“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 sweating 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.
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 bath—even if she had to cart kettles of boiled water, which she usually had to do—a simple meal of whatever was left over, and a quiet evening listening to music on the radio.
“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.
“I am a plumber,” Rostnikov said, leading her past the waiting couple, who pounced on the now-empty table.
Twenty minutes later they joined the crowds under the neon sign of the New Circus. They were shown to their seats, very good seats, in the second row.
“Why do I know this is not simply a night at the circus?” Sarah whispered.
Rostnikov sighed and looked at her. “We came at the invitation of a killer. I could not bring myself to disappoint him.”
“I see,” said Sarah. “And why was it necessary that I come?”
“Because,” said Rostnikov quietly as the lights went down, “I need you.”
“To do what?”
“To be with me,” he said as the music blared forth in a rush of brass and Dimitri Mazaraki stepped out to the center of the ring, huge, confident, giving his fine mustache a twirl of conceit. He was dressed in red—a red coat, red pants, even a red top hat. The music stopped, and the big announcer’s eyes, scanning the audience with a Cheshire grin, silencing one and all—men, women, and children—silenced them with the secret he held of magic to be performed, mystery to be savored, danger to be witnessed, fantasy to store for the gray day tomorrow.
Mazaraki’s eyes played over the crowd, roamed beyond the silence, and snapped onto Rostnikov right in front of him in the second row. Mazaraki’s smile changed, the lip curled ever so slightly below the fine mustache. Rostnikov replied with a smile of
his own, a sad smile that caused the announcer’s lip to hesitate for only a moment before he turned his eyes back to the crowd and announced the first act.
The music came blaring forth again. Mazaraki stepped back into the shadows, and a dancing bear and two mandolin players dressed in plaid suits and baggy pants bounded into the ring.
“That was your killer?” asked Sarah, leaning toward her husband.
Rostnikov nodded.
He felt her grip tighten on his arm.
Emil Karpo sat at his desk on the fifth floor of Petrovka finishing his report. He had no office and his desk was number five in a line of eleven desks against a windowless wall. The windows were all in the offices on the outer wall. An officer named Fyodor sat at desk number nine talking on the telephone. Karpo could make out nothing that Fyodor said. He didn’t care. But he could not ignore the snorting laugh that usually followed a deep intake of air by the other inspector.
He finished the report and looked over at the only other person in the office.
“It’s almost nine,” Mathilde said, playing with her wilted red hat. She seemed generally wilted. Her hair lay across her cheeks. The collar on one side of her red dress was up, the other down, and it was clear that this lack of symmetry was not a clever fashion ploy.
“It is finished,” said Karpo. “I need only make copies and carry them to the deputy procurator’s office.”
“And then?”
“And then,” said Karpo, rising, “you are free to go.”
Mathilde put the hat over her face and laughed. It was a loud, rough laugh that rivaled that of Fyodor, who paused in his conversation with a smile and looked over at the woman in red to share her joke. When Fyodor saw Karpo looking back at him, however, he returned to his phone conversation.
“Something is humorous?” Karpo asked, standing in front of Mathilde, the report, in duplicate, on Yuri Pon neatly tucked into a folder under his left arm.
“I was almost killed this afternoon,” Mathilde said, choking back a hiccup. “That madman almost killed me.”
“I was there,” Karpo said reasonably.
“Oh, yes, of course. How could I have forgotten?”
“I did not literally mean—” Karpo began.
“No, you did not literally mean,” she said, standing. “You literally are. Do you know that I was frightened this afternoon? Do you think it might be reasonable to offer me something? Thanks, an arm of support, an American tap on the chin for a job well done?”
“The hat …” Karpo said.
“With the money I could have made picking up Englishmen at the Bolshoi today, I could have bought five hats,” she said, putting the hat on the chair.
“Well?”
“Well? Is that what you have to say? It’s your turn to speak, Emil Karpo. Your turn.”
Her hands were on her hips. A moist clump of hair fell over her eyes. She tried to blow it away but it didn’t move. She flicked it over with her fingertips.
“You helped to catch a man who committed eight murders of women,” he said evenly. “You seemed quite willing to—”
“Spasee’ba, thank you,” she said.
“Spasee’ba,” Karpo said. “On behalf of the people of Moscow.”
“I’m touched,” she said with a sigh, picking up her hat again. “You are a romantic, Emil Karpo.”
“I don’t see how you could come to such a conclusion,” he said. “Certainly not based on the information you have or on anything I have said or done here.”
Fyodor laughed, and both Mathilde and Karpo turned to see if he were laughing at them. He was not.
“I was being sarcastic, Emil.”
“As you well know, I have no sense of humor,” Karpo said soberly. “I have no repressions and, therefore, no need for humor.”
“Do you know what day it is?” she asked.
“Tuesday,” he replied.
A door somewhere opened and closed, the sound echoing past them.
“Let us break the pattern,” she whispered and found herself unable to repress a hiccup. “Let us go to your apartment, which I have never seen, and let us get in bed.”
“It isn’t Thursday,” Karpo said.
“Believe me,” she replied. “It will still work.”
“Why do you want to do this?” he asked with genuine curiosity.
“Why? Because you are a challenge to my profession, to my craft. I am driven to make you feel, to make you react.”
