A Cold Red Sunrise Read online

  “Two more things, Sergeant,” Rostnikov said.

  “Anything, Comrade Inspector,” Famfanoff said, removing the cigarette from his mouth and standing straight in something that resembled attention.

  “First, I’d like you to draw me a simple map indicating who lives in each of the houses in Tumsk. Bring it back to me later. Second, I want to know if there is any weight-lifting equipment in town?”

  “Weight lifting?” asked Famfanoff, puzzled.

  “Yes.”

  “I will see if the sailors have any. I don’t think they do. Ah, Dimitri Galich has something like that. I’ll inquire and I’ll have the map for you within the hour.”

  “Good. Now I would like to rest. Get the files. Find out about the weight-lifting equipment and call us when the food is ready. Now please close the door on your way out so I can get some rest.”

  Famfanoff considered saluting, started to raise his right hand, saw that Rostnikov wasn’t looking at him and decided to leave. In the corridor he passed the closed door of the one who looked like a vampire and the open door of the other one, the one called Sokolov with the soft smile, the mustache and hard eyes. Sokolov wasn’t in his room. The bathroom door was closed.

  Famfanoff walked slowly, hopefully down the narrow wooden stairway, determined to please Inspector Rostnikov whom he could not figure out. The man was shaped like a crate and had a face so common that one might easily forget it after being introduced if it weren’t for the sad brown eyes and the mouth that looked as if it were just about to smile. Inspector Rostnikov looked like a man who knew a tragic yet comic secret about you.

  Buttoning his coat and pulling his hat down over his ears, the policeman made an agenda. First, to remind the Mirasnikov woman to get the visitors’ food ready. Second, to pull together the copies of all the files on residents of Tumsk. This was easy since he had already done the job for Commissar Rutkin and had the files locked in the cabinet at the People’s Hall of Justice. He would let Rostnikov think he had pulled them together quickly. The third task, the weight equipment, was relatively easy but puzzling. Did Rostnikov have some wild theory that Commissar Rutkin had been killed with a weight-lifting bar? Or did he think the killer was so powerful that he had to be someone who used such equipment? Famfanoff had glanced at the medical examiner’s report that had come in from Noril’sk where they had taken the body. Nothing seemed to support any interest in weight equipment.

  Famfanoff went out into the cold, deciding to get a drink from his own room in the house of Dimitri Galich where he stayed when he came to Tumsk. He could, at the same time if Galich were home, ask about the weights. He crossed the square hoping that Rostnikov was not insane or stupid. Famfanoff did not care if Commissar Rutkin’s killer was found. He thought his bear theory perfectly acceptable and possibly even correct. He did care that Rostnikov not look bad. The inspector’s promised letter might be his ticket out of the frozen exile. Yes, things were looking better and he definitely needed a drink to celebrate.

  “Ah,” said Sokolov after smoothing out his mustache and reaching for a piece of coarse black bread, “sometimes it is good to get away from the watchful eyes of Moscow and Kiev, isn’t it?”

  They ate at a wooden army mess table with no cloth. There were four chairs, wood and so old that Rostnikov imagined himself collapsing to the floor.

  “It is good to experience the magnificent diversity of the Soviet Socialist Republics,” replied Rostnikov without pausing in his consumption of shchi, a thin cabbage soup containing a hint of potato.

  “And,” added Sokolov, “it is good to get back to our history, the simple food of our peasant past.” He pointed at the food on the table: bread; soup; a bowl of kasha; and golubtsy, cabbage rolls, two for each of them, probably stuffed with potatoes; a bottle of amber vodka and a bottle of spring water.

  “Shchi da kasha, Pischcha nasha: cabbage soup and gruel are our food,” said Rostnikov repeating the old Russian saying.

  Karpo, Rostnikov noticed, drank his soup slowly, ate one piece of bread even more slowly and drank only one glass of mineral water while Rostnikov and Sokolov consumed everything on the table including the two golubtsy which would have been Karpo’s, but which he declined when Sokolov gestured to one of them with his fork when he had consumed his own share. Rostnikov had taken the other one.

