the door and knocked. Beyond the door he could hear two voices, one a man’s, the other a woman’s. He could not make out what they were saying. He knocked again, and a voice answered, “Coming.”
It was early in the morning, more than two hours before Irina would discover Aubrey’s body, half an hour before Inspector Rostnikov was due in his office at Petrovka-barely enough time to do what must be done. The door opened.
“Yes?” A thin man in an undershirt stood at the door. His wife, standing behind him, was extremely plump, with her orange hair pinned in an untidy bun.
“I live in the apartment below you,” said Rostnikov, adopting the official voice he used in dealing with those who appeared frightened.
“We are Bulgarian,” the man said.
“I know,” Rostnikov replied.
“I am here for six months for a machine trade exchange,” the man said.
“That’s not important,” replied Rostnikov, shifting the tools in his hand. Both the man and the woman looked down as the tools clanked together.
“You are a policeman,” said the woman.
“Yes.” Rostnikov spoke softly, almost with resignation, trying to give the impression that what he was about to do was regrettable but inevitable.
“What have we done?” said the man, touching his chest and looking at his wife.
“Your toilet,” said Rostnikov.
“I’m what?” said the startled man, stepping back.
“Your toilet is broken,” explained Rostnikov. “It is causing a massive leak in our apartment below. We cannot use our toilet.”
“You cannot use your toilet,” echoed the man dumbly.
“We can,” Rostnikov went on, “but we are not willing to clean up the floor each time we flush.”
“No one told us,” said the woman apologetically, putting a hand to her breast and discovering that her dress was not fully buttoned.
They had not been told, Rostnikov knew, because a decision had been made, in spite of Rostnikov’s threats and pleas to the building manager, a thin Party member named Samsanov, to avoid telling the Bulgarians that their toilet was faulty. Apparently the local political decision was that it would not do to let the Bulgarians see how defective the plumbing was. They might go home and ridicule their Moscow hosts. Rostnikov, in spite of his position with the police, had been told to forget it till the Bulgarians left, but they showed no signs of leaving. So Rostnikov had begun reading plumbing books. For four weeks he read plumbing books. The library was filled with them. There were more books on plumbing than on plastering, cooking, radio and television repairing, automobiles, and crime. He now felt himself capable of repairing whatever the problem might be, if his tools were sufficient and his resolve to defy the local Party decision held firm.
“No one told us,” the man repeated his wife’s word.
“There are reasons,” Rostnikov said mysteriously. “I will repair the problem, and you must promise to tell no one I have done so. It is forbidden for one in my station to do this, but I did not want the problem to get worse and affect you, visitors to our city.”
With this he stepped past them into the replica of his own apartment. The central room, a combination living room-dining room-kitchen, was well furnished, including a small television set. There was a foreign odor, which was not unpleasant but which Rostnikov could not place. To the left of the entrance was the even smaller bedroom. He marched toward it with the Bulgarians behind, mumbling to each other frantically.
“I’ll take no more than a few minutes,” he said, pushing open the door. The window was open, and sunlight was pouring in on the unmade bed. Rostnikov stood before it trying to imagine the unmatched Bulgarians making love. They made little noise during the night. He knew this because his and Sarah’s bedroom was right below theirs. He moved to the bathroom, turned on the light, and removed an oversize pink slip from the toilet seat. The woman, closing in behind him, reaching over to take it from him like a nurse retrieving a scalpel during surgery.
“I’ll not be long. Just leave me alone.”
They backed out, mumbling again in their native language, and Rostnikov went to work. From his pocket he withdrew a long, coiled plumbing snake, unwound it, and began to force it down the toilet. He eased and worked it but struck nothing.
Next, he turned off the water and, with the wrench that he had taken from the confiscated burglar tools in the basement of police headquarters in Petrovka, he removed the pipe behind the toilet seat. When it was removed, he found a cup on the nearby sink, filled it with water, stomped his foot on the floor and poured the water down the pipe. Almost instantly, Sarah in the apartment below pounded on the ceiling with the signal.
“Fitting,” muttered Rostnikov on his hands and knees, peering down into the dark pipe.
“What is?” said the Bulgarian behind him. The man was standing back in the bedroom, unwilling to intrude but equally unwilling to leave this barrel of a man alone.
“There is a loose fitting in the pipe,” Rostnikov explained. “I’ll have to go down to my apartment, unscrew the coupling and pull it up here to fix it. If it’s just a fitting it won’t be difficult. If there is a leak in the pipe, we have a more serious problem.”
Using the sink to steady himself, Rostnikov rose. There was a smile on his lips. He might be a bit late for work, but he would lick this. Triumphs were few in his work and even fewer in the tasks of getting through the day, but this would be a triumph.
The knock at the door jerked him from his near triumph. He turned to face the Bulgarians, who looked at him.
“Answer the door,” he said, stepping into the bedroom. Had someone actually called Samsanov? Did the little man have a spy on the floor? Rostnikov began to think of a lie and decided that his best chance to get through would be to bluff Samsanov, to tell him this was a police matter, that the toilet had to be fixed, that national security was at risk. That, of course, superceded even local Party decisions. The Bulgarian opened the door, and Rostnikov wondered how national security could be involved in fixing a toilet.
“Chief Inspector Rostnikov,” came a familiar voice from the doorway.
“In here,” said the Bulgarian, and Emil Karpo strode into the room to further confound the man and the woman.
The man who strode into the room was about six feet three, lean, and quite hard. Because of his slanted eyes, high cheekbones, tight skin, and expressionless dark face, he had been known in his early police career as the Tatar. But twenty years of fanatical pursuit of enemies of the state had given him the pale look of the obsessed and earned him the more frequent nickname of the Vampire among his colleagues. The name seemed particularly appropriate when a peculiar look crept into Karpo’s eyes and at those moments even those who had worked with him for years avoided him. Only Rostnikov knew that the look was caused by severe migraine headaches, which Karpo refused to admit to. Rostnikov knew quite a lot about his junior colleague. Survival in the Soviet Union often depended on how many secrets you knew and could call upon. Rostnikov watched Karpo with interest, glancing at his left arm, which was stiff and still. Karpo had been shot several months earlier and then had injured the arm again while chasing a petty criminal. He had almost lost the arm that time, but a surgeon who had just had a good meal and a few hours’ sleep had worked harder than usual to save the limb. So the two men shared something- one with a bad leg, the other a bad arm-though they never spoke of their common bond.
“Yes,” said Rostnikov.
“You’re to come to Comrade Timofeyeva’s office. It is urgent. There’s a car downstairs waiting.”
Rostnikov looked at the Bulgarians and back over his shoulder at the toilet.
“Karpo, what do you know of plumbing?”
“I’m a police investigator,” Karpo replied.
“That does not preclude your knowing something,” Rostnikov said.
“You are joking again, Comrade Inspector,” Karpo said expressionlessly.
“Why is it you can recognize a joke, Emil Karpo, but you cannot engage in one?” Rostnikov said, walking past him toward the door.
“It is not functional to engage in jokes,” Karpo said. “There is too much to do. Lenin had no sense of humor either.”
