The Dog Who Bit a Policeman

“I know,” Anna said.

“How would you?” asked Elena, standing next to Iosef. “I didn’t know he would ask. I didn’t know I would say yes.”

“I knew,” said Anna, rummaging for a tea she might find drink-able.

“You approve?” asked Elena.

“I approve,” said Anna, making a choice of teas, the least of the four evils on the shelf.

“When?”

“We haven’t discussed that,” said Iosef.

“No,” said Anna, pushing the tea she had selected back in the narrow cupboard over the sink.

“No?” asked Elena.

“Tonight I take you both out for dinner,” she said. “An old woman with a bad heart, a young woman with a bad arm, and a man who has made a fool of himself. The perfect trio for celebrat-ing. I still have friends, even a friend or two with a restaurant.”

And they had celebrated at an Uzbekistani restaurant where Anna knew the owner, a former cabinet minister who had once needed the help of the stern procurator.

They had eaten well- tkhum-duma, boiled egg inside a fried meat patty; mastava, a rice soup with chopped meat; maniar, a strong broth with ground meat, egg, and bits of rolled-out dough; a shashlik mar-inated and broiled over hot coals. They had laughed, though Elena was in pain from time to time, and they had made some prelimi-nary plans. She had said that she would like to wait a few months before a wedding, to be sure they had not been carried away by a romantic moment. This seemed reasonable to Iosef.

By the time he got to his room, it was too late to call his parents.

Iosef ’s stomach was contentedly full. That, and Elena’s acceptance of him, made it just a bit easier to face the embarrassment at Petrovka in the morning.

Iosef ’s room had theater posters on each of the four walls, bright theater posters except for the one for the self-indulgent play Iosef had written and starred in. That poster held a place of prominence to remind him that he was not a playwright. He had a two-cushion, sturdy yellow sofa with black trim, two chairs, a worn but still colorful handmade Armenian rug that covered most of the floor, and a desk in one corner. The couch opened into a bed in which Iosef slept. There were three bright floor lamps, one black-painted steel, one a mock Tiffany, and the third a brass monstros-ity from the 1950s. The room was bright. Next to the desk was a small table on which the television sat. The rest of the wall space on all four walls was filled by floor-to-ceiling bookcases he had made himself.

He supposed that after he and Elena were married, this is where they would live.

It could have been worse. He had his own toilet and shower behind the door off the kitchen area. The sink, toilet, and shower functioned perfectly since Porfiry Petrovich had worked on them.

Tomorrow, when he was the object of jokes at Petrovka, he would concentrate on thoughts of his and Elena’s future. There was no doubt that word of his calling out a squad to arrest an innocent construction worker would be all over the building, and that there were some who would make lame jokes about the event.

Think of Elena, he told himself, removing the pillows from the couch and opening it into a bed. Think about telling your father and mother. He finished making the bed, propped up his pillows, and turned on the television. There was nothing worth watching.

He turned it off and then turned off the lights.

Tomorrow he would ask Elena if she had changed her mind, tell her that he would understand. He was certain she would not change her mind and that she had already taken plenty of time to decide.

Overall, thought Iosef, it had been a good day.

He lay back in his bed and fell asleep almost instantly.

Emil Karpo sat at the desk in his cell-like room, entering new data in his black book on the new Mafias. Even though he had a computer, Karpo did not fully trust it. He had heard tales of computers losing data, breaking down, crashing in bad weather. He would enter the data on the computer tomorrow night.

Karpo was fully dressed, scrubbed clean with rough soap, teeth brushed, face shaved.

He wrote his last word for the night, closed the book, and turned to look at the painting of Mathilde Verson on the wall.

Emil Karpo had only one bright image in his dark room, the painting of Mathilde, the reminder of a great failure.

Emil Karpo needed the smiling image of Mathilde on the wall to remind him that she had been real. Her red hair was flowing, her cheeks were white. Karpo’s memory held the black-and-white images of hundreds of criminals, but they were flat, dead images.

He turned away from the painting, rose, removed all his clothes, and hung them neatly in his closet. Everything in the closet with the exception of the few things Mathilde had bought for him were black. He closed the closet door and moved naked to the cot. Before he turned off his single light next to the cot, he tried to imagine Raisa Munyakinova in her holding cell. He could not. He simply knew she was there.

She had done no more than he had considered. Mathilde had been gunned down on the street between two Mafias. Raisa’s son had been torn by bullets. But Karpo was certain he would not be able to kill as she had. His belief in Communism was gone.

Mathilde was gone. All he had was the daily solace of doing his job, a job that would never end.

He turned off the light.

Chapter Fourteen

It was raining, finally it was raining, a light but insistent morning rain.

The Yak stood at the window of his office, hands clasped behind him, looking into the Petrovka courtyard below.

“You will turn over all of your notes on the dogfights, the killings, and the foreigners you have arrested to me,” said the Yak.

“This is now an international issue and I shall present it to the proper agencies of investigation. You have done a good job, as usual, Chief Inspector Rostnikov.”

Rostnikov was seated behind the dark conference table in his usual seat. He was slowly drawing pictures of birds in flight. He imagined that one of them was Peter Nimitsov.

“As for the Pleshkov investigation,” Yaklovev said, his back still turned, “there are some irregularities, but the case is closed. Your son has done an excellent job. Please prevail on him to go on quietly to his next assignment. Tell him that his mistake yesterday in calling out the special squad is of no consequence.”

“I will,” said Rostnikov. “He will find the ham thief.”

“Finally,” the Yak said, turning to face the man whose eyes and pencil were fixed on the notebook before him. “The Mafia killings.

They continue. They grow worse. But you have taken into custody someone who committed some of the murders. We can inform the media, give her name.”

“A mistake,” said Rostnikov without raising his eyes.

“Mistake? I’ve read the report from you and Emil Karpo. What is the mistake?”

“She didn’t do it,” said Rostnikov. “Mistakes can be made, as they clearly were in the case of the prominent Yevgeny Pleshkov.”

Silence except for the rain hitting the window.

“I see,” said the Yak. “All right. The woman is of no consequence to me. What do you intend to do to insure that she. .?”

“She has relatives in Odessa,” said Rostnikov, “but I don’t think she will leave the grave of her child.”

“Would she go to Odessa if the body of her son were moved with her and a reasonably impressive headstone placed over his grave?” asked the Yak.

“Perhaps, yes, I think so. I will have to ask her.”