A Fine Red Rain ir-5

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  "I don't believe my telling you to be careful would make you more cautious. You are already aware of the danger," he said.

  Pon had gone through the hotel doors and disappeared.

  "That's true," said Mathilde, shaking her head. "I thought of it more as a sign of… forget it. Good-bye. Stay close behind."

  "As close as I safely can," he said.

  He watched her hurry to the hotel, holding her hat down on her head as she moved. He paused as she entered the lobby and then followed her, moving at a normal pace.

  Yuri Pon was hot sure how he had wandered into the hotel lobby. People bustled around him, his glasses threatened to slip off his nose, the briefcase felt heavy and hurt his arm. He shifted it to the other hand and realized that he was sweating, almost drenched.

  And then the feeling came over him as it had in Petrovka. He was inside. He could not breathe. He had to get out, stay out, perhaps he would never be able to go indoors again. He almost ran into the woman as he backed away and turned toward the hotel doors.

  "Careful," said the woman in the red hat and dress, reaching out to keep him from falling.

  "I'm, I'm… I have to get outside. I don't feel so well," he said, hurrying past her onto the street. That was better. Oh, it was much better.

  "Are you sure you're all right?" the woman in the hat said behind him. She had followed him out. He stepped out of the way of a soldier in uniform, an officer who marched quickly into the hotel.

  "I'm better," Yuri Pon said.

  The woman took his arm to help him. His first impulse was to shrug her off, but she was not Ludmilla. This was a younger woman, a pretty woman with a nice smell.

  "I'll help you," she said, and he let her help him.

  "It's all right," he said after a few seconds of standing at the curb. "It's hot."

  "Yes," the woman in red said. "It's hot. You look like a prosperous businessman?"

  "I'm a file cle, a files supervisor in the Central Petrovka Station," he said.

  "I think you should lie down somewhere," the woman said. "I know a place not far away where we could go. You could rest, lie down, perhaps even enjoy yourself a bit. Just a short taxi drive away."

  Yuri Pon turned his eyes toward the woman and looked at her seriously for the first time. She was pretty, or close to pretty, and she was a prostitute. He had stumbled upon her. The excitement welled within him. He jiggled the briefcase and laughed.

  The woman backed away for an instant, her eyes opening in puzzlement, and then she returned to his arm.

  "What's so funny?" she said. "I like to share a joke with a man."

  "I was looking for you," he said.

  "Magic." The woman sighed. "Fate brought us together. Do we find a taxi?"

  "No taxi," Pon said, taking her hand. "No taxi. Taxis are too…"

  "Constricting?" Mathilde said.

  "Yes," Yuri agreed. "No taxi."

  He suddenly took her right hand and began pulling her with him down the street.

  "What?" she began.

  "Hurry!" Yuri cried. "We'll miss it."

  At the corner a trolleybus stood, its door starting to close. They got to it just in time to reach in and grab the door. He pulled the woman onto the bus, paid the eight kopecks for the two of them, and dragged her to an open pair of seats as the bus pulled away.

  "What is?" the woman began.

  "Wait… wait," Pon said, pushing his glasses onto his nose with his palm. He let go of her hand and clutched the briefcase to his chest. Two uniformed sailors looked at the woman and Pon and whispered to each other.

  "Yes, yes, it's all right," Pon said with a smile. "I can breathe."

  "Good," the woman said with her own smile, looking toward the back of the bus. Yuri looked back, too. There was no one there.

  "Where are we going?" she asked him in a whisper.

  "The park," he said. "I want to take you to the park."

  Emil Karpo walked up to the two cabdrivers in front of the Cosmos Hotel. Both drivers wore little caps. The smaller of the two wore a long-sleeved gray shirt with the sleeves rolled up unevenly. He had hairy arms; the hair was reddish brown. The second driver was bigger, heavier, louder.

  "So you put up relatives if you think it's so easy, Comrade Smart Guy," the heavy cabbie shouted, sweat speckling his brow. "I'm lucky I've got a bedroom. But you can't turn away a sister's family. I ask you."

  "And I answer you," said the smaller one. "If I had relatives from Kiev, I'd take them in till we were sure."

