The Stone Bridge by Alexander Terekhov

Author:Alexander Terekhov [Alexander Terekhov]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-909156-66-1
Publisher: Glagoslav Publications Ltd

THE PLAYERS

The investigation found Stepan Mikoyan an old man, gray-whiskered, a small brush under his nose, wearing a short brown shearling coat. He was small as a boy, and he waited for me at the entrance to an unidentifiable aircraft component factory. He did not have a place to receive guests, and we sat down on squashed chairs, joined in threes, opposite a little window with the sign “Cashier” above it; Stepan Anastasovich resorted to a whisper whenever an employee walked past us.

What I had before me was a handful of dust, mere remains. Yet there had been a time when this diminutive, eagle-nosed old man had been a master of life and had inspired holy fear by the mere mention of his father’s name. One old woman had told me that the strongest impression in her life was when Stepan Mikoyan stepped into an elevator with her, and she was breath-taken, she saw him next to her, he was incredibly handsome. When they reached his floor, and he went out, she couldn’t move, she just stood there and breathed in the scent of his cologne!

I believed him when he said:

“Vano never told anyone why he was arrested. And I didn’t ask. They say that he was playing war games. I don’t know anything more than that. In our family, everyone kept silent about it — both my mother and father. Do you think that my brother’s arrest is somehow connected with the murder of Nina Umanskaya?”

We also got Petya Bakulev, the son of the Surgeon General, on the phone; he said his mother had just passed away. Chukharev, trying to make up for his earlier blunder, obediently read a bunch of solicitous lies we prepared for him off a piece of paper, stopping to allow Bakulev to respond where appropriate, and then hung up:

“He agreed,” he said.

“And remember,” Borya (sober this time) instructed, “never ask too much. For one person, there are just a few questions which have meaningful answers. It doesn’t matter if the person thought about these things a lot or if they never even occurred to him or her until you came along. It is just a coincidence. You need to guess. If you ask less than necessary, there will be something he forgot to tell you. If you push him, he’ll start lying and believe what he says himself. Any questions?”

“He wasn’t surprised,” Chukharev said. “If I were him, I’d think this was a joke, or something. It’s like he’d been waiting all along for someone to come after him.”

An early-Spring snow had fallen, a lot at once, and it clung to tree branches in thick, lopsided slices of white. Children came out, rolling up strips of white with greenish underside into balls to make snowmen. The sun gleamed off the icicles. In the sky, vast stretches of blue opened up and then vanished; the water in the ponds of the Troparev park looked solid under a heavy chill. Up from the ponds, from the

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