Red Chameleon Page 10

“Long ago. He is dead, quite dead. Buried. Long ago.”

  “Yuri Pashkov still lives in Yekteraslav,” Rostnikov pursued, walking over to the old man, ready to grab him if he should fall. “Pashkov—you remember him. He also seemed afraid of the name of Shmuel Prensky.”

  “Afraid? Me?” Ostrovsky said with a false laugh. He was acting quite poorly now. His reviews, if he survived the terror he was going through, would not be approving. “Shmuel Prensky is dead. I’m a very old man in case you haven’t noticed. I have nothing to be afraid of from anyone on this earth. I’ve played the great roles. On this very stage I played Grigory Stepanovich Smirnov in Chekhov’s The Boor. And I’d still be acting if they let Jews have decent roles. See, I’m not afraid to tell a policeman such things. So how could you—”

  Rostnikov closed his eyes and opened them with a little shrug. “Perhaps I was mistaken,” he said.

  “Mistaken,” the old man said vehemently. He began to mop the floor without bothering to dip it into the water. Then a thought struck him, and he turned, trembling.

  “Gorky himself,” he said, sweeping the darkness with his hand, “said the Art Theatre is as marvelous as the Tretyakov Gallery, St. Basil’s Cathedral, and all the finest sights of Moscow. It is impossible not to love it.”

  “I can see that,” Rostnikov said, watching the man justify himself to himself.

  “It’s enough to simply be in here, to be on this stage, to play out a little scene between soaping. To live out my last days with no trouble.”

  “I understand,” Rostnikov said.

  “‘Life,’” said the old man almost to himself, “‘has gone by as if I had never lived. I’ll lie down a while. There’s no strength left in you, old fellow; nothing is left, nothing. You addle head.’”

  “Firs’s final speech in The Cherry Orchard,” Rostnikov said. “A fine performance.”

  “Thank you,” Ostrovsky said, some of his spirit and color returning. “But—”

  The old man was looking over Rostnikov’s shoulder behind the stage, and Rostnikov turned to watch his uniformed driver hurry toward him. The man or the uniform had brought the fear back into Ostrovsky’s eyes.

  “Comrade inspector,” the young man with the flat face said, ignoring the setting and the ancient actor. “You have a message, an urgent message from Investigator Zelach.”

  “Coming,” Rostnikov answered, and then to the old man, he said, “Perhaps we will discuss ancient history and the life of the theater at some point in the future.”

  “My pleasure,” said Ostrovsky, his smile broadening, his manner making it clear that such an encounter would not be a pleasure at all.

  Rostnikov followed the driver toward the wings. He couldn’t keep up with the younger man, not with his bad leg. Instead, he relied on that which he always relied on, his steady movement. He would bear in mind Gorky’s detective from Kostroma; he would endeavor to move with caution and not get himself killed by runaway horses.

  Behind Rostnikov, Lev Ostrovsky waited, waited a full five minutes, waited cautiously in case it was some trick and the policeman was hiding in the darkness. He forced himself to finish the floor, to make straight lines of soapy water, to set up the record player again, to listen to the martial music from Rocky, to control himself, to act out the role of cleaning man, a role he wanted to continue for whatever days he might have left. He waited a full five minutes, and then, when he was confident that he was again alone, he put down his mop, turned off the record player, and hurried off to find a telephone.

  “Old, it’s an old rifle. What can I say?”

  Karpo watched Paulinin searching through the drawer of his desk in the laboratory on the second level below ground of Petrovka. Paulinin was wearing a blue smock and looked more like a flower seller in Dzerzhinsky Park than the eclectic encyclopedia he was. Paulinin looked rather like a bespectacled, nearsighted monkey with an oversized head topped by wild gray-black hair. He was forever searching for something, putting things together, looking for challenges. His office was a clutter—piles of books, objects from past investigations. Here a pistol with the barrel missing. There, on the tottering pile of books on the edge of the desk, some false teeth.

  “You can,” said Karpo, standing in front of the desk, motionless, “tell me when it was made, who made it, how I might discover who it belongs to.”

