Chapter 4

Artur Malyshev turned out to be a handsome fifty-year-old, trying to look younger, with an unexpectedly soft voice.

“I’m saving my throat,” he explained, seeing that Nastya was straining to hear. “I lecture six hours a day – that’s no joke. And I teach courses in the evenings, too, to help earn my daily bread. So between classes I try to keep it to a whisper.”

He didn’t know very much about Solovyov, they were never particularly friendly and belonged to different crowds. They had been in graduate school at the same time, but in different departments. He had learned about Solovyov’s catastrophe from his wife, who had heard it from some acquaintance who worked in an ambulance service. The acquaintance was a fan of the Eastern Best Seller series, and so she remembered Solovyov in that great mass of people she delivered to the hospital.

“Could you remember exactly what your wife said this friend had said?” Nastya asked.

“Well, that the famous translator Solovyov had been beaten up by someone and that an ambulance had picked him up in the street. That was all, no other details.”

“What about this acquaintance? Do you know her?”

“No, unfortunately. I don’t even know her name.”

“How can that be? You don’t know your wife’s friends?” “She’s not a friend, just an acquaintance. My wife met her at the hospital. I think they may have called each other a few times after that, but this woman never came to our house.” “Which hospital was this that they met?”

Malyshev looked very embarrassed. “I… I don’t know.” “Mr. Malyshev, that is impossible. Are you not telling me something?”

He blushed and looked furiously for his lighter, which was right in front of him.

“You see… Well, my wife was having an abortion. I was out of town then. She did not want me to know about it. Therefore, it’s quite natural that I would not know which hospital she was in.”

“But you still found out that she had had an abortion,” Nastya pointed out.

“Yes.”

Malyshev looked up and into her eyes. “There’s no point in trying to hide it from you. You’re with the police and you won’t rest until you find out, right?”

“Got it in one.”

“Especially since the whole institute knows about it anyway. My wife and I are divorced. She had a new man. It was his baby she was aborting. That’s why she wanted to keep it from me. She managed for a while. But then the man asked her to marry him and move abroad. He has some big company in the Ivory Coast. There, that’s it.”

“Excuse me,” Nastya apologized. “I didn’t want to make you talk about unpleasant things. But I really have to find this acquaintance from the ambulance service. Is there anything you can suggest that will help?”

“No.”

“And is there any way to get in touch with your wife?”

“I don’t have her telephone. She’s out there in Guyana. I mean, the Ivory Coast.”

“I understand,” she sighed. “Maybe your former wife has girl friends who might know what hospital she was in?”

Malyshev gave her several names, which Nastya carefully wrote down.

“But I’m not sure that this will help you,” he warned. “My wife was very close-lipped and careful, she did not trust anyone, especially women. She tried to keep her relationship with that millionaire a secret and she managed to do it for a pretty long time. If she had shared secrets with her girl friends, it would have been known much sooner.”

“Mr. Malyshev,” Nastya said with a smile. “I don’t want to disillusion you, but the husband is always the last to know. That’s an old clichè. Your circle may have known all about the affair for a while.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m certain that’s not the case.”

Nastya did not know on what he based his certainty, but she did not insist. Why traumatize the man any more?

However her hopes that the friends of docent Malyshev’s former wife would be helpful were shattered. Either they were not very close friends or the lady truly was very secretive, but none of them could name the hospital where she had the abortion. That was understandable, there were a lot of hospitals in Moscow and an abortion was not an occasion to bring a lot of visitors. You were in only three days, sometimes only one. Come in the morning, leave that night – outpatient surgery. There was only one thing to do: check all the hospitals one by one, looking for the one where Anna Malysheva stayed two years ago. Then take the list of all the women who were in the hospital at the same time, and look for one who works for the ambulance service. It was labor intensive, and what was the point? We weren’t looking for a criminal, just a woman who maintained that Solovyov had been beaten. And it isn’t even clear whether she was part of the team that took him to the hospital or whether she had it second-hand from a colleague. Well, and let’s say Nastya finds the woman and determines that Solovyov had been beaten. What then? What did that have to do with the missing boys? Or the madman who stole the videotapes from the kiosk? Nothing. And no one would ever let her use precious work time to find out the truth about a former lover who was not mixed up in anything criminal and was not even under suspicion.

But was he really not mixed up in anything or under suspicion?

Nastya Kamenskaya was not one who was afraid to tell herself the truth.

* * *

“Don’t bug them,” Victor Gordeev said angrily. “And don’t let them know your ideas.”

He had been in a foul mood in the morning, calming down a bit by evening, but there was still weary irritation in his voice.

Nastya had prepared a memo that morning with a list of preliminary measures for the search for the thief of the videotapes from the kiosk, and she had come in to see her boss and find out what, if anything, had been done about her memo. It turned out that almost nothing was done. Interdepartmental politics had gotten in the way. The video theft was small potatoes, local precinct stuff, and there was no way it could be of concern to Petrovka, CID headquarters, without some weighty reasons. Both Gordeev and Nastya had their reasons, but the problem was that the precinct administration did not report directly to them. And Colonel Gordeev was categorically opposed to making those reasons known to his bosses and demanding that the cases be connected.

