Red Chameleon

SEVEN

“And so I had officer Zelach follow Assistant Inspector Tkach as a backup,” Rostnikov explained as he sat in the chair in front of Deputy Procurator Khabolov’s desk. “When Tkach took more than twenty minutes inside the building, Zelach followed instructions and called me. I-”

“My car,” Khabolov said, standing suddenly behind the desk, his sad hound face quivering, his hands held behind his back to keep them from spasms of anger and frustration.

The office smelled slightly bitter, like the waiting room of a steam bath. When Anna Timofeyeva had occupied it, the office had always smelled to Rostnikov of tea and paper.

“Your car-” Rostnikov sighed, sympathetically shifting slightly to take some pressure from his leg. “Tkach and I risked our lives to save your Chaika, our very lives, but there was no dealing with the madwoman.”

Khabolov’s hand came out to accuse or attack, but he controlled it and raised the palm to push the stray hairs atop his head. The battle was joined and clear. Rostnikov would feign sympathy, and Khabolov would know he was lying but be unable to accuse him. Khabolov would pick, question, punish, but not allow his emotions to show, not let it be seen that he was punishing, though he knew that Rostnikov would understand. And so the two men faced each other and pretended.

“I appreciate your willingness to risk your very bodies for material goods,” Khabolov countered, returning his hand behind his back.

“I felt that the deputy procurator’s official vehicle was more a symbol of the authority of the state than an item of personal and material satisfaction,” said Rostnikov, somberly folding his hands on his lap.

Khabolov looked down at Rostnikov, searching for even a hint of insolence, but there was none there. The deputy procurator’s eyes moved down to the report on his desk. He had to lean forward slightly to read it.

“You were unable to save my automobile, but you managed to break the shoulder of one suspect, the ribs of another, and the skull of a third.”

“They resisted arrest.”

“Do you expect the government to pay for repairs on your suit?”

Rostnikov looked down at this torn sleeve. He had been given no time to change clothes; instead, he had hurried back to Petrovka to write his report and get to the deputy procurator’s office.

“Of course not,” Rostnikov said. “It was, like your Chaika, ruined in the line of duty, but we must all make sacrifices for the state and accept our share of responsibility.”

“You are an insolent man, chief inspector,” Khabolov said, leaning forward with both hands on the desk.

“I am a weary man, comrade procurator, and I have a sniper and the killer of an old man to pursue. May I be excused?”

Khabolov’s face flushed and turned red, though not quite as red as the flag that stood in the corner. His eyes went narrow, and Rostnikov recognized an official look designed to send fear into the guilty and. nonguilty alike. Rostnikov was too weary to feign fear. He simply looked up placidly. The excitement of the morning had passed. The body fluids had coursed through Rostnikov in that makeshift garage. It had been no more than ten minutes, perhaps less, but it was such minutes that made being a policeman most enjoyable. Generally, so little was actually concluded, and that which was concluded normally came to pass through patience and paper and telephone calls and long hours of talking and compromise. Porfiry Petrovich felt tired and pleased. Even with his eyes open and fixed attentively on Khabolov, he imagined the falling Chaika and smiled deep within himself.

“You may not be excused,” Khabolov said, sitting behind his desk to indicate a new phase of conversation. There was a heartbeat of hesitation in the dog-faced man that drew Rostnikov’s interest.

“Chief inspector, you are to drop your investigation of the murdered Jew completely and concentrate on the Weeper.”

“Very good,” Rostnikov agreed. “I’ll put it aside till the Weeper is caught and then-”

“You are to turn your files on the case over to me and drop the investigation completely and indefinitely-no, forever,” Khabolov cut in with irritation.

“On my own time I would like to check the procurator’s files for a-”

Khabolov was now perspiring, though the window was open, sending in a slight but adequate breeze. Something quite odd was going on, and Rostnikov began to observe his superior with curiosity.

“You no longer have access to the procurator’s files,” Khabolov said, reaching for a random file to indicate that the meeting had ended. With eyes down at the paper in his hand, he added, “For political reasons, which you may know.”

There was no arguing with Khabolov. Rostnikov knew this. It wasn’t that Khabolov couldn’t be maneuvered, swayed, tricked. Given time, Rostnikov was sure he would solve the man, find ways to deal with him, but the abrupt air of the man, coupled with his clear nervousness, made it evident that the order to drop the investigation came from somewhere above Khabolov.

And so Rostnikov barely nodded.

“That is all,” said Khabolov without looking up, and Rostnikov stood, propping himself up with the back of the chair, and moved slowly to the door and out. He had things to do, his jacket to change, and the murderer of Sergeant Petrov to catch. Perhaps the murder of Abraham Savitskaya and the mystery of the missing candlestick could wait. Perhaps.

By the time he got back to his tiny office, the rain had begun to fall. The single small window wouldn’t open; it hadn’t opened for months. Rostnikov had intended to fix it himself, though such initiative was frowned upon. There were repairmen assigned to such things, though the repairmen seldom came even after the proper forms were filed, approved, and forwarded. To get the window repaired through proper channels, Rostnikov would need the signature of Deputy Procurator Khabolov, and the price for such … Sitting behind his desk, Rostnikov smiled privately. A plan came. He watched the rain hit the window for about five minutes, doodled three-dimensional cubes of various sizes for a few more minutes, and scrawled out the work” order to have the window fixed.