  "Easy for you to say," the big man said, granting, noticing the pale man advancing toward them. "Everyone in your family is from Moscow."

  "No. My cousin Alexei is in Brezhnev…"

  The gaunt man was standing next to them now, not as tall or heavy as the big cab driver, but impossible to ignore.

  "Whose cab is that?" Karpo said.

  "Mine," said the smaller driver.

  "Get in," said Karpo.

  "I'm talking to my friend," the little man with the hairy arms said with irritation.

  Karpo's left arm shot out and grasped the small driver's arm.

  "Get in, now."

  The bigger driver reached out and grabbed Karpo's wrist.

  "Let him go, you zombie," he hissed.

  Karpo released the hairy arm, snapped his hand down suddenly, and whipped his fingers up to the moist, thick neck of the big driver. The long fingers tightened and the big man gagged and lost his hat. A small crowd had begun to gather, to watch, to do nothing.

  "Into the cab," Karpo said without looking at the smaller driver, who hurried into his car. The long fingers opened and the red-faced cabbie staggered back into a white-haired man with a briefcase.

  Without looking back, Karpo got into the cab, closed the door, and said, "That bus. Follow it."

  The short driver didn't even nod. He started the cab and drove in silence.

  Thirty minutes later, after dozens of stops and starts, in the northeastern section of the city just at the Outer Ring Road, a heavy, sweating man carrying a briefcase and a woman in red with a red hat got off a bus. The sweating man looked back at the rows of apartments to his right and then over at the vast wooded area to his left.

  "Here," said Karpo.

  "Losiny Ostrov, Elk Island," said die cab driver.

  "I know where I am," Karpo said, getting out of the cab and handing the cabbie a five-ruble bill.

  The cabbie hesitated; he had been given either too little or too much money, but he decided not to speak to the man who was standing on the curb next to the cab. Instead, the cabbie threw the car into first gear, made a sudden U-turn in front of a truck, and sped away.

  Karpo crossed the street behind the bus, walking slowly, keeping Pon and Mathilde in sight but not too close. His plan was to move in on Pon, frighten him into a confession or a slip. Hard evidence would not be essential. The courts would accept slips of the tongue, mistakes, a forced search of Pon's home for evidence. Karpo needed little more and he was confident that he was about to get what he needed. Pon was walking like a penguin, sweating like a man who had just run a marathon in hundred-degree heat. In one hand he held his briefcase. In the other he held the wrist of Mathilde.

  "I was bom not fifteen miles from here," Pon said to the woman in the red hat. "Mytishy. My mother still lives mere. Right over there. Beyond the woods."

  He pointed, and her eyes pretended to follow.

  "And over there," Pon said, pointing in another direction as he led her into the park, "is Kalingrad and Balashikha."

  "You are hurting my arm," Mathilde said calmly as they passed an old man with a large belly. The old man was wearing shorts and a yellow shut. He glanced at mem and walked on, minding his own business.

  Pon ignored Mathilde and led her on, his voice growing more excited with each step. His grip tightened as they stopped in front of long, neat rows of birches on both sides of the path leading into the park.

  "When I was a boy," Pon said, panting, "mis was still
just called a forest. Now it's a national park, a national park. Look at that sign."

  He nodded at a tall wooden sign marking the entrance of the park. A small round picture of an elk's head hovered over the embossed number 1406.

  "I know all about this park, all about it," Pon said, hardly noticing the woman he was pulling along. "I spent my days in here, in the darkness of the trees, alone. A fat, smelly boy alone. I wasn't sorry for myself. No, no, no. I wasn't. I liked it here. That sign. In 1406 the name Losiny Ostrov was first mentioned in a will left by a prince of Muscovy. There are tales," he suddenly whispered, leaning toward her ear, "tales of the sinful things that the prince did in these woods to young women. Would you like to hear these tales?"

  "No," Mathilde said, looking back over her shoulder.

  "No," mocked Yuri Pon. "No. You have tales every bit as terrible. You think you do, but you don't. I have a secret for you. Shh. I'll share it up ahead in my favorite place, near the river."

