nutritious part of your diet. This intestine. Look. Diseased?' he asked.
'Impossible to determine without close examination,' Karpo responded.
Kostnitsov handed the fleshy piece of intestine to Karpo, who took it in his palm and turned it over.
'Discoloration,' said Karpo. 'Diminution of blood supply. Possibly disease, possibly poison, possibly-'
'Drug,' Kostnitsov said, taking his prize back and placing it gently in a white china teacup balanced precariously on top of a pile of thick books towering up from the floor. Dangerously close to the books danced the single flame of a Bunsen burner.
'You got that from the body of the young woman, Carla Wasboniak?''
Kostnitsov moved around his cluttered laboratory tables to his even more cluttered desk and lifted a sheet of paper, which he scanned and put back before making his way back around the tables to Karpo, who waited patiently.
'You want some coffee, tea?' asked Kostnitsov.
'No, thank you, Comrade,' said Karpo.
'Why can't they send you down here all the time?' Kostnitsov complained, reaching for the teacup that contained the piece of Carla's intestines and then realizing only at the last instant, as he put it to his lips, that it was not the cup containing tea.
He put the cup down and continued. 'Tkach is a child. He poses, and his mind is always somewhere else. That sack Zelach is worthless. Rostnikov, now Rostnikov is not bad, but he has no love of the tangible. The fact is a means, not, as it is to you and me, an end. You understand? '' 'I believe so,' said Karpo, whose pulsing head told him that precious time was passing. He could, however, do nothing but play out the scene with Kostnitsov or risk losing the man's cooperation. Not even the threat of death could make this man do or say what he did not wish to do or say. Kostnitsov found his teacup and held its charred ceramic bottom over the flame of a Bunsen burner.
'I'll tell you about the bullets first,' said Kostnitsov, looking at Karpo. 'The ones you brought in.'
Karpo said nothing.
' 'They came from an interesting weapon, West German, adjustable for rapid fire or single action,' said Kostnitsov, tasting his tea and deciding that the temperature was acceptable. 'The same weapon was used to kill the businessman two weeks ago. German. Special forces, government controlled, but they get out.
A Walther RA 2000, but you know that, don't you?' ' 'Yes,'' said Karpo.
'Yes. Doesn't matter. The weapon is outside my area of primary concern. The woman died of trauma suffered an instant after contact with the blue-enamel surface of the car she hit. Would you like to know the precise cause of death, the damage to organs from the trauma of impact?'
'If it might be relevant to my investigation,' said Karpo. There was no denying it now. The migraine was coming. He would have to work through it. There was no time for retreat to the cool darkness of his small room.
'It is not,' said Kostnitsov, tilting his head to the side again, examining Karpo as they spoke and he drank. 'However, it may be relevant that the young lady would have been dead in a matter of weeks even had she not been thrown, for she was thrown, unless she leaped up and backward through the window.''
Kostnitsov juggled his teacup as he turned around and demonstrated the turn. His sloped shoulders lifted, and he went up on his toes like an egg attempting to perform ballet.
'Glass in the shoulders, back of the neck, scalp,' he explained.
' 'She would have been dead in a matter of weeks,'' Karpo reminded him.
'Ah,' Kostnitsov replied, finishing his tea and putting the cup down next to the one containing the intestine, which he now picked up again. ' 'Cocaine with strychnine. Judging from the layers of both substances in the intestines, she had been ingesting increasingly high levels of cocaine mixed with strychnine for several weeks. Even if she took no more, there is enough throughout her body to cause death in two to three weeks. Similar cases, almost undiscovered, took place last year in Paris. Both victims were high-ranking foreign service officers. French Journal of Pathology, spring issue last year, had an article.'
'Conjecture?' Karpo said as the pulsing on the right side of his head began in earnest. Recently, the headaches had begun to come more frequently and without the warning odors and occasional flashes of light he had experienced since childhood. Now the headaches were suddenly there, without warning, as if his brain were independent, playing a new game with him.
'…an American association because of the weapon and the drug,' Kostnitsov was saying as he now rummaged through one of the drawers of a laboratory table against a wall.
'Please repeat that,' Karpo said.
Kostnitsov returned and held out a glass pill bottle containing six blue capsules with yellow dots. The capsules were cushioned by a small wad of cotton on the bottom of the bottle.
'Take one,' he said. 'That's all I have now. I'll try to get more, but who knows when. Got them from the pocket of a Canadian vacationer who was killed by a drunken cabdriver. Wasted three of them discovering what they were.' ' 'What are they?'' 'Something,' said Kostnitsov, 'that will control your migraine headache so you can function while you do whatever your headache wishes to prevent you from doing.'
Karpo looked at the bottle.
A wave of nausea curdled up from his stomach. He opened the bottle, shook out two capsules, and downed them with a gulp. Kostnitsov watched Karpo. The pain did not stop, at least not immediately. The two of them stood for perhaps a minute. First, Karpo's stomach relaxed, and then the throbbing in his head slowed like a steam locomotive coming to a gradual stop.
'I have no more time for this, Inspector,' said Kostnitsov, moving back to his desk and searching for something under a mound of coffee-stained journals and papers.
Karpo moved to the door to leave and was taken by an impulse that he did not fully comprehend.
'I will be leaving Moscow for a vacation tomorrow night,' Karpo said, hand on the door, resisting the urge to touch his temples. 'Perhaps when I return you can join me for lunch.'
'Lunch? Lunch? What day?' asked Kostnitsov without looking up from the sheet of paper he was examining.
'At your convenience,' said Karpo, who, in his forty-two years, had never issued an invitation to a meal to anyone.
''Tuesdays are best,' casually answered Kostnitsov, who had never, since his mother's death twenty years ago, been asked to join anyone for any meal.
Karpo left.
SIX
The pear-shaped KGB agent with the bald head was Misha Ivanov.
Once it had been made clear that he could not get away with the pretense that he was simply a carpenter on vacation, he had calmly volunteered the information to Rostnikov, who had not looked directly at the man.
Instead, Rostnikov's eyes were on the concertina lady and her captive tourist.
Occasionally, Rostnikov would glance at Sarah and the two Americans. The American policeman with the name that sounded Irish or Scotch appeared to be absorbed in the conversation of the two women, but Rostnikov knew his attention was really on him and the bald man.
'You are from Moscow?' asked Rostnikov.
'Yes,' said Misha Ivanov, deciding to attack a soggy tart of unknown berries before him.
'I've never seen you.'
'Transferred from Odessa two months ago,'' the man said.
'You are watching me,' said Rostnikov.
'Do you wish confirmation? If so, I am unable to give it,' said the man.
'The food is not good here,' Rostnikov said, looking at the tart.
Misha Ivanov shrugged and kept eating.
'Did you know Georgi Vasilievich?'
'By reputation,' said Ivanov. 'I saw him with you on several occasions during the past week and obtained
