dead end.
“What was the essence of his interview?” he asked.
“The essence. Let me see.” She tapped her even white teeth with a neat fingernail and seemed to be thinking. “He wanted to know if Pierre and I were lovers, if I had ever made any nude films, if we were thinking of bribing or trying to bribe judges. He was not a particularly nice man.”
“Any other details of the interview? Did he seem…”
“Aroused?” she asked.
That was enough. Tkach closed his notebook and looked at her. She looked back. There was certainly intelligence in the brown eyes, intelligence and amusement and something else.
“I haven’t been much help, have I?” she said, rising slowly.
“You’ve told me what was necessary.”
“If you’d like to come back tonight after dinner and ask more questions,” she said, taking a step toward him, “I’ll be right here.”
Now Tkach smiled, and his smile stopped her. The game-playing halted, for she had seen something that told her things had not gone as she had guided them. That smile was quite knowing and much older than the face of the good-looking young detective.
“I have to work tonight,” he said, stepping past her. “But I may have more questions. And perhaps next time you will answer with the truth.”
Without looking at her he crossed the room, opened the door, and stepped into the hall, closing the door behind him. At this point, he had no idea whether or not she had told the truth. He’d had no reason to be suspicious until he gave her the knowing smile he had been working on for four years. He thought of it as the Russian police smile, which says, I know what you are hiding. Tkach didn’t know that it was the smile of all detectives from Tokyo to Calcutta to San Francisco to Moscow. He had seen her play her scene out, then had given her the knowing smile, and for an instant she had broken, showing that there was something more behind those eyes and that lovely facade. He had no idea what she might be hiding or why. He would simply give the information to Rostnikov and let him worry about it.
Meanwhile, Sasha knew of a store that supposedly had received a shipment of coffee. If he was lucky, and if he hurried, he could get there while there was still some left. It would get him home late and cost more than he should really spend, but it would be a welcome treat for Maya and his mother.
The coffee was indeed there. The wait was long, and Sasha arrived home late but quite content at a few minutes after eight, precisely at the moment that the dark-eyed foreigner had put the third and final bomb in place behind the screen in the Zaryadye movie theater in the Hotel Rossyia.
SIX
The thin filament of wire attached to the bottom of the door to Emil Karpo’s apartment was just as he had left it. An intruder, even if he or she located the strand, could not replace it at exactly the right point. No one, Karpo was sure, had ever broken into his apartment. No one, as far as he knew, had any reason to do so, but on the slight chance that it might happen someday, he religiously attached that filament each time he left his room.
Inside the room, Karpo turned on the light over his desk in the corner, removed his notebook from his pocket, and carefully copied his notes as he always did. He put the copied pages into a dark book, made additional notes for cross reference, and shelved the book with forty similar books. There was no such thing as a closed case for Karpo. If a criminal-an enemy of the state-was not caught, the MVD might forget about it, but for Karpo the case would remain active. He had twenty-five such active cases, some dating back sixteen years, and he devoted a specific time each month to each of those cases.
The case of the bookstore skewer took a precise thirty minutes of his time every two weeks. In 1968, on a Tuesday afternoon, in the midst of dozens of people, someone had driven a sharp saberlike object through a minor Party official who was browsing in the Moscow Book House, Dom Knigi. No one had seen the crime done. The following Tuesday, a reasonably well-known poet had been similarly skewered in the philately department of the Moscow Book House. Again, no one saw it happen. Karpo had worked for almost three months on the case, which his colleagues jokingly called the shish-kabob murders. Then he was ordered to go on to other things. But his spare time was his own, and his spare time existed only to serve the state. So, every other Tuesday afternoon, at precisely the time the murders had occurred, Karpo returned to the Moscow Book House, in the faint hope that the killer, who had not struck for almost a dozen years, might show up again. He looked especially hard at people carrying umbrellas or canes or anything that might hide a long, sharp instrument. Such dogged pursuit had, in fact, led eventually to the apprehension of eight criminals who would otherwise have gotten away with their crimes.
When the notebooks were in order, Karpo took a shower and ate a piece of bread and a potato, washing the food down with a large glass of Borzhomi, a mineral water that tasted a bit like iodine. By ten, after an hour of sleep made difficult by the constant ache in his left arm, he fixed the wire on his door and left his apartment. An hour later, about the time Rostnikov and his wife were getting to bed, Karpo emerged from the Novokuznekskaya metro station, walked slowly down the street to a huge Victorian mansion at number 10 Lavrushinsky Pereulok, went around to a small side door in the darkness, and let himself in with a key he’d had made.
Once inside the Tretyakov Gallery, Karpo, having visited the building many times in the daytime, moved softly in the shadows, avoiding the old guards, to a room on the second floor. There the walls were jammed with gilt-framed paintings of various sizes. Sliding around a small marble statue of a man with a spear, Karpo opened the door to a maintenance closet and eased inside. He had done this for the past five nights, knew the room well, and placed himself so that he could see out through a thin space where door and jamb failed to meet. As usual, he would stand there till nearly dawn, watching and waiting.
The building contains the world’s largest collection of Russian paintings, certainly more than five thousand. More than one and a half million visitors each year look at the iconic paintings of Andrei Rublev or the massive nineteenth-century realist paintings of Ilya Repin or the hundreds of photolike social realist paintings done during Stalin’s tenure, such as
A week ago a director of the gallery had discovered that one of the oldest paintings in the collection was missing. This was Karpo’s case, and he had advised the gallery director to say nothing. When another painting, of a different period and in a different room, was found missing two days later, Karpo had begun his closet vigil. If there was a pattern, and the pattern held, eventually the thief would enter this room during the night, and Karpo would be there to catch him. Throughout the night, guards came and went. The room was silent but for the scuttling of something, probably a mouse, just before dawn. One of the guards paused on his rounds for a long drink from a bottle hidden in his jacket, and then light came. There had been no theft, at least not in this room.
Karpo was undiscouraged. He would simply return again tomorrow and the next night and the next, as he returned to the Moscow Book House. He had enough time to slip out unseen, get back to his room, and catch an hour of sleep before returning to the current investigation. Karpo had no great interest in the murder of an American writer, especially one as decadent as Aubrey clearly had been, but it was his duty, and he would work on the case as diligently as he worked on any other.
As Karpo allowed himself to recline on his narrow bed at seven on Friday morning, trying to find a reasonably tolerable position for his arm, Porfiry Rostnikov was entering the huge pale yellow building at 22 Lubyanka Street. The KGB headquarters stands opposite the 36-foot statue of “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, who organized the Cheka for Lenin. The Cheka went through many transformations and is now the KGB, “the sword of the Revolution.” There are white curtains at the windows and shiny brass fittings on the door. Beyond the general offices and interrogation rooms are, as everyone knows, the cells.
The KGB has more than 110,000 members, including many of the most intelligent and highly motivated Russians. It seemed to be Rostnikov’s fortune, however, to deal with but one of that number each time he entered this building. After a ten-minute wait, a stiff-backed man with dark, curly hair led Rostnikov down a corridor and up a short stairway. It was a repeat of his last visit, and Rostnikov did not look forward to it. The guide knocked at the