  He pulled her ahead along the path, past people sitting on benches, deeper into the woods. Mathilde could hear the splash of water, the voices of children at play.

  "Before 1406, as early as 1388, this area was recorded under another name hi certain documents," Pon went on. He was beginning to give off a terrible odor, the smell of sweat and possibly something worse. Mathilde wanted to pull herself" away, to run, but his grip was surprisingly strong.

  "No dogs allowed in this park," Pon said, lurching along the path without looking at her. "No dogs. There are more than a hundred and sixty species of birds. Some of them build their nests on the ground. They have enough natural enemies without bringing dogs in here. At night, the bud calls are marvelous. Peter the First, sometime after 1670, made this the first state forest in all of Russia in which it was prohibited to fell trees except those that were dead or damaged by disease or fire. This is a clean park. Moscow was a clean city. Elk are all over. Even wild boars. Wait, wait, I must take you to the giant pine that slants, the Tower of Pisa."

  He dragged her past three young men sitting on tree stumps. Two of the young men were playing chess on another tree stump. All three men wore glasses. None of them looked up at the woman in red and the sweating man who dragged her to a bench.

  It was at this point that Karpo, keeping Pon and Mathilde in sight, managed to call Rostnikov from a public phone in the clearing. He called because Yuri Pon, as he sat on the bench and pulled Mathilde down next to him, looked directly at Karpo through his thick-lensed glasses, opened his briefcase with one hand, and extracted a long-bladed knife that caught the late afternoon sunlight.

  A jogger crossed the path in front of Karpo, who kept his unblinking eyes on Pon and Mathilde. Pon, in turn, placed his briefcase on his lap to hide the knife and held tightly to Mathilde's wrist. His eyes began to blink like those of a diseased owl. His glasses refused to remain on his moist nose, and he had to keep pushing them back on by twitching his nose and throwing back his head. Karpo walked slowly to the bench facing Pon across the path. They were, perhaps, a dozen feet away from each other. People passed between them, and Mathilde fixed Karpo with an angry glare. He did not look at her. They sat silently for fifteen or twenty minutes while people moved past in both directions and the sounds of people, and even of an occasional animal in the woods, rustled through the pines and grass.

  "I have a philosophy," Pon finally called to Karpo after a family of picnickers had argued their way past the benches. "You want to hear it?"

  Karpo said nothing.

  "All right, then," Pon said. "I'll tell you anyway. There is a bit of animal in each of us. We are born with it. We are, as our history and biology books tell us, all animals. And what is an animal?"

  Karpo remained silent, unblinking.

  "An animal thinks only of its immediate gratification. Food, sex, or the blind preservation of its species," Pon explained. "It is natural."

  Pon paused to watch a young girl walk past. His head turned to follow her. His mouth opened as if he could not breathe and then his eyes returned to Karpo.

  "It is natural," Pon went on, picking up his thought. "But we are civilized. We are taught that machines are more functional than animals. Machines do not feel. They perform without feeling, without thought. We are taught to be machines. You see the contradiction? We are caught between being animals and being machines. It can drive us mad. We live balanced, don't you see? When they say someone has become unbalanced, that is what they mean, that he has fallen into his animalism or given up his humanity to become a machine."

  "And what has that to do with you?" Mathilde said calmly and so quietly that Karpo barely heard her over the sounds of shouting swimmers somewhere beyond the trees.

  "I have channeled my animalism into a useful social function," Pon explained, still looking at Karpo. "I respond to my animalism and rid the state of criminals it cannot allow itself to acknowledge. Prostitutes, like you."

  Pon held Mathilde's hand up high. The briefcase slipped from his lap and the knife was naked in his lap. Four old men and an old woman appeared around a bend in the path and headed their way.

  "I suggest," said Karpo calmly, "that you hide your knife."

  Pon put the knife behind his back and pressed Mathilde's hand into his lap. As the five old people passed by, Pon rubbed Mathilde's hand between his legs.

  "The animal," Pon mouthed to Karpo soundlessly.

