A Fine Red Rain

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Go home,” she said. “Now. Go home and take care of yourself. That is an order, Comrade.”

  Orders, he thought. This woman gives orders. I could give her orders. I could get my briefcase, get my knife. Then I would give the orders. But he knew he would do no such thing. The knife wasn’t for withered goat tails like Ludmilla. It was for young, filthy women. On Ludmilla he would have to use something that didn’t bring him close to her, didn’t force him to touch or smell her. A club, a chair. He thought of the statue of a Greek goddess in his mother’s room, a cheap copy his mother had purchased at a market, a cheap replica with a small chip in the base. He could bring that down on Ludmilla’s face again and again and again.

  Yuri forced himself to stand up. It was difficult. He tried not to tremble with rage, confusion, and that aching, longing feeling.

  “Home, now,” Ludmilla repeated. “If you still feel like this tomorrow, you go to the clinic and have them look at you and fill out a report.”

  “Yes, Comrade,” he whispered. “Thank you. I do feel …”

  She had already turned her back and was marching toward a uniformed officer at the desk. Yuri shut his mouth and moved to the small closet near the door where he kept his jacket and briefcase. Behind him he heard Ludmilla take a file from the officer, heard them speak, but he could not make out the words. As soon as Yuri’s fingers touched the handle of his briefcase, he found it difficult to breathe. He needed air, desperately needed air. He took in large gulps of air and looked back over his shoulder at Ludmilla, who continued to talk to the officer but looked at her departing assistant as if he were a disfigured beggar.

  Yuri didn’t stop to make out an early departure report. He knew he would never make it if he did. As it was, he barely got to the main entrance, where the uniformed and armed guard on duty watched him emotionlessly as he puffed and grunted to the door and out into the afternoon sun. Two men and a woman he recognized from the Procurator’s Office moved past him, eyeing him as he gulped in air and loosened his tie. An efficient-looking woman in a dark suit whom he didn’t know asked him if he needed help. Yuri couldn’t speak, but he shook his head no and stumbled down the steps into the square. He looked across the street toward the stern statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky.

  He stumbled across Kirov Street and was almost hit by a Volga whose driver leaned out the window and shouted something at him before speeding on. The steps of the Dzerzhinsky Metro Station were in front of him. He went to the rail and looked down into the darkness of the station and decided that he could not go down there, not now. A family—five or six people, probably foreign—was coming out of the Mayakovsky Museum to his left. They were talking loudly, arguing about something. They headed toward the metro, and Yuri clutched his briefcase and stumbled away, crossing Serov Passage, managing to avoid traffic. He began to walk aimlessly down the street. At the entrance to the museum, Yuri stopped, adjusted his glasses, and looked around as if he were lost. Then he turned around, headed back to the square, looked up at the sun, and crossed New Square Street in front of the Detsky Mir children’s shop. He passed the store entrance and moved up 25th October Street.

  Yuri was in the wrong area for what he needed, wanted. His moist fingers tightened on the worn handle of the briefcase as he wandered. He looked only forward, not back, and had he looked back in his present state it was doubtful that he would have seen the tall, gaunt man and the woman in the red hat who were following him.

  “He’s sick,” said Mathilde, hurrying to keep pace with Karpo.

  “Yes,” agreed Emil Karpo, following Pon through the afternoon crowd, trying to stay far enough back to keep from being seen. Karpo was well aware that he did not melt well into a crowd. Mathilde’s new red hat did not add to the possibility of their successfully blending into the pedestrian traffic, but Pon was not a man to notice. He had stumbled out of Petrovka, and they followed him simply because he was the first of the three possible suspects to leave that day. They would have pursued any of the three who came out first. The plan would have been the same in any case.

  They had, however, almost missed Pon. One of the suspects was an investigating officer who might come out any time on assignment. Pon was an office worker. It was hours earlier than his normal departure time.

  “I don’t like the way he looks,” said Mathilde as they walked.

  Karpo shrugged. He didn’t care how Pon looked as he staggered around the streets of Moscow.

  “Do you think it’s him?” Mathilde asked. Pon stopped suddenly, clutched his briefcase to his chest, and looked across the street toward the elevated parkway where the statue of Ivan Fyodorov, the first Russian printer, stood. Karpo put out a hand to halt Mathilde.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Pon seemed to be about to cross the street, changed his mind, and continued walking. Across from the Slavyansky Bazaar Restaurant five minutes later, Pon adjusted his slipping glasses once more and turned his head back toward Karpo and Mathilde. Mathilde was about to stop but Karpo reached out, grabbed her hand, and kept walking behind a young couple.

  “Don’t stop. If we stop, we stand out,” he said. “If he doesn’t start walking again, we turn in to the first doorway.”

  But Yuri Pon did decide to walk again. He walked and walked. For almost an hour he wandered almost aimlessly, and as he walked he sweated, and as he sweated he began to recover a bit from whatever was ailing him.

  “I’m tired,” sighed Mathilde.

  Karpo looked at Pon, who had paused in front of the Cosmos Hotel and moved toward the entrance. The Cosmos lobby was not exactly the place where one might encounter a prostitute, but Mathilde was tiring and Pon showed no signs of ceasing his wandering.

  “Now, in the lobby,” Karpo said.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me to be careful?” she asked playfully.

  Karpo looked down at her, at the thin layer of perspiration on her slightly protruding upper lip.

  “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 not 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, grunting, 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 the 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 born not fifteen miles from here,” Pon said to the woman in the red hat. “Mytishy. My mother still lives there. 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 shirt. He glanced at them 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, “this 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 in 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 bird 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.