Rostnikov’s Vacation Read online

  “I am better,” he said to himself, moving forward, head down, as if against a strong, chill wind.

  “I am fine,” he said aloud but not loudly.

  And with that his decision was made. He wanted no more of this place, this solitude. He would go back to the sanitarium, pack his things, and inform Dr. Vostov that he would be returning to Moscow on the first available plane. He had an open ticket. He need but call the air—

  Definitely something behind him. Definitely. He stopped and stepped off the path next to a tree. He was, himself, thin, gnarled. From a distance he could have been a branch growing from the base of a dark tree. He slowly, carefully, removed his glasses from his jacket pocket and placed them on the end of his nose. When they were properly perched, Georgi Vasilievich stood motionless, as he had done hundreds of times in the past while stalking a criminal. He willed his breathing to be shallow, to mingle with the sounds of the woods, the waves brushing the shore beyond the trees. He had no weapon. Why would anyone need a weapon on a hospital vacation? His pistol was locked in the metal box in his office desk in Moscow.

  He stood listening for five or ten minutes. Nothing. Rostnikov was right, or would have been right if Vasilievich had been foolish enough to share his idea with him. All he had told Rostnikov was that he was working on something, putting notes together that he might soon share with him, but he was not prepared to do so yet. Georgi Vasilievich was an old fool who had played too many games, seen too many deaths. Georgi had looked over at Rostnikov with the knowing little smile he had cultivated for more than forty years, a smile that told suspect and colleague alike that he, Vasilievich, knew something, had a secret of great importance to this suspect or colleague.

  He stepped back onto the path, feeling even more chilled. The blood circulated poorly in his feet, and his hands were numb.

  “It’s not cold,” he hissed to himself, chiding himself silently as he walked. “You’re an old fool talking to himself, an old fool who, can’t think straight, can’t tell—”

  Two men stood before him on the path. He sensed them long before he saw them and looked up. He could not run or hide. His body would no longer tolerate or support such action. He assessed the situation quickly, efficiently, and walked toward the men whose faces he could not yet see. When he was perhaps two yards from them, he stopped, pushed his glasses up and found that he could make out their faces, could see what they were wearing. One man was a mountain, massive, wearing a blue sweater and a dark frown. The second man was small, very small, and thin, with a wild eye that did not join its partner in looking at Georgi Vasilievich.

  And in that moment all became clear. He had not imagined it. He had figured it out, had figured it all out. He fleetingly wished that he had shared his knowledge with Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. He stopped walking as a large wave beyond the trees slapped the shore.

  Though the film at the Oktober Theater was not over and Emil Karpo had never seen it, indeed, had not been in a movie theater for more than twenty-five years, he stood up and left. He had been sitting in a seat on the aisle while above him on the screen fat Hungarians were laughing, acting like buffoons, and chasing thin blond women who occasionally spoke words in French.

  Emil Karpo did not dislike movies. But neither did he like them. He followed the young woman who had left the vast auditorium of 2,500 seats moments before. Lenin had said that film had a function, a crucial propagandistic function. Movies were supposed to have brought enlightenment, reinforcement of revolutionary ideas, and idealism. Generally, Karpo considered both movies and television pointless narcotics. Lenin had praised film, and Karpo had taken it as an act of faith, which he called reason, that Lenin knew what he was talking about. Perhaps at one time films did have some seductive power that could be used to ease the people into the Revolution, but that was long ago. Perhaps the words of Lenin had great power to convince those who wished to truly believe, but that was not so long ago. Now statues of Lenin were being toppled in provincial towns. The slowly growing truth of the dream was being ignored, and on twenty-foot-high screens in the darkness Hungarians and Americans were showing their teeth and selling illusions.

  However, in this case, the darkness and relative quiet of the theater was a distinct improvement over the basement den, the Billy Joel, where the young woman he was following had just spent two hours in smoke-filled and drug-dimmed purple light, listening to some band called Pe’r’ets—Pepper-scream and blast something called heavy metal on their electronic instruments.

