselves if the crime is indeed a state or military crime. Major nonmilitary crimes, however, are within the province of the procurator's investigator, who is responsible for a
predvaritel'noe sledstvie,
or preliminary police investigation.

All police officers in the system work for the procurator's office. The procurator general is appointed to his office for seven years, the longest term of any Soviet officer. Working under him or her are subordinate procurators, who are appointed for five years at a time. The job of the procurator's office is enormous: to sanction arrests, supervise investigations, oversee appeals at trials, handle execution of sentences, and supervise detention. The procurator general's office is police, district attorney, warden, and if necessary, executioner. The procurators of Moscow are very busy.

Rostnikov had stood behind his desk in a small cubbyhole office at the Central Petrovka station, straightened his left leg as best he could, and sighed deeply. The leg, partly crippled when he confronted a German tank in the battle of Rostov, had been giving him more trouble recently. Rostnikov catalogued the possible reasons for this increased aching. First, he was simply, at fifty-four, getting older, and with age came pain. Second, since the failure of his scheme to obtain exit visas for his wife and himself, he had spent more and more time working with his weights in their small apartment. The trophy he had won a month earlier gleamed bronze and small in front of him, and he found it easy to lose himself in the pain and the strain of the weights. One morning he had heard a uniformed duty officer say to another as he passed Rostnikov, “That washtub is looking a little washed out.” Rostnikov did not object to being known as the Washtub. He rather liked it. What disturbed him was that he not only agreed with the assessment that he seemed washed out, but he took some comfort in it.

“Zelach,” Rostnikov had called, throwing his jacket over his arm and going into the long, dark room outside his office. The room was modern, clean, filled with desks and men working behind them.

Zelach had looked up as if awakened from a mildly pleasant dream. He was reliable, slow of mind and foot, and the only help Rostnikov had been allowed since his informal demotion.

Zelach stood and followed. He had no curiosity and thus asked no questions as he followed Rostnikov down the aisle of desks past men at their solitary task of filling out reports. None of the actual interrogation was done out there. Interrogation, which could take hours or days if necessary, was normally carried on in small rooms down another corridor. The rooms could be made extremely warm or extremely cold, depending on the investigating officer's assessment of the suspect or the witness.

Rostnikov did not try to divert his eyes from the third desk, the desk of Emil Karpo, who had nearly died a month earlier in an explosion in Red Square. Since his return to duty, his right arm lying limp in a black sling, Karpo had been even less communicative than before. Karpo, he thought, had a look of death in his eyes. It was, Rostnikov knew, an old man's thought, the thought that things were better in the past and would only get worse in the future.

“What?” said Zelach, now at his side as he passed the desk.

“I said nothing,” said Rostnikov, though he was not at all sure that he had said nothing.

In front of Petrovka they hurried to the metro. Zelach had not, in the past month, appeared to notice that Rostnikov no longer had access to a car and driver or that the cases he was assigned were far below the level of social and political import of those in the past. In some ways, Rostnikov envied his lumbering assistant.
If you do not let the world in, if it seems unchanged, it can cause you no pain. Nichevo,
he thought,
nothing. Never let anything bother or surprise you. Be resolved to accept anything and nothing.

As he dropped his five kopeks into the metro's turnstile slot, Rostnikov turned to Zelach. “What would you say if I were to tell you that you have been deemed a political liability and that I would have to shoot you in the next ten seconds?”

Zelach, instead of looking puzzled at the question, let a frightened-looking man in a workman's cap squeeze by them and then answered, “Good-bye, Comrade Rostnikov.”

“As I thought,” said Rostnikov, hearing a train rumble below them and rise to a roar that ended conversation.

On the escalator ride down, Rostnikov reflected for the thousandth time that he had been the victim of terrible timing and overconfidence.

The plan had been dangerous but simple, but chance, which should always be reckoned with, had laughed at him. Chance and accident had always played a part in the life of Steve Carella and the 87th Precinct, the American novels purchased on the black market that Rostnikov loved and kept hidden in his apartment behind the Russian classics and the collected speeches of Lenin.