On the way out, he checked Karpo’s desk, found a note indicating that Karpo was pursuing a lead, and called to Zelach, who sulked at his corner desk, his shaggy head hovering over a document.

“Zelach,” Rostnikov said, moving past two investigators arguing over where they would have lunch. One of them, Irvinov, was a giggler. Everything seemed to amuse him-sex, food, death. His laughter was nervous and made Rostnikov uncomfortable. He had long ago decided that Irvinov’s nervous laughter was much like that which Rostnikov’s son, Josef, had displayed when he was a child. Josef had channeled the nervous laughter into a bemused, ironic smile. The thought of Josef softened him.

“Yes, Comrade Rostnikov,” Zelach said.

“You did very well this morning,” Rostnikov said gently. “You were instrumental in crushing that car-theft ring. I’ve just commended you to the deputy procurator. You have been noticed.”

Zelach was not sure whether he wanted to be noticed, but the idea of being commended to the new deputy procurator was surely better than being reported for incompetence.

“Thank you, chief inspector,” he said somberly.

Rostnikov stood with one hand on the small desk and handed Zelach the order for the window repair.

“Take this work order to the office of Colonel Snitkonoy. Tell them it needs the colonel’s approval immediately, that it relates to the investigation, that I will soon be giving him a complete report.”

Zelach took the work order and looked at it as if it were some radioactive treasure to be held in awe and handled with care.

“I’ll do it immediately,” Zelach said.

“Good man.” Rostnikov sighed. “Good man.”

And with that Rostnikov eased his way out of the large office and down the corridor. Emil Karpo was handling the Weeper. The automobile thieves were caught, and three other cases Rostnikov was working on were at a standstill. It would be, he decided, a good afternoon to make a few social calls, beginning with the strange-daughter of the dead old man in the bathtub. Yes, it would simply be a social call, for he was officially off the investigation.

As he trudged through the rain, back straight, eyes unblinkingly fixed on the large woman carrying the trombone case, Emil Karpo felt an aching numbness that made him want to shift his arm as if he had slept on it for a generation or two.

Except for an occasional umbrella carrier or person so intent on getting somewhere that they braved the driving rain to dash from doorway to doorway, the lean detective and the woman were the only ones who seemed to be out in the rain.

Karpo welcomed the rain and the ache in his arm. Life was, after all, a test. The body was a papier-mache vessel that had to be endured. Man proved himself, his worth, by accepting the weakness of the body and rising above it, not letting pain or emotion rule. Man, if he were to have dignity and meaning, had to rise above his animalism. An individual man was but a transient vessel. Mankind working together as a united organism had power and meaning.

The police were the white corpuscles of the body politic. If a cell went bad, an intruder threatened, the police officer, the soldier, stepped in and removed the offender. If the police officer were destroyed in the process, he would have achieved his goal, served his function.

Emil Karpo was not deluded. Crime would not stop. Corruption would not end. It was the nature of the human beast. It was inevitable. The goal of the Soviet state was a perfection it could never reach, but the seeking of that state of perfection created meaning. Each pain, setback, and criminal, bureaucratic obstacle simply proved the need for commitment.

They walked. First she seemed to have a destination in mind, but as the rain came down harder and harder, the large woman began to wander, her thin dress drenched and clinging to her sexlessly. She walked, and he followed, knowing he would follow for hours, even days, if he had to. He would follow, wait to be sure, and then end it. If by chance she proved to be innocent, he would prove that, too, go home, change clothes, and return to his office for more calls, more leads. He would wait and wait until he found the Weeper or was ordered to stop looking.

It was almost three in the afternoon when the woman began to move resolutely toward some destination. Her pace quickened, her head came up a bit, and she shifted her instrument case to her left hand. The rain had let up just a bit, and they were heading down Kutuzovsky Prospekt. She had not only moved within the possible pattern of previous attacks but was moving in the direction of the Ukraine Hotel.

Karpo was no more than twenty paces behind the woman when she stopped abruptly in front of Don Igrushki, the House of Toys, at 9 Kutuzovsky Prospekt. She turned and looked directly at the detective. The long strands of dark hair clung to her face. There was a madness in her eyes, a defiance that convinced Emil Karpo that he had not wasted his day. He continued to walk, not looking at the woman. She stood, feet firmly planted, not moving the wet, clinging hair from her eyes, nose, and mouth. She watched as he moved past, looking directly in front of her, and he continued down the street as if he had an appointment for which he could not be late. He knew her eyes were on him, knew she would watch him, wondering, cautious, but Karpo did not look back. He knew where she was going and planned to be there when she arrived.

Inside the lobby of the hotel, Karpo paused for a moment, scanning the faces that glanced up at him. The lobby was filled with people talking, waiting, wondering when the rain would end so they could get about their business or pleasure.

