Surrounded, the twenty or so gays fought their way through the crowd with the help of the police and began to run, with the black shirts in pursuit. The police beat the attackers with clubs and pushed a dozen or so of them against the wall behind the tomb.
“We must leave and come back in an hour,” said Laurence.
Biko agreed. If this crowd was attacking a small group of quiet homosexuals peacefully placing flowers on a tomb, what might they do to two black men who were carrying weapons?
As they eased away, above the shouting they could clearly hear the voice of the screaming woman on the bullhorn.
“Mayor Yuri Luzhkov of our beloved Moscow has said that any attempt by these people to lay flowers here is a ‘desecration of a sacred place.’ They should expect to be beaten.”
“Russians are very crazy people,” said Laurence. “I have known crazy people in Sudan, Ghana, but none as crazy as Russians.”
Sasha Tkach had just been through an early morning ordeal. His phone had rung just before six while he lay in the darkness of his hotel room, awake but unwilling to rise, shower, and shave. He would move when the glowing red numbers on his tiny travel clock, a gift from his mother, hit six and two zeroes.
“Sasha?”
It was the very last person whose voice he wished to hear.
“Yes.”
“Do you know what your name means?” Lydia Tkach asked.
“You woke me to ask. .?”
“Aleksei, do you know?”
She almost never called him Aleksei, and when she did so it was intended to indicate a very serious subject of conversation. The problem was that Lydia thought anything regarding her only son was monumentally important.
“Defender of men,” he said.
“Do you know what your name was supposed to be before your father, may he rest with the angels in a field of silver icons, insisted that you be called Aleksei?”
“You are a Communist and an atheist,” he said, holding the phone a few inches from his ear to protect himself from his hard-of-hearing mother who, at the age of seventy, thought people could only be heard on telephones if they were shouted at. “You do not believe that my father is with any angels.”
“I believe what the times dictate I should believe,” she shouted. “That is how we survive. Your name was to have been the same as my father’s, Kliment which means. .”
“Merciful and gentle,” he concluded.
“Merciful and gentle,” she said, not heeding her son’s words. “You were meant to be merciful and gentle.”
“By God?”
“No, by me. Did you see Maya?”
“Yes.”
“When is she coming home with the children?”
“She is not.”
“Try again.”
“I’m going to go see her and the children as soon as you let me go.”
“Who is keeping you? It is time for you to stop being a policeman. I will bet that even now as we are speaking some criminal is planning to beat you or seduce you or stab you or shoot you. .”
“Or drop a rock on my head or beat me with a wooden cross or. .”
“You are mocking me.”
“Yes.”
“You are mocking your mother who is trying to save your marriage and your life,” she said.
“I am sorry.”
He was sitting up now, licking his dry lips with his dry tongue and wondering if perhaps his mother might not be right.
“Think about it.”
“I will,” he said.
“Now go get my grandchildren and your wife.”
Before he could ask her how she got his cell phone’s newly changed number, she hung up.
He should plan what he was going to say, how he would say it. It was difficult to convince himself that he would be fine if she gave him another chance. If he could not convince himself, how could he convince Maya?
What was it she had said? He was a lamb waiting to be shorn by any attractive woman. Some day the shears would slip and he would bleed and be standing shorn and suddenly naked.
He staggered to the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked at himself in the mirror. He was not growing more handsome with each passing day.
“Pathetic image that was meant to be Kliment, you must offer something meaningful. You must make a sacrifice that she cannot refuse.”
His image looked back at him, letting him know exactly what that sacrifice must be. He hurried to shower, shave, wash, and dress so that he could see his children and present his gift to Maya.
Elena lined up the 5 × 7 photographs next to the fax machine in the Russian embassy.
They had two more days before the meeting that would determine the fate of the Office of Special Investigations.
It was a little before seven in the morning and she had a buttered roll and a cup of coffee perched on the table next to the machine. The roll and coffee had been provided by a junior diplomat who had worked through the previous night on a report dealing with the potential tour of a Chinese cellist who now resided in Kiev.
The junior diplomat, whose name was Machov, had told her that the fax machine would be in constant demand in less than twenty minutes when the rest of the staff started to come in.
The first photograph was of Jan Pendowski. The second was of the French woman named Rochelle Tanquay, and the third was of a thin, vacant-eyed man with a scarf around his neck who appeared to be following the Kiev policeman.
She faxed all three photos to Moscow. Later she would try to find a fax number for Porfiry Petrovich in Siberia. When she was finished, she put the photographs back in a folder in her briefcase and stood drinking her coffee and eating her roll.
She yearned for a sausage, even a small one. She had been watching her weight for months and she was sure, though he denied it, Iosef was also watching her weight.
He said that he loved her just the way she was, but when she pressed him about her size, he had admitted that she might be able to fit in clothing more svelte were she to shed a few pounds. Shed a few pounds. He had said it as if it were as easy as taking off one’s shoes. “Svelte” was not a descriptive term for Elena. Full-bodied was much more accurate. Her bones would not allow for svelte as they had not allowed her mother, aunt, or grandmothers a leaner frame.
There was no way Elena Timofeyeva would or could ever look like Oxana Balakona or Rochelle Tanquay.
In half an hour she was due in Jan Pendowski’s office for what she was certain would be a wild goose chase across Kiev in search of Oxana Balakona. She had agreed to let Sasha see Maya and the children instead of coming with her.
The primary problem with being alone to spend the better part of a day with Pendowski was that he was certain to make sexual overtures unless she did something forceful. She was not flattered by the possibility of his advances. He seemed to be in very good condition. He made that clear by wearing his sleeves rolled up to display his muscles and his shirt unbuttoned one button to show just a bit of chest. He was not an oaf, and she could see
