Red Chameleon (12 page)

“What is it you want?” The speaker was a young woman in a black dress, her hair pulled back and tied with a black ribbon. She was vulpine beautiful, a type of face that suggested weary cleverness, of having seen so much that a little more would not be surprising. Her words challenged him to come up with a tale.

He reached into his rear pocket and grunted out his identification, noticing that his leather wallet was bulging and frayed. The bulge came partly from the bills he carried for needed purchases and partly from his unwillingness to part with little bits of paper on which notes were written to remind him of various things he never got around to doing.

The young woman's eyes darted at the wallet and back to his face. He had no doubt that she had actually looked at the card. She appeared to be quite unimpressed. “I repeat, comrade inspector. What is it you want? We are in production at the moment and have—”

“Lev Ostrovsky,” he put in, looking around now that he could see. He was standing in a narrow corridor with a string of lights heading deep inside the building. To each side of the corridor were doors, but he could make out no sounds within them.

“I don't—” She began with a sigh, which Rostnikov recognized as the prelude to dismissal.

“You will,” he assured her, cutting in again. It was time to assume a new role. “Lev Ostrovsky is here. I wish to see him immediately. I do not have time to watch you perform. I am in a good mood, a remarkably good mood considering many things I have no desire to share with you, but that mood can so easily become—” He held up his thick right hand palm down and let it flutter like a wounded bird.

The young woman folded her arms across her small breasts and let out her third sigh of the brief conversation. Rostnikov decided that she was not an actress. Her repertoire of mannerisms was too limited. Either she was without experience or simply had not cultivated her talents.

“Down this corridor,” she said through closed teeth and over a very false cordial smile. “Turn left at the end and then right.”

With that she turned and walked to a door, her heels clicking on the wooden floor, and made her exit.

Rostnikov, uncertain of the directions she had given, limped down the corridor, listening for the sound of a voice, a movement. When he had turned the second corner and was headed toward a door to his right that said Stage Entrance, he heard the sound of music.

He went through the door to the stage, following the music, moved up a low flight of stairs, and found another door. Beyond this door was the rear of the stage. The music was louder, an orchestra. It was familiar and not familiar. The backstage area was even darker than the corridor. Rostnikov moved carefully toward a light ahead that accompanied the music. Beyond a chair and a bank of switches for lights, Rostnikov found himself to the right of the stage of the theater. On the stage, illuminated by an insufficient light from high above, stood a man with a mop. On a chair near the old man was an old record player. The volume was very high and the man very old.

“Lev Ostrovsky?” Rostnikov shouted over the music, but the bent man simply soaked his mophead from the pail in front of him and kept his back to the policeman. Rostnikov could see in the dim light the drying soapy trail on the polished wooden floor of the stage. Beyond the dim light in darkness were hundreds of seats. He listened to his voice break against the far wall of darkness.

The old man did not turn immediately as Rostnikov stepped forward and turned off the record player. Silence thundered, and Rostnikov was suddenly aware of the mop squeaking over the floor.

It took the old man a beat or two to realize that the music was gone. He straightened and turned to face Rostnikov. There was a slight smile fixed on the ancient face, a smile that Rostnikov recognized as not one of amusement of the moment but the permanent mask some people wore. He was a short man in trousers held up by suspenders over a long-sleeved blue work shirt. He grasped his mop in two hands and pursed his lips as he examined the heavy man in front of him.

“What was that music?” Rostnikov asked, but the old man simply continued to stare. So Rostnikov shouted his question again.

“The soundtrack from
Rocky,”
Ostrovsky said in a willowy voice as he looked at the record player.

“Rocky?”
asked Rostnikov, feeling as if he were in some absurdist play and that hundreds of first-nighters were just behind the light, trying to suppress coughs of laughter.

“An American moving picture,” Ostrovsky explained. “I bought it from an American. Actually, I traded for two tickets to
Vassa Zheleznova.
I got the better deal.”

Rostnikov nodded in agreement, partly to preserve his voice and partly because he could think of no appropriate rejoinder.

