He was reaching for the bar now, looking at the weights on either side.
“Do you do these things?” asked Laura.
“No,” said Rostnikov.
“You do not want to win?” the girl pressed.
“Yes, I want to win,” he said, “but I want to win knowing that I have followed the rules, my rules. If I do not, there is no pleasure in winning, simply a trophy which I do not feel I deserve. You understand?”
“Yes,” said the girl. “I think.”
“Good,” said Rostnikov, gripping the bar. “Now, when you are ready, clap your hands.”
Misha Lovski, the truly Naked Cossack, tapped his forehead on the steel bars to the driving beat of his own voice and guitar being played at concert volume.
He could feel the vibrations when he put his hands to the walls or wrapped them around the bars. The music had been playing for hours. He didn’t know how many hours. It might even have been days. He had tried to sleep but the bright lights and pounding music made it impossible.
He sang along with himself now.
His voice was almost gone. All that came out was a hoarse croak. He had cried and laughed, huddled in the corner with his mattress. He had crapped and pissed in the plastic bucket, using torn-up sheets of old newspaper that had been left for him. With his fingers he had eaten what they had given him, though he had no idea what the brown mush in the bowl was, something like meat mixed with kasha. And they had given him just enough water, also in a pot.
Like a trained monkey he had learned that when the lights went out and the music stopped, the door to the room beyond his cage would open, revealing nothing, and he would be expected to put out his bowls, which would be replaced by others.
He had tried to talk to the person whose footsteps he heard. He had tried each time.
“What do you want?” he had demanded the first time. “Money? Call my father. He’ll pay. Just get it done.”
No answer. Just a door closing. The next time it was, “Get me something to wear, you bastard, you
No answer. Just a door closing. Then, after hours of light and blaring music, “Leave the lights on. Keep the music coming. It gives me something to do, something to sing and beat.”
No answer. Just a door closing. The last time it had been but his hoarse croak, “Turn it off. No more light. No more music. If I don’t get some sleep, you will kill me.”
No answer, so he added, “The hell with you. Drive me mad. Drive me crazy. I will go
This time, just before the door closed, he heard a sound in the darkness, perhaps a laugh. It wasn’t much but he held onto it, tried to place it. But before he could, the lights were on and he heard his own voice screaming over the speaker, “Kill your mother. Kill your father. You never asked them to be born.”
He reached through the bars for the cracked metal bowl of brown mush and the cup of warm water. As he ate, he rocked his head. He knew it was only a matter of time before he was completely mad. The problem was that he did not know how much time had passed.
He stopped rocking. An idea had come. A project. Something to keep him busy. Yes. He smiled and looked beyond the bars at the far wall behind which he was certain they were watching him.
He touched the fuzz of his growing beard, leaving a stigma of brown mush, and smiled cunningly toward the wall.
The Naked Cossack had a plan.
Chapter Seven
Zelach had dined with his mother in their small apartment which she kept impeccably neat and clean, smelling and looking like something from a different era, a different place. The place it looked like was an apartment in Voronezh south of Moscow, near the Ukrainian border. Zelach’s mother had been born there, a gypsy who did not look like one and who escaped to marry a slow-witted but decent Moscovite policeman who thought her quite beautiful. Akardy Zelach had been born six months after they had married. She had never, to this very day, told him of his gypsy blood. There was no reason to do so. The boy had looked like his father the moment he was brought painfully into the world.
Zelach’s mother loved her son and worried about him. He had talents but no great intellect. He was a follower, and when she died she wondered whom he might follow.
They ate boiled potatoes, thick fish soup, and bread with water.
“I must work tonight,” he said as he ate.
“I know,” she said.
He had not told her before this moment, but her comment did not surprise him. She almost always knew when he had to work, when his mind was on something other than the meal or the television screen. She usually knew what he was thinking. This did not disturb him. It was reassuring.
The words to one of the Naked Cossacks songs kept running through his head:
“Akardy,” his mother said. “Yes.”
“You are bouncing your head while you eat.”
“A song I can’t … it just …”
“Listen to the song,” she said, tearing off a piece of bread. “It may tell you something.”
Emil Karpo ate alone in his room, which was about the same size as Misha Lovski’s cell. The room held very little furniture-a cot near the single window whose shade was almost always pulled down, a chest of drawers, a free-standing simple wooden closet, a desk in front of a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf filled with files of cases he had worked on, open and closed cases, and cases that he had never been assigned but were still open.
What free time Karpo had, he gave to those files and their challenge.
He ate one cucumber, one tomato, one onion, a thick slice of unbuttered bread, and a piece of plain boiled chicken he had prepared on his hot plate on the dresser.
There were two lights in his room, one a bulb in the ceiling, the other a small table lamp.
The only color in the room was a painting above the dresser, a painting of and by Mathilde Verson, a gift from her. The woman in the foreground looking up the hill to a barn was definitely Mathilde, though her face was turned. Mathilde, the woman of the city, the part-time prostitute whom he had paid once every two weeks for her services until she had stopped taking the money and they had become something more than client and provider.
