He paused, dart in hand, and sighed so slightly that only Ellen, who knew his every move, would have detected it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“What an asinine name. Balta.”
Mounted on shiny dark stone and laid into notches along the path of gray blocks rested the thirteen honored rectangular polished coffins. The coffins contained not human remains but capsules of earth from the Hero Cities of World War II-Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Minsk, Volgograd, Sevastopol, Odessa, Novorossiysk, Kerch, Tula, the Brest Fortress, Murmansk, and Smolensk. The name of each city stood out in large letters facing the path.
The memorial, the Eternal Flame, and the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior meant little to Biko and Laurence other than as possible places in which to hide while they waited for the coming of the Russians who had James Harumbaki.
Yesterday Patrice, before he was killed by the police, had wondered what they might do if the Russians came without their hostage. He had come to no clear conclusion. Biko and Laurence were even less equipped to deal with the problem. So they had concluded that they would arrive in the Alexandrovsky Gardens early, hide, wait, and when the Russians appeared with James Harumbaki they would spring out and fire, trying very hard not to kill James Harumbaki. If the Russians arrived without their hostage, they would try to bargain with the worthless stones Biko had in his pocket. They agreed that Laurence would do the talking, though his command of Russian was no better than Biko’s.
But this was not to be.
First, there were uniformed soldiers in full dress and carrying rifles guarding the ground-level tomb, which was set back against a high wall behind the thirteen entombed capsules of earth.
They could be dealt with. They would have no idea what was going to happen, and both Biko and Laurence reasoned that in the bloody battle that was very likely to take place the death of a few soldiers caught in the crossfire would be marked as casualties of Moscow gang fighting.
But this was also not to be.
Biko and Laurence stood about forty yards from the memorial, off the path, behind a stand of bushes. They thought that this would be the direction from which the Russians would come with James Harumbaki.
And then, quite suddenly, to their left, down the path a dozen or so people quietly appeared, men and women, mostly in their twenties or thirties. All of them were carrying flowers. The group went silently past Biko and Laurence to the tomb and placed the flowers among others that had been put there during the day. The soldiers stood at attention.
Biko and Laurence waited behind a small brace of yellow-flowered bushes for the group to move away, but they stood silently, heads bowed.
Then Biko and Laurence heard something coming from their right. At first there was a distant murmur of voices. Then it became a chanting. Then dozens of people appeared, crowding the path, bleeding over onto the grass.
Biko and Laurence carefully moved farther back, where they were less likely to be seen.
They could not understand who these new, angry people were. There were boys in black shirts, bearded Russian Orthodox priests carrying crosses and icons, old babushkas crying out.
They descended on the small group that had laid out the flowers and began throwing stones, eggs, and condoms filled with water, shouting, “Moscow is not Sodom” and “Faggots Out.” One screaming young woman with a bullhorn, her face turning red, screeched a tinny-sounding, “Not Gay Pride. Queer Shame.”
“What is happening?” asked Biko.
“I do not know,” answered Laurence as about twenty policemen in full uniform and wearing helmets with Plexiglas face covers appeared as if from the air, swinging batons at the black shirts, priests, and old ladies.
Surrounded, the twenty or so gays fought their way through the crowd with the help of the police and began to run, with the black shirts in pursuit. The police beat the attackers with clubs and pushed a dozen or so of them against the wall behind the tomb.
“We must leave and come back in an hour,” said Laurence.
Biko agreed. If this crowd was attacking a small group of quiet homosexuals peacefully placing flowers on a tomb, what might they do to two black men who were carrying weapons?
As they eased away, above the shouting they could clearly hear the voice of the screaming woman on the bullhorn.
“Mayor Yuri Luzhkov of our beloved Moscow has said that any attempt by these people to lay flowers here is a ‘desecration of a sacred place.’ They should expect to be beaten.”
“Russians are very crazy people,” said Laurence. “I have known crazy people in Sudan, Ghana, but none as crazy as Russians.”
Yes, thought Biko, Africa is much safer.
Sasha Tkach had just been through an early morning ordeal. His phone had rung just before six while he lay in the darkness of his hotel room, awake but unwilling to rise, shower, and shave. He would move when the glowing red numbers on his tiny travel clock, a gift from his mother, hit six and two zeroes.
“Sasha?”
It was the very last person whose voice he wished to hear.
“Yes.”
“Do you know what your name means?” Lydia Tkach asked.
“You woke me to ask. .?”
“Aleksei, do you know?”
She almost never called him Aleksei, and when she did so it was intended to indicate a very serious subject of conversation. The problem was that Lydia thought anything regarding her only son was monumentally important.
“Defender of men,” he said.
“Do you know what your name was supposed to be before your father, may he rest with the angels in a field of silver icons, insisted that you be called Aleksei?”
“You are a Communist and an atheist,” he said, holding the phone a few inches from his ear to protect himself from his hard-of-hearing mother who, at the age of seventy, thought people could only be heard on telephones if they were shouted at. “You do not believe that my father is with any angels.”
“I believe what the times dictate I should believe,” she shouted. “That is how we survive. Your name was to have been the same as my father’s, Kliment which means. .”
“Merciful and gentle,” he concluded.
“Merciful and gentle,” she said, not heeding her son’s words. “You were meant to be merciful and gentle.”
“By God?”
“No, by me. Did you see Maya?”
“Yes.”
“When is she coming home with the children?”
“She is not.”
“Try again.”
“I’m going to go see her and the children as soon as you let me go.”
“Who is keeping you? It is time for you to stop being a policeman. I will bet that even now as we are speaking some criminal is planning to beat you or seduce you or stab you or shoot you. .”
“Or drop a rock on my head or beat me with a wooden cross or. .”
“You are mocking me.”
“Yes.”
“You are mocking your mother who is trying to save your marriage and your life,” she said.
“I am sorry.”
He was sitting up now, licking his dry lips with his dry tongue and wondering if perhaps his mother might not be right.
“Think about it.”
“I will,” he said.
“Now go get my grandchildren and your wife.”
Before he could ask her how she got his cell phone’s newly changed number, she hung up.
He should plan what he was going to say, how he would say it. It was difficult to convince himself that he would be fine if she gave him another chance. If he could not convince himself, how could he convince Maya?
What was it she had said? He was a lamb waiting to be shorn by any attractive woman. Some day the shears would slip and he would bleed and be standing shorn and suddenly naked.
He staggered to the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked at himself in the mirror. He was not growing more handsome with each passing day.