hospital.
That had been several hours ago. At Petrovka, Avrum asked to see Rostnikov. The young uniformed man at the guard cage looked at him with less than respect when he said his name was Rabbi Belinsky. The guard made a call and apparently got Zelach, who told the guard to let the rabbi in.
A second guard, who was supposed to be outside the cage, arms at the ready, had come into the cage to warm up a bit, though it was not particularly warm there. The second guard, who looked younger than the first, stepped out and pointed toward the entrance of the U-shaped building. The courtyard was a white rolling garden of snow hills. A wind, chill and whistling low, swirled around the U, sending up puffs of snow.
The lobby of Petrovka was dark. There was a desk inside with another uniformed man. This man was older than the guards and wore a brown uniform and no hat. His head was practically shaved at the sides, and his short brown hair was brushed back. Behind him stood a uniformed guard carrying Kalishnikov automatic weapons. Belinsky recognized the guns. He had seen them in the hands of the PLO, Syrians, Lebanese. Uzis against Kalishnikovs. Belinsky told himself that was another place and time. This was a new Russia. Another armed guard stood at a stairway nearby.
All three armed guards looked at Belinsky, though they pretended not to. Four people came down the stairs arguing. All were in their forties or fifties; only one wore a uniform. It was a military uniform. The military man was doing all the talking. Emphatic, certain, loud, confident, he spoke slowly while the others listened with respect.
“Yulia Piskovaya,” said the military man in disgust. “We bring the case against Yulia Piskovaya. She spends eleven years as a court stenographer and then, suddenly, she’s a judge. How do you talk to someone like that?”
“She’ll find him guilty,” one of the other men said wearily. “She finds everyone guilty. Don’t worry, Constantin.”
“I don’t like dealing with fools,” the older, disgusted man said.
They passed and Avrum turned his attention back to the man with short hair behind the desk.
“Someone will be down for you,” said the man, writing in the ledger before him. “Belinsky, David.”
“Avrum,” the rabbi corrected.
“Abe-ra-ham,” the guard strung out flatly, but making clear what he thought of the Jewish name. “To see Inspector Rostnikov. He is expecting you?”
“He will not be surprised,” said Belinsky, feeling dizzy but not showing it.
The man grunted, examined the rabbi, and went back to his book, pretending to work.
Akardy Zelach was there soon after, awkwardly greeting Belinsky and just as awkwardly asking if it was all right to walk up since there was a problem with the elevators. He didn’t add that there was always a problem with the elevators.
Though it became an ordeal, Belinsky kept pace with the detective, who fortunately did not move quickly. Then they were in the hallway, and Zelach was fetching a chair and asking him if he wanted some coffee. Belinsky declined and Zelach hesitated for a moment, unsure of what he should do next, watch the visitor or go back to his desk. He knew better than to discuss what little he knew of the murders with the rabbi. All clergymen made Zelach uncomfortable. His father, who died when Akardy was a boy, had hated all religions but his own. He was a loyal and unthinking Communist policeman who believed Stalin was a god to be worshiped. Zelach’s father saved his greatest venom for the Jews, and his mother made it clear, through her silence, that she agreed with her husband. She had feared his rages and did her best to agree with his frequent and fervent lectures on everything from collective farming to Jews. Gradually, because her husband was smarter than she, she came to share his prejudices, though she’d had none when she had married.
Even before the Soviet Union ended and the Communists fell into disgrace, Zelach’s mother had returned to the Russian Orthodox Church and had told her son that his father had been right about most things, except Stalin: He was no god, but a mass murderer. Years later Akardy, who admittedly was slow, was just beginning to reconcile the differences between his dead father and his living mother and what he had learned of tolerance from Rostnikov and his coworkers in the Office of Special Investigation.
Zelach disappeared across the hall.
