Black Knight in Red Square (2 page)

“We think,” said Seven, rising, “it would be better to pay you when we are finished.”

Fouad leaned against the door, and Ali backed into a corner, his hand in his pocket. The dark eyes moved to Robert, who sat impassively, arms folded, a slight smile on his lips.

“I get it all, and now,” said the one with dark eyes, “or you can forget about the agreement.”

“If the KGB knew about our meeting,” said Seven, “you would not be seeing anyone for a long time. You might not live very long.”

“You are not very good at this,” said the dark-eyed one, “not good at all. If you get away with the plan, it will be because of what I do, what I plan. You're wasting time with these games. I've got to get back or someone might grow suspicious about where I've been. The cash now, and all of it.”

Robert nodded to Seven, who went to a briefcase on the table and extracted a package.

“If you—” Seven began, but a gesture from Robert stopped her words. She handed the package to the visitor.

The dark-eyed visitor took it and left, thinking that the money was good and the challenge interesting, but that as a group, the terrorists were far below even the clumsy Japanese airport group and the inept Italian quartet, both of which had bungled their tasks miserably. Robert was more interested in self-image than ideology. Seven was all fire and no brains. Ali was an idealist with no experience. Only Fouad had the makings of a good terrorist; he was unconcerned about self-image and able to control his fire and strength. If the four of them had plans to dispose of their visitor eventually, Fouad would be the one to keep an eye on.

Outside the sunlight was bright. Across the street, the three youths had given up their game with the younger boy and were looking for something else to fill their empty day. They spotted the one with the dark eyes and started to move forward. When their quarry did not run or even walk away, they paused in the middle of the street.

The smile on the face of the one with dark eyes told the three boys they were like insects to this lone, well-dressed foreigner. The stranger walked directly toward and then past them without hurrying or looking back. One of the boys muttered the only words he knew in English: “Fuck you.”

The dark-eyed one felt the packet of $150,000 in American dollars and didn't bother to reply.

P
ORFIRY PETROVICH ROSTNIKOV REALIZED THE
importance of what he was about to do this Thursday morning. There had been several such crucial moments in his fifty-two years. The first had occurred in 1941 when he was a boy soldier who had stepped out from behind a doorway in Rostov to face a German tank. He had destroyed the tank with a lucky grenade and a hail of bullets from the machine pistol he had taken from a dead German. The cost had been a nearly destroyed left leg, which he had to drag slowly and often painfully behind him throughout the rest of his life. The second such moment happened when, as a young policeman in Moscow, he had caught a drunken thief named Gremko assaulting a young woman outside the Kursk railway terminal. The drunk had nearly killed Rostnikov with his bare hands, but fortune and a well-placed knee to the groin had turned the tables.

At that point Rostnikov began to lift weights. At first he did so to gain strength and then as a means of relaxation, a way to escape from the pressures of living in Moscow. Eventually, lifting weights had become an end in itself. It demanded his total attention and he gave it willingly. His body had begun to expand with musculature as he lifted, and before he was named a chief inspector he had already earned the nickname “Washtub” among his fellow police and also among full-time criminals.

Rostnikov gripped the metal tightly in his hand and moved slowly up the stairwell of the apartment on Krasikov Street, again going over what he would say. His wife, Sarah, had tried to talk him out of this, but he had worked too hard, prepared too well. He moved resolutely upward, dragging his bad leg behind him, and opened the door on the seventh floor. There were no elevators in the apartment building; few apartment buildings in Moscow had elevators.

Going down the corridor, he took a deep breath. No turning back, he thought, and then he paused before the door and knocked. Beyond the door he could hear two voices, one a man's, the other a woman's. He could not make out what they were saying. He knocked again, and a voice answered, “Coming.”

It was early in the morning, more than two hours before Irina would discover Aubrey's body, half an hour before Inspector Rostnikov was due in his office at Petrovka—barely enough time to do what must be done. The door opened.

“Yes?” A thin man in an undershirt stood at the door. His wife, standing behind him, was extremely plump, with her orange hair pinned in an untidy bun.

“I live in the apartment below you,” said Rostnikov, adopting the official voice he used in dealing with those who appeared frightened.

“We are Bulgarian,” the man said.

