Rostnikov said nothing. Shatalov, though he acted the fool, had subtly informed the inspector that he knew a great deal about him.
“Well,” said Shatalov. “There were these two cows about to be slaughtered kosher. The first cow asked the other one, ‘What’s cooking?’ The second cow said, ‘Don’t ask.’ ”
Shatalov laughed again. So did the big man with the bad complexion. Rostnikov did not laugh. He stood with some difficulty, pushing back the chair and working his artificial leg under him.
“You want to take the rest of this pizza?” Shatalov said. “We’ve had enough.”
“Why not?” said Rostnikov after a very brief pause. “I do not think my superior would consider half a large mushroom pizza a compromise of my principles.”
Shatalov laughed and pointed at the detective. The restaurant went silent. “I have a last question,” said the Chechin. “Did the Tatar hen dipped in sheep shit call me ‘Irving’?”
“I would prefer not to recall,” said Rostnikov.
“I think I’ll be seeing you soon,” said Shatalov, motioning to the waiting waiter, who hurried over and packaged the remaining half-pizza for the rumpled man with the bad leg who looked like a refrigerator.
And so it was that a weary Rostnikov entered his apartment on Krasikov Street with a treat for two little girls, their grandmother, and Sarah Rostnikov.
“Why are you not in bed?” he asked, handing the box to Laura, the elder.
Both children were wearing nightshirts.
“Grandmother said we could stay up and watch you picking up the heavy things.”
“We like to watch,” said the younger girl.
“I know,” said Rostnikov, taking off his jacket and hanging it on the rack near the front door.
Sarah got up and came to him, touching his face and looking at his eyes.
“Hungry?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Maybe later,” he said. “Have a piece of pizza.” The girls took the prize to their grandmother, who sat at the small table near the window.
“I’ve eaten,” said Sarah.
“Are you all right today?” he asked, very softly, examining her face.
Sarah Rostnikov had undergone surgery to remove a benign growth from her brain more than two years ago. Since the operation, she had periods of dizziness and took pills her cousin, Leon the doctor, gave her. There were days when she could not go to work, and only the fact that Porfiry Petrovich was an important chief inspector saved her job.
“I’m fine,” she said with a smile.
She had gained weight before her operation but had steadily grown more trim since. She looked, with her smooth pale skin and red hair, much as she had looked as a young woman. Illness had not aged her. On the contrary, it had, ironically, made her look younger.
There were no messages, no neighbors with toilet or sink problems, no urgent calls to contact his office.
The girls sat next to each other on the floor eating pizza while Rostnikov changed into his gray sweat suit, turned on a cassette of the American rock group Creedence Clearwater Revival. He had discovered the tape by accident, buying it for next to nothing at an outdoor market. Now it was one of his favorites. If he ever went to America, he would try to meet Ed McBain and John Fogarty, who sang and wrote most of the Creedence Clearwater songs. “Bad Moon Rising” began at the same moment Porfiry Petrovich lay back on the narrow bench he had pulled out from the cabinet against the wall. He lined up his weights and began. The women at the table talked softly, and the two little girls ate and watched the serious ritual that they knew was designed to make one stronger, only Rostnikov was already the strongest man in the world, they were certain. They had concluded some weeks ago that he simply enjoyed doing this, which struck them both as very strange, given the pain and grunting and sweat. Adults were very strange and unpredictable creatures.
Chapter Seven
That night in Moscow was a relatively quiet one.
A former farmer from a collective in Georgia, Anatoli Dudniki, weaved his way drunkenly down the middle of Kadashevskaya Prospekt, announcing to the hurtling taxis and cars that it was his sixty-fifth birthday. One driver, who had taken a few drinks himself, screeched to a halt directly in front of Anatoli, who leaned forward over the hood and laughed.
“Like a movie,” Anatoli said. “My life is like a movie now. You hear that?”
The man in the car opened his window and shouted, “Get out of the street, you drunken old bum, before you get killed.”
“You mean,” said Anatoli, none too steady on his feet, “my head could be run over like a melon, a plum, a cabbage, a grape, something? Squish, skwush?”
The man in the car closed his window and drove on.
Anatoli made it to the curb and sat down. A few cars passed but there were no pedestrians. There was a feeling of rain in the air as there had been all day. There was no moon. Anatoli had learned to recognize the coming of rain from his years on that pitiful collective farm where his now-dead wife had learned two hundred ways to prepare potatoes. Oddly enough, Anatoli still loved potatoes, and when others on the collective had complained at the diet, he had nodded in agreement though he did not agree.
“I love potatoes,” he shouted. “You hear that? I love them to little pieces. I could cry over them. I wish I had two potatoes now.
You know what I would do? I would eat one and give one to someone else. That’s the kind of man I am. That’s the kind of man I am.”
Now Anatoli worked in a bar, which was where he was coming from. He cleaned up after closing-sweeping, mopping, tending to the puke in the bathrooms, the sanitary napkins that blocked the toilets in the women’s room, the stuff that stuck to the floor and to the small bandstand. The pay was poor but he got to work alone and drink as much as he wanted to when he finished his cleanup each night. The management never checked the stock. Anatoli drank only the best.
The alcohol compensated for the dirty job, and he could, because he came at closing time, avoid the loud music from the small band trying to sound like Americans, and avoid the young people in stupid crazy clothes who did something they called dancing and laughed at nothing.
“They laugh at nothing,” Anatoli, sitting on the curb, said to no one. “At nothing. Not that there is anything to laugh at if you are not rich.”
Anatoli shook his head. A little drink would be nice, but Anatoli knew better than to ever remove a bottle from the Albuquerque Bar. And so he sat, shoulders down, a huge burp and sigh escaping from him. He should go home, crawl into the narrow bed in the closet in his daughter and son-in-law’s apartment, but he wasn’t quite sure where the apartment was. Things seemed to be turned this way and that tonight. It had always been difficult for Anatoli, but since the revolution had ended and the street names had been changed, it had become worse.
He shifted his right foot, which was growing stiff, and kicked something hard, something in the street next to the curb. The streetlights were dim so Anatoli leaned over to look at the object.
“What’s this? What’s this?” he said, reaching over and picking up the object. “A gun. A weapon. A thing that shoots.”
He held the gun in his hand. It was heavy. He had no idea what kind of gun it was or even, with certainty, that it was real.
“I found a
Anatoli looked at the black pistol in his hand and held it out.
He had never held a gun in his hand. He pulled the trigger. The gun fired and sent him backward. He hit his head on the sidewalk and sat up quickly, at least as quickly as he could with the aid of gawky elbows and arthritic fingers.
He looked across the street. The gun had made a loud noise and the breaking of glass in a window across the
