entered an apartment building, took out a key, and opened the inner wooden door.
Karpo found a dark door, a closed shop, and stood back, watching the windows of the apartment building. His eyes did not blink. They took in the facade, and then a light went on in one of the darkened windows six floors above. He turned his head toward the light, counted the floors without looking at them, decided which apartment she had entered, and then stood erect, determined, no matter how long he would have to stand here, no matter how many nights, not to think until the moment came to act.
He did not have long to wait.
Slightly less than five minutes after he arrived in front of the building near Smolenskaya Square, the window he was watching exploded, showering the dark street with glass and releasing a blast of screaming music. Above the blare came a choking cry as Carla plummeted naked toward the street, her red hair billowing out, catching the light from the broken window behind her.
Karpo could see her frightened face as she fell. For an instant he was even sure that her eyes made contact with his, pleading for help he could not give. And then her knee hit a parked car, her hands reached out to grab something, to stop what could not be stopped. Her breasts quivered as she spun over completely like an awkward gymnast. Then she struck the street and was no longer beautiful or alive.
Karpo looked up at the shattered window as he stepped into the street. Framed by jagged edges of glass, backed by the blasting voice of a woman singing something in English and the sound of a screeching electric guitar, stood a figure in dark leather, a grinning figure with a spike growing out of its head.
TWO
Porfiry petrovich rostnikov was tired. he had, for the first time in twenty years, done nothing for eight days, and each day he had grown more weary as he fell into a routine. Up at seven, bread, coffee with Sarah, if she was up, a stroll to the beach, if his leg was not too stiff from the sea air, and several hours of watching those bathers who were willing to ignore the warnings about possible pollution in the Black Sea. On the beach, when he was not watching the bathers, he read one of the seven books he had brought with him from Moscow and paid unconscious attention to any warnings or demands his left leg might issue.
Rostnikov's leg was not to be trusted. It had been injured when Rostnikov, a fifteen-year-old boy fighting the Germans outside of Rostov, had encountered a tank, which he succeeded in destroying. He had come back from the war, become a policeman, married, and had a son whom, in a moment of long-regretted zeal, he and his wife had named Iosef, in honor of Stalin. He had worked his way into the Procurator General's Office, only to be transferred on 'temporary but open-ended duty' at the age of fifty-five to the MVD-the police, uniformed and ununiformed, who direct traffic, face the public, maintain order, and are the front line of defense against crime. It had been a clear demotion for his too-frequent clashes with the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Besopasnosti, the State Security Agency, the KGB, clashes that were inevitable because the KGB had the power to investigate any crime that posed a threat to national security or the economy and the KGB interpreted its powers broadly.
For more than a year, Rostnikov and his closest associates had been on the staff of Colonel Snitkonoy, the Gray Wolfhound. The responsibilities of the colonel's staff were largely ceremonial, but boundaries between the branches were so thinly drawn that ceremony frequently became substance if an individual investigator so desired.
After watching the bathers and reading for a half hour or so- he was almost through a John Lutz novel about a woman in New York who takes in a murderous roommate-Rostnikov would rise, get the circulation going again in his leg, and then read some more. He had discovered a pattern among the bathers at the crowded, rocky beach. Early morning belonged to the serious bathers, who sought the invigorating confrontation of the cold Black Sea water. Theirs was a ritual to be taken seriously, and they certainly did not look as if they enjoyed themselves.
Then came the short-time vacationers and families, who felt obligated to bring their blankets down and join the crowds on the long, narrow shale beaches. Few of them stayed in the water long. They wanted only to say that they had entered and enjoyed the sea. Many of them were fat. Rostnikov himself, known to colleagues as 'the Washtub,' was solid and compact and heavy, the legacy of his parents and the leg that allowed him little movement. But his devotion to lifting weights had kept him from looking like the nearby vacationers, who seemed not in the least embarrassed to show their bellies over brief swimsuits.
In the very late afternoon and early evening, when the sun was no longer high and after Rostnikov was gone, the beach would belong to younger bodies, and occasionally there would be real laughter. Rostnikov had planned to spend more time with his wife on the beach in the early evening, but Sarah, who was still recovering from rather delicate brain surgery, did not yet have the energy for a late-day excursion after her necessary afternoon visits to the Oreanda sanitarium.
Just before noon each day, Rostnikov would take the slow walk back for a modest lunch with Sarah at the Lermontov Hotel, after which they would take the short bus ride to the sanitarium, where Sarah would receive her treatments while Rostnikov used the weights in the small physical therapy room. Then back to the hotel, where the attentive Anton, one of the hotel waiters who had taken them under his wing, would stop by to ask if they had a good day or needed anything.
Following a brief or lengthy rest, depending on which Sarah needed, they would eat in the dining room at their usual table, and Rostnikov would practice his English on the American tourists, most of whom grumbled about the poor accommodations, the poor service, and the pollution of the sea and who only reluctantly admitted to an appreciation of the area's beauty. And then, about an hour or two before sunset, as Sarah and Rostnikov sat on their wooden folding chairs, looking out at the sea from the ridge next to the Lermontov Hotel, Georgi Vasilievich would show up, gaunt, slow, sadly smiling.
Rostnikov and Sarah had encountered Vasilievich at the sanitarium on their first day in Yalta. Rostnikov and Vasilievich had met each other many times over the years when Rostnikov was an inspector with the Procurator General's Office and Vasilievich a senior investigator in the intelligence directorate. Vasilievich had, in his younger days, served undercover in USSR embassies in Paris, Bangkok, and Istanbul. By 1972, he had returned for permanent duty inside the Soviet Union on assignments related to possible foreign agents operating in Moscow.
Since Rostnikov's demotion to MVD ceremonial staff, he had not run into Vasilievich, and at first he had not recognized the obviously ill man in the corridor, but Vasilievich had recognized him.
'Porfiry Petrovich,' he had said, shaking his head and holding out his hand American style. They had never been intimate, had never been close enough for a friendly hug, though Porfiry Petrovich had felt the urge when he finally recognized the man who had in the few years since he had last seen him moved uncomfortably into old age. 'What's wrong? Why are you here? The old leg wound?'
'No,' Porfiry Petrovich had said, not wanting to explain, to open a dialogue with Vasilievich, who was a notorious busybody. He was also, Rostnikov knew, one of the most tenacious and valued investigators in the GRU.
'It's me,' Sarah had said. 'I had an operation. Brain growth.'
A look of pain had crossed Vasilievich's face; whether from Sarah's news or his own malady was not clear.
'I'm fine now,' Sarah had said. That was not quite true, Rostnikov had thought.
Her red hair had grown back, but she had lost weight, weight she had trouble regaining, and her cheeks were not as pink as before, though he hoped the Yalta sun would help.
'My wife died a few years ago,' Vasilievich had said, looking beyond them as if he could see her ghost.
'I'm sorry,' Sarah had said.
Vasilievich had shrugged.
'I'm here because I was ordered to come,' he had said, with an enormous resigned sigh. 'Order directly from General Pluskat. Heart checkup. Emphysema. Fifty years of smoking, but I feel no worse than I have for a decade, and, Porfiry Petrovich, I tell you I am bored here. I need my work, not memories and regrets.'
Porfiry Petrovich had politely invited Georgi Vasilievich to visit them at the hotel. Neither Sarah nor he had expected Vasilievich to come, and Rostnikov had secretly hoped he
would not accept the invitation, for Vasilievich was walking gloom and horror stories.
