Red Chameleon

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “The resources of the entire militia will be mobilized for this effort,” the Wolfhound said, striking his palm against the polished table for emphasis. Rostnikov had already lifted his cup from the table in anticipation of the gesture. He had been to other conferences hosted by the Wolfhound, and he knew it was coming. Karpo, at his side, had no tea, and most of the others in the room, five of them, had also been to conferences with the most famous member of the military police. Only one drowsy newly appointed man of about fifty with a pink face and round cheeks was taken in by the performance. His full cup of tea tottered and overflowed. The pink man leaned over to wipe the table with his sleeve.

  Porfiry Petrovich leaned over to make a note on his pad of ragged paper, a move that pleased Snitkonoy. The note read, “The entire militia running around on Gorky Street, bumping into each other, possibly killing more people than the Weeper.” He drew two stick figures of uniformed policemen bumping into each other and then he crossed them out. The image of Petrov’s face began to form on the paper. Rostnikov sighed and found himself drawing a candlestick.

  “Questions?” the Wolfhound said, folding his arms and looking around the table.

  “What, precisely, is the militia doing?” asked the newcomer with the pink face.

  The proper question, Rostnikov thought, was “What are we wasting our time here for?”

  The Gray Wolfhound smirked knowingly, as if the pink-faced man’s question was the one he expected. He turned to the map of Moscow behind him on the wall and began to point to buildings as he spoke.

  “For the next three weeks an armed officer will be placed atop the Ukraine Hotel, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance Building, the Mir Hotel on Kalinin Prospekt, the Moskva Hotel on Sverdlov Square, the Izvestia building on Gorky Street, all the buildings from which it is believed the Weeper had fired. This, on the assumption that he will return to one of them as he has apparently returned to the Ukraine Hotel. Further questions?”

  “Did Sergeant Petrov have a family?” Rostnikov asked, looking up from his doodles.

  “I don’t know,” said the Wolfhound, rubbing his palms together. “How is that relevant?”

  Instead of answering, Rostnikov merely shrugged. The Gray Wolfhound was not someone he had to appease.

  “We will catch our sniper within the week, two weeks at the latest,” Snitkonoy said, right palm to his chest. “This I personally promise.”

  “We are reassured,” said Rostnikov, putting the finishing touches to the cube he was shading in. Snitkonoy had made such promises before. On one or two occasions, he had actually succeeded in keeping the promise, though the success had little to do with the colonel.

  “We’ve talked enough,” Snitkonoy said, glancing at Rostnikov, whom he clearly could not fathom. “Comrades, it’s time to work.”

  The pink man rose and then looked around in embarrassment when no one else moved. He sat down quickly as everyone else in the room except for Karpo and Rostnikov got up. The others had expected Snitkonoy to try to hold on to his audience, but possibly the disturbing presence of the Washtub had dissuaded him. The Wolfhound was the first out of the room. His gait had been martial, determined, as if he were on the way to do personal battle with the Weeper. In fact, as everyone but the pink man knew, the Wolfhound would head back to his office to wait until he was needed to perform another ceremonial public act.

  When the room had cleared, the pink man stood and addressed Rostnikov and Karpo.

  “We have not been introduced, comrades. I am Sergei Yefros of the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee.”

  And what, thought Rostnikov, are you doing at this meeting!

  “I don’t know why I was told to come to this meeting,” the pink-faced little man said apologetically in answer to the unstated but obvious question. “I think there may have been some mistake.”

  “Impossible,” said Rostnikov sternly. “We don’t make mistakes. Colonel Snitkonoy makes no mistakes.”

  “No,” the man said, shuffling sideways toward the door and pointing to his own chest with his open palm. “I meant I made a mistake. I … made … I made a mistake. Do you see?”

  “That,” Rostnikov conceded, “is possible.” And the man plunged through the door, leaving Rostnikov and Karpo alone in the room. For a full minute the two men sat in silence, Rostnikov with his lips pursed, looking for the answer to a murder in the crude candlestick he had drawn; Karpo trying to think of nothing—and almost succeeding.

