“I’ve done nothing,” insisted the frightened voice inside.
“We’ll talk about it when you open the door.” Karpo heard a shuffling sound on the other side of the wooden door and something that sounded like the opening of a window. He took a step back in the narrow hall, lifted his foot, and kicked at the door. It gave as if it had been sucked in by a vacuum, and Karpo skidded across the floor of a room even smaller than his own. His eyes saw two things immediately: a police uniform laid neatly on the small bed and a frightened little man in his underwear standing next to it. The frightened little man, in turn, saw the angel of death that had broken down his door, and he turned and leaped out of the window.
Karpo hurried across the room and to the window to look down for the body, but there was no body. There was no impression in the snow three floors below. Then the answer came. Snow fell from above onto Karpo’s head, and he looked up. The overhang of the roof was inches over his head, and he could hear the scuttling of feet on the roof.
With just one hand, he knew he could not follow Kroft, but he was equally determined that he would not let the criminal get away. He went back in the room and out the door, looking up and around. He began kicking down doors.
The first room was unoccupied at the moment except for a huge photograph of a naked woman. The photograph looked very old. In the next room whose door he kicked down, an old woman was talking to a small child. The woman screamed without sound, and the child-Karpo could not tell if it was a boy or girl-looked at him blankly. He paid no attention to them but leaped to the ladder nailed to the wall. He banged his sore arm against the wail and made his way awkwardly up, having to let go at each step and grab for the wooden rung above. He took splinters in his hand, but fortunately there was a very low ceiling and the rungs were few. He forced open the trap door covered with snow by pushing his head against it. It gave slowly, struggling with him for supremacy, but Karpo was a stubborn man with a strong head. He worked his way up on the sloped roof and looked around for Kroft.
“Kroft,” he called. “Give up. There is no place to escape.”
“I could have killed you,” a voice came from behind Karpo. As he turned to face it, his feet gave way in the snow, and Karpo began to fall toward the edge of the roof. He went down on his arm and immediately felt an agonizing pain and heard something crack. Suddenly a sure hand grabbed his sleeve and pulled him.
“Are you all right?” said Kroft, looking into his face.
“Yes,” said Karpo struggling to get up. “You are under arrest.”
“I know,” said Kroft, who stood shivering in his underwear, “but all the same, I could have simply pushed you off the roof. You shouldn’t be climbing around with an arm like that.”
“That is my concern,” said Karpo, unable to resist the help of the man in underwear. “Now go ahead of me down the ladder, and don’t try anything or I’ll have to shoot.”
Kroft shivered and shrugged his shoulders.
“There’s a little boy in that room,” he said. “You think I’d want you to shoot? For a policeman you don’t think much about the people you’re supposed to be helping.”
“I don’t need lectures from a criminal,” said Karpo. “Now down.”
And Kroft went slowly down the ladder with Karpo struggling behind him, but the struggle was in vain. The policeman fell to the floor dropping his gun beneath him. He tried to roll over and extract the weapon from the weight of his own body but found the pain in his arm nearly unbearable. When he finally did retrieve the weapon and looked around, he saw Kroft on a small bed in the corner with a blanket wrapped around his legs. The old woman and the boy looked at Karpo expressionlessly, as if they were now quite accustomed to people in their underwear and wounded men with waving pistols going through their little room.
Karpo was drenched in sweat and unable to come to a sitting position.
“Don’t move,” he warned Kroft.
Kroft touched his nose with his hand, clutching the blanket to him tightly for warmth, not modesty.
“If I wanted to move, I could have run while you were squirming around down there like a turtle on its back. I’ll help you up.”
He got up and started to hobble toward Karpo who waved him back.
“Don’t move, I said.”
“If I don’t help you, you will sit there till Moscow turns capitalist, and I will wither away,” Kroft said reasonably.
“Why didn’t you run?” Karpo demanded, trying to find a reasonable way to at least come to a sitting position.
“Where would I run? I could grab my pants and go out the door. Where would I sleep? Who do I know well enough to hide me? The circus people would turn me in. My relatives are two thousand miles away. Why should I make you even angrier than you are with me? This way I go to trial. I say I’m sorry. I repent. I tell the judge I don’t know what got into me. Maybe I’ll even blame decadent French novels and magazines for my folly. Confession is a marvelous tool. Maybe my sentence will be light.”
“You are a parasite,” hissed Karpo bewildered by his predicament.
“Perhaps,” agreed Kroft. “But would I be less of a parasite if I didn’t work at all? No one wants to hire a sixty-year-old arielist with a bad leg and a prison record.”
“You are sixty-two,” Karpo corrected.
“Look at him,” Kroft appealed to the old woman and the boy. “He lies there in helpless agony and he can’t help arguing with me about a few years. What is your name?”
“Deputy Inspector Karpo, but that is not meaningful at present. You can help me up, but do so carefully.”
“Thank you, Mister Detective Inspector Karpo,” Kroft said with sarcasm and a deep bow. “It will be an honor to help such a fine fellow as you. Perhaps you will bear in mind my consideration when you testify at my trial, if I am to have one.”
With Kroft’s help and the watchful eyes of the old woman and boy, Karpo stood on wobbly legs. He almost fell, but Kroft helped him.
“Are they so short-handed that they send wounded police out to catch criminals?” Kroft asked as he helped Karpo to the door. “Or am I so insignificant a criminal that I merit only the lame for my pursuer?”
“Parasite,” repeated Karpo.
“I didn’t rob a single Russian,” Kroft insisted helping Karpo down the hall to his room. “Not a single Russian, only Africans and Indians. If I had not done this, I would have indeed been a parasite on the state, which would have fed and clothed me. Look how I live. You think I get rich being a criminal? What about the real criminals who take government contracts to make one thing and make something else more profitable instead?”
“Dress,” said Karpo, leaning against the door as Kroft reached for his pants.
“Not the uniform,” Karpo had to bark. Kroft shrugged and laid it aside, saying, “It’s the only decent clothing I own.”
In a few minutes, Kroft was dressed, and Karpo was ready to pass out from the pain.
“Public enemy number two, as the Americans say, is ready,” sighed Kroft.
His coat was indeed badly frayed and his hat a worn cloth affair.
“Perhaps it is better I look like this,” sighed Kroft. “You know, play for sympathy, though I far prefer dignity even at the price that must be paid for it.” He looked at Karpo for an answer but got none, so Kroft went on. “I know. I know. Muscovites are all philosophers. Let’s go, if you can make it.”
It took them almost four minutes to get down the three flights of stairs and another ten minutes to find a taxi. The driver didn’t want to stop, but Kroft had leaped out in front of him.
“This is a policeman,” he shouted at the red-faced driver. “A policeman. We are both policemen. Take us to Petrovka.”
Along the way, Karpo passed out twice, regaining consciousness in a kind of dim twilight. He had no recollection of ever reaching Petrovka or being helped in and up the stairs by his prisoner.
“It is a brochure, a pamphlet advertising an English aftershave lotion, a kind of perfume for men,” Rostnikov told Inspector Vostok. Vostok could not read English and had brought the odd piece of paper into Rostnikov’s office. It was well known that Rostnikov read English well though it was not generally known that this familiarity came primarily from reading black market American mystery novels.