“None of those,” said Karpo. “An eagle with a bomb in its claws. It is on your right buttock. You need not display it.”
Voshenko hovered over the detective, looking down at him, his fingers spread now within inches of Karpo’s.
“I do not wish to kill you,” Karpo said calmly. “I have questions to ask you. But I can find another prisoner somewhere with this tattoo. Please sit.”
Voshenko did not move.
“Sit,” said Karpo calmly. “Or I shall hurt you very badly.”
Voshenko laughed. Karpo did not. Down the corridor the sergeant heard the laughter and wondered, but did not move. Voshenko sat.
“What does that tattoo mean?” Karpo asked.
Voshenko shrugged, clasped his hands together, and shrugged once more.
“Answer, Prisoner Voshenko. Or I have no use for you.”
Voshenko looked at the man. He could easily reach across the table and have the man’s neck before the detective could pull a weapon. Perhaps he would choose to end the interrogation in that manner. But for now he was curious.
“It is a patriotic work,” said Voshenko. “The strength of the nation, now lost by weaklings.”
“It is the sign of a mafia that deals in nuclear material,” said Karpo.
Voshenko’s bushy eyebrows went up slightly and then back down again. “If so, it is a coincidence,” he said. “For me it is a patriotic picture.”
“Stanislav Voshenko, there was an attack by members of your mafia, the assassination of a German businessman named Heinz Dieter Kirst. Why did your people want to kill him?”
Voshenko shrugged and said, “I don’t know any Germans and I don’t belong to a mafia.”
“I wish to know where I can find the leader of your group,” Karpo persisted.
“I belong to no group,” Voshenko said, placing his hands flat on the table again, ready.
“No more lies,” Karpo demanded.
Voshenko lunged across the table. One hand slammed down on Karpo’s hand. The other hand went around Karpo’s throat. Voshenko looked at his victim with a mad grin of satisfaction, but the pale face of the policeman showed no fear or pain. Voshenko lost his grin and continued closing his thumb and finger, cutting off the air. He had done it many times, always without concern for the consequences. And this time he had nothing to lose. They would never let him out anyway. They would give him a quick trial and shoot him against a wall. But until that moment he would brag that he had killed a policeman.
And then Voshenko felt a sudden pain, an electric shock in his left hand. He pulled it back as if he had been bitten. He held his grip on Karpo’s neck as he painfully lifted his left hand. His thumb hung loosely and his hand was rapidly swelling.
In the instant that the prisoner looked away, Karpo grabbed the massive thumb that was pressing his windpipe and jerked it back hard. Voshenko sat back and tried to pull his hand from Karpo’s grasp, but the policeman held fast. Voshenko reached up with his left hand, but with his thumb broken it was useless.
“And when I break your other thumb, you will be unable to attack or defend yourself,” said Karpo. “I think your cellmates might find that interesting.”
“They are cowards,” said Voshenko, clenching back the pain. “Break the thumb. Then kill me. If you don’t, I will find and kill you the first chance I get. Today. Tomorrow. In a year.”
“I will find your leader, and when I do I will inform him that it was you who betrayed him.”
“He won’t believe you,” said Voshenko, still trying to free his hand. “You don’t have the power to free me.”
“I will see to it that the moment I learn the name of your leader, you will be set free,” said Karpo. “It can be done. Will your leader believe that the police just let you walk out the door?”
Voshenko tried to laugh, but it had none of the crazed power of his earlier laughter. He shook his head to indicate that he would not speak. Karpo bent the thumb back even farther.
“Then I shall break this thumb too,” said Karpo.
“Why does it mean so much to you?” growled Voshenko, now sweating and breathing heavily.
“Talk now or you will have no thumbs,” said Karpo. Voshenko knew that he meant it.
SIX
It took less than an hour on the phone back at Petrovka for Rostnikov to find the first garage where there was a mechanic named Artiom. He had continued to call garages and had located two more Artioms.
“We’ll start with these three,” Rostnikov said, standing slowly.
His desk was in the corner of a large office that had been divided into four cubbyholes with low fiberboard walls over which one could both look at and hear one’s neighbors. Each little section had a desk, a phone, and two chairs. There was no uniformity to the furniture. It was whatever Pankov had been able to scrounge, beg, and steal from other offices in Petrovka. There was a cubbyhole office for Rostnikov and one each for Emil Karpo, Sasha Tkach, and Elena Timofeyeva. The only sign of Rostnikov’s superiority was that his cubicle was the one with the window. When he had been a chief inspector with the procurator general’s office several flights down, he had had his own office. It had also been small, however, and his window had looked out not at the outside world but at a line of desks of those of lesser rank. He had not liked that office. He definitely preferred his present cubbyhole. From the sixth floor of Petrovka he could look down into the rapidly decaying courtyard and guard gate, where two armed officers stood, one of them smoking, an act that would have meant his job a year before. Now no one except the corrupt, the desperate, the stupid, and the psychotic seemed to want the low-paying, dangerous, and despised job of being a police officer.
“Rostnikov?” Hamilton said.
“Yes?” Rostnikov had paused to look out the window.
“The Artioms,” Hamilton reminded him.
“Of course,” said Rostnikov. “Look at this.”
Hamilton moved to join Rostnikov at the window and look down at the guards and the courtyard.
“The changing weather and a lack of interest,” Rostnikov observed. “Only one bush still blooming and flowering. Do you know the name of that bush?”
“No,” said Hamilton, locating the bush.
Rostnikov took his notebook from his pocket and made a crude drawing of the shrub and its flowers, then scrawled a description of it. He put the notebook back in his pocket and asked, “Do we start with the three Artioms or with the wife?”
“We Americans would do both at the same time,” said Hamilton.
“We are a small department. To do that, I would have to remove one of my associates from the case he or she is working on,” said Rostnikov. “Or I would have to ask permission to assign an investigator from one of the other departments, and it’s likely that that investigator would be chosen for his or her dependability to report back to an officer within his or her own department. Should anything be uncovered that might lead to an arrest, that department would rush in, make the arrest, and get the credit.”
“Tricky,” said Hamilton.
“It has been like that for almost six hundred years,” said Rostnikov. “When the first little huts went up to form a village where the Kremlin now stands, the Russian people began to develop a society of distrust, corruption, and subservience. Then came the czars, then the Communists, and now the frightened confusion until a new authority is firmly in command. Russians are not built for capitalism. It has turned them into victims, cowards, and criminals.”
Rostnikov reluctantly left the window, walked out of his cubicle, and headed toward the door to the office.
