“I’ll ask,” said Schroeder. “I wasn’t here, you remember. And the night nurse doesn’t-”
“Let’s ask,” said Rostnikov gently.
“It wouldn’t do-”
“Let’s try,” Rostnikov insisted gently.
Schroeder was trapped.
“Well, if you-”
“I do,” said Rostnikov, touching Schroeder’s shoulder.
And they went in search of someone who might be able to tell them what had become of Ivan Bulgarin, the man who walked like a bear.
Boris Trush nodded his head in complete understanding of everything that was being told to him. He nodded his head and began to make a plan.
“We will drive slowly past the Alexander Gardens,” Peotor Kotsis explained as they walked through the dried-out field behind the wooden house and barn where Boris’s bus was parked. Boris had been given a torn pair of cloth pants and a rough sweater so his uniform could be kept neat and clean for the big day.
“Past the Alexander Gardens,” Boris repeated.
Peotor Kotsis had long since removed his coat and now wore a pair of blue pants, a white shirt, and a sweater. The madman looked like a distinguished professor with dark hair and scholarly gray sideburns. But there was no doubt the man was mad, not as mad as his killer son, but quite mad nonetheless.
“Across Fiftieth Anniversary of the October Revolution Square behind the State History Museum,” Kotsis went on.
“Behind the State History Museum,” Boris parroted. Across the field, Vasily, his weapon slung over his back, was talking earnestly to three young men and a young Oriental-looking woman. Vasily seemed to be upset with them. Boris did not want Vasily upset with him. It took very little to upset Vasily, and the result of upsetting Vasily could be fatal.
“Then,” Peotor went on, “past Twenty-fifth of October Street in front of the State Universal Stores.” He paused as they walked.
“Past GUM,” Boris acknowledged.
Across the field, Vasily laughed and began kissing each of the young people in turn, ending with the young woman, who got an especially long kiss.
“And then into the square,” Peotor said. “We move slowly, a busful of visitors, lost, cameras in hand, past the marble stands by the Senate Tower, right up to the Lenin Mausoleum. When the guards move forward to stop us, we will rush out of the doors of the bus, we will eliminate them, destroy the tomb, and be gone before they can react. We’ll all go in different directions. The crowds will be wild. Confusion. They’ve never faced a real threat. They won’t know what happened till we call the foreign press and tell them. You’ll get lost in the crowd, too, Boris. Lost with our gratitude. I’m sure you won’t give us away.”
“I won’t,” said Boris earnestly. “You have my promise.”
The lie was evident. Boris knew that they would kill him the moment he got them to the tomb. They couldn’t let him get away.
Peotor suddenly stopped.
“My people have asked to be heard for almost a thousand years,” Peotor said, looking south in the direction of the province from which he had come. “We have not been allowed to speak until now. Now voices are being raised throughout the land and we are allowed to speak, but Boris, the irony is that no one will listen. Georgians, Armenians, even Mongol mongrels are being heard, but we are considered to be too small and too weak. The world will notice us after this, Boris Trush. The world will notice and we will be part of history.”
“They’ll hate you,” Boris said, knowing he had no chance of prevailing.
“Yes,” said Peotor. “At first they will. There will be days, weeks of shock, but our cause will be explored in magazines, newspapers all over the world. We will no longer be ignored. We must be heard, Boris. We must be heard or the lives of our fathers and mothers and theirs before them for a dozen generations will be meaningless. Do you understand?”
“Perfectly,” said Boris. You are insane, Boris thought. That is what I understand. You are insane. I need a drink and I have to hope I have enough nerve to do what I must to save my life.
Vasily was now trotting across the field toward them with a smile on his face. The gun strapped around the young man’s back jostled. Thunder cracked in the distance, and Boris hoped that he would neither step back nor cringe when the young and smiling lunatic came upon him.
“You know what this is?”
Kostnitsov spoke as if he were addressing a severely retarded child. Kostnitsov was somewhere in his fifties, of medium height, with a little belly, straight white hair, poorly cared for teeth, and a red face more the result of his Georgian heritage than his intake of alcohol, which was moderate. He was an assistant director of the MVD laboratory but he had little or no contact with the director and had no one working under him. Kostnitsov wanted no assistants, and it was clear to everyone that none would be able to tolerate him. Boris Kostnitsov was left alone in his unnumbered laboratory two levels below the ground in Petrovka.
Now, standing in his lab and wearing a blue laboratory coat and a scowl, he held out his hand to display to the two policemen something formless and quite bloody.
Zelach looked at Sasha Tkach for an answer, but Sasha’s thoughts were elsewhere.
“A heart?” Zelach guessed.
Kostnitsov looked disgusted.
“A heart? This little thing looks like a heart to you? Does your little finger look like your penis? In your case, possibly. A penguin has a heart this size, not a human. Tkach, what do you say?”
Kostnitsov held the bloody blob under Sasha Tkach’s nose. Tkach looked down at it emotionlessly.
“A liver,” he guessed.
“A liver,” Kostnitsov repeated incredulously. “This bright-red organ looks like a liver to you? This is a human organ. A human liver is dark, firm, unless, of course, it is diseased.”
Kostnitsov began to pace between his cluttered laboratory tables and his even more cluttered desk, which held, somewhere beneath the books and papers, a bottle in which it was rumored Josef Stalin’s spleen resided.
Zelach looked at the desk and blurted out, “Spleen.”
Kostnitsov stopped pacing, dropped the slithery organ in a metal bowl, placed the bowl on the lab table, and turned to Zelach with a grin.
“There’s hope for you,” he said, advancing to Zelach and patting him on the cheek with a still-bloody hand. Zelach stepped back and looked around frantically for something reasonably clean with which to wipe his face. Seeing nothing he would be willing to use, Zelach moved to the sink, turned on the water, and washed, while Kostnitsov turned his attention to Tkach.
“The spleen,” Kostnitsov explained as if to an avid student, which Tkach was not, “is one of the largest lymphoid structures, a visceral organ composed of a white pulp of lymphatic nodules and tissues and a red pulp of venous sinusoids in a framework of fibrous partitions lying on the left side below the diaphragm, functioning as a blood filter and to store blood. It is said to be either the seat of melancholy or mirth. An underappreciated and quiet poetic organ.”
“Quite poetic,” Tkach agreed.
“The bullet went through the heart,” Kostnitsov said, weaving his bloody hand as if following the trajectory of the missile through an imaginary body. “It moved down through the left lung and heart, shattering a rib, and ending its journey in the spleen. Remarkably little damage to the spleen, but man cannot live on a spleen alone. Are you listening, Comrade Tkach, or am I boring you? Are your thoughts of university girls on the grassy Lenin Hills?”
“I’m listening,” said Tkach, who stood, arms folded, as Kostnitsov pushed his face forward in front of the detective.
“You want to know about the bullet? What?”
“I want to know whatever you know that could help us find who shot Tolvenovov,” said Tkach. Zelach had finished washing his face and was drying his hands on his rumpled trousers.
“You want some tea, coffee?” Kostnitsov asked.
