A Whisper to the Living (Inspector Rostnikov Mysteries) Read online

  He nodded and smiled, not knowing what to say. He had no gift for words and he knew it. This may have been the reason he was so drawn to those who could create words, poets, novelists, politicians, rock musicians, and rappers. He took the book she held out and he opened it to a place she had marked with a red feather, all that remained of a hat she had worn once almost thirty years ago.

  Zelach read the poem by Anna Akhmatova she had marked.

  He loved these three things.

  White peacocks, evening songs,

  And worn-out maps of America.

  No crying of children,

  No raspberry tea,

  No women’s hysterics.

  I was married to him.

  “The tea is good,” she said, patting his hand.

  “I’m glad.”

  “Have you finished yours?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Let me look at your leaves.”

  She took his cup and held it at a slight angle to catch maximum light from the bedside lamp. She looked at it long, perhaps a full minute.

  “What do you see?”

  Both mother and son knew they were endowed with certain connections to thoughts and events that others did not have. These visions, feelings, were not controlled by intent. They just came. Akardy Zelach knew his mother was not reading the leaves but looking to them to give her a flash of insight. She and her son had no great intellect, but they did have the insight.

  Akardy’s mother felt the shudder of connection and put down the cup.

  “What did you see?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Sometimes there is nothing. Another poem please.”

  He obliged and she lay back with closed eyes, listening and wondering about the shadowy specter she had just seen. The vision was too dark to really see, but the dread, the certainty of death that clung to her son now, was evident not in images but in a certainty that pervaded without giving its name.

  In the vision, the creature of dark dreams had been looking at her.

  “You are still happy with the wedding plans?”

  The studio apartment of Iosef Rostnikov was almost dark. The lights were out, but moonlight and street lamps managed to penetrate the drawn shade and thin drapes over the lone window. This was the way Iosef liked it when he slept, just a little light. He retained a dread of total darkness when he slept from an incident during his days in the army. The barracks held memories of a sleepwalker, Private Julian Gorodov, who appeared at Iosef’s bedside babbling. Then there were thieves: Private Ivan Borflovitz had reached gently under Iosef’s pillow looking for his wallet. Iosef had grabbed Borflovitz’s wrist and twisted until the arm of the transgressor strained with a pain that would endure for weeks. Sergeant Naretsev was not so gentle, and Iosef, a light sleeper, awakened to grab him by the neck and whisper a death threat.

  “Yes,” said Elena, who lay at his side.

  Both Elena and Iosef, on their backs atop the blankets, were looking up at the shadows on the ceiling. Elena wore one of Iosef’s gold Tshirts with the words “Lightning in the Woods” in crimson on the front. Lightning in the Woods was one of the plays Iosef had written, produced, directed, and acted in during the years after his military service.

  Iosef, shirtless, wore a pair of gray sweatpants that he had cut off at the knees.

  “We are too old for the nonsense,” she added.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Two days of eating and drinking and warding off drunken people I don’t know.”

  “I agree. So do my mother and father.”

  “And then,” Elena went on, “the ridiculous ritual of my being kidnapped and you having to get past guards to rescue me and find a way out of this apartment. Why can we not just go to our appointment at the marriage office, sign our papers, and have a small party at your parents’ apartment?”

  “I agree with you completely,” he said. “That is what will happen. It will be as you wish. My mother and father and the guests know that.”

  “The point of the wedding is to make us happy, not to make us miserable. And the cost of food and drink …”

  “Do you hear me doing anything but agree with you?” he asked, reaching over to touch her shoulder and move his hand down to her smooth stomach.

  “No,” she said, moving his hand and turning away.

  “I propose we make love one more time and then get up to greet the sun. I will make breakfast.”

  “I accept that proposal,” she said, turning back to face him as she considered whether it was the right time to tell him.

  Iris Templeton entered the darkened tobacco shop not far from the Kremlin. Daniel Volkovich had opened the door with one of several jangling keys taken from his pocket. He had held it open so she could enter in front of him and have to touch him as she moved.

  “You are not afraid,” he said as he closed and locked the door.

  “Should I be?” Iris asked, turning to him.

  There was a single low-wattage lamp on the counter of the shop.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “You do understand why I could not bring you here with your police escort?”

  “Yes.”

  They had paused in the middle of the shop. Iris smelled an almost dizzying array of tobaccos. She had ceased smoking fourteen years ago while her father was dying from what he called “the last whacks of the Marlboro coffin nails.”

  “Good,” Daniel said, and moved to a door at the rear of the small shop.

  The door wasn’t locked. She followed him through it and into another room not much larger than a closet. Still another door, but when this one opened there was a flow, not a rush, of light and the light was a golden haze. Inside the room, eight girls stood or sat talking and smoking. When the door opened, they looked at Daniel and Iris and stopped talking. It was not the first time Daniel had brought a female client. All the girls welcomed female clients. The risks of disease were diminished, and extra money could be earned from voyeurs at peepholes or watching on television monitors. One wealthy customer had a video hookup to all three rooms in the back. The girls knew that the price of such a selection in one’s own home was enormous.