  Emil Karpo had not dared enter. He was at least twenty years older than the youngest patron in the Billy Joel, and he knew that there was no way he could sit inconspicuously. Emil Karpo was a tall, corpselike figure with vaguely Oriental features. His hair was dark and thinning, his cheekbones high, his skin tight and pale, and his face expressionless. All of Emil Karpo’s clothing was black, even his T-shirts and several turtlenecks. He was known among criminals and police alike as the Tartar or the Vampire. He knew this and did not mind. He also knew from the faces of those he encountered that they sensed a cold, silent fury that he in fact did not feel.

  And so he knew he could not enter the Billy Joel. Instead, he had found a dirty window in an alleyway behind the club and had used his two-inch-long glass cutter to make a hole so small that it would probably not be noticed till someone came to clean the window, if that ever happened.

  He had watched her through the hole, had watched the others, had seen drugs passed, bodies sold. Somewhere within him he was ill. It was not so much that these young people were corrupted but that after seventy years of Soviet rule there was more chaos than there had been since the czars. The club had been chaos, noise, decay. Had he entered, he knew he would be enduring one of his headaches within minutes. So he had watched from the window, patiently. Had watched as he had so many times in the past.

  The beautiful, restless young woman had consumed four drinks and with withering looks and hissed words of acid had disposed of two young men and one young woman who made advances to her as she sat alone at a table commanding an unobstructed view of the madmen screaming on the platform. Her name was Carla. That was one of the facts about her that Emil Karpo had entered in ink in his pocket notebook. This information and whatever he discovered this day would be transferred to thicker lined notebooks when Karpo got back to his apartment.

  Carla spent most of her time staring at her drink. She appeared to pay little attention to the band that blared not five yards from where she sat. Suddenly, in the middle of a song about hatred of cowardly parents screamed by a woman-child with orange hair, Carla got up and strode out.

  She had signaled for a cab in front of the café. She had no difficulty getting one. Taxis stopped for beautiful girls. And this beautiful girl was dressed in a very tight-fitting red dress with a three-inch black belt of patent leather. Her thick red hair, which matched the dress, tumbled wildly down her back and over her shoulders.

  Cabs also stopped for Emil Karpo, as one did now, when he stepped into the street and held up his hand, but it stopped for quite different reasons than did the cab that picked up Carla. The woman who drove the cab that Karpo stopped was named Sophie Mirbat, who had been driving for the past ten hours and was on her way in for the night. She had accepted Karpo’s statement that he was a policeman, had given her name when he asked for it, and had followed the other cab dutifully in the hope that it would come to a stop soon so she could rid herself of the Vampire behind her and get home to her father and son before midnight. But it was not to be.

  When they pulled up to the Oktober Theater on Kalinin Prospekt, the Vampire had said, “You will wait here for me, Sophie Mirbat. You will wait even if it is till dawn.”

  Sophie Mirbat considered and abandoned the idea of simply driving away when the man went into the theater. This was not a man to disappoint. Instead, she looked up at the mosaic mural on the facade of the theater, the movie-framelike depictions of historical events in Soviet history, the storming of the Winte
r Palace, the Civil War. She sat quietly looking up at the mural as she wondered whether she dared charge the man for the time she was going to put in.

  Now, less than an hour later, the beautiful woman Karpo was following made a phone call from the booth next to the theater. Karpo was careful to stay back in the shadows. He had learned that those who saw him did not forget him, but he had also learned how to remain unseen.

  From where she was parked, the cabdriver, Sophie Mirbat, could see both Karpo and the young woman he was watching. She considered starting her engine but decided to wait. Gas was dear and going up in price.

  Carla’s call took a few seconds. She did all the talking and men hung up in anger, her eyes meeting the disapproving glance of a passing old couple. She stared at the couple defiantly with one hand on her hip and the other with her thumb hooked into her black belt. The old couple moved on. That she was beautiful was without question, but her beauty was not an issue with which Karpo cared to concern himself. He had lived his adult life with dedication to the Revolution, had lived only to cleanse the state, bring about the world ideal for which Lenin died and in which Karpo believed. That he had a body, had needs, emotions, he acknowledged. He did not find joy in this acknowledgment, but he well knew that man was an animal and as an animal he had needs. It was better, he had long ago concluded, to meet these needs, compartmentalize them.

