Red Chameleon ir-3 Read online

  “I understand,” said Rostnikov.

  “And I loved him.”

  “I understand that, too,” he said to her gently, going out into the hall.

  The wood of the door was thin. He expected a loud wail when he closed it, but instead he heard gentle sobbing. He had to strain to determine which of the two was crying and knew with certainty only when he heard the woman’s voice. “Shh, Lev. Shh. We will be fine.”

  The door to the communal bathroom was open, and Officer Drubkova was now guarding it.

  “I called in,” she greeted him. “They will be here in minutes.”

  Rostnikov grunted and stepped past her, resisting the urge to compliment her or say something pleasant. The Officer Drubkovas of the MVD were sustained by efficiency and self-satisfaction, a belief that those above them were above human feeling, images of an idealized Lenin. To compliment Drubkova would have been to diminish himself in her eyes.

  Zelach was on his knees in front of the old tub, which looked as if. it had belonged to a relative of the czar’s. It stood on clawed legs that gripped metal balls pitted with age and wear. Zelach had found a towel and placed it on the floor for his knee. He was methodically examining the grotesque body in the tub without emotion, concentrating on his task.

  For a moment Rostnikov took in the scene. The water was almost orange with blood, and the sticky remnant of Izvestia quivered just below the surface. Rostnikov could see a photograph on the front page, though he could not, through the orange film, make out who it was. The dead old man was very thin and very white. One arm hung out of the tub, pointing down at the tile floor. The other was under the water, hidden, touching a secret place or thing. The old man’s chest was thin and covered with wisps of gray hair. Two black holes in his chest peeked through, caked with blood. The old man’s face was gray bearded and, like that of the boy, thin. The features were regular, and even in death there was something about him that said, “I’ve been cheated. You, anyone who comes near me, are out only for one thing, to cheat me out of something that is my own.”

  “And?” said Rostnikov.

  “Shot,” said Zelach.

  “I am surprised.” Rostnikov, sitting on the closed toilet seat, sighed.

  “No, look, the bullet holes are quite evident-” Zelach began. Rostnikov put his head down and almost whispered, “I see, Zelach. I see. I was attempting to engage in a bit of humor. Levity.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Zelach, anxious to please but not understanding. “Yes, it was amusing.” He either chuckled or began to choke. Rostnikov, taking no chances, leaned over to pat the man’s back, which resulted in Zelach’s bumping into the dangling arm of the corpse, which set off a small chain reaction. The balance of the corpse changed, and Abraham Savitskaya’s body began to sink below the surface of the reddish water.

  “What should I-?” Zelach said hopelessly.

  Rostnikov didn’t care. He shrugged, and Zelach reached over to grab the corpse’s sparse gray hair. He was pulling the body out by the hair as Officer Drubkova stuck her head in to announce that the evidence truck had arrived. If the sight of the kneeling officer pulling a corpse’s hair revolted, surprised, or shocked her, she gave no indication. She simply made her announcement and backed away to let in a man and a woman, both wearing suits, both carrying small suitcases, both serious. Rostnikov recognized the two of them, Comrades Spinsa and Boritchky, a team who spoke little, worked efficiently, and reminded him of safecrackers in a French movie.

  “He is already dead,” said Boritchky, a small man of about sixty. “You need not redrown him, Zelach.”

  Zelach let go of the corpse’s hair and stood up. The body did, this time, sink under.

  “Thank you,” said Comrade Spinsa, herself about fifty, very thin with a prominent, pouting underlip. “Now we shall have to drain the tub for even the beginning of an examination.”

  “I didn’t-” Zelach began looking over to Rostnikov on the toilet seat for support.

  Rostnikov’s mind was elsewhere. Zelach was not worth saving from embarrassment. Rostnikov had better uses for his energy.

  “We’ll leave you alone,” Rostnikov said, getting up. “Zelach will check with you when you’re done. How long?”

  Boritchky moved the tub, considered how to let the water out without getting his sleeve bloody red, and announced over his shoulder that they would be done in about twenty minutes.

