Tarnished Icons Read online

  There was another sound ahead of her in the near darkness. This too was a voice, a deeper voice, wailing in the wind. Someone was ahead of her along the embankment, out of sight to her left. She would not be able to avoid it.

  Maybe it was just the rustling of wind and snow in the trees, or a stray dog, or even two men arguing on the bridge still far ahead, their voices carrying far in the night.

  The incidence of attacks on women had, since the end of the Soviet Union, risen so dramatically that the statistics published in the newspapers and given on television were no longer reliable. Rapes and murders were up two or three hundred percent. Gangs slaughtered one another on the street. Criminals, with guns visible under their jackets, were welcomed into the best hotels, including the Ukrainia.

  Katrina was good at statistics. She loved statistics. There was certainty in them. Before her, through the haze of white, she could see the lights of Bolshaya Dorogomilovskaya Street, where the bridge crossed into the heart of the city.

  She stood silently for an instant. No more voices in the wind ahead of her. Another fifty yards to go. No one in sight. The street lamps along the embankment were on, though they were dimmed by the swirl of snow. She could hurry and risk falling or she could go a bit slower. Katrina chose to hurry.

  Suddenly in front of her through the whoosh of a gust of wind she heard four sharp, loud cracks like a steel cable striking a metal beam. Now she was sure. There was a moan and then three, four more loud cracks just ahead.

  Katrina was frightened. There was no doubting that now, no lying to herself. About twenty-five yards ahead of her a hunched creature suddenly came up from the riverside. It looked like a bear. The creature looked around and saw Katrina.

  Katrina, seeing something glitter in the creature’s hand, reached into her heavy red plastic purse and pulled out a Tokareve .762mm automatic. She had purchased it from a waiter in the hotel kitchen almost a year before when she had realized that the new Russia was a place of madness where statistics might be meaningless.

  The bearlike figure began to raise its right arm, and Katrina could see that there was something in its hand. She dropped her purse gently in the snow, gripped the pistol in her wool-gloved hands, and leveled the weapon at the hulk pointing at her.

  She fired first and the creature stood straight up. It was a man in a long coat and fur cap, and he definitely had a weapon in his hand. He staggered back. Surprised at the shot? Hit by a bullet? Then he fired. Katrina felt a sudden squeezing of her left arm, as if some great gorilla had grasped her in anger. Before she could fire again, the man ran in the direction of the bridge. Actually, it was more like an animal lope than a run, a strange lope that even at this moment seemed odd. Then he was gone into the darkness. She could hear him moving farther and farther away. Her arm hurt and she was frightened. She picked up her red purse and hurried toward the bridge, screaming for help. She hoped someone would hear her and come to help her, though she knew that few would be brave enough to respond to the midnight cries of a woman so far from the busy, lighted streets.

  Katrina felt dizzy. Weapon still in her hand, she moved forward. She tried not to look down as she shuffled, but she could not resist and she knew she was bleeding. She could see the dark drops falling onto the snow in front of her, and she looked back to see their dim trail behind her. Katrina was lost in weeping panic as she hurried forward.

  The footsteps in the snow where the man who shot her had come up from the embankment lured her toward the edge of the drop to the river. Lights from the other side of the river reflected off the water—bobbing jigsaw pieces—and she saw them. About ten feet down. There were four figures laid out in a line almost perfectly straight, as if they had arranged themselves and were about to make identical snow angels. But these figures did not move.

  The light wasn’t good enough to see clearly, but Katrina knew. In her heart she knew that the four were dead, murdered by the creature who had shot her.

  She trudged forward, too weak and frightened now to scream. He would leap out. She knew it. From behind a clump of snow-covered bushes or a stone block that marked the drop to the river. Something moved ahead. She fired again, not trying to hit anything but trying to keep the creature at bay.

  A dog scuttled out from behind a stand of birch trees and fled in fear into the narrow parkway away from the river.

  Katrina reached the street. She saw the frightened faces of three bundled old men. She passed out.

  When she opened her eyes, a broad flat face appeared before her. She tried to bring it into focus. For an instant she thought it might be the man from the river, but something about the concern in his eyes and the warm feeling of a white room calmed her.