  None of the girls were scantily clad. Most wore skirts and blouses or sweaters that accented their breasts. Others had the lean, slick, boyish look of models.

  “You may talk to whichever one of the girls you wish,” Daniel said. “But I suggest Svetlana. She is the best educated and probably the smartest.”

  He was looking at one of the svelte boyish girls. Svetlana paused in talking to another girl and looked at Iris openly with a smile.

  Daniel motioned for Svetlana to come closer. When she did, her brown eyes were wide and fixed on Iris.

  “Miss Templeton is not a client,” he said. “She is a reporter from England. You will answer her questions and Miss Templeton will compensate you for your time.”

  Svetlana nodded.

  “Room Two,” he said.

  As Svetlana led her through yet another door, Iris looked back at Daniel, who met her gaze and grinned, a dinosauric grin that Iris definitely did not like. She followed the prostitute to a dark hallway and into an unmarked room. The room had a bed, a comfortable chair, a hat rack, and a small painting of an early-nineteenth-century Russian village street on the wall. The yellowish light in the painting was the same as that in the room from which they had come.

  “You’re sure you don’t … ?” the girl asked, touching her red lips.

  “Certain,” Iris said. “No offense.”

  The girl looked puzzled.

  “It means ‘please do not be offended.’ ”

  “Your Russian is quite good. I wish I could speak English that well. I am learning.”

  She motioned to the chair. Iris sat. The girl moved to the bed and sat facing her.

  Iris looked around the room.

  “Yes,” said the girl. “We are being watched and listened to. What do you want to know?”

  Iris took out a sma
ll pad of paper and a click pen.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Are you ever seen by a doctor?”

  “We are all seen every two weeks by a doctor to inspect us for AIDS and other diseases. We urge our clients to wear condoms, and they almost always do if we put it to them correctly. You know, we say, ‘I’m much more stimulated by a man with a condom,’ or some nonsense like that.”

  “Why are you a prostitute?”

  “Money. I am from a very small town where there are few jobs and those that exist pay little and usually require that a girl please a boss or a foreman. I can make in one month here what it would take me a year to make in my town.”

  “Do you plan to stop being a prostitute someday?”

  The girl shrugged.

  “I do not know. I may save enough in three years to go to school here in Moscow and become a hotel manager or a pastry chef.”

  “Do you have any goals while you continue to work as a prostitute?”

  “To move up.”

  The girl lifted her hand gracefully with palm down and wrist bent, reminding Iris of a swan. She made a note of the movement.

  “Up?”

  “We are above the lowest level, the girls who line up in tunnels, maybe twenty of them, in rain, cold, standing all night, hoping to catch the eye of a customer brought by one of the men whose job it is to bring them.”

  “And where … ?” Iris began.

  “Do they take the customers? To reserved rooms in nearby hotels.”

  “So what is ‘up’ for you?”

  “To be one of the women with their own hotel room or one who goes to hotel rooms of visiting businessmen from all over the world. We get double what the tunnel girls get, but the hotel room girls get more than double what we get.”

  “How would you get to be a hotel girl?”

  “By being selected for looks and a certain sophistication and acting ability. Much of what we do is acting.”

  “I would guess that you have a very good chance at going up. Who do you work for?”

  “Daniel.”

  “No, I mean who else? What is this operation called? Who runs it?”

  “That I do not know,” said the girl with an apologetic smile.

  “You are acting now?”

  “Perhaps. I do not know anyone involved but Daniel and the other girls. I do not wish to know. If you talk to any of the other girls, you will get less from them than you have gotten from me.”

  “Do you have regular customers?”

  “A few.”

  “Do you know their names?”

  “Only first names. Never last names. Just Sergei, Boris, Igor, never a Pavel Petrov or—”

  “Pavel Petrov?” Iris jumped in.

  “Random example of the anonymous names of my clients,” Svetlana said, nervously glancing up at an air vent on the wall.

  “I see,” said Iris, displaying nothing and not writing the name in her notebook.

  Pavel Petrov, unless this was a different Pavel Petrov, was a deputy director of Gasprom. Government-owned Gasprom was the largest provider of natural gas in the world, and possibly the largest corporation in the world. It was the economic razor that could be and had been held to the neck of Ukraine and Western Europe, and Pavel Petrov was one of Gasprom’s principal spokesmen, a family man with a loving wife and three beautiful children. Iris knew this because she had interviewed Pavel Petrov the last time she had come to Russia for a story.

  The dropping of Petrov’s name was news on which Iris Templeton might be able to hang a scandal.

  She wanted to place the name into the conversation, though she really had no more questions.

  “Are you fed well?”

  “We are not prisoners,” Svetlana said. “We go out. We pay for our own food.”

  “You have friends among the other girls?”

  “Not really. It does not pay. They move up or down or out quickly. It does not pay to have friends.”

  The door opened and Daniel Volkovich came in smiling.

  “Time is up,” he said. “You have one last question?”

  “No,” said Iris, rising but keeping her eyes on Svetlana, who was looking at Daniel with apprehension.

