He sat at his desk and ordered his healing left arm to move, and it moved to pick up the pen.
At eleven o'clock that night, Dimitri Mazaraki stood alone in the near-darkness of the ring of die New Circus. The night lights cast shadows that merged with die darkness. Beneath his feet, Mazaraki felt the hardness of the concrete floorbelow which was the ice level, which could be raised in a few minutesand below that die water pool, which could be brought forth almost instantly. Layers below layers below layers. Nothing quite what it seemed, just as the circus wasn't quite what it seemed.
Mazaraki liked standing alone looking out at the empty seats and the further darkness, where he knew the empty seats continued. The night sounds didn't frighten him: die creaking, the warping. He felt powerful knowing he was impressive and tall, his mustache fine. He resisted die impulse to put his hands on his hips, but he didn't resist die urge to grin. He would sleep in his office this night. He had done it before. He would sleep in his office and wake up to finish the plans for the next circus tour, which he was to have ready when die director returned. He would suggest die acts at the circus school he thought might replace die Pesknoko troupe. He would praise die slack-wire clown. Dimitri Mazaraki could be patient about most things, but there were things that did not allow one to exercise patience. One of those tilings was Katya Rashkovskaya. He decided that she would have to be killed very, very soon.
At eleven o'clock that night, after Sarah had gone to sleep in the bedroom, Porfiry Petrovich sat in his underwear in die living room of there two-room apartment and read the end of his current 87th Precinct novel. He had read it too quickly, had failed to savor it as he always promised himself to do. He would make up for it by reading die book again, though he wasn't sure he liked die grisly ending with die Calypso woman… No, he wasn't sure he liked it, though he had enjoyed being with Meyer and Carella and Kling and die others. As he put down the book it reminded him mat he had met someone that day who had looked like one of the Isola policemen. Yes, the assistant at the New Circus who had a white streak in his hair like Hawes. That memory triggered another, and Rostnikov got up to return his book to the shelf in the corner and remove two plumbing books to bring to Katya Rashkovskaya. To get to the books, Rostnikov had to move his small trophy, the bronze trophy he had won in the Moscow Senior Weightlifting Championships three years ago.
Each night, as be had done an hour ago this night, Rostnikov had rolled out his mat, removed his weights and bars from the lower shelf, and put on his sweatshirt to work out within a few feet of the trophy. Tonight he had worked out far later than he had in years. With no carpet on the floor he knew that he was making considerable noise for the Barkans in the apartment below, even though he was as quiet as he could be. The Barkans would not complain, not because they were so understanding, but because Rostnikov was a policeman and it did not pay for citizens to complain about the police. Nonetheless, Rostnikov tried to work out early whenever possible. The workout was essential. He could lose himself in the weights as he could in nothing else, and each day for almost an hour it was necessary to engage in that meditation with weights. Tonight had been no different in spite of the long talk with Sarah.
They had walked for an hour and talked in the park after Karpo and Tkach left. They had talked of Josef, reassured each other about the news from Afghanistan, remembered that Josef had only four months left of his army service. They did not talk about leaving the Soviet Union. Sarah had realized and finally accepted that there was nothing to be done that could get them out, mat her husband had risked his career and possibly their lives to try to get exit visas and had failed. She accepted. Even Josef's new assignment she accepted with pain and fear, but she accepted. Rostnikov had put an arm around her and hugged her awkwardly in the park, and she had allowed herself to crybut just for an instant. And then they had returned to the apartment.
After he had put the plumbing books by the front door, Rostnikov turned out the light and made his way to the bedroom, where he got into bed as quietly as he could without waking Sarah. Rostnikov had to be up early for the dreaded morning meeting with the Gray Wolfhound. He hoped he could avoid any new assignment of substance. He wanted to return to the circus. The memory of the smell of the circus came to him suddenly, elusively, like the scent of some flower or candy or young girl smelled once in childhood. And as he went to sleep he knew, as certainly as he knew that smell, that Katya Rashkovskaya would have to tell him the secret she guarded or her life might be as brief as that remembered scent.
CHAPTER FIVE
Precisely seven o'clock the next morning. A Tuesday, Emil Karpo did not bother to knock at the door on the second level below ground in the Petrovka Police Station. He turned the handle and pushed the door open with his right hand and was greeted by a metallic whirring sound like the drill of a dentist. Karpo, his left hand holding a frayed, black leather briefcase filled with the neatly written notes he had spent the night writing, stepped m Hid closed the door.
The room looked more like a way station to the garbage dump than a laboratory. Its clutter irritated Karpo, to whom symmetry, reason, and order were essential. But this was Paulinin's lab, and Paulinin was an enigma to the policeman.
Karpo stepped past a headless dressmaker's bust of a portly woman, avoided a cardboard box full of bottles on the floor, squeezed by a table piled high with books and metal pieces that looked as if they came from inside some mechanical children's toy.
A man in a blue smock with his back to the door leaned over a table in the corner of the windowless room. The man's hands rose delicately, as if he were engaged in a surgical operation or were conducting a particularly difficult piece by Stravinsky.
"I'm busy, Inspector," Paulinin cried over the whirring sound with a wave of his hand, his back still turned.
Karpo took a step closer and stood patiently, silently, in front of Paulinin's desk, the top of which was covered by books and the miscellany of past investigations. The set of teeth that had been on the desk the last time Karpo had visited the laboratory was still there, grinning atop a small abacus stained with dried blood.
"Inspector Karpo," Paulinin sighed, his back still turned. "I'm… ah, ha. There." The whirring sound stopped.
With a triumphant look on his face, Paulinin, a bespectacled, nearsighted monkey with an oversized head topped by wild gray-black hair, turned to face his visitor for the first time. In his hand he held something that looked to Karpo like a human heart. Behind Paulinin, on the table, was a metal tray filled with blood and a small white machine with a glass bowl attached to it.
"A centrifuge didn't — work," Paulinin said, looking around for someplace to put the organ in his hand. "A three-hundred-ruble centrifuge."
His glasses were in danger of falling off the end of his nose, but Paulinin had no free hand with which to adjust them. He tried to push the glasses back with his shoulder and failed.
"And do you know what worked?" he asked, balancing the heart hi one hand and grabbing a plastic bucket from the floor.
"No," said Karpo.
"That," Paulinin said in triumph, nodding back at the metal-and-glass object on the laboratory table. The plastic bucket contained something that looked like coffee grounds. Paulinin dumped them into the metal tray on the table and just managed to drop the heart into the now-empty plastic bucket.
"Paulinin" Karpo began, but the scientist held up a hand to stop him as he pushed his glasses back on his nose, which brought a smile to his simian face and a streak of blood to his forehead.