At eleven o’clock that evening, Emil Karpo finished his arm exercises, clenched his teeth to keep from making a sound, and felt the thin drops of perspiration on his forehead. He wiped the moisture away with his sleeve and moved to his desk, where he had laid out three pages of names. After his meeting with Rostnikov, Karpo had returned to Petrovka, gone to the records room, and told the night clerk that he needed a copy of the complete list of those who had access to the files, who were authorized to go beyond the desk.
If the clerk had any thoughts of withholding the list from the gaunt specter before him, he did not voice or show them. He dutifully supplied a copy of the current authorization list and hoped that Karpo would take it and leave. Instead of leaving, the Vampire had asked the clerk a series of strange questions about how long he had been night clerk, where he had been at certain times of the year, and where he lived. The inspector was obviously mad, as quite a few investigators seemed to be, and the best thing to do was humor him. The clerk answered the questions, and Karpo left without explanation.
And now Karpo stood over his desk looking down at the list of eighty-six names including inspector-level personnel in the MVD and the Procurator’s Office plus clerical personnel. At least fifteen on the list were KGB, though they were not identified as such. They would be the most difficult to check out, but it could be done. Some of the checking could be done without the knowledge of the individual. Work schedules might well clear a good number by showing that they were in a specific place or ill or accounted for at the time of any of the murders. It would not be easy and might take a great deal of time, but the expenditure of time did not bother Emil Karpo. He would methodically go through the list and check them all. Then he might have to check them again. In the end, it might turn out to be none of them, in which case he would have to find another way to deal with the killer. It was just a matter of time and of his ability to make his mind and body continue to function.
He sat at his desk and ordered his healing left arm to move, and it moved to pick up the pen.
At eleven o’clock that night, Dimitri Mazaraki stood alone in the near-darkness of the ring of the New Circus. The night lights cast shadows that merged with the darkness. Beneath his feet, Mazaraki felt the hardness of the concrete floor—below which was the ice level, which could be raised in a few minutes—and below that the water pool, which could be brought forth almost instantly. Layers below layers below layers. Nothing quite what it seemed, just as the circus wasn’t quite what it seemed.
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: the creaking, the warping. He felt powerful knowing he was impressive and tall, his mustache fine. He resisted the impulse to put his hands on his hips, but he didn’t resist the 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 the director returned. He would suggest the acts at the circus school he thought might replace the Pesknoko troupe. He would praise the 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 things 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 the living room of their 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 the book again, though he wasn’t sure he liked the grisly ending with the Calypso woman … No, he wasn’t sure he liked it, though he had enjoyed being with Meyer and Carella and Kling and the others. As he put down the book it reminded him that 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 he 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, that 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 cry—but 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 smelted 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.
FIVE
AT 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 in and 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 visi
ted 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 in 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. They 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 in 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 that 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 this 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 de
cided 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 that 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—”
A Fine Red Rain Page 10