to forget the past.”
The room was not at all what either Elena or Sasha had expected. The neighborhood was nearly a slum and had been for years. Half a block away sat the remains of a building so poorly constructed it had collapsed about four years earlier, killing more than a dozen people.
But this room was immaculate. The walls were clean. Two framed posters of flowers were side by side on one wall. The other walls were bare. The concrete floor was covered by a large, darkly ornate rug, and the chairs and narrow bed in the corner were covered in matching knitted covers of yellow and green. The fourth wall held a full bookcase that stood about six feet high and fourteen feet across. In the corner were two chairs and a table covered with a bright yellow tablecloth. On a polished table in a corner sat the black-and-white television where the laughing man and the movie star were talking.
Both Elena and Sasha saw the low armchair at the window. Elena’s aunt had a chair near their window, where Anna Timofeyeva sat for hours, sometimes the whole day, except to do her prescribed walking and to eat a little. Elena sensed her aunt’s memories in that chair. Sasha imagined his mother, Lydia, in such a chair, but not for long. Lydia had the patience of a fly. Sasha sensed his mother’s fear of loneliness and her ever present impatience. Lydia would not sit still in such a comfortable chair for more than five minutes before she rose and began searching for someone to call, something to do.
“Sit,” said Ludmilla.
“May we turn the television off?” said Elena.
“Yes,” said Ludmilla, going back to her chair at the window.
Sasha anticipated her, stepped ahead, and turned the chair slightly so it could face the two investigators, who sat in the straight-backed wooden chairs. Sasha glanced out of the window at the cemetery. A trio of crows swooped down on a large tombstone that was leaning decidedly to the right.
“A little girl detective,” Ludmilla said with a shake of her head as if she expected no more than madness from the new Russia. “A pretty little girl.”
Elena wasn’t sure whether she should be flattered or insulted.
“The attack,” Elena said.
They had decided that whichever one of them seemed to have the better rapport with the woman would lead the questioning.
Ludmilla now looked at Sasha.
“And a boy detective, too. A boy detective with eyes as old as mine. You know, I used to be a poet. I can show you some of my books, the magazines in which I was published, some posters for readings I did all over the Soviet Union.”
She paused and looked up at the two posters on the wall. Sasha and Elena followed her gaze. Indeed, under the flowers both posters carried printed announcements of appearances and readings. One poster was in French. The other was in Russian.
“I no longer write poetry. And then …”
She trailed off, pulled her distant memories in, and sat up to say with renewed strength, “Tea?”
“No, thank you,” said Elena. “We know it has been a long time, but we have very little information on the attack.”
If it hadn’t been for Karpo’s notes, the information they had found in the general files would never have led them to this woman. There had been only a brief entry. Ludmilla’s name, age, and address. There was also a note on the standard form indicating the location where she was attacked and a description of both the method of attack-knife, sneaking up from behind, hand over the eyes-and the attacker. The attacker’s description was simply “Young man, dark hair, brown eyes, khaki jacket. Attempted to take victim’s purse. She fought him off.”
There were no other entries on the case, and neither Sasha nor Elena thought that there had been any follow-up investigation. It was Karpo’s notes that indicated the victim was a highly regarded poet. It was Karpo who had written in his notebook the address of the apartment building in which they now sat. The official report had the wrong address.
“What is he doing to these women?” asked Ludmilla.
“Violent rape,” said Elena. “So far he hasn’t killed anyone, but …”
“I used to be big and strong,” said the old woman. “Now I am not as weak as I look, but I have lost my need to write what I see and feel.”
“Can you remember the man clearly?”
Ludmilla smiled, rivulets of wrinkles forming around her narrow mouth. There was irony but no mirth in the smile.
“Yes. You want to know what he looked like then and what he looks like now?” she said.
“Now?” asked Tkach. “You’ve seen him recently?”
“I saw him.”
“Did you call the police?” asked Elena.
The smile again.
“Do you think they would care?” she asked. “Do you think they would even write down what I would tell them, an old woman claiming to see the man who attacked her almost ten years ago?”
Both Elena and Sasha knew that the woman was right. In a Moscow gone mad with violence, there was neither time nor inclination to follow up reports about old crimes. There were approximately one hundred thousand policemen in a sprawling city of nine million. Few wanted to be policemen. Even armed with Kalishnikov automatic weapons and wearing bulletproof vests, the police, who worked twelve-or fourteen-hour days, were no match for the new mafias and street gangs who were better armed. The police of Russia, unlike those of America, were permitted to fire on suspects who tried to flee or looked as if they would fire weapons at them. The death rate among criminals was high. Official statistics showed that the Moscow police had fired weapons more than fifteen hundred times in the past year compared to the Los Angeles police, who fired only one hundred fifty times in spite of a much higher rate of violence.
“Where did you see him recently, this man who attacked you?” Elena asked.
Ludmilla looked back at Elena. There was something of herself as a young woman in Elena’s face. The silence was very long.
“Would I have to identify him?”
“Possibly,” said Sasha. “Probably not, if we can find evidence or find out where he lives. Perhaps we could persuade him to confess to one of the recent attacks.”
“You won’t do anything,” Ludmilla said, eyes scanning the small room from bed to bookshelves to television and then back to the two children who were detectives. “And if you talk to him, he might come and find me. He might kill me. I am resigned, not depressed, and I choose to live a while longer.”
“How could he possibly find you? We won’t give him your name,” said Sasha, tossing back his hair.
“The same way you found me,” the old woman said.
“That information is in police records only,” said Sasha.
“Exactly,” said Ludmilla, leaning forward.
There was a chill in the room. It had been there since they had come in. Elena and Sasha had kept their jackets on, but now they were acutely aware of the heavy chill.
“You mean …?” Sasha began.
Ludmilla closed her eyes and nodded.
“He is a policeman?” said Elena.
“He is a policeman,” echoed Ludmilla.
The package had been delivered to Petrovka. It was addressed to Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, Office of Special Investigation. Karpo, Iosef, and Paulinin stood looking down at the package. The four people who worked in the mail room had been told to leave.
After the bomber had contacted Rostnikov, the small army of callers had been put into motion and the warnings had begun. People in the energy industry and others even vaguely connected to or supporting nuclear power had been told “penguin,” and the callers had checked off the names of everyone they reached. Later Karpo and Iosef would go over the report, providing, of course, that the package they were looking at did not contain a bomb that killed them.
Paulinin was a forensic technician. He had a laboratory on the second underground level of Petrovka and
