A Fine Red Rain ir-5

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Mazaraki liked standing alone looking out at the empty seats and the further darkness, where he knew the empty seats continued. The night sounds didn't frighten him: die creaking, the warping. He felt powerful knowing he was impressive and tall, his mustache fine. He resisted die impulse to put his hands on his hips, but he didn't resist die urge to grin. He would sleep in his office this night. He had done it before. He would sleep in his office and wake up to finish the plans for the next circus tour, which he was to have ready when die director returned. He would suggest die acts at the circus school he thought might replace die Pesknoko troupe. He would praise die slack-wire clown. Dimitri Mazaraki could be patient about most things, but there were things that did not allow one to exercise patience. One of those tilings was Katya Rashkovskaya. He decided that she would have to be killed very, very soon.

  At eleven o'clock that night, after Sarah had gone to sleep in the bedroom, Porfiry Petrovich sat in his underwear in die living room of there two-room apartment and read the end of his current 87th Precinct novel. He had read it too quickly, had failed to savor it as he always promised himself to do. He would make up for it by reading die book again, though he wasn't sure he liked die grisly ending with die Calypso woman… No, he wasn't sure he liked it, though he had enjoyed being with Meyer and Carella and Kling and die others. As he put down the book it reminded him mat he had met someone that day who had looked like one of the Isola policemen. Yes, the assistant at the New Circus who had a white streak in his hair like Hawes. That memory triggered another, and Rostnikov got up to return his book to the shelf in the corner and remove two plumbing books to bring to Katya Rashkovskaya. To get to the books, Rostnikov had to move his small trophy, the bronze trophy he had won in the Moscow Senior Weightlifting Championships three years ago.

  Each night, as be had done an hour ago this night, Rostnikov had rolled out his mat, removed his weights and bars from the lower shelf, and put on his sweatshirt to work out within a few feet of the trophy. Tonight he had worked out far later than he had in years. With no carpet on the floor he knew that he was making considerable noise for the Barkans in the apartment below, even though he was as quiet as he could be. The Barkans would not complain, not because they were so understanding, but because Rostnikov was a policeman and it did not pay for citizens to complain about the police. Nonetheless, Rostnikov tried to work out early whenever possible. The workout was essential. He could lose himself in the weights as he could in nothing else, and each day for almost an hour it was necessary to engage in that meditation with weights. Tonight had been no different in spite of the long talk with Sarah.

  They had walked for an hour and talked in the park after Karpo and Tkach left. They had talked of Josef, reassured each other about the news from Afghanistan, remembered that Josef had only four months left of his army service. They did not talk about leaving the Soviet Union. Sarah had realized and finally accepted that there was nothing to be done that could get them out, mat her husband had risked his career and possibly their lives to try to get exit visas and had failed. She accepted. Even Josef's new assignment she accepted with pain and fear, but she accepted. Rostnikov had put an arm around her and hugged her awkwardly in the park, and she had allowed herself to crybut just for an instant. And then they had returned to the apartment.

  After he had put the plumbing books by the front door, Rostnikov turned out the light and made his way to the bedroom, where he got into bed as quietly as he could without waking Sarah. Rostnikov had to be up early for the dreaded morning meeting with the Gray Wolfhound. He hoped he could avoid any new assignment of substance. He wanted to return to the circus. The memory of the smell of the circus came to him suddenly, elusively, like the scent of some flower or candy or young girl smelled once in childhood. And as he went to sleep he knew, as certainly as he knew that smell, that Katya Rashkovskaya would have to tell him the secret she guarded or her life might be as brief as that remembered scent.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Precisely seven o'clock the next morning. A Tuesday, Emil Karpo did not bother to knock at the door on the second level below ground in the Petrovka Police Station. He turned the handle and pushed the door open with his right hand and was greeted by a metallic whirring sound like the drill of a dentist. Karpo, his left hand holding a frayed, black leather briefcase filled with the neatly written notes he had spent the night writing, stepped m Hid closed the door.

