He cupped cold water in his hands and plunged his face into his palms. He let the water drip onto his extra-large gray Nike T-shirt and he rubbed his eyes. He could see somewhat clearly now.
When Maya had moved out, Lydia, who was retired and supposedly on pension from the Ministry of Information, had insisted on moving in with her only son. At first Sasha had protested, said he would be all right, that he was sure his family would be returning soon. She had insisted and, he admitted, he really did not want to be alone.
There were times, however, in the last weeks when he was sure he had made a mistake. Lydia could barely hear. She had a hearing aid but she either didn’t use it or turned it off. Lydia issued commands and criticism. Until Maya had left, Lydia’s favorite topic had been Sasha’s dangerous work and her insistence that he seek safer employment. She had not given up on that quest, but she now had a list of her son’s shortcomings that required addressing.
Lydia had money. She had invested most of her salary for decades in property. It had all been done quietly and with advice from her superiors, who taught her how to make such purchases and protect them even within the Soviet system. Now, having sold much of that property and placed the money in high-yield foreign investments, Lydia was more than comfortable financially. Her prize investment was a bakery and pastry shop on the Arbat. It had been a state-run bakery, with sad loaves and lines of shuffling people. And then the revolution ended: crime, punishment, money flowed next to poverty even worse than that during the Soviet reign. But those with many new rubles, some with hard foreign currency, and even a few with very little flocked to the bakery on the busy Arbat to buy sweet cakes and brown healthy breads.
When even the new ruble had fallen to near nonexistence, Lydia, whose investments and money were all secure in German banks, had become even richer.
Maya had more than once suggested that Sasha stop being a policeman, manage the bakery, perhaps open a second one, maybe a chain of bakeries in various Russian cities. He would make money. He would have time to be with his wife, his children, his mother.
The idea, when presented to Sasha the first time, had made him seriously consider that suicide would be a better alternative to a career in bakery management, a career in which he would work for his mother.
Sasha liked being a policeman. He liked having new problems almost daily, dealing his way in and out of dangerous situations, meeting challenges, carrying a weapon. Anything else, particularly managing a bakery, would mean a slow death.
Now, with Maya and the children gone, he needed his work more than ever and, surprisingly, in the few weeks since she had been gone, he was sure that he was becoming a better policeman. He got along better with the partner assigned to him for each case. He wrote his reports without complaint and he did not frown or sulk when given a case he normally would not have liked.
But at the same time he missed Maya and the children and lived for the day they would return. He would be a better husband and father as he had become a better policeman. At least he thought he would.
He moved slowly to the bedroom door and opened it, inch by inch, pausing when he heard the slightest creak. When it was open just enough to slide through, he eased in carefully to the snoring of his sleeping mother. By all rights, the nearly deaf woman would not have heard a medium-range missile rip through one wall and out the other. But her son’s slightest move would sometimes bring her upright in bed, squinting toward the hint of a sound.
This time he was lucky. He moved with the trumpet of her noise to the tiny bathroom and closed the door before turning on the light. There was just enough room to stand and carefully take off his T-shirt and boxer shorts. And then he turned on the water. With luck, he could shower, shave, shampoo, dress, and be gone before Lydia woke up.
As he shaved in the cool water Sasha became angry, angry with Maya. What had he done? She had given him a deadline. He had done his best. She knew what he was, how he was. He had done much to change, but one doesn’t change in days. It takes weeks, months, if it can be done at all.
She has another man, he thought, and not for the first time. This is all a sham, a trick to make me look responsible, guilty while she is with him, probably someone she met at the Council for International Business Advancement, where she had worked. Why had it been so easy for her to be reassigned to Kiev? Was the man someone higher up in the trade center?
Maya was beautiful. Perhaps she had become vulnerable.
Yes, it was her fault. He had done his best. He turned off the water in the shower and, as he dried himself with Maya’s favorite towel, changed his mind again and was sure that he was to blame. Fully, certainly. There was no other man. There was no other reason. The fault was his. She had simply endured as much as she could. He longed for Maya, for his children-for Pulcharia to run into his arms and announce that she had a story to read to him.
Sasha wiped the steamy mirror and looked at his face, toothbrush in hand. The face looked tired, the eyes heavy, the hair not as lively as it should be in spite of just having been shampooed. The body looked pale. He could no longer pass for a student. He looked thirty or more. It was not a bad-looking face and body, but it was not the face and body that could convince anyone he was a naive twenty year old. He had been through too much, had seen too much.
He dressed, compensating for his feeling of self-pity by putting on his best suit, the one he had hung on the bathroom door the night before. A reasonably eager smile and good grooming might compensate for the fact that he was going to be late. Sasha and the rest of the inspectors had no given hours unless Rostnikov or the Yak himself told them to be in at a specific time. But Sasha had arranged to meet Elena Timofeyeva at Petrovka at eight o’clock. Elena was always on time. Elena, the only woman in the office, made it her business to be on time and do her job with as much energy or more than any of the men.
Elena was plump, pretty, serious, and smart; smarter, Sasha thought, than Sasha Tkach. He had seniority, but she was two years older than he and more likely to get ahead somewhere in the Ministry of Interior, which oversaw all criminal investigation. At first, when he came to this realization about Elena, he had been sullen and felt sorry for himself. That was no longer the case. He belonged exactly where he was. Promotion meant responsibility and greater vulnerability. He had no passion for power, and the greater salary was not sufficient incentive.
Sasha was dressed, ready. With the money from Maya’s salary, which was larger than Sasha’s, not coming in, Lydia had found ways to try to buy her son’s happiness. She had urged money on him, far too much, to pick up a few things on the way home if he ran into them. She would not ask for the change. She found other ways. At first he had been reluctant to take the money, but he had soon found himself accepting, wondering if he was being lured into an emotional debt to his mother, a debt that he would be unable to escape. However, that easy money did provide compensations.
He would take two sweets from his mother’s bakery out of the refrigerator and buy a large coffee from the nearest kiosk today. She was snoring still as he eased out of the bedroom door, deciding not to close it.
Luck was with him as he opened the refrigerator, selected something small and cakelike, covered with chocolate, and a French croissant, dropped them in a brown paper bag, and headed across the room to the front door.
Suddenly the snoring stopped. Sasha could either break for the door and hope she would not hear him leave or move slowly while she got up, hoping to make it out of the room before his mother came through the partially open door.
Neither turned out to be possible.
“Sasha? I hear you. I have to talk to you.”
He was doomed.
She sat in her small office, looking at her cooling cup of tea. It was a bleak, white-walled office. That was the way it was supposed to be. It had no windows. That was the way it was supposed to be. The door was closed. That was the way it had to be.
The woman’s desk was almost completely clear and the dark wood shone with neatly applied polish and without a bump, mark, or scratch. The only object on the desk was her cup of tea in a simple white porcelain cup. The tea strainer had been removed, the grounds dumped into the wastebasket.
The only outside distraction this early in the morning had been a rattle of windows down the hallway outside of her office. She thought she heard the sound of rain on glass and was sure that there had been lightning and