  “We will grow healthy on such fare if we stay here long enough,” said Sokolov sitting back to drink his vodka.

  “No balance,” said Karpo still at his bread. “The myth of health of the peasant was fostered by the landowners, the church and the aristocracy to ease their own consciences.”

  “Lenin,” said Sokolov toasting Karpo.

  “Engels,” said Rostnikov.

  “Politics,” sighed Sokolov.

  “Economics,” said Karpo.

  “The same thing,” Sokolov came back pouring himself another vodka.

  “We agree,” said Karpo.

  And with that the old woman who had served the meal came in from the kitchen behind Karpo. She looked at the table, saw that there was nothing left to consume, and began to clean up. Rostnikov guessed the woman’s age at eighty, perhaps more. She was small, thin, bent and wearing a heavy black dress. Her sparse gray hair was pinned to the top of her head and her wrinkled face held no expression, but her eyes were a deep blue.

  “So, Comrade,” Sokolov said with a smile, protecting his glass and the vodka bottle from the old woman. “How are you going to proceed?”

  “Spasee’bo,” said Rostnikov to the old woman who nodded and then, to Sokolov, “I will begin in the morning after I’ve read the files Sergeant Famfanoff has brought me. Inspector Karpo will conduct some of the interviews. I will conduct others.”

  “And how long will this take?” asked Sokolov.

  Rostnikov shrugged and refused the offer of a drink. He watched the old woman move slowly in her work and was sure she was listening.

  “You are the wife of the janitor?” Rostnikov asked her as she made a second trip to the table to continue cleaning.

  “Yes,” she said without pausing.

  “I will want to see him,” he said.

  The woman bit her lower lip, nodded and left the room.

  “Is it cold in here?” Sokolov asked. “I’m cold.”

  No one answered.

  They were all wearing sweaters. Rostnikov’s was a solid brown with a gray line, knitted by Sarah. Sokolov’s was a colorful creation with two reindeer facing each other on a field of white. Karpo’s was plain, black and loose.

  “Well,” Sokolov said when the old woman had finished clearing the table and the last of the vodka was gone, “tomorrow we begin.”

  “Tomorrow,” agreed Rostnikov shifting his aching leg.

  And then silence. The silence lasted several minutes before Sokolov reminded Rostnikov to wake him in the morning and excused himself. Rostnikov and Karpo waited till they heard Sokolov walking about in his room above them.

  “He did not ask to see the files,” Karpo observed.

  “I’m sure he has his own copies, had them before we left Moscow,” said Rostnikov.

  “Yes, but he should have asked to see them,” said Karpo. “That was a mistake.”

  Rostnikov shrugged. There were many possible reasons for Sokolov’s failure to ask about the files. Perhaps he wanted to appear slightly naïve. Perhaps he wanted to test Rostnikov, put a doubt in his mind about his observer. Perhaps he wanted to disassociate himself from the public investigation.

  “We will not be able to avoid dealing with the death of the child,” Karpo went on.

  “Ah, there’s the rub,” said Rostnikov.

  “The rub?”

  “It’s Shakespeare,” explained Rostnikov. “We have been ordered to leave the investigation of the child’s death to a Commissar who is supposedly coming after us. Yet Rutkin, whose death we are investigating, was himself investigating the Samsonov girl’s death. It is not unlikely that the two are related.”

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bsp; “It is very likely,” agreed Karpo, his eyes fixed on Rostnikov’s face.

  “Your arm seems to be fine,” said Rostnikov.

  “It is almost normal,” said Karpo.

  “You have something you wish to say, Emil?” Rostnikov said slowly, rising with one hand on the back of the chair and the other on the table.

  “Nothing, Comrade Inspector,” said Karpo.

  “Then tomorrow you begin with the sailors at the weather station,” said Rostnikov. “Do’briy v’e’cher, good night.”

  “Good night,” said Karpo.