  “Then we will thank our little Svetlana,” he said. “And perhaps reward her for her valuable time.”

  “How much of a reward?” Iris asked.

  “I would say two hundred euros would be sufficient. You agree, Svetlana?”

  The girl said, “Yes,” and tried to hide the quiver in her voice.

  “If you don’t have—” Daniel began.

  “I have it,” Iris said, opening her purse, putting the notebook inside, and removing her wallet.

  When she finished handing the girl the money, Iris followed Daniel Volkovich toward the door. Daniel paused in the corridor just outside Svetlana’s room.

  “So,” he said. “You have what you need?”

  “I have what you want me to have,” she said.

  “I do not understand.”

  “Svetlana’s a fine actress,” Iris said, facing him.

  “Yes, but I do not understand.”

  “Pavel Petrov,” she said.

  His grin turned into a nervous laugh.

  “How did you know?”

  “She’s too smart to make a mistake like dropping the name of a powerful client. You want me to have Pavel Petrov’s name. Why?”

  The man looked at the painting on the wall for about fifteen seconds and then made a decision and spoke after a sigh.

  “You will write your story and expose Petrov. I will be left out of your story and emerge as the logical choice as his successor.”

  “We use each other,” she said.

  “Precisely, and if you want to seal the enterprise in Room Four just down the hall I will be happy to help you do so.”

  “A tempting offer,” she said, “but I don’t want to be on tape and get blackmailed as we are trying to do to Pavel Petrov.”

  “As you please,” he said, opening the door to where the other prostitutes in the glow of a lamp were looking toward Iris. “I’ll take you to your hotel.”

  “Thank you,” she said as he went from the yellow room filled with the smell of women and perfume through a door into darkness and the pungent smell of tobacco.

  On the drive to her hotel, Daniel did all of the talking. She absorbed little of it. There had been times in her career when she had been awake for three days and there had been others when she had grown tired and in need of sleep after a few hours. She had anticipated a three-day buzz. It had turned into an eight-hour day that rested heavy within her. But still, she had something she wanted to do.

  “Do you still want to pretend to be a prostitute?” he asked as he pulled into the small driveway in front of the Zaray Hotel.

  “No,” she said, reaching for the door handle.

  As pretty as her face was and well tended as her body was, she was no match for any of the girls in that yellow room. The only men who would select her instead of one of them would be either blind or in search of something Iris did not want to consider.

  “Would you like company for a while?” he said.

  “You are persistent,” she said.

  “And charming?”

  “Not really.”

  His grin almost faded, but he held fast to his image.

  “Good night,” he said.

  “Good night,” Iris replied, standing at the open door.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I’ll see,” she said.

  “You would like Pavel Petrov’s phone number?”

  “I have it,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Be careful,” he said.

  She closed the car door and he drove away. In the lobby sat Sasha Tkach. Iris smiled. She had been about to call him on her cell phone.

  “Do not come on the desk,” Emil Karpo commanded gently.

  As soon as he said it, he realized that he had just spoken
to a cat and had some expectation that the animal would understand. Karpo had never addressed an animal before, not that he remembered, and his memory was nearly perfect. He had no pet as a child and none as an adult. He neither liked nor disliked dogs, cats, and domesticated birds. They were simply there.

  The black cat had wandered in through the open window of his one-room apartment on a warm night four months earlier. She, for it was definitely female, had reappeared every week or so for a month and then once every nine or ten days and now almost nightly. In spite of a slightly lame right front leg, the black cat somehow made her way over roofs and down a treacherously steep slate roof to the open window.

  She never made a sound. She simply wandered around the room and came to a halt next to the chair Karpo sat in at his desk. The cat remained there silently, curled up, sometimes looking up at him, sometimes appearing to be asleep. If he approached the cat, her large green eyes would open wide and she would then say something that sounded like nyet. She would also lift her lame leg and paw as if offering it to be shaken.

  There were few places for a cat to go in the room. A bed stood in one corner near the open window. A dresser of unknown antiquity rested against the wall that held the door to the hallway. A wood and wicker wardrobe stood next to the dresser, and on the floor there stood a two-foot-high refrigerator. In the dresser were three pair of slacks, all black, two dress jackets, also black, two pair of black shoes, three white and two black long-sleeve pullover shirts, and a black zipper jacket.

  His clothes, Karpo thought, were as black as the cat that had entered through the window.

  The desk upon which Karpo did not want the cat to tread was one he had built himself. Its two-foot-wide polished wooden top extended from wall to wall, and behind the desk where he could reach over and remove a book was a four-tiered shelf filled with neatly arranged pages. Karpo had notes on every investigation he had been a part of, and each night after finishing whatever work he had for that day he took down his notes and revisited unresolved cases, some fifteen years old. The only things directly on the desk were a computer, a paperweight, a can filled with pens and pencils, and a pile of lined paper, some blank, some with the detective’s current notes.

  The pencils in black, red, and blue were always freshly sharpened; the paperweight was a half sphere in which there was imbedded a deep red beetle.