  Officer Drubkova took a step down the hall with Rostnikov and Zelach, but Rostnikov held up a hand to stop her.

  “Under no circumstances,” Rostnikov said, “is anyone not associated with police business to enter that bathroom. You are to remain and see to this.”

  “Yes, comrade,” she said firmly.

  Having gotten rid of her, Rostnikov limped back to the Savitskaya apartment with Zelach behind, mumbling an apology.

  “Quiet,” said Rostnikov as he opened the apartment door.

  “Otets?” said Sofiya Savitskaya expectantly.

  “Your father is indeed dead,” Rostnikov said.

  Brother and sister were in the same position he had left them. Rostnikov considered bringing them down to Petrovka, but the case really didn’t warrant that attention.

  “Did you remember where you have seen the older man who killed your father, and is anything missing?”

  “The candlestick,” said Lev. “They took my grandmother’s brass candlestick.”

  “A brass candlestick.” Rostnikov sighed, picking up his coat. “Zelach will get a description. Why would someone want your grandmother’s brass candlestick?”

  “And the old man?”

  “In the hall,” Sofiya said, looking up. “I’ve seen him in the hall. Every day for years, in the hall.”

  She was looking up at Rostnikov, still dazed.

  “He lives in this building, works in this building?”

  She shook her head no.

  “Then …?”

  “The photograph,” she said, pointing to the little alcove off of the door. Rostnikov turned around and found himself facing two photographs. One was of a woman. Rostnikov concluded that she must, this kerchief-headed, sad-looking woman, be the dead wife of the recently dead man in the tub. Next to this photograph was another, of four men in peasant dress. Three of the men were very serious. All were young, and the picture was clearly old. Rostnikov moved to it and looked at the quartet with arms around each other’s shoulders. Rostnikov thought that one looked vaguely like a young version of the dead man. The look of suspicion was there, coming through a weak, pale half smile. Only one of the four in the photo, a man younger than the rest, was truly grinning.

  “Which one?” Rostnikov said. Zelach was right behind him, peering at the picture.

  “The man who grins,” Sofiya said. “It was him.”

  “You are sure?”

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “And who is he?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know who any of them are. He never told us.”

  Without asking, Rostnikov took the picture from the wall and handed it to Zelach. He wasn’t at all sure that the woman wasn’t having a delusion or creating a tale, connecting a man in the hall who had helped kill her father with a photograph in the hall from her dead father’s past.

  “Lev,” Rostnikov said, turning into the room. “Do you agree? Was the man in the picture the one who came here this afternoon?”

  The boy looked at his sister, whose head was down and whose hands were in his lap and said, “Yes, it is him.”

  The boy’s face turned to Rostnikov and belied his words. His face said he wasn’t at all sure.

  “Comrade Zelach will remain here and take more complete statements from you,” Rostnikov said, improvising this way to avoid Zelach’s company back to his office. “Comrade Zelach will be most patient with you. Remember that, Zelach.”

  Zelach nodded glumly, but Rostnikov was sure that he would obey.

  Rostnikov retrieved his jacket and took one final look at the b
rother and sister, wondering if he could say something, do something, to help them get through the night, but there was nothing. He could say that he would find the killer, but he doubted if they really cared. He was sure that the assistant procurator and the procurator did not care. It was doubtful, in fact, if anyone with the exception of Chief Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov really cared, and, in truth, he didn’t care very much, either.

  Still, the nibble of a question began to get at him. Why would anyone murder for a brass candlestick? Was the man in the photograph from Savitskaya’s past really the one who had come to shoot him? Why?

  He was thinking about such things, finding himself beginning to get lost in a possible puzzle, when a fat woman, hands on her hips, appeared before him on the narrow steps.

  “Did you arrest him?”

  “Arrest who?”

  “The Jewish boy,” she said. “He threw my son down the steps this afternoon. He is a wild one. He deserves to be arrested, punished.”

