"Let him go, you zombie," he hissed.
Karpo released the hairy arm, snapped his hand down suddenly, and whipped his fingers up to the moist, thick neck of the big driver. The long fingers tightened and the big man gagged and lost his hat. A small crowd had begun to gather, to watch, to do nothing.
"Into the cab," Karpo said without looking at the smaller driver, who hurried into his car. The long fingers opened and the red-faced cabbie staggered back into a white-haired man with a briefcase.
Without looking back, Karpo got into the cab, closed the door, and said, "That bus. Follow it."
The short driver didn't even nod. He started the cab and drove in silence.
Thirty minutes later, after dozens of stops and starts, in the northeastern section of the city just at the Outer Ring Road, a heavy, sweating man carrying a briefcase and a woman in red with a red hat got off a bus. The sweating man looked back at the rows of apartments to his right and then over at the vast wooded area to his left.
"Here," said Karpo.
"Losiny Ostrov, Elk Island," said die cab driver.
"I know where I am," Karpo said, getting out of the cab and handing the cabbie a five-ruble bill.
The cabbie hesitated; he had been given either too little or too much money, but he decided not to speak to the man who was standing on the curb next to the cab. Instead, the cabbie threw the car into first gear, made a sudden U-turn in front of a truck, and sped away.
Karpo crossed the street behind the bus, walking slowly, keeping Pon and Mathilde in sight but not too close. His plan was to move in on Pon, frighten him into a confession or a slip. Hard evidence would not be essential. The courts would accept slips of the tongue, mistakes, a forced search of Pon's home for evidence. Karpo needed little more and he was confident that he was about to get what he needed. Pon was walking like a penguin, sweating like a man who had just run a marathon in hundred-degree heat. In one hand he held his briefcase. In the other he held the wrist of Mathilde.
"I was bom not fifteen miles from here," Pon said to the woman in the red hat. "Mytishy. My mother still lives mere. Right over there. Beyond the woods."
He pointed, and her eyes pretended to follow.
"And over there," Pon said, pointing in another direction as he led her into the park, "is Kalingrad and Balashikha."
"You are hurting my arm," Mathilde said calmly as they passed an old man with a large belly. The old man was wearing shorts and a yellow shut. He glanced at mem and walked on, minding his own business.
Pon ignored Mathilde and led her on, his voice growing more excited with each step. His grip tightened as they stopped in front of long, neat rows of birches on both sides of the path leading into the park.
"When I was a boy," Pon said, panting, "mis was still just called a forest. Now it's a national park, a national park. Look at that sign."
He nodded at a tall wooden sign marking the entrance of the park. A small round picture of an elk's head hovered over the embossed number 1406.
"I know all about this park, all about it," Pon said, hardly noticing the woman he was pulling along. "I spent my days in here, in the darkness of the trees, alone. A fat, smelly boy alone. I wasn't sorry for myself. No, no, no. I wasn't. I liked it here. That sign. In 1406 the name Losiny Ostrov was first mentioned in a will left by a prince of Muscovy. There are tales," he suddenly whispered, leaning toward her ear, "tales of the sinful things that the prince did in these woods to young women. Would you like to hear these tales?"
"No," Mathilde said, looking back over her shoulder.
"No," mocked Yuri Pon. "No. You have tales every bit as terrible. You think you do, but you don't. I have a secret for you. Shh. I'll share it up ahead in my favorite place, near the river."
He pulled her ahead along the path, past people sitting on benches, deeper into the woods. Mathilde could hear the splash of water, the voices of children at play.
"Before 1406, as early as 1388, this area was recorded under another name hi certain documents," Pon went on. He was beginning to give off a terrible odor, the smell of sweat and possibly something worse. Mathilde wanted to pull herself" away, to run, but his grip was surprisingly strong.
"No dogs allowed in this park," Pon said, lurching along the path without looking at her. "No dogs. There are more than a hundred and sixty species of birds. Some of them build their nests on the ground. They have enough natural enemies without bringing dogs in here. At night, the bud calls are marvelous. Peter the First, sometime after 1670, made this the first state forest in all of Russia in which it was prohibited to fell trees except those that were dead or damaged by disease or fire. This is a clean park. Moscow was a clean city. Elk are all over. Even wild boars. Wait, wait, I must take you to the giant pine that slants, the Tower of Pisa."
He dragged her past three young men sitting on tree stumps. Two of the young men were playing chess on another tree stump. All three men wore glasses. None of them looked up at the woman in red and the sweating man who dragged her to a bench.
It was at this point that Karpo, keeping Pon and Mathilde in sight, managed to call Rostnikov from a public phone in the clearing. He called because Yuri Pon, as he sat on the bench and pulled Mathilde down next to him, looked directly at Karpo through his thick-lensed glasses, opened his briefcase with one hand, and extracted a long-bladed knife that caught the late afternoon sunlight.
A jogger crossed the path in front of Karpo, who kept his unblinking eyes on Pon and Mathilde. Pon, in turn, placed his briefcase on his lap to hide the knife and held tightly to Mathilde's wrist. His eyes began to blink like those of a diseased owl. His glasses refused to remain on his moist nose, and he had to keep pushing them back on by twitching his nose and throwing back his head. Karpo walked slowly to the bench facing Pon across the path. They were, perhaps, a dozen feet away from each other. People passed between them, and Mathilde fixed Karpo with an angry glare. He did not look at her. They sat silently for fifteen or twenty minutes while people moved past in both directions and the sounds of people, and even of an occasional animal in the woods, rustled through the pines and grass.
"I have a philosophy," Pon finally called to Karpo after a family of picnickers had argued their way past the benches. "You want to hear it?"
Karpo said nothing.
"All right, then," Pon said. "I'll tell you anyway. There is a bit of animal in each of us. We are born with it. We are, as our history and biology books tell us, all animals. And what is an animal?"
Karpo remained silent, unblinking.
"An animal thinks only of its immediate gratification. Food, sex, or the blind preservation of its species," Pon explained. "It is natural."
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."