  Karpo needed his work. There was nothing else. There was not meant to be anything else. His small fifth-floor apartment was dedicated to his work and contained only a narrow bed, a small chest of drawers, a rough wooden desk, and shelves filled with black-bound notebooks in which were details of every case Karpo had worked on in addition to hundreds of unclosed files, unsolved cases on which he worked in his evenings and on his days off. But he was being overwhelmed. Crime was no longer a dot here and a dot there, dots that might be connected to form a pattern of corruption that could be eliminated line by line with patience. No, crime in Moscow was now a giant splatter of blue paint.

  Emil Karpo’s hope of salvation lay in his total immersion in his work, and the case on which he was now working was quite therapeutic.

  He had, he told Colonel Snitkonoy the day before, a lead on the young man who was suspected of killing a German businessman named Bittermunder near the Moscow River a week earlier. An informant had told him that a young woman with red hair named Carla, a regular at a new rock café called the Billy Joel on Gorky Street, had been talking about the crazy boy she was living with, a boy who had killed a German.

  So when Colonel Snitkonoy had ordered him to take a vacation and get out of Moscow, Emil Karpo had disobeyed. The idea of a week away from Moscow, when he might be so close to a murderer, brought on the threat of one of his headaches. The reasons for Karpo to take a vacation now were quite reasonable. Rostnikov was gone. They had been working on a number of investigations together, so it would make sense to put them aside until they were both present. Karpo had argued that he had taken off a great deal of time for surgery and recovery. His right arm had been damaged first during pursuit of a burglar and later in an explosion in Red Square, where he had confronted a terrorist and for which he had received a Moscow Medal. That time off, said Colonel Snitkonoy, was in the line of duty, not a merited vacation.

  Normally, Karpo accepted his vacations willingly. They gave him time to work on his unsolved cases, but this was the first time he had been ordered out of the city, and it came at a time when he was in great need of his work.

  “If I allow you to remain,” the Gray Wolfhound had said, “you will continue to work. Go, renew your vitality. I have a small dacha near Borodino. Or visit your relatives in Kiev. Read. Sleep. Look at the trees. Come back refreshed. There is much to do, and we need your full and healthy attention.”

  It would have been useless for Karpo to say more, and he could not and would not explain. And so he was soon to be officially on vacation. Officially, he informed the colonel’s assistant, Pankov, that in a few days, after he cleared up some minor items, he would be off with relatives on a farm near Kiev that had no phone.

  Unofficially, he stood in the shadows of the outer lobby of the Oktober Theater and watched a beautiful girl who might steer him to the leader of a gang that may have been involved in the murder of a German businessman. He had no intention of leaving Moscow until he succeeded in this task.

  Carla had time to smoke one cigarette and pace back and forth twenty-two times before a car pulled up in front of the theater, a late-model Chaika, well cared for, catching the lights of the theater and the street. A man got out of the car, a man with neatly cut dark hair and a short, well-trimmed black beard flecked with gray. The man looked around in all directions as the woman climbed into the car and closed the door.

  Cars went by on the street, but still the man did not get back into the car. He continued to look in all directions, even into the lobby of the Oktober, directly at the tall man in black who was deep within the shadows.

  “Come on,” Carla called impatiently to the bearded man, whose hand rested on the door of the car.

  “Adnoo’ meenoo’too,” he said calmly. “Wait a minute.”

  Even at this distance, Karpo thought he detected an accent.

  The woman, clearly irritated, said, “The movie was terrible.”

  The man said nothing, continuing to scan the street, the doorways.

  The woman rolled her window closed, and after a beat, the bearded man, now satisfied, opened his door, got in the car, and drove away.

