Stuart Kaminsky - Tarnished Icons

There were no other entries on the case, and neither Sasha nor Elena thought that there had been any follow-up investigation. It was Karpo’s notes that indicated the victim was a highly regarded poet. It was Karpo who had written in his notebook the address of the apartment building in which they now sat. The official report had the wrong address.

“What is he doing to these women?” asked Ludmilla.

“Violent rape,” said Elena. “So far he hasn’t killed anyone, but …”

“I used to be big and strong,” said the old woman. “Now I am not as weak as I look, but I have lost my need to write what I see and feel.”

“Can you remember the man clearly?”

Ludmilla smiled, rivulets of wrinkles forming around her narrow mouth. There was irony but no mirth in the smile.

“Yes. You want to know what he looked like then and what he looks like now?” she said.

“Now?” asked Tkach. “You’ve seen him recently?”

“I saw him.”

“Did you call the police?” asked Elena.

The smile again.

“Do you think they would care?” she asked. “Do you think they would even write down what I would tell them, an old woman claiming to see the man who attacked her almost ten years ago?”

Both Elena and Sasha knew that the woman was right. In a Moscow gone mad with violence, there was neither time nor inclination to follow up reports about old crimes. There were approximately one hundred thousand policemen in a sprawling city of nine million. Few wanted to be policemen. Even armed with Kalishnikov automatic weapons and wearing bulletproof vests, the police, who worked twelve-or fourteen-hour days, were no match for the new mafias and street gangs who were better armed. The police of Russia, unlike those of America, were permitted to fire on suspects who tried to flee or looked as if they would fire weapons at them. The death rate among criminals was high. Official statistics showed that the Moscow police had fired weapons more than fifteen hundred times in the past year compared to the Los Angeles police, who fired only one hundred fifty times in spite of a much higher rate of violence.

“Where did you see him recently, this man who attacked you?” Elena asked.

Ludmilla looked back at Elena. There was something of herself as a young woman in Elena’s face. The silence was very long.

“Would I have to identify him?”

“Possibly,” said Sasha. “Probably not, if we can find evidence or find out where he lives. Perhaps we could persuade him to confess to one of the recent attacks.”

“You won’t do anything,” Ludmilla said, eyes scanning the small room from bed to bookshelves to television and then back to the two children who were detectives. “And if you talk to him, he might come and find me. He might kill me. I am resigned, not depressed, and I choose to live a while longer.”

“How could he possibly find you? We won’t give him your name,” said Sasha, tossing back his hair.

“The same way you found me,” the old woman said.

“That information is in police records only,” said Sasha.

“Exactly,” said Ludmilla, leaning forward.

There was a chill in the room. It had been there since they had come in. Elena and Sasha had kept their jackets on, but now they were acutely aware of the heavy chill.

“You mean …?” Sasha began.

Ludmilla closed her eyes and nodded.

“He is a policeman?” said Elena.

“He is a policeman,” echoed Ludmilla.

The package had been delivered to Petrovka. It was addressed to Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, Office of Special Investigation. Karpo, Iosef, and Paulinin stood looking down at the package. The four people who worked in the mail room had been told to leave.

After the bomber had contacted Rostnikov, the small army of callers had been put into motion and the warnings had begun. People in the energy industry and others even vaguely connected to or supporting nuclear power had been told “penguin,” and the callers had checked off the names of everyone they reached. Later Karpo and Iosef would go over the report, providing, of course, that the package they were looking at did not contain a bomb that killed them.

Paulinin was a forensic technician. He had a laboratory on the second underground level of Petrovka and was an expert in everything from examination of bodies to explosives. Most of the officers of Petrovka and all of the scientific employees, including the part-time pathologists who conducted autopsies, shunned Paulinin, who was considered a walking encyclopedia but more than a bit eccentric. He looked rather like a bespectacled, nearsighted monkey with an oversize head topped by wild gray-black hair. His office-laboratory was cluttered with piles of books and objects from past investigations. Here a pistol with the barrel missing. There, on the tottering pile of books on the edge of a desk, some false teeth in a mason jar.

The disheveled scientist adjusted his glasses. He put down the cheap red plastic toolbox he had brought with him, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a pair of rubber gloves in a plastic bag. Paulinin put on the gloves, returned the empty plastic bag to his pocket, and got on his knees before the brown package that looked rather thick to be containing only a five-minute message.

Paulinin appeared to be praying to the package. Around him letters and packages sat in unattended piles. Ancient cubbyholes of various sizes were stuffed with mail.

Paulinin leaned forward and sniffed at the bundle from one corner to another. Then he put his right ear next to the package, not quite touching it. He removed a stethoscope from the red plastic box, put it on with a flourish, and looked into space as he gently listened to the parcel. Next he ran his fingers along the rim of the package, pausing at one point. Still on his knees, he slowly turned the bundle over, touching only the rim. Iosef held his breath as Paulinin began to tap gently at the parcel with his rubber-covered fingers. Then, suddenly, he stood, picked up the package by the edges, and said, “I’d say it contains a single sheet of paper and a solid block of wood, probably birch, judging from its weight. I’ll x-ray, then check for fingerprints if I am able to open this and see what else the contents tell me.”

Karpo didn’t bother to answer. Once the package was in Paulinin’s hands, he would do what he wanted with it in his huge, cluttered laboratory in the basement. Karpo had learned that Paulinin was indeed brilliant. He was also, to put the matter kindly, considered to be a bit mad. But it was a madness Karpo had learned not only to accept but to deny. Paulinin was lucid and prone to his own tastes and angers. The anger he sometimes displayed was aimed particularly at all the Petrovka pathologists. He was only a little more tolerant of the so-called forensics experts who at least were not, according to Paulinin, prone to prance like pathology divas. Few things delighted Paulinin more than to be brought a corpse the pathologists had examined and autopsied, for he was always certain of finding something they had overlooked. What he delighted in even more was to be given the corpse first. Such luck came his way only through the Office of Special Investigation and a handful of inspectors in other offices and departments who knew of Paulinin’s skills.

Karpo also knew that Paulinin was a lonely man who had made gestures of friendship toward the Vampire. The overtures had been small: a cup of tea in a suspicious beaker in Paulinin’s laboratory and, much later, an invitation to share the lunch Paulinin had brought with him that day. Twice now the strange pair had gone out to relatively inexpensive cafeterias for lunch. Paulinin considered Emil Karpo his only friend.

“Come to my laboratory in one hour and forty minutes, Emil Karpo,” Paulinin said. “I should have something by then. We can have tea while we talk.”