  When Inspector Rostnikov had made his way slowly up the stairs, Emil Karpo turned off the light, went to his room and spent the next two hours reading the files Porfiry Petrovich had given him. There was no doubt that this investigation was a test for Rostnikov. While he was searching for a killer, Sokolov would be searching for a mistake and Karpo would be expected to confirm any error the Procurator General’s man observed.

  It would be a dangerous few days for Rostnikov.

  In the back of the People’s Hall of Justice and Solidarity was a room which had been designed as the chamber of the regional Party member who would serve as presiding judge for all disputes and legal injustices in the region. However, a decision had been made before the building was even completed in 1936 that all disputes and legal injustices in and around Tumsk and six other towns north of Igarka would be heard in Agapitovo.

  And so, because no one seemed to care, Sergei Mirasnikov, the thirty-two-year-old town janitor, had moved with his wife into the chamber, where they had continued to live for the next fifty-one years.

  Nominally, the officer in charge of the weather station was the ranking official in Tumsk, but in fact few of the many officers who had been through Tumsk on three-year tours of duty cared much about the running of the town and no one had ever questioned Marasnikov’s right to the chamber or inquired about the work he did.

  The large room had a bed in one corner and odd pieces of unmatched furniture abandoned by various naval officers and others who had been exiled to Tumsk that sat around the room in no particular arrangement.

  Sergei was sitting at the table which they had obtained from an engineer named Bright in 1944. Bright had suddenly left the town accompanied by some men in uniform. Sergei had waited a respectful two years before confiscating Bright’s furniture.

  At the table Sergei slowly ate the two cabbage rolls his wife had withheld from the table of the visitors.

  “What did they say?” he asked her.

  “I’m nearly deaf,” she answered, sitting across from him and drinking her soup like tea from a dark mug.

  “Did they say anything about me?” he asked.

  “No, not when I was in the room. Why would they say anything about you?”

  Her hollow cheeks sucked in and out as she drank. She saw no need to tell him that the heavy one had said he would be talking to Mirasnikov. If she told him, they would have a miserable night in which he would wail and complain about the burden of his life.

  “The one who looks like a tree stump,” he said. “He was looking at me.”

  “Don’t look back,” she said.

  “That’s your advice? Don’t look back? He’s going to come and ask me questions. I know it. He can drag me by the neck, take all this from us, throw us into the forest if he doesn’t like my answers,” he whimpered.

  “Then don’t answer when he asks,” Liana said.

  “Don’t answer, she says,” he mocked with a bitter laugh.

  “Then answer,” she came back.

  “Answer, she says,” he mocked again.

  The old woman looked up at her husband. She could think of no other course of action than to answer or not answer.

  “Then what will you do?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “He doesn’t know that I know anything. How can he know? I’ll do nothing. I’ll play the fool. I’ll lie.”

  “Sounds like a good plan to me,” she said finishing her soup by tilting back the cup. A small trickle of soup went down her chin. Sergei watched it blankly and repeated, “Nothing.”

  Those eyes could not force the secret out of him. He pressed his lips together and felt them rubbing against the few odd teeth which remained in his mouth. He would simply avoid the eyes of the man who was built like a tree stump.

  As the soup trickled down the chin of Liana Mirasnikov, the person responsible for the death of Commissar Illya Rutkin sat in a dark room looking out the window toward the center of Tumsk with a pair of binoculars. The night was cold but clear with the moon above almost full. A wind, not the worst of the past few weeks, sent the snow swirling about the town and between the houses.

  In the house where the three investigators were staying, a single second-floor light remained on. In the window of that second-floor room, the heavy-set inspector sat looking out. Unlike the killer, the inspector did not seem to care if he were seen. It would be simple enough for him to turn out the light and watch in the safety of darkness as the killer was doing. Perhaps he actually wanted to be seen.

  The killer watched as the inspector scanned the square and looked toward the darkened houses. At one point, the inspector’s eyes fixed on the room in which the killer sat, but the killer was safely back, invisible in darkness. Nonetheless, the killer’s breath held for just an instant as killer’s and policeman’s eyes seemed to meet. And then the policeman broke the contact and returned his gaze to the square.