  “Miracles,” said the monkey of a man, pulling a long wire from the drawer, examining it carefully with a squint and returning it. “The man wants miracles.”

  And miracles, Karpo knew, were just what Paulinin liked to deliver. And so he waited patiently, immobile, a dark tower around which buzzed the clever spider monkey.

  Paulinin pushed the drawer closed, tapped both open palms on the paper-covered desk, and considered. An idea struck, and he shoved a report on coarse yellow paper aside and grabbed a syringe as if it might try to scurry off the table.

  “An 1891-30 Moisin, our primary rifle of the last war with the Germans,” Paulinin said, holding the syringe up to examine it against the ceiling light. “There are thousands still around. Amazing that this one can still shoot. The bullet went through an almost smooth barrel. The whole rifle is a relic. I don’t see how anyone could hit the Kremlin—forgive my example—with it, let alone a policeman fourteen stories below.”

  Paulinin turned his back to place the examined syringe on the small sink in the corner.

  “Go on.”

  Karpo’s arm had in the past several days begun to lose all feeling. It had to be placed by him in the black sling like a sleeping baby each morning. He wondered if the numbness would continue to spread up his shoulder to the rest of his body. There was no fear in his conjecture, only a curiosity and a suppressed regret deep within.

  “So,” Paulinin said, turning to face Karpo and folding his arms as he leaned back against the sink, “the gun does not break down. It does not come apart, to be placed in a little carrying case. This is no—what was that American movie?”

  Karpo did not go to movies, had only seen part of one while pursuing a pickpocket in the Rossia Theater five years earlier.

  “Filthy Harry,” Paulinin said. “That was it. Americans are rifle crazy since Kennedy. Movies, books, full of rifles, full of people shooting people from rooftops. Like your Weeper.”

  “The rifle could not be broken down for transport,” Emil Karpo reminded Paulinin, who pushed away from the sink and began to search through the pile of books on the desk.

  “Your Weeper has to carry the rifle around full length. It is 51.5 inches long and weighs 8.8 pounds without bayonet. It’s not some little thing, either. Big, long, a Cossack penis, we used to call them. So, ask yourself, Comrade Karpo, how did your Weeper carry that rifle up to those roofs and down? What did your killer carry in it? A rolled-up rug, what? It’s too big for a violin case like they used in old American movies.”

  “I’ve made a note,” Karpo said, and found Paulinin pausing to catch his eye. Normally, Karpo took detailed notes and went back to his room to transcribe them, but with one hand it was a difficult task, and he wanted no comment or glance from Paulinin. They were not friends. In truth, Karpo, the Vampire, the Tatar, wanted no friends. He wanted no obligation except to the state.

  Paulinin looked at the limp arm through his thick glasses and shrugged before continuing.

  “So your killer is left-handed. The Moisin has a right twist, but his bullet enters, drifts toward the left. Could be done by a right-handed shooter, but someone who is picking a target will usually wait till the target is neutral or to the right. That is conjecture, of course, based on experience.”

  “Of course,” agreed Karpo.

  “Finally,” said Paulinin, holding up a finger as he found the thin report he was searching for. “Your killer is strong. That rifle kicks like a member of the Supreme Soviet denied an extra box of Americans cigarettes. So, a picture is forming, comrade inspector?”

  “Someone strong, probably big, left-handed, carrying something long e
nough to hide a long, heavy rifle.”

  “That’s it,” agreed Paulinin, adjusting his glasses and reexamining the report in his hand. Karpo was clearly dismissed.

  “Very good,” the detective said, not in the least offended by his dismissal. “If—when I find the rifle, I will bring it to you for positive identification.”

  Paulinin laughed and shook his head. “You are looking for an antique, Comrade Karpo, a mastodon. If you find it, there will be little need to verify its relation to the crimes. If you dragged the corpse of Stalin in here and said, ‘Is this the Stalin who sat on your mother’s face, the Stalin who wore his collar too tight, the Stalin who was the premier of all the Russias?’ what could I answer?”

  “You could answer like any Russian, ‘It is possible,’” Karpo said, opening the door to depart.

