People Who Walk In Darkness (Inspector Rostnikov)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Rostnikov had accepted the case, though the Yak thought it not worthy of the attention of the Office of Special Investigations. Galina had gone to prison. Sarah and Porfiry Petrovich had taken in the girls. And when Galina got out of prison, she joined them.

  It was tight, but Sarah and Galina were extremely good at making the space work with a minimum of claustrophobia. Sarah and Porfiry Petrovich had the bedroom. Galina and the girls slept in the living room, Galina on the couch, the girls on a soft mattress on the floor.

  “Do you know why I do this each night?” Rostnikov said, moving the weights from the cabinet near the apartment door.

  Laura shook her head no. She had no idea, but she knew it was a sight worth beholding.

  “I do it to commune with my inner self, to lose Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov in a meditation that transcends my body.”

  Both girls looked puzzled as Rostnikov put out the weights and set up the rack on which he could place the bar so he could do his presses. He wore a gray sweat suit with the letters “FSU” in red across the chest. Under the letters was the faded image of the head of an Indian with a colorful feather in his hair.

  “Really?” asked Nina.

  For months after they had first come, the girls had said little to nothing, held each other’s hands, sat on the sofa watching television, and gone to school quietly. For the past four or five months, they had begun to feel as if their world might not be ripped open. They trusted Sarah and Rostnikov, though they could never be sure when he was serious or just trying to be funny. They were still unable to allow themselves to laugh.

  “No,” said Rostnikov, sitting on the bench and reaching down for a fifty-pound weight with which to do curls and arm lifts. “That was nonsense. You recognized nonsense. Good. I lift these weights because they are old friends who welcome me, test me, challenge me. When I’m not with them each night, I miss them. It is the same way I feel about you. Am I telling you the truth now?”

  “Yes,” the girls said together.

  Sarah and Galina looked across from the kitchen to see what the ‘yes’ might mean, but Rostnikov was silent under the strain of the weight in his right hand.

  “Coffee?” asked Sarah.

  Rostnikov grunted his assent and looked at his wife. He never stopped worrying about her. Two operations, both successful, for lesions on her brain. No guarantees that these invaders would not return. Her hair was still red, but it no longer flamed, and the strength in her face he so admired, while still present, was touched with a weary strain.

  “Chocolate?”

  Both girls said “Yes” without taking their eyes from Rostnikov. Soon he would be perspiring. Dark, uneven spots would appear against the gray sweat suit. Rostnikov put the weight down and lifted it with the other hand.

  “Change mine to chocolate,” Rostnikov growled.

  Galina moved to start the chocolate. She worked in a grocery and often came home with small tokens of gratitude. The Rostnikovs would not accept any of her meager supply of money. They urged her to set aside whatever she could for the girls, and that is what she had done and would continue to do.

  “Mrs. Dudenya stopped before you got home,” said Laura.

  “What did she want?” asked Rostnikov.

  “Her toilet is backing up and making strange noises,” said Sarah from the other room.

  Sarah did not understand her husband’s fascination with plumbing, though she tolerated it. He clearly enjoyed getting his tools out of the closet in the bedroom and heading cheerfully out the door to engage the rusting maze of pipes and the reluctant and fickle valves in the old building.

  “It will have to wait till I return from Siberia.”

  “Why are you going to Siberia?” asked Nina.

  “To talk to a ghost.”

  “You aren’t telling the truth again?”

  “Yes, I am,” said Rostnikov, picking up the fresh towel he had placed on the bench and wiping his face and neck.

  The television set was off. Rostnikov didn’t like it on when he was with his weights. Often he played music on the small CD player atop the table on which the weights rested. His musical taste was eclectic. Recently he had discovered a soothing, dreamlike group of young females called Destiny’s Child. But he never abandoned Credence Clearwater and Dinah Washington.

