But since that first encounter in the corridor of the sanitarium, Vasilievich had made the slow and tortured journey each night to the Lermontov Hotel to watch the setting sun, drink tea, and talk. And, much to his surprise, Rostnikov had found himself anticipating these visits and even enjoying Georgi Vasilievich's company.
The talk had been of the past, not the personal past but the professional past, the murders, thefts, their encounters, particularly the Fox-Wolfort investigation in 1971 in which a visiting East German major, who may have been a West German agent, had been found dead in a broom closet of the memorial chapel of the Grenadiers, directly behind KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square. The German had been skewered with a Byzantine cross ripped from the wall.
Vasilievich and Rostnikov had cooperated in finding the prostitute who had done it when the German had attempted to rape her in the broom closet.
Rostnikov had not sought this vacation. In fact, he had fought against it. Too much was going on in Moscow. Citizens had just voted in the first open national election since the Bolsheviks had been soundly beaten in 1917. The Party Congress was coming up. People were going mad on the right and left. Young people were ignoring the law. Jews, even one of Sarah's cousins, Rafael the carpenter, were being singled out, beaten, blamed for the economic change. The lines in stores were longer than they had been since after the war, and the assumed loss of cultural identity was erupting among even the lesser-numbered minorities. There was not less crime but more since the reforms, far more and far more violent. There was no foundation. The law and those who enforced it were no longer a strong kiln but a leaking sieve punctured by the three-pronged pitchfork of perestroika (economic restructuring), glasnost (openness), and demokratizatsiya (democratization). Growing pains, Sarah had suggested, and he had agreed, but he thought it best to be present and in Moscow during the growth.
'But,' the Gray Wolfhound, Colonel Snitkonoy, had said, standing before Rostnikov in his office in Petrovka, the central police building, 'your presence will not change all this. It will be waiting for you when you return.'
The Wolfhound had spoken with his usual great confidence. He was a man buoyed by recent victory. Chance, Rostnikov, and his own instinct for survival had strengthened his political position over the past several months. Colonel Snitkonoy was a tall, slender man with a magnificent mane of silver hair. His brown uniform was always perfectly pressed. His three ribbons of honor, neatly aligned on his chest, were just right in color and number. On formal occasions and for appropriate foreign visitors, whom he frequently escorted, the colonel could trot out an array of medals with the brightness of a small star and the weight of an immodest planet. He had been, at the moment he ordered Rostnikov on vacation, impressive as he strode, hands clasped behind his back.
When he had first been transferred to the Wolfhound's command, Rostnikov had taken the man for a fool, and perhaps the colonel was a fool of sorts, but he was a fool with a sense of survival, a fool who rewarded loyalty and appreciated it, a fool who was no fool at all.
Rostnikov had begun to speak in protest that morning less than two weeks before, but the colonel had raised his right hand to stop him.
'Your wife could benefit from the sanitaria, the sea water,' he said. 'How many sanitaria are there in Yalta?'
The only other person in the room was the Wolfhound's assistant, Pankov, who correctly assumed the question was for him.
'Forty or-' Pankov began, and was interrupted by the Wolfhound.
'' Yalta is the Venice of the Soviet Union,'' the Wolfhound had whispered, as if it were a secret to be shared only by the three men in the room. Rostnikov did not respond. Pankov nodded in agreement.
Pankov, a near dwarf of a man who was widely believed to hold his job because he made such a perfect contrast to the colonel, was a perspirer, a rumpled bumbler whose few remaining strands of rapidly graying hair refused to obey grease or brush.
'Gorky lived in Yalta, Chekhov, too,' the Wolfhound had said.
Rostnikov, of course, knew this but said nothing. Pankov had looked mildly surprised at this information.
'You can visit his house, the house where Chekhov wrote The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard,' the Wolfhound went on. 'Pankov will make the arrangements for everything. This is an order.'
And so it was. And so Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov had found himself standing on the hill on which the Lermontov Hotel was built, folding chair under one arm, American paperback under the other, feeling more tired than he had after many a long night of interrogating a murderer or waiting in a car for the appearance of a car thief or burglar.
From the moment of their arrival and from nowhere and everywhere the waiter Anton had appeared. Anton seemed to be from another time, another planet.
Apparently he did not understand that Soviet waiters and hotel personnel did not cater to the needs of their customers. The Soviet way was to be wary, to wait to be asked and then to treat any request as an imposition. Anton, however, was not in the least bit surly. He had, he said, lived his entire life, except for his military duty, in Yalta. He, and his father before him, had been named for Anton Chekhov, and both had attended School Number 5, which had previously been the Yalta Gymnasium for Girls, the gymnasium, Anton said proudly, where the great Chekhov had been on the board of trustees.
'My grandfather was a waiter in this hotel, as was my father. My grandfather had the honor of serving Chekhov himself on many occasions. Chekhov was very fond of fish. Would you like some help with your chair, Comrade Rostnikov?' he asked with a very small smile that showed reasonably even though not large teeth.
Anton was a short man with wire-rim glasses and short brown hair. He was, at best, wiry; at worst, scrawny.
'I'm fine, Anton,' said Rostnikov.
'Back for lunch at one?' Anton asked as Rostnikov started down the slope for another morning at the beach while Sarah rested.
'At one,' Rostnikov agreed.
'Drinks?' asked Anton, whose voice was a bit farther away as Rostnikov came to the bottom of the slope. He was sure Anton's hands were clasped together.
' 'Ask Mrs. Rostnikov when she gets up,'' Rostnikov called over his shoulder.
The sky threatened rain, but Rostnikov trudged on. Families hurried past him toward the beach, their beach shoes clapping on the path. Rostnikov limped resolutely, folding chair under his arm, anxious to finish his book. Ten minutes later, he positioned himself in more or less his usual spot and was pleased to see a reasonably handsome woman in a red swimsuit lying on a blanket not more than twenty yards away. Thunder rumbled, but the clouds were not dark enough to clear the beach or make Rostnikov think of an early return. Sarah would be sleeping, resting. If it rained, it would rain, and he would get wet as he walked to one of the cafes near the beach, where he could eat an English biscuit and continue reading while having an overpriced cup of coffee or tea.
He was comfortable in his chair, absorbed in his book, letting conversation and the general wave of water and voices wash around him when a single word caught his attention.
'Vasilievich,' came a man's voice.
Rostnikov looked up. A man nearby, a bony old man with a little gray beard and a potbelly, had said the word to a lumpy woman sitting beside him on a blanket.
Rostnikov rose, his leg already a bit stiff, tucked the book under his arm, and moved to the bony man.
'Pardon me,' he said. 'What did you say about Vasilievich? Who…?'
'Yah n'e poneema'yoo vahs,' the man said slowly. 'I don't understand. We are Hungarians. Gavaree't'e pazha-ha 'Ista, me 'dlenn 'eye. Please speak a little more slowly.'
'You speak English?'
'A little,' the bony man said.
'Vasilievich. You said something about someone named Vasilievich,' Rostnikov said in English.
'Correct,' the man said. The woman next to the man turned and shaded her eyes with her right hand to look up at Rostnikov. 'Someone with the name Vasilievich in another room in the hall from my wife's father at the sanitarium. He died during the night. Not her father. Vasilievich.'
'Georgi Vasilievich?'
'Yes,' said the bony man. 'You know… knew him? They said it was heart. Man had a bad heart. Died in a chair outside the sanitarium. Must have been there a long time. Found by a Mrs. Yemelova.'
'Yemelyanova,' the woman corrected him.
'Yes, correct,' said the bony man. 'She found him. You knew him?'
