“The resources of the entire militia will be mobilized for this effort,” the Wolfhound said, striking his palm against the polished table for emphasis. Rostnikov had already lifted his cup from the table in anticipation of the gesture. He had been to other conferences hosted by the Wolfhound, and he knew it was coming. Karpo, at his side, had no tea, and most of the others in the room, five of them, had also been to conferences with the most famous member of the military police. Only one drowsy newly appointed man of about fifty with a pink face and round cheeks was taken in by the performance. His full cup of tea tottered and overflowed. The pink man leaned over to wipe the table with his sleeve.
Porfiry Petrovich leaned over to make a note on his pad of ragged paper, a move that pleased Snitkonoy. The note read, “The entire militia running around on Gorky Street, bumping into each other, possibly killing more people than the Weeper.” He drew two stick figures of uniformed policemen bumping into each other and then he crossed them out. The image of Petrov’s face began to form on the paper. Rostnikov sighed and found himself drawing a candlestick.
“Questions?” the Wolfhound said, folding his arms and looking around the table.
“What, precisely, is the militia doing?” asked the newcomer with the pink face.
The proper question, Rostnikov thought, was “What are we wasting our time here for?”
The Gray Wolfhound smirked knowingly, as if the pink-faced man’s question was the one he expected. He turned to the map of Moscow behind him on the wall and began to point to buildings as he spoke.
“For the next three weeks an armed officer will be placed atop the Ukraine Hotel, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance Building, the Mir Hotel on Kalinin Prospekt, the Moskva Hotel on Sverdlov Square, the Izvestia building on Gorky Street, all the buildings from which it is believed the Weeper had fired. This, on the assumption that he will return to one of them as he has apparently returned to the Ukraine Hotel. Further questions?”
“Did Sergeant Petrov have a family?” Rostnikov asked, looking up from his doodles.
“I don’t know,” said the Wolfhound, rubbing his palms together. “How is that relevant?”
Instead of answering, Rostnikov merely shrugged. The Gray Wolfhound was not someone he had to appease.
“We will catch our sniper within the week, two weeks at the latest,” Snitkonoy said, right palm to his chest. “This I personally promise.”
“We are reassured,” said Rostnikov, putting the finishing touches to the cube he was shading in. Snitkonoy had made such promises before. On one or two occasions, he had actually succeeded in keeping the promise, though the success had little to do with the colonel.
“We’ve talked enough,” Snitkonoy said, glancing at Rostnikov, whom he clearly could not fathom. “Comrades, it’s time to work.”
The pink man rose and then looked around in embarrassment when no one else moved. He sat down quickly as everyone else in the room except for Karpo and Rostnikov got up. The others had expected Snitkonoy to try to hold on to his audience, but possibly the disturbing presence of the Washtub had dissuaded him. The Wolfhound was the first out of the room. His gait had been martial, determined, as if he were on the way to do personal battle with the Weeper. In fact, as everyone but the pink man knew, the Wolfhound would head back to his office to wait until he was needed to perform another ceremonial public act.
When the room had cleared, the pink man stood and addressed Rostnikov and Karpo.
“We have not been introduced, comrades. I am Sergei Yefros of the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee.”
And what, thought Rostnikov, are you doing at this meeting!
“I don’t know why I was told to come to this meeting,” the pink-faced little man said apologetically in answer to the unstated but obvious question. “I think there may have been some mistake.”
“Impossible,” said Rostnikov sternly. “We don’t make mistakes. Colonel Snitkonoy makes no mistakes.”
“No,” the man said, shuffling sideways toward the door and pointing to his own chest with his open palm. “I meant I made a mistake. I … made … I made a mistake. Do you see?”
“That,” Rostnikov conceded, “is possible.” And the man plunged through the door, leaving Rostnikov and Karpo alone in the room. For a full minute the two men sat in silence, Rostnikov with his lips pursed, looking for the answer to a murder in the crude candlestick he had drawn; Karpo trying to think of nothing-and almost succeeding.
“Two questions, Comrade Karpo,” Rostnikov said with a sigh. “First, why would someone murder an old man and take only a brass candlestick.”
Karpo did not for an instant consider that Rostnikov’s question might be a joke. Karpo had no sense of what a joke might be. He knew that other people engaged in non sequiturs, incongruities, insults, physical misdemeanors, at which they laughed or smiled. He had never understood the process or function of comedy. And so he answered where others might have been wary.
“It is unlikely that the murder was committed for the candlestick,” Karpo said, looking straight ahead, “but that you know.”
Rostnikov nodded and kept drawing.
“Was the candlestick new, old, very old?”
“Very old,” Rostnikov said. “Perhaps a hundred years or more, but probably not an antique of any value, certainly not enough value for a well-dressed foreigner to covet.”
“Then,” concluded Karpo, “it could have been a trick, a ploy to lead us into thinking that it was important, to send us looking in the wrong direction, which would be very foolish and very clever at the same time.”
“Foolish?”
“Because,” said Karpo evenly, “we will pursue both the candlestick and the man. We will rely on no assumed link between the two but pursue both. We have the advantage of not tiring.”
Rostnikov looked at Karpo and the map of Moscow. Almost eight million people, the fourth largest city in the world, Moscow on the map looked like the cross-section of a log or tree stump, the rings of which tell its age-the Kremlin at the center, around it five rings, each historically marking where the city’s boundaries were centuries ago, on which were built wooden palisades, stone walls, and earthen ramparts. In those days it was only possible to enter Moscow through special gates built into the battlements.
The second ring, the Boulevard Ring, is lined with trees and is a band of lush green in the summer. The third ring, the Garden Ring, is the transport artery, sixteen kilometers around the center of the city. Farther out is the fourth ring, which two centuries ago served as the city’s customs boundary and on which now runs the Moscow Circular Railway. Finally, the fifth ring, a modern ring, the Moscow Circular Motor Road, marks the city’s present boundary.
“I get very tired, comrade,” Rostnikov said.
“Individually, yes,” Karpo responded seriously. “But we are not individuals alone. We are part of a determined whole.”
“Which,” said Rostnikov, putting his pencil down and turning awkwardly to face his pale subordinate, “brings me to my second question. When will you admit that your arm is no longer capable of function? When will you let it be examined by a competent doctor?”
As long as Karpo had known Rostnikov, almost fifteen years, he had frequently been lulled by the man’s manner into making mistakes. Karpo vowed to himself each time to be more careful, but he also took pride in his superior’s ability to penetrate, to trick sympathetically. If the individual was not so important, why did Karpo not admit his handicap and step down for a more able investigator? Was not the loss of the use of an arm sufficient cause to step down, to recognize that there could well be situations with which one could not cope?