People Who Walk In Darkness (Inspector Rostnikov) Read online

  “I love my children,” he said softly.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I know that, too, but love is only the first part.”

  “You read that somewhere,” he said.

  “Come back in a year.”

  “You will have remarried.”

  “It is possible.”

  She suddenly came close to him and kissed his lips. She smelled of sweet babka. He wept.

  “And so?” asked Iosef, sitting at the desk in his cubicle in Petrovka.

  “And so?” said Elena.

  “What do you say?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Then we marry on Tuesday. Your aunt has the papers and will preside. She is well enough?”

  “Yes,” Elena said.

  She was sitting in the Kiev airport talking on her cell phone. Sasha Tkach sat across from her next to a man with huge eyes. Sasha did not seem to notice. He was busy looking at nothing.

  “And that is it?” asked Iosef.

  “I will see you in Moscow tonight,” she said.

  She hung up. So did he.

  Iosef realized that he had failed to tell her that he loved her.

  Pankov had spent the night in his sweat-dampened suit preparing material for the Yak’s meeting with Frankovich. The temperature inside of Petrovka was notoriously uncertain. Last night it had been warm, hot even.

  At some point while preparing this important material, Pankov suffered a stroke. His right arm began to twitch uncontrollably, the pen flying across the room and creating a black dot on the wall. Gradually, the tremor stopped. He felt as if he might pass out. When he was reasonably sure this would not happen, he resumed his preparation of the material. It was the third small stroke he had suffered in the past month. He had told no one, seen no doctor. With the other two incidents, as now, he had gone back to his duties.

  Gerald St. James and Ellen Sten stood next to the window in his office looking through a steady, steaming rain at the top of the DeBeers building.

  In his right hand, St. James held a dart. He rolled it between his fingers.

  “Nothing to connect us?” he asked casually.

  “Nothing. Those who could are dead or so well compensated that revelation would not be worth the reward we are giving them and their families. The network is ended,” she said. “Do we start a new one at Devochka?”

  “We will wait a year,” he said. “Maybe two. Then I will decide.”

  The primary value of the Devochka operation was a diversion. It brought in little, but kept authorities in sixteen countries from more closely examining St. James’s larger operations in Australia, South Africa, and Botswana.

  Some day soon he would sit at the table at DeBeers. When he sat, he would be Sir Gerald St. James. He was in the process of purchasing and bribing his way into the peerage even as he stood at the window.

  “Loose ends?” he asked.

  “The Africans will not talk. Balta already is talking, but is having great trouble getting anyone to believe him. The British police will certainly be informed through Interpol, and they may want to talk to you.”

  St. James made a sound signifying indifference and turned to place the dart on his desk.

  Porfiry Petrovich sat in the office of his half-brother Fyodor. For fifteen minutes, they said nothing, just listened to a CD of recently restored early Louis Armstrong records.

  “Panin will not talk,” said Porfiry Petrovich.

  “He is a good man,” said Fyodor.

  “A good man,” said Porfiry Petrovich. “He murdered two people, innocent people.”

  “There is that,” said Fyodor, as Armstrong’s trumpet played a plaintive six-note passage.

  There was much that could be said, but nothing Porfiry Petrovich wanted to say.

  His brother had conspired with Panin to smuggle diamonds and murder the Canadian Luc O’Neil and old Lebedev. Fyodor had provided an alibi for Viktor Panin for both murders. Fyodor had written the false report of the naked ghost girl and placed it in his own file. Then, when Porfiry Petrovich had figured out that the report was false, Fyodor had simply taken the typewriter and placed it on his bed where Karpo could find it, so it would look as if some incompetent killer were trying to implicate him.

  These things Rostnikov knew of his brother.

  These things Fyodor knew that his brother knew.

  Panin had confessed to both murders. Fyodor had committed neither. That was sufficient excuse in the eyes of the law, but the eyes of a brother were very different. And Viktor Panin had not given up Fyodor Rostnikov, who promised to take care of Viktor’s family.

  “Time?” asked Rostnikov.

  “A few minutes after two.”

  “I must go. The airplane is waiting.”

  Rostnikov rose. This time his leg cooperated fully.

  Maybe it was the real beginning of a cordiality, if not a friendship, between man and man-made.

  “I will walk out with you,” said Fyodor, also rising.

  “No,” said Rostnikov.

  Fyodor understood.

  “There will be no more smuggling of diamonds from the mine,” said Rostnikov.

  “No more.”

  “Good.”

  That was all. No good-byes. Porfiry Petrovich left the room.

  Back in his room in Moscow, Emil Karpo turned on the light, unpacked his bag, placed it on the shelf of his closet, and sat down at his desk to transcribe his notes into the latest black leather-bound journal.

  Winter was coming. Cold comforted. The night wind rattled the single window.

  After less than an hour, his eyes began to burn, and the neat block letters he wrote in dark ink began to blur. He would soon be needing glasses. It was inevitable.

  A scratching sound at the door. Karpo rubbed the bridge of his nose, wiping away the moisture that had formed in the corner of his eyes.

  He did not hurry. The scratching did not stop. He crossed the room and, fingers of his right hand placed around the gun in the holster at his belt, opened the door.

  The black cat limped in and moved to the cot.

  Emil Karpo closed the door.

  Paulinin had been particularly busy the past week. He had greeted, spoken to, and probed new bodies. He had to completely clean the laboratory tables each time a new arrival appeared.

  For some reason that Paulinin did not wish to or bother to explore, he felt that something somber from Beethoven was in order. And so something somber for orchestra by Beethoven was playing now as he rubbed the bridge of his nose, scratched an itch on his cheek, and scrubbed his hands in the sink. The water was scalding hot. Paulinin wanted it that way.

  And then he turned to the naked man on the table who had a particularly disruptive gunshot wound in his forehead. Paulinin had looked at the man’s wallet. It contained no money. They never did. Someone along the line had made no effort to resist temptation. What did remain was a driver’s license, which identified the dead man as Vladimir Kolokov.

  Cymbals crashed behind Paulinin, who looked down at the dead man and said, “Let us see where you have been, Vladimir. From the look of your body, the tattoos of prison death, the scars of old and recent wounds . . .”

  Paulinin reached down to explore the wound in the dead man’s hand with a long finger.

  “. . . you are, like so many of those who pass through this room, definitely one of the people who walk in darkness.”

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter F
ifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen