Tarnished Icons ir-11

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  The headphones still on, the probe still inside, Paulinin put down the flashlight without bothering to turn it off and groped around in his briefcase till he came up with a thin metal device that looked like a delicate pliers with a small circular scissor at the end. Cautiously opening the clothespin just a bit more as he watched the small screen on the yellow box, Paulinin inserted the new instrument.

  “Contact could break a circuit, create a small spark,” he said more to himself than to either of the men in the room or whomever else might be listening and watching. “How clever is this man I’m playing against?”

  Paulinin paused, left hand holding the tool, right hand holding the clothespin. Then he quickly squeezed the tool, and both Hamilton and Karpo could hear the small sound of metal wire being cut.

  They stood waiting to die, but death didn’t come, only the resumption of song from Paulinin: “Ain’ she nize. Luck hair over hm, hm, hm.”

  Paulinin removed the cutting device from the box, pulled out the clothespin gently, and slipped off the elastic bands, holding each so it would not suddenly snap across and against the table and box.

  Paulinin removed the headphones, turned off the yellow device, and put both back in his briefcase.

  “Oh me oh my,” Paulinin sang softly, reaching over and lifting the lid of the box. “Ain dot perfection.”

  He stopped singing suddenly and laid the hinged lid open.

  “What’s this? What’s this?” he said. “His move. A bold knight, a reckless queen?”

  Paulinin stood looking at the contents of the box, not singing or humming anymore.

  “You two should leave now,” he said.

  “Why?” asked Hamilton.

  “Because,” Paulinin said softly, “I don’t know what my next move will be. The trigger spring is attached to nothing. I recognize none of these mechanisms. If the box had been opened, it would not have exploded. The question is, why? If someone is fool enough to open the box, which does not explode, they see this. Do they stare at it, as we are, while a timer silently moves to explosion? Does the person who opens it call in others so that the bomber gets more victims? I suggest you leave.”

  Neither Karpo nor Hamilton moved, though the American was sorely tempted and would not be breaking any laws or rules by doing so. In fact, by remaining he may very well have been violating some FBI regulation.

  “Your move,” Hamilton said.

  Paulinin grinned, removed his glasses, put them back on, and said, “Uncomfortable.”

  Then he leaned forward toward the box, inches from its inner workings. First he listened and then he smelled each part, pausing at the claylike material. Finally he delicately placed the tip of his finger on the material and put it to, his tongue. The puzzled look returned and he stood thinking for an instant. An idea came. He smelled the box itself and found a scalpel in his briefcase. He carefully scraped away a small piece of the box and examined it through his thick lenses.

  Paulinin looked at the open box again, put the piece of box on the table, put his tools away, closed his briefcase, and placed it on the desk. Then he reached into the open box with his right hand and pulled out the claylike material.

  “Clay,” he said in disgust. “Simple clay mixed with potassium. It’s not explosive. The box isn’t made of anything that can explode. This isn’t a bomb. It’s a fake bomb. A last gesture. Like the American movie I saw when I was a child, The Phantom of the Opera. When the angry crowd surrounds him, the phantom holds up his hand as if it contains a bomb. The crowd steps back in fear. Then the phantom opens his hand, revealing that it’s empty. He laughs as the crowd closes in on him to end the movie. I’ve never forgotten that. The bomber has won.”

  “I’d call it a stalemate,” said Hamilton.

  Paulinin picked up his briefcase and shook his head.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But he is sitting in a cell right now laughing at me.”

  “I doubt that,” said Hamilton.

  “He is laughing, smiling, gloating,” said Paulinin, snapping his fully reloaded briefcase shut.

  “Can we take this?” asked Karpo, looking down at the harmless box on the desk.

  “I don’t know,” said Hamilton. “I’ll see and get back to you.”

  Karpo nodded. Paulinin was already headed for the door, disgruntled, his moment gone. Monochov was a tormenting demon who had made a fool of him. Paulinin was quickly developing a determination never to put himself in a position like this again.