  Rostnikov managed to ease past her and looked back over his shoulder at the woman on the steps.

  “Don’t worry, comrade. He is being punished.”

  TWO

  Emil Karpo stood in front of the statue of Field Marshal Kutuzov, commander of the Russian army in the War of 1812, but he did not look at the statue or at the Triumphal Arch at the end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt that commemorated the heroes of that same war with the French. As far as Karpo was concerned, it was a decadent war fought by two imperialist forces. It was far better that the Russian imperialists won. It was not, however, something to build monuments to, though he understood the sense of history necessary to unite the Russian people.

  Emil Karpo was only slightly aware that more people were looking at him as he stood almost motionless than at the portly stone general seated on his horse twenty feet above him. Few looked directly at Karpo as they headed for the Panorama Museum of the Battle of Borodino, but few failed to notice the tall, lean, and pale figure dressed in black with his right hand tucked under his jacket as if he were reaching for a hidden gun or mocking that Napoleon whom the Great Mikhail Kutuzov had thwarted more than 170 years earlier. Some thought the tall, pale man looked like a vampire whose dark wing had been broken. One couple considered his resemblance to the painting of a Tatar that stood inside the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. A tourist named Marc Lablancet from Lyon considered taking a photograph of Karpo in front of the statue, but his wife tugged at him and hurried him away.

  The cars and buses beeped, braked, and chugged noisily around the Triumphal Arch, but Karpo paid no attention. A passing group of Japanese tourists simply assumed the pale man was mad or meditating; in fact, they were quite close to the truth. Karpo never gave a label to his moments and even hours of concentration. He simply lost himself in the problem to which he had been assigned. His logic was unquestionable. He was a policeman. His job was to prevent crime or bring to justice those who committed a crime. Any crime was a threat to the state, an indication that the criminal did not respect the Party, the Revolution, and the need for total dedication. If there was any meaning to existence for Karpo, it was that the commonweal must be respected, sustained. His dedication to Leninist communism was complete, though he did not see Lenin as a god. Lenin had been a man, a man dedicated to the eventual establishment of a world as close to perfection for all as would be possible, given the weaknesses of the animal that was man.

  Little more than a month earlier, Emil Karpo had stopped a terrorist from damaging and possibly destroying Lenin’s tomb. Karpo expected no reward for his action. Indeed, the government had even covered up the incident and labeled the bomb damage in Red Square “a gas-line explosion.” Karpo had awakened days after the incident to face an incompetent doctor who told him he would soon have the use of his right hand again if he engaged in the proper therapy. The woman had spoken with confident calm as she stood over his bed, but one of the several weaknesses of the system that Karpo recognized and expected to see changed was the low level of competence of physicians.

  Karpo had not even bothered to nod his acknowledgment at the porcine woman. She had made the mistake of trying to wait him out, but he simply stared at her for five minutes, and she left in angry defeat. Two weeks later he left the hospital and ignored Rostnikov’s suggestion that he see a doctor who might know what he was talking about.

  “My wife’s cousin,” Rostnikov had said, looking at Karpo’s arm. “He’ll look at you. He’s good, Jewish.”

  Karpo had declined, abruptly indicating his confidence in the system. In his small monastic room each night Karpo had attempted the exercises suggested by the hospital therapist, but they did no good. There was no doubt in Karpo’s mind that he would never regain the use of his right arm, and so instead of continuing the useless therapy, he had spent silent hours teaching himself to be left-handed. Left-handedness was discouraged in Russia. Russian children caught using their left hand to throw, write, or eat were sternly stopped. Karpo had never thought much about this, assuming the idea of conformity was simply part of one’s education in an overpopulated society. But now Karpo had to become left-handed. He wrote slowly, carefully, in his notebooks, his private volumes of detailed reports on every case to which he was assigned. He wrote about the new case to which he had been assigned and wondered why it had been given to him and not to his superior, Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov. He wondered but did not speak of his wonder as he learned to write with his left hand and constructed the details about the sniper who was shooting at people from the rooftops in Central Moscow.