  The room looked more like a way station to the garbage dump than a laboratory. Its clutter irritated Karpo, to whom symmetry, reason, and order were essential. But this was Paulinin's lab, and Paulinin was an enigma to the policeman.

  Karpo stepped past a headless dressmaker's bust of a portly woman, avoided a cardboard box full of bottles on the floor, squeezed by a table piled high with books and metal pieces that looked as if they came from inside some mechanical children's toy.

  A man in a blue smock with his back to the door leaned over a table in the corner of the windowless room. The man's hands rose delicately, as if he were engaged in a surgical operation or were conducting a particularly difficult piece by Stravinsky.

  "I'm busy, Inspector," Paulinin cried over the whirring sound with a wave of his hand, his back still turned.

  Karpo took a step closer and stood patiently, silently, in front of Paulinin's desk, the top of which was covered by books and the miscellany of past investigations. The set of teeth that had been on the desk the last time Karpo had visited the laboratory was still there, grinning atop a small abacus stained with dried blood.

  "Inspector Karpo," Paulinin sighed, his back still turned. "I'm… ah, ha. There." The whirring sound stopped.

  With a triumphant look on his face, Paulinin, a bespectacled, nearsighted monkey with an oversized head topped by wild gray-black hair, turned to face his visitor for the first time. In his hand he held something that looked to Karpo like a human heart. Behind Paulinin, on the table, was a metal tray filled with blood and a small white machine with a glass bowl attached to it.

  "A centrifuge didn't — work," Paulinin said, looking around for someplace to put the organ in his hand. "A three-hundred-ruble centrifuge."

  His glasses were in danger of falling off the end of his nose, but Paulinin had no free hand with which to adjust them. He tried to push the glasses back with his shoulder and failed.

  "And do you know what worked?" he asked, balancing the heart hi one hand and grabbing a plastic bucket from the floor.

  "No," said Karpo.

  "That," Paulinin said in triumph, nodding back at the metal-and-glass object on the laboratory table. The plastic bucket contained something that looked like coffee grounds. Paulinin dumped them into the metal tray on the table and just managed to drop the heart into the now-empty plastic bucket.

  "Paulinin" Karpo began, but the scientist held up a hand to stop him as he pushed his glasses back on his nose, which brought a smile to his simian face and a streak of blood to his forehead.

  "Do you know what that is?" he asked Karpo, glancing at him and then moving to the small sink in the corner of the room. "Huh?"

  "No," said Karpo patiently.

  Paulinin pushed some rubber tubes and a glass beaker out of the way and turned on the water. As he washed, he looked back at Karpo and said, "A food processor. The French and Americans use them for chopping food into pieces so small that they turn to paste almost. You can put anything except solid mineral products in it. Well, almost anything."

  He turned off the water and faced Karpo as he dried his hands on his smock.

  "I got it from a KGB man named… a KGB man I've done some things for," Paulinin whispered, though his laboratory was almost certainly not wired and the door was soundproof.

  "Interesting," said Karpo at near-attention, waiting.

  "They were through with this heart," Paulinin said, biting his lower lip and looking down at the plastic bucket affectionately. "Through with it. Case closed. Autopsy finished. X ray failed to show anything. Natural death. Th
ey gave me the heart. And do you know what I found in that heart? Do you know what that French food processor and I found in that heart?"

  "I do not know, Comrade," said Karpo.

  "Gold, gold, gold. Tiny fragments of gold," Paulinin said with a smile on his bloody face as he absently reached up to push down his hair. "Someone injected gold into his bloodstream. It blocked his vessels. A man with a heart condition. Gold. Can you imagine?"

  "I" Karpo began.

  "And you want to know what I'm going to do with this information?" Paulinin asked, moving behind his desk and clapping his hands together as he sat.

  "No," said Karpo.

  "Nothing," said Paulinin, blowing out air. "I think our political people may know something about this. The old Cheka eliminated two politicals hi a similar manner for symbolic reasons in 1930. And then various murders have been committed involving the introduction of small particles of metal orally or through an orifice. One particularly interesting case in Syria last year involved the introduction of a catheter into… But I sense a certain disinterest in you, Comrade Emil. So, if the KGB finds out I have the heart, they may ask why and wonder what I found. I will tell them I used it for experiments on tissue, that I discovered nothing, that I chopped the pieces up and flushed them, which is what I will do. I don't want certain people with a strained sense of humor to inject gold into my urinary system so that some morning I would wake up pissing away hundreds of rubles in gold."

  Paulinin looked up at Karpo expectantly.

  "I made a joke, Comrade Inspector," Paulinin said.

  "I know," replied Karpo.

  "Why do I like you, Inspector?"

  "I had no idea you did," said Karpo.

  "I really did find gold in mat heart," said Paulinin softly, turning to look at the food processor. "Now I've sifted it and have enough gold to pay for a second food processor. Why would anyone kill with gold?"

  "I don't know," said Karpo.

  "Aren't you curious?" asked Paulinin, starting to get up, looking over at the bucket, and sitting down again.

  "No," said Karpo.

  "What do you want?" Paulinin asked.

  Karpo opened the battered briefcase and removed the stack of papers held together by a large spring clip. He found a place on the desk atop a book in a foreign language and placed the stack on it.

  "You have a work process report?" Paulinin said, adjusting his glasses and reaching for the papers.

  "No," said Karpo.

  "And no 3245 approval?"

  "No," said Karpo. "The case is not officially mine. Just as the death of the former possessor of that heart is not officially your responsibility."

  "Unlike you, I am always curious," said Paulinin. "I am not always temperate, either, or, as you know, I would have more space, more equipment, more responsibility. But am I bitter?"

  "Yes," said Karpo.

  "A little, perhaps," Paulinin agreed. "What do you want?"

  "I have the names of a number of people on these lists with some information about each of them," Karpo explained. "Each person should be in the central computer file with more data. I cannot have access to the computer without a case report. In addition, I do not know how to program for the answers I need."

  "And you want me to…?" Paulinin began, reaching up to touch his bloody forehead. He brought his hand down and looked a bit puzzled by the sight of blood on his just-washed hands.

  "Put these names into the computer. Ask the questions I tell you to ask. I want to narrow mis list down."

  Paulinin picked up the clipped papers and began to flip through them.

  "I recognize these names, most of these names," said Paulinin, almost to himself. Then he put the pile down and looked at the set of false teeth. With a fresh sigh, he moved the teeth and picked up the abacus. "How many names?"

  "I've got it down to forty-one," said Karpo. "Do you want to know why I want this done?"

  "No," said Paulinin. "What I don't know, I can't tell later. This eccentricity of mine offers protection only as long as I prove to be a creative source of information. You understand?"

  "Perfectly," said Karpo.

  "You need this"

  "Immediately," said Karpo.

  "How many questions do you have about each of these?"

  "Five," said Karpo.

  "Five," said Paulinin, who glanced at the first sheet of the pile of papers Karpo had given him and began to make some calculations on the abacus. The beads clicked quickly under his fingers for a few seconds and then he looked up. "Maybe an hour. Maybe two. You want something to eat, drink, while you wait?"

  "No," said Karpo.

  "Then," said Paulinin, putting down the abacus and rising, "let's narrow your list."

  As Paulinin sat at the computer terminal in his laboratory and Karpo watched over his shoulder, nine floors above them the morning meeting of Colonel Snitkonoy's staff was about to end.

  The Gray Wolfhound had listened with a knowing shake of his head to Pankov's and Major Grigorovich's reports. Something about the Wolfhound's manner alerted Rostnikov. Snitkonoy was not listening to the reports. That was clear from his knowing nods, the inappropriateness of the moments at which he decided to grunt or smile with approval. His uniform neatly pressed, his hair very recently cut, Snitkonoy was putting on his act. Pankov sweated and didn't seem in the least aware that the Wolfhound had another prey in mind. Grigorovich noticed. He relaxed his back slightly after he began his report because he quickly knew that he, too, was not the focus of the Wolfhound's real attention.