Karpo shook his head, unable to understand this woman.
“And I am to pay as always?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, plunking the red hat on her head. “You are to pay as always. The hat was for risking my life.”
“I see,” he said. “Compensation for lost income. And you don’t want cash without expending labor.”
“I love when you talk filthy to me,” she said with a grin.
“I didn’t …”
“Deliver your report and let’s go,” she said. “While I still labor under the delusion that there is hope for you.”
The circus crowd responded with enthusiastic applause to the panorama display of the fighting spirit of the Red Army. A woman stood upon a great horse that pranced around the ring. The woman held high a red flag with the hammer and sickle. In the darkness beyond the curtain, a cannon roared. Twelve men dressed as soldiers high-stepped out and raised their rifles to the sky in salute. The applause rose again.
Rostnikov noted that the applause came nowhere near matching that which had been given to the trick horse rider or the dancing bear or the clown on the high wire or any other act before this one.
Throughout the evening, Mazaraki had moved closer to the crowd with each announcement of each act, had moved closer and closer to Rostnikov.
“For the benefit of our foreign visitors,” Mazaraki had said, looking at Rostnikov during his introduction of a motorcycle act, “the New Moscow Circus does not promote the idea of danger in its performance. Skill is the focus, Soviet skills. Our people come, not in the hope of witnessing accident or death, but with confidence that they will see performers who have perfected their skills, their timing, and the potential with which they have been born and that our nation has nurtured. And yet, Tovarich,” he said, looking directly at Rostnikov with a grin, “some skills have a risk of danger, and those who come through the doors of the circus must understand that there is always the slight possibility of accident for those who would challenge their skills, their muscles, their wit. There is no better place than the circus for such a challenge.”
“He’s talking to you,” Sarah whispered.
Rostnikov said nothing. He watched the announcer in red describe the motorcycle act, watched him back away, watched the look in the man’s eyes, which he had seen many times before during investigations—a look of defiance and desperation.
The last act before the curtain call by all the performers was a magician, a magnificent magician with two bespangled women assistants whom he kept making disappear and reappear in various sections of the audience, high above on a rafter, or inside one of the four locked boxes on a raised platform.
Children clapped, men and women said “wonderful,” and the performers and animals made a final triumphant appearance. As the performers left and the final strains of a march vibrated from the band, Rostnikov looked at the exit curtain, looked at Dimitri Mazaraki looking back at him. The tickets had been the first invitation. All night long, throughout the performance, Mazaraki had issued other invitations. And now came the last, a look that said “Come if you dare, but I doubt if you dare, not in my world.”
It was, Rostnikov thought, the bear trapped in a shed, standing on its hind legs, growling, claws up, paws wavering, a frightening and frightened figure.
“Take the metro home,” Rostnikov said to his wife as the crowd began to thin and the band stopped playing. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Sarah looked at him and avoided a sticky, crying little boy who was being led out by
his mother.
“What are you doing, Porfiry Petrovich?”
She was tired, worried, and well aware that she had no chance of changing his mind regardless of what he was going to do.
“Delivering a message,” he said. “From a man who sat on Gogol’s head.”
“I’m staying,” she said firmly.
“If you stay, I will worry about you,” he told her gently. “If I worry, I cannot do what I must do.”
There were only a few people left in the arena now. Sarah Rostnikov looked around and back at her husband.
“You didn’t plan this?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I thought I had another day.”
“And …”
“Another day may be too late.”
The voices of the stragglers, the sounds of their feet shuffling tired on the concrete steps, dropped another level. There was nothing more to say. Sarah touched her husband’s arm, turned her back, and walked slowly after the others.
TEN
ROSTNIKOV WAITED TILL THE entire arena was clear and then he turned, walked down three steps, and sat in the same seat in which he had sat for the entire performance. Five minutes later a squad of cleaning women in babushkas came out. They came through the main curtain like a new act, the jabbering cleaning women. Rostnikov watched them divide into duets and climb into the seats with their arsenals of brooms, rags, bags, and pans.
The two who had his section noticed Rostnikov later than they would have had he betrayed his presence with any movement, but notice him they did.
“Show is over,” said the older and heavier of the two babushkas.
“Not yet,” said Rostnikov, his eyes not on her but on the entrance curtain.
“We’ve got to clean up,” she said with one hand on her hip and the other using her broom to point to the rows of stands.
Rostnikov shifted slightly to remove his identity card. He held it up to the woman without looking at her. The other cleaning woman, a shorter version of the leader, leaned forward to look at the card.
“We’ll clean around him,” the older woman announced, and they went about their business. In less than twenty minutes the women had finished their cleaning act and exited as they had come. Some of the women turned their heads to look at the bulky man sitting alone in the arena. The older babushka who had seen his identification card spoke to a woman at her side as they departed, and more heads turned to look at him. Then they were gone and all that remained was the overhead humming of the lights. Suddenly the lights began to click off. There was a pattern. The lights behind Rostnikov went off first and then, like a row of dominoes, the other lights clicked off in a wave until the only illumination in the circus arena came from a quartet of night lights mounted on the floor. They cast a dull glow in the circle in front of Rostnikov as if waiting for a final, ghostly performance.
A Fine Red Rain Page 18