policeman.
Karpo stepped past a headless dressmaker's bust of a portly woman, avoided a cardboard box full of bottles on the floor, squeezed by a table piled high with books and metal pieces that looked as if they came from inside some mechanical children's toy.
A man in a blue smock with his back to the door leaned over a table in the corner of the windowless room. The man's hands rose delicately, as if he were engaged in a surgical operation or were conducting a particularly difficult piece by Stravinsky.
'I'm busy, Inspector,' Paulinin cried over the whirring sound with a wave of his hand, his back still turned.
Karpo took a step closer and stood patiently, silently, in front of Paulinin's desk, the top of which was covered by books and the miscellany of past investigations. The set of teeth that had been on the desk the last time Karpo had visited the laboratory was still there, grinning atop a small abacus stained with dried blood.
'Inspector Karpo,' Paulinin sighed, his back still turned. 'I'm… ah, ha. There.' The whirring sound stopped.
With a triumphant look on his face, Paulinin, a bespectacled, nearsighted monkey with an oversized head topped by wild gray-black hair, turned to face his visitor for the first time. In his hand he held something that looked to Karpo like a human heart. Behind Paulinin, on the table, was a metal tray filled with blood and a small white machine with a glass bowl attached to it.
'A centrifuge didn't — work,' Paulinin said, looking around for someplace to put the organ in his hand. 'A three-hundred-ruble centrifuge.'
His glasses were in danger of falling off the end of his nose, but Paulinin had no free hand with which to adjust them. He tried to push the glasses back with his shoulder and failed.
'And do you know what worked?' he asked, balancing the heart hi one hand and grabbing a plastic bucket from the floor.
'No,' said Karpo.
'That,' Paulinin said in triumph, nodding back at the metal-and-glass object on the laboratory table. The plastic bucket contained something that looked like coffee grounds. Paulinin dumped them into the metal tray on the table and just managed to drop the heart into the now-empty plastic bucket.
'Paulinin' Karpo began, but the scientist held up a hand to stop him as he pushed his glasses back on his nose, which brought a smile to his simian face and a streak of blood to his forehead.
'Do you know what that is?' he asked Karpo, glancing at him and then moving to the small sink in the corner of the room. 'Huh?'
'No,' said Karpo patiently.
Paulinin pushed some rubber tubes and a glass beaker out of the way and turned on the water. As he washed, he looked back at Karpo and said, 'A food processor. The French and Americans use them for chopping food into pieces so small that they turn to paste almost. You can put anything except solid mineral products in it. Well, almost anything.'
He turned off the water and faced Karpo as he dried his hands on his smock.
'I got it from a KGB man named… a KGB man I've done some things for,' Paulinin whispered, though his laboratory was almost certainly not wired and the door was soundproof.
'Interesting,' said Karpo at near-attention, waiting.
'They were through with this heart,' Paulinin said, biting his lower lip and looking down at the plastic bucket affectionately. 'Through with it. Case closed. Autopsy finished. X ray failed to show anything. Natural death. They gave me the heart. And do you know what I found in that heart? Do you know what that French food processor and I found in that heart?'
'I do not know, Comrade,' said Karpo.
'Gold, gold, gold. Tiny fragments of gold,' Paulinin said with a smile on his bloody face as he absently reached up to push down his hair. 'Someone injected gold into his bloodstream. It blocked his vessels. A man with a heart condition. Gold. Can you imagine?'
'I' Karpo began.
'And you want to know what I'm going to do with this information?' Paulinin asked, moving behind his desk and clapping his hands together as he sat.
'No,' said Karpo.
'Nothing,' said Paulinin, blowing out air. 'I think our political people may know something about this. The old Cheka eliminated two politicals hi a similar manner for symbolic reasons in 1930. And then various murders have been committed involving the introduction of small particles of metal orally or through an orifice. One particularly interesting case in Syria last year involved the introduction of a catheter into… But I sense a certain disinterest in you, Comrade Emil. So, if the KGB finds out I have the heart, they may ask why and wonder what I found. I will tell them I used it for experiments on tissue, that I discovered nothing, that I chopped the pieces up and flushed them, which is what I will do. I don't want certain people with a strained sense of humor to inject gold into my urinary system so that some morning I would wake up pissing away hundreds of rubles in gold.'
Paulinin looked up at Karpo expectantly.
'I made a joke, Comrade Inspector,' Paulinin said.
'I know,' replied Karpo.
'Why do I like you, Inspector?'
'I had no idea you did,' said Karpo.
'I really did find gold in mat heart,' said Paulinin softly, turning to look at the food processor. 'Now I've sifted it and have enough gold to pay for a second food processor. Why would anyone kill with gold?'
'I don't know,' said Karpo.
'Aren't you curious?' asked Paulinin, starting to get up, looking over at the bucket, and sitting down again.
'No,' said Karpo.
'What do you want?' Paulinin asked.
Karpo opened the battered briefcase and removed the stack of papers held together by a large spring clip. He found a place on the desk atop a book in a foreign language and placed the stack on it.
'You have a work process report?' Paulinin said, adjusting his glasses and reaching for the papers.
'No,' said Karpo.
'And no 3245 approval?'
'No,' said Karpo. 'The case is not officially mine. Just as the death of the former possessor of that heart is not officially your responsibility.'
'Unlike you, I am always curious,' said Paulinin. 'I am not always temperate, either, or, as you know, I would have more space, more equipment, more responsibility. But am I bitter?'
'Yes,' said Karpo.
'A little, perhaps,' Paulinin agreed. 'What do you want?'
'I have the names of a number of people on these lists with some information about each of them,' Karpo explained. 'Each person should be in the central computer file with more data. I cannot have access to the computer without a case report. In addition, I do not know how to program for the answers I need.'
'And you want me to…?' Paulinin began, reaching up to touch his bloody forehead. He brought his hand down and looked a bit puzzled by the sight of blood on his just-washed hands.
'Put these names into the computer. Ask the questions I tell you to ask. I want to narrow mis list down.'
Paulinin picked up the clipped papers and began to flip through them.
'I recognize these names, most of these names,' said Paulinin, almost to himself. Then he put the pile down and looked at the set of false teeth. With a fresh sigh, he moved the teeth and picked up the abacus. 'How many names?'
'I've got it down to forty-one,' said Karpo. 'Do you want to know why I want this done?'
'No,' said Paulinin. 'What I don't know, I can't tell later. This eccentricity of mine offers protection only as long as I prove to be a creative source of information. You understand?'
'Perfectly,' said Karpo.
