flash.”
“Just time,” said Sasha. “Where did you get enough film for this?”
“A donation when I worked at the theater before I became a policeman,” he said, stepping into the small room. “From a man who described himself as a businessman. Foreign accent. Very good clothes. Came to see me after a show. Shook my hand. Said he liked my work. The next day a carton of film was at the theater with a Japanese camera, a Nikon. I think the man was a gangster. The camera and the film are in my closet.”
“A waste of time,” said Sasha.
“A dead end,” said Elena, looking up at Iosef with a smile.
“A red herring,” said Iosef.
“Doomed to failure,” Elena came back.
“Preposterous idea,” Iosef agreed.
“As much chance as a cooked chicken,” said Elena.
“A completely-” Iosef began, but was interrupted by Sasha, who almost shouted, “All right. We use Iosef’s film. But we are going ahead with my plan.”
“At this point,” said Elena, “we have no choice.”
“And I will add my camera to Elena’s so you can both go out at the same time,” said Iosef.
Sasha shrugged, tossing his head back, closing his eyes. Elena looked up at Iosef more guardedly than she had a moment earlier.
Elena Timofeyeva had come to work exhausted. She had taken three aspirin before she even left home. Iosef was pushing gently for marriage but pushing nonetheless.
Last night in his bed they had talked, held each other and talked. Elena had gotten up at four in the morning. Her hope had been to get into the pull-out bed in her aunt’s living room before her aunt rose. If she hurried, which she had done, she would even have time for up to two and a half hours of sleep.
However, when she had returned to the apartment she shared with Anna Timofeyeva, the former powerful deputy procurator for Moscow who was now an invalid who read and looked out windows, she was not alone in the living room. It was just after dawn and she needed that sleep, but Lydia Tkach, Sasha’s deaf, shrill mother was there, at the table, across from Anna. Anna was drinking her tea and listening. Lydia was ignoring her tea and talking.
Anna was a heavy woman given to gray dresses. She had no children, had never married; and had had only three affairs in her life, all brief, all long ago, before she was her niece’s age. Anna kept herself clean and her rapidly graying hair neatly brushed and cut short. In her aunt, who had suffered two heart attacks, one major, Elena always saw her future self. It depressed her. To marry Iosef and turn into her aunt or even her mother back in Odessa was something she preferred not to contemplate. Elena knew she had a pretty, clear-skinned face and that she was smart and intuitive, better at her job than Sasha, who had been an investigator for almost a decade. But Iosef. He was bright, creative. His mother was still a beauty. His father, Porfiry Petrovich, was no beauty, but he had a confident, resigned power and great loyalty to those who worked with him.
Bakunin, Anna Timofeyeva’s orange cat, leapt off Anna’s lap and ran to Elena, who reached down to stroke her as she greeted her aunt and the rapidly talking visitor.
Anna looked up at her niece and shared an almost undetectable look that said “I am trapped. What can I do?”
“I know I said I would not complain,” said Lydia loudly, holding up her hands. She was as frail in appearance as Anna was solid, though it was Lydia who was by far the more healthy of the pair. “And this is not technically a complaint. I leave it to Elena if this is a complaint. Who should know better than Elena what my son goes through each day? He is my only child.”
“Elena has worked all night,” said Anna. “I think she needs some rest. Elya, go into my bedroom and use my bed. Lydia and I will do our best to be quiet.”
Elena nodded her head in appreciation. Later, when she got up and before she left, she would make herself something to eat. There wasn’t much. Some tea, bread, cheese, a bloodred sausage whose origins it was best not to question. There was also half of a sad, small cabbage.
“Elena,” Lydia said, touching her bird breast with her fist somewhere in the vicinity of where people thought the human heart resided. “Tell me, before you sleep. Honestly. My grandchild, Illya, is ill. My daughter-in-law does not tell me, does not call me. My own son doesn’t call me.”
“He’s been very busy,” Elena said. “We have a serial rapist.”
“Rapists!” Lydia cried. “Murderers. Rapists. Sasha’s been wounded more than once, beaten by car thieves, lunatics. Fine, that is what he wants to do, I can’t stop him. But I should see my grandchildren when I want to. I have nothing to do anymore. No job. I can take care of them. They don’t need day care. You have to pay for day care. And the little one is sick. My daughter-in-law doesn’t like me.”
But Lydia was not abiding by the rules that Anna had instituted when Sasha had approached her. A rift would surely come between Anna and Sasha’s mother. Elena hoped that her aunt could remain calm when she became inflexibly firm.
Elena was sipping her tea and listening to Lydia talk about the reunification of the Soviet Union.
“Belarus first,” she said. “Then Ukraine. My daughter-in-law is from Ukraine. Then the southern states. The Soviet Union will be reborn. A world power. Dangerous criminal gangs with machine guns will be executed. The ruble will rise. Pensions will be worth something again to you and me, Anna Timofeyeva.”
“It will not happen,” said Anna. “Communism is dead. All parties, especially the Communists and extremists, are afraid of thoughts like those you have just expressed. The new Communist Party and the Nationalists are forcing displays, false hopes.”
“You were a Communist,” said Lydia.
“I am still,” said Anna. “I believe in what we did. What I did. It failed not because it was a bankrupt idea, but because of Russian corruption, the weakness and greed of human beings who get even a small fistful of power. I worked with them. I prosecuted them. These new Communists are vultures preying on dead hopes and memories.”
“Emil Karpo says the same thing,” Elena said, slicing off a piece of cabbage that did not taste quite good but wasn’t bad enough to discard. Elena was too hungry. She was on a diet, like the Americans, but it did little. Her problem wasn’t an excess of food. There was no excess of food. Her problem was genetic.
“Emil Karpo is a madman,” Lydia said, folding her arms and looking at the two other women for contradiction.
Neither responded, though from what Elena had said, Anna was convinced that since the end of the Soviet Union and the death in the crossfire of a street battle of Mathilde Verson, Karpo had become suicidal. She had seen many like that, disillusioned, confused. Karpo was a pencil wound tight with twine. He would never actually consider suicide, but he would and had taken chances that might well be considered very dangerous and foolhardy, though Karpo was no fool.
Elena was concerned whenever she was teamed with the Vampire. He didn’t talk very much, even less than when she had first met him, before Mathilde’s death. He remained focused and knew what he was doing. She knew she could learn a great deal from him and she did, but if he was going to risk his life unnecessarily, she did not want to be with him. She didn’t want Iosef with him either, but Iosef seemed to welcome the partnership. They made a strange pair, the straight, gaunt man in black with his black hair brushed straight back from a receding hairline and the brawny, handsome, and usually smiling ex-soldier, playwright, and actor who preferred light colors and worried little about his bushy auburn hair that held just a touch of the red of his mother’s.
Whatever love was, and Elena was not at all sure, she believed she loved Iosef Rostnikov. They had made love. It had been good. He had proposed frequently. She had told him of her experiences, down to the last affair
