A Fine Red Rain

CHAPTER NINE

I don't want to go to the circus. Sarah Rostnikov was more weary and distracted than emphatic. Rostnikov had been waiting for her outside the second-hand foreign book store where she worked on Kachalov Street. He had gone home to change into his favorite comfortable pants, worn shiny in the rear and the knees, and his favorite gray turtleneck sweater. In contrast, Sarah wore a black suit and white blouse. She had not been expecting him. She was not dressed for a circus. She had looked forward to a quick ride back to the apartment, a batheven if she had to cart kettles of boiled water, which she usually had to doa simple meal of whatever was left over, and a quiet evening listening to music on the radio.

"You will enjoy the circus," Rostnikov said, taking her arm.

"The circus is noisy. It smells of animals. It will take us an hour to get home when it's over. I'm hungry. I'm tired," she said to the night breeze.

"We'll stop at a stolovaya for some kotleta and potatoes with a little kvass," he said, leading her through the early evening crowd. "We'll call it a celebration. I have free passes."

"Porfiry Petrovich," Sarah said, stopping suddenly, "what have we to celebrate? Josef is being shot at by barbarians. You have been demoted. The KGB has us on some kind of list for troublemakers. What have we to celebrate?"

People moved around them, and Rostnikov shifted his weight to his good leg and touched the red hair of his wife.

"Work, health, appetites, and curiosity," he said.

"You are an optimist, Rostnikov," Sarah said with a smile and a shake of her head.

"I'm a Muscovite," he answered. "And I have a passion for the circus."

"And for cabbage soup and meat pies," she sighed.

They had eaten quietly at a luncheonette near the circus. Rostnikov had consumed three meat pies, a bowl of cabbage soup, and quantities of bread and double potatoes. Sarah had a bowl of cabbage soup, which she didn't quite finish.

"What was your day like?" he said after he had finished the final crumb of bread, which he dipped into the final touch of sauce from the pasty.

"I sold books,"' Sarah said with a shrug, pushing away her soup. "The party representative for the store gave a lunchtime lecture on productivity and how it was our duty to sell more Bulgarian books on breeding goats. What did you do?"

"I helped Emil Karpo catch a man who had murdered eight prostitutes," he said.

She looked at him and at the young couple hovering nearby who obviously wanted their table now that they had finished their meal.

"Good," said Sarah. "You should have shot him."

"He is quite mad."

"That is of little solace to the women he killed," she said.

"You should be a judge," Rostnikov said, standing awkwardly to protect his leg.

"And you should be a plumber," Sarah replied.

"I am a plumber," Rostnikov said, leading her past the waiting couple, who pounced on the now-empty table.

Twenty minutes later they joined the crowds under the neon sign of the New Circus. They were shown to their seats, very good seats, in the second row.

"Why do I know this is not simply a night at the circus?" Sarah whispered.

Rostnikov sighed and looked at her. "We came at the invitation of a killer. I could not bring myself to disappoint him."

"I see," said Sarah. "And why was it necessary that I come?"

"Because," said Rostnikov quietly as the lights went down, "I need you."

"To do what?"

'To be with me," he said as the music blared forth in a rush of brass and Dimitri Mazaraki stepped out to the center of the ring, huge, confident, giving his fine mustache a twirl of conceit. He was dressed in reda red coat, red pants, even a red top hat. The music stopped, and the big announcer's eyes, scanning the audience with a Cheshire grin, silencing one and allmen, women, and childrensilenced them with the secret he held of magic to be performed, mystery to be savored, danger to be witnessed, fantasy to store for the gray day tomorrow.

Mazaraki's eyes played over the crowd, roamed beyond the silence, and snapped onto Rostnikov right in front of him in the second row. Mazaraki's smile changed, the lip curled ever so slightly below the fine mustache. Rostnikov replied with a smile of his own, a sad smile that caused the announcer's lip to hesitate for only a moment before he turned his eyes back to the crowd and announced the first act.

The music came blaring forth again. Mazaraki stepped back into the shadows, and a dancing bear and two mandolin players dressed in plaid suits and baggy pants bounded into the ring.

"That was your killer?" asked Sarah, leaning toward her husband.

Rostnikov nodded.

He felt her grip tighten on his arm.

Emit Karpo sat at his desk on the fifth floor of Petrovka finishing his report. He had no office and his desk was number five in a line of eleven desks against a windowless wall. The windows were all in the offices on the outer wall. An officer named Fyodor sat at desk number nine talking on the telephone. Karpo could make out nothing that Fyodor said. He didn't care. But he could not ignore the snorting laugh that usually followed a deep intake of air by the other inspector.

He finished die report and looked over at the only other person in the office.

"It's almost nine," Mathilde said, playing with her wilted red hat. She seemed generally wilted. Her hair lay across her cheeks. The collar on one side of her red dress was up, the other down, and it was clear that this lack of symmetry was not a clever fashion ploy.

"It is finished," said Karpo. "I need only make copies and carry them to the deputy procurator's office."

"And then?"

"And then," said Karpo, rising, "you are free to go."

Mathilde put the hat over her face and laughed. It was a loud, rough laugh that rivaled that of Fyodor, who paused in his conversation with a smile and looked over at the woman in red to share her joke. When Fyodor saw Karpo looking back at him, however, he returned to his phone conversation.

"Something is humorous?" Karpo asked, standing in front of Mathilde, the report, in duplicate, on Yuri Pon neatly tucked into a folder under his left arm.

"I was almost killed this afternoon," Mathilde said, choking back a hiccup. "That madman almost killed me."