  “We’re in a hospital,” the man said gently. “You have lost some blood but you will recover. Agda is being brought here in a police car. We found her name in your purse.”

  Katrina nodded, her mouth painfully dry.

  “Water,” she whispered.

  The burly man poured a glass of water from a pitcher next to her bed.

  “Just a sip or two,” said the man.

  She nodded and did as she was told.

  The man appeared to be in his fifties. He had dark hair just beginning to turn gray and the body of a small delivery truck. Under his coat he wore a yellow turtle-neck sweater that gave him the appearance of having no neck at all.

  “My name is Chief Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov,” the man said. “My colleague is Inspector Timofeyeva.”

  Katrina turned her eyes but not her head to a second figure in the room, a young, pretty, blond woman definitely on the solid side. The young woman was wearing an open dark coat and a long red scarf. She could have been mistaken for Katrina’s younger sister.

  “We are with the Office of Special Investigation, Petrovka,” the man said. “Can you talk?”

  “Yes,” she said dryly. She took another small sip of water. “Will I be able to use my arm again?”

  “Yes,” said the young woman. She stepped to the edge of the bed and touched Katrina’s right arm gently. “The wound is not bad. What happened?”

  Katrina told her story. The young woman took notes and the man stood, hands in his pockets, listening. When Katrina finished, the man said, “You did not recognize the man you shot?”

  “Did I shoot him?” Katrina asked.

  “There were two sets of blood drops,” he said. “Yours and someone else’s. Yours went straight to the street. The other person’s went into the park. He apparently got into a car he had there.”

  “Are you sure it was a man?” the young woman asked.

  Katrina nodded yes and said, “At first I thought it was a big animal.”

  “I mean,” said the young woman, “could it have been a woman?”

  “No,” said Katrina.

  “Could you identify him?” the young woman asked.

  “No,” said Katrina. “But you said I shot him?”

  “It appears so,” said the man.

  “I’m going to show you photographs of the four dead men,” Elena Timofeyeva said. “Can you look at them?”

  Katrina closed her eyes and nodded another yes. Elena held up Polaroid head shots of the dead men on the river-bank. Each face was eerily illuminated by the white flash of necessary light. Katrina looked at the four faces. Two of them had their eyes closed. Two had open eyes. One of the two with open eyes looked frightened. The other with open eyes looked angry. All four had dark holes in their foreheads and faces. Three of the men were young, possibly even in their teens or twenties. The defiant man was older, but she couldn’t tell how much older.

  “No,” Katrina said. “I’ve never seen them.”

  Elena put the photographs away.

  “Anything you can tell us about the man who did this?”

  Katrina thought and remembered the man coming up from the riverbank, aiming at her and then …

  “He walked funny,” she said. “Like an animal.”

  “You say
he moved quickly,” said Rostnikov.

  “Yes, I think so, very quickly. Not like a cripple.”

  Elena Timofeyeva glanced at Rostnikov, who continued to look down at the woman lying in the bed. Only six months earlier, Rostnikov, at the urging of his wife and son and his wife’s cousin Leon, who was a doctor, had agreed to allow the removal of his left leg just below the knee. It no longer made medical sense to preserve a gradually decaying leg, subject to infection and providing no support.

  It had taken Rostnikov weeks to come to terms with this truth. He had earned the withered leg as a boy soldier fighting the Nazis. He had destroyed a tank. The tank had almost crushed his leg. For almost half a century Rostnikov had lived with the pain from the leg. Because he was a war hero, he had been allowed to become a policeman after the war. He was powerful. He was calm. He possessed the one attribute that made him an ideal member of the police in the cold war period—he had no ambition other than to live with his wife and his son and do his job.

  He had moved up the ranks as a street officer and then as a detective in the office of the procurator general of Moscow. When he ran afoul of some of the powerful and displayed a determination that could not be blunted even by political expediency, he was eventually transferred to the supposedly dead-end job of investigator in the Office of Special Investigation, a dumping ground for cases no one wanted.