  “Question,” said Rostnikov in the process of arm lifts, holding his hand at his side, gripping the weight, and then lifting it straight out from his side to shoulder level and holding it there till his arm trembled and he could hold it out no longer.

  When he did this, his face turned red and his eyes closed. This was the most solemn moment of the evening display.

  “Should I take the shoe off of my artificial leg at night when I put it next to the bed or leave the shoe on?”

  “Leave it on, but change the socks every day,” said Laura.

  “Why?” asked Nina. “A wooden leg doesn’t sweat and smell.”

  “It isn’t wood,” said Laura.

  “I’m inclined to take off the shoe,” said Rostnikov after setting the weight back down and lying on the bench.

  “Why?” asked Laura.

  “Some habits of a lifetime are difficult to break and there is no reason to do so. Others should be broken no matter how long a lifetime has been.”

  “I don’t have bad habits,” said Nina.

  “You pick your nose,” said Laura.

  “I don’t, much.”

  “I advocate doing such things in private,” said Rostnikov. “In fact, I advocate doing most things in private. The moment you share them with others is the moment they feel they have the right or obligation to advise you about your ideas or behavior. You understand?”

  “No,” said Laura.

  “No,” said Nina.

  “Good,” said Rostnikov, putting down the block of chalk that he had rubbed into his palms. “At your ages, it would be dangerous to understand.”

  He reached up, gripped the bar, and with an explosive grunt lifted the three hundred and fifty pounds from the rack and held it steady. Working without a spotter was a bad idea, but he had little choice. If there were a problem, no one in the household could control the weight. No, the challenge was Rostnikov’s alone.

  Years earlier, when Iosef was in his teens and already broad and strong but far better looking than his father, Iosef, who had been mistakenly named for Stalin in a misguided moment of nationalistic zeal, had spotted for his father.

  Iosef never had his father’s interest in the weights. He had been a contentious soldier and a failed playwright before he became, with his father’s support, a policeman.

  Now Iosef worked under his father in the Office of Special Investigations and seemed to enjoy it with one exception. He had little tolerance for the intrigue, the cautious politics that went on inside Petrovka. He was particularly incensed by the perception, quite true, that Igor Yaklovev was self-serving, disinterested in justice, and quite corrupt.

  “That’s too many,” said Laura counting his repetitions.

  “Yes,” said Rostnikov. “I was thinking.”

  “What about?” asked Nina.

  “Diamonds,” said Rostnikov.

  Later, when the girls and Galina were talking quietly in the kitchen alcove, Rostnikov, with an ancient, much-traveled suitcase in hand, stood at the door waiting for the driver. Sarah stood at his side touching his arm, and said, quietly, “Siberia is cold.”

  “Not so much in November,” he answered.

  Porfiry Petrovich had been known to become absorbed in thinking about everything from the case at hand to the possibility of distant planets, and walk out coatless in freezing winter. He had, in fact, suffered frostbite on several occasions.

  She had packed his things, including his fur-lined hat and coat and his boots, though she too knew that Northern Siberia at this time of year was not quite at the edge of the impending winter.

  “You have your book?”

  He pulled a new paperback novel from
his jacket pocket. It was the last of the 87th Precinct novels written by Ed McBain before the author died. Rostnikov had savored the book, held off reading it until now. It was his Siberian treat. He feared he would weep when he read it and said good-bye to old friends on the pages.

  “You spoke of a ghost to the girls,” Sarah said.

  “Yes.”

  “You were talking about him?”

  “I was,” said Rostnikov.

  “I’d almost forgotten that he exists,” she said.

  “I have not.”

  “You are certain he is alive, that he is there?”

  “His name is in the file I was given by Yaklovev.”

  “No ghost,” Sarah said, more to herself than Rostnikov.

  “Not a real ghost, but can a ghost be real? Certainly not as satisfyingly real as Mrs. Dudenya’s toilet. If he were a ghost it would, by definition, not be real.”

  “You will be careful?”

  “I am always careful,” he said.

