She nodded as they passed the tenth floor. He reached over and pushed the button for eleven. She pressed herself against the wall. The door opened, and Tkach said, “Now go down. Quick.”
As soon as he was out of the car, she pushed the doors closed and was gone.
The dark hallway was quiet and deserted. Then Tkach saw a woman of about sixty with a bucket in her hand.
The cleaning women, he thought. They’re after a cleaning woman. He dashed past the woman. He ran down the narrow concrete stairs two at a time, almost stumbling.
On the seventh floor the corridor was also dark and deserted. Staying in the shadows, he moved along slowly, listening, and then he heard something, a ticking perhaps, metal hitting metal. He followed the sound, carefully listening for voices, hearing none, trying to keep his footsteps as soundless as possible. It took him a few minutes to determine that the tapping was coming from a room at the far end of the corridor. Perhaps it was a cleaning woman.
He stopped at the door, listening for a moment to the soft clanking, then pushed it open. The office was dark, but the sound was quite clear. And then the lights went on.
One of the men was tapping a knife against a metal desk. There was a man on each side of the door. The one who had been on the elevator stood in the corner, his arms folded, a smile on his face.
The one with the knife stopped tapping.
“You followed like a fish,” he said, showing a very poor set of teeth. He was the biggest of the group, quite big and clearly the leader.
“I am a police inspector,” Tkach said, trying not to show fear. “There are police downstairs by now. You don’t want trouble with the police. Just come with me and answer a few questions.”
“About what?” asked the leader, closing his knife and putting it in his pocket.
“Routine,” said Tkach, cursing himself for sweating.
“Ah,” said the leader, suddenly understanding. “You mean about my selling drinks in the square without a license.”
“Yes,” said Tkach. “That is it.”
“And you followed me all the way here for that great crime?”
“And to see if you were involved in any other criminal activity,” Tkach said. “I don’t like your looks, but I can see you’re not up to anything more than mild hooliganism.”
“Do any of you believe this baby face?” the leader asked.
There was no answer. The leader came around the desk and moved in front of Tkach.
“Those women,” he said. “That’s why you followed us. We want to know how you got on to us. You tell us. Then we push you around a little, tie you up, and run. We’ve got places in the North we can go.”
It was a lie, a poor lie, a game to give Tkach hope and then take it away. The image of the battered women came back to Tkach and he said, “There is no place you can hide in the Soviet Union. You know that. You might as well give up and hope that you get labor in a detention camp.”
“I don’t like this,” came a voice from behind Tkach. It was one of the men at the door, the one who looked like the youngest. “If the police are coming, we have to get out of here. Let’s just kill him and go.”
The leader shook his head sadly at the ignorance of his underling.
“There are no police coming. He’s the only one. He hasn’t had time to call for help. He’s alone. We saw he was alone.”
Tkach now understood the situation. The leader enjoyed making the victim suffer; they had probably never worked on a man before, and he was trying to decide how to handle it.
He looked at Tkach and suddenly threw a punch into the policeman’s stomach. Tkach doubled over, and the man grabbed his hair and pulled him up straight.
“To the elevator,” the leader said. “We’ll make it a double. Our brave policeman can watch while we show him first hand how we do our work on the elevator operator. Misha, when we get on, you close the elevator doors. Boris, you grab the woman and throw her on the floor. Alexi and I will watch our inspector.”
When they turned Tkach around, he was still trying to catch his breath. Breathe slowly, he told himself as they walked to the elevator. As soon as the door opened, he would make his move, try to fight them off and get the door closed. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the best he could do. At the very least, he would smash the face of the leader before they got their knives into him. May the first punch be wonderful. May it break him, kill him.
He dragged his feet and doubled over, trying to slow them down, but it didn’t do much good. He had told the elevator operator not to come up here, to wait for the police, but he had little hope that she would obey. And he couldn’t be sure the woman in the gift shop had called. Even if she had, he didn’t know how long it would take for help to come. It would almost certainly be too late.
The men surrounded him at the elevator door and pushed the button. Tkach hoped fervently that the elevator would not come but slowly, steadily, it was coming. He looked up at the inscription embossed on the panel above the elevator door: The Revolution Continues. Transportation Forward.
With that, the door of the elevator groaned open, and two of the muggers stepped forward to grab the operator, but the woman was not there. Instead, a stubby washtub of a man with a dark scowl and muscular, hairy arms seized the two men. Both came skittering out almost instantly, one thrown across the corridor against the wall, the other sliding back on his rear.
Tkach straightened up and slammed the heel of his hand into the nose of the leader. The man screamed, and stumbled back, holding his face in his hands.
The other mugger, the one who had ridden up in the elevator with Tkach, had his knife out and was advancing on Rostnikov, who stepped out slowly, staring at him. There was no time for Tkach to move, but neither was there need. Rostnikov ducked low as the man with the knife lunged, then grabbed the man’s arm with one hand and his belt with the other. He lifted him and hurled him against the wall, where he sagged to the floor next to the man with the broken nose.
Tkach heard a sound behind him and turned to see the second man, whom Rostnikov had thrown out of the elevator, reach into his pocket. He kicked the man in the stomach and was satisfied to hear an escape of air not unlike the one he had let out when the leader punched him.
Without a word, Rostnikov herded the four muggers into the elevator with kicks and pushes and motioned Tkach in, giving a sour look at the whimpering leader.
Then he pushed the elevator button for the first floor.
“I-” Tkach began, trying to put his clothes back in order.
“Not now,” said Rostnikov abruptly, “I have important work for you to do. You do speak French, don’t you?”
“I speak French,” said Tkach.
“Bon,” said Rostnikov, turning so that neither Tkach nor the muggers could see the satisfied grin on his face.
FOUR
Prostitution, of course, does not exist in the Soviet Union. It has not existed since 1930. This disease of exploitative societies, according to the official Soviet Encyclopedia, “has been liquidated in the Soviet Union, since the conditions engendering and nourishing it have disappeared.” Lenin said that “lack of self-control in sexual matters is a bourgeois characteristic, a sign of demoralization.” Therefore, following a brief flurry of free love movements after the revolution, the Soviet Union effectively ended the sexual exploitation of women.
Which is why it took Emil Karpo almost half an hour to find the prostitute he was looking for in Moscow. Normally, time and duty permitting, Karpo met Mathilde in the Café Moscow off Gorky Street at seven in the evening on the first Wednesday of each month. They would then go to the apartment Mathilde shared with her aunt and cousin, who would be conveniently absent for an hour. Mathilde worked as a telephone operator during the day and as a prostitute at night. She was a sekretarsha, or “secretary,” not a full-time prostitutka.