direction lay a greater danger. Elena Timofeyeva and Sasha Tkach would have to succeed without the money. If they failed, Yaklovev would accept responsibility for the failure. There were more successes than failures. He could weather a few such failures and tolerate the gloating satisfaction of his enemies. While his enemies gloated with self-satisfaction, Igor Yaklovev would find a way to leap ahead of them.
The second case underway was less clear but more likely to come to a satisfying conclusion. Psychic research was an up-and-down issue. With money short, a murder could cause a shock to the system, could be disastrous. Yaklovev did not believe in ghosts, telepathy, telekinesis, or anything else that these scientists were wasting time and money on. On the other hand, he didn’t disbelieve. He simply didn’t care. What he did care about was the good will of the wealthy, very wealthy businessmen who were funding such research and wanted it to continue. Such men had arranged for the case to go to the Office of Special Investigation.
Yaklovev read the preliminary autopsy report and the trail to the shoes. There was nothing in Emil Karpo’s report about the supposed psychic powers of Akardy Zelach.
The investigation, Yaklovev decided, was going well.
He looked at the plain, white-faced clock with large numerals on the wall. He sat at his desk and touched a button that opened the line to the microphone in the outer office. There was no sound, a sign that Rostnikov had made his arrangements with Pankov for the trip.
The Yak flipped the switch off, rose, and moved to the outer office where Pankov sat, suddenly at sweating attention.
“Pankov,” the Yak said. “You know the notebook Chief Inspector Rostnikov carries?”
“The larger one or the one in his pocket?” asked Pankov, to show that he was indeed observant.
“The larger one. You know where the chief inspector keeps it when he goes out?”
“In his drawer, the middle one, or he just leaves it on his desk,” said Pankov, trying mightily not to show any curiosity about the curious questions from the director.
“In five minutes, you will call the chief inspector and tell him he is to go down to Section Seven to sign papers for his trip. You will then call our friend in Section Seven and tell him to keep Inspector Rostnikov busy signing papers for fifteen minutes,” said Yaklovev. “When he is signing papers, I want you to enter the chief inspector’s office, find his notebook, copy every page quickly on our machine, and return the notebook to the exact place where you took it from.”
Pankov wanted to plead, weep, beg. Rostnikov might come back, find him, break him to pieces. And what of the others across the hall? What if the Vampire caught him?
“I understand,” said Pankov.
“Good.”
And with that the Yak went back into his office, leaving Pankov to wonder what might be of interest or importance enough to merit this errand, an errand filled with danger for the frightened assistant.
Had he been able to ask the director, and had the director been willing to give an honest answer, that answer would have been “I don’t know.” But at a deeper level, the real answer the Yak barely acknowledged was “I want to know this man in whom I put so much trust.”
The sky was clear and the day warm as Maya Tkach crossed the Paton Bridge over the Dnieper River. She walked without thinking about where she was going, letting her body take her as it had more than a decade earlier when she had been a very young woman in Kiev.
People, cars, and buses passed her in both directions. She looked neither at them nor at the water to her right. She knew she was heading for the heart of the city, where she would probably wind up on Kreschatik, the busiest street in Kiev, where she would go into the Kreschatik metro station and head for the house of her brother and her sister-in-law.
Young men and old men glanced at the pretty, dark woman who appeared to be lost in thought or grief. Maya was vaguely aware of the glances, as she had been since she was a girl of fifteen.
Her sister-in-law would watch the children and her own till three. If Maya was back by then, there would be no problem. In truth, Rita would probably not grumble even if she were quite late. Rita had welcomed Maya and the children and refrained from commenting on her situation or making negative comments about Sasha, though Maya’s brother had told her at least something of Sasha’s behavior and the reasons for Maya’s coming to Kiev.
Maya had said she was going to an afternoon concert and she had fully intended to do just that, but as she had approached Philharmonia Hall, she knew she could not possibly sit through even a short afternoon concert of light baroque works.
Instead she had wandered.
Maya was the only one who really knew why she had left her husband in Moscow. Yes, he had betrayed her with other women at least five times since their marriage, but she also knew that Sasha was very vulnerable. It was his prolonged depressions that were more responsible for her decision to leave him than were his indiscretions.
Those were the reasons for which he himself was responsible.
Her own responsibility was the real secret. He had entered into his encounters with women impulsively. Maya had entered into her one affair with calculation and determination. She had first told herself that she had begun the affair with the Japanese executive who dealt with her office to get even with Sasha. Then she had told herself that she had done so because she was lonely and beginning to feel unwanted. Then she told herself that she had begun the relationship to escape from the deadening blanket of Sasha’s depression. Finally she had concluded that it was all these things and a simple desire to be desired. It had gone on for a long time, far longer than all of Sasha’s encounters put together.
So, one important reason for her fleeting was a deep sense of guilt.
But something now had to be done, had to be decided. Sasha had called. She had chosen not to carry on a conversation. Lydia Tkach had called. Maya had been polite and let her talk to the children, though the baby knew nothing of what was going on and had no more than a few words to say, prompted by Maya’s mother and sister.
A decision had to be made soon. Maya would have to get work or consider returning to Sasha. If she returned, should she confess? No, she decided, no. She would live with her guilt. But returning to Sasha would require more than her willingness to try. For her sake, for the sake of the children, she would need to truly believe that Sasha would and could change, that he had made a beginning.
Time was running out. Maya had heard quiet conversations in Moscow about Kiev and Chernobyl, which was a short ride away. Kiev, she had been told officially, was a safe city to visit for as much as four months or even longer. Unofficially, she had been told that it would take a century for the entire region to be safe.
Stories had come from her brother about sickness in the family, aunts, uncles, cousins with cancers and other illnesses. All were explained away, but now Maya had seen with her own eyes. More than a decade after the nuclear disaster there were sick people on the streets, sickness that could not simply be explained by heavy smoking and alcoholism that matched that of Russia and caused a death rate equal to that of the poorest African countries.
She had to get her children someplace safer. She knew of no other place but Moscow.
As she crossed Leipzig Street, she willed her husband to call tonight. She willed him to sound genuinely different, not just guilty and contrite. She was no longer really interested in guilt. They had more than enough between them to last a lifetime.
He will call, she thought. Sasha will call. If not tonight, tomorrow. And then what will I say? She really had no idea.
She remembered that there was something she had to do before she went back to the apartment. Something … oh, yes. She would stop at the sweet shop near the Tchaikovsky Conservatory and bring something back for her children and her brother.
“A great chain of being,” Mikhail Stoltz said, sitting in his small office behind his desk. “An action begets another action which begets two reactions and …”
He leaned forward and looked around his office. There were photographs of him with astronauts, cosmonauts, visiting dignitaries, and members of the current government. He had other photographs with now- discredited leaders. They were in a drawer in the desk behind which he sat looking at the man across from him.