There were more than two thousand rooms in the twenty-nine floors of the hotel, with excellent views of Central Moscow from many of the windows. The view from the roof was especially magnificent, but tourists had no access to the roof. Karpo, tingling hand plunged deeply into his black sling, strode across the floor to the bank of elevators and waited, watching the entrance in the reflection of a mirror next to the first elevator. The elevator dispatcher was a man with thick glasses and a tight collar. He was tall, with shoulders stooped from years of working hard to look important. The elevator doors came open, and the dispatcher signaled his approval for the five waiting people to enter after three businessmen came out, but Karpo did not enter.

“This car up,” he said to Karpo while the elevator waited and the young woman operating it watched in guarded curiosity lest she offend the militant dispatcher.

Karpo responded, turning to face the dispatcher, who mistakenly elected to attempt to stare him down. The crowd on the elevator grew impatient, and the operator continued to watch. It reminded her of two gunfighters she had seen in a Czech movie about American cowboys.

The sopping-wet stranger was the unblinking gun-fighter. The dispatcher was the sheriff whose authority had been questioned, and Elena Soldatkin imagined herself the schoolteacher who would have to step in and make an emotional plea to stop the bloodshed, a plea that would have no effect in a film and that she would never make in reality, because the dispatcher was a most unpleasant man who was also the party organizer for the Ukraine Hotel. So she sat, watched, and tried not to show emotion, but at this she was an amateur compared to the strange, besoaked, pale skeleton of a man.

Suddenly, the pale man glanced toward her, looked at the mirror beside the elevator, and then entered the elevator, room being quickly created for him by the retreating figures, who wanted neither the moisture nor the aura he carried. The dispatcher, feeling quite triumphant, though a bit unsettled by the strange man, watched the elevator doors close and turned to gather his next flock for the next ascent. The massive woman carrying some kind of instrument case strode wetly toward him, and he calculated how many people could reasonably be allowed to occupy the same elevator with her, but he was certain it was a task he could handle with his usual expertise.

Two men in the rear of the elevator spoke in a whisper as Karpo’s elevator moved slowly upward. They were not from Moscow. Their accents were from the west, possibly as far as Kiev.

“Because if we go to the Berlin,” said one man with exasperation, “he’ll bloat, get drunk. We’ll get no business done.”

“So we’ll get no business done,” the other man countered in a high voice, “But we’ll get goodwill, and tomorrow they will owe us. Don’t be impatient.”

The two men got out at the sixteenth floor. By the eighteenth floor no one was left but Karpo and the operator. Elena said, “Floor,” recalling that the dispatcher had never extracted a destination from the man. Elena had the sudden chill feeling that the man might pull out something he was hiding in his sling and plunge it through her back. Her voice was high, quivering slightly.

“Top,” he said.

“Twenty,” she answered, and threw the lever as far to the right as it would go, knowing that there was no way to make the elevator move faster but willing it to do so. The elevator stopped with a jerk, and she reached over to throw the door open. Only then did she look back at the man, who said, “The roof. How do I get to the roof?”

Elena knew she should ask a question, challenge his authority, demand an explanation, but this was not a man one asked for explanations. It was a man you got out of your elevator and forgot as soon as possible. Elena was twenty-six years old and looked forward to twenty-seven and thousands of miles going up and down in the elevator and the movie she was going to see that night with her friend Nora.

“To the right, end of the corridor. There’s a stairway, but I don’t know if-”

The stiff man was already heading down the hall, his back to her, his secret protected by his hand, plunged into his wet sling. Elena closed the door without finishing her sentence. She planned to forget the encounter, at least till she could see Nora and build it into something more than it had been.

Karpo found the door without trouble. It was unmarked and unnumbered. He turned the handle and pushed. The heavy door gave way slowly. Had he been able to use his right hand, he could have-but he stopped that thought. One used what one had, overcame obstacles, did not weep when they appeared. He pushed the door open, went in, and moved up the concrete steps in near darkness.

There was a single light on the landing above. The light was a dull yellow and made his hand look jaundiced. The steps were clean and rough. On the floor above twenty, Karpo found himself in front of a metal door with a push bar. He pressed against it and stepped out onto the roof of the Ukraine. The wind slapped him and cracked the metal door closed with a clang. The rain had dwindled but not stopped. It pelted down on the flat pebbled roof, sending up an odor of strong warm tar that Karpo savored without quite making the sensation conscious. Above him for nine floors stood the front tower of the hotel with a star on its uppermost spire. He looked around, up, saw nothing, and heard only the rain brushing the roof and the slight wind.

There were turrets, outcroppings for air, heating, and simple decoration, many places to hide and wait, but no place to keep dry. Karpo did not expect to be there long. He strode to the edge of the building and looked over the low stone wall down at the bridge, the Moscow River, the city where he had spent his life. He felt himself merge with the building, could imagine himself disappearing, to be absorbed in the stone and the water. Perhaps he was a bit tired. If Colonel Snitkonoy were not a fool, an armed man would be up there now, but, Karpo decided, perhaps it was better this way.

He walked to a stone heating turret, stepped behind it, out of the line of vision of the door through which he had come, and demanded that his body ignore the throbbing, electric tingling in his right arm. He looked through the thinning rain at the modern building of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Mir (Peace) Hotel and let his breath take in the smell of his own humid sweat.

He heard the sound of someone coming before the door opened. When it did open with a loud clank, Karpo was standing well back, where he could see but not be seen.

