Red Chameleon (7 page)

“I was working late,” Zelach said. “Inspector Rostnikov said—”

“I appreciate your conscientiousness, Zelach,” Rostnikov said, wiping his forehead with his sleeve and moving forward to pat the man's shoulder. Zelach smiled and gulped down his tea. “Tomorrow you and I will take a journey to Yekteraslav on the
electrichka.
We'll take sandwiches and talk to old ladies. Perhaps we'll wander in the fields of wheat.”

Zelach looked puzzled.

“They grow soybeans in that area now. My cousin's—”

“Poetry eludes you, Zelach. Did you know that?” Rostnikov said.

“I know,” Zelach said. “I was always better in numbers in school, though I was none too good in that.”

“Go home now,” Rostnikov said, leading Zelach to the door. “You've done well.”

Zelach smiled and looked around for someplace to put his empty teacup now that he was half a dozen feet from the table. Rostnikov took it with a nod and ushered the man out the door, giving Zelach just enough time to say a polite good-bye to Sarah.

When the door was closed, he turned to his wife.

“Is it important?” she said with a touch of curiosity he wanted to catch, nurture, and use.

“An old man was murdered this morning,” he said. “An old Jewish man.”

“And someone cares?” she said with what might have been sarcasm, a mode Rostnikov had seldom seen in his wife.

“I care,” said Rostnikov softly, though in truth it was less that he cared about the gnarled old man than about the man's children, especially the woman with the bad leg and the edge of madness to her eyes. And, in truth, it was a case. Somewhere there was a man or woman, men or women, who had committed a crime. The crime had been handed to Rostnikov, and his skill was being challenged by the criminal, possibly by the procurator, and certainly by himself.

“I care,” he repeated, and moved toward the bedroom and the shower stall beyond, which he hoped would deliver warm water but from which he expected only a cool dip.

After Vera Shepovik had fired her rifle from the roof of the Ukraine Hotel, she had not wept. She had sobbed in frustration when the gun had jammed after the first shot. Vera's plan had been to kill as many people as possible in case she was caught. She had seen the porter come through the door, weaving slightly, and had backed into the shadows, away from the edge, behind a stone turret. She had wept again in frustration, because she wanted desperately to shoot the obviously drunken little man. For a moment she even considered leaping from behind the protective bricks, beating the man to death with her rifle, and throwing him down to the street. It would have been a minor inconvenience. Vera was a robust woman, a muscular woman who at the age of forty had been an athlete, skilled at both the javelin and hammer. In 1964, she had just missed the Olympic team. That had been the highlight of her life. The lows had been far more plentiful.

First Stefan had been killed. They had told her it was an accident, but it had been no accident. It had been the first step in the conspiracy against her, a conspiracy by the state, the KGB, the police. She knew the reason, too. The steroids. They had urged her to take those steroids for competition and to prepare her for the Olympics. Now, even twenty years later, they were still warning her to keep her quiet, to keep her from creating an international scandal that might ruin the reputation of the Soviet athletic system. They had, of course, lied to her. One doctor had said she needed psychiatric help, but it was not a psychiatrist she needed; besides, the state didn't believe in psychoanalysis.

No, there was no one to trust. First it had been Stefan they had pushed in front of the metro at the Kurskaya station. Then her father had been murdered. They had said it was a heart attack, that he was seventy-eight years old, drank too much, smoked too much, but she knew the truth. One by one, as a warning to her, they had murdered people she knew. Sometimes they were very subtle. Nikolai Repin, whom she had gone to school with, was dead of some unknown cause. She was told this by another old acquaintance she happened to meet in front of the National Restaurant on Gorky Street. Vera had not seen Nikolai for at least ten years, but this woman, whose name she could not recall, had happened to meet her, had happened to mention his death. Vera was no fool. The meeting had not been by chance. It had been planned, another warning. She had been careful, so careful not to let them know, not to let her mother know of the conspiracy around her. Vera knew they were trying to poison the air in her small apartment, and so for years she had set up a tent in her room, a tent of blankets held up by chairs and the kitchen table. There was ample air under the blanket for the night, though there was always the slight smell of poison in the room each morning, and in the summer it had been almost unbearably hot under the blanket. Her mother had survived miraculously, probably because she had grown immune to the poison. Luck.

