The television was on in front of him. The picture was terrible and the show boring, but Yevgeny liked the sound of other human voices when he was alone. He had no great love for humanity as a whole or for his supposed friends in particular, but he did not like to be alone with his own thoughts.
He had killed six people. Five of them had been Jews. He felt no remorse, not even for Igor Mesanovich. Igor was a fool, not because he wanted to get out of the plot but because he wanted the killing of the Jews to stop. He wanted to find another way. Yevgeny was the smartest of the group, the leader. He had decided early that there was no other way. He knew, in fact, that there were certainly other ways, but he couldn’t think of any that made sense, and once he had killed the first two Jews, they really had no choice.
Georgi lived across the way in a building identical to the one Yevgeny and Leonid lived in. They were outside of Moscow in one of the “new” planned apartments near the airport. From the moment the buildings had been completed sometime in the 1950s, they had ceased to be new and had begun crumbling. Shoddy plumbing, heating, insulation, and wiring were more than problems. They were disasters.
Yevgeny was almost thirty. Georgi was almost fifty. He should have been the leader, but he was stupid,
Yevgeny hadn’t taken the money from the dead Jews and Igor because he and the others had decided the killings had to look like anti-Semitic attacks on members of the growing congregation. Leonid and Georgi had no great fondness for Jews, but neither did they have sufficient animosity to kill or even attack them. They were more concerned about survival. Igor had actually grown to like many of the Jews with whom he had dealt as he passed himself off as one of them.
The most immediate problem, however, was that they had not anticipated the young rabbi’s ability not only to defend himself but to attack them when he was cornered. Georgi had suffered a badly broken nose, which had been hastily taped by a nurse Yevgeny had been seeing. The nurse thought they might eventually live together, even consider marrying. Yevgeny had said it was definitely an idea for the near future, when he finished his current business venture. Yevgeny had no plans to marry the woman, who was well built, loaned him money, and was ten years his senior.
After treating the broken nose, the nurse had said that Georgi had almost been killed. If a little more pressure had been put into the blow, broken bone would have penetrated his brain. Yevgeny had said his friend and he had gotten into a fight with some drunken street toughs who had attacked them. The nurse acted as if she accepted the explanation. Yevgeny was handsome, confident, and a pleasure in her bed the infrequent times they wound up there.
Mistakes, problems. Now the Jews would be more determined to stay. They had to be driven out. Perhaps Yevgeny and his friends simply should have murdered the rabbi, but these people were determined. Another rabbi would be sent from Israel, and the next one would probably come with protection.
The wound in his shoulder, which he had treated himself, did not bother Yevgeny, though his arm had been stiff in the morning. The woman at the top of the embankment had been a very poor shot, lucky to even graze his shoulder. But, on the other hand, she might have been lucky enough to kill him.
He was sure that he had hit her with his single shot, but, truth be told, Yevgeny was not a particularly good shot either. This was all new to him. He was a poor laundry worker and a mediocre murderer. His ancestors, he had told Leonid, would have handled this better. His great-great-grandfather and those of Leonid, Georgi, and Igor were trained warriors who had gone to their execution wordlessly, with courage, but that was more than a century ago. With the Revolution, families like theirs had buried their aristocratic heritage and embraced Communism. Some of them even believed in it.
He had to leave for work in an hour. He would do his best to hide the limp he would certainly have. He would give the same excuse to the laundry manager that he had given to his nurse. The manager, a woman, tall, a little older than he with short, straight, dyed blond hair, was always well groomed and handsome if not traditionally pretty. Yevgeny did not quite hate her, but he certainly resented her and her attitude.
If he could get past the problems, and he was determined to do so no matter how many Jews had to be killed, he would no longer need this job. Yevgeny would no longer need Russia.
The idea came to him as a burst of pain shot through his sore leg. A bomb. If murder did not budge these stubborn Jews, the destruction or at least partial destruction of their place of worship would certainly force them to move, at least temporarily. And if a few more Jews died in the process, it wouldn’t hinder Yevgeny and his fellows in attaining their goals.
Yevgeny knew nothing of bombs, but Leonid had studied mechanical engineering. He knew something of such things. They would discuss it tonight. Georgi might be able to help get the materials Leonid would need if Leonid had any idea of how to make a bomb.
The Jews might be determined, but so was Yevgeny. The Jews had their congregation and place of worship to protect. Yevgeny was after much higher stakes.
He took off the now cool wet towel and tested his leg. It hurt. It really hurt. What kind of rabbi were they dealing with?
Yevgeny forced himself to dress in the same slacks and heavy wool shirt he had worn the day before. In five minutes, slowed by pain, he was dressed, hair brushed, teeth brushed, black shoes brushed and polished. He knew it would be agony to pull his far-from-new black galoshes on, but he had only one pair of decent shoes, so he went through the agony, after which he stood panting and biting his lower lip for about fifteen seconds before putting on his coat and hat and turning off the television.
He had killed and had discovered that he had no regrets and no remorse, not even over Igor. Yevgeny knew he could kill again, and he now wanted to, not just for the sake of the plan but to see the rabbi dead. He wanted the confident Jew standing in front of him, knowing he was going to die, and Yevgeny wanted to pull the trigger and watch the man fall.
Yevgeny turned off the television and went to work.
Alexi Monochov had been standing across the street under the marquee of the Rossia Cinema when the two men came out of the Pushkin Square metro station. Alexi had been waiting for them. There was no doubt that they were policemen. They had the air of confidence and determination that such people had even when unwarranted. He could not get a close look, and even with his glasses, he was not able to tell much about them other than one was tall, thin, and dressed in black and the other was younger and stocky, not stocky like Alexi but a solid stocky. Still, Alexi was some distance away, and there was some frost on his glasses, so he may have been imagining things, but he had not imagined that Rostnikov now knew too much and that it was no longer safe to remain at home. Thus, he had prepared the note for the police and had carefully packed his briefcase, which he held in his gloved right hand as he crossed Pushkin Street to get a better look at the two men who entered his apartment building.
Alexi had gotten out of the apartment with only about fifteen minutes to spare. He hadn’t really expected them to come so soon, but fortunately he had taken no chances.
Alexi had adjusted his glasses, plunged one hand in his pocket, firmly grasped the briefcase in his other hand, and looked up at the apartment, guessing when his mother would open the door, when the policemen would discover his workshop, when they would be picking up the note. Would they come running out of the building? Would they make a call or two and then begin a useless search? He didn’t guess. He waited.
For the last few days the ache in his groin had turned to real pain, not searing, screaming pain, but pain. The pain, he had been told, would grow worse. He knew what could be done to slow the process, but a cure or a remission was out of the question. Alexi was dying as his father had died, but he would not go in quiet darkness as his father had.
The policemen were inside for less than fifteen minutes. When they came out, a plastic bag in the hand of the younger, stocky one, they did not hurry. The tall, gaunt one set the pace, steady, serious. Alexi began to walk in their direction on his side of the street. He bumped into an old woman whose head was down against the wind. He did not bother to apologize. His head was down, too, but he was watching the two men and for an instant could
