He was taller and leaner than most of Sarah’s family and was given to wearing suits and ties even when he was not working. He did not like wearing clinical whites, though he did wear blue gowns and caps and a mask when he performed or assisted at surgery.
Sarah had come from the clinic her cousin used. Leon kept himself and his patients away from Moscow hospitals whenever possible. Unlike most doctors in Russia, and in the Soviet Union before, Leon prospered. He was younger than Sarah, no more than forty-five. He had managed to get into a Soviet medical school in spite of being Jewish, though it had taken a substantial bribe. After medical school he had supplemented the outdated medical education he had received by apprenticing under Cuban doctors, then had opened his own practice.
Leon was aware that he was known as the Jew doctor on Herzen Street. People with money came to him-government officials, businessmen, criminals-and, because of his connection to Porfiry Petrovich, an increasing number of ranking officers from the various law enforcement agencies. Leon treated them all, charged them according to their ability to pay, and, in turn, worked for nothing at the clinic to which he had sent Sarah. His patients at the clinic, in contrast to his private patients, tended to be abominably poor.
“You have the clinic report?” Sarah asked as calmly as she could.
Leon thought, as he had since he was a boy, that his cousin was a beautiful woman of great dignity. At first Leon, like the others in the family, wondered why she had married the Gentile policeman who walked with a limp and looked like a file cabinet. But Leon and the others were gradually won over. They had come to accept Porfiry Petrovich and, of course, Sarah and Porfiry Petrovich’s son.
“They called about ten minutes before you got here,” he said, not touching his own cup of coffee. “The X rays are being delivered here now.”
“It’s back,” Sarah said.
“The tumor? I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t know, but I don’t think so. That is not my specialty, but I will look and I will consult with the woman who operated on you. I think, at this point, something was touched, cut, perhaps even severed during the initial surgery. Or perhaps the tumor itself caused some minor damage before it was removed. None of this is uncommon.”
Sarah knew her cousin as if he were her brother. They had grown up together. Their families had lived in the same apartment building, a building that was about half Jewish. Leon was not lying. He would not lie to her.
“And so?” she said.
“And so,” he repeated, “if I am right, this is something that we may be able to treat with medication, perhaps antiseizure pills. If we can’t find a good way to treat it, we may simply have to tell you to live with it unless it gets worse.”
“And if you are wrong, Leon Moiseyevitch?”
“Perhaps surgery again to see if we can find and take care of the problem, but I don’t think that will be necessary.”
The room was warm and comfortable. Leon had made the two-bedroom apartment so. It was not filled with expensive furniture or antiques or anything that would suggest to the visitor that he was well-off. But there was an Oriental rug on the floor, a warm maroon-and-purple motif in the furniture, and contemporary Russian art on his walls. The art was all representational and non-political. There were separate entrances to the apartment and to his office and examining room next door. Leon could go to work or back home in seconds.
“Finish your coffee and we’ll go take another look at you,” he said. “Someone should be delivering the laboratory reports and X rays from the clinic any moment.”
“You will let me know if I am going to die, Leon,” she said. “I would have a great deal to do to prepare.”
“You are not going to die,” he said. “Not till you’re as old as Grandma Rebecca. Ninety-one years. That’s a promise. I will not permit another woman I love to be taken before her time.”
Leon’s wife had died almost seven years earlier of stomach cancer. They had one child, Itzhak, whom they called Ivan. Ivan was now nine. The woman who took care of him, Masha, a Hungarian, would pick the boy up at school and bring him home. The boy bore an uncanny resemblance to his mother, a resemblance, Sarah knew, that constantly reminded her cousin of his loss and caused him to have a protectiveness of the boy that Sarah understood, though she often thought it would not serve Leon or the child well as the boy grew.
“Shall we go?” Leon asked with a smile as he stood.
Sarah put down her cup and took his offered hand. On the way to the door to the office and through the examination room, Sarah asked about Itzhak, and Leon talked with pride about his son’s accomplishments.
Sarah did not have nor did she want anyone to look after the two girls who would be waiting for her. They were old enough to make their own way home from school and find something to eat. She had left a note telling them to do their homework and then to read the books they had begun. After an early dinner she would let them watch some television.
As she lay talking and thinking, a deep part of her prayed that she would never have a seizure in front of the girls or Iosef or Porfiry Petrovich, though she knew she would soon have to tell her husband what was happening.
Rostnikov sat across the table from Yevgeny Tutsolov. Zelach stood behind the young man, who sat erect and was remarkably calm. Rostnikov had not told the young man why they had come to talk to him at the hotel where he worked in the laundry. When they had found him pulling sheets from a large dryer with the help of the hotel services supervisor, Tutsolov had seemed surprised but not at all nervous.
The supervisor was a bull of a woman in a white uniform who said they could use the small room off the laundry where the employees ate their lunch. She added that the sooner Tutsolov got back to work, the better, unless they planned to arrest him for something.
Rostnikov thanked her, smiled, and told the woman that she reminded him of Tolstoy’s description of Anna Karenina. The woman’s scowl had turned to a smile of pleasure.
“I’ve been told that before,” she said over the sound of the washing and drying machines and the rolling of carts by curious employees. “Of course, that was before I put on a little weight.”
“It shows through,” said Rostnikov as the woman led her employee and the two policemen to the small lunchroom. “Beauty shows through.”
She closed the door behind her when she left, and the three men were enclosed by windowless walls and the smell of thousands of previous lunches.
Rostnikov moved to one side of the table and sat on the bench. He had motioned Tutsolov to the other side of the bench. Zelach needed no order to know where he was to place himself-behind the suspect, close and intimidating.
“You have a slight limp,” Rostnikov said.
“You noticed? One of the workers pushed a laundry cart into me about a month ago. It’s getting better every day. I don’t think anyone even noticed the limp except you. You, too, have a limp.”
“I have an artificial leg,” said Rostnikov. “Have you ever seen one?”
“No,” said Tutsolov.
“The good ones they make now are marvels of technology,” said Rostnikov. “My son, who used to be a poet and playwright after he was a soldier, envisions the day when as each internal organ and external limb is diseased or mutilated, it will immediately be replaced by an artificial one that works even better than the original. Everything but the brain.”
“Interesting,” said Tutsolov.
“Yes,” said Rostnikov. “But I think it is only the poet in him. Would you like to know why we are here?”
“Very much,” said the young man, folding his hands on the table and leaning forward attentively, curiosity crossing his innocent-looking face.
“You knew a young man named Igor Mesanovich,” said Rostnikov.
“Yes. He was my friend. We knew each other from the time we were children,” said Yevgeny Tutsolov, his eyes growing moist. “But I haven’t seen him for months.”