Vera had checked her food carefully for years, feeding a bit to Gorki, her cat, before she ate it. She never ate out where they could slip something in.

And then they had gotten through her defenses. Vera wasn't sure how they had done it, probably through special rays in the wall. It didn't matter. They had done it. For almost a year she had kept quiet about the pains in her stomach. Once in a hospital, she was sure they would simply cut her open, remove the remnants of the steroids, and let her die, stomach open, no one caring. They would stuff a rag in her mouth and wheel her into the corner to die, possibly shunt her body into a little closet. They didn't care. She had no use, no value. Then they had finally gotten her into a hospital when she collapsed at the box factory where she worked. The doctor who examined her said Vera had stomach cancer. Vera did not weep. No one would see her weep. They all looked at her with curiosity, as if she were some specimen, some experiment that had gone wrong and now would not quietly die so she could be swept into the garbage.

The doctor had recommended surgery, but Vera had declined. The doctor had not seemed to care. No one seemed to care about Vera. As far as they were concerned, she was already dead, taken care of, gone, swept into the garbage. But they were wrong. They had killed her, but they had made the mistake of not finishing the job.

The Moisin rifle had been her father's in the war. It was too large, too awkward, and she wasn't sure the rifle would work. The bullets were so old. Her father had sometimes taken her hunting when she was a child, and she had been a natural shooter. The idea was simple. She would pay them back, make them realize what they had done. Those people who walked past her, unsmiling, uncaring. She had become a pawn of the state and then had been cast out, and they had been reasonable, all of them who walked past and didn't care what the old men who ran the country did to innocent people like Vera. If she could, she would put a bullet into every solid Soviet face in Moscow, but what she wanted most was to destroy the authorities who conspired against her—police, KGB, the military.

She wept with fury each time she climbed a hotel roof, her rifle hidden in that idiotic trombone case. She had avoided elevators and made the painful trek upward through stairways, fire escapes. And then the rifle, the damned rifle, always had something wrong with it. She had now shot five people. That she knew, but she had no idea of whether she had killed them or not. The newspapers never carried stories on such things. But she knew she had hit them. She had watched them go down. She wanted them dead. They had expected her to be dead in a few months, but it was they who had died first. Each shot was justice.

She could have leaped out that night and killed the porter, but she could not count on her stomach to allow her to make the run. In addition, had she thrown him to the street, someone below might have realized where the shots originated, and the police might come after her, catch her before she was finished.

“What are you doing, Verochka?” her mother called across the room. The old woman was embroidering near the window to catch the sun before it was gone.

Vera had told her mother nothing of the cancer, nothing of her frustration, her anger, her fear.

“Thinking,” Vera said.

“Thinking,” her mother repeated.

The two were a contrast. The mother, a small round creature with scraggly white hair and thick glasses, the daughter, massive, with a severe pink face and brown hair tied back with hairpins. Vera was more like her father, at least her father when he had been younger.

“Thinking about people,” Vera said.

Her mother shrugged, not wanting to pursue the thoughts of the daughter she had long ago given up as mad. There was no recourse, no treatment, for the mad in Moscow other than to lock them up. Vera could still work, though she had begun to look pale and had talked less and less each day. Adriana Shepovik was well aware of her daughter's obsession with the old rifle, but she didn't question it. The thing certainly didn't work. The girl had probably been trying from time to time to sell the gun, though Adriana doubted if anyone would buy the piece of junk.

“I'm going out,” Vera said, suddenly getting up.

“Eat something.”

“I'll eat when I get back,” Vera said, reaching down to pet Gorki, who had rubbed against her leg.

Vera went to the closet near the door and reached behind the heavy curtain for the trombone case. She kept her back to the old woman, though she doubted if the woman could see that far.

