A Whisper to the Living

As pretty as her face was and well tended as her body was, she was no match for any of the girls in that yellow room. The only men who would select her instead of one of them would be either blind or in search of something Iris did not want to consider.

“Would you like company for a while?” he said.

“You are persistent,” she said.

“And charming?”

“Not really.”

His grin almost faded, but he held fast to his image.

“Good night,” he said.

“Good night,” Iris replied, standing at the open door.

“Tomorrow?”

“I’ll see,” she said.

“You would like Pavel Petrov’s phone number?”

“I have it,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Be careful,” he said.

She closed the car door and he drove away. In the lobby sat Sasha Tkach. Iris smiled. She had been about to call him on her cell phone.

“Do not come on the desk,” Emil Karpo commanded gently.

As soon as he said it, he realized that he had just spoken to a cat and had some expectation that the animal would understand. Karpo had never addressed an animal before, not that he remembered, and his memory was nearly perfect. He had no pet as a child and none as an adult. He neither liked nor disliked dogs, cats, and domesticated birds. They were simply there.

The black cat had wandered in through the open window of his one-room apartment on a warm night four months earlier. She, for it was definitely female, had reappeared every week or so for a month and then once every nine or ten days and now almost nightly. In spite of a slightly lame right front leg, the black cat somehow made her way over roofs and down a treacherously steep slate roof to the open window.

She never made a sound. She simply wandered around the room and came to a halt next to the chair Karpo sat in at his desk. The cat remained there silently, curled up, sometimes looking up at him, sometimes appearing to be asleep. If he approached the cat, her large green eyes would open wide and she would then say something that sounded like nyet. She would also lift her lame leg and paw as if offering it to be shaken.

There were few places for a cat to go in the room. A bed stood in one corner near the open window. A dresser of unknown antiquity rested against the wall that held the door to the hallway. A wood and wicker wardrobe stood next to the dresser, and on the floor there stood a two-foot-high refrigerator. In the dresser were three pair of slacks, all black, two dress jackets, also black, two pair of black shoes, three white and two black long-sleeve pullover shirts, and a black zipper jacket.

His clothes, Karpo thought, were as black as the cat that had entered through the window.

The desk upon which Karpo did not want the cat to tread was one he had built himself. Its two-foot-wide polished wooden top extended from wall to wall, and behind the desk where he could reach over and remove a book was a four-tiered shelf filled with neatly arranged pages. Karpo had notes on every investigation he had been a part of, and each night after finishing whatever work he had for that day he took down his notes and revisited unresolved cases, some fifteen years old. The only things directly on the desk were a computer, a paperweight, a can filled with pens and pencils, and a pile of lined paper, some blank, some with the detective’s current notes.

The pencils in black, red, and blue were always freshly sharpened; the paperweight was a half sphere in which there was imbedded a deep red beetle.

“Are you hungry?” Karpo asked the cat, telling himself he was not talking to the cat but to himself.

Karpo rose and moved to the refrigerator.

Karpo had stopped on his way home, telling himself he was purchasing the three cans of sardines in water for a lunch meal.

Emil Karpo took out a can, opened it, and tapped the sardines out onto a white saucer with a soft tap-tap. Then he moved back to his desk and pressed the button that brought the computer back to life. When the machine was purring, not unlike the cat, he punched in his access code and watched the screen fill with folders.

He worked till the clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen told him it was two in the morning. He was no more tired than he had been when he first sat down, but he put his notebooks back on the shelves and turned off the computer.

When he turned, the cat was curled atop his dresser asleep. Karpo took his toothbrush, tooth powder, and plastic container with his soap inside, plus a towel, opened his door, and closed it tightly behind him, after which he plucked a single hair from his head and placed it against a small invisible gummy dot on the door. If someone was to enter the room, the movement of the hair would betray them. It was a ritual Karpo followed whenever he left the room for whatever reason.

He walked with even paces to the washroom at the end of the corridor. There was no one inside. He washed, brushed his teeth, and shaved.

When he returned to his room, the cat was still sleeping on the dresser. Karpo stripped and put on a solid black T-shirt and boxer shorts. In the morning, when he rose, he would take a shower and shave again. He would do this in four hours, before anyone else on the floor was awake except for Adamski, who worked in the fish market. When Adamski had moved into the building almost eight years ago, he had run into the detective in the washroom well before the sun rose. Adamski had gone back to his room. He had never made the same mistake again.

A breeze kicked the shade. Karpo lifted the shade. He would be up while darkness still reigned. Karpo turned off the light next to his bed and lay atop the neatly tucked-in blanket.

Seconds after he lay down with his eyes open, the insight had come. The Maniac had made a mistake. Most humans would need to rise and make a note of their discovery or run the risk of losing it. Karpo had no such worry. The morning was soon enough to check his finding and to tell Rostnikov.

“Spakoynay nochi, good night,” he said aloud, realizing less than a second later that he had actually spoken to the cat.

The cat did not reply. Seconds later Emil Karpo was asleep.

“It is almost midnight,” Ivan Medivkin said when Vera Korstov entered her apartment.

“Yes,” she said, placing her red mesh grocery bag on the table. “I have been talking to people, searching for whoever killed your wife and Fedot Babinski.”

She took off her coat, hung it on the hook on the wall between the kitchen area and the front door. She had been gone for eleven hours, yet to Ivan she looked as if she had just arisen. He knew the look, the flow of adrenaline when he met people in the ring who thought they could get past the giant’s paws. Surely the huge man must be slow, easy to hit. Surely they were wrong and paid for it, as they would with Vera.

“What have you found?”

“Four outstanding suspects about whom I would like to ask you some questions.”

“These are. .?”

“Two women who were involved with Babinski and two men who were, apparently, involved with your wife.”

“With Lena? She would never-”

He stopped himself, realizing not only that she would do it but also that she had done it with Babinski. Why not with others?

“I brought vegetables and eggs,” Vera said. “Would you like an omelet?”

“No, yes, not now. In the morning maybe. You know how to find these people?”

“I do. I spoke to them, Ivan Ivanovich,” said Vera, taking the few things she had purchased and putting them