Blood and Rubles

“I made the soup,” Lydia said, looking at the bowl from which her son was drinking.

“Perfect,” Sasha said.

Lydia talked. Sasha and Maya listened. When he was finished eating, Maya cleared the table. Lydia was on to one of her favorite subjects-Boris Yeltsin and his stooges who had succeeded in making things much worse instead of even a little better.

“I’m not saying I agree with Zhirinovsky,” she said. “But he has a point. And Yeltsin is a drunk who doesn’t know what he’s doing. If it weren’t for the Americans and their money, Yeltsin wouldn’t be wearing those pressed suits and designer ties. You know where he would be?”

“No,” said Sasha.

“In a little apartment with a big bottle,” Lydia said triumphantly.

Sasha had argued with such observations before. This time he nodded and yawned.

“That’s not a real yawn,” his mother said. “That’s a yawn that says, ‘Mother, go to bed.’ Fine. I have books. It’s early, but I have books. You haven’t asked me how I feel today.”

“How do you feel today?”

“Toot bahlyeet, a little pain right here,” she said, pointing to her stomach, “and a touch of pahnohs.”

Sasha did not smile.

“A good reason to get into bed and get some rest,” Sasha said, reaching over to touch his mother’s thin arm. She put her hand on top of his and smiled.

After a shower and a shave, Sasha emerged in an oversized white American T-shirt that had a crude cartoon of a yellow-haired boy and words that Maya had told him meant “Don’t Have a Cow.”

The humor and meaning had always escaped Lydia, who finally retired to the bedroom with a thick paper- covered book. Maya was already in bed. She wore a blue and white long-sleeved nightgown tied at the neck. When the bedroom door was closed, she slipped out of her nightgown and let him see and touch her. Then she reached over and turned off the lights. They made love to the sound of Lydia screeching a lullaby in the shower.

“Romantic,” Sasha whispered.

“Funny,” she whispered back.

He rolled her over onto her stomach and climbed gently on top of her from behind.

“All right?” he asked.

She lifted her buttocks and rose to her knees. In the shower Lydia squealed, “Never any soap in this house.”

Emil Karpo sat at his desk eating a sandwich he had purchased at a stand near the Belorussia train station. The bread slices were thin, the pink and white sheet that passed for ham was even thinner, and there was barely the hint of butter. A bottle of water stood next to the sandwich, which lay on a sheet of paper.

Karpo stopped in his review of his notes from time to time to take a bite of sandwich and a drink of water. It was Thursday night, the night he would normally be with Mathilde. He continued his search. There were Igor Kuzens listed in the directory, and the MVD computer system had come up with a probable Igor Kuzen, a medicine hijacker, but he was in prison. The name had touched a memory in Karpo. He had seen it somewhere, written it somewhere, and now he was going methodically through his cross-index in search of a reference. All names listed in his books of notes were cross-indexed.

He couldn’t find it.

Karpo sat back to finish his sandwich. There was a table lamp before him and a standing lamp in the corner. Mathilde had placed a painting of some people having a picnic on one wall, a painting of a huge red flower on another. She had found a patterned blanket for his cot and was on the verge of convincing him to buy a real bed. She had brought life to Emil Karpo. Communism had been his meaning, but Mathilde had brought life. Now she was dead. A stray bullet from an automatic weapon. The cross fire between two gangs fighting over what? Territory? Nuclear weapons?

Emil Karpo tried to summon anger, but he couldn’t. It was an emotion he bore little of when he was a child and none when he became an adult. He was determined, relentless. He could feel regret at the enormous waste of human life he saw-a murdered child, a woman raped and left for dead, a young man with a meat hook through his body. He had seen this and much more, and it had made him determined to find whoever committed such atrocities.

Now Mathilde was dead and he wanted to feel different. It was Thursday. He wanted to feel angry, but all he could feel was empty. He had lost everything, everything but his work, and he was even beginning to wonder what the point was to that.

“Spelling,” he said aloud, flipping through the index volume where each entry was clearly printed in his own precise hand. He was now going through the Ts, and that was where he found it. Igor Tuzen. A single reference. July 1986. Questioned in relation to the beating and death of a woman who lived in the apartment next to his. The man had identified himself as a physicist. He’d claimed not to have heard the sound of a struggle on the night of the murder even though he had been home all night. The walls were not thick and the woman’s struggle had been fierce. Tuzen maintained that he had been completely absorbed in his work and that furthermore a hockey game had been blaring on his television. Description of Igor Tuzen: age forty, height approximately five feet eight inches, weight 155 pounds. Thick dark brown hair and a pink, youthful face. Glasses with thick lenses. No nervousness. No signs of regret at the murder of his neighbor. No fear. Cooperative. Sorry that he couldn’t help. Wore a smile all the time as if either the world constantly amused him or he were on the verge of idiocy.

Karpo noted the man’s phone number and dialed. The person who answered said no one named Kuzen lived there. Karpo dialed the home of Paulinin. There was no answer. He called Paulinin’s laboratory on the second lower level of Petrovka.

“What?” Paulinin answered.

“Karpo.”

“I have no new information for you,” said Paulinin. “What I have is a new corpse, a Gypsy woman, no obvious means of death. I have a theory.”

“Do you know a physicist named Igor Kuzen?”

“Kuzen? Igor Kuzen.” Long pause, then, “Yes, I’ll find it. Igor Kuzen. Not a physicist. Science training. Wrote a few articles back five, ten years ago, discredited nonsense about the effects of nuclear explosions on plant life, changes in gene patterns, acquired characteristics that could be passed on. He was not completely wrong, just completely ignorant. I might be able to find the articles if you can wait.”

“What happened to Kuzen?” Karpo asked.

“Went to work for a foreign pharmaceutical company,” said Paulinin. “Started in research, moved quickly down to quality control. Last I heard of him.”

“The foreign company?”

“Czech company. Jansco Pharmaceuticals. They make a poor brand of American Prozac. They call it Prinsco. Sells like mad now that everyone thinks he is mad. Can I get back to my corpse?”

“Thank you,” said Karpo.

“You have a night open for dinner perhaps?” Paulinin ventured.

“Perhaps,” said Karpo. “We do not eat in your laboratory.”

“Out, wherever you say.”

“Yes,” said Karpo. “When I’ve finished with what I am working on.”

Next he called the office of Jansco Pharmaceuticals just beyond the outer ring road. He got one of those answering machines and a number to call in case of emergency, which he dialed. A tired woman answered. Karpo asked her how he might find Igor Kuzen. She gave the phone to a man.

“What is this emergency that you have to find Kuzen?” the man asked with some irritation.

“Police,” said Karpo.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” the man said. “I fired him more than eight months ago.”

“Why?”

“Passing on formulas to the Chinese.”

“Where does he live?”