  Paulinin was actually surprised. Never in his fifteen years of dealing with the pale, sharp bone had he known Karpo to display any humor. He turned to his report on chemical testing of vomit with professional joy as soon as the door was firmly closed.

  But Karpo had meant no humor in his remark. Humor was far from his mind. It was caution he voiced, a caution he usually exhibited but which something within him now told him, urged him, to abandon. Time was, he feared, against him. The Weeper might strike again, kill another policeman. Or Karpo’s arm might be exposed, and he might be summarily dismissed. That could not, must not, happen till the Weeper was found.

  He spoke to no one as he climbed the stairs. Karpo never took an elevator unless ordered to or accompanying a superior. He liked his feet on something solid. He walked home in the noon heat, absorbing but not considering the sweating figures that moved past him in shirt-sleeves or short-sleeved, loose blouses. The young woman who stared at him at the corner registered deeply but not consciously. Her breasts were large, unfettered, distracting. As he crossed Sverdlov Square and strode through the thin crowd in front of the metro station, the image of Mathilde came to him. He stopped, drew a deep breath, and willed the image to depart. He imagined a silver circle, breathed easily, ignoring the man with the loaf of bread under his arm who stared at him, and waited while the distraction of the body passed. When he moved again, he knew it would have to be addressed, that imp inside. There was no denying the animal inside. It could distract, but it also confirmed, reminded. It spoke and had to be answered, or it would play hell with even the most disciplined body, calling it from its duty. Better to respond, appease, recognize, than to suffer the distraction.

  He got on the Marx Prospekt train and stood for the four stops till the Komsomolskaya Station. There were a few seats, but Karpo did not want to sit. He wanted the distraction of discomfort, relished the physical irritation to be overcome.

  He departed from the train, walked slowly through the crowd, avoided bumping into a man in a railway uniform who carried a net bag filled with green apples, and headed for the long escalator. The station reminded him of an ancient time with its decadent upturned glass chandeliers, its arched columns, and curved white roof with decorative designs. He preferred the more efficient outer stations to these compromises with the past.

  Ten minutes later he stood in front of his room at the rear of the fifth floor of an apartment building built less than thirty years ago and already smelling of mold and mildew. As he always did before he entered, Emil Karpo checked the thin hair at the corner just above the door hinge to be sure no one had entered the room. Only then did he insert his key and step into darkness.

  The shade was, as always, drawn. There was nothing to see through the window beyond, nothing he wished to look at. He clicked on the light in the ceiling and moved to his desk to turn on the desk lamp. The room was remarkably small, small even for a poor Muscovite. It was almost a cell, a cell with a simple table desk, a bed that was little more than a cot, a hot plate in the corner, and shelves of notebooks, each with the same black cover, notebooks filled with legible handwritten reports on every investigation he had ever engaged in.

  It was in such a room that Lenin had worked, and Emil Karpo did not find it constricting. On the contrary, he enjoyed the compactness, the wall that kept his energy imploded.

  He sat, reached for the current notebook, opened it to the proper page with some awkwardness, since he had but one hand to use, propped the book open with another book, and began to write and to think as he wrote of the next move in his campaign to catch the Weeper.

  SIX

  SASHA SAT UP ON THE mattress and groped for something to cover himself, a blanket, something, but there was nothing within easy reach. He brushed his hair from his eyes and realized that he was covered with sweat. The room was small, about the size of a large office at Petrovka. It contained a worn mattress in one corner, on which Sasha was now sitting; metal shelving, rusted and cluttered with bits of wiring, machinery, and dusty cans; a very battered table covered with automobile parts; and the woman named Marina, who stood calmly and quite as naked as Sasha, at least from the waist up. She was about to pull her blouse over her head, and Sasha observed with quite conscious guilt that her breasts were much fuller, much larger and rosier, than those of his own Maya.

  He watched her pop her head through the blouse and shake her hair clear. She didn’t look at the naked policeman sitting on the mattress who had, for the moment, forgotten his elusive trousers.