“I may be home late,” Vera said.

Her mother grunted and plunged the needle into the orange material on her lap.

“Very late,” Vera repeated, opening the front door and stepping out.

It was possible, Vera thought, that she might not return all night. She was determined this time not to be impatient. The pain in her stomach was growing each day, and the medicine she had been given had helped less and less. The day might come soon when Vera would not be able to go out, climb to the roofs of Moscow, and find justice.

No, tonight she would wait patiently even if it took till dawn. She would wait until she could get a good shot at a policeman.

The electrichka had been fast and not particularly crowded. It had been an off hour for travel, around ten when Rostnikov and Zelach left. The ride to Yekteraslav took about an hour, during which Zelach tried to carry on a conversation while Rostnikov grunted and attempted to read his Ed McBain book.

There was no stop at Yekteraslav. They had to get off at Sdminkov. When they left the train, Rostnikov's left leg was almost totally numb. A taxi stood near the station, and Rostnikov limped toward it, with Zelach in front.

“Busy,” growled the stubble-faced driver whose curly gray hair billowed around his face. He did not bother to turn toward the two men.

“Police,” said Zelach, getting in and sliding over.

“I'm still—” the driver said wearily, without turning.

Rostnikov reached over after he got in and put his hand on the driver's shoulder.

“What is your name?”

The man winced in pain and turned to face his two passengers. Fear appeared in his eyes.

“I—I thought you were lying,” the man said, the smell of fish on his breath. “Smart city people say they are everything to get a cab. I'm supposed to wait here each day for Comrade—”

“Yekteraslav,” Rostnikov said, releasing the man so he could massage his shoulder.

“But I—” the man protested.

Rostnikov was already leaning back in the uncomfortable seat with his eyes closed. He would massage his leg as soon as the man started.

“Yekteraslav,” Zelach repeated, looking out the window.

The driver looked at his two passengers in the mirror and decided against argument.

Fifteen minutes later, after rumbling over a stone road in need of repair, the driver grumbled, “Yekteraslav.”

Rostnikov opened his eyes and looked out the window at a looming three-story factory belching smoke on the town's thirty or forty houses and sprinkling of isbas, the old wooden houses without toilets.

“Where?” the driver said.

“Police headquarters,” Zelach said.

The driver hurried on.

The bureaucracy of the local police delayed them for half an hour and did little to ease their way to the home of Yuri Pashkov. To say the home was modest would be kind. It was little better than a shack with a small porch on which an ancient man was seated on a wooden chair, watching, as the two heavy policemen ambled forward. The sad-faced younger man deferred to the slightly older man with the bad leg. Yuri was intrigued by the older man, but he showed nothing.

“You are Yuri Pashkov?” Zelach asked.

“I am well aware of who I am,” the old man said, looking away at the fascinating spectacle of the factory.

“Would you rather have this conversation at the police station?” Zelach said, stepping onto the porch. Yuri shrugged and looked up at the man.

“You want to carry me to police headquarters, carry me,” the old man said.

“Your tongue will get you in trouble,” Zelach warned, falling back on the threats of his trade.

“Ha,” Yuri cackled. “I'm eighty-five years old. What have you to threaten me with? My family is gone. This shack is a piece of shit. Threaten. Go ahead. Threaten.”

Rostnikov stepped up on the small porch into the slight shade from the wooden slats above.

“What kind of factory have you here?” he said.

“Vests.”

Rostnikov glanced at the old man in the chair. The lines on his face were amazingly deep and leathery.

“Vests?” Rostnikov asked, sensing the man's favorite subject.

“Vests,” the old man said, pausing to spit into the dirt near Zelach, who stepped back. “We used to farm around here, and now they have us working in a factory, and what do we make in that factory?”

“Vests,” said Rostnikov.

“Exactly,” said Yuri, recognizing a kindred spirit. “What dignity is there in a man's life when he has spent it sewing buttons on vests to be worn by Hungarians or Italians.”