  What was he looking at? What could he see? There was nothing there. No one. No one would be out tonight. There was nowhere to go and the temperature had dropped to almost 45 below zero. And yet the policeman looked. He seemed to be looking at the window of the People’s Hall of Justice and Solidarity, but that window was dark and there was nothing in there to see but old Mirasnikov and his wife. But a second look convinced the killer that Rostnikov was, indeed, watching the window.

  What could he know after only a few hours in Tumsk? The killer watched the policeman for almost two hours and was about to give up for the night when the inspector rose slowly, moved out of sight and then, about twenty seconds later, the lights went out.

  The killer put aside the binoculars and went to bed. Tomorrow promised to be a most challenging day.

  “It’s not my business. I know it’s not my business, but wouldn’t it have made more sense if you sold flowers or worked in one of the restaurants?”

  The question came to Sasha Tkach from the small man named Boris at the moment Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov had first sat down at the window of his second-floor bedroom in Tumsk.

  It was a reasonable question. Karpo had been undercover at the same ice cream stand. It was at least possible that the young men who were mugging people around the Yamarka area would stay away from the place where they had almost been caught. It was also possible that they had seen Karpo at the ice cream stand and would, even if they were stupid enough to return, check anyone new at the stand. It made no sense, but one could not always expect sense from the Procurator’s Office or the MVD, at least no sense that could be explained to an investigator who would simply be given orders.

  The little man in white kept talking but seemed to be reasonably happy.

  “But I must admit that you look more like an ice cream salesman than the other one,” Boris said looking up to examine Tkach between customers. “The other one looked like an embalmer. You want an ice cream?”

  “No,” said Tkach adjusting his white cap and scanning the crowd.

  He had called home to tell Maya that he would be late but she had been out. Instead he had reached his mother, Lydia, who lived with them. Lydia had a hearing problem and a listening problem.

  “Mama,” he had said. “I must work late tonight.”

  “No,” said Lydia.

  “Yes, mama,” he said.

  “Tell them no,” she insisted.

  “I cannot tell them no, mama,” he said with a sigh. “I can only tell them yes.”

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sp; “Your father would have told them no,” she insisted loudly enough so that he was sure Zelach, who was sitting across from him, would have heard if he were not preoccupied with preparing a report.

  Tkach remembered his dead father well enough to know that he would rather have cut out his tongue than disagree with a superior who issued him an order. His father had never even had the nerve to disagree with his own wife.

  “I’m not my father,” Tkach said.

  “Now you talk back,” Lydia shouted.

  “I’m not talking back,” Tkach said looking over at Zelach who still appeared to hear nothing. “I’ve got to work. Tell Maya I’ll be home late.”

  “You’re not going to tell them no?”

  “I am not.”

  “You are a stubborn child,” Lydia shouted.

  “I have not been a child for some time, mama.”

  “Be sure to eat something,” she said. “And don’t stop at a movie before you come home the way you always do.”

  Once, when he was fourteen, Sasha had stopped at a movie before he returned home from school. That one incident had, over the years, turned into “the way you always do.”

  He had hung up depressed and the depression did not leave him as he made his way to the shopping center, found the indoor ice cream stand and informed the little man that he would be working with him.

  “You have children?” Boris asked after they had served a pair of families.

  “A little girl,” said Sasha watching the crowd, hoping for a stroke of luck.

  “Little girls are better,” said Boris.

  Tkach waited for the reasoning or emotion behind this observation but Boris appeared to have none.

  “Your wife ever see the exhibition?” Boris said, hands on his hips.

  “Once, before we were married.”

  “Why not have them come tomorrow? We’ll give them a free ice cream,” said Boris.

  Tkach liked the idea and smiled at Boris.

  “I’ve decided in the last hour you’re good for business,” said Boris. “The women like you. You are coming back? Not the other one.”

  “He’s in Siberia,” said Tkach, looking past a pair of giggling girls who were looking at him and walking toward the ice cream stand.