The man inside laughed bitterly. Zelach was now coming slowly and carefully up the stairs, calculatedly making a good amount of noise. Sasha waved him to the door.
“So,” said the man inside with a sigh, “if I don’t let you in, you break down the door and kill me. If I open the door, maybe you just kill me. How do I know you are policemen?”
“Do you have a phone?”
“Ha,” the old man laughed.
“My ID, common sense. We are not thieves. We are not some mafia wanting to steal your apartment.”
A series of locks and chains went into action, and the door came open to reveal a man. He was tall, thin, and quite old and he wore dark trousers, a blue shirt, and a dark sweater vest. At the man’s side was a large white dog.
“Well, if you’re going to kill me, do it. Just let Petya go.”
The old man in the doorway, Svet Zorotich, was obviously quite blind. His eyes were a clouded white and his gaze missed both detectives.
“I’m still alive,” the man said, “so you must be the police or thieves or both. As you will see, there is very little in here worth stealing.”
Sasha looked around. The man was right. A bed in the corner. Two chairs at a small table. A cupboard. A chair against another wall. A radio on a small table near the chair.
“Obviously,” Zorotich said, “I did not see anything last night, nor anything since 1971.”
“Sorry,” said Zelach.
“Since you’re here,” he said, “maybe you can get that damn cripple to turn down his television at night and go to sleep at a reasonable hour.”
“We’ll tell him,” said Sasha. “Sorry we bothered you.”
“You’re not going to ask me, are you?” the old man said. “Hear that, Petya? They want to know what we saw, not what we heard.”
The dog was alert now.
“What did you hear?” asked Sasha, certain that the man was going to blame his downstairs neighbor for the murder.
“Voices, outside,” said the man. “I had the radio turned down out of consideration for my neighbors, a consideration they do not choose to extend to me.”
“Voices?” Sasha prompted.
With the help of the dog the man found his way to the chair near the wall and next to the table.
“I turned off the radio like this,” he said, demonstrating his action. “And I heard him talking to himself on the street, the drunk. Then they came. I could hear them talking to him. I could hear them crushing him with rocks that scraped the sidewalk when they missed.”
“Do you know who they were?” asked Sasha.
The old man shrugged and reached down to pet his white dog. The dog moved closer to the man.
“I recognized their voices,” he said. “They don’t live far away. I’ve heard them in the street at night.”
“Who are they?”
“Who knows?” asked the man.
“If we find them, could you identify their voices?” asked Sasha.
“Yes.”
“Would you?”
“I don’t know. I think so. One of them was named Mark. They used his name. And they live near here.”
“Anything else you can tell us about these men?” asked Sasha.
“Men? Who said ‘men’? Not me. They were boys, little boys, children. I knew they were killing and I was afraid to go to the window and shout down, afraid they would come up for me and kill me. So I said and did nothing.”
“But you’ve told us now,” said Sasha.
“I’m a veteran, you know,” old Zorotich said. “Pension. Terrible pension. Can’t live on it. Got a niece who helps me out as much as she can. Anything else?”
Sasha looked at Zelach, then said, “Nothing I can think of.”
Once the policemen were out the door, Sasha said seriously, “He did it, Zelach. The tommy gun was hidden in his closet. He is only pretending to be blind.”
“Then why didn’t we arrest him?” asked a perplexed Zelach.
They were almost to the foot of the stairs. Sasha stopped and turned to Zelach. “Svet Zorotich is really blind.”
“I thought so,” said Zelach.
“Now we are searching for three children who live in this neighborhood. One of them is named Mark.”
“That shouldn’t be so hard,” said Zelach.
“It shouldn’t?” said Sasha with less certainty than his partner.
When they stepped out onto the sidewalk, they were immediately confronted by the old man in the postman’s cap.
“Did he confess? Why aren’t you dragging him away?”
“He is blind,” said Zelach.
The old man on the crutches looked skyward for help in enduring such fools as these.
“He is pretending to be blind to collect his pension,” the old man said.
“I don’t think so,” said Sasha.
“Then Zorotich had that dog lead him down with the tommy gun and he shot the man, blind or not. Shot him and took his money. A blind man could do that. I saw him.”
“You were mistaken,” said Sasha. “Do you know any small boys in this neighborhood? Two, three, four of them. One of them is named Mark.”
The old man suddenly looked terrified.
“No,” he said, hurrying down the street, almost falling. “I know nothing.”
Zelach turned to Sasha and said softly, “It may not be so easy.”
Karpo walked through the hall of the Khovrino Municipal Police Station half listening to the uniformed sergeant who had been assigned to him. The police station had been built in 1946 as a school. Now it was falling apart, as were most of the district stations, which occupied whatever space had been found for them-old apartment buildings, taxi garages, large shops. One district station had once been a toy store. Some of the walls of the former toy store were still covered with fading cartoon drawings of Donald Duck, Elmer Fudd, Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Yogi Bear.
But it was the Khovrino where Karpo found himself through a combination of determination and good luck.
Beneath his feet were cracked floor tiles. Above him the ceiling was a trail of exposed electrical wires. The wallpaper was peeling badly, and many of the light fixtures had no bulbs.
“Here,” said a somber young sergeant with a mustache, indicating a door on their right. There was a thick plate of scratched glass at eye level. Karpo looked in.
Inside were six men. There were six cots lining the walls. Three of the men were seated on the floor playing some kind of card game. One of the prisoners was lying on a cot reading the newspaper, Moskovskiy Komsomolets. He was the only prisoner who wore leg chains. The other two men in the room were looking out the barred window on the wall opposite the door. One of the men was talking heatedly.
“This is where we keep the toughest,” said the sergeant. “Murder suspects, strong-arm robbers. We’ve got two other lockups.”
Karpo knew all this. He continued looking into the cell, showing no sign that he had heard what the sergeant said.
“Your man, Voshenko, is the one looking at the newspaper.”
Karpo looked at the man lying on the cot. The man seemed to sense his gaze and looked up from his newspaper at the gaunt specter at the cell door. Their eyes locked, and neither man wavered.
“Voshenko’s been in for twenty days. We expect to charge him with murder soon and to transfer him to a prison to await trial,” the sergeant said.
The man on the cot smiled at Karpo. It was not a pleasant smile.
“Is the interrogation room empty?” Karpo asked.
“Yes, I think so,” said the sergeant, looking into the gloom farther down the hall. “The light is not on.”
“Can you bring Voshenko to me there?”
“Yes, but …”
The sergeant had been told by the colonel who was chief of the district to do whatever the strange-looking detective from Petrovka wanted, and to do it without question. The sergeant unlocked the door. The men playing cards and the two men at the window looked at him as he stepped into the cell, his hand on his pistol. The black-clad vampire had disappeared. The sergeant was about to speak Voshenko’s name, but the prisoner had already put down the newspaper and was standing. He was a huge man, dressed like the others in a badly faded blue two-piece uniform. Voshenko’s face was dark, ugly, and freshly shaved. He got up slowly and stepped past the sergeant, who, even though the prisoner was shackled, backed away to give him room.