on Georgi’s right foot. Every man in the room heard the bones cracking followed by a shriek of pain and the crowbar clanking across the room in a wild spin into the aluminum tubing, which clanged loudly. Even this did not rouse Leonid.
Georgi’s eyes rolled back and he slumped to the floor and onto his back, unconscious with the shock of sudden, horrible agony. For an instant, Rostnikov wondered if the big man on the floor would lose his foot.
With the help of Rabbi Belinsky, Rostnikov handcuffed Yevgeny and Leonid together and got them out to their car, where Zelach sat behind the wheel. Rostnikov then went back into Congregation Israel for the wolf, which he put in the trunk of the car. Finally he returned to carry the limp, semi-conscious Georgi Radzo, who, Belinsky estimated, weighed well over 220 pounds. Rostnikov had lifted him with no great effort in spite of having to do so with only one good leg.
Outside, after turning off the lights and locking the door, the rabbi took a handful of snow and gently put it to the mouth of Yevgeny Tutsolov, who sat in the backseat of the police car handcuffed to the zombielike Leonid, who did not even react to the weight of Georgi unconsciously slumped against him.
“That should stop the bleeding,” said Belinsky, examining Yevgeny’s face.
Yevgeny didn’t answer. His hand was cuffed to the dead weight of Leonid, and he was at the mercy of the mad Jew.
A little more than an hour later, when the three murderers were behind bars and Belinsky had gone home, Rostnikov entered Petrovka and went up to see the director of the Office of Special Investigation. The lights were on and the door open. Rostnikov entered, holding the wolf in one arm, and then walked in front of Pankov’s desk to the inner door. It came open before he had to shift the burden again.
Director Yakovlev stood back to let him in and pointed to the conference table, where a thick towel lay. Rostnikov placed the wolf on the towel. The Yak said nothing. He shook Rostnikov’s hand and stood at the door ushering his deputy director out. He closed the door behind him.
Twenty minutes later Rostnikov took off his left leg and crawled into bed under the thick blanket next to Sarah.
“You’re all right?” she asked dreamily.
“I’m all right,” he answered.
And then they slept.
THIRTEEN
It was a narrow street in the old part of Moscow, a street that had been fashionable a century ago and now withstood the crumbling of its stores and brick houses, which had been turned into apartments.
Karpo knew the street well.
It was where, for several years, he had come to meet Mathilde Verson, where they had gone to a small room, a neatly decorated and quite comfortably bright room where they initially had sex and eventually did something very close to making love. Mathilde was smart, a flaming redhead with good teeth and extremely fair skin. She was a little over forty. During the day she filled in as a telephone operator. For the last six months of their relationship, Mathilde had refused to take money from him, though the thought of anything but a business arrangement made Karpo uneasy. Yet resistance to the life force that was Mathilde, the good-natured fun she made of his seriousness and his lack of a sense of humor, was impossible.
When Mathilde was caught in the crossfire between two gangs and torn to pieces by bullets from automatic weapons as she sat in a small cafe drinking tea, Karpo had, with Rostnikov’s support, joined with Craig Hamilton, the American FBI adviser on organized crime, to find, confront, and destroy those who had taken her life.
This retribution had given Karpo little satisfaction, and he had stepped back into total dedication to his work. He had also, Porfiry Petrovich had told him, begun behaving like a man who was now courting death. If that was true, Karpo was not consciously aware of it.
Now it was a Thursday again, and he was on the same street where he had first begun meeting Mathilde. It was also almost the same time of day.
Emil Karpo had only broken one law in his life. He had believed fervently in Communism from the time he was a boy and his father took him to his first party meeting. He had believed in its laws and promise. There were weak and corrupt government officials and police, but Karpo, erect, dressed in black, pale-faced and determined, walked like death in Ingmar Bergman’s
The law he had broken was that of frequenting a prostitute. He wanted no wife and was not sure of the kind of woman who would have him even had he so chosen. He was aware, not just from the teachings of Lenin and Marx and Chairman Mao, that men were potentially superior animals, but that did not stop them from being animals.
Emil Karpo had decided that to fulfill his function as a citizen of the Soviet state he had to acknowledge his existence as a sexual animal or he would lose at least some of his ability as a police inspector. It had been a difficult position to arrive at for Karpo, especially in a Soviet Union that proclaimed prostitution did not exist.
Now Karpo walked. The sun was out, but the snow was not melting. People, carrying their plastic bags and bundled up, avoided him on the street, and only an occasional young man would look directly at him.
The shop was small, the walls cracking. An icon of the Madonna and the baby Jesus hung where only a few years ago Lenin had looked off into the future. The owner of the small coffee and tea shop, much smaller than the one in which Mathilde had been killed, was not a Communist or a Christian. He was a survivor, a Turk by birth, with a round body and mustache and a look of constant consternation on his face.
The prostitutes had paid him a token fee for taking up table space in his shop. He didn’t mind having the place look a little busy. But those were the old days. Now prostitutes plied their bodies openly near the big hotels that made special arrangements for visiting businessmen. The newly rich, proudly unscrupulous capitalistic entrepreneurs and the mafias had their own contacts for obtaining prostitutes and seldom accepted the offers of the women who were reduced to walking the streets.
The shop was nearly empty. There were only five tables, in any case, with a counter against the far wall that was only a dozen paces from the door. One table held a couple, a man and woman about the same age. Maybe they were married or lovers, or maybe this was one of the last vestiges of the old days and they were talking money for favors.
At another table sitting alone, looking out of the frosted window, was a dark-haired young woman, thinner than Mathilde and wearing more makeup than Mathilde had ever used. She was wearing a reasonably modest green dress, and she was seated far enough back from the small table to reveal a black belt around the middle of the dress. Draped over her chair was an expensive-looking black jacket.
Karpo approached the young woman. Before her was a demitasse of dark coffee and a smoldering cigarette in a clear glass ashtray.
“Amelia?” he asked, standing over her.
The woman turned to look up at him. She was definitely pretty. She was also older than she had looked in profile, which, he decided, was probably why she had been looking out of the window instead of at the door when he entered. She was somewhere in her thirties. Beyond that, he couldn’t be sure.
She smiled, a very small but sincere smile, and held out her hand. It was slender and her nails were cut relatively short and painted bright red.
“Please sit,” she said, putting out the cigarette. “Would you like a coffee? Tea?”
“Nothing,” he said, sitting, not unbuttoning his coat.
“You are going to make this difficult for me, aren’t you, Inspector?” she said with a sigh.
“That is not my intention.”
“We have met, you know?” she said.
“Almost two years ago,” he said. “On the street. Mathilde said hello to you. You were with two other women.”
“Quite a memory,” she said, looking impressed.
“I am a policeman,” he said.
