careful.”
With that, Svetlana entered the room, looked at him and glared.
“You are late,” she said.
Valery smiled and Nikita stepped back in near terror. No one smiled at Svetlana Gorchinova when she chastised, not even Levich or Kriskov.
“I have a fever,” said Valery, still smiling.
Svetlana looked at his pink face and the drops of moisture on his upper lip.
“Then why are you grinning like a fool?” she said.
“Am I grinning? I didn’t know. Perhaps I have a secret,” he said.
“Perhaps you are delirious,” she said, moving to her chair in front of the Avid editing machine.
“Perhaps,” he agreed. “You know, you look like the pilot of a Klingon warship, sitting in front of the editor. The light hits your face eerily. You look determined and formidable.”
She turned in her chair and looked at him. “Go home,” she said. “You are sick. You are talking like an idiot.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” he responded.
Nikita had turned his back and moved to a corner, where he pretended to examine a long-nosed pliers.
“Well,” she said. “I am not perfectly fine having you here. There isn’t that much to do until … there isn’t that much and I don’t want to go through the day with you acting like a maniac.”
“I am perfectly sane,” he said. “A bit feverish perhaps, but …”
“Go home,” she shouted. “Or don’t go home. But go.”
Valery shook his head knowingly and said, “I’ll go.”
“Then go, you fool, and don’t return until and unless you can behave, be quiet, and take orders.”
Valery shrugged and moved to the door. “When I return,” he said, “it will not be as a pawn to take orders, but as a king.” And out the door he went.
Svetlana muttered something and ignored Valery’s parting words.
Nikita Kolodny did not. Nikita suspected that Valery Grachev had taken the negatives. This behavior had made him more than suspicious. But Nikita was a coward. He had come from a long, long line of cowards who rose no higher than their intelligence or lack of it and their desire for safe anonymity would permit. There was no way Nikita would risk his safety and job by reporting what he believed. There were no rewards to be gained and, even if there were, risking Valery’s wrath would not be worth stepping forward. No, Nikita would stand back in the corners of his life, watching, listening. Perhaps if Valery were caught, Nikita might move up to first assistant. That was as far as he aspired to. It would be enough.
Vera Kriskov comforted her husband with no success while the two policemen made calls and tried to trace the man who had just telephoned. The children were at school and, thank God, she thought, they didn’t have to see their father nearly hysterical.
“He’s mad,” said Kriskov, reaching for a cigarette, unable to light it with his shaking hands. Vera helped. “What was he talking about? Chess games? This isn’t a chess game. That bastard is going to destroy my negatives, destroy me. He is going to kill me.
“He is not going to kill you,” Vera said, knowing that the younger of the two policemen in the room had been admiring her since he came into the house. “He will stay away. The police will not let him get close.”
“Like they were going to catch him with the bag of strips of paper,” Yuri said, leaning over to put his head in his hands. “He’s probably burning the negatives now, right now.”
“Why would he do that?” she said. “He’d have to be mad. The negatives are worth money to him. He will call back. He will make a deal.”
“He is mad, Vera,” said Yuri, looking up. “Crazy, crazy mad.” He pounded the sides of his head with the heels of his hands. “A lunatic.”
Vera thought her husband might well be right. Valery Grachev had not done what they had agreed upon. The second call was not just a mistake, it was an act of madness. There was no point to it. Perhaps she should cut her losses, kill Valery, let the police discover the negative, drop the whole idea.
But there were two reasons why she could not seriously consider this. First, she could not imagine killing Valery or anyone else. What would she use? A gun? There were two in the house, but she couldn’t. And then there was Yuri sniveling next to her. She put her arm around him soothingly under the eye of the envious young policeman.
“Shh,” she said. “It will work out.”
Yuri simply shook his head.
He had to die. She could not live with this lying, worthless thing next to her for another week. Valery would have to kill him and kill him soon. She would have to find a way to get in touch with him, to urge him to move quickly. Maybe she would threaten him, tell him that he would lose her if he didn’t act, tell him that his mad phone call was giving her second thoughts about him and the whole plan.
“Can I get you anything?” the young policeman asked.
“No, thank you,” said Vera with a sad smile.
“A drink,” said Yuri. “I’ll die if I don’t have a drink.”
You will die with or without a drink if Valery Grachev keeps from going completely insane, Vera thought. “Brandy, in the cabinet over there,” she told the policeman, nodding toward the large wooden antique in the corner.
“They’ve traced the second call and a car was there in less than two minutes,” said the older policeman from the phone. “A public phone just outside a metro station.”
“And?” asked Yuri hopefully.
“Nothing,” said the older policeman. “They’re asking questions. Trying to find if someone saw …”
The front door opened. Sasha and Elena came in.
“Doesn’t anyone knock?” Yuri shouted, accepting an overly large and welcome brandy snifter from the young policeman. “Knock. Knock. Knock. That lunatic could walk right in here with a … an automatic weapon and kill me. You failed.”
“Not completely,” said Elena, looking at him and then at Vera.
“Not? …” Yuri said, looking up from the drink he held in two hands.
“The second call,” said Sasha. “The chess allusion.”
“He sent us to a chess table in the park,” Elena went on. “It is possible he has played at that table.”
“Thousands of people must have played at that table,” groaned Yuri.
“We have officers talking to people at the metro stop and near the telephone,” said Elena. “Perhaps we can get a description of whoever used the phone.”
“But people just rush by,” said Vera. “Anyone who might have seen him has long gone.”
“No, perhaps,” said Sasha. “Someone running a kiosk or some pensioner who might have been strolling by with nothing to do or walking his dog, or … maybe someone will be able to come up with a description we can take to the regular chess players in the park.”
“No,” said Yuri. “He will kill me. That is that.”
“He won’t kill you, Yuri,” Vera said soothingly, beginning to worry now that Valery might, in fact, fail, and deciding that she would have to find a way to get rid of Valery when Yuri was gone.
Elena watched the beautiful woman soothe her frantic husband. She watched and she felt that it was not love she was seeing. But what of it? Many women did not love the men to whom they had found themselves married. And, besides, perhaps it was the woman’s beauty to which Elena was reacting. It made no difference. What was important was the tugging feeling that the man with the negatives somehow knew that the money would not be delivered.
Elena was more and more certain that the real goal in this was not ransom but an excuse to kill Yuri Kriskov. But who would want Kriskov dead? She had no intention of sharing this intuition with Sasha Tkach, who would, in his present state, humor her. Had he been as he had before this inexplicable euphoria, he would have ridiculed her feelings and they would have fought. Elena would have to talk to Porfiry Petrovich.
At the same moment Elena was deciding that she had to talk to Rostnikov, a twenty-four-year-old uniformed policeman named Yakov Pierta, his second week on the force, was talking to a beggar woman just inside the entrance of the Novoslobodskaya metro station, within sight of the phone from which Valery had made his call to
