“Why not?”
“Please.”
“I take the American. .”
“Canadian.”
“Canadian, yes,” said Boris. “I take this Amer. . Canadian into the mine. My English? Not good. Canada grumbled, growls all the time. All the time. I take him to the tunnel he wants and wait while he goes in. I hear a noise.”
“Noise?”
“You know. Something clanking, noise. Down there you can hear someone farting two hundred feet away.”
“He farted?”
Boris looked at the barrel-shaped detective.
“No, he did not fart. All right if I continue? I am getting older with the passing of each minute. You want me dropping dead right in here?”
“Please do not drop dead,” Rostnikov said politely.
Boris had not forgotten where he was in his tale.
“I hear the noise. Then I hear singing. Then I. . see the ghost coming toward me from the tunnel.”
“What was the ghost singing?”
Boris burst into gravelly song.
“ ‘The Po ulitse mastavoi.’ Along the paved road there went a girl to fetch water, there went a girl to fetch water, to fetch the cold spring water. Behind her a young lad shouted ‘Girl, stand still. Girl, stand still. Let’s have a little talk.’ ”
“You saw her?”
“She hurried by me, holding her lantern at her side.”
“She wore?”
“A dress, a nice one buttoned at the neck. Chaste, very chaste. I think it was blue, but in the light in the mines here it is difficult to be sure of the color. Everything looks green.”
“The two men who were in here when you came in, what were they wearing?”
“Games? You’re playing games with me now?”
“No,” said Rostnikov. “I would like to know.”
“Tall one,” Boris said. “He was wearing black socks, black pants, black shoes, black jacket, and a black look, as if it were he who had seen the ghost.”
“And the other man?”
“He looked like you with a beard. That was Fyodor Rostnikov, Director of Security, your brother. Everyone knows that.”
“The ghost girl, did she look like any child in Devochka?”
Boris looked at Porfiry Petrovich with a compassion he usually reserved for those of limited intellect.
“She was a ghost.”
“Could you identify the ghost girl if you saw her again?”
“No.”
“No? Why?”
“I am not a fool,” said Boris. “People take me for one, but I’m not a fool. Whoever this ghost girl is, it would not be healthy, if she is not a ghost, to identify her if I saw her.”
“You could be arrested for refusing.”
“And then what would you do? Send me to Siberia?”
Rostnikov laughed, clapped his hands together noiselessly three times, and then clasped them together.
“I guarantee nothing will happen to you if you identify the girl. I’ll arrange for you to move to St. Petersburg.”
“Just pack a bag, get on an airplane, and get out?”
“That can be arranged.”
“I will identify her if I see her, but I would have to look at all the girls here to be sure. I have not memorized the face of every child in this place. I will identify her if I see her again.”
“Good,” said Rostnikov, standing to alter the stiffening of his leg. “I will arrange for every girl in Devochka to be in the meeting room later today. Tell no one what we are doing.”
Boris rose.
“Be careful,” said Rostnikov.
Boris leaned forward to whisper, “I have a gun.”
Rostnikov held a finger to his lips to warn the old man to keep that information quiet.
“One question,” said Boris.
“Ask.”
“Can you dance with only one leg?”
“I do not know. I have never tried.”
“Try,” said Boris.
When he was gone, Porfiry Petrovich gathered his drawings and stood. With the door still closed, he hummed one of the peppier Sarah Vaughan songs he listened to when he worked out. As he was humming, he attempted to take a few dance-like steps. It was not bad. He tried a few more and hummed a bit louder.
His back was to the door when it opened silently. Emil Karpo and Fyodor Rostnikov stood in the open doorway, witnessing Rostnikov’s dance. Rostnikov sensed their presence, stopped dancing, and turned to face them.
“I was dancing,” Rostnikov said.
“Yes,” said Karpo.
“You should try it.”
“I think not.”
Rostnikov tried to imagine the man dancing. It was impossible except for a macabre shuffling of the feet that conjured up the image of a humorless zombie lurching slowly forward.
“I agree.”
“We found the typewriter,” said Fyodor.
“It must not have been well hidden. It took you all of thirty minutes.”
“It was in plain sight.”
“Where?”
“On my bed,” said Fyodor.
He should not have let the Moscow policeman find the typewriter. He should not be playing games with this.
Did he want to get caught? No. The policeman would have figured it out in any case. He was smart, this barrel of a policeman. It would not have taken him very long to figure out that the report had not only been altered, but written completely anew. Let Rostnikov wonder why the typewriter had been placed where it could so easily be found. The question was, what was in this replacement report that would provide Rostnikov with the information he needed. It was simple, clear, right in the report. One word.
This killer had one more murder to commit and then he would stop, melt back into the community, into his work.
He would have to go back into the mine, close and seal the small cave where he had found the vein of diamonds that he had been mining and shipping to the Botswanans in Moscow. The Canadian and Lebedev had found the cave. No one else must find it.
Tonight. Late tonight. There would be but one guard. He hoped it would not be Misha Planck or Leo Kamikayanski. He liked them both. He did not wish to kill either man, but it might have to be done.
One final shipment of diamonds to Moscow.
Just one more shipment and he would tell St. James in his London tower that he would no longer steal or murder.
Just one more.
The teacher asked a question. The child had not been listening. Instead the child had been singing an internal song, the song of the mine.
“Along the paved road, there went a girl to fetch water.”
The child had no idea what the question was. Other children watched. The teacher repeated the question.
“Who was Abraham Lincoln?”
“An American President.”
“What do you know about him?” asked the teacher.
“He was responsible for a bloody suppression of a revolution by the southern states of America,” answered the child.
“The result?”
“Darkness. Lincoln held up a lamp and frightened faces were revealed.”
“Imaginative,” said the teacher, “but I would prefer a more conventional answer.”
The child had none.
Chapter Eleven
“Okay, let’s do it this way.”
Kolokov was pacing around the room. With almost every step the buckled once-yellow linoleum on the floor crackled like the shell of a Botswanan click beetle.
James was now tied to a white plastic chair. Electrical cord bound his wrists behind his back, eliminating all but minimal circulation. The faces of Kolokov and the bald man named Montez offered no sympathy.
The room was large, the former kitchen of a dacha that had once belonged to the member of the Duma designated as Commissar of Transportation. The Commissar was dead, murdered by one of his assistants, named Rasmusen, who wished to show the newly minted Yeltsin government his hatred of the Communist regime.
Now the dacha was abandoned, too close to the city to be considered a reasonable getaway by those who could now afford it, too expensive to restore for those who might consider it.