Red Chameleon Read online

  “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.”

  “None,” Rostnikov agreed.

  “None,” Yuri said. “And so they make vests without heart, spirit, need. You know what kind of vests they make?”

  “Vests of poor quality,” Rostnikov guessed, glancing at Zelach, who clearly ached to shake the old rag of a man into a cooperation that would never come.

  “Vests of paper, toilet paper, vests not fit to wipe one’s ass with,” the old man said with venom, spit forming on his mouth, eyes turned always toward the factory.

  “It wasn’t always like this,” Rostnikov said softly.

  “There were times,” the old man said.

  “Long ago,” Rostnikov agreed.

  “Long ago,” Yuri agreed.

  “I understand you remember a man named Abraham Savitskaya who was here a long time ago,” Rostnikov said, not looking at the man.

  “I don’t remember.”

  Zelach stepped forward, whipped the photograph from his pocket, and thrust it in front of the wrinkled face.

  “That,” said Zelach, “is you. And that is Savitskaya.”

  “And you are Comrade Shit,” the old man said sweetly.

  “Zelach,” Rostnikov said firmly before the sweating, weary policeman could crush the dry old man. “Walk back to the police station, arrange for a car to get us to the station in time to catch the next train.”

  Zelach’s face displayed a rush of thought: first the consideration of defiance and then its quick suppression, followed by petulance, and finally resignation.

  When Zelach had gone, Rostnikov leaned against the wall and said nothing.

  “What happened to your leg?”

  “Battle of Rostov,” Yuri said. “I still have poison gas in my lungs. I can taste it when I belch.”

  They watched the factory a while longer before the old man spoke again.

  “Some didn’t stay around to face the troubles, the Germans, the Revolution.”

  “Some?” Rostnikov tried gently.

  “Savitskaya,” he said. “Savitskaya and Mikhail.”

  “Mikhail?”

  “Mikhail Posniky,” the old man said. “After the first Revolution, they fled.”

  “Mikhail Posniky is the third man in the photograph?”

  Yuri shrugged, the closest he would come to cooperation.

  “What happened to him?”

  “They
left, said they were going to America. Who knows? We were supposed to be friends, but they ran like cowards.”

  “They should have stayed,” Rostnikov agreed.

  “To make vests?” said the old man.

  “To fight the Nazis,” Rostnikov answered.

  “Who knew in 1920 the Nazis were coming?” the old man said, looking at his feebleminded police guest.

  “Who knew?” Rostnikov agreed. “And the fourth man?”

  Pashkov shrugged and shivered. “I don’t know.”

  Rostnikov was sure, however, that the man did know. His face had paled, and he had folded his hands on his lap. His arthritic fingers had held each other to keep from trembling.

  “You are Jewish,” Rostnikov said.

  “Ah,” Yuri said, laughing. “I knew it was coming. It always comes. I fought. This village fought. And you people come and—”

  “The four of you were Jewish?” Rostnikov said, stepping in front of the old man and cutting off his view of the factory.

  “Some of us still are,” Pashkov said defiantly. “Those of us who are alive, at least one, me.” He pointed a gnarled finger at his own chest.

  “The fourth man,” Rostnikov repeated. “Who is he?”

  “I forget,” Pashkov said, showing yellow teeth barely rooted to his gums.

  “You forget nothing,” Rostnikov said, looking down.

  “I forget what I must forget. I’m a very old man.”

  “A name,” Rostnikov said, and then softly added, “My wife is Jewish.”

  “You lie, comrade policeman,” the old man said.

  Rostnikov reached into his back pocket with a grunt, removed his wallet, and fished through it till he found the picture of Sarah and his identification papers. He handed them to the old man.

  “You could have prepared these just to fool me?” he said, handing the photograph and papers back to the man who blocked his view of the loved and hated factory.

  “I could have,” Rostnikov agreed. “But I didn’t, and you know I didn’t.”

  “I know,” Pashkov said, painfully rising, using the side of the house to help him to a level of near dignity. “He was not a pleasant boy.”

  “And you are afraid?”

  “Vests,” Yuri Pashkov spat, coming to a decision. “His name was Shmuel Prensky. Beyond that I know nothing. He cooperated with the Stalinist pishers who came here in, I don’t know, 1930, ’31. He helped them. … I have nothing more to say.”

  “You were afraid of him?” Rostnikov said, stepping out of the man’s line of sight.

  “I’m still afraid of him,” Yuri whispered. “May you carry my damnation for bringing his name and memory back to me, for reminding me of those dark eyes that betrayed his own people. I damn you for bringing that photograph.”

  Rostnikov stepped back and let the trembling man return to his chair and to his thoughts of useless vests and distant Italians wearing them.

  There was nothing more to say. Rostnikov had two names now, and if Sofiya Savitskaya was right in her identification, the name of the killer of her father was Mikhail Posniky.

  “The other man in the photograph,” Rostnikov tried, hoping to catch the old man before he was completely lost. “The little man with the smile in the photograph.”

  “Lev, Lev Ostrovsky,” Yuri answered, sighing. “The clown, the actor.”

  “Actor?”

  “He stayed through the troubles and moved to Moscow.” The word Moscow came out like the spit of a dry, dirty word. “He left to become an actor. His father had been the rabbi here. But we had no need for rabbis or the sons of rabbis when Shmuel Prensky and his friends …”

  He never finished the sentence. His eyes closed and then his mouth, hiding what little remained of lips. The sun was hot and high, and Rostnikov was tired and hungry. The walk to the police station was far and dry, but Porfiry Petrovich did not mind. He had some names to work with. He wanted to hurry back to Moscow, for it was there a survivor existed who might provide a link in the puzzle of the murder of Abraham Savitskaya.