It was the large woman in the dark flower dress. She looked like a ripe country melon, the kind his mother had purchased once or twice when he was a child. The thought in this circumstance led Karpo to reach up and touch his forehead, which confirmed what he suspected. He was feverish. His body was damaged, and his mind was not at its best. He came as close to smiling as was possible for him, but no one, with the possible exception of Rostnikov, would have detected it had they been with him.

The woman trudged forward toward the edge of the hotel roof, stopped, took a small bottle out of her pocket, removed some green pills, and threw them into her mouth. Then she turned her head upward to the sky to take in rain to wash down the pills. The rain hit her face, pushing her hair from her eyes and mouth, and for an instant Karpo thought there was the remnant of something in the woman’s face, something that might have been but had been burned away.

Her head came down, and she stood, arms folded at the edge of the building, looking down, waiting. They both waited for perhaps ten minutes, sharing the solitude. Then the rain began to ease, and within a minute it stopped. Behind him, Karpo could hear a bird singing as the woman knelt with some pain and opened her trombone case.

He waited till she lifted the rifle out, waited till she carefully loaded it, waited till she propped it up on the stone facade and looked down at the street, before he stepped out from behind the turret.

“No,” he said as the bird sailed past him, singing.

The woman was not startled. In fact, for an instant Karpo thought that she might not have heard him, that she might be hard of hearing or so preoccupied that his word did not penetrate her consciousness. Then she turned to him, and he could see her strange smile of satisfaction. The rifle in her hands, large and clumsy, came around in her large hands and aimed at him, smelled him out. Karpo stopped ho more than a dozen feet from her.

“You are a policeman,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“I am a policeman,” Karpo agreed. “Assistant Inspector Emil Karpo of the procurator’s office. And you are-”

“A killer of policemen,” Vera said with defiance.

“Yes, what is the name of this killer of policemen?”

“Vera Shepovik,” she said, spitting out her own name with what sounded like hatred. “I don’t mind telling you. I’m going to kill you. I saw you following me. I hoped you would be here. I was afraid you wouldn’t. I-”

“I saw you compete in the university games three years ago,” he said. “At the Palace of Sports in Luzhniki. Javelin and-”

“Hammer,” she said. “I placed second in the hammer. That was my last competition.”

“You were very good,” he said. Karpo had no passion for sports, for athletic competition, but he did find satisfaction in the vision of athletes, Soviet athletes, who disciplined their bodies, drove them. It was something he respected, and so when Rostnikov had invited him to watch the competition, Karpo had agreed. Rostnikov had shown little interest in anything but the weightlifting, during which he talked constantly, pointing out nuances and tensions that Karpo could not discern.

“Do you want to know why it was my last competition?” she asked.

Karpo nodded.

“Because I discovered that I was ill, that I was poisoned, that steroids were eating away my organs from within.” She took one hand off the rifle to touch her stomach, to indicate where the process of decay was taking place. “They used me; the great Soviet state used my body, used me like a zombie, and then cast me aside to die without meaning when their experiment failed.”

Her hand went back to the rifle.

“And you are sure your illness was a result of-”

“I’m sure,” she shouted. “I feel it.”

“A doctor confirmed-”

“I don’t need a doctor to confirm what my body knows,” she said. “My mind knows that the state killed me and left my body to walk about. I know you are one of the tentacles of the state, that I must cut down as many tentacles as I can. My life may be small, but it will have this meaning, demand this attention. I’m dying.”

“And so are we all,” Karpo said, stepping a bit closer to the woman, whose red eyes were fixed on his own.

“But some of us sooner than others,” she said with a smile.

“Yes,” he agreed.

She raised the rifle, and Karpo saw the dark hole of the barrel searching his face. His chance was to keep her sights high, to move low after she shot. If the rifle came down, it would be aimed at his body, and even a miss might take off his head.

“Why aren’t you afraid, policeman? There is a gun in your face. People with guns in their face are afraid. People are afraid to die, policeman.”

“You are afraid to die, Vera Shepovik.” He took a step forward and continued. “You are quite right. I am a part of the state. I can be killed, and you will either be caught or you will die from whatever it is that tears at you.”

“Be afraid,” she shouted. “It doesn’t have meaning if you aren’t afraid. It doesn’t count if I can’t see-”

“The policeman you shot two days ago was thirty years old,” he said, moving to within four feet of her; the rifle was almost touching his mouth. “He was quite brave, a hero.”

“And that is why you hate me,” she said in triumph. “Now I understand. You want revenge.”

“No. I want you to understand that your act has no meaning. You kill us, and there are others. You accomplish nothing. Come from this roof and we will get you to a hospital where you can be looked at, where you can find out what is really within you.”

She laughed and looked for an instant at the sky, but the rifle did not move.

“And I will be kept alive long enough to be executed.”

There was no denying it.

“I can’t allow you to kill again,” he said softly.

“And I can’t stop,” she said almost softly. “There is a painting in the Pushkin Museum …”

The moment was strange, intimate, and Karpo, blaming his fever, his pain, the quivering cold, wet skin, felt that he could love this woman. The thought almost got him killed. The metal click of the rifle entered him, was absorbed without thought. When the bullet cracked, his head was already moving down to the right. There was a roar, an explosion, and he felt his inner ear vibrate and go deaf. His left arm went up, hitting the barrel of the rifle as he sprawled backward, awkwardly unable to use either hand to stop him from crashing to the rough, wet roof. He rolled quickly over, sensing the barrel of the rifle striking the space where his head had been.

