It was not a question.
“No,” said Tyrone. “I was asked by the police to make no copies, and I did not have the time.”
“Oleg?” said the white-haired man.
The other man shook his head “no.”
“Oleg does not believe you,” said the white-haired man.
The slaps came in quick, stinging seconds, two with the open palm of Oleg’s right hand and then two with the back of the man’s right hand. Oleg was wearing a large ring. It cut into Tyrone’s cheek. Tyrone reached out to steady himself on a chair that was not there. He sat backward on the floor with a brittle thump.
Oleg stood over him. Tyrone tried to think.
“No copies,” he said. “I swear on the graves and bones of all the saints who have ever lived, on every holy icon that has ever been discovered. I swear.”
“Empty your pockets,” the white-haired man said.
Tyrone, cheek bleeding and certainly in need of surgical closure, came to his knees and emptied the contents of his pockets onto the floor. Then Oleg lifted him to his feet and patted him down.
Agreement passed between the two invaders.
“Come here. I have something important for you to do,” said the white-haired man.
Tyrone put a hand to his cheek and shuffled his way to the man, who said, “Do not drip blood on me.”
The white-haired man took a small spray can from his pocket. He unscrewed the lid of the can and handed it to Oleg, who began spraying its contents generously around the room.
“Now,” said the white-haired man. “Be thankful you are alive and, as you consider your luck, run through the corridors shouting, ‘The building is on fire.’ ”
Oleg produced a lighter, turned it on, held it to a piece of paper he tore from a discarded newspaper on the sofa, and set the apartment ablaze.
The white-haired man and Oleg pulled Tyrone into the hallway and closed the apartment door.
“You will have a scar,” said the white-haired man. “It will remind you to be careful about working with the police. Now run.”
Tyrone, hand to his burning cheek, stumbled, then ran awkwardly, calling out, “Fire, fire, fire.”
When he looked back over his shoulder, the two intruders were gone. He paused for an instant to be certain and then shambled back to his apartment door. The heat from inside threatened the door. Almost everything of his and his mother’s was now gone. His equipment would be useless. Almost everything was gone. Almost.
He knelt and dug his fingernails into the cover of the electrical outlet near the door. The heat stung his fingers, but the outlet cover popped off, revealing an empty space just large enough for the copy of the tape he had placed there less than half an hour earlier.
It was a time to panic, but Tyrone did not panic. Instead, he walked slowly out the door past the people who had come out of their apartments to find out whether there was a fire or they were the victims of a drunken joke.
In bare feet, Tyrone moved to the stairwell, his right hand to his bloody cheek, his left hand clutching the tape.
10
Sara and Porfiry Petrovich sat in the apartment on Krasnikov Street.
“It will happen and we will have grandchildren,” said Rostnikov. “And they will grow and ask impossible questions, which we will delight in answering.”
“And they will be strong and beautiful,” she said.
“Of course.”
She had fixed him a bag of food, including a bottle of orange juice and a thermos of coffee, when he told her he would have to work through the night. She wanted to ask if what he was going to do might be dangerous, but she did not. What was the point? Everything he did each day might result in anticipated or unanticipated danger.
The wedding. How could there be a wedding when the bride, groom, and father of the groom were all involved in solving different violent crimes? How could there be a wedding in which bride and groom feared the loss of their independence?
Was it too late for them to change their minds? Yes. Things she had already ordered could be kept reasonably fresh at the markets, at least for a few days, but not beyond that. People had been invited and had accepted.
When Porfiry Petrovich had kissed her and gone through the door, Galina and her two granddaughters came up from their apartment to keep Sara company.
“Where is Porfiry Petrovich?” asked the younger granddaughter. “Is he fixing someone’s toilet?”
“Perhaps,” said Sara.
Galina had brought vatrushka, sweet cottage cheese-filled pastries, from her work, and the four of them had eaten the pastries with tea and told of their day. Sara had the least to say. She had gone to her treatment earlier in the day, treatment to keep the malignancy from returning. She was reassured once again by her cousin Leon, who was also her doctor, that she was cancer free. The cost of remaining cancer free, however, was an ever-present fatigue, which she fought to keep under control.
Sara kept from slouching like Zelach or shuffling like her husband or looking blank like Karpo. She had wonderful examples in her life of how not to look. Leon had suggested that she merely remember to walk heel down first and chest up to maintain erect posture and a firm step.
Sara had reached out and touched the cheek of Galina’s older granddaughter, who smiled through her disappointment. On the one hand, nothing delighted the girl more than serving as Rostnikov’s assistant when he went on an apartment mission, tools in the box in one hand, to repair a fissure or diagnose a change in pressure. Only a complete rupture of ancient piping pleased her more. The younger girl, on the other hand, was particularly taken by Porfiry Petrovich’s nightly ritual of taking his weights out of the cupboard, pushing his bench away from the wall, and lifting. She was convinced that he was the strongest man in the world.
They had departed more than two hours ago and now Sara lay on the bed with a night-light on, glasses on her nose. She was trying to read one of her husband’s detective novels in English, but her English simply was not good enough to make the effort even slightly enjoyable. She began to think of the wedding once more.
The apartment was really too small for the wedding reception, which was to take place after the official sanction of the government wedding bureau. It would have to spill out into the hallway outside their door and probably down the stairs.
She had wanted to rent the former neighborhood Communist Party Headquarters offices, now a meeting hall for groups of almost all persuasions and perversions. Iosef had said no. He and Elena needed no meeting hall. Sara and Porfiry Petrovich, who had not had a wedding party of their own when they got married, both understood. So all would be crowded into the apartment in which she now lay.
She would have help. Some of it, like Galina’s, was welcome. Some, like that of Lydia Tkach, was most unwelcome but impossible to reject. The effort of communicating with Sasha’s mother was not worth the small woman’s willing and ever-moving hands, which jumped into service. Anna Timofeyeva had volunteered to help and Sara had said it would be most welcome, though, in fact, Anna Timofeyeva had already survived three heart attacks and seldom left the small apartment in which she lived with her niece Elena.
There would be no pretense of impressing Igor Yaklovev, who had, to Sara’s surprise, said he would attend. He had never been to the Rostnikov apartment and she had never met him. He would find it small, with old but serviceable furniture and marvelous plumbing.
Sara had tried to go back to work at the Metro Music Shop near the Kremlin. She and Porfiry Petrovich needed the income. She had been unable to handle the eight or nine hours a day on her feet and being almost constantly engaged in conversation, not to mention the need to be always well-groomed, always presentable.