Stuart Kaminsky: Rostnikov vacation

The beautiful, restless young woman had consumed four drinks and with withering looks and hissed words of acid had disposed of two young men and one young woman who made advances to her as she sat alone at a table commanding an unobstructed view of the madmen screaming on the platform. Her name was Carla. That was one of the facts about her that Emil Karpo had entered in ink in his pocket notebook. This information and whatever he discovered this day would be transferred to thicker lined notebooks when Karpo got back to his apartment.

Carla spent most of her time staring at her drink. She appeared to pay little attention to the band that blared not five yards from where she sat. Suddenly, in the middle of a song about hatred of cowardly parents screamed by a woman-child with orange hair, Carla got up and strode out.

She had signaled for a cab in front of the cafe. She had no difficulty getting one. Taxis stopped for beautiful girls. And this beautiful girl was dressed in a very tight-fitting red dress with a three-inch black belt of patent leather. Her thick red hair, which matched the dress, tumbled wildly down her back and over her shoulders.

Cabs also stopped for Emil Karpo, as one did now, when he stepped into the street and held up his hand, but it stopped for quite different reasons than did the cab that picked up Carla. The woman who drove the cab that Karpo stopped was named Sophie Mirbat, who had been driving for the past ten hours and was on her way in for the night. She had accepted Karpo's statement that he was a policeman, had given her name when he asked for it, and had followed the other cab dutifully in the hope that it would come to a stop soon so she could rid herself of the Vampire behind her and get home to her father and son before midnight. But it was not to be.

When they pulled up to the Oktober Theater on Kalinin Prospekt, the Vampire had said, "You will wait here for me, Sophie Mirbat. You will wait even if it is till dawn."

Sophie Mirbat considered and abandoned the idea of simply driving away when the man went into the theater. This was not a man to disappoint. Instead, she looked up at the mosaic mural on the facade of the theater, the movie-frame-like depictions of historical events in Soviet history, the storming of the Winter Palace, the Civil War. She sat quietly looking up at the mural as she wondered whether she dared charge the man for the time she was going to put in.

Now, less than an hour later, the beautiful woman Karpo was following made a phone call from the booth next to the theater. Karpo was careful to stay back in the shadows. He had learned that those who saw him did not forget him, but he had also learned how to remain unseen.

From where she was parked, the cabdriver, Sophie Mirbat, could see both Karpo and the young woman he was watching. She considered starting her engine but decided to wait. Gas was dear and going up in price.

Carla's call took a few seconds. She did all the talking and then hung up in anger, her eyes meeting the disapproving glance of a passing old couple. She stared at the couple defiantly with one hand on her hip and the other with her thumb hooked into her black belt. The old couple moved on. That she was beautiful was without question, but her beauty was not an issue with which Karpo cared to concern himself. He had lived his adult life with dedication to the Revolution, had lived only to cleanse the state, bring about the world ideal for which Lenin died and in which Karpo believed.

That he had a body, had needs, emotions, he acknowledged. He did not find joy in this acknowledgment, but he well knew that man was an animal and as an animal he had needs. It was better, he had long ago concluded, to meet these needs, compartmentalize them.

Karpo needed his work. There was nothing else. There was not meant to be anything else. His small fifth-floor apartment was dedicated to his work and contained only a narrow bed, a small chest of drawers, a rough wooden desk, and shelves filled with black-bound notebooks in which were details of every case Karpo had worked on in addition to hundreds of unclosed files, unsolved cases on which he worked in his evenings and on his days off. But he was being overwhelmed. Crime was no longer a dot here and a dot there, dots that might be connected to form a pattern of corruption that could be eliminated line by line with patience. No, crime in Moscow was now a giant splatter of blue paint.

Emil Karpo's hope of salvation lay in his total immersion in his work, and the case on which he was now working was quite therapeutic.

He had, he told Colonel Snitkonoy the day before, a lead on the young man who was suspected of killing a German businessman named Bittermunder near the Moscow River a week earlier. An informant had told him that a young woman with red hair named Carla, a regular at a new rock cafe" called the Billy Joel on Gorky Street, had been talking about the crazy boy she was living with, a boy who had killed a German.

So when Colonel Snitkonoy had ordered him to take a vacation and get out of Moscow, Emil Karpo had disobeyed. The idea of a week away from Moscow, when he might be so close to a murderer, brought on the threat of one of his headaches.

The reasons for Karpo to take a vacation now were quite reasonable. Rostnikov was gone. They had been working on a number of investigations together, so it would make sense to put them aside until they were both present. Karpo had argued that he had taken off a great deal of time for surgery and recovery. His right arm had been damaged first during pursuit of a burglar and later in an explosion in Red Square, where he had confronted a terrorist and for which he had received a Moscow Medal. That time off, said Colonel Snitkonoy, was in the line of duty, not a merited vacation.

Normally, Karpo accepted his vacations willingly. They gave him time to work on his unsolved cases, but this was the first time he had been ordered out of the city, and it came at a time when he was in great need of his work.

"If I allow you to remain,'' the Gray Wolfhound had said, "you will continue to work. Go, renew your vitality. I have a small dacha near Borodino. Or visit your relatives in Kiev. Read. Sleep. Look at the trees. Come back refreshed. There is much to do, and we need your full and healthy attention.''

It would have been useless for Karpo to say more, and he could not and would not explain. And so he was soon to be officially on vacation. Officially, he informed the colonel's assistant, Pankov, that in a few days, after he cleared up some minor items, he would be off with relatives on a farm near Kiev that had no phone.

Unofficially, he stood in the shadows of the outer lobby of the Oktober Theater and watched a beautiful girl who might steer him to the leader of a gang that may have been involved in the murder of a German businessman. He had no intention of leaving Moscow until he succeeded in this task.

Carla had time to smoke one cigarette and pace back and forth twenty-two times before a car pulled up in front of the theater, a late-model Chaika, well cared for, catching the lights of the theater and the street. A man got out of the car, a man with neatly cut dark hair and a short, well-trimmed black beard flecked with gray. The man looked around in all directions as the woman climbed into the car and closed the door.

Cars went by on the street, but still the man did not get back into the car. He continued to look in all directions, even into the lobby of the Oktober, directly at the tall man in black who was deep within the shadows.

"Come on," Carla called impatiently to the bearded man, whose hand rested on the door of the car.

"Adnoo'meenoo'too, "he said calmly. "Wait a minute."

Even at this distance, Karpo thought he detected an accent.

The woman, clearly irritated, said, "The movie was terrible."