The Secret History of Moscow Read Online Free PDF

hallway, muttering to herself and sighing. Yakov felt for her, left like this with a double burden of a missing child and care for the grandchild. He didn't dare to venture inside the apartment and waited by the door, resting his back against its smooth surface, until a lock clicked and the door shoved him into the hallway.
    "I'm sorry,” the woman who entered said, and eyed him suspiciously. She was taller than Yakov and about his age; she carried grocery bags. “Are you with the police?"
    "Yes,” Yakov said, resisting the impulse to sarcasm. “I'm sorry it took me so long-I'm interviewing many people today. A lot of folks seem to be missing. I think I just spoke to your mother?"
    The woman nodded. “My sister disappeared two days ago."
    "Where did she work?"
    "She was a student, at the Pedagogical Institute. Started last year. She just had a baby."
    "A boy or a girl?” Yakov asked.
    The woman looked at him with a strange expression in her dark eyes. “I don't know,” she said. “I was so shaken, I never thought of asking."
    The old woman reappeared, wiping her hands on the housecoat. “It's a boy,” she told Yakov, pointedly ignoring the woman with grocery bags. “Come on in, son. I'll tell you all about it."
    She led him into the living room, where he sat on the collapsed couch, a spring digging into his thigh, and asked questions. Just like everyone else, the missing girl had no criminal connections and led a startlingly ordinary life. The only unusual thing was the circumstances of her disappear-ance-giving birth in the bathroom and then melting into thin air.
    "And you haven't heard or seen anything?” he asked. “And are you sure the bathroom door was locked?"
    "I'm sure,” the woman said. “And there wasn't anyone else, except myself, and Galina."
    "And a jackdaw,” the tall woman said from the doorway where she apparently stood for some time, silent.
    Man. Wings. Scottish terrier.
    The old woman shook her head in exasperation. “Excuse her,” she told Yakov. “She's not-right."
    There didn't seem to be anything wrong with the woman, except that at her mother's words she shrank and retreated into the hallway.
    "Wait,” Yakov called. “Did you say a jackdaw?"
    The woman peeked in again. “Yes. Other birds, too. And I think I know someone who can help you look. Only…"
    "Stop that,” the older woman said. “You're embarrassing me."
    And Galina faded from view, silently disappearing into the darkness of the apartment. She reappeared once, when Yakov was leaving, and shoved a crumpled note into his hand. “Call me at work. There's a street artist who knows something,” she whispered and fled under her mother's withering stare.
    3: Fyodor
    Fyodor was afraid of gypsies; when he was little, his mother used to warn him of straying too far away from the house. “Gypsies will get you,” she said. “They steal children and sell them."
    Fyodor played by the porch, in its cool shadow smelling of rotting wood, and rarely wandered past the outhouse and the fence discolored by weather.
    When his stepfather came to live with them, he was much less aware of the gypsy problem. “Go play outside,” he would tell little Fyodor. “What are you, stupid?"
    "But the gypsies,” he tried to explain. “They'll get me."
    The stepfather laughed, and gave him a shove away from the porch. “Gypsies are not dumb. Why would they steal a kid who'd fetch no more than a quarter?"
    Fyodor went then, sobbing silently to himself. He hoped to run into some gypsies and to be stolen away, both to get away from the stepfather and to prove him wrong. He wandered past the fence and down the only earthen street of Vasilyevskoe, the village where he was born and lived all his life. It was just a row of one-story wooden houses and a gaggle of filthy geese fraternizing with a few disheveled chickens. He passed the only store, and then the road led him out of the village, to a small clump of pines overgrowing sandy dunes-the