Stuart Kaminsky - People Who Walk In Darkness

“I’m inclined to take off the shoe,” said Rostnikov after setting the weight back down and lying on the bench.

“Why?” asked Laura.

“Some habits of a lifetime are difficult to break and there is no reason to do so. Others should be broken no matter how long a lifetime has been.”

“I don’t have bad habits,” said Nina.

“You pick your nose,” said Laura.

“I don’t, much.”

“I advocate doing such things in private,” said Rostnikov. “In fact, I advocate doing most things in private. The moment you share them with others is the moment they feel they have the right or obligation to advise you about your ideas or behavior. You understand?”

“No,” said Laura.

“No,” said Nina.

“Good,” said Rostnikov, putting down the block of chalk that he had rubbed into his palms. “At your ages, it would be dangerous to understand.”

He reached up, gripped the bar, and with an explosive grunt lifted the three hundred and fifty pounds from the rack and held it steady. Working without a spotter was a bad idea, but he had little choice. If there were a problem, no one in the household could control the weight. No, the challenge was Rostnikov’s alone.

Years earlier, when Iosef was in his teens and already broad and strong but far better looking than his father, Iosef, who had been mistakenly named for Stalin in a misguided moment of nationalistic zeal, had spotted for his father.

Iosef never had his father’s interest in the weights. He had been a contentious soldier and a failed playwright before he became, with his father’s support, a policeman.

Now Iosef worked under his father in the Office of Special Investigations and seemed to enjoy it with one exception. He had little tolerance for the intrigue, the cautious politics that went on inside Petrovka. He was particularly incensed by the perception, quite true, that Igor Yaklovev was self-serving, disinterested in justice, and quite corrupt.

“That’s too many,” said Laura counting his repetitions.

“Yes,” said Rostnikov. “I was thinking.”

“What about?” asked Nina.

“Diamonds,” said Rostnikov.

Later, when the girls and Galina were talking quietly in the kitchen alcove, Rostnikov, with an ancient, much-traveled suitcase in hand, stood at the door waiting for the driver. Sarah stood at his side touching his arm, and said, quietly, “Siberia is cold.”

“Not so much in November,” he answered.

Porfiry Petrovich had been known to become absorbed in thinking about everything from the case at hand to the possibility of distant planets, and walk out coatless in freezing winter. He had, in fact, suffered frostbite on several occasions.

She had packed his things, including his fur-lined hat and coat and his boots, though she too knew that Northern Siberia at this time of year was not quite at the edge of the impending winter.

“You have your book?”

He pulled a new paperback novel from his jacket pocket. It was the last of the 87th Precinct novels written by Ed McBain before the author died. Rostnikov had savored the book, held off reading it until now. It was his Siberian treat. He feared he would weep when he read it and said good-bye to old friends on the pages.

“You spoke of a ghost to the girls,” Sarah said.

“Yes.”

“You were talking about him?”

“I was,” said Rostnikov.

“I’d almost forgotten that he exists,” she said.

“I have not.”

“You are certain he is alive, that he is there?”

“His name is in the file I was given by Yaklovev.”

“No ghost,” Sarah said, more to herself than Rostnikov.

“Not a real ghost, but can a ghost be real? Certainly not as satisfyingly real as Mrs. Dudenya’s toilet. If he were a ghost it would, by definition, not be real.”

“You will be careful?”

“I am always careful,” he said.

“We define ‘careful’ differently,” she said. “You are more curious than careful.”

“Are the two necessarily exclusive?”

“I always hope they are not,” Sarah said as they heard the knock at the door. “Call.”

Rostnikov kissed his wife’s cheek, picked up his suitcase, waved back at Galina and the girls, and went through the door.

Emil Karpostood at the window of the single room in which he had lived for more than twenty-five years. There was nothing to see of any great interest from the window-a street lamp, a five-story warehouse, the passing of seasons marked by the appearance of weeds and grass in a small patch next to the warehouse, a swirl of snow and its accumulation in the winter. He was satisfied with the view. Some things did not change, and that was how he felt most content. He did not feel comfortable. Comfort was the enemy of progress. It allowed time to pass without accomplishment.

Inspector Emil Karpo, as lean as a leafless birch tree, as erect as the street lamp outside his window, his face with the pallor of one who shuns the sun. His nickname, never spoken to his face, was “the Vampire.” He had others, but that was the one that had stayed with him.

Only Mathilde Verson had dared, with a smile, to use one of his nicknames, “the Tatar,” to engage in occasional teasing of the man who had started as a client and finished as a lover. Before she died in the crossfire between two gangs on the streets of Moscow, she had made it clear that she no longer wanted him to pay for her services.

“You are a tough town, Emil Karpo,” she had said pursing her lips, meeting his dark eyes with her own green eyes, smiling.

For almost all of his life, even as a boy, Emil Karpo had seen people turn away from him. This served him well as a young man and as a policeman dedicated to a belief in the Utopian possibility of Communism. He had served the possibility well knowing that the ideal had to be met by dedicated men and women who were imperfect animals.

When Communism had failed, Karpo had dedicated himself to the law-the uncertain, malleable law left behind by a failed hope. He had endured the transition without complaint. He had Porfiry Petrovich, in whom he could believe. He had Mathilde, with whom he could begin to do what he was uncertain about accepting-feel. Now she was gone.

He turned back into the room illuminated by a lean wrought iron lamp in the corner, its shade a compromise of two tones of sober blue selected by Mathilde to complement the single light in the ceiling, muted by a simple white glass cover. Karpo’s eyesight was perfect in spite of the nighttime hours he spent at his desk against the ceiling-high shelves. The shelves were filled with reports carefully handwritten in black notebooks, meticulously checked, on every case in which he had ever been involved.

He had a computer. It sat on the simple wooden desk before the shelves. He did not fully trust the computer. He knew it could send his words into oblivion, wipe out his carefully prepared observations. He had transferred much of what he had written in his notebooks to the hard drive and backed it up, but it was the notebooks on which he relied.

There was a bed with its head against one wall. It was little more than a cot. The blanket he had laid out would meet the taut requirements of all but the most sadistic noncommissioned Army officers. The blanket was a dark blue one, with which Mathilde had replaced a khaki one.

A dresser, three drawers high, stood against the wall near the door. Inside, neatly laid out, were underwear and socks. After packing, what remained in his closet were three pairs of black slacks, two black business jackets, four black turtleneck shirts, four white shirts, and three ties, one black, one blue, and one with red and green stripes, a gift from Mathilde that he had worn once.