Lashkovich’s locker was at the beginning of one row. Kolya opened it with his master key. It was empty.
“How did Lashkovich dress when he came up here?”
“Dress? Clothes?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve only seen him up here a few times,” said Kolya. “The night manager would know.”
“No one is to touch this locker, come in this room, come through your doors.”
“But our guests are. .”
“No one,” Karpo repeated. “Not you. Not Swartz. Not the cleaning lady. No one.”
“No one,” Kolya said in resignation, dreading the rest of the day.
“The workout room,” the policeman said, facing Kolya.
“Through that door,” said Kolya, pointing to a door at the far end of the locker room.
“Inform me as soon as the night manager and the cleaning woman who was on duty last night arrive,” said Karpo, moving toward the door to the weight room.
“Immediately,” said Kolya.
The policeman entered the weight room, and Kolya quickly escaped to the relative safety of his reception room and the anticipation of angry guests who paid an average of three hundred dollars a night to stay in this hotel, which boasted all the amenities of the finest hotels in the world.
Except today they would not be able to use the health center.
Chapter Five
Elena was sure she was being followed almost as soon as she stepped out of the hotel. The young couple behind her, arm in arm, moved past her, laughing. The woman had long dark hair. The man was slender, equally dark, and handsome. They were poor actors. Their mirth was quite false. Neither one of them looked at her as they passed. And then Elena caught sight of the couple pausing half a block in front of her when she stopped to look in the window of a clothing store. Nothing was certain, however, till she had gone four more blocks, meandering through the streets, catching glimpses of the couple who now kept their distance and no longer smiled.
The relative incompetence of the couple did not keep Elena from remaining alert. She had planned to see her aunt, Anna Timofeyeva. Normally, she would not have considered such a visit while undercover, but her aunt had shown small signs of distress over the past few weeks, including one moment at dinner when Anna gasped, started to reach for her chest, and brought herself under control, saying, “Gas.”
Anna Timofeyeva had been a Soviet procurator, a very successful, workaholic procurator whose chief investigator had been Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. A heart attack had ended Anna’s career and forced her into one- bedroom retirement, looking into a cement courtyard watching mothers and small children, waiting for visits, which she dreaded, from Lydia Tkach. Anna would never speak up if she was not feeling well. Elena knew her aunt would prefer to die in the chair at the window with her cat, Baku, in her lap than admit weakness.
But Elena was worried and had decided that she had to talk to her aunt, had to convince her to see a doctor, preferably Sarah Rostnikov’s cousin, Leon.
Had she told Porfiry Petrovich, he would have understood, probably would have volunteered to visit Anna himself, though he would certainly have little hope of success. But to tell Rostnikov would have put him in an awkward position. Elena was supposed to be undercover, contacts made in only one way and only if necessary. If Porfiry Petrovich sanctioned her visit home and did not tell the Yak, it was possible that something could go wrong and Rostnikov’s position as chief investigator, not to mention Elena’s safety, would be compromised.
No, Elena had decided to do it on her own and to be very careful. Sasha was back in the hotel waiting to be picked up that evening by Boris Osipov; taken to the small arena where he was to bring Tchaikovsky to do battle against one of the dogs that Illya and Boris’s boss had chosen. Sasha suspected that the dog Tchaikovsky would be fighting would be a particularly vicious one with an excellent survival record.
Elena walked down Kalinin Street to Vorovsky Street and paused in front of the small old Church of St. Simon the Stylite. The church, during the generations of Soviet Communism, had been the exhibition hall of the All-Russian Society for the Preservation of Nature. She didn’t know what it was used for now. She looked at her watch and caught a glimpse of the couple standing in the doorway of one of the twenty-four-story blocks of flats ahead.
There were five blocks of flats on her right, built in the 1960s, each containing 280 apartments.
Elena looked impatiently at her watch and moved to the jewelry shop, past the couple who had entered the building before which they had stood. They did not appear again till she entered the pedestrian underpass in front of the Moscow Book House. They continued to remain far behind, but not so far that they would lose sight of her.
Elena had walked slowly, going up the stairs at the end of the tunnel, moving past a sudden rush of a dozen or so people coming down. As soon as she reached the broad sidewalk, she did her best to act as if she had forgotten something. Turning, she started back across the street, dodging cars, moving quickly. She managed to enter the bookshop and close the door in time to look back and see the couple emerge from the tunnel on the other side of the street. Elena stood back as the couple looked in all directions, had a quick discussion, and headed for the nearest shop.
As soon as they disappeared inside, Elena moved back to the street and went quickly to her left, away from them. The couple was now lost behind her, searching shops and cafes.
But Elena knew that one of two things had happened. Either the people who wanted her watched were incompetent, or she was meant to spot the couple, lose them, and feel free. That would mean someone far more able was somewhere nearby watching her.
She decided on caution and was rewarded when she turned her head suddenly and found her eyes meeting those of a rotund man with pink cheeks, carrying an American shopping bag. The bag was black. So were the man’s eyes, even at a distance of a dozen paces.
The man was good. He did not look away. Instead, he walked directly up to Elena and said, “You dropped this.” He held up the black shopping bag. A white art-deco figure of a woman decorated the back.
“No,” she said politely.
“No?” he said, apparently puzzled. “I could have sworn. .”
“
“Two honest people,” the round man said with a smile. “I find a bag and try to return it, and you, who could take it and whatever it contains, reject the offer of that which is not yours. It seems to be from a very expensive shop, too.”
“Your good fortune,” Elena said with a smile of her own, and turned away.
The man was indeed remarkably good, and Elena knew she had a problem. She could lose the man, but that would bring suspicion upon her. Her evasion of the couple, crude though their methods had been, might well raise questions, but to lose this man would have been very dangerous. Elena abandoned the idea of visiting her aunt and headed slowly back to the hotel, pretending to look in the shop windows.
The rotund man moved slowly, smiling, having a good idea now that she had been frightened into heading back to the hotel. He had watched her elude the incompetent couple. The woman known as Lyuba had been very skillful in her evasion of the couple. It certainly looked like a professional effort. The rotund man, who was Peter Nimitsov’s uncle, continued down the street.
It took Iosef Rostnikov and Zelach only two hours to find Yulia Yalutshkin, the sometime mistress of Yevgeny Pleshkov, the missing member of parliament.
The soccer coach, Oleg Kisolev, had told them where they might find her at midnight.
The computer center at Petrovka was desperately in need of up-dating, new programs and people to feed data into the system’s memory, not to mention one full-time technician to service the existing system until he or she went mad.
Iosef was well aware that there were stacks of arrest-and-questioning reports that had never been fed in.
