artificial maple syrup. Boxes of oatmeal lined his small shelves, and his small refrigerator held three bottles of syrup. Still, one could never be sure when one might run out.
In the outer office, Pankov put on his coat and pressed the button that activated the recording of not only the mocking conversations in Rostnikov’s office but also the conversations in the outer office across the hall where the other inspectors had desks and conversation.
Both the Yak and Pankov had been invited to the wedding of Elena and Iosef. Both had accepted. The Yak was well aware that his presence would make everyone uncomfortable. That did not bother him.
Pankov gladly accepted when he knew that the Yak was going to attend. Pankov had never been to a wedding. Never. He had no friends outside of the thirteen members of the Monocle Club, the group of ten men and three women who not only collected the ocular affectations of the obliterated aristocracy but also knew everything worth knowing and even more not worth knowing about the lenses. Strictly speaking, the members of the Monocle Club were not his friends, but they shared a common, if arcane, interest. They met every two weeks in a small room of the Budapest Hotel, a hundred meters from the Bolshoi Theatre.
As he stepped out of the office, closing the door quietly behind him, Pankov remembered to turn on the cell phone in his pocket. He hated the phone, but the Yak insisted that Pankov keep it charged and in his pocket where he could hear it. There was no place he could be comfortably alone and really no place where he could feel comfortable among people.
It was his life. He accepted it. It did keep him on the fringes of power. He was the assistant and secretary, really, of a very powerful man who would only grow more powerful. This was not bad for a man whose father had been a sub-foreman in a government uniform-manufacturing factory and whose mother had been a sewing machine operator in the same factory.
Behind Pankov as he left Petrovka he could hear a single dog wail. The sun was dropping in the west, and the temperature seemed to be rising.
He headed for the Metro station willing his cell phone not to ring. He would ask his neighbor Mrs. Olga Ferinova what gift he should bring to the wedding and how he should dress and behave.
Vera Korstov was a highly methodical and determined woman. She had left her apartment with a neatly printed list of six names carefully coaxed out of Ivan Medivkin. She had expected more, but this, she had been sure, would be a good start. At the top of her list was Albina Babinski, the widow of Fedot Babinski, the murdered sparring partner.
The police, Vera was certain, would have a similar list of names with at least several duplicates. They would be looking for Ivan as she would be looking for the murderer who had set Ivan up for the crime.
It was unlikely the police would be in a hurry to talk to Albina Babinski. They had no reason to think that she might know where Ivan was hiding.
The apartment building, in one of the many four-, five-, and six-story concrete Stalin-era complexes throughout the city was a river map of cracks and fissures. Three men huddled in the demi-warmth of the tobacco-fouled entryway. They took some notice of her but were more interested in arguing about what they thought of the latest Russian rage against Georgia.
Vera walked up the staircase lit only on the landings by dim yellow bulbs. She tried not to touch the walls, which were dappled with stains and graffiti, most of which brightly extolled the virtues of one gang over another.
She found the apartment on the second floor where two women stood in opposite open doors talking. A child of no more than two clung to the dress of one of the women.
Vera knocked at the door and prepared herself, got into character. She held her purse protectively in two hands against her stomach. She let her shoulders drop and pinched the flesh under each eye to make them moist. She knocked again, and this time the door opened a crack.
The two women in the hall stopped talking to hear what would be said.
“Albina Babinski?”
Vera could see little of the woman who replied with a tentative “
“I am sorry, so sorry, to bother you,” Vera said nervously. “I am. . was a cousin of your husband from Odessa. I happened to be in Moscow with a meeting of raw sewage engineers and I heard. . I’m so sorry. I haven’t seen Fedot since we were about twelve. He was always so. . I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.”
“Come in, Countess,” said the woman on the other side of the door. “And I shall endeavor to snatch from you the halo you have been imagining about your cousin’s head.”
Vera could smell the alcohol on the woman’s breath as the door opened. Sunlight illuminated the small, disheveled room. A dark brown sofa sat heavily across from two chrome and plastic chairs that had probably been considered modern in the seventies. A bottle with three glasses stood on a glass-and-steel table the size of a bicycle tire. The table had chosen to side with the two chairs, but the large sofa with obviously soft pillows had a distinct magnetic attraction for objects in the room that stood in deference to the largest piece of furniture.
Albina Babinski was a mess. Her dyed blond hair was losing its color, and its loose strands were held tentatively in place with five little red plastic clips. Her brown dress was draped over her commodious frame like a Roman toga. Albina Babinski’s face was round, very round, with pink cheeks punctuated by two small pimples on her left cheek and three on her right. Thick, unflattering makeup covered her face, neck, and even the backs of her hands. Vera did, however, give the widow credit for her bright blue eyes and the look of something painful, likely the death of her husband.
“Would you like a drink?” Albina said, motioning toward both sofa and chairs to give her visitor a choice of discomforts.
“Yes, thank you,” said Vera, sitting on one of the chairs, which proved to be just as uncomfortable as it looked.
Albina poured vodka into two glasses, handed one glass to her guest, and clutched the other in her hand as she plopped into the sofa, spilling a few drops of her drink in the process.
“You may return to Odessa to spread the news that Fedot the cousin of fond memory was a walking blind erection that managed to be unable to locate me for the past four years. He was, however, more successful in locating a colorful array of other willing, waiting receptacles.”
Vera looked down.
“I shock you, you who deal in sewage?”
“No.”
“He found the wrong vessel in that giant’s wife,” said Albina, holding up her drink and looking at it as if it were a masterpiece.
“Were there other wives, other women?” Vera asked as if amazed at the possibility.
Albina drank, held her glass to one side, leaned over toward Vera, and whispered, “Dozens. I do not know why women were attracted to him. Fedot was a decent-looking man with a scarred body, but he was hardly a Michael Clooney.”
“I think the actor’s name is George,” said Vera softly.
“Who gives a shit?” said Albina even more softly. “What’s your name, Countess?”
“Vera Egorovna.”
Albina pursed her lips, thought, and said, “Who are you?”
“Vera Egorovna, Fedot’s cousin from Odessa.”
“Bullshit. Fedot was taken from Riga to Moscow when he was a baby. He liked to tell people that he was from Odessa, that he had family there, but he did not. So who are you besides Countess of the sewers?”
Vera sat up straight, put down her purse, and smiled.
“I am a reporter for
“And you are going to write an article about the giant and his slut and Fedot?”
“Yes.”
“How much are you willing to pay for my undivided and truthful story?”
“If there is a story, I am authorized to pay either five thousand rubles or two hundred euros.”
“I’ll take the euros. Can you pay me now? In cash? I have bills to pay, a future to consider.”
“I can give you one thousand rubles today and have the rest in euros delivered by two this afternoon.”
It was, of course, a lie, but the thousand rubles would be a reasonable price for an expanded list of