  “We define ‘careful’ differently,” she said. “You are more curious than careful.”

  “Are the two necessarily exclusive?”

  “I always hope they are not,” Sarah said as they heard the knock at the door. “Call.”

  Rostnikov kissed his wife’s cheek, picked up his suitcase, waved back at Galina and the girls, and went through the door.

  Emil Karpo stood at the window of the single room in which he had lived for more than twenty-five years. There was nothing to see of any great interest from the window—a street lamp, a five-story warehouse, the passing of seasons marked by the appearance of weeds and grass in a small patch next to the warehouse, a swirl of snow and its accumulation in the winter. He was satisfied with the view. Some things did not change, and that was how he felt most content. He did not feel comfortable. Comfort was the enemy of progress. It allowed time to pass without accomplishment.

  Inspector Emil Karpo, as lean as a leafless birch tree, as erect as the street lamp outside his window, his face with the pallor of one who shuns the sun. His nickname, never spoken to his face, was “the Vampire.” He had others, but that was the one that had stayed with him.

  Only Mathilde Verson had dared, with a smile, to use one of his nicknames, “the Tatar,” to engage in occasional teasing of the man who had started as a client and finished as a lover. Before she died in the crossfire between two gangs on the streets of Moscow, she had made it clear that she no longer wanted him to pay for her services.

  “You are a tough town, Emil Karpo,” she had said pursing her lips, meeting his dark eyes with her own green eyes, smiling.

  For almost all of his life, even as a boy, Emil Karpo had seen people turn away from him. This served him well as a young man and as a policeman dedicated to a belief in the Utopian possibility of Communism. He had served the possibility well knowing that the ideal had to be met by dedicated men and women who were imperfect animals.

  When Communism had failed, Karpo had dedicated himself to the law—the uncertain, malleable law left behind by a failed hope. He had endured the transition without complaint. He had Porfiry Petrovich, in whom he could believe. He had Mathilde, with whom he could begin to do what he was uncertain about accepting—feel. Now she was gone.

  He turned back into the room illuminated by a lean wrought iron lamp in the corner, its shade a compromise of two tones of sober blue selected by Mathilde to complement the single light in the ceiling, muted by a simple white glass cover. Karpo’s eyesight was perfect in spite of the nighttime hours he spent at his desk against the ceiling-high shelves. The shelves were filled with reports carefully handwritten in black notebooks, meticulously checked, on every case in which he had ever been involved.

  He had a computer. It sat on the simple wooden desk before the shelves. He did not fully trust the computer. He knew it could send his words into oblivion, wipe out his carefully prepared observations. He had transferred much of what he had written in his notebooks to the hard drive and backed it up, but it was the notebooks on which he relied.

  There was a bed with its head against one wall. It was little more than a cot. The blanket he had laid out would meet the taut requirements of all but the most sadistic noncommissioned Army officers. The blanket was a dark blue one, with which Mathilde had replaced a khaki one.

  A dresser, three drawers high, stood against the wall near the door. Inside, neatly laid out, were underwear and socks. After packing, what remained in his closet were three pairs of black slacks, two black business jackets, four black turtleneck shirts, four white shirts, and three ties, one black, one blue, and one with red and green stripes, a gift from Mathilde that he had worn once.

  Coat over his arm, Emil Karpo waited, valise on the floor next to the door.

  He knew only that Porfiry Petrovich had told him that they were going to Siberia, to a diamond mine where a Canadian had been murdered. When he needed to know more, he would be told.

  There was a scratching at the door. Not a knock. A scratching sound. Emil Karpo took no chance. The journals on shelves over his desk were filled with the emotionless accounts of crimes petty and abundant, sad and horrific. And there were those who harbored grudges for the ghostly detective who had sent them to prison or into hiding or exile.

  Karpo, hand on his weapon, opened the door.

  The lean black cat that walked slowly in stretched as she moved, her left paw betraying a long, imperfectly healed injury. The cat ignored Karpo and leapt onto the cot.

