question I must ask myself is: Am I the light that shines or the darkness that cannot be overcome?”
Shortly after seven in the morning Emil Karpo heard the door of the meeting hall open and footsteps move quickly across the floor in his direction.
He had been awake for two hours. His bed was made and in the small kitchen he had found a pot of cold tea and some bread, which he had eaten slowly while he finished his report.
He was reading a book on the Russian Orthodox Church when the door opened. Karpo put the book aside and stood.
“Are you awake, comrade? Tovarish Karpo, are you up?”
Karpo opened the door and found himself facing Misha Gonsk, the MVD officer, in need of a shave, uniform partly buttoned, trying to hold himself together.
“Dead, murder,” said Gonsk, trying to catch his breath.
“Who’s dead?”
“The nun,” said Gonsk, pointing toward the next room as if the body were just beyond the door.
“Sister Nina?” asked Karpo.
“Sister Nina,” Gonsk confirmed. “She … he … her body is … Come.”
“Wait for me in the street,” Karpo said. “I will be there in a moment.”
Gonsk nodded and hurried off. When he was through the outer door and into the street, Emil Karpo stepped to the hook next to the door and reached for his dark coat. He put the coat on and moved across the small room into the cold outer room and crossed to the door to the street. It was only when his hand went out to turn the doorknob that he became aware that he was shaking.
A little past seven that same morning Peotor Merhum, son of Father Vasili Merhum, father of Aleksandr Merhum, husband of Sonia Merhum, keeper of a farm equipment shop, decided to run away.
“Decide” is, perhaps, too strong a word. He fled in mindless panic, fled without packing, fled without eating, fled without leaving a note.
The hardest part about flight was remaining calm as he ventured out into the street. Pulling his coat around his chest and covering his ears with his cap, he stepped into the morning and turned to his right. He encountered no one as he forced himself to walk north from Arkush in the general direction of nowhere in particular. After almost an hour of walking he stopped abruptly, looked up, and realized that this would never do. He would be found walking this road or hiding in an icy barn. Night would come and he would be lost in the woods and never found. Or worse, he would be found frozen, his body nibbled by mice, gnawed by rats, his …
Peotor turned and headed back toward Arkush, moving faster, ordering his mind to come up with a plan. But he could think of sanctuary or survival for only a few seconds. A snatch of a children’s rhyme came to him:
He repeated the rhyme, ordered it to go away, but it would not. It simply returned like a prayer, “Nowhere to go, just staying afloat.”
At the same moment on that day a very large and ugly crow, with black wings and head and a gray body, perched on the window of the house of Father Vasili Merhum. He cawed four times and pecked at something that might have been a seed but turned out to be a small, bright stone. He dropped the stone, cawed again, and looked through the window at the bloody room and the mutilated body of the nun. Just inside the window a small bright object that resembled a human eye shone on top of a torn icon of St. Sebastian.
The bird contemplated the object, tapped the window with his beak, and cocked his head at an angle to get a better look at the ax embedded in the wall.
Once again he cawed four times and was about to caw again when he heard the sound of humans coming through the woods.
The bird turned on the window ledge, flapped its black wings, and rose slowly toward the trees. He caught the wind and soared upward. Before he had cleared the first row of birches, he had forgotten the house and was thinking only of finding something to eat.
TWELVE
When Rostnikov arrived in Arkush a little before nine, he could tell from the delegation that watched him get off the train that something had changed. The farmer Vadim Petrov stood next to the little mayor Dmitri Dmitriovich, beside whom stood the disheveled MVD officer Misha Gonsk, who had made some effort, though a poor one, to put himself in order, an effort that had resulted in his cutting his cheek while shaving. Peotor Merhum was missing, but Emil Karpo was standing next to Gonsk, his unblinking eyes focused not on Rostnikov but through him and well beyond.
Rostnikov had never seen this look on the face of Emil Karpo. It was the look of a dreamer or a person in shock. Though his words had sometimes betrayed a hint of emotion, Karpo’s face had never, till this moment, revealed anything but a slight tension of the forehead that told Rostnikov that his colleague was in some stage of a migraine.
“Who is dead?” asked Rostnikov.
“Sister Nina,” said Vadim Petrov, his voice tense. “Someone-” He stopped, trying to find the words. A trio of men coming off the train brushed past them, talking excitedly, and Rostnikov heard one of them say, “Murder.”
“She has been mutilated,” said Karpo. “Someone has hacked into her body fifteen or sixteen times. The killer left the weapon, an ax, embedded in the wall. It is possible that it is the same weapon that killed the priest.”
“Madmen,” mumbled the mayor, looking around for agreement with his observation. “A madman is loose, killing priests, nuns. Maybe he will start killing government officials.”
“Let’s go somewhere where we can talk, Emil Karpo,” Rostnikov said, stepping past the four men.
Emil Karpo nodded, his eyes fixed where Rostnikov had been standing a moment ago. Rostnikov repeated, “Somewhere we can talk and I can have a glass of tea.”
“Yes,” said Karpo, tearing himself from the vision only he could see. “The meeting hall.”
“What would you like us to do, Inspector?” asked Petrov. He removed his cap and rubbed his head with a flat, heavy palm.
“Try to keep people calm,” said Rostnikov. “Tell them that more police will soon be here, that they are safe, that we expect to find the killer very soon.”
“You do?” asked the mayor.
“We always do,” said Rostnikov. “We will talk to you all later. Where is Merhum’s son? Peotor?”
“I don’t know,” said Gonsk. “He wasn’t home. I stopped to … his wife said … I don’t know. You want me to find him?”
“Yes,” said Rostnikov. “Find him and bring him to the meeting hall. Bring his son, Aleksandr, too. And the wife.”
The three men moved away. Only Gonsk moved quickly. Petrov, who towered over the mayor, walked at the little man’s side, supporting him gently at the elbow.
Rostnikov and Karpo walked down the same street they had taken the day before. “About fifty paces behind us walks a man who was on the train with me from Moscow,” said Rostnikov. “He looks a bit like a frog.”
“Klamkin,” said Karpo. “He was here yesterday also. He followed me. He was in KGB Five with Colonel Lunacharski.”
“Our Wolfhound will find that interesting.”
They walked a few minutes in silence.
“I have a confession to make, Emil Karpo,” Rostnikov said when they came to the town square. “I do not like to stay in small towns at night. During the day I enjoy the isolation. At night I like to feel that there are people around, beyond the walls, down the street. I like the sound of an automobile horn from somewhere far away. I am uneasy in towns like this.”
Karpo said nothing as he opened the door of the party hall and stepped back so Rostnikov could enter. The