  With an irony that was not lost on some of the more intelligent of the members of the National Police and the KGB, the Office of Special Investigation not only took on dead-end cases but also managed to solve most of them. Rostnikov had gradually brought other investigators from the procurator general’s office. Their moment of initial glory came when Rostnikov’s people thwarted an attempt on the life of Mikhail Gorbachev. They had since managed to walk the line that allowed them to survive the political breakup of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party.

  Through all this, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov had been accompanied by his withered left leg. It was not an easy decision to let it go.

  Rostnikov’s surgery had been performed in Moscow by an American surgeon obtained through a friend in the FBI who had been assigned to counsel the Russian police on dealing with organized crime. Within days after the surgery Rostnikov had begun learning to walk with a prosthetic leg. Gradually the pain went away. In its place was an occasional soreness where what remained of his leg had to be fitted into the device he now had to endure. He walked with only the slightest of limps, and though he told no one, there were many times when he missed the leg that had given him half a century of torture. He even wondered what had happened to the leg, but he had decided never to ask.

  Rostnikov said to Katrina, “The ground was trampled by the first police who arrived, but basically, the prints in the snow were clear.”

  A tall, thin woman in white, who Rostnikov guessed was probably from Uzbekistan, came into the room and whispered to Rostnikov. He nodded and looked down at Katrina with a smile.

  “Inspector Timofeyeva has a few more questions. Your friend Agda is here.”

  As Rostnikov left the hospital room with the nurse, a woman came quickly in. She was a short older woman in a heavy coat. Her dark hair was a wild mess, and she was pink-cheeked from the cold. Rostnikov was already out of the room when the tearful Agda bent over to kiss her friend on the mouth and whisper to her.

  Elena stood back waiting. In spite of the difficulty of getting information through the outdated computer network, Rostnikov and Elena had known a number of things about Katrina Ivanova before they talked to her at the hospital. They knew her age, that she had come from Georgia as a child, that she had never used her gun before, that she was a reliable employee of the Ukrainia Hotel, and that she had a long-term relationship with Agda, who played the violin with a band at the Metropole Hotel. Elena stepped farther back to give them some privacy.

  Before he had taken five steps into the hospital corridor, Rostnikov found himself facing a man of about forty, slightly shorter than himself and considerably lighter. Through the man’s open jacket it was clear that he was remarkably muscular.

  Though it was warm in the hospital, an unusual phenomenon for any Russian building in the winter, the man did not remove his small fur cap. He was clean-shaven and light-skinned, with light brown hair and cheekbones tightened in determined anger.

  “What happened?” the man demanded. Rostnikov could not quite place his accent.

  “Who are you?” Rostnikov asked.

  “I asked a question,” the man said, standing very close to Rostnikov. People passing in the hall tried to ignore the two men, who looked as if they might be about to engage in a monumental brawl.

  “As did I,” said Rostnikov. “My name is Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. And you are?”

  “Belinsky, Rabbi Avrum Belinsky.”

  “Ah, yes. I wanted to talk to you. Your name was on cards in the wallets of four men murdered tonight. You knew the victims?” Rostnikov handed the rabbi the Polaroid pictures.

  “My question first,” said Belinsky. “I’ve seen the bodies. Identified them. I have no need of photographs to remember them.”

  The man seemed nothing like what Rostnikov expected in a rabbi.

  “Four men were murdered on the Taras Shevchenko Embankment slightly after midnight,” said Rostnikov. “Judging from the names we retrieved from the bodies, the four men were Jewish.”

  “With the two last month, that makes six,” Belinsky said. “All from our congregation. We can’t and won’t lose more Jews. What are you doing to find the murderers?”

  “What can you do to help us?” asked Rostnikov, thinking he felt a twinge in his no longer extant left leg.

  “More questions for answers,” said Belinsky impatiently. “I have some information that might be relevant. But how do I know you and the rest of the police will bother with the murders of Jews?”

  “My wife is Jewish,” said Rostnikov. “And my son, therefore, is half Jewish. In the old Soviet Union and the days of the czars, that would have made him entirely Jewish. As he discovered when he was in the army, under our new system too, he is considered Jewish.”

  “And you don’t want that,” Belinsky said sarcastically, now taking off his jacket and draping it over his arm.

