“I’m at home right now. How am I supposed to remember where a former employee lives? I could check in the morning.”
“I’ll meet you at your office in one hour,” said Karpo.
“It’s nearly midnight,” the man groaned.
“One hour.”
“Just a moment,” said the man.
The moment passed. Karpo could hear the woman who had answered the call complaining. The man came back on the phone.
“The last address I can find for Igor Kuzen is Two-thirty-four Lermontov Prospekt. Do you want the phone number?”
“No,” said Karpo, and hung up.
He cleaned up the crumbs left from his dinner, drank the rest of the water, put on his jacket, then paused for a moment to look at the painting of the people in the park. He turned off the lights. He set three hairs he plucked from his head at exact markings in the door, where only he would notice. Should someone enter his apartment or try to during the night, the hairs would move, and even if the person was an expert, it would be difficult to find them and return them to their precise positions.
Karpo checked the pistol in the shoulder holster under his jacket, a Browning that held a thirteen-round clip, and went out into the night. Unlike so many others in the new democratic Russia, Emil Karpo was not afraid of the night. He had, however, begun to fear that he was afraid of being alone.
NINE
“What are you looking for?” the little girl asked.
It was well past her bedtime, but after dinner Sarah had told him the Karenskovs on the fourth floor had a badly leaking pipe under their bathroom sink.
Laura and her eight-year-old sister were both frail, with short dark brown hair. They looked nothing like their grandmother, who was in prison for shooting the manager of a government food shop. The grandmother had been raising the children since her daughter disappeared, leaving the brief message that she would return sometime, maybe. The girls’ father was already long gone, and there were no aunts or uncles. The Rostnikovs had taken the girls in, and slowly, cautiously, the children had been coming out of their near-catatonic state. Now the eleven-year-old was expressing a definite interest in Rostnikov’s activities.
He was lying on his back under the Karenskovs’ sink, his copper-colored tool kit on the floor beside him. The girl, in her nightshirt, was kneeling.
“Searching for the leak,” Rostnikov said.
“You are getting dirty,” Laura said.
“The plumbing is old,” he said. “It rusts, it leaks, it makes noises like the wind and machine guns. Hand me the pipe wrench, that big metal thing with jaws.”
She found the wrench and offered it into the darkness below the sink. Rostnikov clamped, tugged, grunted, and pulled. Rust flaked over his face and he closed his eyes.
“No use,” he said, sliding out awkwardly.
The girl smiled when he sat up. His face was covered with red rust. In his hand was a dirty length of piping.
“I amuse you?” he asked. “Good. Now hand me that piece of pipe. No, the smaller one.”
She handed him a short section of plastic piping he had brought with him.
“The pipes are all forty years old, and made from inferior galvanized steel,” he said. “They are beginning to rust from inside. Small holes are developing in the pipes. They can be patched with tape for a while, but eventually they will all have to be replaced, just like I am replacing this section.”
The Karenskovs waited in the other room watching television. Rostnikov and the girl could hear the cheerful voices of a man and woman on the television. Then the audience laughed.
“The plumbing in this building, like most of the buildings in Moscow, is similar to our government,” Rostnikov said, putting down the rusted section of pipe and examining the tube of black plastic the girl had handed him. “It is rusty and rotten. Soon … leaks everywhere. The system is falling apart. It has to be replaced, but the cost is great. Do the new plumbers simply make repairs with plastic tubing?” He held up the plastic pipe section in his hand. “Or do they completely replace the entire system as they have promised but which they cannot afford to do?”
The girl listened, a look of intensity on her face.
“You don’t understand, do you?” he asked, reaching out to touch her cheek.
“A little,” she said.
When he removed his hand from her cheek, he saw that he had left a handprint of rust and dust. He put the two pieces of pipe side by side on the floor. The black plastic one was longer.
“Saw and clamp,” he said, pointing at the tools.
The girl handed them to him and said, “It’s like being a nurse, a little.”
“A little,” Rostnikov agreed with a smile. “You would like to be a doctor or a nurse?”
The girl considered this while Rostnikov turned his body, biting his lower lip to control the pain in his leg, and fixed the clamp and black piping together on the edge of the sink.
“No,” she said. “I want to be a traffic director. I’ll have a uniform and stand in the street telling cars when to go and stop. Or I’ll be up in one of those little traffic towers.”
“A noble ambition,” Rostnikov said as he stood up and started to cut the pipe to the same length as the rusty one he had removed. “Well within your grasp.”
“You are a policeman,” she said.
“I am,” he answered, continuing to saw.
“You put my grandmother in jail.”
It was the first time the girl had spoken of her grandmother, though both Sarah and Porfiry Petrovich had given the girls messages from her.
“I took her to the judges, who put her in jail,” said Rostnikov without looking away from his sawing. “I am trying to get her out. You know what she did?”
“Yes,” said the girl, also standing now and watching with interest as Rostnikov sawed. “She shot a mean man who wouldn’t give her bread for me and my sister to eat.”
“Basically correct,” said Rostnikov as he sawed through the piece of plastic and the loose end fell to the floor.
The girl picked up the four-inch piece of black plastic and asked, “Can I keep this?”
“Yes,” said Rostnikov, loosening the clamp and painfully beginning to make his way back under the sink.
“There may be things I can make with it,” she said, turning it around in her hands.
“Now,” he said, the top of his body hidden under the sink, “hand me that small can of oil. The blue can.”
She did so, and after a minute he handed it back out to her.
“Now the bigger can, the one that looks like a small drum.”
She handed it to him. Moments later he handed it back out.
“Finally,” he said, “the bottle. It is solvent. Handle it carefully, and if you feel brave enough, unscrew the top.”
Slowly she unscrewed the top. The solvent smelled terrible. She handed it to him and listened to him grunt and turn. The girl looked at Rostnikov’s withered leg and said, “Does your leg hurt all the time?”
“Almost all the time,” he answered with another grunt from the darkness. “There.”
Rostnikov, covered now with even more dirt and rust, eased out from beneath the sink and reached back under it to retrieve some rags, a spatula, and another small tool. He had to grip the sink with both hands in order