  Not once had Snitkonoy mentioned his visit the day before to the factory. Not once did he say anything about his influence, his busy schedule. What was even more disturbing was that he gave no words of wisdom to the trio that sat as he paced. In addition, he had made no lists and drawn no diagrams on the blackboard.

  "Inspector Rostnikov," the Wolfhound said in his deep voice mat had been known to carry throughout Dynamo Stadium without benefit of a microphone. "You have several concurrent investigations."

  "Yes, Comrade," Rostnikov agreed, alert, anticipating but keeping his voice low and a bit lazy. "The gang of youths defacing transportation centers, the pickpocket, metro stations with paint seem to be"

  "The tsirk" Snitkonoy said, suddenly leaning forward over the table, his medals jangling on his chest. "What is going on with the circus business, the accident?"

  "I made some preliminary inquiries"

  "And found what you believe to be a connection between the fall of the man in Gogol Square and the aerialist?" the Wolfhound said, leaning even further forward toward Rostnikov. Grigorovich, who sat between the two men, was ramrod straight and still.

  "Possibly, Comrade, possibly," agreed Rostnikov.

  "And you took an officer on standard patrol and assigned him to protect a woman from the circus?" said Snitkonoy with a smile directed at Pankov, who shrank back and smiled in return.

  The woman was distraught and, possibly, a potential victim of the person who may have killed or induced the deaths of the two circus performers," said Rostnikov.

  "They were accidents," said Snitkonoy, standing up and clasping his hands behind his back in the familiar pose of his frequent photographs.

  "Possibly," said Rostnikov with a shrug as he watched the colonel begin to pace.

  "You will remove the officer from that assignment and you will cease this investigation," said the colonel, pacing but not looking at Rostnikov.

  "As you say, Colonel," Rostnikov said, looking down at his pad and fighting the urge to fill in a quick caricature of the prancing fool. The urge was followed by a weaker but distinct urge to grab the colonel, lift him up, and shake him like a toy till his brains were rearranged in a more functional manner or ceased to work altogether.

  "You have done it again, Inspector Rostnikov," the Wolfhound said with a shake of his head. "Once again. You have blundered into something mat…doesn't concern you. Do you understand?"

  "The KGB has an interest in the
case." Rostnikov sighed, put down his pencil, and sat back.

  "I was unaware of the interest of another investigative branch when I approved the assignment," said the Wolfhound. "This morning I was fully briefed on the situation. You are to drop the investigation."

  Which meant that Snitkonoy knew nothing, had been told nothing other than that he should have Rostnikov back away from whatever he was doing. It meant that the case, which had been deemed to have some importance, was far beyond the petty nonsense the Gray Wolfhound was allowed to handle. It wasn't at all unusual for the KGB to pick up a case once preliminary investigative reports had been tiled and decide that the situation was political or economic.

  It was also clear to Rostnikov that the Wolfhound had probably been treated with no great respect by whoever had ordered him to pass the word on to Rostnikov.

  "Find the metro painters, Comrade Inspector," the Wolfhound said, turning his back to the seated trio. "Find the pickpocket."

  "Yes, Comrade Colonel," Rostnikov said, putting his hands below the table so that the others would not see his fists tighten, his knuckles go white.

  "That is all, gentlemen," the Wolfhound said with a dismissing wave of his right hand, his back still to them. Pankov gathered his papers and was out of the meeting room almost instantly. Major Grigorovich moved deliberately and just slowly enough so that Rostnikov might not think that he was hurrying away to escape the wrath of the Wolfhound. Rostnikov took a deep, silent breath, stood up, gathered his notes, and limped toward the door. As he touched the handle, the deep voice behind him said, "Rostnikov."

  Rostnikov turned to the colonel, whose back was still to him. The tightly gripped fingers of Snitkonoy's hands, clasped behind his back, were as white as Rostnikov's had been under the table.