Iosef looked at the paperback. His English was not as good as his father’s but it was adequate.
“No.”
“Here, try it,” said Rostnikov.
“You are reading it.”
“I have read it. Besides, I have work to do.”
Iosef was not particularly fond of mystery stories, but he had brought nothing with him to read. He accepted the offer, and his father shifted and awkwardly removed his pad of paper from his inner jacket pocket.
Iosef began to read and Porfiry Petrovich began to draw.
There was a mischief in Rostnikov. It had come before. On occasion, it had yielded interesting results for him and others. On other occasions, it had gotten him into trouble. But it was an urge he had trouble resisting.
He got out his mechanical pencil with the eraser, clicked once to make the lead come out just a bit more, and began to draw.
“Boris Adamovskovich, you are under arrest,” said Emil Karpo.
“What?” asked the scientist, looking up, mouth open, at the two unsmiling inspectors.
“On suspicion of murder in the death of Sergei Bolskanov,” Karpo continued.
The office was not large. Adamovskovich rose from behind his desk, computer screen alive with numbers behind him. He looked from Zelach to Karpo with disbelief.
“I did not kill him,” Adamovskovich said with his right hand on his heart.
“There is blood on your shoes, the blood of the victim.”
“On my shoes? Blood? Sergei Bolskanov’s blood? No. No. That isn’t possible. Someone put it there. People here are jealous of my success.”
“We have heard that you were jealous of Bolskanov’s success,” said Karpo flatly.
“No, nonsense … well, maybe a slight bit of envy, but we all … I didn’t kill him. We weren’t even interested in the same research.”
“We shall see,” said’ Karpo. “Please come with us. If we are in error, you will be given a letter of apology.”
“I need to finish what … I am in the middle. I’ll save it and turn off my computer.”
Nothing else was said inside the office. Adamovskovich turned off the computer, looked around, patted his pockets to see if he might be forgetting something, and followed Zelach and Karpo into the bright white corridor.
Nadia Spectorski was the only one in the hall.
“I didn’t do this, Nadia,” Adamovskovich said.
She looked at him and smiled knowingly.
“Someone is making me take the blame,” he said, following Karpo and Zelach.
About halfway down the hall, Nadia called, “Wait. Please. Inspector Zelach, can you give me just half an hour?”
“No,” he said.
“The director has called your director, Yaklovev,” she said. “Director Yaklovev said that you are to cooperate with us, cooperate fully.”
Karpo had stopped and so had the bewildered Adamovskovich. Zelach adjusted his glasses and looked to Karpo for help.
“I have to help take the suspect in,” he said.
“I expect no trouble,” said Karpo. “Stay, then join me at Petrovka.”
Karpo led the scientist down the hall, and Zelach stood facing the diminutive Nadia Spectorski. He wondered if he could possibly outwit her. He very much doubted it.
Kiro-Stovitsk, eighty miles west of St. Petersburg, was little more than a village. It lay in a vast plain of bleak cold winters and summers that were either too dry or too wet. The two hundred and forty people of the town were either potato farmers or made a meager living selling to or working for farmers.
For more than a thousand years, Kiro-Stovitsk had been relatively undisturbed by the outside world. During World War II, the Germans had not bothered with the town or not known it was there. That did not mean that the people of Kiro-Stovitsk had not fought and died. Half of the men, all between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five, had gone off to fight. All but six of the eighty-seven men had died. There was a cemetery a short walk from the edge of town. It was marked by small headstones. Some of the headstones were for those who died in the war, though their bodies were not here below the ground.
Food had always been scarce. The people of Kiro-Stovitsk had lived mainly on their own potatoes and what little they could get for trading those potatoes. Cash was almost nonexistent. It had been a barter economy, even with Alexander Podgorny, who ran the store and the tractor-repair shop behind it. Podgorny, his father before him, and generations before that of the family, had owned the store, which stocked meager supplies of clothing, food, tools, a few items of furniture, and Pepsi-Cola in a large blue cooler. The Russian Orthodox church, the tallest building in the town, a solid structure of red stone built by farmers more than a century ago, had served as the town meeting hall in the years of the revolution. Five years ago, a pair of priests with a small group of servants and a single nun had come to the town to reclaim the church, but the people had no heart for the enterprise. The men, women, and children did not wish to give up their town hall, which had become not only the meeting center but the communal gathering place where people came to gossip, drink tea and coffee, play chess, make plans.
Only a small handful of people had come to the services and none had volunteered to bring the church back to its former state. An attempt was made by the priests and the nun to gather donations to buy icons, but it failed. After almost two years, the priests had declared that the town was not ready for God, and they had left vowing to return when the mother church told them the time was right and God had entered the hearts of the ignorant farmers who had for too long been under the oppressive spell of Communism.
Boris Vladovka and the people of the town of Kiro-Stovitsk knew the priests were wrong. Whether it was the church or government or a political party, the people of the town wanted no part of it. The church might well return. The government would grow increasingly corrupt and, if they felt it was profitable, appointed officials would set up an office and try to take a piece of the town’s small profits. Something calling itself Communism might even return, but the people were determined to survive. History had long since proved that they could.
When the commune farms had been disbanded and the land given to the people who had been tenants of nobles, kulaks, small landlords, and corrupt Communist commissars, most of the people had been frightened. They had no experience selling potato crops. They could not afford their own machinery. They prepared themselves for starvation.
But Boris Vladovka had reluctantly stepped forward. Boris, father of Konstantin the farmer and Tsimion the cosmonaut, had suggested that the farmers of Kiro-Stovitsk enter into a partnership, pool their meager money, buy two ancient trucks, and have Boris and Konstantin drive to the markets of St. Petersburg and sell the crops to one of the new dealers who had stepped in to serve as brokers for restaurants, the new supermarkets, and the growing number of hotels and clubs throughout Russia and beyond its borders.
Boris did not make the town wealthy, but as long as the weather did not destroy an annual crop, he did bring in enough for the people to live without fear of starvation or even hunger.
Boris was the unofficial mayor of Kiro-Stovitsk, a sixty-year-old patriarch of the entire grateful town, a town that had little to be proud of outside of Boris’s cosmonaut son.
In the center of the town’s only street there was a war memorial, a simple, six-foot-high weather-pocked concrete obelisk with the names of the eighty-one who had died fighting the Germans chiseled carefully into its surface. Many of the names on the obelisk were Vladovka, Dersknikov, and Laminski. The town, like hundreds across Russia, had been inbred for as far back as anyone could remember and farther back than that.
Kiro-Stovitsk was now a town of the very young and the very old. The young left, most of them as soon as they were able. They left with dreams of becoming business successes or cosmonauts like their most famous citizen. A few of them had returned, disillusioned, carrying a wisdom of the outer world that had drained a bit of life from them.
Most of the people of the town lived in the small farms well beyond the edge of the wooden buildings on the main street. Over the centuries, the farms and village buildings had been propped up, rebuilt, and reinforced so
