Stuart Kaminsky: Red Chameleon

“Ah, yes,” said Zelach, anxious to please but not understanding. “Yes, it was amusing.” He either chuckled or began to choke. Rostnikov, taking no chances, leaned over to pat the man’s back, which resulted in Zelach’s bumping into the dangling arm of the corpse, which set off a small chain reaction. The balance of the corpse changed, and Abraham Savitskaya’s body began to sink below the surface of the reddish water.

“What should I-?” Zelach said hopelessly.

Rostnikov didn’t care. He shrugged, and Zelach reached over to grab the corpse’s sparse gray hair. He was pulling the body out by the hair as Officer Drubkova stuck her head in to announce that the evidence truck had arrived. If the sight of the kneeling officer pulling a corpse’s hair revolted, surprised, or shocked her, she gave no indication. She simply made her announcement and backed away to let in a man and a woman, both wearing suits, both carrying small suitcases, both serious. Rostnikov recognized the two of them, Comrades Spinsa and Boritchky, a team who spoke little, worked efficiently, and reminded him of safecrackers in a French movie.

“He is already dead,” said Boritchky, a small man of about sixty. “You need not redrown him, Zelach.”

Zelach let go of the corpse’s hair and stood up. The body did, this time, sink under.

“Thank you,” said Comrade Spinsa, herself about fifty, very thin with a prominent, pouting underlip. “Now we shall have to drain the tub for even the beginning of an examination.”

“I didn’t-” Zelach began looking over to Rostnikov on the toilet seat for support.

Rostnikov’s mind was elsewhere. Zelach was not worth saving from embarrassment. Rostnikov had better uses for his energy.

“We’ll leave you alone,” Rostnikov said, getting up. “Zelach will check with you when you’re done. How long?”

Boritchky moved the tub, considered how to let the water out without getting his sleeve bloody red, and announced over his shoulder that they would be done in about twenty minutes.

Officer Drubkova took a step down the hall with Rostnikov and Zelach, but Rostnikov held up a hand to stop her.

“Under no circumstances,” Rostnikov said, “is anyone not associated with police business to enter that bathroom. You are to remain and see to this.”

“Yes, comrade,” she said firmly.

Having gotten rid of her, Rostnikov limped back to the Savitskaya apartment with Zelach behind, mumbling an apology.

“Quiet,” said Rostnikov as he opened the apartment door.

“Otets?” said Sofiya Savitskaya expectantly.

“Your father is indeed dead,” Rostnikov said.

Brother and sister were in the same position he had left them. Rostnikov considered bringing them down to Petrovka, but the case really didn’t warrant that attention.

“Did you remember where you have seen the older man who killed your father, and is anything missing?”

“The candlestick,” said Lev. “They took my grandmother’s brass candlestick.”

“A brass candlestick.” Rostnikov sighed, picking up his coat. “Zelach will get a description. Why would someone want your grandmother’s brass candlestick?”

“And the old man?”

“In the hall,” Sofiya said, looking up. “I’ve seen him in the hall. Every day for years, in the hall.”

She was looking up at Rostnikov, still dazed.

“He lives in this building, works in this building?”

She shook her head no.

“Then …?”

“The photograph,” she said, pointing to the little alcove off of the door. Rostnikov turned around and found himself facing two photographs. One was of a woman. Rostnikov concluded that she must, this kerchief-headed, sad-looking woman, be the dead wife of the recently dead man in the tub. Next to this photograph was another, of four men in peasant dress. Three of the men were very serious. All were young, and the picture was clearly old. Rostnikov moved to it and looked at the quartet with arms around each other’s shoulders. Rostnikov thought that one looked vaguely like a young version of the dead man. The look of suspicion was there, coming through a weak, pale half smile. Only one of the four in the photo, a man younger than the rest, was truly grinning.

“Which one?” Rostnikov said. Zelach was right behind him, peering at the picture.

“The man who grins,” Sofiya said. “It was him.”

“You are sure?”

“I’m sure,” she said.

“And who is he?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know who any of them are. He never told us.”

Without asking, Rostnikov took the picture from the wall and handed it to Zelach. He wasn’t at all sure that the woman wasn’t having a delusion or creating a tale, connecting a man in the hall who had helped kill her father with a photograph in the hall from her dead father’s past.

“Lev,” Rostnikov said, turning into the room. “Do you agree? Was the man in the picture the one who came here this afternoon?”

The boy looked at his sister, whose head was down and whose hands were in his lap and said, “Yes, it is him.”

The boy’s face turned to Rostnikov and belied his words. His face said he wasn’t at all sure.

“Comrade Zelach will remain here and take more complete statements from you,” Rostnikov said, improvising this way to avoid Zelach’s company back to his office. “Comrade Zelach will be most patient with you. Remember that, Zelach.”

Zelach nodded glumly, but Rostnikov was sure that he would obey.

Rostnikov retrieved his jacket and took one final look at the brother and sister, wondering if he could say something, do something, to help them get through the night, but there was nothing. He could say that he would find the killer, but he doubted if they really cared. He was sure that the assistant procurator and the procurator did not care. It was doubtful, in fact, if anyone with the exception of Chief Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov really cared, and, in truth, he didn’t care very much, either.

Still, the nibble of a question began to get at him. Why would anyone murder for a brass candlestick? Was the man in the photograph from Savitskaya’s past really the one who had come to shoot him? Why?

He was thinking about such things, finding himself beginning to get lost in a possible puzzle, when a fat woman, hands on her hips, appeared before him on the narrow steps.

“Did you arrest him?”

“Arrest who?”

“The Jewish boy,” she said. “He threw my son down the steps this afternoon. He is a wild one. He deserves to be arrested, punished.”

Rostnikov managed to ease past her and looked back over his shoulder at the woman on the steps.

“Don’t worry, comrade. He is being punished.”

Emil Karpo stood in front of the statue of Field Marshal Kutuzov, commander of the Russian army in the War of 1812, but he did not look at the statue or at the Triumphal Arch at the end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt that commemorated the heroes of that same war with the French. As far as Karpo was concerned, it was a decadent war fought by two imperialist forces. It was far better that the Russian imperialists won. It was not, however, something to build monuments to, though he understood the sense of history necessary to unite the Russian people.

Emil Karpo was only slightly aware that more people were looking at him as he stood almost motionless than at the portly stone general seated on his horse twenty feet above him. Few looked directly at Karpo as they headed for the Panorama Museum of the Battle of Borodino, but few failed to notice the tall, lean, and pale figure dressed in black with his right hand tucked under his jacket as if he were reaching for a hidden gun or mocking that Napoleon whom the Great Mikhail Kutuzov had thwarted more than 170 years earlier. Some thought the tall, pale man looked like a vampire whose dark wing had been broken. One couple considered his resemblance to the painting of a Tatar that stood inside the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. A tourist named Marc Lablancet from Lyon considered taking a photograph of Karpo in front of the statue, but his wife tugged at him and hurried him away.