  Karpo put his weapon away and moved to the cot to pick up the cat. When he was a boy, his brother had a cat not unlike this one, which did not object to being lifted. Karpo put him outside the door and watched the cat saunter down the darkened hallway.

  Something, the smell of the cat, the feel of its fur, the pulsing of its purr, evoked a sense of childhood. It was not unpleasant.

  “I am about to be very rich.”

  He lay beside Oxana in the bed, grinning, his hands behind his head, his mind savoring a simple but expensive list of indulgences—a dacha on the Black Sea with a modest boat including a cabin with a large round bed that gently rocked to the melody of his body and that of whatever young or not-so-young woman he had invited aboard. But there would be more. Yes, the clothes, like James Bond, but what he dwelled on most was the notion of food. He would stuff himself through the beak like a pampered goose, bred to produce the finest fois gras. He would drink fine wines from France and Spain. Maybe he would have enough to buy an English soccer team. He had no idea what they cost.

  Maybe a great many things, though he was smart enough to know that he would have to keep a very low profile for years and hold onto a job he really didn’t mind.

  “We,” Oxana Balakona said.

  She shared this apartment in Kiev with another model who was away on an ad shoot in Cyprus. Oxana also had a small apartment of her own in Moscow.

  “We?”

  “We will be rich,” she explained. “You said ‘I.’ ”

  “Of course, ‘we.’ ”

  “If there were to be only you before I receive my share of the money,” she said, “some people would be enlightened about what happened to their diamonds.”

  “The diamonds do not belong to them,” he said, happily turning to look at her profile. She had a lovely profile, aquiline, her skin almost white. “They stole the diamonds from someone else, who stole them from a mine in Africa. I paid for them with euros confiscated from a band of Estonian smugglers.”

  “Still, some people would be interested in what happened to the diamonds,” she repeated without looking at him, wanting to reach for her cigarettes on the table next to the bed, knowing he did not like it when she smoked in bed.

  They had not known each other long, but he had not been shy about making his wishes clear. He was not bad looking and Oxana had a reasonable if not excessive sexual drive. The problem was that he was an animal, a smart, careful animal driven by an almost constant desire for immediate gratification. For him,
sex was quick, self-indulgent, filled with lust, growls, and grunts instead of words.

  It wasn’t bad. Oxana was an animal too, but she considered herself a sleek, calculating, protective cat. He was a wild bear. They were not a bad match.

  “You are a greedy creature,” he had said when he had approached her about the diamonds.

  She had smiled the knowing smile that had appeared in several hundred ads, magazine layouts, and on runways in eleven countries. She was not greedy, but she had no intention of explaining that to him. Yes, she made lots of money, but she had many expenses and, as one very gay German designer had once said to her, “Models have a limited shelf life.”

  Oxana would eventually no longer be the product which could sell illusions to women who had no hope of ever looking like her and to men who would dress their wives and mistresses with the clothes Oxana modeled. Both the men and women hoped they could buy a little of the illusion, that it might be slightly transferred with the silk, cotton, and cashmere.

  Oxana had five or six years more as a model. Then a battle she could not win against weight and age would begin, or end. She had no intention of letting herself go when she was rich, but she wanted the pleasure of knowing that she was maintaining her beauty for herself and not for others.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “You really expect me to answer that?”

  “Absolutely not. I expect you to lie. I expect to look at your beautiful face, at your little smile, and delight in watching you lie.”

  “I was thinking about what I will do with the money.”

  “We,” he said. “What we will do with the money.”

  “We won’t be together,” she said, reaching for her cigarettes, no longer able to wait.

  “Why not?” he said with a grin, his hand on her lean thigh.

  “Truth or lie?” she asked.

  He considered his options and said, “Your choice.”

  “We’d grow tired of each other. Very quickly.”

  “Are you already growing tired of me then?” he asked, getting out of bed.