The blow to his neck had been the worst, Belinsky decided as he sat waiting. His neck was sore to the touch, and it had throbbed when he was helping the truck driver. The cut on his chest was certainly worthy of a long line of stitches. There were a few other lesser injuries, and there was a possibility that the small finger on his right hand was broken. He had packed it in snow, taped it, and taken some codeine pills that he had stored in a drawer in his small room. The wound on his chest he had treated by a thorough cleaning with soap and water and then stinging peroxide. The wound appeared to be clean. He had taped it neatly, expertly, probably better than would have been done in a Russian hospital. He would bear a scar, but that did not bother him. It would join the other scars both inside and outside his firm body. The tape had probably loosened a bit from the hour or so of moving metal and parts from the truck, but it would hold till he could re-dress it. It was his neck that troubled him most. Turning it was painful. The man had hit him hard but didn’t know what he was doing. If Avrum had delivered such a blow, he would have done it correctly, and his opponent would be dead.
What had happened was curious. So curious that Avrum had lain awake most of the night waiting for the dawn thinking about the event, doing his best to ignore his pain.
Avrum had kept walking toward the two young men in front of him. Before he had reached them, the two stood together to block the sidewalk and the one on the right said, “Jew, if you live through this night, you are to take yourself and the rest of your filth out of Moscow. You are to sell your church to anyone foolish enough to buy it. We will probably let you live so you can do this, but we can’t guarantee it.”
Belinsky stopped about five feet before them, sensing the man coming from behind, moving slowly. The young man before him was talking loudly and rapidly to cover the approach of the assailant behind, who tried not to make sounds in the snow.
Belinsky stood, listening both to the young man and to the slight sound behind him. He watched the eyes of the man who wasn’t talking. It was dark but there was enough light to see the man’s eyes. Both young men wore scarves around their faces like masks, an indication to Belinsky that they might seriously be considering letting him live, but unable to identify his attackers. Even as he spun and squatted, he wondered why he wasn’t dead. Why he hadn’t been shot like the others.
The man behind Belinsky was big, bigger than the other two, and older. Belinsky plunged his right fist into the man’s stomach, but the man didn’t go down. The attacker swung his right fist, catching Avrum in the neck. The pain was swift and electric. The rabbi thought he might pass out, but his life might well depend on staying awake. His second strike at the older man was with the heel of his left hand into the big man’s nose. The nose broke. Belinsky had been weakened by the blow to his neck and had not struck hard enough to drive the broken bones into the attacker’s brain, but he had done enough damage to send the groaning man to his knees.
It had all happened quickly, before the other two, the ones who had blocked his way, could react. They had assumed the smaller rabbi would put up little resistance to Georgi. Georgi was big, strong, and unafraid. Now he lay in the snow holding his hand to his face to slow the flow of blood from his nose. What they saw made them cautious and gave Belinsky an instant in which to turn as the young man who had spoken, Yevgeny Tutsolov, struck out with a slash of his knife. The cut had gone through Belinsky’s coat and shirt and across his chest.
Belinsky felt a sudden chill race along his fresh wound. He kicked out at the kneecap of the man who had slashed him. The blow was high. The kneecap did not break, but the man staggered back with a scream of pain. That left the silent man standing before the rabbi, trembling with fright, a pistol in his hand. Belinsky could see in the man’s eyes that he was going to shoot, but the man had made a mistake. He was no more than two feet away. Avrum stepped swiftly to his right and with a chop brought his right hand down on Leonid Sharvotz’s wrist. Leonid let out a gasp and dropped the gun in a knee-high bank of snow.
A first-floor light went on in the building next to which they were fighting. A woman’s face appeared, squinting at the window, wiping away a small circle of frost so that she could see what was going on. The three men fled in different directions. The one he had kicked above the knee hopped rather than ran. Belinsky could have caught him, but the rabbi had no idea of how serious his chest wound might be, how much blood he had lost. The one whose nose he had broken was far down the street, and Avrum could see a trail of blood in the light from the woman’s window. His eyes turned to hers, and the woman backed away quickly and turned off her light.
Avrum went to the snowbank where the gun had fallen, picked up a handful of snow, and pressed it through