  “I needn’t tell you it is difficult to be Jewish in Russia, now and always, Avrum Belinsky,” said Rostnikov. “You are not Russian, are you?”

  “I’m Israeli,” said Belinsky. “I came here to help rebuild the Jewish community. We are not to be stopped. A Jewish community center just opened in Saint Petersburg where they estimate there are one hundred thousand Jews. There were only some sixty synagogues in all of the Soviet Union, half of them in Georgia. Now we are trying to reignite Judaism in Russia, to give dignity and faith to those who have too long been without it.”

  “Is that a sermon?” asked Rostnikov.

  “It comes from one of my sermons,” Belinsky admitted. “When you check on my file, you will find that I was an officer in the Israeli army, that I have been twice wounded. I volunteered for this job when a group of Jews in Moscow requested assistance. I was, you will also discover, a member of the Olympic team in Germany when the massacre took place. I knew the men who died there as I knew the men who have died here.”

  “You were a wrestler?”

  “Greco-Roman,” Belinsky said.

  “You lift weights?” asked Rostnikov.

  Belinsky looked irritated.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “There will be a meeting in a few hours of the Office of Special Investigation, in which I work,” said Rostnikov. “I will ask that I be assigned exclusively to this case with adequate support.”

  Belinsky nodded, still wary.

  “Don’t do anything on your own, rabbi,” Rostnikov said.

  Belinsky didn’t answer.

  “Now,” said Rostnikov, “let’s go to the canteen for some tea and talk.”

  Belinsky hesitated and then nodded in agreement.

 
; Sasha Tkach was running late. It seemed as if there were a few truths by which he could live with some certainty. First, he would never get enough sleep. Second, he would always be running late. Third, he would never escape from his nearly seventy-year-old mother, Lydia, who, though she now had a tiny apartment of her own, spent almost every evening and many nights in the already cramped apartment of her son, his wife, and their two children. Sasha had found her the small but neat room in a concrete one-story apartment building. Elena Timofeyeva, the only woman in the Office of Special Investigation, had arranged it.

  Actually, Elena, who lived in one of the two-room apartments in the building, had enlisted the aid of her aunt, with whom she lived. Anna Timofeyeva, who still had friends who owed her favors from her days as first deputy director of the Moscow procurator’s office, had gotten Lydia into the building. Anna had laid down a series of rules by which Lydia Tkach could live there. The rules were in writing. First, Lydia could visit Anna and Elena only when invited or in the case of a real emergency. The determination of whether the situation was an emergency would depend on Anna’s assessment of information given in no more than two sentences. Second, Lydia must wear her hearing aid when visiting. If it was broken, she could not visit. Third, discussions of her son’s job or complaints about her daughter-in-law were not to be tolerated. Although it wasn’t a rule, Anna made it clear that she did not particularly want to hear about Lydia’s grandchildren unless it was Anna who brought up the subject. Lydia had agreed to abide by the rules. She still spent as much time at her son’s apartment as her daughter-in-law Maya’s tolerance would permit. As much as Maya disliked the frequency of her mother-in-law’s visits, she had to admit that Lydia’s willingness to take care of the children while Maya worked was extremely helpful.

  Sasha was an investigator in the Office of Special Investigation. He and Emil Karpo had been transferred to the office with Rostnikov when Rostnikov had lost favor within the procurator general’s office. The Office of Special Investigation had been a strictly ceremonial dead end until the often confused regime of Yeltsin and the reformers, when it took on more important cases, often politically sensitive ones, that the other investigative branches—State Security (formerly the KGB), the Ministry of the Interior (including the mafia task force), the National Police (formerly the MVD), the procurator’s office, the tax police—did not want. It was not uncommon for disputes to rage at a crime scene as to which of the investigative branches had jurisdiction. Often, two police districts would engage in heated argument in front of the public about who was in charge. The criminal investigation system of Russia was not quite in a shambles, but everyone seemed to be lying back and waiting to see if the reformers would hold on to power or the new Communists and Zhirinovsky Nationalists would combine and seize control. No one wished to fail. It was easier to shift the difficult cases to the Office of Special Investigation.