“‘He reminds me of a policeman',” the old man said, his smile still fixed, his right hand leaving the mop to point at Rostnikov. “‘A policeman I once knew. In our theater in Kostroma we used to have a policeman—a tall fellow with bulging eyes. He didn't walk. He ran, didn't just smoke but practically choked on the fumes. One got the impression he wasn't so much just living as jumping and tumbling, trying to reach for something quick. Yet what he was after, he himself didn't know.'”

“I'm—” Rostnikov said, but he had forgotten to shout, and the old man continued, no longer looking at the policeman but out into the audience.

“‘When a man has a clear objective, he proceeds toward it calmly. But this one hurried. And it was a peculiar kind of haste—it lashed him on from within—and he ran and ran, getting in everybody's way, including his own. He wasn't avaricious. He only wanted avidly to do all he had to do as quickly as he could. He wanted to get all his duties out of the way, not overlooking the duty of taking bribes. Nor did he accept bribes. No, he grabbed them in a hurry, forgetting even to thank you. One day he got himself run over by some horses and was killed.'”

The old man turned to face Rostnikov, who was now convinced that he was dealing with senility and had best be simply polite and depart.

“Did your policeman have a name,” Rostnikov said. “This one does.” He pulled out his wallet and displayed it, though the man had obviously recognized him for what he was.

“There was no policeman,” Ostrovsky said, shaking his head. “I was acting. You couldn't tell I was acting? That's the goal, the very thing all these young actors miss the point of. That business about the policeman was one of Tatyana's speeches from Gorky's
Enemies.
Have you ever seen it? “

“No,” Rostnikov admitted. The stage was cool, and the chief inspector half expected the ghosts of past audiences to reveal themselves and laugh at his confusion.

“Too much talk,” the old man said, holding up his arthritic right hand and opening and closing it to show what talk was. “But I got you, huh? I can still act circles around these people today, these actors.”

He demonstrated his ability to act circles around those who frequented the stage by swirling his mop in a circle on the floor.

“I can see that,” Rostnikov said.

“I actually met Anton Chekhov when I was a boy,” Ostrovsky said, pointing to a spot on the stage where he presumably met Chekhov. “Right here.”

“Chekhov died before you were born,” Rostnikov said.

“Then it was Tolstoy I met,” the old man said with a shrug.

“Abraham Savitskaya,” Rostnikov said. His leg was beginning to stiffen. He shuffled to the single chair on the stage, moved the record player to the floor, sat, and looked up at the old man, who had been struck dumb by the name from antiquity.

“He's dead,” said Ostrovsky, his permanent smile going dead.

“How did you know?” Now Rostnikov was directing, acting to the nonexistent audience. He was back in his familiar role.

“Everyone's dead.” The old man shrugged. “I have a stage to mop.”

“Mikhail Posniky,” Rostnikov shouted as the old man made a move to resume his work. The name stopped his motion. Rostnikov had a few more he could pull out if need be.

“Dead,” Ostrovsky said.

“No, I think he murdered Abraham Savitskaya two nights ago here in Moscow.”

“I haven't seen either of them for … a thousand years,” Ostrovsky said. “Who can remember—”

“You remember lines from old plays.”

“Ah,” the old man said, his smile strong and crinkly. “That is fantasy, easy to recall. Reality, now that is not nearly as real to an actor.”

How long could an eighty-year-old man stand up? It was an experiment that Rostnikov might have to make to get some answers.

“A brass candlestick,” Rostnikov said. “Do you remember a brass candlestick that Abraham Savitskaya owned?”

The old man's face looked blank, and he began to shake his head when an image came, a memory. He shuffled a foot for new balance.

“No, it was Mikhail who left with the candlesticks,” he said, seeing some vague image in the past. “Mikhail and Abraham left together, going to America, they said. Each had a little suitcase, and Mikhail had the candlestick. His mother had given it to him just before he left. Why do I remember such things, such details? Who wants to remember such things?”

Rostnikov had no answer, only questions. “And have you seen either of them since they left the village, left Yekteraslav?”

“Who?”

“The men, Posniky or Savitskaya.”

Ostrovsky shrugged. “Rumors—I heard rumors from people I ran into from the village, just rumors, rumors, rumors. You know rumors?”

“I know rumors,” Rostnikov admitted to the parched mask of a smiling face that moved slowly toward him. “What kind of rumors?”

