It wasn't as easy to corrupt circus performers as it would have been with some other professionals. Circus performers had prestige, good living conditions, a guaranteed lifetime of work. It would be a challenge, but as he stood in the shadows he looked for the signs of weakness in the faces of the young people below, the signs that had probably been in his own face when he had been down there. How quickly did the stage smile drop when the act was finished? Did the performer hurry the hug of approval from other students and back away? Was there a touch of uncertainty and a masked lack of confidence in the stride?
He looked for these things and saw his greatest hope in the slack-wire clown. It would be hard to influence the decision, perhaps impossible, but the clown had the most promise for corruption. Yes, there was a future, a way out, with but one loose end: Katya Rashkovskaya, a most dangerous loose end. He went back to the first floor and found the office of a teacher who had once been in the New Circus. The teacher had a known drinking problem and debts. He could use money and Dimitri Mazaraki had plenty of money. He paused and examined himself in the glass of the office door, adjusted his mustache, parted down his hair, and stepped through the door.
Yuri Pon had not brought his knife. He was not planning to execute a prostitute on impulse. He had made that mistake once, on the subway, and had regretted it. Everything had gone wrong that time. The prostitute had worn a uniform and had turned out not to be a prostitute at all. He had worked too quickly. He had even been seen. No, he had to be careful, precise. He knew how deeply his emotions ran, and for mat reason he forced himself to be cautious and methodical.
He would identify a prostitute, be absolutely sure that he was correct, follow her, and, if possible, observe her in the act. He would find out where she normally went, prepare himself, and, on the night chosen, execute her.
He took the metro to the Mayakovsky Station and made his way to the Byelorussian Railway Station, where he was sure to find what he was looking for if he were a bit patient. It didn't take long. He bought a coffee from an old woman at a stand in the station, sat with a copy of Izvestia in his hand, adjusted his glasses, and pretended to be waiting for a train. Occasionally, he would look up at the posted schedules to suggest to anyone who might be watching him that he had legitimate business.
In the course of the next two hours he saw three prostitutes attempting to pick up travelers coming in. He rejected two of the prostitutes immediately. They were not pretty enough. A third was a distinct possibility. She was blond, about twenty-five, and wearing a gray dress and a white top. She looked healthy, confident, not defiant. And she was not afraid to approach an occasional soldier. The fourth soldier she approached picked her up, and the two of them walked toward the massive front entrance of the station. Yuri gulped down his coffee, tucked his newspaper under his arm, and got up to follow them. He arrived at the entrance a step before they did and even held the door open for the couple to walk out. It was then that he got his first clear look at the woman. She was pretty but she was flawed. A dark purple birthmark about the size of a baby's hand ran from below her right ear down her neck. It didn't touch her face but it was there. He imagined the soldier kissing her in the dark, kissing her neck.
Yuri Ron did not follow them. He felt ill. His stomach was sour and the acid taste snaked into his mouth. The evening was hot and he had had a hard day. Nikolai would probably have passed out by now, so it would be safe to go back to the apartment. Tomorrow or the next night Yuri would try again. It would be hard to wait. He would try someplace else. He would be patient, careful, efficient. He would.control his emotions. He would make his contribution. Tomorrow or the next night.
When Rostnikov walked down Krasikov Street toward his apartment that evening, he had a plan for the night. First, he would engage in small talk with Sarah. Before they ate, he would spend his forty minutes lifting weights in the comer of the room and she would read or watch television. During dinner he would suggest that they go for a walk and Sarah would accept. She would also know that he had something serious to say. On the walk he would tell her about Josef's posting to Afghanistan, try to comfort her, and hope she would have some words of comfort for him. They would stop for something, maybe an ice cream, and come home early to talk or read. It would, he thought, be a slow, perhaps sad, night in which he would not think of the KGB, of the Gray Wolfhound, of the man who had dived off Gogol's statue. He hoped it would not be one of those nights when bad news angered her, turned her against him, transformed him into the evil cossack of her imagination. These outbursts were always brief and regretted, but they lingered in his memory and he feared that frequent setbacks would increase the periods of anger. Her anger made him feel helpless. Rostnikov could deal with murderers, pompous superiors, scheming KGB officers. He could play their games, even gain a satisfaction from small triumphs, but his wife's emotion swept him away. He never considered joining her in anger. Rostnikov had learned even as a boy not to be angry. It wasn't that he controlled his anger. It was simply that he didn't feel it. The world was strange, sad, ironic, comic, even terrible, and, yes, there were people who were monsters. It wasn't that he forgave them. He often thought that anger might be far more satisfying than the frequent state of amused melancholy with which he felt most comfortable.
When he reached the apartment and stepped in, Porfiry Petrovich saw and accepted that the night he had planned was not to be. At the wooden table that had been given them by Sarah's mother sat his wife and two men. Sarah, hep red hair tied loosely back, looked up at him with a small smile. Rostnikov moved to her and kissed her moist forehead. The warm evening brought out her distinct, natural smell, which always came back to him as a nearly forgotten pleasant memory.
He shook hands with Sasha Tkach and then reached out with both hands to shake the left hand of Emil Karpo. Karpo's grip was firm.
"The hand is strong," said Rostnikov, sitting at the last unoccupied chair and reaching for the bread in the center of the table. Tkach had a teacup in front of him.
"It is better than it was yesterday, and yesterday it was better than the day before," Karpo said.
"Cousin Alex is a good doctor," said Sarah with pride.
"He's a good doctor," Karpo agreed.
Rostnikov looked at his two unexpected guests, who looked at each other to determine who would speak first. When Porfiry Petrovich was chief inspector in the Procurator's Office, the three of them had been an unofficial team.
Rostnikov had used their strengths, worked around their weaknesses, encouraged their initiative. In turn, they had given him loyalty. It was not the first night they had sat around this table, and Rostnikov hoped that it would not be the last. From his pocket, Rostnikov removed the pistol he had taken from Katya Rashkovskaya and placed it carefully on the table.
"It is no longer loaded," Rostnikov said, turning to Sarah.
"Did someone…?" she began.
"Just to shoot a toilet," said Rostnikov.
"A TK," Karpo said quietly, looking at the weapon. "A six-point-three-five-millimeter blowback automatic of good quality. The pistol was supposedly designed by a man named Korovine in 1930. There is a mystery about Korovine. He designed weapons in Belgium during the First World War and took out a patent for a double-action internal-hammer lock for automatic pistols, though there seems to be no evidence that it was ever actually manufactured. Then, after disappearing for almost ten years, he designed the TK in the Soviet Union and was never heard of or from again."
"So you can tell me nothing about this weapon?" Rostnikov asked with a smile.