after she moved in.
The day before, Anna Timofeyeva had sat petting her cat, Bakunin, in the window and had said to Elena, “Perhaps we will be lucky. Perhaps Sasha’s wife will never return.”
“You mean that?” Elena had asked.
“I don’t know,” said Anna. “Maybe I do.”
And now, Elena and Iosef sat in the dark and empty courtyard surrounded by dimly lit windows, possibly being watched by Aunt Anna.
“What are you doing?” Elena asked, putting her hand on the shoulder of Iosef, who leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.
“Brooding,” he said.
“Are you going to stop brooding sometime tonight? I have to get up early and catch a thief.”
“I’ll stop,” he said. “It will take great effort. You can help by setting a clear date for our marriage, a date when you will be moving into my apartment.”
“Which,” she said, “will then be ‘our apartment’ and which, you have agreed, will be redecorated to our mutual satisfaction.”
He sat up and looked at her.
“I thought you liked the way my apartment looks.”
“Iosef, we’ve talked about this. I like it for you. For us, I want more of us, or me, to be there, which is why I want to pay half the rent. And please, don’t talk about how all of our money will be together. I don’t want to bicker about tables and chairs and … Iosef, tell me truthfully, am I fat?”
He leaned back a bit to examine her as if for the first time, from foot to head.
“Stop,” she said. “This is not a joke.”
“You are not fat,” he said. “You are voluptuous. You are perfect. If you lose a pound, one pound, I will call off the marriage. If after we are married, you lose one pound, I will seek a divorce.”
“You mean it?”
“Yes.”
“Good. If you want to brood some more, you have my permission,” she said.
“No, you’ve taken the pain out of it.”
“What were you brooding about?”
“Dead poets. Dead cosmonauts. Did you know that Mikhail Lermontov was only twenty-seven when he died?”
“Yes,” Elena said, tugging at his ear. “He died in 1841. Did you know he was descended from a Scottish family that came to Russia in the seventeenth century? And that Lermontov was a military officer transferred to the Caucasus for writing poetry attacking the royal court?”
“No,” said Iosef. “You are fond of Lermontov’s work?”
“Not particularly,” she said. “He is too brooding.”
“Your point is taken,” said Iosef, leaning over to kiss her. She liked his kisses. His lips were ample, his mouth and tongue passionate. She had taught herself to be careful with men, but with Iosef she felt she could let herself float without flying away.
When the first kiss had ended, she said, “I will have to get some sleep and you have to be up early to get to the airport.”
“I’m packed,” he said, leaning toward her again.
“We’re being watched from many windows,” she said with a smile.
“I would hope so,” he said. “I have never completely lost my desire for an audience.”
“And I have never lost my desire for privacy,” she said.
“A perfect match,” he said, placing her hand gently between his legs.
“Perfect,” she said.
Emil Karpo continued to believe that Communism was a nearly ideal social-political system. The problem, he had come to believe, was that humanity could not abide an ideal system. People were self-serving, animalistic, and were capable of destroying anything that required total cooperation. There were many individuals of worth who cared about others, who had, he knew not why, cared about him. Porfiry Petrovich and his wife clearly cared. Mathilde had cared.
Emil Karpo sat at the table in his room, facing the floor-to-ceiling bookcase filled with files and notes of unresolved cases. Emil Karpo sat in the light of a single lamp behind him and the glow of his computer screen. He wore a white T-shirt over a pair of white shorts. In his room, alone, he wore white. Outside, he wore black.
Barefoot, Karpo looked at the screen.
When he had become a policeman, his goal had been clear, his task certain. He would find and help punish those who broke the law, those who were not fit for a Communist state. He knew that he would never stop all crime, not alone, not with the help of thousands, because people did not live for an ideal. They lived for themselves, for their families sometimes, for a few others or one other for whom they had often-fleeting feelings. But he could keep to a minimum the numbers of those who did not conform.
He quickly discovered, however, that the task was beyond monumental. The people who ruled were corrupt. The people who were supposed to contain crime and prosecute criminals were corrupt. Soviet Communism had turned into a grotesque distortion of what his father, his readings, and the speeches of many had promised, but it had been replaced by an even more corrupt system.
Emil Karpo was still a Communist, not a member of the party any longer. Those who said they were Communists now were opportunists preying on the memories of the poor who had forgotten the corruption and remembered only safe streets and having just enough to eat without worrying about making a living. Perhaps there was only one true Communist and his name was Emil Karpo.
He moved the cursor and found the file he sought on the computer screen.
Outside of the table, bookshelves, and chair, Emil Karpo’s room was, intentionally, as bare as a prison cell or a monk’s chamber. The wooden floor was dark and uncovered. There was a cot in the corner near the single window covered by a shade. Next to the cot was a small square table with a telephone, a clock, and a lamp on it. Under the single drawer of the table was space for about a dozen books. The space was filled. There was a wardrobe, a tall rectangle in a corner that could have been a large standing coffin. Next to the wardrobe was a modest, dark chest of drawers upon which stood nothing. Above the chest of drawers was a painting, a painting of a smiling red-haired woman in a field with a barn in the distance behind her. The painting was of the dead Mathilde Verson. It was the only sign of life in the room.
Emil Karpo kept his room scrubbed and clean. Each morning, before dawn, he awoke without needing to check the small electric clock. It took him exactly twenty-eight minutes to exercise by the light of his lamp. His motions were without sound and without the accompaniment of music or the news. He owned no television set.
After he exercised, Karpo would don a robe, a blue one Mathilde had given him for a birthday, and he would go down the hall with a towel to take a shower in the bathroom he shared with the other tenants on the floor. Everyone knew when the ghost got up to take a shower. No one left his apartment till he had finished.
Karpo could have afforded much better. He spent almost no money and ate little. He cut his own thin hair the infrequent times that it was necessary, and he did not use a bank. His room was a vault, rigged to shock an intruder and detect any attempt to enter without the specially machined two keys of which only he and Porfiry Petrovich had a set.
Now Emil Karpo worked not for a cause but to punish. The law was under siege, had always been. The law was ridiculous, but it was law. Those who challenged it had to be stopped if even the semblance of sanity was to be maintained.
Karpo was relentless. To be otherwise was to invite madness. Karpo, who had decades earlier accepted that he was devoid of emotion, had discovered when he was past the age of forty-with the help of Mathilde-that he did have emotions, had covered and protected them. When she had gotten him to let some of those emotions out, she had left a hole big enough for madness to slink in.
Mathilde had given him a gift and a curse.
Very early that evening, Karpo had talked to Porfiry Petrovich by phone. The conversation had been brief.