  “Two questions, Comrade Karpo,” Rostnikov said with a sigh. “First, why would someone murder an old man and take only a brass candlestick.”

  Karpo did not for an instant consider that Rostnikov’s question might be a joke. Karpo had no sense of what a joke might be. He knew that other people engaged in non sequiturs, incongruities, insults, physical misdemeanors, at which they laughed or smiled. He had never understood the process or function of comedy. And so he answered where others might have been wary.

  “It is unlikely that the murder was committed for the candlestick,” Karpo said, looking straight ahead, “but that you know.”

  Rostnikov nodded and kept drawing.

  “Was the candlestick new, old, very old?”

  “Very old,” Rostnikov said. “Perhaps a hundred years or more, but probably not an antique of any value, certainly not enough value for a well-dressed foreigner to covet.”

  “Then,” concluded Karpo, “it could have been a trick, a ploy to lead us into thinking that it was important, to send us looking in the wrong direction, which would be very foolish and very clever at the same time.”

  “Foolish?”

  “Because,” said Karpo evenly, “we will pursue both the candlestick and the man. We will rely on no assumed link between the two but pursue both. We have the advantage of not tiring.”

  Rostnikov looked at Karpo and the map of Moscow. Almost eight million people, the fourth largest city in the world, Moscow on the map looked like the cross-section of a log or tree stump, the rings of which tell its age—the Kremlin at the center, around it five rings, each historically marking where the city’s boundaries were centuries ago, on which were built wooden palisades, stone walls, and earthen ramparts. In those days it was only possible to enter Moscow through special gates built into the battlements.

  The second ring, the Boulevard Ring, is lined with trees and is a band of lush green in the summer. The third ring, the Garden Ring, is the transport artery, sixteen kilometers around the center of the city. Farther out is the fourth ring, which two centuries ago served as the city’s customs boundary and on which now runs the Moscow Circular Railway. Finally, the fifth ring, a modern ring, the Moscow Circular Motor Road, marks the city’s present boundary.

  “I get very tired, comrade,” Rostnikov said.

  “Individually, yes,” Karpo responded seriously. “But we are not individuals alone. We are part of a determined whole.”

  “Which,” said Rostnikov, putting his pencil down and turning awkwardly to face his pale subordinate, “brings me to my second question. When will you admit that your arm is no longer capable of function? When will you let it be examined by a competent doctor?”

  As long as Karpo had known Rostnikov, almost fifteen years, he had frequently been lulled by the man’s manner into making mistakes. Karpo vowed to himself each time to be more careful, but he also took pride in his superior’s ability to penetrate, to trick sympathetically. If the individual was not so important, why did Karpo not admit his handicap and step down for a more able investigator? Was not the loss of the use of an arm sufficient cause to step down, to recognize that there could well be situations with which one could not cope?

  “Perhaps never,” Karpo said, unblinking eyes fixed on his superior.

  Rostnikov rose with a sigh, holding the table with his right hand till he could straighten his left leg under him.

  “Never?”

  “When I catch the Weeper, perhaps,” Karpo amended. The amendment was necessar
y. Karpo lived by reason and dedication. It was only reasonable to come to this conclusion.

  “You don’t have to retire even if you discover you have one arm,” Rostnikov said, shaking his head. “I have, in effect, only one leg, and the Gray Wolfhound has but half a brain.”

  “I do not wish to be a detriment to—”

  “Ha,” Rostnikov interrupted in mock exasperation. “With one arm you are the best man in the procuracy. See, now you have forced me to embarrass both you and myself by extending flattery. You keep on like this, and I will soon be cordial, then polite, and we will find ourselves in a situation in which we are like that pink panda who just shambled out of here.”

  Karpo rose and nodded in agreement. “I will take your suggestion under advisement,” Karpo said.

  “The Weeper,” Rostnikov said, holding back a morning yawn.

  “The Weeper may return to any of those hotel roofs,” Karpo said softly.