  Paulinin retrieved his coat and put it on, buttoning it quickly.

  Hamilton ushered the two men out of the room. As they headed back down the stairs, the FBI agent thanked them. Karpo nodded in response. Paulinin didn’t even do that. He imagined that videotape. The FBI would watch it, laugh at him as he sang the foolish American song, as he played the bomber’s game with surgical precision, as he stood looking down at the near jack-in-the-box of a surprise.

  Instead of leading them to the front door of the embassy, Hamilton made a turn and motioned for the two Russians to follow him. Paulinin hesitated but moved to Karpo’s side, gripping his briefcase. Hamilton opened a door to a small concrete-reinforced room filled with video screens. Tapes were running. The room hummed electronically.

  “All automatic,” said Hamilton. “Every once in a while there’s a glitch, a failure to record. The videotape just made of us was automatic, not monitored. I’ve turned off my microphone.”

  Hamilton reached over to one of the machines. On the second screen on top was the room with the desk and the fake bomb. Hamilton pressed a button. The second screen went blank. A tape popped up. He removed it and replaced it with a fresh tape from a cabinet against the wall. He handed the tape he had removed from the machine to Paulinin.

  “The machine malfunctioned,” Hamilton said seriously. “It never turned on. I’ll have it repaired.”

  Paulinin took the tape, opened his briefcase enough to drop it in, and closed the case. Hamilton left the room, looking both ways down the hall, and motioned for the two men to follow him.

  The FBI agent led them back to the front door and past the marines.

  “I turned off the microphone when you opened the box,” said Hamilton softly as the three men stood out in the cold. A sharp wind was blowing. “Electronic malfunction is getting too common around here. A few agents think it’s some kind of jamming from your government. The microphone and recorder were a backup for the video in case this room was destroyed, very similar to the black boxes on airplanes.”

  “You knew it was a fake bomb when I opened the box?” asked Paulinin incredulously. “Before I knew?”

  “No,” said Hamilton. “I didn’t know. I suspected only when you opened it. I told you I know a little about bombs. Something about it seemed off, wrong, too intricate. Most bombs, even those sent by madmen, are simple. The simpler they are, the more effective they tend to be.”

  This, too, was a humiliation for Paulinin, but not as bad as it would have been if the FBI had wound up with the videotape that was now in his briefcase or if Hamilton had not turned off his microphone.

  The FBI agent held out his hand. Karpo shook it. Paulinin hesitated, but then he shook it, too. He knew he should thank the American, but he didn’t know how.

  “We’d appreciate being kept informed about the bomber and his trial if it comes to one,” said Hamilton, smiling. “Thank you for your assistance.”

  With that the agent went back into the building.

  Karpo and Paulinin walked slowly away.

  “Humiliation,” Paulinin muttered. “I will remain in my laboratory from now on.”

  “Embarrassment,” said Karpo. “Not humiliation. Shall we walk back?”

  “It’s far,” said Paulinin.

  “Yes,” said Karpo. “And it’s cold.”

  “Let’s walk,” said Paulinin.

  “Good,” said Emil Karpo. “That will give me ample time to tell you of one of the major embarrassments of my career, one that has remai
ned with me for years. A woman outwitted me and almost killed me with a bomb.”

  They passed a parked American Buick. Three men were inside. They pretended not to look at the strange pair of Russians who passed them.

  “And, if we have time, I will tell you other embarrassments and failures I have experienced,” said Karpo.

  “Perhaps we can stop for some tea or coffee and a sweet,” said Paulinin. He held his hat in his hand, and the cold wind blew his wild hair in a winter dance.

  “I see no reason not to,” said Karpo, moving far more slowly than his usual pace so the smaller man could keep up with him.

  ELEVEN

  Sarah Rostnikov sat in a modest dark maroon armchair in the apartment of her cousin Leon, the doctor. He sat across from her in an identical chair. Leon had not asked her but had made and poured coffee. He knew she liked hers with only a touch of sugar. He drank his black.

  He was taller and leaner than most of Sarah’s family and was given to wearing suits and ties even when he was not working. He did not like wearing clinical whites, though he did wear blue gowns and caps and a mask when he performed or assisted at surgery.

  Sarah had come from the clinic her cousin used. Leon kept himself and his patients away from Moscow hospitals whenever possible. Unlike most doctors in Russia, and in the Soviet Union before, Leon prospered. He was younger than Sarah, no more than forty-five. He had managed to get into a Soviet medical school in spite of being Jewish, though it had taken a substantial bribe. After medical school he had supplemented the outdated medical education he had received by apprenticing under Cuban doctors, then had opened his own practice.

  Leon was aware that he was known as the Jew doctor on Herzen Street. People with money came to him-government officials, businessmen, criminals-and, because of his connection to Porfiry Petrovich, an increasing number of ranking officers from the various law enforcement agencies. Leon treated them all, charged them according to their ability to pay, and, in turn, worked for nothing at the clinic to which he had sent Sarah. His patients at the clinic, in contrast to his private patients, tended to be abominably poor.

  “You have the clinic report?” Sarah asked as calmly as she could.

  Leon thought, as he had since he was a boy, that his cousin was a beautiful woman of great dignity. At first Leon, like the others in the family, wondered why she had married the Gentile policeman who walked with a limp and looked like a file cabinet. But Leon and the others were gradually won over. They had come to accept Porfiry Petrovich and, of course, Sarah and Porfiry Petrovich’s son.

  “They called about ten minutes before you got here,” he said, not touching his own cup of coffee. “The X rays are being delivered here now.”

  “It’s back,” Sarah said.

  “The tumor? I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t know, but I don’t think so. That is not my specialty, but I will look and I will consult with the woman who operated on you. I think, at this point, something was touched, cut, perhaps even severed during the initial surgery. Or perhaps the tumor itself caused some minor damage before it was removed. None of this is uncommon.”

  Sarah knew her cousin as if he were her brother. They had grown up together. Their families had lived in the same apartment building, a building that was about half Jewish. Leon was not lying. He would not lie to her.

  “And so?” she said.

  “And so,” he repeated, “if I am right, this is something that we may be able to treat with medication, perhaps antiseizure pills. If we can’t find a good way to treat it, we may simply have to tell you to live with it unless it gets worse.”

  “And if you are wrong, Leon Moiseyevitch?”

  “Perhaps surgery again to see if we can find and take care of the problem, but I don’t think that will be necessary.”

  The room was warm and comfortable. Leon had made the two-bedroom apartment so. It was not filled with expensive furniture or antiques or anything that would suggest to the visitor that he was well-off. But there was an Oriental rug on the floor, a warm maroon-and-purple motif in the furniture, and contemporary Russian art on his walls. The art was all representational and non-political. There were separate entrances to the apartment and to his office and examining room next door. Leon could go to work or back home in seconds.

  “Finish your coffee and we’ll go take another look at you,” he said. “Someone should be delivering the laboratory reports and X rays from the clinic any moment.”

  “You will let me know if I am going to die, Leon,” she said. “I would have a great deal to do to prepare.”

  “You are not going to die,” he said. “Not till you’re as old as Grandma Rebecca. Ninety-one years. That’s a promise. I will not permit another woman I love to be taken before her time.”

  Leon’s wife had died almost seven years earlier of stomach cancer. They had one child, Itzhak, whom they called Ivan. Ivan was now nine. The woman who took care of him, Masha, a Hungarian, would pick the boy up at school and bring him home. The boy bore an uncanny resemblance to his mother, a resemblance, Sarah knew, that constantly reminded her cousin of his loss and caused him to have a protectiveness of the boy that Sarah understood, though she often thought it would not serve Leon or the child well as the boy grew.

  “Shall we go?” Leon asked with a smile as he stood.

  Sarah put down her cup and took his offered hand. On the way to the door to the office and through the examination room, Sarah asked about Itzhak, and Leon talked with pride about his son’s accomplishments.