"I was there," Karpo said reasonably.

"Oh, yes, of course. How could I have forgotten?"

"I did not literally mean" Karpo began.

"No, you did not literally mean," she said, standing. "You literally are. Do you know that I was frightened this afternoon? Do you think it might be reasonable to offer me something? Thanks, an arm of support, an American tap on the chin for a job well done?"

"The hat…" Karpo said.

"With the money I could have made picking up Englishmen at the Bolshoi today, I could have bought five hats," she said, putting the hat on the chair.

"Well?"

"Well? Is that what you have to say? It's your turn to speak, Emil Karpo. Your turn."

Her hands were on her hips. A moist clump of hair fell over her eyes. She tried to blow it away but it didn't move. She flicked it over with her fingertips.

"You helped to catch a man who committed eight murders of women," he said evenly. "You seemed quite willing to"

"Spasee' ba, thank you," she said.

"Spasee' ba," Karpo said. "On behalf of the people of Moscow."

"I'm touched," she said with a sigh, picking up her hat again. "You are a romantic, Emil Karpo."

"I don't see how you could come to such a conclusion," he said. "Certainly not based on the information you have or on anything I have said or done here."

Fyodor laughed, and both Mathilde and Karpo turned to see if he were laughing at them. He was not.

"I was being sarcastic, Emil."

"As you well know, I have no sense of humor," Karpo said soberly. "I have no repressions and, therefore, no need for humor."

"Do you know what day it is?" she asked.

"Tuesday," he replied.

A door somewhere opened and closed, the sound echoing past them.

"Let us break the pattern," she whispered and found herself unable to repress a hiccup. "Let us go to your apartment, which I have never seen, and let us get in bed."

"It isn't Thursday," Karpo said.

"Believe me," she replied. "It will still work."

"Why do you want to do this?" he asked with genuine curiosity.

"Why? Because you are a challenge to my profession, to my craft. I am driven to make you feel, to make you react."

Karpo shook his head, unable to understand this woman.

"And I am to pay as always?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, plunking the red hat on her head. "You are to pay as always. The hat was for risking my life."

"I see," he said. "Compensation for lost income. And you don't want cash without expending labor."

"I love when you talk filthy to me," she said with a grin.

"I didn't…"

"Deliver your report and let's go," she said. "While I still labor under the delusion that there is hope for you."

The circus crowd responded with enthusiastic applause to the panorama display of the fighting spirit of the Red Army. A woman stood upon a great horse that pranced around the ring. The woman held high a red flag with the hammer and sickle. In the darkness beyond the curtain, a cannon roared. Twelve men dressed as soldiers high-stepped out and raised their rifles to the sky in salute. The applause rose again.

Rostnikov noted that the applause came nowhere near matching that which had been given to the trick horse rider or the dancing bear or the clown on the high wire or any other act before this one.

Throughout the evening, Mazaraki had moved closer to the crowd with each announcement of each act, had moved closer and closer to Rostnikov.

"For the benefit of our foreign visitors," Mazaraki had said, looking at Rostnikov during his introduction of a motorcycle act, "the New Moscow Circus does not promote the idea of danger in its performance. Skill is the focus, Soviet skills. Our people come, not in the hope of witnessing accident or death, but with confidence that they will see performers who have perfected their skills, their timing, and the potential with which they have been born and that our nation has nurtured. And yet, Tovarich," he said, looking directly at Rostnikov with a grin, "some skills have a risk of danger, and those who come through the doors of the circus must understand that there is always the slight possibility of accident for those who would challenge their skills, their muscles, their wit. There is no better place man the circus for such a challenge."

"He's talking to you," Sarah whispered.

Rostnikov said nothing. He watched the announcer hi red describe the motorcycle act, watched him back away, watched the look in the man's eyes, which he had seen many times before during investigationsa look of defiance and desperation.

The last act before the curtain call by all the performers was a magician, a magnificent magician with two bespangled women assistants whom he kept making disappear and reappear in various sections of the audience, high above on a rafter, or inside one of the four locked boxes on a raised platform.

Children clapped, men and women said "wonderful," and the performers and animals made a final triumphant appearance. As the performers left and the final strains of a march vibrated from the band, Rostnikov looked at the exit curtain, looked at Dimitri Mazaraki looking back at him. The tickets had been the first invitation. All night long, throughout the performance, Mazaraki had issued other invitations. And now came the last, a look that said "Come if you dare, but I doubt if you dare, not in my world."

It was, Rostnikov thought, the bear trapped in a shed, standing on its hind legs, growling, claws up, paws wavering, a frightening and frightened figure.

'Take the metro home," Rostnikov said to his wife as the crowd began to thin and the band stopped playing. "I'll be there as soon as I can."

Sarah looked at him and avoided a sticky, crying little boy who was being led out by his mother.

"What are you doing, Porfiry Petrovich?"

She was tired, worried, and well aware that she had no chance of changing his mind regardless of what he was going to do.

"Delivering a message," he said. "From a man who sat on Gogol's head."

"I'm staying," she said firmly.

"If you stay, I will worry about you," he told her gently. "If I worry, I cannot do what I must do."

There were only a few people left in the arena now. Sarah Rostnikov looked around and back at her husband.

"You didn't plan this?"

"No," he said, shaking his head. "I thought I had another day."

"And…"

"Another day may be too late."

The voices of the stragglers, the sounds of their feet shuffling tired on the concrete steps, dropped another level. There was nothing more to say. Sarah touched her husband's arm, turned her back, and walked slowly after the others.