Chance had failed to crown Rostnikov's plan. He had set up an elaborate blackmailing of a KGB senior officer named Drozhkin that involved Rostnikov's silence concerning the cover-up and the KGB assassination of a well-known dissident and Rostnikov's assurance that the official reports, which were with a friend in West Germany, would not be released if exit visas for Rostnikov and his wife were issued. It was to have been processed as a routine exit visa for a dissident Jew and her husband with special permission for a police officer to depart based on his years of loyal service in both the military and the government.

However, Brezhnev had died, and Andropov had taken over. Andropov had been a friend and admirer of Drozhkin's and when Andropov took over, Drozhkin had been promoted, which meant he spent more quiet days on his dacha in Lobnya. And then Andropov had died, followed quickly by Chernenko's death, which confused the situation even further. It had all gone wrong. Drozhkin had simply refused to deal with him. Rostnikov could have committed suicide by having the papers released in Germany to the Western press. As it was, there was still the threat of release, and at some level of the KGB apparently a decision had been informally or formally made. A stalemate existed. Rostnikov would not be allowed to leave the Soviet Union. However, he would not lose his job or be driven to complete despair, which might make him release the embarrassing report. It was a chess game in which the police officer had been outmaneuvered by the KGB. In this case, the stalemate had been a victory for the KGB.

In the rumbling metro Rostnikov looked over at a woman with an
avoska,
a string sack on her lap, and wondered briefly if his case had actually made it to the desk of Andropov. It was possible but not terribly likely. It would have made the situation more bearable for him to know that it had reached such a level.

More painful, however, was the knowledge that Rostnikov's son, Josef, who was serving his time in the army and stationed in Kiev, would certainly be part of the continuing stalemate. Were the papers to be released to
Stern
or the
New York
or
London Times,
Josef would be on the next plane to Afghanistan. That threat had been made explicit by Drozhkin.

“We're here,” Zelach said, shouldering past a pair of young men with paper sacks under their arms. One of the younger men considered a look of anger, let his eyes take in the two disgruntled policemen, and changed his mind.

Rostnikov dragged his leg behind him and just managed to get through the door of the train and onto the platform of the Prospekt Vernadskogo station behind Zelach as the door closed. He glanced back into the passing train and caught a look of clear hatred from the now-safe young man within. Had the young man been within reach, Rostnikov probably would have lifted him off the ground and shaken him like a sack of grain.

“Zelach,” he said as they rode up the escalator, “do you think of me as a violent man?”

“No, chief inspector,” said Zelach indifferently. “There's a stand on the corner. I have not eaten. Would it be all right if I bought some blinchiki?”

“It would be all right, Comrade Zelach,” Rostnikov said sarcastically, but the sarcasm was lost on Zelach. “Do you want to know where we are going?”

Zelach shrugged as they pressed through the morning crowd.

“In that case, we will let that be your surprise for the day.”

In almost any country in the world, the knowledge that a murder had taken place would draw a crowd. In Naples, it would be almost impossible for the police to make their way through the crush of curious onlookers speculating on who had done what to whom and for what reasons. The situation would have been the same in Liverpool, Tokyo, Cleveland, or Berne, but in Moscow the sidewalk in front of the tenement was clear. Curiosity was there, but it was overcome by the fear of becoming involved, questioned, asked to remember and comment, to be made part of an official report.

The building was one of the Stalin postwar blocks that looked like pale refrigerators. The apartments were usually dark, small, and far too hot in the summer. One could be easily disoriented by the sameness of such structures all over the city. Since Rostnikov's own apartment on Krasikov Street was from the same period and in the same style, although in a slightly better neighborhood, he was filled with a weary sadness as he followed Zelach through the door and into the small lobby.

There was no one there, no children, no old people. The building seemed deserted for a Wednesday evening, but both Rostnikov and Zelach were accustomed to this. Later, Zelach would wearily knock on doors and cajole, threaten, or force statements from people who insisted that they had seen and heard nothing.