“That Mikhail had become a big gangster in America, just like the movies. Tiny Caesar, the Godfather. Guns. Everything. It was possible. Who knew? He was a hard boy, a hard young man. I was a clown.”

“Savitskaya?”

“Ah,” Ostrovsky said, moving close enough to whisper.
“A macher.”

“A macher?”

“That's Yiddish,” Ostrovsky confided. “A dead language for dead Jews like me. Savitskaya was a dealer, a man not to be trusted.”

“One more name,” Rostnikov said, standing up. “A fourth young friend of yours from the village. Shmuel Prensky. What became—”

Rostnikov had simply been finishing the routine, looking for another step, another lead. He had not anticipated the reaction. Lev Ostrovsky went an enamel white and trembled. The smile became a grimace of pain or fear.

“Dead,” Ostrovsky said, holding his mop handle, his knuckles twisted and white.

“When did he—”

“Long ago. He is dead, quite dead. Buried. Long ago.”

“Yuri Pashkov still lives in Yekteraslav,” Rostnikov pursued, walking over to the old man, ready to grab him if he should fall. “Pashkov—you remember him. He also seemed afraid of the name of Shmuel Prensky.”

“Afraid? Me?” Ostrovsky said with a false laugh. He was acting quite poorly now. His reviews, if he survived the terror he was going through, would not be approving. “Shmuel Prensky is dead. I'm a very old man in case you haven't noticed. I have nothing to be afraid of from anyone on this earth. I've played the great roles. On this very stage I played Grigory Stepanovich Smirnov in Chekhov's
The Boor.
And I'd still be acting if they let Jews have decent roles. See, I'm not afraid to tell a policeman such things. So how could you—”

Rostnikov closed his eyes and opened them with a little shrug. “Perhaps I was mistaken,” he said.

“Mistaken,” the old man said vehemently. He began to mop the floor without bothering to dip it into the water. Then a thought struck him, and he turned, trembling.

“Gorky himself,” he said, sweeping the darkness with his hand, “said the Art Theatre is as marvelous as the Tretyakov Gallery, St. Basil's Cathedral, and all the finest sights of Moscow. It is impossible not to love it.”

“I can see that,” Rostnikov said, watching the man justify himself to himself.

“It's enough to simply be in here, to be on this stage, to play out a little scene between soaping. To live out my last days with no trouble.”

“I understand,” Rostnikov said.

“‘Life,'” said the old man almost to himself, “‘has gone by as if I had never lived. I'll lie down a while. There's no strength left in you, old fellow; nothing is left, nothing. You addle head.'”

“Firs's final speech in
The Cherry Orchard,”
Rostnikov said. “A fine performance.”

“Thank you,” Ostrovsky said, some of his spirit and color returning. “But—”

The old man was looking over Rostnikov's shoulder behind the stage, and Rostnikov turned to watch his uniformed driver hurry toward him. The man or the uniform had brought the fear back into Ostrovsky's eyes.

“Comrade inspector,” the young man with the flat face said, ignoring the setting and the ancient actor. “You have a message, an urgent message from Investigator Zelach.”

“Coming,” Rostnikov answered, and then to the old man, he said, “Perhaps we will discuss ancient history and the life of the theater at some point in the future.”

“My pleasure,” said Ostrovsky, his smile broadening, his manner making it clear that such an encounter would not be a pleasure at all.

Rostnikov followed the driver toward the wings. He couldn't keep up with the younger man, not with his bad leg. Instead, he relied on that which he always relied on, his steady movement. He would bear in mind Gorky's detective from Kostroma; he would endeavor to move with caution and not get himself killed by runaway horses.

Behind Rostnikov, Lev Ostrovsky waited, waited a full five minutes, waited cautiously in case it was some trick and the policeman was hiding in the darkness. He forced himself to finish the floor, to make straight lines of soapy water, to set up the record player again, to listen to the martial music from
Rocky,
to control himself, to act out the role of cleaning man, a role he wanted to continue for whatever days he might have left. He waited a full five minutes, and then, when he was confident that he was again alone, he put down his mop, turned off the record player, and hurried off to find a telephone.