Karpo scrambled up, expecting to be hit or pushed over the edge twenty floors to the street. He wondered what the sensation would be, whether he would have time to think, observe, before he was absorbed into the pavement.

He managed to get his pistol out awkwardly in his left hand as Vera raised the rifle to strike again.

“Enough,” he said gently. “Enough.”

Something in his voice stopped her. She had expected anger, hatred, but this walking death of a man gave her only a sense of understanding. It was not what it should be.

“Damn you, policeman,” she said.

She threw the rifle over his head, and it sailed down toward Kutuzov Avenue.

“All over,” Karpo said, feeling his head go light, warning him that he might soon simply pass out.

“No,” she said, stepping to her right to the edge of the hotel. She looked over the side in the direction she had thrown her rifle. Her hair blew back. Tears were in her eyes.

“Perhaps, if I aim carefully, I can hit a policeman walking by. On the television they jump from airplanes and guide themselves.” She looked down, and Karpo aimed his pistol at a pink, faded rose on her dress.

“No,” he commanded.

She was standing on the narrow wall, not looking at him, looking downward, biting her lower lip.

“Vera,” he said gently, and she looked at him. He had the impression that she was listening, was considering stepping back.

She did indeed say, “Maybe,” as her foot slipped on the wet mounting and she went over the edge, her head striking the wall with a horrible crack before she tumbled out of Karpo’s sight.

Karpo fell to his knees and managed to roll over to the trombone case, to pull it to him. He put his pistol back in its holster and laid his head on the case, his eyes to the gray sky. Emil Karpo passed out.

Lydia Tkach’s hearing was poor. She resisted the urgings of her son and daughter-in-law to get an electric thing to stick in her ears. At the Ministry of Information Building where she worked filing papers, she was not a popular woman. The primary reason for her lack of popularity was that she called attention to herself by the volume of her conversation. She would, in addition, when able to trap a listener, be sure to get in the information that her son was a high-ranking government official. And so people avoided Lydia Tkach, which made her lonely and crotchety, which in turn made her turn her son and daughter-in-law into a captive audience at home.

“Something’s wrong,” she shouted with satisfaction when Sasha tried to enter the small apartment without calling attention to himself.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he answered, looking around for Maya. “Mother, I’m just tired.”

“You look tired,” Lydia shouted. “You look tired and dirty.”

“Mother …” he said in a loud whisper.

“What have you been doing?”

“My job,” he said, taking off his jacket and looking at the closed door of the bedroom, slightly more than closet-sized, that his mother slept in and in which Maya sometimes sought refuge after her long day of work. “Is Maya home?”

“Resting,” Lydia shouted, holding up a finger to her lips to indicate that they should both be quiet, which was exactly what they were not being. “She’s going to have a baby.”

“I am well aware of that, mother,” he said, brushing his hair back from his forehead. He wanted to look in a mirror to see if guilt were on his face. Sasha was very good at lying with his face, with his eyes. He had learned to develop it in his work. It was a skill that went well with his youthful, open face, but Marina, the car thief, had seen through it and through him, and now he moved to the table near the window with no place to hide.

“We’re having dinner,” his mother yelled, a knowing smile on her face. She was a frail woman with an iron will under which Sasha had frequently been broken. Lydia had never been physical, never hit him. She simply kept up her barrage of words and fierce determination until she achieved victory or drove her opponent from the room.

“We usually do, mother,” he said, his stomach growling, wondering how he could face his pregnant wife.

“For dinner we’re having kulebiaka stuffed with salmon and cabbage soup,” she said, walking over to him. She was wearing her at-home sack, a simple baglike creation with three holes, one for the head and two for her arms. Lydia claimed it was the fashion in France to wear such things. Neither Sasha nor Maya had argued with her.

“And you want to know what else?”

“What else?” he asked dutifully, wanting to put his head in his hands, wanting to take a shower, wanting to emigrate to Albania.

“Cherry vodka, a whole bottle,” Lydia said, putting her hands on her hips and waiting. Obviously, there was a question to be asked by her son, but he was too distracted to know what it might be.

Sasha loved his mother, truly loved her, but it was his dream to create some space between himself and her. With the baby coming, Maya was getting increasingly annoyed with the older woman. There was no room to get away after a hard day of work, and there would be less room when the baby came. It had been agreed, primarily by Lydia, that when the baby came, she would stop working and take care of it as soon as Maya was prepared to go back to work. Sasha and Maya had reluctantly agreed. There really was no choice.

“Do you want to know what we are celebrating?” she finally said.

Grateful for the help, Sasha said dutifully, “What are we celebrating?” He looked about for the bottle of cherry vodka so he could start the celebration.

“Guess. If you don’t feel well enough to guess, I can understand.”

“I’ll guess.” He sighed, sure that their conversation had roused the napping Maya. “I’ll guess.”

“Then guess.”

