Stuart Kaminsky - Rostnikov vacation

The man said nothing, continuing to scan the street, the doorways.

The woman rolled her window closed, and after a beat, the bearded man, now satisfied, opened his door, got in the car, and drove away.

Karpo strode quickly to the street. The car with the bearded man and the woman was moving to his right. He did not look to his left, where the headlights of Sophie Mirbat's cab suddenly came on. His eyes were still following the disappearing Chaika when the cab pulled up to the curb. He reached down, opened the door, and got into the front seat.

"There," Karpo said, pointing in the direction of many dots of light from many cars. "That car."

"Where?" asked Sophie, moving back into traffic.

"Drive," said Karpo.

"I'm driving," she said. "But…"

"Faster, around."

"I don't see it," said Sophie Mirbat.

"I see it," said Karpo. "Go more slowly. Don't get too close."

"To what? Where are we going?" she began, and looked at Karpo. The look she got in return convinced her that it would be best to say no more.

Karpo believed they were not going far but that it might take them a long time to get there. He believed they were not going far because the car the woman had called had come quickly from where she had summoned it. He believed it might take long because the bearded driver was being cautious, very cautious. It would be a game. The bearded man would drive as if he were being followed even though he probably did not believe that he was being followed. He would watch, drive around side streets, and take Carla where she was going only after he was sure he was not being followed.

And so they drove. In circles the Chaika and the cab drove. Down the same streets and past the same corners they drove. Sophie Mirbat said nothing, simply followed the directions given by the ghostly man at her side. Twenty minutes later the Chaika arrived at a point they could have reached in five minutes.

"They're not worried about the cost of petrol," Sophie Mirbat said, and regretted it almost immediately.

"Stop here," said Karpo.

She stopped. They were on a side street just off Smolenskaya Square, near the Borodinsky Bridge. Beyond the tall buildings, less than a block away, was the Moscow River. Karpo got out of the car. A boat horn bleated in the night.

"You want me to…?" Sophie Mirbat whispered, rolling down the window.

"Go," said Karpo, handing her some bills.

Sophie needed no further orders, and she did not pause to count the money. She made a U-turn and rolled back into darkness.

The beautiful woman with red hair got out of the car almost a block away and slammed the door behind her in anger. The bearded man drove off slowly, and Emil Karpo moved down the street in their direction. The woman entered an apartment building, took out a key, and opened the inner wooden door.

Karpo found a dark door, a closed shop, and stood back, watching the windows of the apartment building. His eyes did not blink. They took in the facade, and then a light went on in one of the darkened windows six floors above. He turned his head toward the light, counted the floors without looking at them, decided which apartment she had entered, and then stood erect, determined, no matter how long he would have to stand here, no matter how many nights, not to think until the moment came to act.

He did not have long to wait.

Slightly less than five minutes after he arrived in front of the building near Smolenskaya Square, the window he was watching exploded, showering the dark street with glass and releasing a blast of screaming music. Above the blare came a choking cry as Carla plummeted naked toward the street, her red hair billowing out, catching the light from the broken window behind her.

Karpo could see her frightened face as she fell. For an instant he was even sure that her eyes made contact with his, pleading for help he could not give. And then her knee hit a parked car, her hands reached out to grab something, to stop what could not be stopped. Her breasts quivered as she spun over completely like an awkward gymnast. Then she struck the street and was no longer beautiful or alive.

Karpo looked up at the shattered window as he stepped into the street. Framed by jagged edges of glass, backed by the blasting voice of a woman singing something in English and the sound of a screeching electric guitar, stood a figure in dark leather, a grinning figure with a spike growing out of its head.

Porfiry petrovich rostnikov was tired. he had, for the first time in twenty years, done nothing for eight days, and each day he had grown more weary as he fell into a routine. Up at seven, bread, coffee with Sarah, if she was up, a stroll to the beach, if his leg was not too stiff from the sea air, and several hours of watching those bathers who were willing to ignore the warnings about possible pollution in the Black Sea. On the beach, when he was not watching the bathers, he read one of the seven books he had brought with him from Moscow and paid unconscious attention to any warnings or demands his left leg might issue.

Rostnikov's leg was not to be trusted. It had been injured when Rostnikov, a fifteen-year-old boy fighting the Germans outside of Rostov, had encountered a tank, which he succeeded in destroying. He had come back from the war, become a policeman, married, and had a son whom, in a moment of long-regretted zeal, he and his wife had named Iosef, in honor of Stalin. He had worked his way into the Procurator General's Office, only to be transferred on "temporary but open-ended duty" at the age of fifty-five to the MVD-the police, uniformed and ununiformed, who direct traffic, face the public, maintain order, and are the front line of defense against crime. It had been a clear demotion for his too-frequent clashes with the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Besopasnosti, the State Security Agency, the KGB, clashes that were inevitable because the KGB had the power to investigate any crime that posed a threat to national security or the economy and the KGB interpreted its powers broadly.

For more than a year, Rostnikov and his closest associates had been on the staff of Colonel Snitkonoy, the Gray Wolfhound. The responsibilities of the colonel's staff were largely ceremonial, but boundaries between the branches were so thinly drawn that ceremony frequently became substance if an individual investigator so desired.

After watching the bathers and reading for a half hour or so- he was almost through a John Lutz novel about a woman in New York who takes in a murderous roommate-Rostnikov would rise, get the circulation going again in his leg, and then read some more. He had discovered a pattern among the bathers at the crowded, rocky beach. Early morning belonged to the serious bathers, who sought the invigorating confrontation of the cold Black Sea water. Theirs was a ritual to be taken seriously, and they certainly did not look as if they enjoyed themselves.

Then came the short-time vacationers and families, who felt obligated to bring their blankets down and join the crowds on the long, narrow shale beaches. Few of them stayed in the water long. They wanted only to say that they had entered and enjoyed the sea. Many of them were fat. Rostnikov himself, known to colleagues as "the Washtub," was solid and compact and heavy, the legacy of his parents and the leg that allowed him little movement. But his devotion to lifting weights had kept him from looking like the nearby vacationers, who seemed not in the least embarrassed to show their bellies over brief swimsuits.

In the very late afternoon and early evening, when the sun was no longer high and after Rostnikov was gone, the beach would belong to younger bodies, and occasionally there would be real laughter. Rostnikov had planned to spend more time with his wife on the beach in the early evening, but Sarah, who was still recovering from rather delicate brain surgery, did not yet have the energy for a late-day excursion after her necessary afternoon visits to the Oreanda sanitarium.