heard the intonation in his voice that used to make her head spin.
“Man gets used to good things very quickly,” Solovyov went on. “The day before yesterday you called me, yesterday you visited, and today I had the feeling that something was missing. You called just now and I realized what it was. I miss you.”
“Me too,” she said with a smile. “I’ll come over tomorrow if you don’t have any other plans.”
“What time?”
“Around eight. Is that all right?”
“I’ll be waiting.”
“Kisses,” she said softly. “Good night.”
There, Solovyov. You miss me already. And why? Let’s not think about me, I’ve always been a sucker where you were concerned. But you? You didn’t even think me human. I was nothing more than a dangerous daughter of my mother, someone who could cause a lot of trouble if not handled properly. A device. Back then, you were afraid of my mother, and you were afraid that if you rejected me, your advisor would be angry, and if you had an affair with me, she would bring up questions of divorce and marriage to me. You did not love me and did not want to marry me. But it never occurred to you that my mother would never hear of our affair. You were sure that I told her everything. Actually, I never had that habit. Mother learned about it many years later and, I must say, was very surprised. In other words, afraid of my mother, you started sleeping with me, and even more afraid of her, you broke it off. But now, a relationship with me is not threat to you at all. You’re not married, and I am. Therefore, you are insured against matrimonial demands from my side. And if they did come up, your illness is your best defense. No one could force you to marry anyone. So you can flirt. Your life is boring and lonely now, and even though you pretend not to need anyone, it’s not true. You were always the life of the party, the center of attention, and you can’t break the habits of a lifetime in just two years. You need to have a person who loves you around. And your feelings don’t matter here. You could deceive to get what you want. You say that you miss me? Perhaps. Tomorrow you’ll start acting as if you cared about me. And that won’t be true. You will pretend so that I keep coming back, so that you can feel my love once again, sense it and breathe it. You’re an emotional vampire. God, I used to love you so much.
Chapter 4
Artur Malyshev turned out to be a handsome fifty-year-old, trying to look younger, with an unexpectedly soft voice.
“I’m saving my throat,” he explained, seeing that Nastya was straining to hear. “I lecture six hours a day – that’s no joke. And I teach courses in the evenings, too, to help earn my daily bread. So between classes I try to keep it to a whisper.”
He didn’t know very much about Solovyov, they were never particularly friendly and belonged to different crowds. They had been in graduate school at the same time, but in different departments. He had learned about Solovyov’s catastrophe from his wife, who had heard it from some acquaintance who worked in an ambulance service. The acquaintance was a fan of the Eastern Best Seller series, and so she remembered Solovyov in that great mass of people she delivered to the hospital.
“Could you remember exactly what your wife said this friend had said?” Nastya asked.
“Well, that the famous translator Solovyov had been beaten up by someone and that an ambulance had picked him up in the street. That was all, no other details.”
“What about this acquaintance? Do you know her?”
“No, unfortunately. I don’t even know her name.”
“How can that be? You don’t know your wife’s friends?” “She’s not a friend, just an acquaintance. My wife met her at the hospital. I think they may have called each other a few times after that, but this woman never came to our house.” “Which hospital was this that they met?”
Malyshev looked very embarrassed. “I… I don’t know.” “Mr. Malyshev, that is impossible. Are you not telling me something?”
He blushed and looked furiously for his lighter, which was right in front of him.
“You see… Well, my wife was having an abortion. I was out of town then. She did not want me to know about it. Therefore, it’s quite natural that I would not know which hospital she was in.”
“But you still found out that she had had an abortion,” Nastya pointed out.
“Yes.”
Malyshev looked up and into her eyes. “There’s no point in trying to hide it from you. You’re with the police and you won’t rest until you find out, right?”
“Got it in one.”
“Especially since the whole institute knows about it anyway. My wife and I are divorced. She had a new man. It was his baby she was aborting. That’s why she wanted to keep it from me. She managed for a while. But then the man asked her to marry him and move abroad. He has some big company in the Ivory Coast. There, that’s it.”
“Excuse me,” Nastya apologized. “I didn’t want to make you talk about unpleasant things. But I really have to find this acquaintance from the ambulance service. Is there anything you can suggest that will help?”
“No.”
“And is there any way to get in touch with your wife?”
“I don’t have her telephone. She’s out there in Guyana. I mean, the Ivory Coast.”
“I understand,” she sighed. “Maybe your former wife has girl friends who might know what hospital she was in?”
Malyshev gave her several names, which Nastya carefully wrote down.
“But I’m not sure that this will help you,” he warned. “My wife was very close-lipped and careful, she did not trust anyone, especially women. She tried to keep her relationship with that millionaire a secret and she managed to do it for a pretty long time. If she had shared secrets with her girl friends, it would have been known much sooner.”
“Mr. Malyshev,” Nastya said with a smile. “I don’t want to disillusion you, but the husband is always the last to know. That’s an old clichè. Your circle may have known all about the affair for a while.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m certain that’s not the case.”
Nastya did not know on what he based his certainty, but she did not insist. Why traumatize the man any more?
However her hopes that the friends of docent Malyshev’s former wife would be helpful were shattered. Either they were not very close friends or the lady truly was very secretive, but none of them could name the hospital where she had the abortion. That was understandable, there were a lot of hospitals in Moscow and an abortion was not an occasion to bring a lot of visitors. You were in only three days, sometimes only one. Come in the morning, leave that night – outpatient surgery. There was only one thing to do: check all the hospitals one by one, looking for the one where Anna Malysheva stayed two years ago. Then take the list of all the women who were in the hospital at the same time, and look for one who works for the ambulance service. It was labor intensive, and what was the point? We weren’t looking for a criminal, just a woman who maintained that Solovyov had been beaten. And it isn’t even clear whether she was part of the team that took him to the hospital or whether she had it second-hand from
