'I do not believe your suicide would have a productive result.'
Tkach did not answer. He knocked at the door. Karpo moved to the side of the door and motioned Tkach out of the way. Karpo reached over and knocked. Someone stirred
inside, and the door began to open. Tkach held his gun outstretched at eye level, about where the head of an average-sized man might appear.
The door was opened all the way now, and the scrawny doctor who had treated Jerold stood there calmly, paying no attention to the young man holding the gun.
'What do you want?' she said, adjusting her glasses and looking at Karpo without emotion.
'We are the police,' said Karpo.
'I can see that,' she said.
Tkach moved a step closer so that he could not miss.
'This automobile,' said Karpo. 'Is the driver here?'
'The car is mine,' said the woman.
'They aren't here,' said Tkach.
'We are coming in,' said Karpo, and the woman backed away to let them enter.
'Why did they come here?' Tkach asked the woman impatiently. 'Where are they?'
The woman moved ahead of them silently. Karpo moved into the house and said to the woman, 'You have a phone?'
She nodded toward a closed door to the right of the front entrance. Karpo entered, and Sasha Tkach urged the woman into the room after him by pointing with the gun.
They were in the treatment room. It looked clean, ready. Karpo moved to the wastebasket in the corner and looked into it.
'She treated one of them for a wound,' Karpo said. ' 'Bandages, recent blood.''
Karpo saw the phone on an old metal cabinet painted with white enamel and picked it up while Tkach carefully moved to the wastebasket and looked down at its bloody contents.
The woman folded her arms and waited while Karpo made his call, which began with Karpo giving someone the name of the town and the street number of the house in which they stood. It ended with Karpo saying, 'Spasee 'ba,' and turning.
'Her name is Katerina Agulgan,' he said. 'She is a doctor. She owns an automobile, but it is not the one parked in front. Hers is a green Zil. A search for it is now being undertaken with concentration within Moscow.'
'She can tell us where it is,' said Sasha, moving forward to hold the gun to the right temple of the woman, who did not flinch or turn her eyes to~him. Instead, she looked at Karpo, who met her gaze.
'She will not tell you, Sasha,' he said.
'Then I shoot her,' said Sasha, his voice breaking.
'There is nothing to be gained from her death, as there was nothing to be gained from your suicide,' said Karpo.
' 'Something must have a resolution,'' said Sasha. 'Something this day must conclude without confusion, without…'He could not find the word, but the woman did.
'Ambiguity,' she said.
'She will not tell you,' said Karpo, 'because she is the mother of Yakov Krivonos, as the computer told us. Since the man we seek was shot, it was possible that Krivonos would bring him to his mother for treatment. Doctor, you will sit while we search your house and wait. You will sit now, in that chair.'
She moved to the chair and sat.
' 'Sasha,'' he said, ' 'you will please put your weapon away and search this house.''
Tkach put his gun away, looked at the woman, and left the room, closing the door behind him.
'What is wrong with that young man?' the woman asked when Tkach had departed.
'He is brooding, Dr. Agulgan,' answered Karpo. 'I do not know the details, nor are they relevant to your situation.'' 'They are if he shoots me,' she said.
'He will control himself,' Karpo assured her.
'How do you know? He is a brooding Russian.'
'And you are not Russian?'
She shrugged and went silent.
'Your son and the man called Jerold plan to commit murder,' Karpo said, standing erect and facing the seated woman. 'You know that.' ''Your partner planned to murder me a moment ago,'' she said.
'Yes,' said Karpo.
'You want me to help a murderer find my son,' she said.
'I want you to do so, but I do not expect it,' said Karpo.
'What do you expect?' she asked.
'I expect nothing,' he said.
The door opened, and Sasha Tkach came in holding a framed photograph in his hand.
The woman adjusted her glasses and looked at him defiantly, but she did not speak.
'Your son?' Tkach asked.
Karpo moved forward to take the photograph from Tkach, who held it at his side.
Karpo looked down at the framed photograph, at the face of Yakov Krivonos as he had been perhaps ten years earlier.
The woman was sitting erect, her mouth a very thin line drawn tight. Karpo handed her the photograph, which she put gently into her lap.
'The man called Jerold will get your son killed,' Karpo said.
'And if you catch him, you will kill him,' she said. 'I see no difference other than if I tell you where they are I betray my son.'
'We will not kill your son if we can do otherwise,' said Karpo.
The woman tore her eyes from the young man and looked at the ghostly figure before her. Their eyes met again, but this time there was no duel. She clutched the photograph to her chest and whispered, 'I believe you.'
'Do you know where they are?' he asked.
'Yes,' she said. 'I heard them… yes.'
'Will you tell us?'
'Nothing is simple,' she said.
'Nothing is simple,' Karpo repeated, and though Tkach said nothing, he agreed.
Set well back in Soviet Square on Gorky Street stands the Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism- Leninism, which contains more than six thousand manuscripts of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and over thirty thousand documents of Lenin. Party members, politicians, and scholars who come to the building are greeted before they enter by a red granite statue of Lenin dedicated in 1938. On the outer wall of the institute is a panel with paintings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin and the bold inscription 'Forward, to the Victory of Communism.'
In front of Lenin, blocking his view of Gorky Street and the Moscow Soviet of Working People's Deputies, stands a four-story-high statue of Prince Yuri Dolgoruki seated triumphantly upon his horse. The prince is credited with founding Moscow more than eight hundred years ago.
The Moscow Soviet of Working People's Deputies is, as Moscow official buildings go, not terribly impressive. Built originally in 1782 as a one-story residence for the governor-general of Moscow, it was added to and rebuilt before and after the war with the Germans, complete with porticos and a balcony from which Lenin frequently addressed crowds on the street and in Soviet Square. In this building in 1917, the Revolutionary Military Council met and directed the October armed uprising in Moscow. Inside the Moscow Soviet can be found the banner of the city of Moscow. The banner bears two Orders of Lenin, the Gold Star of the Hero City, and the Order of the October Revolution.
Lenin's name is permanently on the roll of deputies of the Moscow Soviet, who, until perestroika, were the Communist party members responsible for running the city's services. Each of the Soviet states has its own Soviet. It is from this one in Moscow that the newly elected officials governed, and it was in Soviet Square, in front of the statue of Prince Yuri Dolgoruki, that Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Soviet, and Mikhail Gorbachev,