“I’m trying,” he said. The idea came to him quite madly that they were celebrating his moment of infidelity with Marina, that Maya had heard about it, had left, and Lydia had been so struck with joy at her daughter-in-law’s departure that she had prepared a feast. But that made no sense. She stood waiting over him, about to shout.

“The baby,” he said.

“We celebrate the baby when we get the baby,” she said impatiently. “Don’t be stupid. You’re a smart boy.”

“Ah … you’re moving in with Aunt Valentina. Uncle Kolya died, and you’re moving-”

“That would be something to celebrate? What’s wrong with you?” She reached over and slapped the back of his head. “What’s wrong with you? You look like you- Did you shoot somebody again? Like last time? You shot somebody.”

He got up from the table and began to search in the small cupboard for the bottle of vodka. He found it, grabbed a glass, and turned back to the table, glancing out the window at the steamy after-rain street below.

“I didn’t shoot anybody. Nobody shot me. I haven’t lost my job. I don’t know what we are celebrating. For the love of reason, mother, let me breathe.”

“You are a hopeless case, Sashkala. Sometimes you are a hopeless case. I’ll tell you what we are going to celebrate.”

He opened the bottle and poured himself a large glass of vodka.

“Without eating? You are going to drink like your father without eating?” She reached atop the tabletop refrigerator behind him and pulled down a loaf of bread as he began to drink. He accepted the torn handful of bread she handed him and bit off a hunk to follow the half glass he had just downed.

“We are celebrating, mother, remember? But what we are celebrating not only eludes me; it is beginning to fill me with indifference.”

She pulled out the chair across from him, reached for the bottle, and poured herself a healthy glassful of vodka. Sasha noticed that she did not accompany it with bread, but he said nothing.

“We are-” she began.

“-going to have a new apartment.” Maya’s voice finished from behind him.

Sasha turned to face her, expecting his eyes to betray his feelings, wanting to shout out his guilt, ask for forgiveness. He did not really hear what she had said. He took her in, her dark eyes, her smile, her simple brown dress, and the clear small circle of her growing belly. Her eyes met his and noticed something. Her smile dropped for a part of a heartbeat and then came back.

“Sasha,” she said, moving to him, “are you all right? Do you have a fever? Did you-?”

“He didn’t shoot anyone,” Lydia shouted, taking a drink of vodka.

“I’m all right,” he said, trying to smile. “I-did you say something about an apartment?”

“Our application was approved.” Maya beamed, taking his head in her hands. “I went down today.”

“We went down today to the housing ministry,” Lydia amended.

“In North Zmailova,” Maya said excitedly. “Much bigger than here. One bedroom and a small extra room, big enough for a bed. Lydia can have it. We’ll have our own room with the baby, and later he can go to sleep in the bedroom and we can move him into a bed in the living room. It’s right near the metro station.”

“I get a television,” Lydia said.

“Look happy, Sasha,” Maya said, examining his face.

He smiled, but she could see tears.

“He was always like that,” Lydia said, reaching for the bread and tearing off a piece. Crumbs fell on her dress. She swiped them off. “Emotional. Like his father after a drink or two. An emotional policeman. You have to control your emotions if you are going to be a success. I told your father that. Did he listen?”

Sasha wasn’t listening to his mother.

“Let’s eat,” Maya said softly.

The dinner went well, and Sasha, after the bottle was finished, determined to devote himself to being a good husband, a good son, a good father, and a good policeman. A few minutes after making that solemn resolution to himself, he had some difficulty remembering just what it was he had resolved to do. He knew it involved his family and recalled, perhaps, that it had involved working to get his mother a television set.

Sasha was feeling much better when the telephone rang. They were still talking at the table when the sound of the phone cut through his heart.

“It’s the phone,” his mother said, looking suddenly pale. “It’s for you. Who calls here but the police people? I’ll get it.”

He leaped up before she could reach the phone and managed to answer first. Maya looked at him with concern, and he smiled back at her.

It was Zelach.

“I can’t find the chief inspector,” Zelach said wearily.

“Why are you looking for him?”

“The list he wanted is ready, the list of American tourists in Moscow,” Zelach said. “It was long, but the chief inspector said I should make a shorter list of older men, men over seventy-five. That list’s not so long. And-”

“And you have this list?” Sasha said, trying to avoid Maya’s penetrating, questioning eyes.

“I just said I had the list,” Zelach said with irritation. “I want to go home now.”

“Leave the list on my desk. I’ll be right there.”

“But-” Zelach began as Sasha hung up the phone.

“Emergency,” he said apologetically. “I have to get back to the office.”

“Now?” asked Lydia, picking at the crumbs of salmon. “It can’t wait till morning?”

It could certainly wait till morning, but Sasha wanted to get out, to control himself.

“No, it’s an emergency, a murder.”

He moved to Maya, giving her a quick kiss, and started to turn away, but she stood up and grabbed his sleeve.

“What?” he began.

“Whatever it is,” she whispered, “try not to worry. Are you sick?”

“No,” he said, sighing.

“Are you having trouble in your work?”

“A bit,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “But it will pass.”

“Touch the baby,” she said, taking his hand. He touched her stomach. “Everything will be fine.”

And, he thought, waving to his mother, perhaps it would.

