'Is it Josef?' he asked softly.
'No,' she said. 'On the contrary. He is fine. At least he was last Thursday. I just got a letter from him.'
'Then…?'
'It's me,' she said softly.
'The headaches,' he said.
'They think I might have some kind of growth, a something on the brain,' she said.
'They think,' he said, sitting on the steel chair behind the desk.
'They know,' she said. 'They did a machine thing with my head.'
'I see,' he said.
'It's probably nothing much,' Sarah said.
He imagined her sitting on the dark little bench near the phone, her left hand playing with the loose strands of auburn hair at the nape of her neck. She paused and he said nothing.
'Porfiry, are you still there?' she asked.
'Unfortunately, I am still here and not in Moscow,' he said, his voice dry, very dry.
'Will it be long? Will you be long?' she asked quite matter-of-factly.
'I'll try to get this finished in a few days. I'm doing some things to move it along. Who did you see? What are they going to do?'
'My cousin Alex sent me to a friend of his, another doctor. She did the test. I'm afraid it will cost, Porfiry Petrovich. She is a private doctor, private clinic just outside of Moscow. She'll try to keep it down, but, I'm sorry.'
'We will pay. We have some money,' he said. 'What are we paying for?'
She laughed, a sad variation on her familiar laugh.
'An operation,' she said.
'When?'
'As soon as possible. It can wait three or four days for you to get back. She assures me that I should be fine. It doesn't look as if it is anything to worry about.'
'Allow me the indulgence of worry,' he said.
'I'll join you.'
'I'll try to get Josef back on leave,' Porfiry Petrovich said, looking around the room for something to focus on, finding a small bookcase whose technical volumes were neatly lined up. 'I might be able to…'
'You can't,' she said gently. 'Don't waste your time trying. I know you'd like to.'
'What is the doctor's name? The one who will…'
'Operate? Dr. Yegeneva. Olga Yegeneva. Remember when Josef went with that girl named Olga?'
'Yes.'
'This one is nothing like her, but she is young, a child almost with big round glasses like mine, clear skin and her hair cut short. I like her.'
'Maybe we can make a match,' he said with a smile.
'I think she's married,' Sarah said. 'Who is paying for this call?'
'The navy. Don't worry.'
'What is it like there?'
'Cold, dark. Peaceful on the surface. Boiling beneath. How are you feeling?'
'Surprisingly, not bad. I feared the worst for weeks and hearing it was a terrible relief. You understand?'
'Yes,' he said. The room seemed a bit blurred.
'I don't know how you feel, Porfiry Petrovich. I'm never sure how you feel and I don't think you know how you feel. The irony is that you seem to understand perfectly how everyone else feels but yourself, but that is a bit deep for a phone conversation in the middle of the night from Siberia. The line is very clear.'
'I think they do it by satellite or something,' he said.
Silence again, a slight crackling sound on the phone. For an instant he feared that they would be cut off.
'Sarah,' he said. 'I love you very much.'
'I know, Porfiry Petrovich. It would help if you said it a bit more often.'
'I'll do that.'
'Enough,' she said. 'Get your work done. Find whoever or whatever they sent you to find and get back. I've dusted your weights. Do they have weights for you there?'
'Yes,' he said.
'Good. Stay strong. Goodbye.'
'Goodbye,' he said and she hung up.
He sat holding the phone for a few seconds and then put it down. Galich's vodka or empathy sent a pain through his head, a cold pain as if he had bitten into an icicle. He shuddered and picked up the phone again.
Trial, error, persistence and the use of the fact that he was a policeman got him Olga Yegeneva on the phone within six minutes.
'Dr. Yegeneva?'
'Yes.' She sounded very young.
'This is Inspector Rostnikov. You have seen my wife.'
It sounded awkward, formal, wasn't what he wanted to say at all.
'Yes, Inspector,' she said, perhaps a bit defensively.
'You are going to operate on her. Is that correct?'
'Yes.' She was growing more abrupt. He had reached her at home.
'How serious is the situation?'
'Can you call me back tomorrow, please, at the clinic,' she said coolly.
'I am in Tumsk, Siberia. I don't know if or when I can get a phone or a line tomorrow.'
'I see. It is serious, but it does not appear to be malignant. However, it is in a position where it is causing pressure and even if it is not malignant the longer we wait the more difficult the surgery.'
'Then operate immediately,' he said.
'She wants to wait for you.'
'I cannot get back for at least two days, possibly three or four.'
The doctor paused on the other end just as his wife had a few minutes earlier, and Rostnikov felt that he had to fill the vacuum of time and space but he did not know what to add.
'It can wait a few days, but not many,' she said much more gently than she had been speaking.
'I'll get there as soon as I can,' he said.
'As soon as you can. And Inspector, I really do not think that the danger is great. I cannot deny that some exists but I have done more than forty similar operations and seen quite similar cases. I believe she will be fine.'
'Thank you,' he said. 'Forgive me for calling you at home.'
'Oh, that's all right. I just got home and I was spending a few minutes with my little boy before he went to bed.'
'How old is he?'
'Two years,' she said.
'A good age,' said Rostnikov. 'Goodnight, Doctor.'
'Goodnight, Inspector.'
Rostnikov left the office, thanked the young officer, nodded at a sailor with very short hair and freckles who looked up at him, and went out the door of the weather station and into the night.
The path which the navy plow had made that morning had long been filled by drifting snow. He had to move down the slope slowly, carefully. He was no more than a dozen feet from the door of the house on the square when the first shot was fired. It probably would have torn off the top of his head had he not been stumbling slightly. He had stumbled more than a dozen times coming down the slope. Had he looked up and behind him there was a chance, a slight chance that he would have seen a movement in the shadows near the forest higher up the slope between the wooden houses, but he had no reason to do so.
Even as he rolled to his right and the second shot came tearing up a furrow of snow as if an animal were
