Page 344 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

"I'm coming. Phone the police."

"Come quickly!"

"Phone the police, okay?"

"Okay."

Dimka dropped the phone and left the room. He raced out of the building. He had not paused to put on his coat, but he hardly noticed the cold Moscow air. He jumped into his Moskvitch, shoved the steering-column gearshift into first, and tore out of the compound. Even with his foot flat to the floor, the little car did not go fast.

Nina still had the apartment they had lived in together at Government House, less than a mile from the Kremlin. Dimka double-parked and ran in.

There was a KGB doorman in the lobby. "Good afternoon, Dmitri Ilich," the man said politely.

"Have you seen Grisha, my little boy?" said Dimka.

"Not today."

"He's disappeared--could he have gone out?"

"Not since I came back from my lunch break at one."

"Have any strangers entered the building today?"

"Several, as always. I have a list--"

"I'll look at it later. If you see Grisha, call the apartment immediately."

"Yes, of course."

"The police will be here any minute."

"I'll send them right up."

Dimka waited for the elevator. He was slick with perspiration. He was so jumpy he pressed the wrong button and had to wait while the lift stopped at an intermediate floor. When he reached Nina's floor she was in the corridor with Dimka's mother, Anya.

Anya was wiping her hands compulsively in her flower-print apron. She said: "He never reached my apartment. I don't understand what happened!"

"Could he have got lost?" said Dimka.

Nina said: "He's gone there twenty times before--he knows the way--but yes, he could have got distracted by something and gone to the wrong place, he's five years old."

"The doorman is sure he hasn't left the building. So we just have to search. We'll knock at every apartment door. No, wait, most of the residents have telephones. I'll go down and use the doorman's phone to call them."

Anya said: "He might not be in an apartment."

"You two search every corridor and staircase and cleaning closet."

"All right," said Anya. "We'll take the elevator to the top floor and work down."

They got in the lift and Dimka ran down the stairs. In the lobby he told the doorman what was happening and began to phone apartments. He was not sure how many there were in the building: maybe a hundred? "A little boy is lost, have you seen him?" he said each time his call was answered. As soon as he heard "No" he hung up and dialed the next apartment. He made a note of the apartments where there was no answer or no phone.

He had done four floors without a glimmer of hope when the police arrived, a fat sergeant and a young constable. They were maddeningly calm. "We'll take a look around," the sergeant said. "We know this building."

"It'll need more than two of you to search properly!" Dimka said.

"We'll send for reinforcements if necessary, sir," the sergeant said.

Dimka did not want to spend time arguing with them. He went back to phoning, but he was beginning to think that Nina and Anya had the best chance of finding Grisha. If the boy had wandered into the wrong apartment, surely the occupier would have phoned the doorman by now. Grisha might be going up and down staircases, lost. Dimka wanted to weep when he thought of how scared the little boy would be.

---