To Rostnikov, the apartment building on Balaklava Prospekt looked that day like a child’s gray building block. He had purchased a set of gray plastic blocks for Josef when his son was about seven, and Josef had rearranged his blocks into imaginative structures that he named “the typewriter without keys,” “the radio with no sound,” “the refrigerator with no doors,” “the book with no pages,” and “the ice cream van without wheels.” This, thought Rostnikov, is the apartment without a mouth. It was a thought that depressed him as he slowly climbed the three flights of stairs toward the apartment of Sofiya and Lev Savitskaya. It depressed him because his own apartment on Krasikov Street was so much like it.

Going there was a risk, a slight risk, but a risk nonetheless. He had been officially ordered off the case. Were he to be caught, he could, would, simply say that he was informing those involved, the survivors of the victim, that the investigation would continue under another investigator when time permitted. He would argue, explain, that he was tying up loose ends to keep concerned citizens from lodging protests. The argument would be an absurd one. No one would pay attention to a protest from a distraught Jew whose old father had been murdered, but what could they do to Rostnikov? Take his job? If they wanted to dismiss him from his work, they would simply do it. Rostnikov had no illusions. He would continue to work as long as he continued to have a function that no one else could fulfill.

He ground his teeth as he arrived at the third floor and reached down to rub his complaining left leg. He had stopped home briefly to change into his other suit and to lay out his torn jacket neatly with a note to Sarah asking her please to repair it. The note had been carefully worded, brief but examined, to ensure that no word or phrase could give offense. Sarah’s disappointment at their failure to get out of the Soviet Union had been great. At first she had seemed to accept it as inevitable. She took it like a Russian, but as the days passed and she became aware that an occasional KGB man would inquire about her at her work or she thought about the consequences of their failure to obtain permission to emigrate, consequences more for their son Josef than for themselves, she had begun to brood. The brooding got worse when she was dismissed without reason from her job at the music shop. Brooding didn’t become her. She was normally cheerful, open, supportive. Brooding was Porfiry Petrovich’s specialty. A small apartment could not sustain two brooders without the possibility of explosion.

Rostnikov had not called ahead that he was coming. There was no one to call. The Savitskayas had no telephone. Few Russians had telephones. The latest estimate was that in the entire Soviet Union there were no more than 20 million phones compared to more than 140 million in the United States. It was, therefore, a calculated risk to come to the Savitskaya apartment. The woman was a schoolteacher and the boy a student. They might well be home late in the afternoon. It had also struck Rostnikov that Sofiya Savitskaya was not the most social of citizens. As it was, he was proved right. He knocked once, solidly, on the apartment door and was greeted by a dreamy “Who is there?”

“Inspector Rostnikov,” he said, and waited while she came to the door and opened it just enough to see him, a pointless protection, since he could simply push it open.

“What?” she said, one brown eye showing, puzzled and frightened, through the crack.

“I would like to come in and talk,” he said. “What I have to say need not be shared by the neighbors.”

She hesitated and then opened the door for him to enter. She waited till he was all the way in before closing the door. The apartment was hot, moist and hot, in spite of the open window. There was no draft, no opening for the breeze, should one arise, to seek out and enter.

She stood near the door, and he could see over her right shoulder the space from which the photo had been taken. There was something of the fragile bird about the woman that touched Rostnikov, though she was not thin. In fact, she seemed a bemused, disheveled, slightly younger version of his own Sarah, but that might simply be the cautious Jewishness of both women. There was no clear physical characteristic that marked Soviet Jews from other Russians. But there was a look nurtured by hundreds of years of wariness in an always-hostile culture.

“I would like a drink of water,” he said gently.

“A drink of water,” she repeated, as if no command could be acted upon unless programmed through her own voice. She moved, limped, to the small sink, turned on the faucet, and filled a glass for him. Instead of advancing to give it to him, she stood at the sink, holding it out. Rostnikov nodded solemnly and walked over to take it.

She was not pretty, he decided, looking at her as he drank, but there was that air of Cassandra, a distance, a sense that she was listening to voices on another plane. Rostnikov admitted that there was something intriguing about that, something that attracted him. Her air suggested madness, and madness suggested a vision he could not imagine, a fragile creative power that needed protection.

He drank the water and handed the glass back to her before he spoke.

“We have made some progress,” he said.

She looked at him as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

“Progress in finding the killers of your father,” he explained.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, looking directly at him and making it quite clear that it didn’t matter to her. “All I want is the photograph and the candlestick. Lev and I have very little to remember.”

“When we catch the killers, we will have the candlestick. The killers do not have the photograph, however. We took that, as you may recall. And we will return it shortly.

“I have some names I want to say to you, names of the people who we think were in the photograph. I will say them, and you tell me if your father ever mentioned them, what he said. Can we do that?”

She didn’t answer.

“And can we sit?”

She sat at one of the three wooden chairs at the small kitchen table, and he sat across from her. He considered asking for another glass of water just to keep his hands busy. Most Russians smoked. It was a habit Rostnikov’ had never considered.

“Mikhail Posniky, Lev Ostrovsky, Shmuel Prensky,” he said. “I thought, perhaps, your brother Lev might be named for Ostrovsky, who was one of the men in the photograph.”

“Never,” she said without emotion.