  There had been five shootings, three resulting in death. There had been no real clues besides the bullets, with the possible exception of the report by the drunken night porter of the Ukraine Hotel who swore that he heard someone weeping loudly on the roof of the hotel on the night of the third shooting. Since the bullets had certainly come from the hotel roof, the sniper had been given the nickname the Weeper, but it was a nickname only a few in Petrovka shared. No word of the snipings had been heard on the radio or television, and no reports had appeared in the press.

  The Weeper would go on killing without the people of Moscow knowing of it until he or she was caught or the shootings became pandemic. It was, Karpo was sure, better this way. There was nothing to be gained from alerting the public to this crime. There were no safeguards to be taken. There was nothing to do except catch the sniper and turn him over for a quiet trial, or perhaps no trial at all.

  So Karpo had learned to drink his black tea with his left hand, to dress himself with his left hand, and to write his clear, precise notes with his left hand. Deep within him, as he adjusted to the change, he considered what might happen if the procurator learned that his disability was permanent. It was inevitable, but until that inevitable moment came, he would continue to work as he had for twenty-two of is forty-three years.

  And so it was that on a hot August morning Emil Karpo stood in front of the statue below the general and in front of the pedestal on which were carved life-sized images of the commanders, soldiers, and partisans who had long ago risen to the defense of their country.

  Twenty minutes after he had taken up his vigil in the square, Karpo saw the man he had been waiting for. The man was about sixty, wearing a dark and slightly shabby hotel uniform. In his right hand was a small cloth sack. Instead of joining the flow of tourists, the man sought out a bench, found an empty seat, and looked around, squinting against the sun. Not finding what or who he was looking for, he opened his sack lovingly and removed a sandwich wrapped in newspaper and a small box from which he began to remove dominoes. An overweight woman on the far end of the bench who had stopped to catch her breath, a task she might never accomplish, glanced at the old man, who appeared to be offering her a game. Karpo could see the man’s mouth moving and the woman nodding her head no as he left the statue and moved forward.

  Karpo brushed by a couple trying to figure out a visitor’s map and approached the bench, standing between the old man and the
sun, throwing his shadow over the black dominoes the man was placing on the bench. The fat woman looked at Karpo and forced herself up, pretending to see someone she knew. Karpo ignored the open space on the bench and stood over the man, who looked up at the dark outline before him.

  “A game?” the man said. His teeth were in bad condition, but he was clean-shaven and, in spite of the hot weather, not nearly as rancid as many who worked in heavy uniforms were in the summer.

  “Pavel Mikiyovich?” Karpo asked, though he knew this was the man.

  Mikiyovich squinted up curiously, then with fear, and then with Moscow indifference, feigned and protective.

  “I know you?” he said.

  “Inspector Karpo. Police.”

  Two little girls, about ten or eleven, in matching school dresses strolled by arm in arm and giggled at the two men, whispering.

  “It’s just dominoes,” Mikiyovich said, holding up a double two to prove his point. “I’m not gambling.”

  “The man who wept,” Karpo said. “The sniper.”

  Mikiyovich let out a small sigh of relief and gummed a bite of sandwich.

  “I told the other man from the police everything,” Mikiyovich said, looking at his sandwich, the tiles, anything to avoid the tall man who blocked the sun. “I’m on my lunch break. I’ve only got-”

  “I was told I could find you here,” Karpo interrupted. Karpo had read the report of the interview. It had been brief, and had he any other reasonable leads, he would not have bothered with this requestioning, at least not yet, but the chance existed that a new lead might arise.

  Mikiyovich shrugged, resigned. He wondered if the man above him had only one arm or was scratching his stomach.

  “He wept,” Mikiyovich said, raising his arms, the remnant of sandwich in one hand, a domino in the other. “I was getting some air on the roof at nine.”

  “You went to the roof to drink,” Karpo corrected.

  “Never,” Mikiyovich said indignantly.