The simple lock had been easily slipped with a credit card. The apartment was a three-room affair with a living room/dining room, a kitchen and a bedroom. Presumably there were toilet and bathing facilities elsewhere on the floor. A mezuzah was stuck to the doorframe, and a menorah sat on an old, scarred sideboard, the nine candles no more than inch-long stubs. Ostap Obelovich had died just in time. Beside the menorah were pale, overexposed photographs of a young man and his wife, the man the picture-perfect proletarian worker, the young woman virginal and expectant. Khrushchev’s Russia and the new Five-year Plan, a plan that had gone on forever and finally come to nothing. The apartment smelled of borscht and cigarettes and lemon vodka and failed dreams. Somewhere along the way Ostap Obelovich had lost the young wife, because there was no sign of her in the apartment. The bed was single, the clothes were all his and there was dust everywhere. In the bedroom someone had laid out a lace doily on Ostap Obelovich’s dresser, atop which lay a ring, a watch, a worn plastic wallet and a bar of medals.