“Your parents would never name-”

“Lev was named for my grandfather. But Mikhail Posniky-I heard that name. My father knew him, went to America with him. I think he died.”

“And Shmuel Prensky?”

“The magic snake,” she answered, looking down at her hands. “The poison snake of gold. To say his name is like saying the name of the Lord. It is forbidden.”

“Your father said this?”

“In the dark, once or twice. At night. To my mother when she lived. Inspector, have you ever thought that being alive is very difficult?”

“I have thought this, yes.”

“And?”

“And I eat my borscht, lift my weights, read my books, do my work.”

“Do you have a wife and children?”

“A wife, a son, a grown son.”

“You said your wife is Jewish. You said that the day my father was killed. Was it a lie?”

Their eyes met and Rostnikov smiled. “It was no lie.”

“Shmuel Prensky is Jewish,” she said almost to herself.

“So were all the men in the photograph,” Rostnikov said in return, wanting to reach out and pat the nervous hand of the woman as it rested on the hard wood table. But he did not reach out.

She shrugged, dismissing the thought.

“Where is your brother?”

“At the home of a friend,” she said. “He grew tired of all the police. All the questions.”

“All the- You mean more policemen came to talk to you since I-since your father’s death?”

Her head was shaking in confirmation.

“They came, asked these same questions. Came again. We can’t move. Can’t hide. We can only sit and answer. In life, no one ever came to see father. Now that he is dead, he has many visitors. Do you think it is hot in here?”

“It is hot,” Rostnikov agreed. “I must go.”

He could tell her now that the investigation was closed. It wasn’t too late. What could she do? Could she cry, wail? This was a woman with dreaded dreams who wanted her candlestick, her photograph, and a reason for insanity.

Rostnikov stood up with the help of the table, because, as usual, his leg had begun to stiffen. Sofiya watched and, he noticed, rubbed her own crippled leg. As he moved to the door, she rose, took a step toward him, and looked up at his face with a question. He opened his arms, and she put her head on his chest. He held her, patted her head, and waited for her to weep. He felt her cheek against his shoulder, her breasts against his chest, and wondered how long it had been since anyone had held and comforted Sofiya Savitskaya. He wondered, in fact, if she had ever been held and comforted, and inside himself he wept for her.

They stood that way for several minutes, and she was so silent that Rostnikov thought she might have fallen asleep. He could feel her breathing against him.

“I must go,” he said gently, but she didn’t move back. He took her arms and held her a few inches away as he repeated, “I must go,” and then he sat her in the kitchen chair. Her eyes were closed, and her shoulders remained close together as if she had been hypnotized.

“I will come back when I know more,” he promised, going to the door. The woman did not move. He went out and closed the door noiselessly behind him. Then he paused to listen. If she cried, he might go back, invite her for dinner, stay with her and tell his life story, spin a tale about Isola in America, about Ed McBain’s world of police who caught criminals and knew nothing of politics, of police who were supported by their system, policemen named Carella, Meyer, Kling, and Brown, of policemen in a nightmare world but one in which they could comfort each other and those they encountered who were the victims of the madness.

Rostnikov went home. He wondered when he looked up at the evening sun if Sofiya Savitskaya would remain in that chair, her shoulders together, her eyes closed, until a prince came who would break the spell. Rostnikov felt the grit and sweat under his rapidly wilting collar and knew he was no prince. He was, at best, a comic knight or a guardian of the secret, but he was no prince.

He almost wandered into a hole in the street clearly marked with a sign indicating remont, or repair, and he put off going home by entering a bakery where the line to find out the price was reasonably short. He got the price and then went to the line to pay the cashier. Ten minutes later he had gone through the third line, the one to pick up the bread, and was on his way home.

“Let’s go to a movie,” he growled when he finally returned to his apartment and saw Sarah, her red hair tied back, her face solemn, her dress dark, placing food on the table.

She stopped, looked at him with her hands on her hips, and cocked her head to one side, which reminded him of the way she had looked one afternoon in 1962 when he had teased her about going on a vacation. He remembered that it was 1962, because he had just finished the investigation of the murder of the three shoe-store clerks on Lenin Prospekt, and he had been feeling wonderful.

“The Mir has a French movie about Napoleon and Josephine,” she said, testing him, for she knew that Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov’s taste went to action films and comedies.

“The Mir sounds perfect,” he said, putting his bread on the table.

“Maybe, we could find-” Sarah began, ready to concede some ground.

“The Mir it shall be,” he said. “We will eat after I lift my iron babies. I will wash, and we will lose ourselves in decadent history and French romanticism. You smile? Does that mean we shall hold hands and kiss in the darkness like children?”

“You were never a child, Porfiry Petrovich,” she said, checking something cooking that smelled sweet and indefinable to Rostnikov, who had begun to remove his clothes and prepare himself for his beloved weights. It would, he decided, be a perfect night. He would merge with the weights, sweat upon his own sweat, exhaust himself, and eat. He would eat as if he were in a terrible contest in which he had to extract all taste and savor all odors to win. Then he would go with Sarah to the French movie and love it, talk about it, imagine himself Napoleon. For one night he would not be in Moscow. One night. That was all he could do, and deep down he thought that was all he really wanted to do.