  FOUR

  THE YOUNG MAN AND WOMAN walked along Granovsky Street arm in arm. People who passed them in the late afternoon assumed the man had obtained his flattened nose in some hockey or soccer game. He was burly, rugged looking, and his straight black hair, falling over his forehead, bounced athletically as he moved. He talked easily and loudly. He wore a clean blue short-sleeved shirt that revealed his well-developed biceps and added to his image as an athlete. It was also appropriate that the woman with him was quite beautiful and strikingly blond, her hair worn back in an American-style ponytail. She was not thin like an American, however. She was full and athletic appearing, possibly weighing about 140 pounds and looking as if she had just rolled up her sleeves and stepped out of a poster for increasing production in the steel industry. All she needed was a flag. She wore no makeup and needed none. Health beamed from their faces, and Vera Shepovik glanced at them as she passed, cursed them silently, and wished that she could cross to the park, get out her father’s old rifle, and burn the joy of life from their faces.

  Vera, however, was a half mile away when the couple passed in front of a large apartment building, one of the many on the street that housed the most important and privileged nachalstvo, bosses, in the Soviet Union. A chauffeur-driven car stood in front of one building where Chernenko supposedly lived. The couple paid no attention but whispered something to each other that the driver, pretending to look straight ahead, assumed was sexual. It made the driver shift and wish he could remove the jacket of his semimilitary uniform. It was a hot day, a muggy hot Thursday.

  A jogger, complete with Western sweat suit, flew past the young couple, seriously intent on three or four miles before dinner. His hair was white, and he was lean and fit, an unusual figure on the streets of Moscow. The serious joggers were like this one, head forward, arms low, pace steady. The less serious moved slowly, sometimes almost walking. The jogging suit made it clear, the runner hoped, that he was indeed running and not simply walking.

  As the couple passed a group of men and women arriving home from work, the woman tugged at the sleeve of the young man and pointed at a white Chaika parked in front of an apartment building about four car lengths from the building’s entrance. He seemed at first reluctant to look at the car but then smiled weakly and gave in. Like two honeymooners, they peered through the window and examined the upholstery of the car that the likes of them would never own.

  “Well,” said the man in a pebbly voice from a throat planed dry by too much vodka.

  The woman smiled, her pink cheeks a contrast to the broken veins on the man’s hose, visible at close range.

  “Yes,” she said decisively.

  The street was relatively clear. Cars passed, the sound of traffic rattled past them, and pedestrians ambled forward, carrying cloth shopping bags and briefcases. Standing on the sidewalk, his eyes toward the front of the apartment building, the muscular man, who looked not quite so young at close range, leaned against the car as the woman moved to his side to join him. Behind her back she tried to open the door to the Chaika. It was locked. They talked of this and that and nothing for a few seconds, mentioned a possible picnic in the park, and waited for a break in the crowd. It came, a brief one, and the woman turned, pulling a hollow metal tube of twelve inches or so from her bag. Quickly, without looking back, she leaned forward and thrust the steel tube against the car’s window. Her arms were strong and the thrust powerful. The bar penetrated the window almost noiselessly and the circle of glass fell to the plush seat within. She withdrew the bar to the patter of the man with the mashed nose, who repeated, “Khorosho, good” as she worked. She dropped the bar into her shopping bag, pushed her fingers through the small hole, and lifted the button inside.

  She stood, turned again, and looked around the street. They continued to look like a pair of lovers who had paused on their nightly walk to admire the apartments of the great and near-great men who ran the country.
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  “Now,” she said softly when an older couple passed in front of them. Had the older couple paid more attention to the two at the car, they would have seen that the man was perspiring. The sun was already going down, and the early evening was turning cool.

  The young woman turned, opened the door of the white car, slid across the seat, and pulled a metal bar and a wire with a clip at the end of her shopping bag as the man jumped in at her side, closed the door, and looked back over his shoulder.

  “Use the mirror,” the woman said without looking up from what she was doing under the dashboard. “Don’t draw attention.”

  The man wiped his forehead and glanced at the mirror without looking at the woman. He tried to keep himself from panting like a dog as he counted slowly. By the time he reached seven, the woman had started the car. He stopped counting as she sat up. In the rearview mirror, he saw a pair of men step out of the apartment building and look around. They glanced at the Chaika, and the young man reached inside his jacket for the pistol, which stuck clammily to his stomach.

  “Go,” he said. “Go.”

  She sat up with maddening calm, looked back over her shoulder for an opening in traffic, and began to ease out of the space. In the mirror, the man saw the two men at the apartment entrance turn the other way and wave.

  “Done, Ilya,” the woman said. He looked at her beautiful, strong face and marveled once again at her coolness. Ilya wanted nothing more than a drink.

  “When we get this to the garage, we are done, Marina,” he said, opening the glove compartment to keep his hands from trembling.

  As Marina sped along Botanical Street past Dzerzhinsky Recreation Park, a dog shot into the street. She swerved deftly to miss it and barely avoided a collision with a tourist bus. Oriental faces peered out the bus window.

  “Drive carefully,” Ilya hissed between closed teeth.

  “Next time I’ll hit the dog,” she said jokingly.

  It was then that he found the report among the papers in the glove compartment and almost threw up on the freshly scented seat of the newly shampooed Chaika. He controlled the hot, vile, small ball of fear that rose from his stomach to his throat and spoke as calmly as he could, which, he was sure, was not calm at all.