“I know,” Rostnikov replied.

“I am here for six months for a machine trade exchange,” the man said.

“That's not important,” replied Rostnikov, shifting the tools in his hand. Both the man and the woman looked down as the tools clanked together.

“You are a policeman,” said the woman.

“Yes.” Rostnikov spoke softly, almost with resignation, trying to give the impression that what he was about to do was regrettable but inevitable.

“What have we done?” said the man, touching his chest and looking at his wife.

“Your toilet,” said Rostnikov.

“I'm what?” said the startled man, stepping back.

“Your toilet is broken,” explained Rostnikov. “It is causing a massive leak in our apartment below. We cannot use our toilet.”

“You cannot use your toilet,” echoed the man dumbly.

“We can,” Rostnikov went on, “but we are not willing to clean up the floor each time we flush.”

“No one told us,” said the woman apologetically, putting a hand to her breast and discovering that her dress was not fully buttoned.

They had not been told, Rostnikov knew, because a decision had been made, in spite of Rostnikov's threats and pleas to the building manager, a thin Party member named Samsanov, to avoid telling the Bulgarians that their toilet was faulty. Apparently the local political decision was that it would not do to let the Bulgarians see how defective the plumbing was. They might go home and ridicule their Moscow hosts. Rostnikov, in spite of his position with the police, had been told to forget it till the Bulgarians left, but they showed no signs of leaving. So Rostnikov had begun reading plumbing books. For four weeks he read plumbing books. The library was filled with them. There were more books on plumbing than on plastering, cooking, radio and television repairing, automobiles, and crime. He now felt himself capable of repairing whatever the problem might be, if his tools were sufficient and his resolve to defy the local Party decision held firm.

“No one told us,” the man repeated his wife's word.

“There are reasons,” Rostnikov said mysteriously. “I will repair the problem, and you must promise to tell no one I have done so. It is forbidden for one in my station to do this, but I did not want the problem to get worse and affect you, visitors to our city.”

With this he stepped past them into the replica of his own apartment. The central room, a combination living room—dining room—kitchen, was well furnished, including a small television set. There was a foreign odor, which was not unpleasant but which Rostnikov could not place. To the left of the entrance was the even smaller bedroom. He marched toward it with the Bulgarians behind, mumbling to each other frantically.

“I'll take no more than a few minutes,” he said, pushing open the door. The window was open, and sunlight was pouring in on the unmade bed. Rostnikov stood before it trying to imagine the unmatched Bulgarians making love. They made little noise during the night. He knew this because his and Sarah's bedroom was right below theirs. He moved to the bathroom, turned on the light, and removed an oversize pink slip from the toilet seat. The woman, closing in behind him, reaching over to take it from him like a nurse retrieving a scalpel during surgery.

“I'll not be long. Just leave me alone.”

They backed out, mumbling again in their native language, and Rostnikov went to work. From his pocket he withdrew a long, coiled plumbing snake, unwound it, and began to force it down the toilet. He eased and worked it but struck nothing.

Next, he turned off the water and, with the wrench that he had taken from the confiscated burglar tools in the basement of police headquarters in Petrovka, he removed the pipe behind the toilet seat. When it was removed, he found a cup on the nearby sink, filled it with water, stomped his foot on the floor and poured the water down the pipe. Almost instantly, Sarah in the apartment below pounded on the ceiling with the signal.

“Fitting,” muttered Rostnikov on his hands and knees, peering down into the dark pipe.

“What is?” said the Bulgarian behind him. The man was standing back in the bedroom, unwilling to intrude but equally unwilling to leave this barrel of a man alone.

“There is a loose fitting in the pipe,” Rostnikov explained. “I'll have to go down to my apartment, unscrew the coupling and pull it up here to fix it. If it's just a fitting it won't be difficult. If there is a leak in the pipe, we have a more serious problem.”

Using the sink to steady himself, Rostnikov rose. There was a smile on his lips. He might be a bit late for work, but he would lick this. Triumphs were few in his work and even fewer in the tasks of getting through the day, but this would be a triumph.

The knock at the door jerked him from his near triumph. He turned to face the Bulgarians, who looked at him.