  The ceiling of the room was high. In fact, it stretched far above them, perhaps two floors, and since the partition that defined it as a room was made only of thin planks of wood, the sound of grinding machines in the room beyond easily penetrated the sanctum of this unlikely sexual space.

  Marina didn’t brush or comb her hair. With confidence she simply tossed her head like an unconscious animal that must clear its field of vision to watch for predators.

  Sasha Tkach remembered his pants again, looked about, saw them across the room on a chair near the cluttered table, and tried to urge his body to rise. He touched the hairs on his stomach with a solitary finger and brought it away damp.

  Why he had come to this moment of confusion and embarrassment was not completely clear to Sasha Tkach. How he had come to it was as sharp and visual as a poster for increased production glued to the temporary wall outside the Bolshoi.

  The woman, Marina, had questioned him, questioned him in painful detail, about his alleged father, the kind of automobile he wanted, the deal they could make. As she had led him through the small workshop with the sullen, muscle-bound man named Ilya at their side, Sasha had the distinct impression that Marina was playing with him, smiling to herself as if she had a secret. She stayed close to Sasha, sometimes touching him, once let her breast run against his arm as she pointed to two men who were spray painting a small Volga. The Volga was basically blue, but under the hand of the two goggled men in overalls, it was turning a deep blood red.

  The work space, the factory, was not enormous, but it was large enough to hold five automobiles in various states of alteration. The most striking of the vehicles was a white Chaika suspended about eight feet in the air by heavy chains attached to the front and rear bumpers.

  “So, Comrade—” she had said.

  Sasha had completed: “Pashkov.”

  “Yes, Comrade Pashkov,” she went on, leading him past two goggled men who glanced at him with Martian eyes. “So, what do you think? Anything here you or your wealthy friends would like?”

  She had paused, hands on hips, to say this, and Sasha, playing his role, had glanced at her, thinking that there was some provocation in her tone, words, attitude, but deciding that it was simply the woman’s normal tone or his imagination.

  All he had to do at that point was to make some deal, any deal, not to appear too anxious, to remember to pause, even idle, and then get to a phone, for surely he had found what he had been searching for. All he had to do was play his role out for a few more minutes. He had looked over at the man called Ilya, who was uncomfortably close, his arms folded across his muscular chest, his eyes filled with suspicion.
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  “The Chaika,” Sasha said. “It’s just what I need. Perhaps we can make a deal for that and”—he shrugged, beginning to perspire in the closeness of the loud shop and the man and woman who wedged him in—“who knows, some additional vehicles for my friends.”

  “Fifteen thousand rubles,” the man called Ilya finally said in a growl.

  Sasha had looked around at the Chaika with interest and was about to agree when the woman, who had stepped very close to him, whispered with a smile, showing very white, large teeth, “Thirty thousand rubles.”

  “Thirty thou—,” he began.

  “Worth every ruble,” she went on with that same smile. He could smell her breath on his face.

  “I’ll—” Sasha had said as Ilya picked up a very nasty looking electric tool of uncertain function, umbilically tied to the wall with a thick cord. There was anger in Ilya’s face as he pushed a button on the machine and it roared into artificial life in his hands, a metal blade whirring noisily as the machine vibrated. Something in Ilya’s look made it quite clear that he was experiencing at least antagonism and more likely hatred toward the potential customer. The source of that hatred might be resentment at Sasha’s feigned wealth, suspicion that something was not quite correct, or jealousy of Marina’s attention to him. Whatever it was, Sasha did not like the look of the whirring blade or the noise or the man or the fact that he was now effectively blocked from a clear run to the door through which they had come. He might be able to push past the woman. After all, Ilya was carrying a heavy tool in his hands, and the other two burly men seemed to be reasonably well occupied with their painting. But there were two doors to get through, either of which might have been locked behind him, and there were automobile body parts to leap over and perhaps here and there a small pool of oil on which he might slip. No, though the situation was uncomfortable, his best chance was to see it through, play the role, though he wished now that he had been better prepared for it.

  “Comrade Pashkov,” she had said at that point, taking his arm quite firmly, “let’s go into the office and conclude our deal.”