  Sarah did not have nor did she want anyone to look after the two girls who would be waiting for her. They were old enough to make their own way home from school and find something to eat. She had left a note telling them to do their homework and then to read the books they had begun. After an early dinner she would let them watch some television.

  As she lay talking and thinking, a deep part of her prayed that she would never have a seizure in front of the girls or Iosef or Porfiry Petrovich, though she knew she would soon have to tell her husband what was happening.

  Rostnikov sat across the table from Yevgeny Tutsolov. Zelach stood behind the young man, who sat erect and was remarkably calm. Rostnikov had not told the young man why they had come to talk to him at the hotel where he worked in the laundry. When they had found him pulling sheets from a large dryer with the help of the hotel services supervisor, Tutsolov had seemed surprised but not at all nervous.

  The supervisor was a bull of a woman in a white uniform who said they could use the small room off the laundry where the employees ate their lunch. She added that the sooner Tutsolov got back to work, the better, unless they planned to arrest him for something.

  Rostnikov thanked her, smiled, and told the woman that she reminded him of Tolstoy’s description of Anna Karenina. The woman’s scowl had turned to a smile of pleasure.

  “I’ve been told that before,” she said over the sound of the washing and drying machines and the rolling of carts by curious employees. “Of course, that was before I put on a little weight.”

  “It shows through,” said Rostnikov as the woman led her employee and the two policemen to the small lunchroom. “Beauty shows through.”

  She closed the door behind her when she left, and the three men were enclosed by windowless walls and the smell of thousands of previous lunches.

  Rostnikov moved to one side of the table and sat on the bench. He had motioned Tutsolov to the other side of the bench. Zelach needed no order to know where he was to place himself-behind the suspect, close and intimidating.

  “You have a slight limp,” Rostnikov said.

  “You noticed? One of the workers pushed a laundry cart into me about a month ago. It’s getting better every day. I don’t think anyone even noticed the limp except you. You, too, have a limp.”

  “I have an artificial leg,” said Rostnikov. “Have you ever seen one?”

  “No,” said Tutsolov.

  “The good ones they make now are marve
ls of technology,” said Rostnikov. “My son, who used to be a poet and playwright after he was a soldier, envisions the day when as each internal organ and external limb is diseased or mutilated, it will immediately be replaced by an artificial one that works even better than the original. Everything but the brain.”

  “Interesting,” said Tutsolov.

  “Yes,” said Rostnikov. “But I think it is only the poet in him. Would you like to know why we are here?”

  “Very much,” said the young man, folding his hands on the table and leaning forward attentively, curiosity crossing his innocent-looking face.

  “You knew a young man named Igor Mesanovich,” said Rostnikov.

  “Yes. He was my friend. We knew each other from the time we were children,” said Yevgeny Tutsolov, his eyes growing moist. “But I haven’t seen him for months.”

  “You know he is dead,” said Rostnikov, trying to find a comfortable angle for his bionic leg.

  “Yes. I heard,” said Tutsolov. “Someone beat him with a rock near the river a few nights ago.”

  “He was shot,” said Rostnikov. “Not beaten. He and three others, Jews.”

  Tutsolov nodded. “The last time we talked, months ago, Igor said he had grown interested in Judaism. I tried to talk him out of it.”

  “You don’t like Jews?” asked Rostnikov.

  “Not particularly,” said Tutsolov, “but I don’t feel strongly about it, and I seldom give it even a fleeting thought.”

  “Perhaps you were right to try to talk him out of it,” said Rostnikov with a sigh of understanding. “My wife is Jewish. My son is half Jewish, but I’m told that according to the Jews if the mother is Jewish, the child is Jewish. Here, if either parent is Jewish, then the child is Jewish. Being Jewish is hard in our country.”

  “Exactly,” said Tutsolov. “That’s what I tried to tell Igor, but he was determined. I wished him well and told him he was acting like a fool.”

  “Three nights ago, just before midnight,” said Rostnikov, “where were you?”