  Karpo strode quickly to the street. The car with the bearded man and the woman was moving to his right. He did not look to his left, where the headlights of Sophie Mirbat’s cab suddenly came on. His eyes were still following the disappearing Chaika when the cab pulled up to the curb. He reached down, opened the door, and got into the front seat.

  “There,” Karpo said, pointing in the direction of many dots of light from many cars. “That car.”

  “Where?” asked Sophie, moving back into traffic.

  “Drive,” said Karpo.

  “I’m driving,” she said. “But …”

  “Faster, around.”

  “I don’t see it,” said Sophie Mirbat.

  “I see it,” said Karpo. “Go more slowly. Don’t get too close.”

  “To what? Where are we going?” she began, and looked at Karpo. The look she got in return convinced her that it would be best to say no more.

  Karpo believed they were not going far but that it might take them a long time to get there. He believed they were not going far because the car the woman had called had come quickly from where she had summoned it. He believed it might take long because the bearded driver was being cautious, very cautious. It would be a game. The bearded man would drive as if he were being followed even though he probably did not believe that he was being followed. He would watch, drive around side streets, and take Carla where she was going only after he was sure he was not being followed.

  And so they drove. In circles the Chaika and the cab drove. Down the same streets and past the same corners they drove. Sophie Mirbat said nothing, simply followed the directions given by the ghostly man at her side. Twenty minutes later the Chaika arrived at a point they could have reached in five minutes.

  “They’re not worried about the cost of petrol,” Sophie Mirbat said, and regretted it almost immediately.

  “Stop here,” said Karpo.

  She stopped. They were on a side street just off Smolenskaya Square, near the Borodinsky Bridge. Beyond the tall buildings, less than a block away, was the Moscow River. Karpo got out of the car. A boat horn bleated in the night.

  “You want me to … ?” Sophie Mirbat whispered, rolling down the window.

  “Go,” said Karpo, handing her some bills.

  Sophie needed no further orders, and she did not pause to count the money. She made a U-turn and rolled back into darkness.

  The beautiful woman with red hair got out of the car almost a block away and slammed the doo
r behind her in anger. The bearded man drove off slowly, and Emil Karpo moved down the street in their direction. The woman entered an apartment building, took out a key, and opened the inner wooden door.

  Karpo found a dark door, a closed shop, and stood back, watching the windows of the apartment building. His eyes did not blink. They took in the facade, and then a light went on in one of the darkened windows six floors above. He turned his head toward the light, counted the floors without looking at them, decided which apartment she had entered, and then stood erect, determined, no matter how long he would have to stand here, no matter how many nights, not to think until the moment came to act.

  He did not have long to wait.

  Slightly less than five minutes after he arrived in front of the building near Smolenskaya Square, the window he was watching exploded, showering the dark street with glass and releasing a blast of screaming music. Above the blare came a choking cry as Carla plummeted naked toward the street, her red hair billowing out, catching the light from the broken window behind her.

  Karpo could see her frightened face as she fell. For an instant he was even sure that her eyes made contact with his, pleading for help he could not give. And men her knee hit a parked car, her hands reached out to grab something, to stop what could not be stopped. Her breasts quivered as she spun over completely like an awkward gymnast. Then she struck the street and was no longer beautiful or alive.

  Karpo looked up at the shattered window as he stepped into the street. Framed by jagged edges of glass, backed by the blasting voice of a woman singing something in English and the sound of a screeching electric guitar, stood a figure in dark learner, a grinning figure with a spike growing out of its head.

  TWO

  PORFIRY PETROVICH ROSTNIKOV WAS tired. He had, for the first time in twenty years, done nothing for eight days, and each day he had grown more weary as he fell into a routine. Up at seven, bread, coffee with Sarah, if she was up, a stroll to the beach, if his leg was not too stiff from the sea air, and several hours of watching those bathers who were willing to ignore the warnings about possible pollution in the Black Sea. On the beach, when he was not watching the bathers, he read one of the seven books he had brought with him from Moscow and paid unconscious attention to any warnings or demands his left leg might issue.