  The old people were about twenty feet down the path when Pon pulled the knife out from behind his back. For some reason, the old woman at the rear of the quintet picked that moment to glance back, and she saw the sweat-big man on the bench holding a knife, saw the woman in the red dress try to pull away, saw the man who looked like a ghost rise and move forward. The old woman was quite sure that the ghost would not cross the path before the man with the knife plunged it into the young woman. The old woman wanted to turn away from the sight, away from her helplessness, away from her own memories of a war long ago and her uncle lying dead with bayonet wounds forming red-black exclamation marks in his side.

  The four old men walked on but the old woman stood, watched, waited for the knife to come down, but it didn't. Then, suddenly, a barrel of a man crashed through the thick trees behind the bench of the sweating owl with the knife. The barrel-shaped man caught the wrist of the owl, wrenched the man's hand from the wrist of the woman, and pulled suddenly upward. The sweating man, the heavy sweating man, rose from the bench, a look of surprise on his face, his glasses dropping to the path. The barrel-shaped man stepped back and gave a mighty pull, and the sweating man went bouncing backward over the bench with a terrible release of air as he hit the ground, as the ghostly man leaped over the bench.

  "No!" screamed the sweating man, trying to rise.

  "Yes," said the ghostly man, kicking the knife out of his hand.

  The woman in red stood safely on the path side of the bench, clutching her red hat in her hands.

  "Olga," croaked one of the old men far down the path, "what are you doing?"

  For an instant the old woman was bewildered. No one was dead. She did not know what was happening, what had happened or why, but no one was dead. The woman in red looked at Olga and smiled, and Olga Korechakova, who had not felt like smiling in at least two decades, smiled back and turned to join the old men in the park.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I don't want to go to the circus. Sarah Rostnikov was more weary and distracted than emphatic. Rostnikov had been waiting for her outside the second-hand foreign book store where she worked on Kachalov Street. He had gone home to change into his favorite comfortable pants, worn shiny in the rear and the knees, and his favorite gray turtleneck sweater. In contrast, Sarah wore a black suit and white blouse. She had not been expecting him. She was not dressed for a circus. She had looked forward to a quick ride back to the apartment, a batheven if she had to cart kettles of boiled water, which she usually had to doa simple meal of whatever was left over, and a quiet evening listening to music on the radio.

&
nbsp; "You will enjoy the circus," Rostnikov said, taking her arm.

  "The circus is noisy. It smells of animals. It will take us an hour to get home when it's over. I'm hungry. I'm tired," she said to the night breeze.

  "We'll stop at a stolovaya for some kotleta and potatoes with a little kvass," he said, leading her through the early evening crowd. "We'll call it a celebration. I have free passes."

  "Porfiry Petrovich," Sarah said, stopping suddenly, "what have we to celebrate? Josef is being shot at by barbarians. You have been demoted. The KGB has us on some kind of list for troublemakers. What have we to celebrate?"

  People moved around them, and Rostnikov shifted his weight to his good leg and touched the red hair of his wife.

  "Work, health, appetites, and curiosity," he said.

  "You are an optimist, Rostnikov," Sarah said with a smile and a shake of her head.

  "I'm a Muscovite," he answered. "And I have a passion for the circus."

  "And for cabbage soup and meat pies," she sighed.

  They had eaten quietly at a luncheonette near the circus. Rostnikov had consumed three meat pies, a bowl of cabbage soup, and quantities of bread and double potatoes. Sarah had a bowl of cabbage soup, which she didn't quite finish.

  "What was your day like?" he said after he had finished the final crumb of bread, which he dipped into the final touch of sauce from the pasty.

  "I sold books,"' Sarah said with a shrug, pushing away her soup. "The party representative for the store gave a lunchtime lecture on productivity and how it was our duty to sell more Bulgarian books on breeding goats. What did you do?"

  "I helped Emil Karpo catch a man who had murdered eight prostitutes," he said.

  She looked at him and at the young couple hovering nearby who obviously wanted their table now that they had finished their meal.

  "Good," said Sarah. "You should have shot him."

  "He is quite mad."

  "That is of little solace to the women he killed," she said.

  "You should be a judge," Rostnikov said, standing awkwardly to protect his leg.

  "And you should be a plumber," Sarah replied.