  “He appears to be a creature of habit,” Rostnikov prodded.

  Karpo nodded and went on. “The attacks are coming more frequently. I believe the Weeper is on some time schedule, some constraint. I believe the Weeper is no longer shooting randomly but that Sergeant Petrov was an intended victim. I’ve examined the reports of the incidents, spoke to those who were nearby. For every attack there was at least one nearby witness in uniform, military or police. The Weeper has simply grown confident or angry enough to fire at the real intended victims.”

  “And you conclude from this?” Rostnikov said with a small smile.

  “That another attack will take place soon where people in uniform can be readily found.”

  “That could be—”

  “Many places,” said Karpo. “I am well aware of that. I would like to post men who would be well hidden atop the high buildings facing military establishments within Moscow and perhaps a man atop the Destky Mir children’s shop across from KGB headquarters. And, of course, atop this building.”

  Rostnikov pocketed his doodles, shook his head, and smiled. “You have no evidence,” he said. “This is all concoction.”

  “I remind the chief inspector that in the past I—”

  “—have been right about such things,” Rostnikov finished. Karpo’s statement about his own record had been given without ego. He spoke not out of pride but confidence, a willingness to pursue. He might turn out to be quite wrong, but Rostnikov knew that Karpo would not mind, that he would simply formulate another theory, and another and another, and pursue until he caught the Weeper or someone else did so.

  “You will have your men atop buildings, but I cannot take responsibility for placing anyone across from KGB headquarters,” Rostnikov said, reaching for the door. “It would be difficult to explain why we had not informed the KGB about our plan if we were caught. No, the KGB will have to rely on its reputation. Besides, they are more expendable than we are. There are so many more of them.”

  Karpo gave no sign that he recognized irony in the Washtub’s words or manner. He simply nodded in agreement and moved to follow Rostnikov out of the now-open door.

  “One final thing,” the Washtub said. “Why do you think the Weeper might be a woman?”

  “I didn’t say—” Karpo began.

  “You carefully avoided gender in describing the Weeper. I conclude—”

  “The Weeper may be a man or woman,” said Karpo. “It might have been a man weeping in a high voice or a woman.”

  They were standing in the hall now near a window open to let in some touch of air in the summer heat. The moist taste of coming rain prickled Rostnikov’s cheek and gave him a curious satisfaction. The sound of barking German shepherd dogs in the police kennels below the window gave a faraway sense of melancholy to the scene.

  “Emil,” Rostnikov said, walking at the side of the taller, gaunt man whose limp left arm was plunged into the black sling under his jacket, “have you ever read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?”

  “No,” said Karpo as they stepped aside to let a uniformed young man carrying a stack of files hurry past them. “Should I?”

  “There is a passage in which the drifting young boy hears the faraway sound of someone chopping wood,” Rostnikov said. “The sound of something far away, the echo of each plunge of the ax blade into the wood. It is a passage of great beauty, Emil. It is a passage which vibrates like a summer day in Moscow.”

  “I see,” Karpo said, unable to fathom the cryptic turns of mind of the limping, near block of a man at his side. Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov was an enigma in the life of Emil Karpo but one that the younger man accepted, for he respected his superior’s abilities.

  But Karpo knew that Rostnikov was not infallible. Occasionally, he failed to see something, to detect. The example was immediate. Rostnikov obviously had no idea that Karpo planned to make himself the next target of the rooftop Weeper.

  Sasha Tkach had a headache. He was not much given to drinking vodka. He was well aware of the damage it did to those around him, and he often had the impression that at night Moscow was a vast matrix of drunks who staggered about like giddy or morose zombies. He had heard that it was worse in other countries—Iceland, the United States—but Moscow surely had a high percentage of those who sought escape in alcohol. One of those who did so was his neighbor Bazhen Surikov, the carpenter. Surikov liked to suggest that he was a painter. He wore a small beard like a caricature of a 1920s Parisian artist and even dabbled in painting, though Sasha thought the few works he had seen by the wiry man were at best mediocre. However, Sasha did not consider himself an art expert. He did, however, consider himself a man with many problems.

