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.'
'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,