“Answer the door,” he said, stepping into the bedroom. Had someone actually called Samsanov? Did the little man have a spy on the floor? Rostnikov began to think of a lie and decided that his best chance to get through would be to bluff Samsanov, to tell him this was a police matter, that the toilet had to be fixed, that national security was at risk. That, of course, superceded even local Party decisions. The Bulgarian opened the door, and Rostnikov wondered how national security could be involved in fixing a toilet.

“Chief Inspector Rostnikov,” came a familiar voice from the doorway.

“In here,” said the Bulgarian, and Emil Karpo strode into the room to further confound the man and the woman.

The man who strode into the room was about six feet three, lean, and quite hard. Because of his slanted eyes, high cheekbones, tight skin, and expressionless dark face, he had been known in his early police career as the Tatar. But twenty years of fanatical pursuit of enemies of the state had given him the pale look of the obsessed and earned him the more frequent nickname of the Vampire among his colleagues. The name seemed particularly appropriate when a peculiar look crept into Karpo's eyes and at those moments even those who had worked with him for years avoided him. Only Rostnikov knew that the look was caused by severe migraine headaches, which Karpo refused to admit to. Rostnikov knew quite a lot about his junior colleague. Survival in the Soviet Union often depended on how many secrets you knew and could call upon. Rostnikov watched Karpo with interest, glancing at his left arm, which was stiff and still. Karpo had been shot several months earlier and then had injured the arm again while chasing a petty criminal. He had almost lost the arm that time, but a surgeon who had just had a good meal and a few hours' sleep had worked harder than usual to save the limb. So the two men shared something—one with a bad leg, the other a bad arm—though they never spoke of their common bond.

“Yes,” said Rostnikov.

“You're to come to Comrade Timofeyeva's office. It is urgent. There's a car downstairs waiting.”

Rostnikov looked at the Bulgarians and back over his shoulder at the toilet.

“Karpo, what do you know of plumbing?”

“I'm a police investigator,” Karpo replied.

“That does not preclude your knowing something,” Rostnikov said.

“You are joking again, Comrade Inspector,” Karpo said expressionlessly.

“Why is it you can recognize a joke, Emil Karpo, but you cannot engage in one?” Rostnikov said, walking past him toward the door.

“It is not functional to engage in jokes,” Karpo said. “There is too much to do. Lenin had no sense of humor either.”

“I know.” Rostnikov sighed, and then said to the Bulgarians. “Do not touch the toilet. Use the one at the end of the corridor. Above all do not tell anyone of this.” He put his fingers to his lips. “I'll be back tonight to fix it.”

“But—” the woman began. The thin man tugged at her sleeve to quiet her.

“Security,” said Rostnikov, allowing Karpo to precede him through the door.

“We understand,” said the Bulgarian, rushing to close the door behind the two policemen.

As they walked down the corridor, Rostnikov said, “Are you curious about that?”

“No,” said Karpo, and the conversation ended.

Twenty minutes later, after getting his jacket and saying good-bye to Sarah, Rostnikov arrived with Karpo at the entrance to Petrovka in a yellow police Volga with a blue horizontal stripe.

Petrovka consists of two ten-story L-shaped buildings on Petrovka Street. It is modern, utilitarian, and very busy. It is prominent—everyone knows where it is—and so are the thousands of gray-clad policemen who patrol the city. The ratio of police to civilians is higher in Moscow than in any other major city of the world.

In spite of this, crime, while it does not flourish, exists. Files of
doznaniye
or inquiries, cover the desks of the procurators working under the procurator general of the Soviet Union. The police work with the procurators in the twenty districts of Moscow and are responsible for all but political crimes, which fall within the sphere of the KGB (Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Besapanost) or State Security Agency. It is a constant puzzle to both procurators and police what qualifies as a political crime. Economic crimes are generally political because they threaten the economy of the state and thus are subversive. In fact, any crime can be considered political, even the bludgeoning of a husband by a jealous wife. Officially, the procurator general's office is empowered by the constitution of the U.S.S.R., Article 164, to exercise “supreme power of supervision over the strict and uniform observance of laws by all ministries, state committees and departments, enterprises, institutions and organizations, executive-administrative bodies of local Soviets of People's Deputies, collective farms, cooperatives and other public organizations, officials and citizens.”