Stuart Kaminsky - A Fine Red Rain

Pon paused to watch a young girl walk past. His head turned to follow her. His mouth opened as if he could not breathe and then his eyes returned to Karpo.

"It is natural," Pon went on, picking up his thought. "But we are civilized. We are taught that machines are more functional than animals. Machines do not feel. They perform without feeling, without thought. We are taught to be machines. You see the contradiction? We are caught between being animals and being machines. It can drive us mad. We live balanced, don't you see? When they say someone has become unbalanced, that is what they mean, that he has fallen into his animalism or given up his humanity to become a machine."

"And what has that to do with you?" Mathilde said calmly and so quietly that Karpo barely heard her over the sounds of shouting swimmers somewhere beyond the trees.

"I have channeled my animalism into a useful social function," Pon explained, still looking at Karpo. "I respond to my animalism and rid the state of criminals it cannot allow itself to acknowledge. Prostitutes, like you."

Pon held Mathilde's hand up high. The briefcase slipped from his lap and the knife was naked in his lap. Four old men and an old woman appeared around a bend in the path and headed their way.

"I suggest," said Karpo calmly, "that you hide your knife."

Pon put the knife behind his back and pressed Mathilde's hand into his lap. As the five old people passed by, Pon rubbed Mathilde's hand between his legs.

"The animal," Pon mouthed to Karpo soundlessly.

The old people were about twenty feet down the path when Pon pulled the knife out from behind his back. For some reason, the old woman at the rear of the quintet picked that moment to glance back, and she saw the sweat-big man on the bench holding a knife, saw the woman in the red dress try to pull away, saw the man who looked like a ghost rise and move forward. The old woman was quite sure that the ghost would not cross the path before the man with the knife plunged it into the young woman. The old woman wanted to turn away from the sight, away from her helplessness, away from her own memories of a war long ago and her uncle lying dead with bayonet wounds forming red-black exclamation marks in his side.

The four old men walked on but the old woman stood, watched, waited for the knife to come down, but it didn't. Then, suddenly, a barrel of a man crashed through the thick trees behind the bench of the sweating owl with the knife. The barrel-shaped man caught the wrist of the owl, wrenched the man's hand from the wrist of the woman, and pulled suddenly upward. The sweating man, the heavy sweating man, rose from the bench, a look of surprise on his face, his glasses dropping to the path. The barrel-shaped man stepped back and gave a mighty pull, and the sweating man went bouncing backward over the bench with a terrible release of air as he hit the ground, as the ghostly man leaped over the bench.

"No!" screamed the sweating man, trying to rise.

"Yes," said the ghostly man, kicking the knife out of his hand.

The woman in red stood safely on the path side of the bench, clutching her red hat in her hands.

"Olga," croaked one of the old men far down the path, "what are you doing?"

For an instant the old woman was bewildered. No one was dead. She did not know what was happening, what had happened or why, but no one was dead. The woman in red looked at Olga and smiled, and Olga Korechakova, who had not felt like smiling in at least two decades, smiled back and turned to join the old men in the park.

I don't want to go to the circus. Sarah Rostnikov was more weary and distracted than emphatic. Rostnikov had been waiting for her outside the second-hand foreign book store where she worked on Kachalov Street. He had gone home to change into his favorite comfortable pants, worn shiny in the rear and the knees, and his favorite gray turtleneck sweater. In contrast, Sarah wore a black suit and white blouse. She had not been expecting him. She was not dressed for a circus. She had looked forward to a quick ride back to the apartment, a batheven if she had to cart kettles of boiled water, which she usually had to doa simple meal of whatever was left over, and a quiet evening listening to music on the radio.

"You will enjoy the circus," Rostnikov said, taking her arm.

"The circus is noisy. It smells of animals. It will take us an hour to get home when it's over. I'm hungry. I'm tired," she said to the night breeze.

"We'll stop at a stolovaya for some kotleta and potatoes with a little kvass," he said, leading her through the early evening crowd. "We'll call it a celebration. I have free passes."

"Porfiry Petrovich," Sarah said, stopping suddenly, "what have we to celebrate? Josef is being shot at by barbarians. You have been demoted. The KGB has us on some kind of list for troublemakers. What have we to celebrate?"

People moved around them, and Rostnikov shifted his weight to his good leg and touched the red hair of his wife.

"Work, health, appetites, and curiosity," he said.

"You are an optimist, Rostnikov," Sarah said with a smile and a shake of her head.

"I'm a Muscovite," he answered. "And I have a passion for the circus."

"And for cabbage soup and meat pies," she sighed.

They had eaten quietly at a luncheonette near the circus. Rostnikov had consumed three meat pies, a bowl of cabbage soup, and quantities of bread and double potatoes. Sarah had a bowl of cabbage soup, which she didn't quite finish.

"What was your day like?" he said after he had finished the final crumb of bread, which he dipped into the final touch of sauce from the pasty.

"I sold books,"' Sarah said with a shrug, pushing away her soup. "The party representative for the store gave a lunchtime lecture on productivity and how it was our duty to sell more Bulgarian books on breeding goats. What did you do?"

"I helped Emil Karpo catch a man who had murdered eight prostitutes," he said.

She looked at him and at the young couple hovering nearby who obviously wanted their table now that they had finished their meal.

"Good," said Sarah. "You should have shot him."

"He is quite mad."

"That is of little solace to the women he killed," she said.

"You should be a judge," Rostnikov said, standing awkwardly to protect his leg.

"And you should be a plumber," Sarah replied.

"I am a plumber," Rostnikov said, leading her past the waiting couple, who pounced on the now-empty table.

Twenty minutes later they joined the crowds under the neon sign of the New Circus. They were shown to their seats, very good seats, in the second row.

"Why do I know this is not simply a night at the circus?" Sarah whispered.

Rostnikov sighed and looked at her. "We came at the invitation of a killer. I could not bring myself to disappoint him."

"I see," said Sarah. "And why was it necessary that I come?"

"Because," said Rostnikov quietly as the lights went down, "I need you."

"To do what?"

'To be with me," he said as the music blared forth in a rush of brass and Dimitri Mazaraki stepped out to the center of the ring, huge, confident, giving his fine mustache a twirl of conceit. He was dressed in reda red coat, red pants, even a red top hat. The music stopped, and the big announcer's eyes, scanning the audience with a Cheshire grin, silencing one and allmen, women, and childrensilenced them with the secret he held of magic to be performed, mystery to be savored, danger to be witnessed, fantasy to store for the gray day tomorrow.

Mazaraki's eyes played over the crowd, roamed beyond the silence, and snapped onto Rostnikov right in front of him in the second row. Mazaraki's smile changed, the lip curled ever so slightly below the fine mustache. Rostnikov replied with a smile of his own, a sad smile that caused the announcer's lip to hesitate for only a moment before he turned his eyes back to the crowd and announced the first act.