“When did you last see your father?” Karpo went on.
A woman in a fake-fur jacket took the vacated seat. She was about seventy and looked as if she had a great deal of experience at minding her own business.
“I saw him at my aunt’s apartment,” Katerina said, looking in the direction the young man had gone. “A few weeks, maybe a month ago. He needed a place to sleep. He was drunk. Said he couldn’t go to his own apartment, not that night. He has done this before, and my mother’s sister has never been able to say no.”
“Your father has a tattoo,” Karpo said. “An eagle with a bomb in its claws.”
The girl nodded. She was running out of french fries and had only a bit of Coca-Cola left in her cup.
“He showed it to us. He took off all his clothes and showed it to us,” she said. “Then he talked. He sat there with nothing on. Before, when I was little, he was full of hair, a great bear. Now he is shaven to show his tattoos. He is proud of them, especially the one with the eagle and the bomb.”
“What did he say about it?”
“I don’t remember,” the young woman said, looking again to where the leather-coated young man had gone. “Something about being an eagle and swooping down for a bomb full of gold. He was drunk.”
“He looks a little like your father,” Karpo said.
“Who?”
“The young man in the leather jacket.”
“No,” she said. “A little, maybe.”
“Your father has friends,” Karpo said.
“People who are like him,” she said. “Who in his right mind would want my father as a friend? I’ve got to get back to work.”
She began to gather the cup and paper.
“Names,” Karpo said. “Did he ever mention the names of any of his friends?”
“He was very drunk,” she said. “Kept saying that he was a personal friend of Kuzen’s, that Kuzen was an eagle, that he had been in Kuzen’s apartment on Kalinin and at his dacha more than once for dinner.”
“Did he give Kuzen’s first name?” Karpo asked as the young woman started to rise.
“Igor,” she said with certainty. “Is my father in prison for killing someone?”
“Yes,” said Karpo.
Katerina Voshenko rose from her chair and looked blankly at the passing people and at the long counter behind which she would soon be standing.
“Will he ever get out?”
“I don’t think so,” said Karpo.
The girl nodded her head.
“Igor Kuzen,” Karpo said. “Did your father say anything more about him?”
As Katerina stood there, Karpo could see a hint of her father in her pose.
“He said Igor Kuzen is a famous scientist. But my father was drunk. He is a liar.”
“Could he have made up this Igor Kuzen?” Karpo asked, rising from his chair.
A pair of men eyed the soon-to-be-vacant spaces but did not advance.
“My father has no imagination,” she said. “It is one of the things I inherited from him, that and some of my looks. The uniform helps overcome that. Sometimes it turns a man on. Some men like to say they went to bed with a girl who works at McDonald’s.”
Her eyes sought the young man in the leather jacket. When she turned back to the ghostly detective, he had disappeared. The two businessmen took the empty seats and she hurried to dump her garbage and get back to work. Then she saw the young man move toward her through the crowd. He was smiling. She smiled back and checked her watch. She had about a minute left before she’d have to resume her shift. She pushed back the thought that this young man did remind her of her father, then she allowed herself to consider it. She did not like what she saw, but that did not stop her from smiling at the young man who stood before her, wiping his hands on his work jeans.
“You will be all right?” Sasha asked as they stood looking across at the battered apartment building.
People came and went. Mostly old people, but also a few young boys.
Sasha had listened at the Chazovs’ door and heard nothing. Now they had stood in this doorway for over an hour. No boys fitting the description they had of the three Chazovs had come either in or out. There had been no usable fingerprints on the items Zelach had taken from the apartment. Now they had to do this the hard way-the usual way.
“I’ll be fine,” said Zelach.
They had decided to watch the apartment building in shifts. It was certainly possible that the Chazov boys would come through some rear entrance, but eventually they would use the front door.
The night was growing cold. A wind wailed down the corridor of beaten tenements.
Zelach had volunteered for the first shift so that Sasha could have dinner with his family and get two or three hours’ sleep. Sasha had promised to call Zelach’s mother or, rather, to call the apartment of the man from the Water Bureau, who lived down the hall and had a phone. The man was proud of his phone and had made it clear that having a policeman in the building was something he appreciated.
Sasha tried the door behind them. The cold would keep Zelach awake for a few hours, but then it would dull him into frozen lethargy. The door was locked. He had no problem opening it with his pocketknife and an identification card. He entered and motioned for Zelach to follow.
They were in a small, far-from-clean hallway with a narrow band of concrete steps leading upward.
Sasha knocked on the door to his left and waited. He knocked again. No answer. Then they moved across the hall, heard a voice behind the door, and knocked.
“Who?” asked a woman.
“Police,” said Sasha.
“Police, there are all kinds of police,” she said. “All kinds of people who say they are the police.”
“We are the police,” Sasha said, looking at Zelach, who stood patiently.
“What do you want?” the woman asked.
“To talk to you without shouting,” said Sasha.
“Talk about what?” she said.
“You will find out when you open the door.”
“I’m not that curious,” the woman said.
“Then you will find out when we break the door down,” said Sasha.
“I’m calling the police now,” the woman said with more determination and less fear than Sasha would have expected. He was reasonably certain that she had no phone.
The door was heavy, and time was passing. Sasha looked back toward the front door of the building and hoped that the Chazovs didn’t coincidentally arrive in the minutes they were wasting. Sasha had no intention of trying to knock down the woman’s door. It would be easier to move up one flight and try another door. But it would have to be done quickly.
He took a step back from the door and was about to head for the wooden stairs when the door opened and he found himself facing a woman and a rifle. The rifle was large. The woman was small, and she seemed to be about fifty years old.
“Show me,” she said.
Sasha and Zelach took out their identification cards.
“Proves nothing,” she said. “Come in. Remember, I can shoot this.”
“We will find it difficult to forget,” said Sasha, stepping in. Zelach stepped in beside him.
Sasha looked at the windows of the apartment. They were barred. Through the bars Sasha could see the front entrance of the Chazovs’ apartment building.
“May I close the door?” Sasha asked.
The woman considered and looked at Zelach. Something about the way the woman looked at his partner reminded Sasha of the way his mother looked at Pulcharia when she was doing something Lydia thought was particularly cute.
“Close it,” she said, “Softly.”
Zelach closed the door. The apartment was really only a single room, with a bed in one corner covered with
