A man in a white shirt with an open collar glanced at the pale man flexing his fingers and then hurried past.
"What help do you want?"
"The prostitute killer," he said. "I may know who it is."
"Ah," she said as they walked.
"I know it is probably one of three people," he added as she paused to look into the window of a hat shop on Kalinin Prospekt.
"And how am I to help?" she asked.
"You want us to catch this killer," he said.
It was not a question, so she did not answer. She simply said, "I want you to catch the killer. I knew one of… I knew die second victim, Illyana Osnakovich."
"She was the third victim," Karpo corrected.
"An important revision," she said, still looking at the "It might be. Information must be kept in order or" "Do you like mat hat?" she interrupted. "That…" he said, looking at the red hat with the wide brim. "It does not look particularly functional."
"It is very functional," Mathilde said. "I would like that hat. You would like that hat on me."
"You are asking for a reward to do what you should do as a duty to the state," he said seriously.
"No," she said, squinting into the shop window and shielding her eyes with her hands to see if there were a salesperson inside. "I'll help, but I'd also like the hat."
"You'll have the hat," he said, wanting to massage his left arm with his right hand but resisting the urge.
"You plan to use me to lure this killer, to identify him when he tries to kill me."
"Yes," Karpo said.
A car skidded on the street somewhere behind them. They did not rum to look.
"It will be dangerous?" she asked.
"Perhaps," he answered.
'The red hat?"
"Yes," Karpo said, looking at her. "The red hat."
CHAPTER SIX
Maya held Pulcharia's cheek against her own as they stood in line in front of the shoe store on Gorky Street. She cooed something meaningless into the baby's ear and bounced her gently, almost backing into the couple behind her. The man was wearing denim pants, a checked shirt, and a white American cowboy hat. He had thick eyebrows and a thick beard. The woman was dark, thin, pretty, with long black hair. She carried a large colorful handbag that clashed with her blue-and-pink long skirt with a zigzag white pattern, which in turn clashed with the tight knit blouse with horizontal green stripes. The woman's shoulders were bare and brown.
"Eezveenee' t'e, pashah' lsta" Maya said to the woman.
The woman smiled, brushed her arm where the baby might have touched her, and said, "It's nothing. The baby is very beautiful."
"Thank you," said Maya, looking at Pulcharia's sleeping face to reassure herself.
"I hear the shoes are Korean," the woman said.
"I heard Polish," said Maya.
"Polish," agreed the bearded cowboy.
The line moved forward, and Maya glanced across the street, where Sasha had been pacing as she waited in line. He should have been working. This was not a normal day off. He said that he had been assigned a new case, something to do with a gang of youths who were involved with some kind of extortion against shopkeepers beyond the Outer Ring Road. He shouldn't have come home to play with the baby. He shouldn't be pacing the sidewalk while she waited in line for a pair of Korean or Polish shoes. She wasn't sure they could afford shoes, but Sasha had absently told her to go ahtad, get in line. They would manage.
Maya wanted to put the baby back in the buggy, but she was afraid Pulcharia would cry. The people in line would begin by being sympathetic and understanding and end by being irritable and giving her nasty looks. The morning was hot. The line was slow. The woman behind her was young and pretty, and Sasha was brooding. Maya reached back and pulled the buggy with one hand, holding the baby tightly with the other, as the line moved again.
Across the street, Sasha approached the cart of a white-clad ice-cream vendor, gave her some coins, and waited while she opened the metal door on her cart, reached in, and pulled out two ice-cream pops. Maya watched as he carefully crossed Gorky Street, dodging traffic. Maya watched him and was struck by the feeling that this moment had happened before. That she had stood here before now and that now the moment was happening again. Perhaps she had not stood here but had been a baby like her daughter and had seen her own father crossing the street with two ice creams. She knew the word for it, deja vu, but this wasn't quite it.
"Ice cream," Sasha said, holding one out to her. "I read a report only weeks ago that said Muscovites eat a hundred and seventy tons of ice cream every day, summer and winter."
Maya took the ice cream and Sasha took the baby, who stirred drowsily. Sasha handed Maya his own ice cream and gently put the baby in the buggy. Pulcharia made an irritable sound, and Sasha began to rock the buggy with one hand as he took his ice cream back from Maya with the other. A babushka farther up the line turned around with a frown to see what was going on, saw the carriage, approved, and turned back to face the shoe store with her bag in her hand.
"I feel very old," said Maya after a small bite of the ice cream.
She looked back at the cowboy and the pretty girl in the clashing colors, who were engaged in a head-to-head whispered discussion.
"So do I," Sasha said. "The problem is that neither of us looks old or is old. It's a feeling that goes away."
"But it comes back," Maya said, taking another bite.
She had no trouble digging her teeth into ice cream, which sent a shiver down Sasha's back when she did it but also intrigued him, reminded him somehow of her independence, her strength. Maya's teeth were very good. His own were acceptable, except for the Romanian space between his top front teeth. His mother, Lydia, had the same space and she said that someone in each generation had it, that somewhere in antiquity there must have been a Romanian in her family. Sasha wondered if his daughter would have the space.
"You should be working," Maya said.
"I am working. That gang might be considering a move into the heart of the city, onto Gorky Street. I'm exploring that possibility," he said with a smile, trying to avoid being splattered by the ice cream, which had begun dripping in the late-morning heat.
Sasha looked at the pretty woman with the cowboy, and Maya saw him looking. Maya's and Sasha's eyes met and they both smiled. She handed him the stick from her ice cream. He took the last bite of his own, accepted her stick, and let her rock the buggy as he moved to deposit the sticks in the trash.
He wouldn't have the nerve to do what he was going to do without Rostnikov. Rostnikov seemed so confident, so quietly certain, not only that this was the proper course of action but also that it would work. Why Rostnikov should risk so much for him was something Sasha could hot fully understand. Part of it, certainly, was Rostnikov's dislike for Deputy Procurator Khabolov, but something else was going on in the Washtub. Though he knew how to survive, there was a defiant, independent edge to the inspector that Tkach admired and feared.
"What?" Maya said as he returned to her in the line.
"What?" he repeated.
"What is wrong? Your eyes…"
"Work," he said. "The streets are full of criminals. If mis line moves fast enough, you can put on your new shoes and we can walk to the park and lie in the grass. I don't have to be anywhere till noon."
"All right," she said. She felt better but not younger, for there was something in her husband's behavior that made her feel that this was a particularly important day and noon a particularly important tune.
Dimitri Mazaraki parked his car and checked his watch. His schedule was off, and things were not going quite right. He had failed to hit Katya and he had seen in his rearview mirror the crippled policeman hurry across the street toward her. He got out, 'breathed deeply, touched his fine mustache, and grinned at nothing. He would survive, succeed. He had done so for this long. He would continue to do so. He was confident, sure of his cunning, his strength, his ruthlessness. He had no loyalty except to himself, and no dependencies. In Klaipeda, the coastal Lithuanian town on the Baltic Sea where he had been born and from which he had escaped through the tsirk, he had relativesa sister, several cousins. He needed them and they needed him when he and the circus came to the area, but it was a need born of money and security, not of affection. As he had for years, Mazaraki had scheduled a circus tour to Lithuania and Latvia. The circus director had never questioned his scheduling, had even liked the idea, because he liked the Baltic beaches in the summer.