credit for the swift action in finding the murderer of a highly respected Moscow police officer.”
“You are not going to shoot.”
“I am not going to shoot you, Porfiry Petrovich, but neither am I putting my gun away. I’ll go back and tell the colonel that you are considering his offer, that you need time. Meanwhile, Porfiry Petrovich, either reconsider or protect yourself.”
“Thank you,” said Rostnikov.
“Just between us, Porfiry Petrovich,” whispered Klamkin, “I like you and I do not like Lunacharski, but …”
“Survival,” said Rostnikov.
“Survival,” agreed Klamkin. As he reached to open the door his Walther was still trained on Rostnikov.
When Klamkin was gone, Rostnikov locked the door. It wasn’t a bad door. He had reinforced it himself, but he knew that no door, not even one of steel, could withstand the technology that the KGB had developed.
In the morning he would decide what to do. The world had changed, but in many ways it had not changed at all. For the world to change truly, people had to change, and that was too much to expect.
When he climbed carefully back into bed, Sarah stirred and stopped snoring. “Were you talking to someone, Porfiry?” she asked sleepily.
“It was the television,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Sleep now,” she said, reaching out for him. “You need your sleep.”
He thought of Galina Panishkoya, seated on that stool, the barrel of a pistol pointed at the head of a frightened shopgirl. He thought about the woman’s grandchildren. “Sarah,” he whispered.
“Yes.”
“There are two little girls who may need someplace to stay.”
“Yes.”
“Maybe we can take them in for a little while.”
“Maybe. We’ll talk about it in the morning,” she said.
He took Sarah gently in his arms as he had at some point each night for almost forty years. He lay on his back, and she rested her head on his right arm and curled up against him. She liked his warmth and purred gently. He liked the coolness of her feet and fingertips.
Then it came to him. Clear and complete. He remembered the apartment he had lived in when he was a child, remembered the sofa with the wooden legs and the spring that hit his back if he moved to the left, remembered the chairs, the windows, the table, the radio with the chip of plastic missing in the front near the dials, remembered even the pattern on the worn-out rug his grandfather had given them and his shoe box filled with lead soldiers. And he remembered quite vividly the faces of his father and mother.
He remembered, and a moment later Rostnikov was asleep.