“You have to understand,” he explained to Nastya, “that we are the only ones who know that the disappearance of the nine boys is the work of one person. And we don’t know that for sure, we merely suspect it. There are four of us. Korotkov, Seluyanov, and you and me. That’s it. Do you know what can happen if we make our dubious suspicions known? If we even hint today that among the masses of missing boys there is a group with Semitic features, all the scandal rags will print front-page stories tomorrow about an anti-Semitic underground organization at work in Moscow. What do those newspapers want? Circulation! And they’ll use whatever they can – unchecked information, unfounded rumors, outright lies. Just to get readers, who want a spicy story. Can you imagine what will happen next? The Jewish community in Moscow will be in a panic. They’ll demand emergency measures and insist that the authorities are not protecting them because they are Jewish. You can’t go off half-cocked, my dear, in such delicate matters. I’m not sure that we have enough wise and subtle politicians in the city to cool off a brewing scandal without insulting anyone. The ethnic issue is always a problem. A tough one. It takes spiritual sensitivity, patience, and far-sightedness. And all our words that this is a maniac at work who simply likes boys who look like that no matter their nationality will be a cry in the wilderness. No one will hear it, because there will be lots of people who will benefit from reducing the problem to an ethnic issue and blowing it up to an enormous scandal. Elections aren’t far away, don’t forget.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Nastya sighed. “But the precinct isn’t going to look for this thief. I mean really look for him. He’s not important to them.”

“What about the fellow who was smart enough to check the film credits? He seems intelligent. Do you think he won’t be able to manage it?”

“Who’ll let him!” She made a hopeless gesture with her hand. “No one will understand why he cares about this kiosk robbery. It’s a petty crime. They’ll load him up with a million other things, and he’ll forget all about the thief in two days.”

“Well, then, let’s trick them,” Gordeev proposed.

“How?”

“What district is that?”

“Western. Around the Molodezhnaya metro station. ”

“Do we have any of our cases there?”

“Two,” Nastya said, figuring out what her boss had in mind. “Seluyanov has a corpse, and Igor Lesnikov had another. Seluyanov’s murder had expensive things, paintings and jewelry stolen from the apartment. Will that do?”

“It will. You catch on fast,” Gordeev said, praising her.

A half hour later he had arranged to have a police officer from the Western district to follow the trail of the stolen goods. The very one he wanted. And now no one could blame the young officer for following the orders of the detectives from Petrovka.

Nastya put off meeting him until tomorrow and went to see Solovyov.

* * *

“Come on,” Nastya said jokingly, as she sat in the comfortable armchair, “tell me how much you missed me.”

“A lot,” Solovyov said in the same bantering tone.

He seemed a bit different today, not like he had been on his birthday. In a dark blue sweater, hair rumpled and eyes laughing, he was more like the Solovyov she used to know many years ago – confident, happy with life, always ready for a joke and a smile.

Andrei was not home, he had gone to the publishing house to pick copies of the new book. Without him around, Nastya felt much freer. She could not handle hostility, even well-hidden hostility. They settled in the living room, bringing coffee and sandwiches from the kitchen. Nastya was going to offer to make dinner, since there was a lot of food, but said nothing figuring that the assistant would not be happy seeing someone else taking charge.

“Did you miss me?” Vladimir asked.

“A little,” she said with a smile. “In between urgent work, negotiations, and preparing contracts. Are we going to talk about us or can we pick a more interesting topic?”

“Our relationship is the most interesting. Isn’t it?”

Nastya gave Solovyov a close look. Was he seriously planning to make her fall for him again? What conceit!

“Probably,” she agreed. “But you know that you can’t step into the same river twice. We’ve both changed. So there’s no point in talking about our former relationship, and we don’t know each other well enough to talk about a new one. If we do decide that our present relationship is a subject for discussion, then we need to talk about each other.”

“You’re impossible!” Solovyov laughed. “You’ve lost all your romanticism over the years and you’ve become terribly dry, businesslike, and terrifyingly logical. Why do you think that I’ve changed? I’m the same. I’m exactly the same Solovyov that you used to love.”

“That can’t be,” she noted gently. “Many things have happened in your life over the years and in mine. And it’s left its mark – a quite noticeable one, I might add. You’ve lived through a tragedy, losing your wife. You’ve become rich and rather famous. How can you say that you haven’t changed?”

“You’re right about the money, but I doubt that I’m famous.”

“What about the wife and illness?” Nastya thought. “Pretending not to have heard? Why? Why are you avoiding the discussion?”

“No doubts about it,” she replied quickly. “The readers know you.”

“What makes you say that?”

Nastya saw unfeigned interest in his eyes. Solovyov had always been vain and he liked to talk about fame. But in this case he wasn’t acting coy, he really did want to know.

“The doctor in the ambulance that took you to hospital is a big fan of yours.”

Now his face showed anger, his features seemed sharper and frozen, as if he was controlling himself to keep from saying something harsh.

“She started calling up all her friends to tell them that the Solovyov who translates Eastern Best Seller had been viciously mugged on the street. She was so sorry for you. She suffered so much over you.”

Now Nastya was completely sure that the talk of the mugging was true. But why hadn’t it appeared in the reports? This was a serious crime, to leave the victim an invalid. You could get eight years for that. Solovyov was protecting the criminal, that was clear. That’s why he didn’t want to talk about it. Who was it? His son? Maybe. But what about the doctors? They were required to report a viciously beaten patient to the police. Why hadn’t they? Because no one cared anymore. For the last few years nobody did what the law or the regulations demanded. Because everyone was out for himself and didn’t care about anyone else. The country was going to hell in a handbasket.

“She called me then, too,” Nastya continued without a pause, as if nothing were wrong. “Actually, it was then that I started thinking about coming to see you.”

“It was a long think,” he replied dryly. “Almost two years.”