  He and Maya had not exactly quarreled the night before. She had attempted to talk about their future, and he had attempted to avoid it. He was tired, sore from the bout with the blacksmith, angry at his assignment, and unable to think of a solution to the problem of what to do when the very visible child in Maya’s stomach decided to face the world.

  Sasha’s mother, Lydia, offered no help, only her usual wisdom. “It will work out. Each day passes, and a new one comes. We have bread on the table, shoes on our feet, a bed to sleep on.”

  One could not quarrel with such wisdom, especially when one’s mother was nearly deaf and interested in preserving platitudes rather than coping with reality.

  And so when Bazhen Surikov had suggested that Sasha join him in his apartment to look at a new painting, Sasha had gone, leaving mother, wife, and soon-to-come child in their two-room apartment. And when Bazhen had shown him the idiotic painting of a horse or a boar or a bear on its knees, Sasha had been properly complimentary, which resulted in the offer by Bazhen of a shared bottle of vodka. Nearly two hours later, when Sasha had managed to return to his apartment, Maya looked at his smiling face and put down her book, undecided about whether to get angry or weep. She did neither but turned to go in the bedroom, realized her mother-in-law was in there, and then faced Sasha with a pleading look that said clearly, “See, I have no place to go when I am hurt, angry. And soon there will be a baby, your baby.”

  The next day, the vodka was no longer in effect, the sun was hot, and Sasha had no heart to pretend that he was the spoiled son of a member of the Politburo. He had some sense, he thought, of how an actor must feel who has a hangover, an ulcer, a nagging wife, and a dying friend and who must still step upon the stage to pretend for two hours that he is Alexander the Great.

  Sasha had already had a meeting with Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov; he had gone to two locations on his list and crossed out both, convinced that they were not what he was searching for. He had been especially disturbed by the fact that in his early-morning meeting, Porfiry Petrovich, who usually gave suggestions and attention and consideration to even minor cases, seemed to be indifferent to Sasha’s investigation in spite of the fact that pressure was now being exerted because “an important official” had been the victim of the car thieves.

  Sasha had taken the green metro line, the Gorkovsko-Zamoskvoretskaya line, to the end,
gotten off at Rechnoi Vokzal, and wandered in unfamiliar territory in search of the building from which it had been reported that a large new car had been seen. The report was almost two weeks old and had come from a woman who, the report noted, was a notorious local busybody, the kind who would come up to you on the street and tell you to straighten your tie. Sasha Tkach knew the type; one of them had married his father and now lived in Sasha’s small apartment.

  Finding the building was difficult, but he continued. The directions had been poor, but find it he did, a one-story brick building that looked as if it had once been a small factory. There was a large car or truck entrance with a sliding metal door closed over it. The windows of the building were dirty, and one could not see because the curtains were closed. It meant nothing, this twenty-third location he had checked in two weeks while others were seeking snipers who shot policemen and mysterious old gunmen who stole candlesticks. Life was not always fair.

  Sasha found a door at the side of the building, blinked once, sighed deeply, feeling sorry for himself, knocked, and entered before someone could say, “Come in,” or, “Stay out.”

  Beyond the door, Tkach found himself facing a quite beautiful blond young woman, full and athletic looking, who wore no makeup and needed none.

  “That door is supposed to be locked,” she said, her eyes meeting Sasha’s. “This is a private club for potential automobile mechanics.”

  Tkach looked past her without letting his eyes roam. There was a wooden partition behind them, a dirty wooden partition painted gray, behind which he could hear the scraping of machinery, the clanking of metal on metal. There was something defiant and attractive about the young woman holding a small wrench in one hand, her other hand on her hip. Even the smudges of dirt on her dark overalls were somehow appealing. A shiver of fear and physical attraction passed through the detective, and he felt confident that if he had not finally found what he was looking for, he had surely stumbled upon something the woman was trying to hide.